cyberspacial musings
bits about the real and virtual worlds

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists today moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock, a symbol of nuclear danger. The current time on the clock shows seven minutes until midnight, the time that the clock had when it first appeared. The hands have moved backwards and forwards, depending on the circumstances. Treaties like START and SALT [...]

The unbelievable wealth of software available for computer today is amazing. But why is it that very few commercial software vendors sell software that runs directly on the desktop? The business has changed radically from the early days of $795 WordPerfect software for DOS to a commercial software business that doesn’t make any real money [...]

Sorry for old bits, but I found this interview to be pretty interesting. Time Inc. did an exclusive interview of the founder of Movie88, which at this point is still shut down by the Taiwanese authorities. They plan on arresting the founders should they ever set foot in Taiwan (no overreaction there, of course), according [...]

Game developer Monkeystone has announced that it will begin producing games for Qualcomm phones using the BREW development kit. BREW is an environment for developing applications that run directly on Qualcomm phones. This is actually a pretty cool convergence idea. Much like PC gamers that can connect to each other over the Internet, games on [...]

Not my usual fare, but since this is the second week of the Olympics, I have two issues that I’m going to comment on. First, the Washington Post reports that the DC Boxing and Wrestling Commission granted a license to Mike Tyson. William Gildea, of the Post, wrote a great editorial on this today. The [...]

I was recently thinking about Digital IDs and secure e-mail and it occurred to me to visit Verisign’s web site to see if they were still selling them. It turns out that they are ($14.95/per year), but it took me several clicks to find out where to get the ID. They have that buried in [...]

You heard the news about Movie88 here first. Here’s the follow up article from CNet, with a quote from Jack Valenti, the chief of the MPAA. Seems that the MPAA asked the Taiwanese government to shut Movie88 down, which they apparently did. Any bets that the MPAA threatened to boycott Taiwan?

While I’m on the soapbox about exclusive rights, I think the lack of streaming video segments from the Olympics was a poor decision. I understand the fear of piracy, but considering how poor coverage is, the Olympic committee needs to do something about this for the next set of games. It would be spectacular to [...]

See this news article on the current case before the US Supreme Court on copyright law. The key issue that the Supreme Court is weighing is how long inventors and authors can maintain exclusive right to their works. Originally, copyrights lasted 14 years. Current laws now extend it to 70 years after the death of [...]

I received an interesting e-mail from the Movie88 folks this morning. If you look at previous entries, you’ll remember that these are the folks who are streaming movies at a price of $1 for 3 days of viewing. Here’s the e-mail: We have been shut down without notice!!! At about 4pm (Eastern Time), all our [...]