November 2009
22 posts
Sensing Angels →
campdeadly.com
by Charles Gran
in three movements
for solo clarinet and electronics with improvisation
Performed by Jesse Krebs
Recorded Sunday, November 8, 2009
(via The Csound Blog)
Psystar gets slapped, hard
Psystar has lost their case against Apple. You can read the summary here from BusinessWeek, and all the gory details here from Groklaw.
Frankly, I’m fine with the decision, particularly after the story published by SF Weekly which fawned all over the founders of Psystar for six pages, painting them as revolutionaries fighting an evil empire. It left a really bad taste in my mouth.
As a software developer, I believe strongly in license agreements whether they are applied to commercial or open source software. Computing is a unique industry from a legal and liability standpoint, and companies and individual developers alike have the right to protect themselves and their work.
As a hacker, I’m all in favor of making a piece of software or a system do something it’s not intended to do by the creator. I applaud Psystar’s founders and their hacker ethic, but I believe they were foolish and arrogant to try and make a business out of breaking the law and acting like Apple is the one in the wrong.
The bottom line is, if you don’t like the EULA, don’t use the product. The great thing about the computing industry and the advent of open source/free software is that we have choice.
Full disclosure: I’m an AAPL shareholder. A minor one, but a shareholder nonetheless.
Play
Eating animals is making us sick →
cnn.com
In the United States, about 3 million pounds of antibiotics are given to humans each year, but a whopping 17.8 million pounds are fed to livestock — at least, that is what the industry claims.
The Union of Concerned Scientists estimated that the industry underreported its antibiotic use by at least 40 percent.
The group calculated that 24.6 million pounds of antibiotics were fed to chickens, pigs and other farmed animals, counting only nontherapeutic uses. And that was in 2001. In other words, for every dose of antibiotics taken by a sick human, eight doses are given to a “healthy” animal.
…
Still, the factory farm industry has effectively opposed such a ban in the United States. And, unsurprisingly, the limited bans in other countries are only a limited solution.
There is a glaring reason that the necessary total ban on nontherapeutic use of antibiotics hasn’t happened: The factory farm industry, allied with the pharmaceutical industry, has more power than public-health professionals.
