Voltage blog entries tagged with: computers

The Berkeley Center for New Media has created this interesting opinion viewer - you rate you answer to 5 questions (a sliding scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree) and it maps the 3-D (or 5-D ?) combination of you answers into 2-D and plots them against many other opinions. The text answer is just a highlight to see when you click on a particular star.

I like the idea - trying to organize the craziness of comments in web-space. How you would bring the free-form of the web into this sort of model is a question, though - maybe this would be most useful for visualizing poll/survey results?

(by way of Epicenter)

A good short piece that ponders the myriad issues and problems involved with President Obama giving an iPod with 40 show tunes on it to the Queen of England on an official state visit. Particularly interesting:

So, how does President Obama fare in this? It's nearly impossible to figure out. If he'd simply purchased a "greatest hits" CD of show tunes and given it to the Queen, the first sale doctrine would have taken care of it. But because digital technology is involved here, suddenly it's a legal quagmire. (And, for the remainder of this discussion, I am going to set aside the Presidential immunity issues and the UK copyright law issues, which make it even more of a quagmire.)

First, let's imagine that the President (or his staff) bought the 40 show tunes from the iTunes music store. Do you "own" the music that you buy from iTunes? The nearly 9,000 words of legalese to which you agree before buying don't answer that question (an oversight? I doubt it). Copyright owners have consistently argued in court that many digital products (even physical "promo" CDs!) are "licensed," not "owned," and therefore you're not entitled to resell them or give them away. (And the Amazon MP3 Store terms of service are even worse for consumers than iTunes -- those terms specifically purport to strip you of "ownership" and forbid any "redistribution.")