I'd completely forgotten I wrote this three years ago:

Joshua Kinsberg has been released. But his bike and invention are impounded, at least until his court date on Friday (after the RNC is over).

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5850151/

NYC's anti-graffiti law is very strict:

http://www.nyc.gov/html/nograffiti/html/legislation.html

"No person shall write, paint or draw any inscription, figure or mark of any type on any public or private building or other structure or any other real or personal property owned, operated or maintained by a public benefit corporation, the city of New York or any agency or instrumentality thereof or by any person, firm, or corporation, or any personal property maintained on a city street or other city-owned property pursuant to a franchise, concession or revocable consent granted by the city, unless the express permission of the owner or operator of the property has been obtained."

I wonder if the framers of that law realized they were banning kids from chalking hopscotch onto their schools' playground or onto the sidewalks in front of their houses. I wonder how many children have been arrested for chalking up a 4-square game.

One important point: the police did not see the chalk-spraying invention being _used_. So the inventor probably could not have been charged with the above law. But the only other anti-graffiti laws describe "aerosol spray paint cans," and the video of the arrest clearly shows the inventor explaining to the police that it uses chalk, not paint. Predictably, the New York Post gets that wrong, describing the invention as "a convoluted spray-paint mechanism": http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/29532.htm

Earlier this month, a family was threatened with a $300 fine for their 6-year-old girl's drawing with sidewalk chalk.

On her own front step.

It's legal of course. The police screwed up. Notice the final clause from the law as of 2004 ("unless... permission of the owner... has been obtained") and the similar clause from the 2005 law Natalie Shea was threatened with (only if "not consented to by the owner").

But a street artist was later arrested for drawing on the sidewalk with chalk (while being filmed by PBS about his artwork!). And I won't be surprised if sooner or later some kid literally chalking hopscotch onto the sidewalk or a school playground gets arrested.

That's the law, after all. We had to make sure nobody chalked anti-Bush slogans while the RNC was in town. And the law's the law.

The Ann Arbor party seemed to go great- lots of people packed Leopold Bros place, doing battle with barflies and football fans. It was somewhat bizarre watching obvious normal bar people try to figure out what this large crowd of 'different' people were all about. We handed out a ton of t-shirts, drank much alcohol, ate nachos etc. Our party had a great number of Slashdot and SourceForge staffers... all folks who have been with Slashdot for so many years it's hard to remember Slashdot without them. I'm not exactly sure how many people eventually showed up... a lot of our RSVPs didn't show, and a lot more didn't bother sign up at all, so I think the two balanced out.

For me personally these sorts of things are always difficult. I'm not very good at crowds. I can smile for a picture, but I'm perpetually nervous when surrounded by strangers who have certain expectations of me. There's a reason I live life behind a keyboard!

Further compounding matters lately is baby induced chronic sleep deprivation. Me want REM cycles. It's always nice to get out and have a beer. Kathleen & I get only so many hours "out" together now, gotta make each one count. The party attendees were all cool... and understanding that I was pretty tired.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who showed up... I've still got the california party later this week. Hopefully my throat heals up by then. The only real problem with this location was the acoustics... I had to shout to be heard, and stick my ear in front of people to hear them (baby crying has done some amount of hopefully temporary ear damage). My throat is raaaaw from yelling. Sucking on cough drops helps.

As for other parties, boxes have been shipped. Hopefully they have arrived to most places on time, although I think they were shipped on a slowish shipping option so I'm not sure. I know some folks got shirts on friday, but I'm sure the others will arrive monday or so. Also, keep in mind that we only had 700 shirts and 2300 attendees from 136 parties with more than 5 attendees. So obviously not every party is getting a box... when we sent out the bulk mail, we had over 100 replies, and I'm sure there was nowhere near enough to fill even that.

But shirts or not, I hope your parties go well. Remember to submit videos or pictures or whatever to anniversary at slashdot dot org for your chance at the $1k ThinkGeek gift certificate grand prize.

This feels like a mega-spam entry, and I'm very self conscious about posting it, but I'm excited about this and I wanted to share . . .

I just published my third book, The Happiest Days of Our Lives. I mention it here because it's all about growing up in the 70s, and coming of age in the 80s as part of the D&D/BBS/video game/Star Wars figures generation, and I think a lot of Slashdot readers will relate to the stories in it.

I published a few of the stories on my blog, including Blue Light Special. It's about the greatest challenge a ten year-old could face in 1982: save his allowance, or buy Star Wars figures?

After our corduroy pants and collared shirts and Trapper Keepers and economy packs of pencils and wide-ruled paper were piled up in our cart, our mom took our three year-old sister with her to the make-up department to get shampoo and whatever moms buy in the make-up department, and my brother and I were allowed to go to the toy department.

"Can I spend my allowance?" I said.

"If that's what you want to do," my mom said, another entry in a long string of unsuccessful passive/aggressive attempts to encourage me to save my money for . . . things you save money for, I guess. It was a concept that was entirely alien to me at nine years old.

"Keep an eye on Jeremy," she said.

"Okay," I said. As long as Jeremy stood right at my side and didn't bother me while I shopped, and as long as he didn't want to look at anything of his own, it wouldn't be a problem.

I held my brother's hand as we tried to walk, but ended up running, across the store, past a flashing blue light special, to the toy department. Once there, we wove our way past the bicycles and board games until we got to the best aisle in the world: the one with the Star Wars figures.

I'm really proud of this book, and the initial feedback on it has been overwhelmingly positive. I've been reluctant to mention it here, because of the spam issue, but I honestly do think my stories will appeal to Slashdotters.

After the disaster with O'Reilly on Just A Geek, I've decided to try this one entirely on my own, so I'm responsible for the publicity, the marketing, the shipping, and . . . well, everything. If this one fails, it will be because of me, not because a marketing department insisted on marketing it as something it's not.

Of course, I hope I can claim the same responsibility if (when?) it finds its audience . . . which would be awesome.

So if you only count anniversary parties with 5 or more attendees, we have 128 venues with a grand total of 2366 attendees. The largest parties include Pudge's in seattle with 129, mine in Ann Arbor with 194 and Hemos's in CA with 197.

I'm sure that there will be many RSVPs that no show, but still, that's still an awful lot of interest. We'll be shipping shirts to a good number of those parties, but we have triple the attendees to shirts available, so we'll see just how far we're able to spread the love. Emails will be going out to party planners in the next couple days to get postal addresses.

As we're nearing 100 signed up people for the A2 Slashdot anniversary party, we've changed the venue to Leopold Bros... it's just a block south from the other place and they can handle us. I've also got word that we'll be printing a few hundred extra shirts since there was already like 50 parties with 5+ people in attendance. We certainly won't have enough for everyone, but we'll make a good dent in it.

I will of course put this information into a story next reasonable chance I get for a story, but I figured at least I could get the word out there. The anniversary party entry on the official page has been updated with the new location & address.

The A2 party already has like 70 signed up. We're going to have to rethink venue or time I think if we really have that many people. Wait a few more days and see what we can work out. Keep reading in the party forum for info. We have 500 shirts to print and hand out... it'll be fun to see where they go.

more info as I get it. There will be notes on future stories as days get closer.

If any of you are using an iPhone and are willing to help test out some Slashdot handheld crap, shoot me off a note... my email is the same address as always, and if you can't guess it, you probably can't help anyway ;) I've built a stylesheet and Tim put together a few little options that we think will make a few bits of Slashdot look nice on an iPhone (or really most lower resolution displays) but unfortunately none of us actually HAVE one yet... so anyway, let us know. Or if you work at Apple, send us freebies dammit!

In reference to http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/31/0623246 I posted over on Bob's site:

Mr. Squidoo said in response to Cringley's article:

I certainly do not think that a 3rd party notice from someone other than the copyright holder are grounds for YouTube to remove my clip. Even a notice from Oregon Public Broadcasting would have to be considered an "alleged infringement" claim from a copyright holder.

What's so great about copyright is there isn't any alleged infringement. It works like this: did you distribute some work? Yes. Are you Oregon Public Broadcasting? No. You are infringing. Now you'll probably argue that your case is an example of Fair Use -- but get this -- Fair Use is an affirmative defense. If you claim Fair Use you are affirming "guilt" (copyright infringement) by making the defense. At which point a judge decides against the four point test if your infringement is Fair Use, or not. With copyright you are essentially* infringing until proven Fair Use, i.e., "guilty" until proven "innocent"!

In short, Fair Use isn't a right, it's a defense. Copyright isn't a right either; it is a limited-time** State-granted monopoly on distribution. For more info, check out 17 USC 107 and also http://fairuse.stanford.edu/

*Since you can't be non-infringing without being sued and winning!

**One day short of forever, is inexplicably constitutional to some Supremes. Extention every time new works are about to reach the Public Domain still counts as "for a limited time"; See Article 1.8.8.

And just now I left this over at Moyer's new blog re:'Open source journalism':

"As long as source materials are kept private and as long as the final product is copyrighted, it is incorrect to call something open source. Critiquing an article or emailing a suggestion is not nearly enough to justify the title of "Open-Source Journalism". It actually has to be open source." --DR (above)

I feel like I'm back on Slashdot right now! You are misunderstanding what "open source journalism" is, or claims to be. The swarm of emails, posts, crossposts, hat-tips, comments and cross references that coalesce across the 'net to form a "story" is the phenomenon described as "open source journalism". In this respect bloggers (Josh Marshall included) are both the journalist and the audience in the same fashion that open source coders are both the developer and the end-user. It's the many eyes and the feedback-loop that produce the refined results. The phrase open-source journalism doesn't describe the (absolutely critical) goals of either the FSF or the Creative Commons, though.

It needs to be said, in direct response to the quotation above that both the CC licenses and the GPL rely on copyright -- so to claim that because something is copyrighted it is not open source is absolutely incorrect. The difference between written journalism and (most commercial) software applications is that writing is distributed as source already. AV is a different story, one that Creative Commons is going to great lengths to address (remix and reuse without the chilling effects of rampant copyright litigation).

I wanted to say "RTFA", as the episode in question and the post go into detail about what "open-source journalism" is (and you can watch it right there on the site :-D).

Simple tasks like switching between Firefox and Thunderbird are driving the load on my machine up over 4, and if I'm trying to run Amarok at the same time, it drives it up to 8. In fact, my machine frequently climbs up into the 7-9 range, bringing my apps to a crawl and frustrating the hell out of me.

So I've decided it's time to buy a new computer. I'm going to replace my aging Sony Vaio desktop machine (which runs Linux) with something newer that has more RAM, a faster processor, and a bigger hard drive.

The thing is, I'm not entirely sure where to start looking. A quick walk through Circuit City a month or so ago lead me to believe I can get a rather "big" computer for as low as five hundred bucks, which further leads me to believe that if I were to buy something online, I can get a huge pile of RAM, a fast processor, and a big honkin' hard drive for even less.

I run Kubuntu, and use KDE as my desktop (though I occasionally switch to Gnome when I get bored) and I mostly use Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, Amarok, and run PokerStars in wine. I'm looking for something that can do all of that without slowing my machine to a crawl.

Anyone have any suggestions on where to start looking?

Edit: I don't think I have the patience to build my own machine out of individual parts. I also don't have any real loyalty to any particular company or architecture. New Egg has lots of machines with AMD processors, and though I've always had Intel processors because more things seemed to run on x86, that's not as much of an issue as it once was, right?

I was just checking the TiVo.com website for something else when I noticed the homepage now touts Amazon Unbox and says Now Available! TiVo and Amazon.com offer Amazon Unbox Video Downloads on TiVo service. Learn more. Now Available? It looks like the service is going live today - very likely timed to coincide with the end-of-quarter-and-year financial conference call in the afternoon. Here's a bonus - if you register for the service by April 30, 2007 you get $15 in free movies and TV shows. So you can try it without any risk. Very nice, TiVo and Amazon, good move.

TiVo has the product page, an overview, a 'Get Ready' page, a FAQ, and a troubleshooting guide. Likewise, Amazon has an Amazon Unbox on TiVo page on their site with more information. They also have a complete list of videos currently available for TiVo download and a support page with a FAQ.

It looks like the service is launching with a slightly limited list of titles, but Amazon says they will continue to expand the list of titles. I expect that's due to the conversion process, it takes time to convert videos into a TiVo-compatible format, so they're just not going to have thousands of videos ready to go on day one, even if they've been converting things for weeks. But it looks like a good start, and I believe Amazon will continue to convert additional content to grow the list.

It is very easy to use. You simply register for the service, which ties your Amazon and TiVo accounts together. Then you can shop for videos via your web browser, and have them downloaded directly to your TiVo. Right now it is not possible to shop for videos directly from the TiVo itself, but I believe we'll see that added down the road. It would even be possible for a 3rd party to write an HME application that allowed you to browse the Unbox site and then order videos, all with the TiVo remote. (Anyone want to get started on that? ;-) )

I'd love to hear some feedback from people. How easy (or hard) did you find it to use? How do you like the service overall? What do you think of the quality of the videos?

The discussion2 system had 2 notable changes in this weeks code refresh that I'd love to hear feedback on (use email if you can't post here). The first is Scott's very excellent new draggable slider control. Everyone mostly figured out the slider tool before, but it was very unresponsive... but no longer! It has some layout niggles under some browsers, but it functions properly in most of them.

Equally exciting is new dynamic updating... the old code actually transferred the full discussion and displayed/hid content as requested by your settings. Thew new code properly requests comments as needed, and when needed. This cuts page sizes dramatically for people reading with filters turned up very high. It also puts us a few stone throws away from a 'refresh' button which can just add newly posted comments in place. There's some work to be done yet, but it's made a lot of progress. I hope you like it.

We've tested everything under most of our most common browsers... if you're curious they are very roughly FF2 38%, FF1.5 19%, IE7 8%, Safari 7%, Opera 3%. Missing from our compatibility list is IE6 with 13% of our traffic. Fixing IE6 is non-trivial and we'd certainly take patches... but since the IE6 population lost a point or two last month anyway, and fixing the code is pretty substantial, we'll probably be focusing our development time on the larger and growing platforms (FF2 and IE7 obviously being the most important).

Anyway, merry-whatever-you-believe to everyone out there. I'm spending my holidays the same as always- driving from family gathering to family gathering. Roads suck but the person I like being with most is in the car too, so it doesn't matter.

After three successful years, Notacon's 2007 event will also be host to Blockparty, a North American demoparty. In the past, Notacon has tackled its goal of being a creativity-oriented technology event by pushing themes of art, music, history, communication, community, and hacker culture. This year, there'll be talks from some of the biggest names in the demo scene, competitions, and even more great prizes. Also in the works is a talk given by a dead guy. (His sense of humor would totally approve.) There's a ham radio station planned for this year, plus the streaming-audio Notacon Radio. Oh yes, bring your contraptions for Anything but Ethernet, my absurd networking contest.

Now here's what makes it all interesting: Notacon just announced the first three speakers for the 2007 event, but the Call for Proposals is still open. Notacon's all about giving interesting ideas a venue, so if you have something to contribute to the milieu, write it up! Submit it! Do it today!

If you have enabled the Discussion2 beta, you will notice a number of confusingly titled links appearing in comments. These control expansion/contraction of threads in several different ways. They are confusingly titled because we want you to try each of them and let us know which ones you like best without concerning yourself explicitly with how they work.

You can email your feedback to me (try d2 at cmdrtaco dot net) or some of you can actually post here.

I think next week will have a patch with a number of D2 changes (including some results from this experiment hopefully) so your help is really appreciated.

The contents of a story I submitted that's sure to be rejected... I am after all abusing the editors' time:

After threads like this one and its forerunners in similarly affected stories, Slashdot editors have agreed to stop accepting kiddie slang in headlines. This move was heralded by the vast, silent majority of Slashdot who don't have time for this sort of childish crap. CmdrTaco was overheard saying, 'I know I'm a [World of Warcraft] addict -- like many of you -- but I will nip this in the bud before we have headlines containing ZOMGWTFBBQ!!~. This is not Digg and I'd like to keep it that way.'

I didn't mean to submit it containing the world heralded, but ... mistakes happen.

As web applications grow more and more featureful, I slowly find myself replacing desktop apps with web apps. This really makes a lot of navigation on the desktop a real pain in the ass. Example: Gmail. It's probably open in a tab right now. Not sure which one... occasionally we accidentallly close tabs. But if I use quicksilver to open 'gmail' it will open a NEW tab every time. Same if I use the gmail notifier.

Applications each open individually, and they know that they get focused when activated/launched whatever. But effectively firefox may (or may NOT!) actually encapsulate 2-3 different applications... spreadsheets, email, or say, the bookmarks that I use to maintain Slashdot's submissions bin.

I'm not exactly sure how to deal with this. I imagine this problem will only grow if good web applications continue to replace desktop applications.