Dan Siemon

How To Do What You Love

The most dangerous liars can be the kids’ own parents. If you take a boring job to give your family a high standard of living, as so many people do, you risk infecting your kids with the idea that work is boring.

Most people are doomed in childhood by accepting the axiom that work = pain.

All parents tend to be more conservative for their kids than they would for themselves, simply because, as parents, they share risks more than rewards. If your eight year old son decides to climb a tall tree, or your teenage daughter decides to date the local bad boy, you won’t get a share in the excitement, but if your son falls, or your daughter gets pregnant, you’ll have to deal with the consequences.

The Problem with Webcasting provides a nice overview of the new webcaster’s (copy) right that is being pushed by the U.S. WIPO delegation.

There’s a new restriction on content waiting in the wings–a “webcaster’s right” that allows websites to control the dissemination of content they put up. With this new privilege, they’ll be able to prevent retransmission even if the copyright on that content is owned by somebody else–even, in fact, if that content was in the public domain.

I don’t do much gaming these days so maybe Second Life is well known and I just missed it. It certainly is an interesting concept. Instead of paying a service fee, users pay what essentially amounts to a land tax on the virtual land they own.

Become a part of history by purchasing land and developing your own piece of Second Life. The Pricing and Fees are simple; you pay $9.95 a month plus a Land Use Fee proportional to the amount of land you own.

Linden Lab’s Terms of Service agreement recognizes Residents’ right to retain full intellectual property protection for the digital content they create in Second Life …

The Marketplace currently supports millions of US dollars in monthly transactions. This commerce is handled with the in-world currency, the Linden dollar, which can be converted to US dollars at several thriving online currency exchanges.

What do you think about an Internet public works commission?

Check out E-Work found here.

What is your dangerous idea? from the Edge.

Answers to that question from 120 thinkers. Warning, it is quite long but very interesting.

The Conservative party of Canada has been making a big deal out of accountability during this election campaign. The following quote is from Harper Makes Commitment to Clean Up Government.

Stephen Harper said today his first piece of legislation as Prime Minister will be to introduce a new Federal Accountability Act designed to end the influence of big money in Ottawa and crack down on a lobbying culture that has thrived under Paul Martin.

To their credit, the Conservatives do outline some good ideas for dealing with this problem in the quoted article.

However, it would appear that at least one current Conservative MP is not a stranger to accepting money from lobby groups. From The Sad Reality of Copyright Policy in Canada:

In fact, notwithstanding the Conservatives’ claims of accountability, new research indicates that Oda is no stranger to funding support. According to her 2004 riding association data, she accepted thousands of dollars in contributions from the broadcast lobby. Corporate supporters included Alliance Atlantis, Astral Media, Canwest, and CHUM.

Doc Searls has been writing about markets being a conversation for quite a while now. Despite reading a lot of his stuff, (minus the Cluetrain Manifesto which I have been meaning to buy) I never really understood what he was talking about until I read TV News in a Postmodern World which Doc recently linked to.

The Wikipedia Foundation is having trouble meeting its fundraising goals.

Do you use Wikipedia? Then why not give them a little bit of money. It’s easy.

A Personal Appeal from Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales

Wikimedia Fundraiser 2005 Q4

Today, I stumbled onto the following nasty bit of shell code in SECURITY Limit User Processes over on the Gentoo Wiki. No, I haven’t switched to Gentoo.

:(){ :|:& };:

Warning, this will cause your shell to create processes as fast as it can; most likely grinding your computer to a halt if you don’t have the appropriate limits set.

After spending some time trying to figure out what this command was doing assuming the colon was functioning as a no-op, I did a quick Google search and found this nice explanation of what it actually does. So, today I learned that Bash allows functions to be defined which override built-in commands.

Searching for stuff on Technorati is quite interesting.

I discovered an article in the Globe and Mail written by a London doctor. He discusses how hospitals are funded in Ontario. The post that led me to the article is called More on a rational view for healthcare and wait times.