Reference:
"We want to investigate how people react when they first encounter Mo, as we lovingly like to call the robot," said Prof Warwick.

"Through one of Mo's eyes, he can watch people's responses to him following them around.

"It appears this is not deemed acceptable for under 18-year-olds without prior consent from their legal guardian."
Guardian

Notes:

Reference:
Both the Net and Linux were created, grew and flourished almost entirely outside the regulatory sphere. They are, in a literal sense, what free markets have done with their freedoms.
....
The Internet has been blessedly free of regulation for most of its short life. But the companies that provide most Internet service--telcos and cable companies--are highly regulated. They are creatures that live in a regulatory environment that bears little resemblance to a real marketplace. As natives of regulatory habitats, they see nothing but Good Sense in regulating the Net. After all, any regulation will help assert their ownership over the sections of the Net they control and legitimize the limitations they place on what their customers can do with, and on, the Net.
....
I think we need a galvanizing issue. I suggest Saving the Net. To do that, we need to treat the Net as two things:

1. a public domain, and therefore
2. a natural habitat for markets

In other words, we need to see the Net as a marketplace that has done enormous good, is under extreme threat and needs to be saved.
Linux Journal/Doc Searls

Notes:
Let's see if we can get this right. Markets are good, asserting property rights is bad. No, no, it's that free markets are good but regulatory markets are bad. No, no, its a public domain where there's no property rights. No, no, it's an ecosystem...

Muddled economic spouting only hurts the case. It ain't about markets, it's about free as in freedom.

And this comes from someone who praised Shirky's thoughts on the influence of the power rule on blog popularity. The same thing happens in markets. That's why we end up with government regulation.

Reference:
According to its Web site, the Policy Analysis Market would be a joint program of the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, and two private companies: Net Exchange, a market technologies company, and the Economist Intelligence Unit, the business information arm of the publisher of The Economist magazine.

DARPA has received strong criticism from Congress for its Terrorism Information Awareness program, a computerized surveillance program that has raised privacy concerns. Wyden said the Policy Analysis Market is under retired Adm. John Poindexter, the head of the Terrorism Information Awareness program and, in the 1980s, a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal.
Yahoo

Notes:
Remember, these are the same people who gave us the Internet. All hail end-to-end.

Reference:
(SCO licensing) Prices are steep, for a free operating system. Introductory prices include $199 to run Linux on a desktop PC and $699 to run it on a server with a single CPU. The server price jumps to $1,399 after the introductory period ends on Oct. 15. By comparison, Red Hat's standard version of desktop Linux sells for $39.
....
If SCO is successful with its intellectual property claims, however, such licensing prices will help kill Linux, Haff said.
news.com

Notes:
This is such a "cut your nose off to spite yourself" kind of action on SCO's part that it is very hard not to conclude that there is a hidden agenda. And it is hard not to speculate that there is a collusion between MS and SCO.

Reference:
We talked about GNU/Linux being able to survive long-term. He was thinking from a US perspective, so his initial reaction was that MS would surely kill it off, because "they have to". Nobody, he told me, can win against MS, because they have too much money.
GROKlaw

Notes:
Now, to continue the conspiracy theory: MS has nothing new coming out until Longhorn ships in 2005-06-07 whenever. That's a long time for no new upgrades, especially considering upgrade leapfrogging. Linux is making a push into the desktop space. They've got to do something to slow the Linux momentum so that when Longhorn *does* ship, they'll pick up both single-step upgraders and the leapfroggers.

Reference:
Pharmaceutical plants might take the familiar forms of corn or lettuce or tomatoes, but they're not meant to be eaten; they're designed to be efficient living factories for pharmaceuticals and other therapeutic products. It's not known how stray proteins from these crops could affect human health, but anyone can predict their impact on human consumer habits. Even if there's only a small chance of contraceptives in your cornflakes, you're not likely to be buying.
....
Problem is, most of this science is shrouded in secrecy. Biotechnology companies are not required to release research data or the location of testing sites to the public, and even state officials are not informed of the exact locations of sites.
....
Federal regulators, long friendly to biotechnology, haven't pressed very hard for more independent information or greater corporate openness. Their oversight of plant-made pharmaceuticals is further complicated by a somewhat murky division of responsibilities between the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration.
....
Yet organic farmer Doug Wiley isn't reassured by the uproar. ... "Those bureaucracies have seldom made decisions that benefit rural communities," he says. "I have no faith in them at all."
Salon

Notes: