] Fortean Times is a monthly magazine of news, reviews and
] research on strange phenomena and experiences,
] curiosities, prodigies and portents.

I just noticed that Fortean Times has a website..

Fortean Times

] Cyberspace was once thought to be the modern equivalent
] of the Western Frontier, a place, where land was free for
] the taking, where explorers could roam, and communities
] could form with their own rules. It was an endless
] expanse of space: open, free, replete with possibility.
] This is true no longer. This Article argues that we are
] enclosing cyberspace, and imposing private property
] conceptions upon it. As a result, we are creating a
] digital anti-commons where sub-optimal uses of Internet
] resources is going to be the norm.

Blogging for later reading..

Cyberspace as Place, and the Tragedy of the Digital Anticommons

,----
| VANCOUVER - A top White House drug policy official is threatening
| retaliation from the U.S. if Canada relaxes its laws against marijuana
| possession.
|
| David Murray, right-hand man to U.S. "drug czar" John Walters, says he
| doesn't want to tread on another country's sovereignty, but warned
| there would be consequences if Canada proceeds with a plan to
| decriminalize the possession of marijuana.
`----

Oh, really? So now tell me, would that be a 'Shock and Awe' type
retaliation?

CBC News: U.S. warns Canada against easing pot laws

] If they don't fight for their right to exist, independent
] ISPs soon will be replaced by huge cable television and
] telephone companies supported by misguided FCC
] regulations, according to Kushnick, who addressed an
] audience Friday at ISPCON, an annual gathering for
] Internet service providers.
]
] Extinction is not the only trouble bedeviling ISPs.
] Owners and workers say they are being forced to turn into
] Net nannies, cops and snoops by the cavalcade of
] anti-terrorist and copyright-protection legislation
] that's been passed in the last two years.
]
] Kushnick's speech was greeted with much somber
] head-nodding and occasional bursts of approving applause
] from an audience consisting mostly of ISP owners and
] employees.

Wired News: Indie ISPs Fight for Survival

] In the case of physical property, we take it for granted
] that the ownership right should have the potential of
] persisting as long as the physical object itself. In the
] case of an idea, however, we have chosen to strike a
] different balance in recognition of the chaos that could
] follow from having to trace back all the thoughts
] implicit in one's current undertaking and pay a royalty
] to the originator of each one. So rather than adopting
] that obviously principled but unworkable approach, we
] have chosen instead to follow the lead of British common
] law and place time limits on intellectual property
] rights.

I'm rerecommending this. I've read it now. Greenspan explains the changing nature of the situation just as I have in the past, and this talk offers itself as a good reference for such an explanation, as people usually don't want to take my word for it. :)

Intellectual Property is broken. You heard it here from the guy that runs the economy. So don't tell me I'm being silly.

Of course, Greenspans perspective on how to fix it is probably 180 degrees from mine.

FRB: Speech, Greenspan-Market economies--April 4, 2003

] The recording industry is suing students at Michigan
] Technological and two other universities, saying they ran
] Napster-like file sharing systems on the schools'
] high-speed Internet networks.
]
] The lawsuit says Michigan Tech student Joseph Nievelt and
] three others ran systems offering more than 1 million
] copies of songs for illegal downloading.

Michigan Tech student sued by music industry over file sharing

] Dear America: This is a difficult letter to write,
] because I'm no longer sure who you are.

From north of the 49th parallel

Abstract: Both laboratory and field data suggest that people punish noncooperators even in one-shot interactions. Although such "altruistic punishment" may explain the high levels of cooperation in human societies, it creates an evolutionary puzzle: existing models suggest that altruistic cooperation among nonrelatives is evolutionarily stable only in small groups.

Thus, applying such models to the evolution of altruistic punishment leads to the prediction that people will not incur costs to punish others to provide benefits to large groups of nonrelatives.

However, here we show that an important asymmetry between altruistic cooperation and altruistic punishment allows altruistic punishment to evolve in populations engaged in one-time, anonymous interactions.

This process allows both altruistic punishment and altruistic cooperation to be maintained even when groups are large and other parameter values approximate conditions that characterize cultural evolution in the small-scale societies in which humans lived for most of our prehistory.

This article appears in the March 18, 2003 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). It is provided here by the author with no subscription required.

The evolution of altruistic punishment [PDF]

] There's a new breed of combat personnel at the war front:
] soldier "bloggers."
]
] Once the narrow domain of geeks and technology
] journalists, "Web logs" -- or diary accounts published
] online -- have gone mainstream, making it possible for
] even soldiers to transmit daily updates to Web sites
] about the rigours of battle.
]
] War-themed blogs, appearing on sites such as
] www.blogsofwar.com and www.sgtstryker.com, have become a
] popular alternative news source since fighting broke out
] in Iraq a week ago, sometimes beating newspapers and
] television with war developments.

Soldier 'bloggers' report from war

Some interesting statistics on wars from the Revolutionary War to the (first) Gulf War, on things such as:
- Percentage of population enrolled in the military
- Number of casualties (both absolute and percentage)
- Cost of the war (converted to 1990 dollars)
- Duration of war, average casualties/month, and so forth

Statistical Summary: America's Major Wars