links for 2008-12-22

• | The Public Domain |
  James Boyle introduces readers to the idea of the public domain and describes how it is being tragically eroded by our current copyright, patent, and trademark laws. In a series of fascinating case studies, Boyle explains why gene sequences, basic business ideas and pairs of musical notes are now owned, why jazz might be illegal if it were invented today, why most of 20th century culture is legally unavailable to us, and why today’s policies would probably have smothered the World Wide Web at its inception.
  (tags: opensource creativecommons copyright)
• Prof tries to dial down greenhouse emissions from cellphone use
  A report by the Global e-Sustainability Initiative says the power it takes to send and receive signals from cellphones and other wireless electronics creates the same amount of carbon dioxide per year as that generated by the aviation industry. According the report, 830 million tonnes of carbon dioxide is generated worldwide each year to keep communications towers buzzing.
  (tags: technology mobile sustainability)
• The Internet Tidal Wave
  Bill Gates wrote a paper titled The Internet Tidal Wave in 1995. It’s a concept that’s been used quite extensively since then. This was the document used as prove of the real concern od Bill Gates about Netscape's browser (Navigator) on the Anti-trust process at the and of the Browser War I.
  (tags: internet software)
• ViOS – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  ViOS (Visual Internet Operating System) was a client-server software system designed by Julian Lombardi in the mid-1990s and built by a team he led at ViOS Inc. from 1999-2001 as a way of spatially organizing all Internet-deliverable resources (including web pages) into a massively-scaled multiuser 3D environment with users of the system represented as customizable avatars. The basic concept behind the "ViOS 3D Internet Viewer" was to take the virtual world of the entire Internet and adapt it to a physical representation of large virtual landscape, complete with mountains, rivers and cities. This approach was taken because of the belief that virtual landscapes resembling our physical world are more conducive to exploration and social interaction than the flat and abstracted world of the current document-based Internet.
  (tags: internet virtualworlds metaverse 3d interface)
• One in five teens engaged in 'tech sex' – web – Technology – smh.com.au
  One in five US teens has sent nude or partially-clothed images of themselves to someone by email or mobile phone and twice as many have sent sexually suggestive electronic messages, a survey shows.
  (tags: onlinesafety technology teens)
• Export your Tumblr blog to WordPress « Web 0.2 – Hao Chen
  Fresh off the press, just finished coding a tool to that will export all the posts in your Tumblr blog into an XML file. You can then import that XML file into your WordPress.com blog or self-hosted WordPress blog.
  (tags: tools wordpress)