You only feel safer

Wired 12.03: VIEW
A nice concise argument why we are wasting our money on all of these precautionary measures intended to make us safer but do nothing but make us feel safer.
From the article:
Every day, some 82,000 foreign visitors set foot in the US with a visa, and since early this year, most of them have been fingerprinted and photographed in the name of security. But despite the money spent, the inconveniences suffered, and the international ill will caused, these new measures, like most instituted in the wake of September 11, are mostly ineffectual.

Play that media, share that control, perform baby, perform

KeyWorx
From the site:
KeyWorx is a Multi-User Cross Media Synthesizer – a distributed application that allows multiple players to generate, synthesize and process images, sounds and text within a shared realtime environment. As an instrument it allows communities of players to dynamically control and modify all aspects of digitized media in a collaborative performance.

NY standing up to copyright tyranny

www.nyfairuse.org – New Yorkers for Protecting Fair Use of Copyrighted Material
From the site:
New Yorkers for Fair Use is a group that supports copyright law as Congress originally framed and implemented it. Congress first conceived of copyright law as a limited term protection for authors and inventors. This limited term protection was meant to be an incentive to creators of original work to distribute their inventions as quickly and as widely as possible. Congress hoped that this distribution would facilitate scientific and artistic progress. Today, the extension of copyright to 70 or more years past the death of the author and the passage of laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, support the interests of corporations in maintaining monopolies over their creations at the expense of scientific and artistic progress. The DMCA is a particularly egregious example of this trend in copyright law. The DMCA grants the authors of digital works the ability to specify how their work my be used in perpetuity. Moreover, the DMCA even allows authors to prohibit the copying and quoting of their digital work for the purpose of education — a use of copyrighted works which has traditionally been allowed under the doctrine of fair use. Because the DMCA allows authors to prevent other members of the public from using their work as a basis for further creative endeavor, we believe the DMCA fatally harms the original intent of copyright law, which was to promote progress in the useful arts and sciences. As such, we support the revocation of the DMCA in the interests of scientific and artistic progress. We also support the extension of the fair use doctrine into the digital domain so that some balance is restored between the interests of the public and the interests of authors and inventors.