A life in words

  • Two Ideas

    These ideas have rather caught my attention: About the Semantic Web, see this TED talk by Tim Berners-Lee: The next Web of open, linked data A blog post about Internet-fueled government transparency: What the post-bureaucratic era will mean for the public service

  • Why…

    …are eBooks embracing DRM while online music stores are abandoning it? What’s the difference aside from a couple of megabytes?

  • Dubious Honor, But See The Show!

    Well, I’m not quite sure what it says about my not-quite-nascent acting career (they said I was good at “vacant”), but I’ve been cast to play the title role (at least, a role from part of the title) in Waiting for Godot Baggins at tomorrow night’s Bad Play Project. There will be minimal, if any,…

Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech … Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom, and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech, which is the right of every man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or control the right of another: and this is the only check it ought to suffer, and the only bounds it ought to know. … A free People will be shewing that they are so, by their freedom of speech. … Freedom of speech is ever the symptom, as well as the effect of a good government. … Guilt only dreads liberty of speech, which drags it out of its lurking holes, and exposes its deformity and horror to daylight.Benjamin Franklin, Silence Dogood no. 8, 1722 (orthography and spelling modernized)