Posterish

Facebook Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has sold 30.2 million shares and director Peter Thiel has sold 16.8 million shares of the social-networking company, according to securities filings published late Tuesday. The sales confirm plans detailed in a prospectus before Friday's $16 billion IPO. Zuckerberg sold 30.2 million shares at a price of $37.58 for gross proceeds of $1.13 billion; Thiel sold 16.8 million shares for gross proceeds of $633 million.

Every $0.03 more per share for Zuckerberg would've been another million dollars.

[Nicholas] Merrill, 39, who previously ran a New York-based Internet provider, told CNET that he's raising funds to launch a national "non-profit telecommunications provider dedicated to privacy, using ubiquitous encryption" that will sell mobile phone service and, for as little as $20 a month, Internet connectivity. . . . Merrill says his ISP, to be run by a non-profit called the Calyx Institute with for-profit subsidiaries, will put customers first. "Calyx will use all legal and technical means available to protect the privacy and integrity of user data," he says.

[ . . . ]

His recipe for Calyx was inspired by [] six years of interminable legal wrangling with the Feds: Take wireless service like that offered by Clear, which began selling 4G WiMAX broadband in 2009. Inject end-to-end encryption for Web browsing. Add e-mail that's stored in encrypted form, so even Calyx can't read it after it arrives. Wrap all of this up into an easy-to-use package and sell it for competitive prices, ideally around $20 a month without data caps, though perhaps prepaid for a full year. "The idea that we are working on is to not be capable of complying" with requests from the FBI . . . .

[ . . . ]

Merrill has formed an advisory board with members including Sascha Meinrath from the New America Foundation; former NSA technical director Brian Snow; and Jacob Appelbaum from the Tor Project. . . . The next step for Merrill is to raise about $2 million and then, if all goes well, launch the service later this year.

$2 million and he'll get something together by the end of the year?! Post to Kickstarter/Reddit and he could get that inside the week. Everyone would get on board for this, which I would think would require tens of millions to be done effectively, but I guess he is currently getting a lot of free help. A new, correct ISP, and entirely wireless like this one, is our next biggest thing.

Paul Brigner, whom the MPAA hired in January 2011 as its chief technology officer, has left the industry's trade and lobbying organization, CNET reports. He's now a major critic of legislation championed by the MPAA such as the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect Intellectual Property Act that stalled in Congress earlier this year . . . .

Last month Brigner became director of the North American Regional Bureau of the Internet Society, an organization whose stated goals include "the continued evolution and growth of the Internet for everyone."

Even though he wasn't really in on the policy- and decision-making this is great news. Honestly if any Congressman supporting SOPA understood (or even encountered) the realities of both the Internet and copyright legislation like Brigner, we would have never seen SOPA or PIPA. They just don't understand the Internet. Brigner's realization sums it up perfectly:

So, here's my belief in black and white: I firmly believe that we should not be legislating technological mandates to protect copyright—including SOPA and Protect IP. That is what the Internet Society believes, and, frankly, that is a prime reason I chose to join the organization. Did my position on this issue evolve over the last 12 months? I am not ashamed to admit that it certainly did. The more I became educated on the realities of these issues, the more I came to the realization that a mandated technical solution just isn't mutually compatible with the health of the Internet.

A group of three large academic publishers has sued the start-up Boundless Learning in federal court, alleging that the young company, which produces open-education alternatives to printed textbooks, has stolen the creative expression of their authors and editors, violating their intellectual-property rights. . . .

The publishers' complaint takes issue with the way the upstart produces its open-education textbooks, which Boundless bills as free substitutes for expensive printed material. To gain access to the digital alternatives, students select the traditional books assigned in their classes, and Boundless pulls content from an array of open-education sources to knit together a text that the company claims is as good as the designated book. The company calls this mapping of printed book to open material "alignment"—a tactic the complaint said creates a finished product that violates the publishers' copyrights.

[ . . . ]

To illustrate this claim of intellectual theft, the publishers' complaint points to the Boundless versions of several textbooks, including Biology, a textbook authored by Neil Campbell and Jane Reece. The Boundless alternative, the complaint alleges, is guilty of copying the printed material's layout and engaging in what the complaint calls "photographic paraphrasing." In one chapter of the printed book, for instance, the editors chose to illustrate the first and second laws of thermodynamics using pictures of a bear running and a bear catching a fish in its mouth. Boundless's substitute text uses similar pictures to illustrate the same concepts—albeit Creative Commons-licensed images hosted on Wikipedia that include links to the source material, in accordance with the terms of the open license. . . . The complaint goes on to allege that Boundless's choice of bear photographs in that chapter reflects "only the previously made creative, scholarly, and aesthetic judgments of the authors and editors of Campbell's Biology."

There are a lot of interesting things going on in this. None of the content is actually the same so Boundless' open textbooks must be pretty good if these publishers are essentially suing them for "look and feel" infringement. All auto-generated books I've seen to date have been just terrible in their ability to piece together free and unlicensed content. This lawsuit kind of implicitly acknowledges that Boundless' content is nearly just as good as Pearson's.

I'd like to see how closely the two books actually resemble each other, Boundless might have some problems if it's just a slavish imitation of popular paper books but the best example the publishers seem to come up with are two related photographs to illustrate the same concept. I wish Boundless' reply was a little more than declining to comment on how they pull together the open-education content or if humans are paraphrasing the popular books though, that doesn't sound comforting.

None of this is surprising, these traditional publishers have incredible paper textbook margins to protect and their biggest contribution to our inevitable movement to digital content is to crawl slowly, load it up with DRM, make them harder to access and use, and sue upstart competitors. This will just be the first of many to protect their insanely dominant position, which is a shame because they once did do incredible work to standardize information and get it into more hands.

Still though, even if Pearson and these publishers win, it has to be a frightening message to them and their 60% margins that nearly all of the content in their textbooks can be sourced from free, open, and unlicensed alternatives with existing technology. All they have now is the organization and layout?

I was listening to an interview on fresh air with baseball catcher Brad Ausmus today. He said something I thought was pretty insightful, and relevant to the science and people's reactions towards failure:

DAVIES: And when somebody could take a little berating what would you berate them about?

Mr. AUSMUS: Usually when I was berating someone it was because they were pitching what I would call scared. They were trying to avoid contact or they were afraid that the hitter was going to hit the ball. In sports in general you can't be afraid of failure, but in baseball there's so much failure you really can't be afraid of it. So the only time I would berate a pitcher or get on a pitcher would be when I felt like they were pitching scared on the mound and that they were trying to avoid contact because they were afraid of what was going to happen. So unless you were doing that like I said my general rule was to walk away with them feeling they could get out of that situation.

"The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls" is an unpublished work by J. D. Salinger. It is about the death of Kenneth Caulfield, who later became Allie in The Catcher in the Rye.

The story was initially going to appear in Harper's Bazaar but Salinger withdrew the story before publication. This story is available only in the Princeton library. Those who wish to read it must check in with two forms of ID with the librarian, and are then supervised while they read the story behind the closed doors of a special reading room. As per the terms of Salinger's donation of the manuscript to Princeton, it cannot be published until 50 years after his death; thus, the earliest it can be published is January 27, 2060.

How has this not been reproduced yet? I can't see how Princeton could police someone filming or photographing it secretly as they read, and collecting that sweet private tracker bounty.