can you tell I'm bored/procrastinating today?

I just noticed an entry on Ed Felton's Freedom To Tinker regarding the deal between the RIAA and tech companies. The statement includes:

The role of government, if needed at all, should be limited to enforcing compliance with voluntarily developed functional specifications reflecting consensus among affected interests.

What I'm curious about is why the government should have to enforce these "voluntarily developed functional specifications"? I can voluntarily decide a lot of things, but just because I write on paper that it would be nice for the government to enforce my decisions, doesn't meant that it's their obligation, or right, to do so. I hope I'm misunderstanding their intent.

Cringely recently wrote why "Why Apple is Pulling Away From Microsoft and Can't Afford Not to Do It". It's an interesting read on: why Keynote; why Safari; and how MS, in another of it's classic examples of innovation, is copying Apple's Digital Hub strategy:

With Redmond periodically threatening Apple with an end to Microsoft Office for the Mac, this is Apple saying, "We dare you."

A complete office application suite requires a word processor, spreadsheet, web browser, database, and presentation program, so with these new programs and its FileMaker database, Apple already has on sale three-fifths of an office suite.  Who is to say that next year Jobs won't announce the other two applications, either of which is frankly easier to make than the applications announced this week?

One of the interesting parts about this that he doesn't mention is that, to a large extent, this will be possible because of the choice to go with NeXT as the foundation for Mac OS X. One of the cooler parts about NexT was that it was amazingly easy to build applications. The large amount of foundation classes and the ease with which they integrated into the programming environments, thus encouraging their use, made the few developers who signed on very happy. I remember seeing some NeXT demos as an undergraduate where they would build word processors and such for you on the spot. Obviously rigged, and they weren't too full featured, but it showed the potential.

That became Cocoa, and its not coincidence that Apple has been writing all these new apps in that environment. NeXT was always touted as being about 10 years ahead of its time, which means that should be right around the corner.

Everyone and their mother will be posting about it, but it deserves the coverage. Lessig says it quite succinctly as: "the Supreme Court has rejected our challenge to the Sonny Bono Law." I can't say I'm surprised. As much as I think the law sucks, it was never clear to me that it was so much unconstitutional as just ..well...sucky. The proper place to get this fixed in in Congress, but until there's some kind of campaign finance reform so that the entertainment cartels can't buy influence, that's not likely to happen.

via Scripting News, a list of relevant links.

This month's Crypto-Gram is out today. Because its only monthly, and therefore doesn't intrude too much, this is something I tend to read every month. This month, some of the reader feedback on previous months' newsletters is pretty good.