Copybright

"I've said it before and I'll say it again: Democracy just doesn't work." Kent Brockman may have had an insight here, but what is truly broken is Copyright Law™.
Myth: Copyrights lasts as long as they should.
My take: Copyrights were originally 52 year, later 20 years past the artist's death (to account for an increase in life expectancy). Today they are owned by corporations which have no death date.

Myth: Copyrights protect the artist
My take: Copyrights may marginally benefit the artists, but usually benefit the distribution companies

Myth: File sharing is killing the record industry
My take: File sharing often helps sales, and the drop in the record industry sales is likely due to really stupid decisions as they tried to guess what we consumers would want to buy.

For more information, see: http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2003-09-07-1.html

For more information on fair use, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJn_jC4FNDo

Women: Know your Bigots

Men outnumber Women in the "hard sciences", particularly in the Computer Sciences, by orders of magnitude. Why? This has been discussed extensively, and with (as far as I can tell) no solid conclusion. Ideas include not enough daycare services at universities, and making the field hyper-theoretical to accommodate a non-tinkering personality. As I am not a woman (suprise!), I will not pretend to be an authority on this subject. I will say that this will likely not change in the near future, as women seem to be opting out (at least in part).
This makes me sad.

Family Bliss-tory

Although most love their family, not many know of their fore-bears preceding their grandparents. It seems ironic, but our world-wide journey into the future has brought us closer to the past. FamilySearch and other genealogical research and database resources have begun to connect the family tree of the whole human race at a pace never before imagined. And many people find themselves drawn to this work of genealogy, to find out who they are and where they've come from, and simply because they love their precursors.

Dear God, thanks for the tactical nukes.

Our technology is a miracle from God. How do we use it? Sometimes well, sometimes horrifically.
If aliens saw our use of technology, what would they think? Let me tell you:
"They wish to have a flood of data & facts, and even then they will not use it to their advantage. They are ever learning and never able to come to a knowledge of the truth. They have more wisdom than any time in their history, and yet they have less wisdom than ever."

Anarchy makes the Best Organization

The Internet has turned the standard business model upside-down. The Open-Source model, especially, has destroyed many ideas held in resolute, such as Brook's Law. The basic philosophy and tenets held to so zealously by many open-source developers are to blame: be open and honest to the point of promiscuity, release it while it's still crap and get loads of feedback, treat your users as co-developers and as your most valuable resource; and of course, the obvious yet often overlooked fact that many minds are greater than one.

A Treatise: On Stupid-heads

For years, some foresightful people had looked forward to the day when computers could be linked together all over the world, in order to create a database which would propagate information to everybody who accessed it. The phenomenon of the Internet was far from a surprise, and in fact was commonly predicted. What they failed to predict was HOW it would be used.
When ARPA-Net was opened up to universities, it started to be viewed as a research and collaboration tool; it was seen as a digital library. And virtually everybody expected people to treat it like a library as well: one is to be respectful of the library's assets and of other patrons. If one wishes to retrieve information, it can be expected that they will go to reasonable lengths to ensure that they check out the material with the proper procedure, notifying those who need such notification for administrative purposes. And, obviously, one does not do something outright illegal in a library.
The problem with the early Internet lied in the facts that it was one of the only international forums of inter-personal interaction open to the general public at the time. Another, that real personal identification was either voluntary, or virtually non-existent. But most of all, it just sprung up too fast. There were almost no laws concerning the internet; and there were certainly no international laws. People were just expected to behave.
Clifford Stoll found that this was not to be. He tracked an international spy-hacker for months while he wasted staff time, resources, network connection time, and used unpaid for long-distance tolls. But much worse, he trespassed, invaded property and privacy, and conducted espionage. He even risked injuring a medical patient at one point.
The result? The trust of the network community was if not lost than changed forever. The open cooperative character of the research network had been violated.
And it would seem that, once again, a new technology meant to bring in a new dawn of cooperation and mutual benefit gets ruined by one guy.
References: Clifford Stoll, The Cuckoo's Egg
Clifford Stoll, Stalking the Wily Hacker