I was just telling someone about
TinyURL and it
reminded me of some math I did to
calculate the number
of unique identifiers they can create with the 36 alphanumeric characters
they use for various lengths of IDs
(
check out the
context of that comment).
In my introduction, I wrote, "it's even more than that, should they choose
to have URLs with unique identifiers of between 1 and 6 characters".
Reading this made me wonder: does TinyURL do this? And if so, what's the
first TinyURL? http://tinyurl.com/0 doesn't exist (so subtract 1 from my answer ;-) but http://tinyurl.com/1 does. It is kind of fun to check out all these other
people's URLs. http://tinyurl.com/z is pretty amusing.
I also realized that TinyURL's identifier is basically just counting in
base 36. Ah, the ease of constructing unique IDs if they don't have to be
hard to guess. 1...2...3...4...5...6...
Back in August, I wrote about
semi-private networks. I suggested that they would not take off unless
the RIAA succeeds in limiting the value of open networks like Kazaa. I
also suggested some empirical research into whether or not this was
actually happening.
Clay Shirky has a recent piece called
File-sharing Goes
Social. He writes, "[t]he RIAA has slowly altered the environment so that
relatively efficient systems like Napster were killed, opening up a niche
for more decentralized systems like Gnutella and Kazaa. With their current
campaign against Kazaa in full swing, we are about to see another shift in
network design, one that will have file sharers adopting tools originally
designed for secure collaboration in a corporate setting."
Meanwhile, Philip Greenspun
proposes that
portable MP3 jukeboxes are home audio recording devices, and sharing
music between them with your friends is legal:
Consider this scenario. You are sitting at Starbucks and see a friend. He is not inside your Starbucks but across the street in the other Starbucks. You walk across the street. Both of you happen to have your MP3 jukeboxes your pockets. He says "Have you heard the latest Britney Spears song? It reminds me so much of the late Beethoven Quartets with some of Stravinsky's innovative tonality." You haven't? Just click your MP3 jukeboxes together and sync them up. Any tracks that he had and you didn't you now have. You're using a digital audio recorder; the device won't do anything except record music. You're not paying each other so it is noncommercial. Under Section 1008 what you're doing is perfectly legal in the United States.
Imagine having a party at your house in which 30 people show up. By the end of the evening every person has the union of 30 personal music collections.
This idea makes me want to get a 40 gig iPod
and synch it up with all my friends' music collections to see how much
music I could get, and whether or not I would want any of it. That would
be an interesting experiment. Maybe someone will pay me to write an
article about it. Then I could afford the 40 gig iPod. :)
Josh Marshall reacts to one of the suggestions in
Rumsfield's memo
about the progress of the "war on terror":
Couldn't we just build a super-strong ladder up into space instead of using those rockets?
Yes.