The design has changed slightly since, but that’s the basic idea. I’ve been working steadily on it for the last few weeks, with a ton of help from Carly and my friends Tim Corbett and Jesse Green, to get all of the pieces of it ready. This weekend we finally started putting it all together—a bunch of people came out to help and we got a lot done.

Pictures!

Tracy and Anna building a blocky hillside.

Carly putting the finishing touches on a hill

Tim checks his pager messages. Foreground: the glue on the castle infrastructure dries.

Despite this, I took exception to James’s conclusion that “If you appreciate a song or an album buy it so the artist can appreciate your support.” My response (and I’m paraphrasing, because tweets demean us all) was that buying copies of songs is no answer. The great thing about the internet is that we don’t need copies anymore — we can broadcast (relatively, but soon unequivocally) high-quality audio on-demand, instantly, to anyone with a connection. We only ever had to own individual copies of the songs we liked because it was the best technology we had for giving people music on demand, and that’s no longer true. And even though selling copies has been how we’ve primarily paid artists for the last several decades, there must be other ways — we’ve supported musicians for millennia without even being able to record music.

To Sheff, I sounded like all tech people, in no small part because I unwisely called albums “obsolete technology,” which is dismissive and in many ways untrue, to say nothing of its disutility as a rhetorical device in a conversation with a musician. But truly, having a music collection has, for the last several years at least, been nothing but a source of psychological stress for me. I’ve got a small collection of vinyl, because it’s got a physical presence and a mythology that no other format ever did, but I can’t realistically collect music this way, nor can most people — it’s bulky and heavy, and owning very much of it makes rent expensive and moving horrible. CDs truly have nothing to recommend them: none of the mystique of an LP, no perceptibly higher quality than a good mp3, and they still take up lots of space.

So if LPs are impractical and CDs offer no benefits, my remaining option is to “own” some mp3s, but why the hell would I want to do that? Right now I listen to mp3s in three places — my home stereo PC, my laptop that I take to work, and my phone/mp3 player. The collections don’t overlap because my phone doesn’t hold all my music and I don’t sync between my other computers often, so I don’t always have all of my music with me. Worse, hard drives fail like champs, so in addition to all these devices, I’ve got to have a backup if I want to make sure I don’t lose my investment in all those songs I “own.” But even a single-hard drive backup isn’t really reliable, and anyway it takes a lot of discipline to do backups right. If I can subscribe to a service that has all of the songs I want to listen to, I don’t have to worry about storing and moving physical objects, or about backups, or about having all of my music accessible wherever I listen. (Assuming a ubiquitous Internet connection, which is admittedly a big assumption.)

I’m not everybody. Some people have a lot more personally invested in having tangible copies of each of their albums than I do, for example. But whatever gratification they may get out of those physical objects, even they mostly value the music, and an increasing proportion of music fans values only the music. Owning copies adds baggage, not value, for those fans. Telling them to buy a copy is tantamount to asking them to make a donation: it may be the right thing to do, but it’s not really tied in any way to the value they’re getting out of the product, because they’re probably going to listen to the album via the streaming service they were already using.

The point here isn’t that artists should get over it. Music fans need to be aware of how little they’re contributing to the music they love by subscribing to Spotify or Pandora or Rhapsody. But for the artist who can’t count on enlightened, community-minded listeners, the fact remains that people will by and large only pay where they perceive they’re getting value out of the transaction. It’s not good enough that they consider the artist or the art valuable — they have to believe they’re getting specific additional value out of this purchase (to economists, this is “marginal value”). And we’re past the point where most people believe they get any more value out of an mp3 download, a CD, or even an LP, than they do out of reasonably reliable access to a song streaming from someone else’s server.

While I think this is an important thing for artists to understand, I don’t think it’s positive. I think our self-centered insistence on marginal value is the result of centuries of conditioning by capitalism and decades of dependence upon a music production and dissemination system that values profits over art and national/international appeal over intimate (or local) experience. The distribution channels were for many years captured by publishers, leaving independent record stores to struggle along in the margins, and despite the Internet’s promise of connecting fans directly to artists, they’ve only been recaptured as iTunes, Amazon, and the various streaming services. The inevitable national tours, where artists are told to go pick up the slack from album sales, make it impossible for artists to hold down solid jobs, and disconnect them from the local support systems in their hometowns. So the problem’s systemic, and just as it’s not going to be solved by telling people to “buy” albums, it’s not going to be solved by telling artists to just find the money somewhere else.

Do not use the Django admin’s DateTime widget.

I spent the weekend working out how to do a split DateTime widget properly, and I’m pretty happy with the result, so I’ll share it here.  It uses a text field with a jQuery UI calendar picker for the date, and a simple widget for the time.  Here’s what it looks like:

And here’s the code:

fields.py

from time import strptime, strftime
from django import forms
from django.db import models
from django.forms import fields
from conflux.widgets import JqSplitDateTimeWidget

class JqSplitDateTimeField(fields.MultiValueField):
    widget = JqSplitDateTimeWidget

    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        """
        Have to pass a list of field types to the constructor, else we
        won't get any data to our compress method.
        """
        all_fields = (
            fields.CharField(max_length=10),
            fields.CharField(max_length=2),
            fields.CharField(max_length=2),
            fields.ChoiceField(choices=[('AM','AM'),('PM','PM')])
            )
        super(JqSplitDateTimeField, self).__init__(all_fields, *args, **kwargs)

    def compress(self, data_list):
        """
        Takes the values from the MultiWidget and passes them as a
        list to this function. This function needs to compress the
        list into a single object to save.
        """
        if data_list:
            if not (data_list[0] and data_list[1] and data_list[2] and data_list[3]):
                raise forms.ValidationError("Field is missing data.")
            input_time = strptime("%s:%s %s"%(data_list[1], data_list[2], data_list[3]), "%I:%M %p")
            datetime_string = "%s %s" % (data_list[0], strftime('%H:%M', input_time))
            print "Datetime: %s"%datetime_string
            return datetime_string
        return None

widgets.py

from django import forms
from django.db import models
from django.template.loader import render_to_string
from django.forms.widgets import Select, MultiWidget, DateInput, TextInput
from time import strftime

class JqSplitDateTimeWidget(MultiWidget):

    def __init__(self, attrs=None, date_format=None, time_format=None):
        date_class = attrs['date_class']
        time_class = attrs['time_class']
        del attrs['date_class']
        del attrs['time_class']

        time_attrs = attrs.copy()
        time_attrs['class'] = time_class
        date_attrs = attrs.copy()
        date_attrs['class'] = date_class

        widgets = (DateInput(attrs=date_attrs, format=date_format),
                   TextInput(attrs=time_attrs), TextInput(attrs=time_attrs),
                   Select(attrs=attrs, choices=[('AM','AM'),('PM','PM')]))

        super(JqSplitDateTimeWidget, self).__init__(widgets, attrs)

    def decompress(self, value):
        if value:
            d = strftime("%Y-%m-%d", value.timetuple())
            hour = strftime("%I", value.timetuple())
            minute = strftime("%M", value.timetuple())
            meridian = strftime("%p", value.timetuple())
            return (d, hour, minute, meridian)
        else:
            return (None, None, None, None)

    def format_output(self, rendered_widgets):
        """
        Given a list of rendered widgets (as strings), it inserts an HTML
        linebreak between them.

        Returns a Unicode string representing the HTML for the whole lot.
        """
        return "Date: %s<br/>Time: %s:%s %s" % (rendered_widgets[0], rendered_widgets[1],
                                                rendered_widgets[2], rendered_widgets[3])

    class Media:
        css = {
            }
        js = (
            "js/jqsplitdatetime.js",
            )

/media/js/jqsplitdatetime.js

$(function() {
   $(".datepicker").datepicker({ dateFormat: 'yy-mm-dd' });
});

To use the field in a form, put something like the following into your form definition:

some_date_field = JqSplitDateTimeField(widget=JqSplitDateTimeWidget(attrs={'date_class':'datepicker','time_class':'timepicker'})

Finally, you need to put the jQuery UI code somewhere. Go get a custom jQuery UI package (I used all of UI Core and Interactions, the Datepicker widget, and Effects Core — your may want more or less depending on where else you’re using JQuery and JQuery UI), put the necessary files (the jQuery UI css and js, the jQuery js) somewhere accessible to your form. I’m using jQuery UI throughout my site, so I’ve got them in my base.html:

    <link type="text/css" href="/media/css/ui-conflux/jquery-ui-1.8.custom.css" rel="Stylesheet" />
    <script src="/media/js/jquery-1.4.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
    <script src="/media/js/jquery-ui-1.8.custom.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

But if you only need jQuery UI for this form, it might make sense to put these in the media class of the JqSplitDateTimeWidget along with jqsplitdatetime.js:

class Media:
   css = {
      "css/ui-custom/jquery-ui-1.8.custom.css"
   }
   js = (
      "js/jqsplitdatetime.js",
      "js/jquery-1.4.2.min.js",
      "js/jquery-ui-1.8.custom.min.js",
   )

A couple of caveats: this widget is not currently very customizable/internationalizable. It only deals with 12-hour time and I should probably pass the date format in as an argument. But it does the trick for what I need, and what a lot of U.S. developers will need, and these things are easily added (I’d love a patch!).

1. “If you like the widgets that the Django Admin application uses, feel free to use them in your own application! They’re all stored in django.contrib.admin.widgets.” – The Django Form Media documentation

The goals for this application are/were roughly:

• Give developers an easy way to check whether a user has agreed to a particular agreement when the user accesses a view. I decided the best way to do this was through a decorator, like so:
  
@requires_agreement('terms_of_service')
def any_old_view(request):
...


• Keep versions of each agreement and record users’ agreement to each, so that the site maintainers have a log of which terms bound a user at which date, and the decorator above can determine whether the user has signed the *latest* version of the agreement.

I implemented both of the above features in version 0.1. What I want to do next is build in a feature I think is best practice for any site that maintains terms of service or a privacy policy:

• When a user is asked to agree to an updated version of an agreement that user has already signed, display a diff of the old form and the current one so that the user can easily see what’s changed.

If you don’t do this, and your site gets big enough, EFF will do it for you. In my opinion, it’s a matter of fundamental respect for users — if you reserve the right in your ToS to make periodic changes to the agreement (and there are good reasons to do this), you should give your users clear notice of those changes.

Unfortunately, the most common practice is to change the terms silently and leave users to seek out a tiny link in the footer if they want to find the current terms. Another common, far better practice is to display the new terms upon the user’s first login to the site after the new terms become active. But few (edit: very few) users read the original terms, much less remember them, so even upon a careful read-through they may have no idea what’s changed. By giving users a diff of the old and new terms, a site makes itself accountable to and builds goodwill with its users. It may also strengthen the legal effect of its terms by giving users actual notice (although courts have been all too ready to enforce online agreements with little to no notice).

I’ve been working on developing a free software application market for Android.¹ The obvious place to start was the SlideME Community Edition code, which as far as I know is the only existing free software project that does even part of the job. Unfortunately, SlideME’s Community Edition was abandoned due to “lack of community interest” in April 2008, several months before the first Android phones were even available. So most of the work I’ve done so far was to update the code to work with the current SDK, rework the interface to behave in a more standard way, and rewrite portions that relied on now-unavailable API elements.

FLOSS Dispenser (like SlideME) works in conjunction with a J2EE server application called JVending. JVending’s public repository was also abandoned by SlideME some time ago, so I’m maintaining a fork of JVending along with my fork of FLOSS Dispenser as a part of the Replicant project.

I put up build instructions for FLOSS Dispenser as well as for JVending; using these, you should be able to build both and have them work together. However, neither one is ready, which is why I’m not hosting an application store already. The FLOSS Dispenser code in particular is pretty buggy (most of them aren’t mine, but only because I haven’t written much of it), for one thing. For another, the system doesn’t yet facilitate GPL compliance — you can download and install apk binaries, but they don’t come with source code and license text. Until at least this feature exists, I don’t recommend anyone serve GPL’d apks to the public using JVending. Update: The client application is now in a working alpha state. The really bad bugs have been hammered out and source can be delivered with the apk (the mechanism for this is nonoptimal, but functional). The challenge now is to enable users of the server to submit new apps easily, and to enable admins to moderate them.

I wanted to have this and some other issues hammered out before I put the code up, but I was motivated by Jonathan Corbet’s recent LWN article on Android to just put up what I had and try to get some help. I know other people are interested in something like this, and though I’m hardly proud of the little coding I’ve done on this, it’s the best start we have for a free market.

So by all means, take a look and help me kick this thing out the door.

1. The quick rationale for this is that the Android Market 1) is not itself free software, and 2) doesn’t enable you to search for applications by their license.

This Month’s ABA Journal	The controversial National Review cover

The National Review, by Asian-ing up Sotomayor’s physical appearance, obviously posts a clear win in terms of sheer cultural insensitivity. But surely someone at the ABA Journal’s editorial staff thought, before rehashing an apparently irresistable cliché to characterize Sotomayor’s frictionless confirmation process, “hey, maybe surrounding her with a bunch of Japanese-looking stuff will raise uncomfortable associations?”  No?

Sort of.

A friend just posted about a White House photo on Flickr, which is appropriately designated as a United States Government Work.  However, beneath the photo is the following text:

This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, or promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.

Several things about the section in bold are problematic.  The first is that it contradicts the law, and the government’s own statement of the law (linked to from the Flickr page), by prohibiting derivative works as well as, it would seem, many other permissible uses.  The limitation to publication by news organizations contradicts the public’s right to distribute copies of the photos, and to display them.  The release by “the subject(s) of the photograph” may be intended to remind users that some states recognize individuals’ rights to the use of their likeness in certain limited contexts (recall another Flickr-related licensing dispute), but those laws do not justify a broad proscription on use by anyone other than news organizations.

Maybe after one more time around, the White House will figure out what “public domain” really means.

Matt is wrong¹ about history.  Nevermind that his thesis, about the framers’ niggardly disposition of rights, enumerates only those granted in the First Amendment (that’s out of 10).  By simplifying to absurdity the history of the Bill of Rights, and omitting completely the development of rights over the course of U.S. and world history, Matt leaves not even a single fun-sized marshmallow of credible context to support his rhetorical toothpick-house.

His conception of the constitutional framers as a unitary band of Democratic-Republicans is shallow, ignoring that the Constitution is and has always been a product of compromise, and that the Bill of Rights is by its own terms² an irreducible minimum statement of rights, not an exhaustive list.  To give Matt some credit, he correctly points out that “US constitutional rights tend to keep govt *out* of citizens’ lives,” and he believes that a right to access does the opposite (roundaboutly, via increased taxation). But Matt’s questionable comprehension of constitutional history is not entirely (or even mostly) why he’s so wrong.

The problem with all of these bothersome rights, Matt says, is that they create a slippery slope.  If you give someone a right, then they might think the right is attended by specific guarantees.  Deftly unwinding the logical integrity of a single tweet, Matt points out that if people are given a right to use a channel of communication simply because that is how one interacts with government, then there is no literally no possible way to distinguish that channel from any other.  If the right to participate in government means that the government must enable that right, then they have to in every conceivable, to the full extent imaginable.  End result?  The government has to buy me the New York Times AND the Wall Street Journal so I can make an informed voting decision.

Matt went to law school, scout’s honor.  At Stanford.  Presumably he took Constitutional Law and learned that over this country’s 230-odd years, Congress and the courts have managed to define, adapt to technological changes, and where necessary narrow a great number of rights, all without giving me a free newspaper.  They’ve addressed some of the issues Matt touched on — for instance by requiring balanced treatment of controversial issues by broadcasters — but the unlimited expansion of rights with which Matt is concerned has been repeatedly thwarted by reasonable people.

But again, one need not engage Matt on the battlefield of grand constitutional theory to see why he is wrong.  One need merely do what Matt seems never to ever do before reaching — and blogging — his opinion: read past the headline.  Because the “fundamental right” Matt is up in arms about isn’t the one he thinks it is.  The European Commission did not consider “codifying Internet access as a basic human right.”  Rather, it merely considered an amendment prohibiting ISPs from limiting subscribers’ access without a court ruling:

[T]he Parliament’s lower house… passed an amendment to the telecommunications package making it illegal for any E.U. country to sever Internet service unless a citizen is found guilty in court…

As the New York Times notes, “the amendment was intended as a rebuff to a proposal before the French National Assembly that would allow a government agency to sever Internet service based on industry complaints.”³ It does not create a right to access for those who haven’t paid for it or impose any other great taxpayer burdens.

So Matt is wrong even about the topic of the debate — the “fundamental right to Internet access” is a strawman he’s set up.  I don’t think he intended to mislead anyone, he just didn’t do his homework.  He read a couple of headlines and one politician’s puffery and took it from there (this is a common M.O. for Matt, which is a major contributing factor to his always being wrong).  But even that immanently defeatable strawman (I don’t know anyone, myself included, who would argue for creating a fundamental right to Internet access, and certainly not absent a detailed plan for implementation and some strong limits on scope) is more than a match for Matt, who relies on popular historical revisionism and an unrealistic parade of horribles to refute the argument that no one is making.

1. Matt Asay is Wrong will be a recurring feature of the copiesofcopies webl.
2. See the Ninth Amendment.
3. French Anti-Piracy Proposal Undermines E.U. Telecommunications Overhaul, May 7, 2009.  Matt claims that Parliament voted against the amendment, which is incorrect.  The parliament instead temporarily defeated a deal permitting three-strikes style laws, by introducing the amendment.  This can all be found in the first two paragraphs of the article Matt cites.

This fee is illegal “key money.”  No agent of a landlord in NYC can charge tenants for anything other than rent, a security deposit, and the (actual) cost of a background check (usually no more than $100).  Demanding more than $250 in key money is a class A misdemeanor under N.Y. Penal Law § 180.56.  “Systematically” demanding key money from three or more tenants is a class E felony under N.Y Penal Law § 180.57.

I should not have taken the apartment.  But I liked the place, I didn’t want to leave my roommate in the lurch (it had been about two weeks since I’d agreed to move in, and he’s stopped looking for other takers) and I would have had to pay a broker’s fee for most other places anyway, so I decided to suck it up and pay the key charge.  I collected what documentation I could of the payment: I called the landlord (Leah from Eckstein Properties, dba 350 Lincoln Place Owners’ Association) and confirmed that she was aware of and stood behind the super’s fee;  I sent her a letter (unregistered, unfortunately) describing the fee, and I kept a copy; I gave the super a similar letter along with the check, cc’d the landlord, and kept a copy for myself; and I kept the check’s stub.

But even though I know my rights and did about as much as could be expected to document the transaction, I suspect there’s nothing I can do to retrieve my money.  The NYC Rent Guidelines Board informs me that the Attorney General will probably take no action without “solid evidence” or a corroborating witness.  My roommate doesn’t want to rock the boat, and he was the only one there besides me.  The cashier’s check, though made out to Lukovic, could have been cashed by anyone.  The letters are from me, and anyway I sent them unregistered so they are readily deniable.  For all of these reasons, an action in small claims court could also easily fail.

One option would be to hold a meeting of the building’s tenants — which I can do in the building without interference or retaliation by the landlord under N.Y. Real Property Law § Sec. 230 — and find others who were charged key money to corroborate my story or put pressure on the landlord.  But if no one shows up (for example because they’re afraid of retaliation, notwithstanding their rights) then I could upset my roommate’s relationship with the landlord against his express wishes for nothing.  And after all, I moved into his apartment.

I’m posting this for a couple of reasons: first, if anyone thinks of anything I haven’t that could help me, please let me know; second, I just want people to be able to google “350 Lincoln Place” and find out that the owners are responsible for rent gouging; third, to make the point that even in NYC, which has some of the strongest tenant protections in the country, it can be difficult or impossible to exercise your rights, because it’s not just your rights at issue.

FML

But what got me laughing was Scott’s pithy demonstration of another problem: conservatives’ refusal to acknowledge the complexity of political issues or the merits of opposing arguments.  No doubt on the advice of his swiftboat-PR consultants, Scott blithely dropped this line during his CNN spot:

Are the decisions that I make with my doctor for my care going to be dictated by some federal bureaucracy? That’s very scary.

I won’t bother connecting the dots.  Suffice it to say that I think it’s disingenuous for conservatives to rally under this particular banner.