She's Geeky conference takes aim at Silicon Valley's male-skewed culture (San Jose Mercury)

...She's Geeky was a chance for these women to discuss the things they know that perhaps everybody doesn't. The two-day conference may turn out to be a first step toward a permanent forum for women who are more than happy to identify as geeks.

The conference, which attracted about 200 women to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View Monday and today, is about business networking, hard-edged technical brainstorming and polishing individual business skills such as public speaking.

But because it's an all-woman conference - the first of its kind in Silicon Valley, organizers said, for its wideranging focus on the challenges women face in the high technology workplace, its desire to let participants set the agenda, and its intent.

(more. . .)

Law Firm Uses Copyright Claim To Say You Can't View Its Website's HTML Sourc (Techdirect)

Greg Beck writes in to let us know that the law firm that was recently challenged for claiming that it was a copyright violation to post its cease-and-desist letter also has some other interesting ideas about copyright, including banning people from looking at the firm's source code.

(more . . )

U.S. ISP blocking BitTorrent users

PETER SVENSSON
Associated Press

NEW YORK — Comcast Corp. actively interferes with attempts by some of its high-speed Internet subscribers to share files online, a move that runs counter to the tradition of treating all types of Net traffic equally.

The interference, which The Associated Press confirmed through nationwide tests, is the most drastic example yet of data discrimination by a U.S. Internet service provider. It involves company computers masquerading as those of its users.

If widely applied by other ISPs, the technology Comcast is using would be a crippling blow to the BitTorrent, eDonkey and Gnutella file-sharing networks. While these are mainly known as sources of copyright music, software and movies, BitTorrent in particular is emerging as a legitimate tool for quickly disseminating legal content.
(more . . )

Rome: The Marvels and the Menace (NY Review of Books)

A great article/review about a number of books about Rome:

On April 21, the city of Rome celebrated the 2760th anniversary of its founding. Despite nearly three thousand years of invasions by Sabines, Gauls, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Huns, Normans, German Landesknechte, Napoleon, Hitler, and mass tourism, Rome survives, in many respects handsomely. Constant use keeps buildings alive as well as wearing them down, and the same is true of cities. No floor in Rome is as spotless as the thirteenth-century marble pavement in the church of Santa Maria in Ara Coeli, the same intricate designs wrought in bits of ancient colored marble that Dante walked across when they were new, and where Edward Gibbon paced nearly half a millennium later as he began to conceive his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The floor's irregularities have been worn smooth by generations of feet, and polished to gleaming by generations of sacristans whose humble, repetitive actions have in themselves created a thing of beauty. And so it is with the rest of the Eternal City: it is as full of loving gestures as it is of deliberate creations, and both are essential to its continued existence.

(more. . .)