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Those poor film producers, have somehow gotten the German populace to help fund their movies. Of course, stranger things happen, like paying for a war that ended over 100 years ago.

Before someone can answer who owns “the Internet” one must first answer, what is “the Internet.” This is not a post that will answer those questions, rather this is a stub — a place holder for that discussion that will take place many moons from now. If you are interested in some commentary. geekoid Sean Lynch tackles some of the propertarian issues in light of claims from Doc Searls.

And to wet your mouth a little more, some network engineers put together a map of nearly 135,000 routers and who owns them. This is routers, and not actual fibre or cabling which could be owned by someone else.

An associate pointed me to yet another gem from Forbes, Is College Worth It? The conclusion is simple, unless you goto a nationally recognized brand-name institution like Yale, Harvard or 20 some odd schools the answer is no. One of the most interesting points the author notes is that,

Search engines such as Google have ushered in the era of open-source learning. Society is rapidly progressing to the point where any Googler is on equal footing with a Widener Library pass-holder.

When I was an undergrad (history/economics) I found many of the works we discussed in class to be available online for free (e.g. all of the Western Classics are in the Public Domain and can be found in digital libraries like Project Gutenberg). The other two main points he makes are worth reading as well, so leas.

The Associated Press also ran an interesting story discussing the uptake of podcasts at institutions of higher education across the country, specifically one liberal arts school. The moral of the story, innovative faculty members at a State-university in Georgia have created easy to use supplements for students or as administrators call it: value-added. This is just another continuation of the digital university meme.

Or Will Wright would have you believe. I do recall that back in the day, when I attended computer gaming tournaments in highschool, talking with game modders added a nice little twist to the event. They are a different breed altogether because they are content creators, writers, artists and otherwise innovative people that like to think outside the box — which is fairly easy to do in virtual worlds (moreso than meatspace). Sometimes they smell though.