grack.com

RSS (and Atom) should come with an acceptable use flag that lets me tell people that it’s okay to syndicate my blog posts in full.

For future reference, it’s okay to quote or aggregate any of my posts, even in full.

There’s an interesting Wiki discussing Copyright Economics.  It breaks down the interaction between producers and consumers of “intellectual property”, comparing it with the interaction between buyers and sellers of physical goods.

From what I can tell of the analysis, a “social gain” is equivalent to saying that the extra money that the producer gained over the minimum they would have done it for plus the extra money that the consumer has that they didn’t need to use to buy what they wanted results in extra money for everyone!

The interesting conclusion is that pirating IP actually results in a social gain in the short term, while in the long term can potentially result in a social loss:

Okay, gotta make myself a checklist so I can finish this project up in a reasonable amount of time.  It looks like a lot, but I can usually take out a number of these in a day.

Did I mention that a MAME cabinet requires a huge amount of commitment?

Stage One: Construction

Started putting together the MAME cabinet on friday.  I managed to get as far as assembling the base.  Since it’s such an integral part of the entire cabinet, I spent a bunch of time with tubes of No More Nails and some good wood screws to make sure nothing moves. 

It supports me standing on top of it- hopefully it’ll support the weight of the cabinet and the TV (which probably weighs twice as much as me together!)

Fancy tip: pre-drilling all of the screw holes should ensure that none of your wood splits.

I took the cabinet sides and used the circular saw to clean up some of the nastiness I left by using a spinsaw.  The trick is building a jig using a straight piece of wood and an aluminum guide.  You can use one edge of the wood to line up your cut and then use the aluminum to guide the saw in a straight line.

I also got the top of the control panel cut.  By the time I started I was getting pretty tired and really messed up the first cut.  Thankfully you can fix most cuts with more cutting.