So last night and today, we've been walking all around Boston and hanging out at cafes. It's nice to be back in a town where you can get anywhere easily just by hopping on a train ;) At Harvard Square, I picked up the Nikkei Shimbun, Hangug Ilbo, and SingTao Daily — they have almost every language for sale at the news stands... :)

Today we hung out at a bookstore cafe with free wireless internet access, but no one was using a laptop except my friend Rich... Starbucks will be charging for theirs, but maybe some other independent cafes will have it for free. I can't describe how sweet it is to be able to access the entire internet from wherever you are. I feel so connected and liberated on wireless internet... My only problem now is deciding whether my next laptop will be a super-ultra-portable or a tablet or something more traditional... Then I do everything from the comfort of a nice cafe... :)

Dunkin Dunuts is ubiquitous here. I'll have to be careful to stay away from them when I get home or it may become a habit... ;) Mmmm...

I've been thinking about the concepts of intellectual property protection more and more lately, especially with regard to software. As we progress in the current directions of technological development, many more fields will soon find that their various special purpose hardware will be implemented in software, run on a small number of general purpose machines.

Because of this, we know that software must be a protected entity in our society. But how should we protect software, and for how long? This is the truly difficult question.

Counter to all the recent grumblings in the software community over copyrights being 'too long', I've begun to wonder whether very long is not also very good. In fact, don't long copyrights spur innovation precicely because it is so hard to produce something similar? Aren't we forcing people to come up with new things constantly because they're not allowed to take advantage of the old things?

There are so many arguments both ways, it's hard to keep them all in mind at once and weigh them together. But I think that this point may have been overlooked by many. If copyright terms are too short, we may be running the risk of disincentivizing innovation, rather than nurturing it.

So I'm up in Boston now! We're staying with Rich at his place on the west side of town — apparently there are a lot of cool restaurants and stuff around here. Last night we just walked around the corner to a Turkish doner kebab place where they also have millions of flavors of frozen yogurt... ;)

Rich is coding as usual for work today, so Paul and I will probably just go hang out somewhere and play Go. We played 2 games last night and 2 the night before so my brain is hurting quite a bit. ;) Extremely fun though. hehe... ;)

We ended up boring Rich last night with a long explication of "hangul", the amazing korean writing system. We tried to get him to play Go, but he insisted that he's not a game person... ;) I guess not everyone can get excited by a bunch of black and white stones...

I think I'll have to chug a few bottles of gatorade to counteract the coffee I'll be drinking on this trip. :)

I'm also thinking about going to check out the new Library built at the Christian Science Mother Church, containing many previously unpublished works of Mary Baker Eddy... They have a cool fountain there that they built in cooperation with some grad students at MIT or something — it projects jumbled letters in light onto the water, so that it looks like they flow out of the fountain onto the floor, then compose themselves into famous quotes while they travel up the walls of the room... :)

I also have yet to encounter anyone here with a Boston accent. ;) Most so far have been Middle Eastern... :-P

Since Chinese is such an important language now, I have to try to keep using mine or I'll lose it. Maybe I'll try to start writing in alternating languages just to give myself some practice. ;)

我这次想用中文给中文世界介绍自己。我虽然不太喜欢简体字，但是 Microsoft 的繁体输入法不能够用拼音。；）

我在大学学了三年的中文。大学毕业了，我跟四个朋友到中国练武术，利用我的中文（我知道它还差得很！）。回来了在可罗拉多州认识了一位很了不起的八卦掌老师，跟他开始学八卦掌。可是，可罗拉多得经济不好了，我没法办儿，就会到我故乡华盛顿。我现在住在华盛顿，试试进入法律大学院。因为我在大学学了电脑科学，所以我现在想成为一个对于软件的专利权律师。现在的中国而说，专利权是一个很重要的问题。如果中国不能够保持发现人的权利，就大概不能创造一个健康的软体市场。我未来希望帮助中国人提高中国的专利知识。

Went back to chinatown again on Wednesday, and had some awesome dim-sum... ;) I ordered way too much though. Yuki and I got 5 dishes for the two of us, roast duck, crab, and 3 different types of dumplings... Ahhh. Man that was good. :)

I also exchanged a bum game that I got with my modded PS2. They gave me a Japanese snowboarding game, but it didn't work with the modchip they used in my system, even though most games apparently work... They said that that game was from a small lesser-known company, so maybe they had some weird code or something... I guess the modchip makers don't test every game anyway. But they exchanged it for Z.O.E (Zone of the Enders), which is a pretty kick-ass Mega-Robot fighting game. I'm quite happy with the outcome. :)

We decided to take the U.N. tour while we were there, and it was pretty interesting. I think I took it something like 10 years ago, but I can't remember anything from then. This time I found it all quite interesting, but felt that somehow all the U.N.'s emphasis on humanitarian aid is naive... They don't seem to realize that the aid prevents countries in many cases from becoming self-sufficient. I've seen more and more programs that actually work to stimulate 3rd world economies such as micro-loans — I hope the U.N. will re-evaluate their programs in the light of such successes as well.

I also attempted to take some interesting pictures there, but it's actually kinda tough with a little digital camera... I'll have to practice more. ;)