Useful decision tree provided by the UK Museums Copyright Group. [pdf]
Monthly Archives: September 2005
Message: I Care About those Black Folks
My favourite NYT columnists are Paul Krugman and Frank Rich. Here is Rich writing about Dubya’s response to Katrina.
This White House doesn’t hate all pictures, of course. It loves those by Karl Rove’s Imagineers, from the spectacularly lighted Statue of Liberty backdrop of Mr. Bush’s first 9/11 anniversary speech to his “Top Gun” stunt to Thursday’s laughably stagy stride across the lawn to his lectern in Jackson Square. (Message: I am a leader, not that vacationing slacker who first surveyed the hurricane damage from my presidential jet.)
The most odious image-mongering, however, has been Mr. Bush’s repeated deployment of African-Americans as dress extras to advertise his “compassion.” In 2000, the Republican convention filled the stage with break dancers and gospel singers, trying to dispel the memory of Mr. Bush’s craven appearance at Bob Jones University when it forbade interracial dating. (The few blacks in the convention hall itself were positioned near celebrities so they’d show up in TV shots.) In 2004, the Bush-Cheney campaign Web site had a page titled “Compassion” devoted mainly to photos of the president with black people, Colin Powell included.
Some of these poses are re-enacted in the “Hurricane Relief” photo gallery currently on display on the White House Web site. But this time the old magic isn’t working. The “compassion” photos are outweighed by the cinéma vérité of poor people screaming for their lives. The government effort to keep body recovery efforts in New Orleans as invisible as the coffins from Iraq was abandoned when challenged in court by CNN…
Lunch money
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer each earned a salary of $600,000 and a bonus of $400,000 for Microsoft’s 2005 fiscal year — which ended on June 30, according to Microsoft’s annual proxy filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That’s a million each — peanuts by US corporate standards, even in these post-Enron days.
Exploding ‘Intelligent Design’
Jerry Coyne has performed a remorseless dissection of the idiocies of ‘Intelligent Design’ in The New Republic.
Mr Tambourine Man unmasked
Why, I asked the other day, did the credits for Martin Scorsese’s film about Bob Dylan include the words “With special thanks to Steve Jobs”. The answer, according to an associate director on the film, is that Apple sponsored the project.
More: Thanks to Fergus Cassidy for pointing out this on the Apple site.
A DVD version of the documentary, featuring additional never-before-seen footage, will be released on September 20. Apple will present the DVD and international version of “No Direction Home: Bob Dylan,” and is the corporate underwriter of the PBS broadcast. The Soundtrack CD will be released by Columbia Records on August 30th.
Nemesis
A friend sent me these extraordinary photographs of Katrina on the move. They were allegedly taken in Alabama but I’ve no idea by whom. Since they were circulating via a UK government department (DEFRA) it’s possible they came from a US official source (who knows, maybe even FEMA!)
UPDATE: Ah, the wonders of the Web. Sean French points me at the Urban Legends site, where it’s claimed that, although these are real hurricane photographs, they are not images of Katrina. Still, lovely pics. Sigh. What was it that TH Huxley said about “the slaughter of a beautiful theory by an ugly fact”?
Boyle on WIPO and webcasting rights
Lovely Financial Times column by James Boyle. Sample:
I teach intellectual property law, a subject that is attracting attention from economists, political scientists and people who simply want to make money. These, after all, are the rules that define the hightechnology marketplace. Are we doing a good job of writing those rules? The answer is no. Three tendencies stand out.
First and most lamentably, intellectual property laws are created without any empirical evidence that they are necessary or that they will help rather than hurt. Second, the policymaking process has failed to keep track of the increasing importance of intellectual property rights to everything from freedom of expression and communications policy to economic development or access to educational materials. We still make law as though it were just a deal brokered between industry groups – balancing the interests of content companies with those of broadcasters, for example. The public interest in competition, access, free speech and vigorous technological markets takes a back seat. What matters is making the big boys happy.
Finally, communications networks are increasingly built around intellectual property rules, as law regulates technology more and more directly; not always to good effect…
Donate your copy of Microsoft Office to Katrina relief!
From Good Morning, Silicon Valley…
On Friday, [Massachussetts] state officials approved a proposal to standardize desktop applications on the OpenDocument format — a move that will strip some 50,000 state computers of Microsoft’s Office and effectively eliminate Microsoft, which has chosen not to support Open Document, from the state’s procurement process. Microsoft, it should be noted, could add native support for Open Document to Office, but won’t, no doubt because doing so could encourage the spread of non-Microsoft formats. In an interview with DesktopLinux.com, Massachusetts’ chief information officer, Peter Quinn, said the shift to open formats was inevitable. The state runs a “vast majority” of its office and system computers on Windows — “only a very small percentage of them run Linux and other open source software at this time,” Quinn said. “This is in tune with the general market in the U.S. But we like to ‘eat our own cooking,’ in that we are using OpenOffice.org and Linux more and more as time goes along, because it produces open format documents. Microsoft has remade the desktop world. But if you’ve watched history, there’s a slag heap of proprietary companies who have fallen by the wayside because they were stuck in their ways. Just look at the minicomputer business, for example. The world is about open standards and open source. I can’t understand why anybody would want to continue making closed-format documents anymore.”
Good stuff. Lots more coming in the same vein.
No direction home
Just finished watching the first part of Martin Scorsese’s riveting film about Bob Dylan. As the credits rolled I saw the words “With Special Thanks to Steve Jobs”. For what, exactly?
Microsoft at 30
This morning’s Observer column.
Microsoft has grown up, and is beginning to experience the mixed blessings of corporate middle age. On the one hand there is the respectability and status of being the most famous company in the world after Disney, and the complacency that comes from having $50 billion in the bank. On the other hand, there’s the furring of the corporate arteries, the slowing of reflexes and the dawning realisation that you are no longer the coolest kid on the block.
And, as if to confirm the suspicion of internal unease, this week also saw the announcement of massive restructuring of the company’s corporate structure. Its seven divisions will be merged into three groups – Platform Products and Services, (formerly Windows, MSN, and the Server and Tools division); Business (formerly Office and Microsoft Business Solutions); and Entertainment and Devices (formerly Xbox and mobile devices)…