Daily Archives: September 27, 2005

Nemesis

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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”?

Katrina approaching

Boyle on WIPO and webcasting rights

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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!

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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.