Daily Archives: March 18, 2006

More tech-support transcripts

Posted on by

Hilarious piece in Slate by Evan Eisenberg. Sample:

In order to serve you better, it will be helpful for us to know which order you belong to. For Primates, press 1. For Cetacea and Proboscidea, press 2. For Jesuit or Dominican, press 3. For Knights Templar or Hospitaler, Knights of Pythias or Columbus, as well as Masons, Elks, and Kiwanis, or if you are unsure, press 4. If you are a Franciscan and have a rotary phone, please stay on the line.

Please key in the model and serial number of the product you are calling about. The model number is the series of 12 letters and digits that is visible when you push the unit away from the wall, work your head into the gap using a crowbar and No. 10 machine oil, and train a beam of ultraviolet light on the lower three centimeters of the right-hand rear surface of the appliance.

If the model number is obscured by dust or cockroach detritus, wipe it with a soft, lint-free cloth soaked in a solution of ordinary rubbing alcohol, Kirschwasser, and formaldehyde. The serial number is the 37-digit number inscribed by means of laser nanotechnology on the underside of the unit and is not visible to the naked eye.

When you have entered both numbers, press the pound key. Note that at any point you may return to the previous menu by hanging up, calling again, and repeating the process until you reach the point just before the point you are at right now…

There’s more. Much more. For example:

Most common problems can be resolved at home by following a simple sequence of diagnostic tests and procedures. We will now guide you through such a sequence. If you wish to skip this section, press 1, 3, and 9 simultaneously while restarting your telephone. Please note: If, while answering these questions, you see smoke or flames or if your chest is warm to the touch, hang up and call 911.

The only thing missing is the ubiquitous assurance that “we really value your call”.

Footnote: After recovering from a bout of hysterical laughter I realised that I’m currently reading Mr Eisenberg’s lovely book, The recording angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa.

Gates disses $100 laptop (again)

Posted on by

ZDNet.com report of remarks made at a Microsoft “Government Leaders Forum” in Washington the other day.

Gates once again let known his feelings of disdain for the $100 laptop, Nicholas Negroponte’s proposed appropriate technology for the developing world. Gates dismissed the proposed machine’s lack of hard disk, tiny screen and hand crank power supply.

“If you are going to go have people share the computer, get a broadband connection and have somebody there who can help support the user, geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you’re not sitting there cranking the thing while you’re trying to type,” Gates said.

Gates questioned the choice to skip the hard disk, saying that hardware is a small part of the cost. Network connectivity is more expensive, he said.

He did not explain how you get broadband into, say, rural Somalia. But then, he’s a Big Picture man.

Technolust (contd.)

Posted on by

Why, oh why, does Canon always beat Nikon to the punch? (I write as a Nikon user.) This is the EOS 5D, which I think is the first product to reach the market with an image sensor the same size as a 35mm film frame. Expensive (£1800 inc VAT for body only in the UK). But still… More detailed spec here.

Tales from the public domain

Posted on by

A terrific idea from James Boyle and his law colleagues at Duke University — a comic book that explains vividly the problems that our current IP regime poses for creative people.

A documentary is being filmed. A cell phone rings, playing the “Rocky” theme song. The filmmaker is told she must pay $10,000 to clear the rights to the song. Can this be true? “Eyes on the Prize,” the great civil rights documentary, was pulled from circulation because the filmmakers’ rights to music and footage had expired. What’s going on here? It’s the collision of documentary filmmaking and intellectual property law, and it’s the inspiration for this new comic book. Follow its heroine Akiko as she films her documentary, and navigates the twists and turns of intellectual property. Why do we have copyrights? What’s “fair use”? Bound By Law reaches beyond documentary film to provide a commentary on the most pressing issues facing law, art, property and an increasingly digital world of remixed culture…

The comic is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, and can be downloaded or purchased in hard copy from Amazon.

Macho frauds

Posted on by

Lovely Guardian column by Linda Colley about the weird macho strutting of Bush, Cheney & Co — all of whom shirked military service in Vietnam…

In America, the excitement about Dick Cheney’s shooting accident is over. There are no more talkshow debates about why he took so long to make a statement, and no more news reports about his 78-year-old victim. Even the delicious contrast between the vicepresident’s bravery in the face of small birds and the deferments he took to keep from going to Vietnam no longer raises eyebrows. Yet the shrewdest comment I heard on the incident was rarely touched on. What did the vice-president think he was doing, inquired a serious hunter? Real men got up early and went into the countryside hunting wild quail alone with their dog. Going in groups to a farm to shoot specially bred birds was for sissies. It wasn’t Cheney’s involvement in masculine pursuits that was noteworthy; it was that the mode of masculinity on show was bogus…

Google avoids surrendering search requests to government

Posted on by

From AP Wire on San Jose Mercury News…

SAN FRANCISCO – A federal judge on Friday ordered Google Inc. to give the Bush administration a peek inside its search engine, but rebuffed the government’s demand for a list of people’s search requests – potentially sensitive information that the company had fought to protect.

In his 21-page ruling, U.S. District Judge James Ware told Google to provide the U.S. Justice Department with the addresses of 50,000 randomly selected Web sites indexed by its search engine by April 3.

The government plans to use the data for a study in another case in Pennsylvania, where the Bush administration is trying to revive a law meant to shield children from online pornography.

Ware, though, decided Google won’t have to disclose what people have been looking for on its widely used search engine, handing a significant victory to the company and privacy rights advocates.

“We will always be subject to government subpoenas, but the fact that the judge sent a clear message about privacy is reassuring,” Google lawyer Nicole Wong wrote on the company’s Web site Friday night.

“What his ruling means is that neither the government nor anyone else has carte blanche when demanding data from Internet companies.”