Wall-to-wall Olympics for the next three weeks. Zzzzzz…
Meanwhile Russia and Georgia are going to war while the world’s attention is focussed on these idiotic games. Bah!
Monthly Archives: August 2008
Gorillapod
This just has to be the photo accessory of the decade. I think it was Michael who discovered it first, and then Quentin had one, and I was reduced to photographing theirs while grinding my teeth in envy. Now, as a belated birthday present from my lovely daughter, I have one too. Yippee!
No ‘Tibet’ at Hotmail. I wonder why…
The New York Times Blog has been following up complaints from would-be Hotmail users who have been told that they cannot have a username which includes the letters “tibet”.
Big American tech companies have given us plenty of reasons to be cynical about how far they will go to keep China’s leaders happy and keep their fingers in the Chinese market … And China’s leaders would prefer that everyone just not mention those unruly Tibetans, especially with the Olympics on the way. But would the Chinese regime really feel threatened by the creation of, say, ILoveTibet@hotmail.com? And even if it did, would Microsoft really agree to help perpetuate that insecurity?
A Microsoft spokeswoman had a different explanation. The company blocks usernames that include the names of various financial institutions. This is meant to make life harder for those seeking to impersonate a bank using an official-looking e-mail address in order to steal customers’ passwords. In this case Microsoft is blocking usernames containing “tib,” apparently to protect customers of TIB Bank in Florida.
Ho, ho!
Nudge, nudge…
Where do the Cameroonians get their ideas from? One source, apparently, is Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein. This focuses on the foibles and idiosyncrasies of human behaviour and on how, with a little discreet encouragement, we can usually be ushered in the right direction. Writing in the Guardian, James Harkin is not impressed.
Nudge has been put on a list of 38 books which Tory MPs have been given by Dave as their summer reading. I’ve just looked at the list. It’s got some weird things on it — The Rise of Boris Johnson, for example. The only item I’ve read is Ferdinant Mount’s memoir, Cold Cream. Other books are Tom Wheeler’s book on Abraham Lincoln’s use of the telegraph in the Civil War and Philip Bobbitt’s Terror and Consent. And why the Cameroonians should need David Runciman’s Political Hypocrisy is beyond me, given that they are such past masters of the art.
Er, wink, wink.
Quote of the day
“We spend too much time getting our systems to work, and not enough putting them to work.”
Net Neutrality
Save the Internet | Rock the Vote
Good campaigning video. Wonder where John McCain and David Cameron stand on this.
Location, location, location
I’m not into geotagging, but if I were this would be useful. The Nikon Coolpix P6000 has a built-in GPS unit which enables the coordinates of each image to be recorded. An Ethernet port built into the camera then lets you connect it to the web and log your picture locations on a Nikon image map service — and, eventually no doubt, on Wikipedia and Google Earth.
US Patent Office thinks again about ‘cloud computing’
From The Register…
Dell’s grip on a “cloud computing” trademark may not be as solid as it first seemed.
The US Patent Office has canceled its “notice of allowance” on the Round Rock computer vendor’s attempt to master the popular IT buzzword. Passing the “allowance” step in the trademark process had meant that opponents could no longer object to Dell’s claims. But Dell’s trademark application was updated yesterday to show the case has now “returned to examination.”
It would seem someone working for the USPTO was stuck by thunderbolt of rationality…
Not before time.
The dividing line
Jenni Russell, writing in the Guardian about what divides Britain’s two main political parties, now that the Cameroonians have staked a claim to the centre ground.
The new dividing line between Labour and the Tories is less about a left-right split than about an authoritarian approach on one side and a more liberal one on the other. And Labour are on the wrong side of it. Many of their social and economic policies may have failed, but where they have succeeded is in developing a targeting, controlling, distrustful state. From the micromanagement of civil servants, teachers, doctors and the police, to ID cards, super databases and the growth of surveillance, the government’s answer to too many problems has been the removal of autonomy from individuals and more oversight from Whitehall.
The Conservative analysis is that this over-controlling state is not only disastrously unpopular, it is also one of the key reasons why Labour, despite all its spending, has failed to achieve its goals. Endless supervision has been an expensive distraction, and has sapped energy and morale out of public life.
The Tories say that the Labour approach reflects a deep pessimism about human nature, which they themselves don’t share. They argue that people will work best if they are trusted, given outcomes they are expected to achieve, and then left to decide how to get on with the job…
Fruitcakes rule OK
The number of crazies in the Democratic Unionist Party (now the lead party in the government of Northern Ireland) continues to amaze. After the First Minister’s wife’s outbursts against homosexuality, we now have this:
A SENIOR DUP Assemblyman has pressed for creationism to be taught alongside evolution in classrooms across the North.
Mervyn Storey, who chairs the Stormont education committee, said his “ideal” would be the removal of evolutionary teaching from the curriculum altogether.
“This is not about removing anything from the classroom, although that would probably be the ideal for me, but this is about us having equality of access to other views as to how the world came into existence and that I think is a very, very important issue for many parents in Northern Ireland.”
He also has a problem with geology, specifically the age of the Giant’s Causeway in County Antrim.
Mr Storey, among others, has called for the proposed visitors’ centre to display not just accepted geological data, but also the creationist argument that the distinctive rock formation is only 6,000 years old. “The problem to date has been that we only have a narrow interpretation from an evolutionary point of view as to how these particular stones were formed,” he said last year.