Quote of the day

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The Carrowteigue area is notorious for its scenic landscapes.

From the online brochure of a Co. Mayo estate agent.

Update: I’ve had a lovely email from a fastidious reader who points out that ‘notorious’ has several meanings. For example, the Shorter Oxford lists these three:

  • Well known, commonly or generally known, forming a matter of common knowledge, esp. on account of some bad practice, quality etc., or some other thing not generally approved of or admired;
  • Such as is or may be generally, openly or publicly known. (Now rare.);
  • Conspicious, obvious, evident.

    I of course assumed the first, which is why I hooted with laughter upon reading the estate agent’s blurb. But it is perfectly possible, I concede, that in the recesses of Co. Mayo (where I was born), there dwells an estate agent with a more extensive grasp of the English language than mine and an even more antiquated style!

    What a thing it is to have erudite readers. I expect I will now become notorious among them for my ignorance. Sigh.

    • That State of the Union speech

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    The first President Bush loved to quote Woody Allen’s saying that half of life is just showing up. Last night, the current President Bush demonstrated the wisdom in those words. He delivered a pedestrian State of the Union speech, and he’ll likely get a brief bounce in the polls just for showing up at an annual ritual designed to make any president look presidential. But by next week, nobody will remember what he said….

    David Kusnet, writing in The New Republic. I think he’s wrong. Everyone will remember Dubya saying “America is addicted to oil”. I never thought I’d hear him say something like that.

    Helpful hints

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    My colleague Seb’s plane was diverted to Delhi when he was en route to Bangladesh to instal the first Ndiyo Internet cafe using mobile phone technology to provide internet connectivity. To compensate for the disruption, he was put up in a luxury hotel which, among other thoughtful touches provided this ‘To Do’ list. Suggestions include:

  • Have you called your family today?
  • Are there any important calls to be made before the day ends?
  • Are there any anniversary or birthday greetings?
  • Have you charged your mobile phone and/or laptop?
  • Have you taken your prescribed medicines or vitamins?

    • Photo arcade

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    Behind the facade of these buildings in St Andrew’s Street in Cambridge, there’s a huge retail development under way with the optimistic name ‘Grand Arcade’. In a smart move to counter public dislike of the disruption caused by a massive building project right in the heart of a medieval city, the developers commissioned Martin Parr, the populist Magnum photographer, to do a series of photographs under the general heading of “The Cambridge Portrait” which will be displayed over coming months on the hoardings round the site. So far the pictures have been quite nice but not really outstanding. But they do provide opportunities for interesting juxtapositions — as, for example, here,

    or here.

    Note for photography buffs: Looking at the images, I had concluded they must have been shot with a Hasselblad, but a visit to Parr’s web site suggests they were made with a truly recondite instrument, the Plaubel Makina 67. Now there’s a really obscure camera for you.

    Parr describes himself, btw, as a “mischievous ironist”.

    “Microsoft Would Put Poor Online by Cellphone”

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    This hilarious NYT headline goes over an equally hilarious report about Microsoft and the $100 laptop project.

    Mr. Negroponte has made significant progress, but he has also catalyzed the debate over the role of computing in poor nations — and ruffled a few feathers. He failed to reach an agreement with Microsoft on including its Windows software in the laptop, leading Microsoft executives to start discussing what they say is a less expensive alternative: turning a specially configured cellular phone into a computer by connecting it to a TV and a keyboard.

    Translation: Negroponte doesn’t want to clobber his laptop by getting it to run proprietary bloatware and had the temerity to say so to Gates & Co. So they’re going to teach him a lesson by, er, launching a mobile phone which runs Windows CE. Ho, ho. Wonder how you get Ctrl-Alt-Del on a mobile keyboard? Ah, I see. Like this:

    Divine (IP) Rights, contd.

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    Further to my comment about whether the pope is entitled to assert IP rights over papal encyclicals (on the grounds that he is merely a conduit for the Word of the Lord), Joe Newman writes,

    Encyclicals do not necessarily constitute ex-cathedra pronouncements, invested with infallible authority (see http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05413a.htm).

    Further, according to that inerrant source of all knowledge Wikipedia “papal infallibility is the dogma that the Pope is preserved from error when he solemnly promulgates, or declares, to the Church a decision on faith or morals.”

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papal_infallibility

    i.e. he isn’t acting as a conduit, but is creating an original attributable work (hence copyrightable), on his own behalf. Whether it is divinely free of error (hard to digest I admit) or not is neither here nor there where the intellectual property rights are concerned.

    Er, amen to that. Mark Stephens, a lawyer with a big London firm, wrote to the Creative Commons mailing list pointing out that while the Vatican is defending its imposition of a copyright on papal pronouncements it is placing no bar on dissemination and publication of the pope’s works by the news media, so it would be most appropriate for His Holiness to use a Creative Commons licence! (Might I humbly suggest the Attribution, No derivative works, no-commercial-use version.)

    Tiffany sues eBay

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    The New York Times reports that Tiffany & Company is sueing eBay for facilitating the sale of counterfeit goods over the Internet. Undercover agents working for the company secretly bought 200 ‘Tiffany’ items in eBay auctions and found that 75% were counterfeited. The case will go to trial later this year. If Tiffany wins, the implications for eBay would be dire: imagine the costs of policing all those auctions.

    Posted in Web

    Google falls at first moral hurdle

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    This morning’s Observer column.

    In the longer term … the commercial logic that led Google to capitulate may turn out to be counterproductive. The reason is that – in contrast to companies like, say, Halliburton – Google’s ultimate fate depends on trust. Its corporate mission – to ‘organise the world’s information’ – means that it aspires to become the custodian of immense quantities of private data. Already, it holds the email archives of millions of subscribers to Google Mail, plus records of every web search they ever made. And although it is resisting the attempt of the US government to mount a fishing expedition through those data, nobody doubts that, in the end, Google will comply with the law.

    But that’s different from making a strategic decision to compete in a space dominated by an evil political regime. Google could, after all, have said that if the Chinese authorities demanded self-censorship then it would not play. One only has to put it like that to imagine the incredulity of mainstream media reaction to such a proposition. Imagine standing up at a CBI conference and declaring that one is not going to do business in China until it makes serious moves towards becoming an open society! By joining the Gadarene rush into the Chinese market, Google may have gained short-term advantage. But it has also forfeited its right to our trust.

    More: Just seen this post on Brad DeLong’s Blog. It compares the results from an image search for “tienanmen” on (1) Google.cn and (2) Google.com.

    Yet more: Bill Thompson (who is less censorious of Google) sent me a link to this Geekculture cartoon!

    Divine IP Right

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    Andrew Brown draws my attention to the fact that the Vatican is now claiming IP Rights over papal encyclicals. According to the Times story,

    For the first time all papal documents, including encyclicals, will be governed by copyright invested in the official Vatican publishing house, the Libreria Editrice Vaticana.

    The edict covers Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, which is to be issued this week amid huge international interest. The edict is retroactive, covering not only the writings of the present pontiff — as Pope and as cardinal — but also those of his predecessors over the past 50 years. It therefore includes anything written by John Paul II, John Paul I, Paul VI and John XXIII.

    Ahem, but isn’t there a small problem here? Encyclicals are utterances ex cathedra: in them the pope claims to be speaking as the ‘Vicar of Christ’ — i.e. he is a mouthpiece for the Lord. So logically, the IP Rights, such as they are, belong to the author, not to the conduit. Hmmm…. time to call for Professor Lessig.