… why then are some of its senior executives selling stock like there was no tomorrow?
Profile of Ed Felten
From his campus newspaper. Ed is one of the great figures of our time, an academic who uses ingenuity and intelligence to resist the incursions of the copyright thugs of the content industries. See for example the Amicus brief he and some other computer scientists have filed in the Grokster case currently before the Supreme Court.
Bloggers don’t have same legal protection as bona-fide hacks
Well, well. In December, Apple’s lawyers went after three weblogs which had posted leaked information about forthcoming products. They filed a lawsuit to compel the bloggers to reveal the names of their informants (who presumably are Apple employees). The defendants claimed that online publishers are entitled to the same legal protection as traditional journalists. Yesterday, Judge James Kleinberg of the Santa Clara County Superior Court was reported as saying that he was “leaning toward” granting Apple’s demands. If this leads to a solid legal precedent then we will have some interesting contradictions — for example, the right-wing crazies of Fox News will enjoy constitutional protection while intelligent, rational bloggers will not.
Note to UK readers: all this is irrelevant over here, since UK journalists don’t have this kind of legal protection, and indeed some have gone to gaol for refusing to reveal their sources in court.
The death of satire — Dubya style
Tom Lehrer famously said that satire died the day Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Well, here’s a modern take on the same thought. The New York Times is reporting that the front-runners to succeed John Wolfensohn as President of the World Bank are (a) Carly Fiorina, the testosterone-poisoned ex-CEO of Hewlett Packard, and (b) Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense and the ‘brains’ behind the invasion of Iraq. Note: the World Bank was set up to help poor people in countries where dysentry is a way of life. What have the world’s poor done to deserve this fate?
Do dog owners really resemble their pets?
Lovely story in The Economist reporting an experiment described in the Journal of Ethology which appears to support the proposition.
Normal service resumed!
Memex has been offline all week, pending a move to WordPress. Now back, thanks to Herculean efforts by Quentin. We’re currently trying to find an elegant way of including archived postings since 2002. As the man said, the impossible we do right away; miracles take a bit longer. It’s been an infuriating week — lots happening and no Blog in which to rant about them. Sigh.
The Librarian and the Bloggers
The Librarian and the Bloggers
Michael Gorman, President-Elect of that venerable body, the American Library Association, doesn’t think much of Bloggers. He explains why here. It all started because he dared to write something dismissive about the Google phenomenon — which he described as “a wonderfully modern manifestation of the triumph of hope and boosterism over reality.”
As a conoisseur of invective, I particularly like this passage:
“It is obvious that the Blog People read what they want to read rather than what is in front of them and judge me to be wrong on the basis of what they think rather than what I actually wrote. Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs. In that case, their rejection of my view is quite understandable.”
I sympathise with Mr. Gorman, but it’s clear that he has led a sheltered life up to now. I doubt, for example, that he has ever seen a flame war in a News Group!
The practical alternative to work!
The practical alternative to work!
(Thanks to Gerard for the link.)
Travelling with the Prez
Travelling with the Prez
Justin Webb is the BBC reporter who’s been travelling with Dubya on his mission to smooth ruffled European feathers. (En passant will somebody explain to me why Europe has been welcoming the head of a state which practices and condones torture?) Mr. Webb has been keeping a Blog. Here’s an excerpt from today’s:
“Made a big error of judgement this morning – leaving the warm embrace of the White House team to cross this snow covered city to get to a studio for an interview with the Today programme on Radio Four.
All went fine till I tried to get back. I have seven passes (no really!) all with photos and official inscriptions. But none of them impress riot police schooled in the eastern European approach to public relations. “No,” they say. “You go. You no come here today.”
I smile. I try to look important and official. Nothing works. Briefly I imagine being trapped here forever among the stony faced denizens of Bratislava (I have no passport: the White House whips them away on these trips and whisks you in and out of nations without need of it).
Then a miracle. The secret service agent with whom I had been discussing hamburgers in Brussels passes by on the other side of the barricade. “Help,” I shout!
A small man in a sensible grey suit, he approaches the goons and says, “US Secret Service: I need him in here.”
They briefly consider clubbing us both to death there and then. Old habits die hard even when you’ve joined Nato.
But my man in the grey suit is backed up by the greatest power ever seen on the face of the Earth: his identity card carries a menace which every security guard in every godforsaken corner of the globe understands and appreciates.
If you are going to be an ally of America, you must let the secret service through roadblocks with whomsoever they choose to travel.
And they did. Freedom is on the march.”
The funniest things today were the hostile questions about US ‘democracy’ planted by the Russians during the Press Conference in Bratislava Castle.
Broadband, broadband
Broadband, broadband
BT is currently connecting an average of 6,600 UK broadband subscribers a week. My Observer column on the implications of this is here.