NY Times: “I think the moment is right,” he said, to treat the Internet “the way we refer to television, radio and the telephone.” That is to say, stop capitalising its initial letter. It’s arrived and become part of our lives. The Telephone and the Phonograph once had automatic capitalisation in every newspaper style guide. But there came a point where the thing had become so familiar that it was dropped. [Scripting News]

The gulf between Big Content and the rest of us

Peter Chernin, CEO of Fox Network, gave a keynote address at Comdex — the first entertainment big-shot to do so. Jonathan Peterson has done a commented version of his talk. It’s very revealing and would make great material for a class discussion on digital rights. And here is an intriguing critical dissection of the RIAA’s statistical ‘evidence’ for their assertion that downloading is killing the music industry. The bottom line seems to be that the record companies are releasing far fewer albums than they did two years ago. No wonder sales are down.

Grief and its timewarp

It’s four months today since my Sue died. It feels more like a hundred years. This has been the bleakest Christmas I’ve ever spent. In trying to come to terms with it, I went looking to see what has been written about grief — and found very little that is useful to someone who is non-religious like me. The only exception so far is C.S Lewis’s A Grief Observed. Like me, Lewis met his wife late in life. Like me, he fell hopelessly in love with her. And like me, he was devastated when cancer took her away from him. His book is the most accurate account that I have encountered to date of what grief is like. Strip away Lewis’s attempts to reconcile his belief in a merciful God with the cruel fate that this God has permitted and one finds an exact description of many of the feelings I have experienced — only articulated more vividly than I could achieve.

Lewis is also very good on the well-intentioned assurance that one will eventually ‘get over’ such a loss. “The words are ambiguous”, he writes. “To say that the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had a leg off it is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he will get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it’. But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it…. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present, I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I will presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again”.

Neilsen’s Top Ten Web Mistakes of 2002

Sounds corny, but isn’t. He even identifies my pet hate — sites that are coy about revealing the price of what they are selling. When I go looking for product information, I am after two things: (a) specification and (b) price. Any site which give me prices up front stands a better chance of getting my business. Otherwise I move on. Another Neilsen pet hate is inflexible search engines — i.e. ones that will only give you a result if you get the query exactly right. (Useless if you don’t know how the database behind the engine has been designed.)

Scoble is playing with a NEC Tablet computer. “This thing might ruin your marriage.” Thanks to Dave Winer for reminding us that Scoble works for NEC, but even so he makes one very good point — namely that unless Apple gets an OS X tablet out there soon, the company might lose its stranglehold on the graphics-design community. [Scripting News]

Variation on a theme of Lessig: no. 1

“One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.”

T.S. Eliot, “Massinger”, in The Sacred Wood

Creative Commons. About a week ago, Creative Commons launched the first version of their licensing project.

It’s a well-designed site. They explain the licences clearly in non-legal jargon and have a form where you can say what you want to do with your work and they suggest the appropriate licence.

I’ll be adopting one of their licences for everything on this site in the near future. [Status-Q: Quentin Stafford-Fraser’s notepad]

The new new firm: Bush, Poindexter and Orwell

“The Bush administration is planning to propose requiring Internet service providers to help build a centralized system to enable broad monitoring of the Internet and, potentially, surveillance of its users.

The proposal is part of a final version of a report, “The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace,” set for release early next year, according to several people who have been briefed on the report. It is a component of the effort to increase national security after the Sept. 11 attacks”.[More]

Someone’s selling a town on eBay

“NYT” story. Asking price: $775,000. It’s in California, natch. Wonder if I could apply for the post of Sherrif? Update December 27: It was sold for $1.8 million.

Microsoft loses Java round to Sun
“NYT” story.

“A federal judge ruled yesterday that Microsoft must include the Java programming language of Sun Microsystems with the Windows operating system, handing Sun a victory in its private antitrust case.

In granting a preliminary injunction sought by Sun, the judge forced Microsoft to confront what would be perhaps the most intrusive penalty yet to stem from court rulings that it broke federal antitrust laws.

The judge, J. Frederick Motz of Federal District Court in Baltimore, also indicated that he would order Microsoft to stop shipping a version of Java that Sun contends damages the chances of its own version because it is outdated and creates confusion among programmers about which one to use for developing software….”.