Very thoughtful article by Victor Keegan on that most unpromising of subjects — the ‘digital divide’.

Lovely April Fool joke on The Register.

2:00 a.m. March 30, 2002 PST WASHINGTON — Sen. Patrick Leahy says a controversial proposal to embed copy protection in electronics gear will not become law this year.

Since Leahy is the powerful chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, his opposition instantly boosts the difficulty Hollywood studios will encounter in their attempts to enact sweeping copyright legislation. [more from Wired]

More on the (non) availability of broadband in rural areas

One of the banes of my life is the fact that I live in a lovely village which is only three miles from Cambridge and yet might as well be on Mars as far as BT broadband access is concerned. Interesting then to find that a software engineer living in a village outside Bedford has been experiencing the same frustration. This BBC report outlines his heroic efforts to find someone in BT who could give him an intelligent answer to his question. The answer, of course, was no.

I was asked by the Observer to write a column marking the second anniversary of the NASDAQ crash and answering the question: how can companies make money from the Net? My answer: it’s the wrong question.

George Soros, is funding an initiative to “make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the Internet.” Needless to say, the publishers are furious .

Apropos of the previous item…Thanks to Sam Ruby for sending a pointer to the Microsoft shared source license. The patent disclaimer is at the top. “You may use any information in intangible form that you remember after accessing the Software. However, this right does not grant you a license to any of Microsoft’s copyrights or patents for anything you might create using such information.” It’s a poison pill for sure. Very clear.   [Scripting News]

There’s a story on MSNBC (so it must be true!) that Microsoft is so concerned about the fact that computer science students mostly work with Open Source software and Java that it plans to release the source of some .NET software to university departments. It will be interesting to see the licensing terms under which this ‘release’ takes place…

Michael Eisner: born-again political philospher

Well, well, well. The head of Disney has concluded that Abe Lincoln would have loved the Internet but hated file-sharing. Quote from his FT article:

“In other words, thinkers both major and minor, in words both profound and mundane, have asserted the primacy of property ownership in a free society. It is as American as the apple pie that one may not take off a neighbour’s kitchen ledge.

In writing this, I am not just speaking from the self-interest of the head of an entertainment company. For me, theft of property, via the internet or any other way, is not only alarming because of the material loss but also disconcerting because it implies the loss of the moral compass on which our society is based.”

There’s a lot more in this vein. Am reminded of Dr. Johnson’s comment about a dog walking on its hind legs. One is surprised not that he does it well, but that he can do it at all.

Thanks to AA for alerting me to this engaging example of Hollywood cant.

Why is consistency so absurdly prized by the British mass media? This morning there are reports that Stephen Byers, the Secretary of State responsible for the railways, has decided to compensate Railtrack shareholders for his decision to put the company into administration. This immediately starts up the media (and political) gibe “U-Turn, U-Turn, yah boo!”. But why shouldn’t ministers change their minds? After all, circumstances change. The really stupid people are those who refuse to countenance changing their minds, no matter what happens.