That’s what TechCrunch thinks anyway.
[Aside] Where do they get these daft names from?
Steal this laptop
Richard Charkin is a Big Cheese in Macmillan, the publishers. On his blog he admits to a heist. He posts a photograph of the Google stand at a trade fair (BookExpo America). Then, he continues:
There’s no computer where a computer should be to the left of the gentleman’s arm. You will also notice that there is no sign saying ‘please do not steal the computers’. I confess that a colleague and I simply picked up two computers from the Google stand and waited in close proximity until someone noticed. This took more than an hour.
Our justification for this appalling piece of criminal behaviour? The owner of the computer had not specifically told us not to steal it. If s/he had, we would not have done so. When s/he asked for its return, we did so. It is exactly what Google expects publishers to expect and accept in respect to intellectual property.
‘If you don’t tell us we may not digitise something, we shall do so. But we do no evil. So if you tell us to desist we shall.’
I felt rather shabby playing this trick on Google. They should feel the same playing the same trick on authors and publishers…
Well it’s one way of making your point. And an even better way of getting attention.
Marc Andreessen has started a blog
Quote of the day
The physicist I.I. Rabi and General (later President) Dwight Eisenhower became friends after Eisenhower was appointed president of Columbia University soon after the end of WW2. When introduced to Rabi, Eisenhower said, “I am always very happy to see one of the employees of the university,” to which Rabi replied, “Mr. President, the faculty are not the employees of the university. They are the university.”
Quoted in J. S. Rigden, Rabi: Scientist and Citizen, Harvard University Press, 2000.
The George Bush Memorial Library
Photographed by my colleague, Geoff Peters. It’s next door to JanetUK’s new offices at Harwell. Funnily enough, I was under the impression that the Bush library was to be based at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. Perhaps the protests are getting to him. Harwell’s nice and quiet.
Wikipedia deficiencies
Dan Bricklin has some interesting reflections about the Wikipedia entry on the spreadsheet. I’ve always thought that Dan invented the spreadsheet, but the Wikipedia entry begs to differ. I’ve just looked at it and it fails to give a date for the first release of VisiCalc and doesn’t mention Microsoft’s first stab at a spreadsheet program — Multiplan — at all.
News from the G8
From David Blair’s (no relation) Telegraph Blog…
I have just watched the G8 leaders yawn and scratch their way through a toe-curling session with the so-called “junior eight”. This is an absurd innovation at G8 summits where eight rather dim teenagers are brought before the world’s most powerful leaders.
George Bush and Angela Merkel in Heiligendamm
Bush and Merkel share a joke at the G8 summitEach of the kids gets to read out a pathetic little speech consisting of a string of platitudes. The world’s most powerful leaders do their best to feign interest. OK, none of them actually yawned. But Nicolas Sarkozy took the opportunity to scratch his head and smooth his hair while the French adolescent stumbled through her script. Sarko also forgot to remove his translation earplug while she was talking – in French, of course – suggesting that he really was mentally out-to-lunch.
George Bush began chewing peanuts while the Tanzanian kid was talking. Vladimir Putin looked sinister and bored in equal measure as each of the teens ran through their cringing little speeches. Romano Prodi’s eyelids grew heavier and heavier.
The two most obscure members of the G8, Shinzo Abe and Stephen Harper, the Japanese and Canadian prime ministers, appeared utterly bewildered. (Incidentally, most of my fellow journalists have no idea who these guys are). Only Tony Blair had some success in pretending to be interested…
Still, George Bush got to meet St Bob Geldof and Bono, so the Summic can’t have been entirely pointless.
Health warnings on wine bottles
Er, vintage indignation from Boris Johnson…
And there I was – all set to blame Brussels. As soon as I heard there was some loony plan to put health warnings on wine bottles, my
As I prepared my continental bombing raid, I could see my target in my imagination.
That’s right: it was some Swedish divorcee health commissioner, sitting in her velour slacks in her taupe-coloured office in the Breydel building, Brussels; and I could just imagine the imperious set of her jaw as she put down her glass of Badoit and prepared to Mont Blanc her initials under the EU edict that alcohol was henceforward to be clearly labelled as a poison; and in my rage I reached for another lunchtime glass of Mazis-Chambertin 2000, to fortify myself for the rigours of composing my column, and I can tell you that it was with all bomb bays fully loaded that I arrived at my desk; and I was on the very point of launching the great Brussels-busting task force when I paused.
I had a spasm of journalistic scruple. I picked up the phone….
You can guess the rest. Lazy column, but still amusing.
Buy radio advertising slots on eBay
From yesterday’s Radio Time to Join List of eBay Items Up for Auction – New York Times…
SAN FRANCISCO, June 5 — The auction giant eBay said it would begin selling radio airtime to advertisers starting Wednesday, expanding into a business that Google entered last year
EBay, through a partnership with Bid4Spots, a 2-year-old company in Encino, Calif., will offer advertisers a way to buy unsold radio inventory from 2,300 radio stations in the top 300 media markets in the United States
Advertisers can go shopping for airtime on the eBay Media Marketplace, originally a forum for cable television ads which began in March. EBay was hired to create the service by a consortium of major advertisers like Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Home Depot.
But the eBay ad exchange has had little success so far. Broadcasters have vocally protested that they were not adequately consulted on its development and that it goes too far in removing people from the process. Only Oxygen, the cable network, currently sells some of its ad time on eBay’s service…
Genetic markers for certain diseases
Wow! Technology Review report:
A massive genetic study carried out in the United Kingdom has pinpointed 24 genetic markers that increase risk for illnesses such as diabetes, arthritis, and Crohn’s disease, a form of inflammatory bowel disease. The findings illustrate the success of a new approach to gene hunting known as genome-wide association, made possible by recent advances in gene-sequencing technologies. The results were published in this week’s issue of Nature.
“This is a powerful way of identifying genes for common diseases,” says Anne Bowcock, a geneticist at Washington University Medical School, in Saint Louis. “These genes will point to altered pathways that will then point to novel therapies.”
Scientists analyzed 500,000 genetic markers in each of 1,700 people, making it the largest such study to date. By comparing the DNA of 2,000 patients with one of seven different diseases–Crohn’s disease, type 1 and 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, rheumatoid arthritis, and bipolar disorder–with 3,000 healthy controls, researchers identified 24 genetic regions strongly linked to specific diseases: one in bipolar disorder, one in coronary-artery disease, nine in Crohn’s disease, three in rheumatoid arthritis, seven in type 1 diabetes, and three in type 2 diabetes. Known as the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium, the project is a collaboration among 50 different research groups…
Wonder how long it will take insurance companies to start demanding genetic scans before providing insurance.