Why Yours Truly is not always best

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Oh dear. An article in the New York Times explains all.

“So many people are not clear communicators,” said Judith Kallos, creator of NetManners.com, a site dedicated to online etiquette, and author of “Because Netiquette Matters.” To be clear about what an e-mail message is trying to say, and about what is implied as well as what is stated, “the reader is left looking at everything from the greeting to the closing for clues,” she said.

Mr. Troutwine [a chap described earlier in the piece] is not alone in thinking that an e-mail sender who writes “Best,” then a name, is offering something close to a brush-off. He said he chooses his own business sign-offs in a descending order of cordiality, from “Warmest regards” to “All the best” to a curt “Sincerely.

”When Kim Bondy, a former CNN executive, e-mailed a suitor after a dinner date, she used one of her preferred closings: “Chat soon.” It was her way of saying, “The date went well, let’s do it again,” she said.

She may have been the only one who thought that. The return message closed with the dreaded “Best.” It left her feeling as though she had misread the evening. “I felt like, ‘Oh, that’s kind of formal. I don’t think he liked me,’ ” she said, laughing. “A chill came with the ‘Best.’ ” They have not gone out since…

Why is this interesting? Well, simply that I’ve always innocently signed off my email messages with “Best”. No wonder I have such an uneventful social life. Sigh.

From Russia with hate

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Nice column by Henry Porter about the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko…

Casino Royale, which opened in Moscow last week, features an assassin operating on foreign soil with impunity and deniability, yet also with the undoubted backing of his government at home. The British do this in the movies; the Russians appear to be doing it for real. If they are, it constitutes state-sponsored terrorism because a man walking around London in a glimmering trail of radioactivity represents a considerable threat to others. This is quite apart from the revolting, calculated cruelty of his murder.

Litvinenko courted death and knew that living in Britain would not protect him. There have been too many downed helicopters and unsolved murders across Europe for that. He must have known that more than 20 journalists have lost their lives in the former Soviet Union since Putin came to power. But, not content with having accused the KGB’s successor, the Federal Security Service (FSB), of planning to murder exiled financier Boris Berezovsky, and being tried on corruption charges as a result, he stuck his head out by accusing the FSB of masterminding explosions in 1999 which killed some 230 people and allowed Putin to go to war in Chechnya.

He was tried and convicted in his absence for abuse of office, a purely Soviet catch-all charge; his family was hounded by the FSB and he was told that his life was in danger. But still he continued to make allegations, most recently at the Frontline Club in Paddington, London, where he condemned Putin for the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya. He stood in the club’s upstairs room making his points without emotion, waiting patiently for his translator to finish…

Henry’s right: Russia is, in fact, a rogue state — a corrupt autocracy. What happened to Litvinenko was state-sponsored terrorism (captured nicely by that phrase about “a man walking around London in a glimmering trail of radioactivity”). But Russia won’t — can’t — be treated as a rogue state. For one thing, it has nukes. For another, it’s where we have to get our gas (and maybe oil) from in the future. What surprises me at the moment is why the government isn’t making the link between energy policy and national security. Doing something serious about carbon emissions is also just about the best way of reducing the UK’s dependence on vicious despots like Vladimir Putin.

Scandal of Farepak phone lines

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The glories of capitalism. From today’s Observer…

MPs have slated Farepak administrator BDO Stoy Hayward for setting up an expensive premium-rate telephone information line for victims of the collapsed Christmas savings company.

BDO Stoy Hayward will itself receive a portion of the money earned from the 0870 telephone line, which charges 8p per minute during peak hours, 5p per minute in the evening, and 3p per minute at weekends.The accountancy firm says this is intended to cover the costs of handling compensation claims from up to 150,000 Farepak savers, and strongly denies it is profiting at the victims’ expense.

But the cost of calls threatens to pile unexpected financial hardship on Farepak savers from low-income backgrounds. Only last week BDO Stoy Hayward warned Farepak customers they could expect a maximum refund of 4p for every pound they had invested…

Vista: the torture begins

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This morning’s Observer column…

Next Thursday, 30 November, is the feast day of St Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland. Pity he’s not also the patron saint of computer users, because soon they are going to need all the divine help they can get.

How come? Well, 30 November is also the day that Microsoft releases Vista, the new version of Windows, to its corporate customers. Because companies don’t squeal, we may expect the occasion to pass off reasonably peacefully. The screaming proper will only start on 30 January next year, when the system is released to consumers.

Vista, you see, is a new kind of beast. It’s not enough just to install it on your computer; you must also ‘activate’ it…

The rule of law

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Martin Kettle’s column alterted me to something I had missed — a lecture given to the Cambridge Law Faculty on November 16 by Lord Bingham, Britain’s most senior judge, in which he set out the eight criteria that a society has to meet if it is to be said to be obeying the rule of law. It’s a fascinating and sobering read — sobering because he implies that the current UK government doesn’t understand what the rule of law requires.

Bingham’s starting point is the way the phrase “the rule of law” has become debased by casual over-use. “It is true”, he says

that the rule of law has been routinely invoked by judges in their judgments. But they have not explained what they meant by the expression, and well-respected authors have thrown doubt on its meaning and value. Thus Joseph Raz has commented on the tendency to use the rule of law as a shorthand description of the positive aspects of any given political system. John Finnis has described the rule of law as “[t]he name commonly given to the state of affairs in which a legal system is legally in good shape”. Judith Shklar has suggested that the expression may have become meaningless thanks to ideological abuse and general over-use: “It may well have become just another one of those self-congratulatory rhetorical devices that grace the public utterances of Anglo-American politicians. No intellectual effort need therefore be wasted on this bit of ruling-class chatter”.

Jeremy Waldron, commenting on Bush v Gore in which the rule of law was invoked on both sides, recognised a widespread impression that utterance of those magic words meant little more than “Hooray for our side!”.

Well, hooray for Lord Bingham, say I! It’s a terrific lecture.

An audio recording is also available — see here.

OJ Simpson’s book creating eBay frenzy?

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From New York Daily News…

While O.J. Simpson’s defunct book has been branded the scourge of publishing, it continued to be a hot collector’s item on eBay yesterday – with people bidding thousands of dollars for a copy.

At least three hardcovers of “If I Did It” – in which the disgraced football legend theoretically expounds on how he would have committed the slayings of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman – were sparking bidding wars.

An attorney for the Brown family accused eBay yesterday of dragging its feet on complying with the publisher’s request to have the books removed from the site.

“We really need to stem the tide and get these books out of circulation because anything that’s out there now is really hurtful to family,” said lawyer Natasha Roit.

A spokesman for eBay, Hani Durzy, insisted his company was trying to accommodate publisher HarperCollins’ request to remove the books from the auction block. But he said with more than 100 million items on the site at any given time, it was difficult to quickly flag them.

The three books up for auction yesterday received more than 100 bids. The highest legitimate offer was $15,300.

Seamus Heaney

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Just heard that Seamus Heaney, the Nobel Laureate, has suffered a major stroke. He’s in hospital in Dublin, recuperating. I hope he makes a rapid and full recovery. Can’t find anything about this on Irish news media, but my source is knowledgeable and reliable.

UPDATE… Kevin Cryan found one other online reference — from Ireland Literature Guide.

Ndiyo on ZDNet

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Andrew Donoughue’s piece about Ndiyo and the digital divide is now on the Web. The nice thing about it is that it sets our work in the wider context.

An alternative to both the refurbished PCs and the OLPC approach has been developed by two UK academics. Ndiyo, the Swahili word for “yes”, is a project that aims to allow multiple users access to the same PC. Rather than trying to push more bespoke devices on countries with meagre IT budgets, Ndiyo allows one PC to be shared by five to 10 individuals by turning it into a mini-server networked to a series of thin clients.

The brain-child of Quentin Stafford-Fraser, a former research scientist at AT&T Laboratories Cambridge, Ndiyo is based around the untapped ability of the Linux operating system (Ubuntu) to support numerous simultaneous users. Together with his partner, technical author and Open University professor John Naughton, Stafford-Fraser decided that the traditional idea of one machine per user was a model that just didn’t make economic or functional sense for the developing world. Instead, in the Ndiyo model, a Linux PC becomes a server to a series of “ultra-thin-clients” — called Nivos — which allow an extra display, keyboard and mouse to be connected to the computer via a standard network cable.

ZDNet UK caught up with Stafford-Fraser and Naughton recently to find out how their technology works and why it makes more sense than the strategies being developed by heavyweights such as Intel and OLPC…

Iraq death toll rises

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From today’s New York Times…

BAGHDAD, Nov. 22 — More Iraqi civilians were killed in October than in any other month since the American invasion in 2003, a report released by the United Nations on Wednesday said, a rise that underscored the growing cost of Iraq’s deepening sectarian war.
According to the report, 3,709 Iraqis were killed in October, up slightly from the previous high in July, and an increase of about 11 percent from the number in September.

The figures, which include totals from the Baghdad morgue and hospitals and morgues across the country, have become a central barometer of the war here and a gauge of the progress of the American military as it tries to bring stability to this exhausted country.

A dangerous trend has surfaced: Sixty-five percent of all deaths in Baghdad were categorized as unidentified corpses, the signature of militias, who kidnap, kill and throw away bodies at a rate that now outstrips the slaughter inflicted by suicide bombers. The report did not offer a breakdown by sect, and it is impossible to tell who is dying in greater numbers.

Indeed, the 52 bodies found by the authorities on Wednesday were far more than the 16 Iraqis reported killed in Baghdad and Baquba, a violent city north of the capital.

“We have a situation in which impunity prevails,” said Gianni Magazzeni, chief of the United Nations’ Human Rights Office in Baghdad, which compiled the report. “It’s critically important for the government to ensure that justice is done.”

Even daily life spoke of war and a society in collapse. The report painted a portrait of social calamity that included 100,000 Iraqis a month fleeing to Syria and Jordan, and schools in some of the most violent areas of the country almost completely shut down. Areas that are not mixed — Iraq’s Kurdish north and portions of its Shiite south — were far safer.

The figures illustrate in stark percentages just how deeply the killing has sunk into Iraqi society. They had been a point of contention for the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, which suppressed them in September after criticizing them as inflated. The American military has also criticized the figures as high, but it does not release statistics of its own.

President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice are preparing for meetings next week with Mr. Maliki, in part to discuss the security situation in Iraq.

But the United Nations stands by the count, which tallies unclaimed bodies from Iraq’s approximately six morgues and from death certificates — required for burial and for inheritance procedures. If anything, the numbers are low. Figures from hospitals come from the Ministry of Health, which counts deaths only on the day of the attack. Victims who die a day later are not counted…

Reviewing BBC business coverage

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From today’s Guardian…

Sir Alan Budd, the former Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee member, will chair the BBC’s review of the impartiality of its business coverage.

Instigated by the corporation’s governors as part of a series of reviews, BBC staff, licence fee payers, unions and other interested parties will be invited to give their views to Sir Alan’s six-strong panel.

The other members are: Stephen Jukes, head of Bournemouth University’s media school; Chris Bones of Henley Management College; John Naughton, Open University professor and Observer columnist; Oxfam director Barbara Stocking; and Paralympic athlete Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson.