Microsoft’s earth is flat

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Hmmm… According to Playfuls.com,

A comparison between Google Earth and Virtual Earth 3D is inevitable. And the conclusion is that Virtual Earth is so restrictive that it cannot even be considered a Beta version.The first annoying thing that all users outside the US or England will probably encounter is that you are not allowed to install Virtual Earth 3D yet in your native language.

In order to be able to install Microsoft’s VE3D you’ll have to change your settings (if you are in Windows XP) from Control Panel-Regional Settings and make your computer have a default English language. I haven’t yet had the opportunity to test the program on Linux, Solaris or Mac, but I am not that naïve to think it will work on those operating systems…

My apologies to Microsoft if that is not the case…The second annoying thing makes me again remember why everybody considers MS’s policy as arrogant, tyrannical and often stupid. You will not be able to view 3D maps if you don’t have Internet Explorer 6 or 7. To tell you the truth I do have IE7 installed on my computer but I don’t use it because I am a FireFox and Opera user. Well, Microsoft thought at that and made me cry in anger when I first tried to download the .msi installer for VE3D: nothing budged!… I asked through Skype a friend and he told me the same thing about FF: no pop-up, no warning, nothing! He eventually gave up but I had more patience and in the end I discovered that only IE is available (for now, I hope…) for this option…

If only it didn’t run under Windows.

Election news: machines are faulty!

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Er, why are we not surprised? Here’s a Forbes.com report…

A lawyer stood with a cellphone in one ear, a landline connected to the other, all while typing on his BlackBerry. Twenty phones weren’t enough to handle the calls streaming into the election protection center monitoring Ohio.The lawyer was one of 20 volunteers manning calls from Ohio voters in a conference room at the New York offices of law firm of Proskauer Rose. By early afternoon the hotline had received over 500 calls reporting problems in Ohio alone, according to coordinating lawyer Jennifer Scullion.

Ohio wasn’t the only state facing voting difficulties in the most fully automated election in the nation’s history. Electronic or optical scan systems, operating in about 90% of precincts, caused problems across the country. The new voting machines often froze or failed to turn on. In multiple states, voters faced long lines as poll workers scrambled to find extra paper ballots. New laws requiring voters to show their ID also caused confusion…

Krugman: Limiting the Damage

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From Paul Krugman’s NYT column…

At this point, nobody should have any illusions about Mr. Bush’s character. To put it bluntly, he’s an insecure bully who believes that owning up to a mistake, any mistake, would undermine his manhood — and who therefore lives in a dream world in which all of his policies are succeeding and all of his officials are doing a heckuva job. Just last week he declared himself “pleased with the progress we’re making” in Iraq.

In other words, he’s the sort of man who should never have been put in a position of authority, let alone been given the kind of unquestioned power, free from normal checks and balances, that he was granted after 9/11. But he was, alas, given that power, as well as a prolonged free ride from much of the news media.

The results have been predictably disastrous. The nightmare in Iraq is only part of the story. In time, the degradation of the federal government by rampant cronyism — almost every part of the executive branch I know anything about, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been FEMAfied — may come to be seen as an equally serious blow to America’s future…

It’s a good piece. It concludes:

But here’s the thing: no matter how hard the Bush administration may try to ignore the constitutional division of power, Mr. Bush’s ability to make deadly mistakes has rested in part on G.O.P. control of Congress. That’s why many Americans, myself included, will breathe a lot easier if one-party rule ends tomorrow.

Saddam’s trial

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From Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard…

I don’t think the White House needed any “scheming.” The Iraqi court knows exactly what its “mission” is without being explicitly ordered. Coordination doesn’t require command.

The simple fact remains: this verdict represents a last-minute spasm of the GOP’s desperate hang-on-to-power campaign. And the White House is doing its Orwellian part in loudly denying the fact and protesting the Iraqis’ independence.

Sadly for them, the election’s outcome won’t really make a difference to the bloodshed in Iraq, the dynamics of which long ago spun out of American control. And once U.S. forces have abandoned the wreckage of the occupation, how long do you think Saddam’s judges have left to live?

The Wealth of Networks

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Paul Miller has a nice, succinct review in the Financial Times. Sample:

What Benkler sees is an emerging pattern in the way we use network technologies which he thinks is positive for democracy and innovation, but not without its downsides. He argues that the internet is making obvious an existing form of exchange – social sharing – and taking it from the periphery to the mainstream of the economy. Conventional economics can’t explain why volunteer-generated projects such as Wikipedia or open-source software, which are given away for free, have been so successful. He proposes his own theory of “social production” – “commons-based peer production” – to fill the gap.

It’s a counterpoint to the received wisdom that creating and exploiting intellectual property (patents and copyright) is the only way to do business in the 21st century. He points out that in 2003 IBM made twice as much money from providing open-source services as it did from intellectual property – despite the fact that between 1999 and 2004 it created more patents than any other US company. Benkler proposes that this is a pattern we will see repeated. The thesis is unsettling for those businesses, particularly entertainment ones, that have relied on controlling distribution of copyrighted material. He says not that they will disappear overnight but that social production is more than a fad. It is no surprise to Benkler that: “We find ourselves in the midst of a battle over the institutional ecology of the digital environment.”

Electronic Voting Machines

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From Scott Adams’s The Dilbert Blog…

Years ago when I worked at a big bank, one of the hot issues was that many customers didn’t trust our new-fangled ATM machines. Amazingly, this fear had almost nothing to do with the fact that I worked in the ATM department. Indeed, my suggestion to include a paper shredder hole right next to the deposit hole was barely even considered. In the end, ATMs rarely stole anyone’s money and kept it for long. Now most people trust ATMs.

I think about the history of ATMs when I hear all the nervous Nellies wetting their pants over electronic voting machines. I believe those worries are totally misplaced. Now don’t get me wrong – there’s a 100% chance that the voting machines will get hacked and all future elections will be rigged.  But that doesn’t mean we’ll get a worse government. It probably means that the choice of the next American president will be taken out of the hands of deep-pocket, autofellating, corporate shitbags and put it into the hands of some teenager in Finland. How is that not an improvement?

Statistically speaking, any hacker who is skilled enough to rig the elections will also be smart enough to select politicians that believe in . . . oh, let’s say for example, science. Compare that to the current method where big money interests buy political ads that confuse snake-dancing simpletons until they vote for the guy who scares them the least. Then during the period between the election and the impending Rapture, that traditionally elected President will get busy protecting the lives of stem cells while finding creative ways to blow the living crap out of anything that has the audacity to grow up and turn brownish…

Thanks to Boyd Harris for the link.

Brillo Pad rides again!

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Andrew Neil (aka Brillo Pad) gave the Keynote Address to the Society of Editors conference. This picture was taken just as the TV director was switching from a questioner (standing) back to BP.

His Address was an entertaining farrago of insights, half-truths and thinly-veiled attacks on his enemies. It went like this:

New media bring challenges… time for a new mindset…an opportunity not a threat…all technological change brings upheaval…much to be positive about… bad news only for red top tabloids… the Guardian has used the web astutely to reinvent the Guardian brand… Sunday Times is selling more copies today than it did under his editorship…the Economist is doing brilliantly… the FT is thriving again, showing what can be done when a newspaper comes to terms with the Net…journalists who are so good at lecturing others about the need to adapt to disruptive change are not very good at learning to live with it themselves…the days of spending the day working on a piece, filing it just before five and heading off to the pub are over…all media organisations must become 24×7 operations…’reach’ is the key to getting a true measure of our proposition… 38% of people’s leisure time now spent online (more than watching TV) but 38% of advertising spend hasn’t followed it — yet: but that will change as advertisers follow the eyeballs…Google now has more ad revenue than ITV… but Google is growing fat on the backs of poor unpaid journalists and their employers … time for a conversation with Google about this matter …need for a new breed of journalist … journalists will become brands in their own right… broadband has transformed the Net into a multimedia channel… there’s a premium on moving-picture ads…. newspapers must get into that… there’s never been a better time to be a journalist… these new journalist-brands “will write blogs because you wouldn’t give them a column, and then they’ll sell the Blog back to you for an inflated price”…

He finished off with some incomprehensible score-settling about the Scottish Media Group, the Scotsman, the Herald and the unalloyed stupidity of the Scottish political class.

In questioning, he revealed that he had bought Handbag.com for £300,000 and sold it a short time later for £22 million.

Update… Roy Greenslade is also at the conference. Here’s his Blog’s take on Brillo Pad.

Base camp

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Just checked in to the Radisson in Glasgow, where I’m speaking at the UK Society of Editors’ conference. First thing I looked for, naturally, was (free) broadband — and it’s provided. Quite fast, too. Just the ticket.

Will the Democrats win — and then blow it?

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Very astute column by Martin Kettle.

The aftermath of November 7 will also pose a larger political challenge for the Democrats. The 2006 midterms will be best understood as an Iraq-led defeat for the Republicans, and for the president in particular, rather than as a victory for the Democrats. Americans will express their disillusion with the conduct of the war by electing Democrats in larger numbers than before. But this does not mean that the Democrats can be confident that they speak for America on other issues. If they want to crown this comeback by recapturing the White House in 2008, the Democrats must be clever, careful and clear.

The danger is that too many Democrats will draw the wrong message about themselves from their victory. It’s very easy to beat up on the Democrats for their many recent failings, ironically not least on Iraq, and sometimes those criticisms go impossibly over the top. Yet Tuesday may lull the party into thinking they are suddenly more in tune with American opinion on issues other than Iraq than they really are. The perils of blundering into excessive partisanship over the next two years are enormous. The process of fixing the Democratic party that Bill Clinton started a decade ago remains unfinished business. Yet somehow it needs to go on…

You bet. One of things that was truly appalling in the last Presidential election was how intellectually bankrupt the Democrats were. I still have no idea what they really stand for — and nor do they.

Hack early, hack often

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This morning’s Observer column — on the security vulnerabilities of voting machines.

Oddly enough, it wasn’t these flaws that forced the ministry’s hand, but the further discovery that the ES3B emitted enough electromagnetic radiation for its operations to be monitored by snoopers, thereby violating the constitutional requirement for secret ballots.As a result, municipalities that had planned to use the ES3B have gone into panic mode. There was a stampede to purchase the alternative – and supposedly safe – voting machine, but supplies soon ran out.

Officials in Amsterdam, having decided to go back to pencil and paper, discovered that some ingenious jobsworth had sold all the old ballot-boxes for €25 apiece – and the Dutch media have been gleefully unearthing the uses to which their proud new owners have put them. (One has made an attractive barbecue from his.)