A weblog devoted to the use and misuse of language: Language Log.
I’ve just seen the most wonderful anti-statistic:
99.9% of humans have more than the average number of arms.
I’m very fond of Knell’s Second Law:
When contentious subjects are being discussed, an individual’s knowledge of the subject under discussion is inversely proportional to their willingness to loudly make authoritative-sounding statements.
A Goldman Sachs trader has been warned to stop using the social networking site, Facebook, after the IT department noted that he had spent four hours a day using the website. He posted the email to Facebook, as the link shows.
There are probably several points of interest here, but what I find most interesting [...]
Last month a Belgium court ruled that Google had infringed the copyright of several newspapers. It’s crime? Indexing their content, and presenting it to users as part of the Google News service.
Surely, many said at the time, a search engine must be allowed to index content, no?
Well, no. Apparently not. Discussion [...]
Give people you don’t know free hosting for arbitrary content and people wanting a place to put viruses and the like will exploit your generosity. Blog hosting websites are the latest target. See The Register for details.
Nothing surprising here, except that one would have thought people would have thought about this before now.
Testimony before Congress here. Makes a good case.
I keep hearing that the “monopoly” on the delivery of letters has ended, and that there is now competition. But it’s a strange form of competition.
As an individual, as far as I can see, Royal Mail still has a monopoly, and the prices of all services are increasing from 2nd April. [...]
I’ve reported before on attacks on Academic freedom in the US. It was only a matter of time before the same thing came here.
There is an interesting discussion here about whether the UK ID card should double as a travel document. If it does, it may have to be insecure:
This is one of many reasons why lately there has been great consideration as to whether any UK ID card should also double-up as a travel document: [...]