One can usually trust Jon Stewart for insightful comment not only about American politics, but the media coverage of it. Yesterdays segment is particularly good:
And if you enjoyed that, you’ll enjoy this follow-up segment well.
I just saw this in my RSS feed from Wired.com:
Israel is worried about Iran launching an all-out, “doomsday” barrage of rockets and missiles. So military leaders have begun early planning for a new, robotic defense system, armed with enough artificial intelligence that it “could take over completely” from flesh-and-blood operators. “It will be designed for … autonomous operations,” the commander of Israel’s air defense forces insists.
O Dr Strangelove, you live again.
So. Apple released a new Macbook this year, oddly called the Macbook Air. As names go, I think it has all the memorability of the Ford Focus. Still, as the Focus proved, you can produce a winning product with a bland name, and I think this is one.
As someone who travels a lot and hates large laptops, and with an other half who both has one of the world’s greatest aversions to checking in baggage as she zips through airports and has a history of choosing laptops on the basis of whether or not they will fit in an oversized handbag, I appreciate the new form factor.
As for the compromises they made to get there: well, the hard disk is small, but this is not a desktop-replacement machine, but a desktop-complimenting machine, even if Apple’s recent patent for something more exiting comes to nothing.
I was surprised to see that there is no ethernet port – ethernet joins modems in this brave new world in becoming a USB dongle (optional). Still, five minutes thought reassured me that this, too, was the right choice. In all the settings I am likely to use a laptop like this, connectivity either doesn’t exist or is provided almost exclusively by wireless. This will only increase to be the case in the future – wireless (whatever the limits or disadvantages of the technology) is much cheaper to deploy. If I am carrying an ethernet cable, the dongle is a minor addition. As for home use, well, it makes little odds whether I am plugging in a USB cable or a USB cable with modem.
Speaking of USB, the single USB port is a surprise, but again probably a compromise worth making for a laptop that will fit into an envelope but which still packs a full-size keyboard. In the setting where I want to plug in lots of devices (at home), a USB hub might quickly become a de-facto docking station. On the road, as it were, the single port is unlikely to be a real problem.
The lack of an optical drive is no real surprise (for 90% of the time my laptop’s one is dead weight), though watching Apple roll out their next OS upgrade to such users will be interesting. There are, still many large software packages that are not shipped in download-able form. Apple will sell a USB DVD drive to you at extra cost, of course, and have included software that well let you ‘share’ the drive of another computer in what (from the videos) looks like a typically (for Apple) painless fashion.
I am less convinced, though, by the idea that we all want to give up our DVD collections in favour of ‘renting’ poorer quality content from Apple. Let’s be clear that it lacks a DVD drive because that is a compromise worth making in an ultra-portable machine, not because the DVD is even close to retirement – which brings me to discussing what this machine is not. This is not a desktop replacement, and sits poorly against even its junior sibling as a real replacement for anyone’s ‘main’ computer. In fact, unless you are going to buy an external DVD drive and probably some kind of external hard drive too, this machine is a parasite (though a benign one) on your more capable machines.
The processors are fast enough, but are still going to be sluggish running all the snazzier features of Leopard. More seriously, the Hard Disk, at a maximum of 80 gigs (or an expensive SSD 65 gigs) is plenty for word processing and work on the go, isn’t going to store your family photographs, your music collection, the podcasts you are creating, or the ever-growing collection of large files needed for work. Of course, on your home network, Jobs is ready with a partial solution, but nothing beats properly-sized internal hard drive.
Still, unless it has some unfortunate flaw, like a case that gets far too hot (and the aluminium does not inspire confidence given the Macbook Pro experience), this machine is a winner. It is for people who don’t pack the kitchen sink on the basis that they just might need it and are prepared to travel light. For them it is perfect – at least until they can get back home.
Oh, this is my first post in quite a while. Is anyone still out there?
There is a problem lurking right at the heart of much current computer software, and because it involves the law of so many countries, it is hard to see how it can be resolved.
Back when I was using computers for the first time, there were three basic models for software:
* Shrink-wrapped and very expensive, with onerous sounding End-User Licence Agreements
* Shareware on Magazine Disks – you could use a demo, but had to pay ($20 is the figure that seems to have stuck in my memory) to get a licence code and keep on using the program.
* Free programs, that came with a simple disclaimer and let you copy and share them with your friends. Probably also found on a floppy disk on a magazine.
What I didn’t know about at the time was that a ‘Copyleft’ movement was growing.
The Free Software Foundation are the foremost promoters of a model that says, as far as I understand it, “we want to let you do all the things that copyright law would usually prevent you from doing, we want to to copy, to modify, to distribute our software. But we want to control the way you do it.” Software created in the light of this philosophy runs much of the internet, and parts of the Mac OS operating system.
The FSF are the writers and promoters of a licence called the GPL. For very good reasons, the FSF want the GPL to be a contract. As a contract, it could be hard to enforce and open to challenge: under US law, to enforce it effectively, you would have to show that you have suffered economic damage as a result of a breach.
So the FSF would like Courts to interpret their software licences not as contracts, but as grants of licence. These can be more easily enforced, using the civil and criminal statutes on copyright law which, thanks to international treaties, are ever more standardised.
The problem is that Courts in the US seem not to wish to do this. The GPL – and similar licences – look to them more like a contract than a grant of licence.
And that could be a very big problem for the GPL, because it could render its most important features effectively unenforceable. Since the GPL makes it clear that software can be copied, modified and redistributed freely, courts may decide that there is little economic harm done by those who ignore the other conditions the licence tries to enforce.
Many people have an opinion on this, and the truth is that until there is more case law, especially in the US, who is right and who is wrong will simply not be known. Until then, however, there is a very serious risk that the whole concept of the GPL is holed below the waterline.
The FSF could, of course, re-write the GPL with its status as a contract in mind, but this would make enforceability hard, would mean that the contract law of different jurisdictions would have to be taken into account and – perhaps the biggest hurdle of all – would mean they would have to give up some of their most cherished legal-philosophical positions.
The moral is: be careful about saying that information wants to be free—you may get more than you bargained for.
Here’s something intriguing: Lieutenant Walter Haut, the public relations officer at the time of a famous crash of a UFO or weather balloon (depending on whether you are a ‘true believer’ or whatever non-conspiracy-theorists are), has released a posthumous affidavit offering aid and comfort to the UFO hunters.
A wicked sense of humour, a whistle-blower, or just a PR man who was left out of the loop? On the net, you get to decide.
Whether or not you support the smoking ban that is about to come into force in England, you cannot argue that the policy was fully debated and discussed over an extended period by those institutions in the country we trust with the business of setting laws. A legal challenge is not, therefore, something which I think has any merit at all.
I fully expect this challenge to fail. But what if it did succeed? What if courts did decide that the right to peaceful enjoyment of possessions guaranteed by the Human Rights Act (and written, I have no doubt at all, to make illegal the arbitrary confiscation of property by a government) really did trump the ability of Parliament to make law and settle policy?
Not only would the decision lack democratic legitimacy, but it would further damage Parliament: if all decisions by MPs were to be second-guessed in court in this way, would that not destroy much of the incentive for MPs responsibly in the first place?
I hate mornings, have never had one as bas Michael Moylan from Florida. Here was his morning:
A start like that doesn’t bode well for the rest of the day, does it?
I watched the transfer of power in the company of a few friends. It was quite clear that the journalists had little to say, and were trying to play up what was in the event quite a down-beat occasion. One BBC commentator, tasked with providing commentary as the car transporting Brown from the Palace to Downing Street took a journey that even on roads that had not been closed would have been uninteresting, resorted to saying ‘Mr Brown now turns his formidable intellect to the daunting task of running the country’ or words of similar banality. Whether or not they were impartial I leave the reader to judge.
As it turned out the formidable intellect had produced no great speech, though I did hope, as Brown said that there were some words that had always moved him, that he was about to use the words of Francis of Assisi. It wouldn’t have been original, but it would have been so witty it would have had the press chortling with him for days. As it turned out, he instead quoted his old school motto and promised to try his utmost. Personally, I’m more interested in results and achievement when it comes to my politicians. I’d much rather have a Bill that was a doddle for them to work out but that does its job well than one they sat up all night to work on and still couldn’t get right.
Still, he left the journalists at rather a loss. Nick Robinson, not usually one to write copy when he has nothing to say but feeling the pressure on this of all days to say something, resorted to writing absolute nonsense:
He delivered his words with confidence, but his nervousness was very, very evident.
According to the BBC, then, Brown was both confident and nervous. Well that, at least, is balanced reporting writing. Perhaps it is a quantum universe after all.
For a little over an hour today, the United Kingdom was governed by Her Majesty and the Civil Service. I think it went very smoothly indeed.
I hear from the Today Programme that President Bush thinks that History will judge Blair kindly. Well it is possible, I suppose. Though I know some of the people who’ll have a hand in actually writing the first, second and third drafts of it, and many of them will have quite a lot of sympathy with this sort of list.
If anyone ever tries to tell me that impartial narration of facts is possible, I think I shall point them at that list – it’s a rather fine example of a gloriously, knowingly impartial list. Which is not to say that it is ‘wrong’ or should be discounted out of hand. ‘Biased’ does not, contrary to what GCSE History tries to tell you, mean ‘ignorable’. See also something like An Inconvenient Truth for another example.
I have written before about (what seem to me obvious) dangers inherent in putting personal or commercial information online. Here are some concrete examples:
1. Whether by design or incompetence, Facebook reveals more information to strangers than you think.
2. Your remotely stored documents may be liable to subpoena without your knowledge.
The moral of the story, folks, is Nicholas’ second law of computing:
The fact that you need to enter a password to access your data tells you nothing about who else can access it.
Corollary: passwords provide only peace of mind.