Geoff Arnold

A rant deferred: Bangalore airport

My colleague Mani Chandrasekaran just posted a piece about the new Bangalore airport which is due to be completed in 2008. He began by saying "Most airports, in India, dont really compare to the modern airports around the world", which reminded me that I had promised you a little rant about my experiences at Bangalore airport. So here it is.

If you remember, I was flying from Bangalore to Mumbai to connect with a flight to London. My Jet Airways flight from Bangalore was repeatedly delayed, and I wound up missing my connection. In these circumstances, when you're stuck in the departure lounge waiting for a flight, most people need two things: refreshment and information.

1. Refreshments: none. Correction: one water fountain of dubious quality, and nothing else: no food, no beverages. No bottled water, no vending machines, no kiosk, no cafe. Zip.

2. Information: Here's where it really gets absurd. Scattered around the lounge were half a dozen televisions. These were used for three purposes: to show advertisements, to display flight information, and to carry a live TV feed. There was no other source of flight information. It quickly became apparent that there was no particular sequence or tempo as to what was shown when. Unless you watched intently you were likely to miss the occasional brief flight status displays.

   But it gets worse. It just so happened that India was playing Sri Lanka at cricket that evening, and the match was very exciting. India was winning: many of the ~250 waiting travellers jostled for the best seats to watch the TV, and when their heroes like Tendulkar and Sehwag were facing the bowling you could forget about anything else. Whoever was controlling the system wasn't going to bother with trivia like flight information (or even advertising). At one point there were 20 uninterrupted minutes of cricket....

I would have taken a few pictures of this place for you, but of course photography is absolutely forbidden at all Indian airports. In any case, the lesson is clear: if you're going to fly out of Bangalore, make sure you have bottled water and snacks with you, and be prepared to grab a seat in front of the TV. And if anyone from the airport reads this, I'm sure you can afford a few extra monitors to dedicate to flight information. Because we're not there to watch cricket, we're bloody well there to fly!

(Thanks. I feel much better now.)

P.S. The December'05 issue of Airliner World (excellent magazine, lousy website) includes a piece on p.68 about the critical state of the commercial aviation infrastructure in India. Airport parking places, terminal facilities, ground services, air traffic control - in every area, demand is outstripping supply, exposing a serious lack of investment. And this also applies to aircrew: a conservative estimate is that India needs an extra 1,200 pilots.

You know you're travelling more than is healthy.....

Oh dear. I actually caught myself gazing at this with interest: "For $1500, you can buy this pair of used first-class plane-seats to use as a sofa in your living room."

The lunatics are running the asylum....

From The Inquirer: US grants patent for anti-gravity device:

"ACCUSATIONS that the US Patent office is giving out dotty patents were given some credence this week after the magazine Nature discovered that the watchdog had just granted one to a bloke who claimed to have invented an anti-gravity machine.

Boris Volfson, of Huntington, is the proud holder of patent 6,960,975, which is for a space vehicle propelled by a superconducting shield that alters the curvature of space-time outside the craft in a way that counteracts gravity."

No word on whether it has to be constructed from transparent aluminum.

Essential reading on the Sony/BMG Rootkit fiasco

Here's a detailed account of the incompetence of Sony/BMG and First 4 Internet, the cowboys who wrote the brain-dead rootkit masquerading as DRM (digital rights management). From Mark's Sysinternals Blog, the bottom line: "Instead of admitting fault for installing a rootkit and installing it without proper disclosure, both Sony and First 4 Internet claim innocence. By not coming clean they are making clear to any potential customers that they are not only technically incompetent, but also dishonest."

And yes, they try the same trick on Macs too. Scumbags!

No names, no pack-drill

[Company policy, and contractual obligations, mean that I have to conceal a few details. Never mind - the message will be clear.]

I've always thought that, next to banking, the most mature kind of applications software was in airline ticketing. Like many of you, I've visited airline websites and seen the fare for a particular flight change from minute to minute , often quite dramatically. I've read about the principles of "yield management", and the anecdotes of how one passenger winds up paying a thousand dollars more than another in the same class on the same flight. And I've seen the commercials for the various companies that promise to find you the cheapest flights, hotels, cars, and so forth. Clearly there's some powerful software at work here: indeed were it not for the fact that "Artificial Intelligence" has come to mean "that which we don't know how to do yet", this would seem to qualify.

And yet...

Hard on the heels of my recent trip to Colorado, I now have to visit California for a week. I prepared a budgetary estimate, filled out a travel request, received an authorization number, and sat down to book the travel. (Those of you still living in the 1980's might imagine that my admin or secretary would do this. You can go back to sleep now.) Like most large companies, Sun has contracted with a Large Travel Service Company That Cannot Be Named so that employees can book their own travel through an exquisitely-customized on-line portal.

I logged in, and selected the page for travel planning. (Jakob Nielsen would love this page; it violates almost all of his design guidelines.) I entered the dates of my outbound and return travel, as well as the origin and destination airports. The system offers two ways of planning air travel: choosing each flight individually, or configuring complete round-trip itineraries. I knew that whatever I did the system would follow up by attempting to find a cheaper alternative, so I asked for complete itineraries, sorted by price.

After thinking about it for nearly a minute, the system offered me several choices. Oddly, the cheapest of these wasn't a particularly good fit with my chosen travel times, and it was several hundred dollars more than what I've paid for my last few trips from BOS to SFO. (This also meant that it was well above the budgetary estimate that I'd provided. Oops.) I backtracked to the flight search page, and tried searching for individual flights. I found a pair of flights that looked like the cheapest (though you can't tell for sure until you've chosen), and was $50 less than I'd budgeted. Bingo! But wait! "Your choice violates policy: a cheaper alternative was not chosen." But the [expletive deleted] system refused to tell me what the cheaper alternative might be!!. After trying several times to guess what might make it happy (without once finding a cheaper combination), I chose an override option and completed my itinerary. I'm not going to go into the "Fatal resource error" during my hotel search; let's just say that the whole procedure took me nearly an hour, including substantial duplicate data entry.

So to my divisional controller: if I spent a couple of dollars more than I should on the flight, I'm sorry. I'd love to know how I could have done better, though if you factor in the cost of my time.... And to the Large Travel Service Company That Cannot Be Named: evolve or die. Outsourcing complexity to patients and providers may be an odious but winning strategy for managed care companies, but a travel agent can be replaced in a mouse-click. As for whether this violates any blogging policy, I can't imagine that it does. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this kind of thing affects every large company. As Jonathan has discussed in his blog, the best measure of quality is the customer recommendation index. It's worth remembering that this applies to our suppliers as well.

And as for the trip itself, I'm going to be travelling on an airline that I've never used before! But that's the subject of another blog entry. Now, has anyone got any cheap A.I. software that they want to unload?

Metal detectors? Good grief....

Apparently one reason that people couldn't be evacuated from New Orleans by air is that there weren't enough metal detectors, x-ray machines, air marshals, and TSA personnel. I have this vision of a group of refugees - with no more than the clothes they're wearing and a few plastic carrier bags of personal effects - being forced to take off their wet shoes for x-raying....

Dork! (No, really!)

Required reading for the fashion-conscious.

(Via Susan on the ASML.)

Call the men in white coats, no sharps

So Tom Cruise thinks he was a noted playwright in a prior life. What a raving loonie.....

"Shakespeare was deja vu for me," said Tom Cruise. "It was so cool. I felt as if I had seen his words already, knew them all by heart. Then, after I began studying scientology, I realized the words had come from my heart in a previous life. That's why I say that as glorious and enviable as my present life is, making 'War of the Worlds' and all those other great movies can't compare to writing 'Romeo and Juliet' or the sonnets."

Well, that final point is certainly true. But "glorious and enviable"??? Reminds me of Zaphod's line in HHGTTG: "If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now!!"

(Via Huffington.)

Please tick box if you know how to make a bomb

I'm glad to see that the bureaucratic mentality that asked me to to declare whether or not I planned to "overthrow the Government of the United States" when I first came to the US is still alive and well. From Harry Mount in New York:

Before Euan Blair took up his job this summer as an intern working for the House of Representatives in Washington, he had to fill out a DS-157 visa form from the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square.

The DS-157 is a special extra anti-terrorist form that asks Euan to give honest answers to questions like "Do you have any specialised skills or training, including firearms, explosives, nuclear, biological or chemical experience?"

It's a pretty pointless form. If Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein were applying for a visa, they'd hardly tick the box marked "Yes - please explain."

But, in any case, they wouldn't have to.

The form is only for men aged 16-45 wanting an American visa. Saddam Hussein (b. 1937, Iraq) and Osama (b. 1957, Saudi Arabia) don't have to go through this extra level of American security. Euan Blair (b. 1984, England) and I (b. 1971, England) do.

[...]

Issuing precise, catch-all prohibitions on the sort of post you're allowed to send, or precise age ranges for extra visas, just means that terrorists work out ways of getting round the restrictions. They develop 15-ounce letter bombs that you are allowed to send by plane. They train adolescents and geriatrics to become suicide bombers.

If [you are going after] terrorists, you catch them by going to war with them abroad, or by using intelligence to track them down in your own country. You do not catch them or kill them by restricting what they send through the post or what diplomatic forms they fill out.

(From today's Expat.telegraph, a newsletter that I subscribe to containing a few stories and many ads that might be of interest to expat Brits around the world.)

First, find a dictionary

I was just chatting to my brother about library information systems - he works at the Bodleian Library in Oxford - and he mentioned that "the Bod" is implementing some new systems from VTLS in Virginia. Naturally, I checked out their web site. I assumed that the VT in the name stood for Virginia Tech - after all, both institutions are based in Blacksburg, VA. Nope - VTLS stands for "Visionary Technologies in Library Solutions". (That has to be one of the most blatant acronym redefinitions I've come across.) Digging further, I came across this gem:

"Built according to the standards and best practices set forth by the Digital Library Federation's Electronic Resource Management Initiative, VERIFY brings a plethora of benefits to staff and users alike."

Plethora?!?! Perhaps they should try using their own software to locate a decent dictionary or thesaurus....

"My WiFi is safer than your WiFi...."

File this under "Lawyers saying stupid things on behalf of their clients"*. Massport, the agency that operates Boston's Logan airport, has been deploying WiFi throughout the terminals, and charging $7.95 a day for its use. (Cheapskates like me have not been tempted.) Now Continental wants to provide free WiFi in its frequent flier lounges, just as it has elsewhere. Since Massport can't come right out and say, "No, we don't want you undercutting our monopoly,", they need to find another argument. And they have: Continental's WiFi is not safe.

Last month, a Massport attorney warned the airline that its antenna "presents an unacceptable potential risk" to Logan's safety and security systems, including its keycard access system and state police communications.

Massport told the airline it could route its wireless signals over Logan's Wi-Fi signal, at a "very reasonable rate structure." In response, however, Continental said using Logan's Wi-Fi vendor could force the airline to start charging its customers for the service.

Hey, guys: WiFi is WiFi. If Continental's isn't safe, then neither is Massport's. Of course the truth is that both are perfectly safe. I wonder if the Massport lawyer knew that he was spouting bull-guano, or whether some BOFH in Massport fed him a line. Either way, Massport looks pretty stupid.

--
* There's a lot of it about. You may have noticed this story in the L. A. Times [free registration required] about the woman whose child was fathered by a seminarian, now a Catholic priest in Whittier, OR. When she applied for an increase in child support, the archdiocese's lawyer responded that ' the child's mother had engaged "in unprotected intercourse … when [she] should have known that could result in pregnancy"'. Oops.

Same rights, same rules?

I don't understand cyclists. (Massachusetts cyclists, anyway.)

I was driving home from work last week, and took a short cut along a slow road with three or four traffic lights in the space of a couple of miles. The lights seem to be timed so that one is forced to wait for a few moments at each of them. I was in a group of about five cars, waiting at the first light, when two cyclists, riding expensive-looking bikes, wearing the requisite amount of Spandex, and eyes hidden by mirror shades, flashed past us and ran the red light. The signal changed, the cars started off, overtook the cyclists, and stopped at the next red light. Once again, the cyclists flashed by and ran the red light at full speed. And so on.

This was not an uncommon experience, just a dramatically clear instance of a familiar pattern.

Now I was under the impression that the cyclists' cri de coeur was "Same roads, same rights, same rules". So what gives? Yes, I know about signals with detectors that don't respond to bicycles, but that didn't apply in this case. And I've come across detailed explanations of how - with toe clips and other gear - it's unsafe to force cyclists to come to a full stop (which seems an extraordinary admission, and an invitation to ban such dangerous equipment). And I've read comments by cyclists who claim that drivers are picking on them, and ignoring the far more numerous violations committed by drivers. This seems simply false to me. When it comes to observing red lights, stop signs, and the like, the vast majority of drivers follow the rules; the vast majority of cyclists (here in Massachusetts, anyway) do not. And the police...?

I don't understand.

25 years on: Serendipity and "Death of a princess"

I just noticed what my local public television station is showing tonight: frontline: death of a princess: "It was perhaps the most controversial film in the history of public television -- the story of a young Saudi princess who was publicly executed for committing adultery." It wasn't just controversial: it changed my life.

Back in 1979-1980, we were going through a tough patch financially. (Most people were - this was the era of "stagflation".) I had a decent job at CMC, but I really needed something that paid a bit more. At that time most of the oil companies in the Middle East were starting to ramp up their IT and HPC activities, and the trade papers were full of advertisements for positions in Saudi Arabia. The typical deal was fairly complicated, but extremely lucrative. Contractors (male only) lived in company housing, were paid tax-free through numbered Swiss bank accounts, worked their tails off writing Fortran and PL/1, and got two 2-week vacations a year (either at home, or wherever the family wanted to holiday). The minimum contract was two years, with a nice bonus for extending. There wasn't much to do except work, although I had an idea of getting a personal computer (a Commodore PET or similar) and doing some applications development.

I contacted one of the "body shops" that handled the contracts, went through all the interviews, and was accepted. I was perhaps a week away from giving my notice at CMC and fixing a travel date to Riyadh. And then the BBC showed Death of a princess. The next day (May 7, 1980), the agency called me to say that the Saudi government had broken off diplomatic relations with the UK and had frozen all visas for UK nationals; my contract was therefore cancelled. A few weeks later I saw an ad for a job in the USA... and the rest is history. But it could have been very different.

My joke

Before the web, the best Internet jokes were disseminated via the Usenet group rec.humor.funny, run by Brad Templeton. A discussion on an internal Sun email alias just now reminded me of my one and only r.h.f contribution

Music, maestro
Seen in yesterday's Parade magazine that probably accompanied a couple of million Sunday papers: an advertisement for a beautiful little scale model violin. According to the ad, it's a 1/24 scale replica, measuring 8 inches long.

Screw the violin, I want to see the fiddler who can tuck a 16 foot violin under his or her chin....

[This was posted to r.h.f on Sunday April 25, 1993, at 4:30 am EDT, apparently from my Sun workstation called tyger.east.sun.com. I wonder was I was doing at the office that early on a Sunday morning. Or maybe I was travelling, and logged in remotely. On reflection, I suspect that I emailed it to the moderator, Maddi, and she finally posted it to r.h.f. on Sunday. Just think of the mind-boggling level of detail that the web captures for posterity....]

Did someone say "theocracy"?

The Indianapolis Star is reporting that: "An Indianapolis father is appealing a Marion County judge's unusual order that prohibits him and his ex-wife from exposing their child to 'non-mainstream religious beliefs and rituals.' The parents practice Wicca, a contemporary pagan religion that emphasizes a balance in nature and reverence for the earth. Cale J. Bradford, chief judge of the Marion Superior Court, kept the unusual provision in the couple's divorce decree last year over their fierce objections, court records show. The order does not define a mainstream religion."

What's really bizarre is that Bradford normally hears only criminal cases. Apparently he chose to get involved in this domestic matter because he read a "confidential report" (yeah, right) from a counseling bureau. "'There is a discrepancy between Ms. Jones and Mr. Jones' lifestyle and the belief system adhered to by the parochial school. . . . Ms. Jones and Mr. Jones display little insight into the confusion these divergent belief systems will have upon (the boy) as he ages,' the bureau said in its report." So we're not just dealing with a constitutionally-challenged judge....

That atheistic theory of freezing water....

Nice cartoon in Salon today by Ruben Bolling: Creationists challenge the teaching of water's freezing point. (As usual, click the thumbnail to view it. If you're not a Salon subscriber, you may have to jump through a small hoop.)

The punch line: The creationists found unlikely support among students in China and India. "Yes, America, we would like very much if you would teach your children religious dogma instead of science. We'd like their jobs."

Texan infidels

In her blog, Eike Rathke of the OpenOffice team skewers the idiots in Texas who want to ban suggestive cheerleading: "Why don't they just burn some of them as it would be appropriate in God's own country obeying God's own laws?" Indeed. If you really believe in infallible, unalterable religious texts, you can't afford to pick and choose.

(Plus Eike includes a really cool Manga animated GIF....)

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity

In conjunction with getting my new car, we decided to donate my Mazda Miata to charity (specifically to the Lupus Foundation of America). After filling out a form on their website, we were contacted by the company that handles the transport for them (and many other charities, I imagine), and they came to take it away. Just two more things to do: cancel the insurance, and take the plates back to the Registry of Motor Vehicles. It turns out that the former depends on the latter, so tomorrow morning I'll be stopping in at the Watertown RMV to return the plates.

While I was at the RMV website, checking on opening times and so forth, I started thinking about whether to get a custom, "vanity" license plate for the new car. Here in Massachusetts, the rules for cars are simple: 2-6 letters, letters that might be confused with digits can only be used in "recognizable words", and nothing "inappropriate". (You can use digits, but there are too many restrictions - they want to keep their options open.) And you can check online to see which combinations might be available. To my surprise, all of the following were reportedly free:

GEOFF
GEOFFA
EVOLVE
EVOLTN
EVLUTN
DARWIN
SECULR
HHGTTG

Hmmmm......

UPDATE: I'm going to apply for EVOLVE. They shouldn't have any problem with that....

UPDATE: It turns out that EVOLVE had (just) been taken. Curses, foiled again...! So I went with my second choice, DARWIN. Quite apart from affirming evolution through natural selection, and celebrating one of the most influential scientists in history, there's a nice Mac geek connection too.

How to be an elementary school teacher in America

I always thought that teacher training included basic skills in coping with wayward children. I wasn't aware that it was acceptable practice to call the police to handcuff a 5-year old who's throwing a tantrum. (Note that two staff were present, including an assistant principal, and a camera was rolling.)

[And yes, I know that a teacher can easily get into trouble for simply trying to enforce discipline. But this cure is worse than the disease. Mad. All mad.]

Open source, closed repositories, and snake oil

Over in the Register, Andrew Orlowski has a fascinating article entitled Torvalds knifes Tridgell about another bizarre outburst by Linus Torvalds. This time it's all about BitKeeper, the source code repository system. "Torvalds uses the pay-for proprietary software to manage the Linux source code (obliging other kernel developers to follow suit), but last week its owner, Bitkeeper CEO Larry McVoy, yanked the license, pushing Torvalds to look for an alternative. He's now going to write his own. For this inconvenience, he blames [Andrew] Tridgell", the genius behind SAMBA (the technology which finally killed my old PC-NFS product).

And what was Tridgell's crime? He wanted to reverse-engineer the BitKeeper protocols so that Linux developers could browse the repository metadata. This sounds innocuous enough - after all, BitKeeper's own website says that "Read-only users (people browsing the source, tracking progress, doing builds, etc.) still need a license but there is no charge for that license.", so it's not a question of money. Clearly there is something big at stake - something so important that McVoy is prepared to forego the prestige of hosting the Linux kernel repositories. According to Andrew Orlowski, "McVoy was adamant: 'sorry, we're not in the business of helping you develop a competing product.'" So that's it? The key intellectual property is in the protocols? That seems odd.

I had two reactions to this piece. First, why on earth is the acknowledged flagship product of the FOSS world relying on a proprietary, closed source repository - particularly one run by a guy who clearly has no sympathy with FOSS, nor any understanding of the related business models? I would (naïvely) have thought that BitKeeper would want to hang on to the data and proliferate clients like crazy. (A famous LBJ quotation comes to mind.) And second, what is it that makes BitKeeper so wonderful? Let's check out their web site. Truth in advertising? You be the judge:

Hardware costs: BitKeeper does not have this problem [of scale] because of its distributed model.... This model means that the hardware costs can be spread over a set of inexpensive PCs rather than a $300,000 SMP machine. BitMover hosts the Linux kernel repositories for thousands of users on a single inexpensive PC.

Human costs: An administrator is the person who makes sure that the hardware and the software is working, the repositories are backed up, etc. The distributed nature of BitKeeper removes the need for such a person.

Wow. Thousands of users on a single PC. No administrators. How cool. No wonder Linus was impressed. [That's sarcasm, in case you didn't notice.] I think that in the long term we'll see that Andrew Tridgell has done the FOSS community a service, by provoking Linus and Larry into falling out. Hopefully the community can create a better - and truly open source - repository. However I wouldn't rely on Linus to create it - he doesn't seem to believe in open source any more....

Arithmetically challenged Google?

According to the Guardian: "Google is celebrating the first birthday of its free email service Gmail by doubling users' capacity to two gigabytes, with a promise to boost its email storage further in future." Sounds good. But why does my Gmail page say that I have only 1479MB? Am I not worthy?:

UPDATE: Thanks to Robin and Mark for pointing out that Google is doling out the additional space a few megabytes at a time. I'm now up to 1540 MB, and there's a cute graphic on the Gmail login page that explains what's going on. To infinity and beyond, I guess.....

The angels cheer: "They killed Kenny!"

No, I don't normally watch "South Park". I'm not sure why - we used to have an awesome "South Park" pinball machine here in the Labs. Anyway, the buzz was that yesterday's "South Park" was going to be a very special one - and it was. Andrew Leonard tells all over at Salon: "But wait! Kenny isn't dead! Doctors manage to resuscitate him! With a feeding tube! He's in a 'persistent vegetative state.' Heaven is doomed!... The feeding tube is pulled. 'They killed Kenny,' the angels cheer! Heaven is saved, as Kenny, using a gold-plated PSP given to him by Peter, defeats the forces of Satan."

Brilliant. Tasteless? Sure, but it's a breath of fresh air after the recent media circus.

And coincidentally Kenny popped up again today, over at Boing Boing: trench art from Iraq. (See thumbnail.) Full size pic at Flickr.

How to make sense of the world....

As I do most weekends, I phoned my mother in Oxford today. After exchanging family news, the subject turned to my philosophy course. "I just caught a story on BBC Oxford about a new philosophy group here," she said. "Of course wasn't able to read about it in the paper," [because of her blindness] "but I think it was about the study of consciousness." As we spoke, I quickly searched and came up with the obvious hit. "Are you talking about the Oxford Centre for Science of the Mind," I asked. "The project that Susan Greenfield... sorry, Baroness Susan Greenfield is heading up? This led to a short digression about Tony Blair's habit of handing out life peerages like school prizes, and then discussing our disappointment at the lack of rigour in many of Greenfield's publications. After that, I told my mother about OXCSOM's approach:

Initially there will be eight academics on the payroll of the Centre from six different departments: Anatomy, Pharmacology, Philosophy, Physiology, the Ian Ramsey Centre (Theology), and the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. The researchers will employ a wide range of techniques, including functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

"I wonder how the theologians will get on with fMRI," I mused, and my mother assured me that that as Oxford theologians they would embrace it enthusiastically. "By the way," I said, "do you know where OXCSOM is getting its money? It's hosted by the IAN RAMSEY CENTRE [studying the relationship of religious belief and science], and funded by the John Templeton Foundation." Both of us vaguely recognized the name - something about underwriting a scientific study of prayer. [Turns out he's a Tennessee-born investment manager.]

As we talked, I clicked on a few links... and then I couldn't contain myself any more. "So, let me tell you about another Templeton project I've just come across. It's called The Institute for Research on Unlimited Love." "What on earth do they mean by 'unlimited love', and how do you do research in it?" said my mother. "It all sounds very flakey." I clicked the About us link. "No problem," I said. "They've got all that covered. By 'unlimited love', they mean 'love for all humanity without exception'. And as for research, 'Just as we investigate the force of gravity or the energy of the atom, we can scientifically examine the power of unlimited love in human moral and spiritual experience.' Easy."

My mother sighed. "You know, a friend of mine, a newspaper columnist, told me that he was giving up on satire," she said. "He feels that nothing he can write matches up to the reality of today's world." And we agreed that satire is dead, and set a time for our next conversation.

Another web quiz... well, look at that!

What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

AIM Terms of Service

Welcome to the revised AIM Terms of Service from AOL. The interesting thing is that AOL wants the benefits of being a common carrier (e.g. they disclaim all responsibility for what passes through their system) while at the same time gaining full rights over that content. Would you use a VoIP service from somebody that reserved the right to record your conversations and publish them? If these various communications media (POTS, VoIP, IM, email, etc.) are really converging, let's make sure that AOL doesn't set the standard for privacy:

"Although you or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to any AIM Product, AOL owns all right, title and interest in any compilation, collective work or other derivative work created by AOL using or incorporating this Content. In addition, by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL... the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the Content or to be compensated for any such uses."

(Via BoingBoing.)

How the FSF really gets its money?

Arriving at Google this morning for a routine search, I noticed that they were highlighting a new feature, Google Local. "I wonder what kind of local resources they cover," I thought, and I tried a few sample entries. Plumbers? Boring. Restaurants? Lots of them. Escort agencies? The first result was the Free Software Foundation. Hmmm. And the second result was for the local Veterans' Hospital. Career opportunities for those returing from Iraq? Earth to Google....

[Click image for screenshot]

Oddity du jour: zombie Linux badger

Words fail me.

[Curiously, a Google for "Duppy card" came up with 17 hits, all as part of this joke, and it's not clear who was the original author. Welcome to the web.]

The Cuddly Menace

Take one saccharine-sweet children's book entitled "My Little Golden Book About God." Replace bland text with the horrifying truth. The result: The Cuddly Menace. Please keep beverages away from your keyboard while reading. (This means you, Alec.)

(Via Boing Boing.)

Dial 999 (or 911), then hop in the shower

I know that multiply-resistant pathogens are a significant risk in hospitals, but even so, this BBC story seems to go a bit far: "Patients should bring their own medical wipes and scrub up before coming to hospital to cut MRSA, say advisors. They should ask relatives to launder their clothes and make sure their visitors have washed themselves properly before entering the ward. The Patients Association's 10-point code also advises patients to collect their own rubbish."

I can see it now: "Dearie me - it looks like you're having a heart attack. Why don't you pop upstairs and have a quick shower, while I wash my hands, call an ambulance, and pack a few bin liners."

The future of flying... :-)

Virgin A380 Floor Plans....

Nerd? Moi?

Blame Alec.

UPDATED:

Blame Kevin.

Not waving, but dialling....

OK, I admit it: the only reason to blog about this was because I couldn't resist using this subject line. As CNET reports, Samsung is launching a motion-sensitive mobile phone: "Samsung said the phone is also able to recognize and translate more complex movements, including dialing numbers drawn in the air using the handset or recognizing an 'o' or an 'x' drawn in the air as a yes or no command. " I imagine they'll use "gumby" clips from Monty Python in the TV ads...

(Via L'Inq.)

Nothing left but dust, and fundamentalists...

I'm glad Alec checked out the Reality drama at the Creation Museum, so I don't have to. Too much for me in my flu-weakened state :-)

(Via CIDOMLB.)

Scott's back

The Register just gave Scott some space to share his Xmas dream. Although it's pretty goofy, it's nice to see the old familiar Scott back. (A little gentle bashing once a year isn't going to hurt.) Memo to Jonathan: the "11 words" are necessary but not sufficient. And Scott clearly has his priorities right: he wants "an NHL hockey season ticket and a new set of irons to knock a couple of strokes off my handicap" I think he'd settle for just one NHL game....

Now everybody will know about IP addresses

As all news-junkies will know, the press is reporting that: "Police zeroed in on Lisa Montgomery [by] tracing an IP address, 65.150.168.223, to a computer at her Melvern, Kan., home." Which reminds me of a recent trip to California....

I was at San Jose airport, en route for Boston, and I was wearing my favourite ThinkGeek t-shirt: the one that says "There's no place like 127.0.0.1". As I was waiting in line at Starbucks, a PHB type walked past, read my shirt, and said, "Hey, that's cool. Is that the IP address of your website?" And since I have no shame, I replied with a straight face, "Yes it is. And it's the address of your website... and his (pointing), and hers (pointing), and Yahoo!, and...." And I walked up and ordered my usual quadruple espresso macchiato, leaving the poor guy looking terminally confused.

(Via BoingBoing.)

Antony or Anthony? Confusion reigns.....

If you look at my two recent blog entries on "l'affaire Flew", you will see that the first spells the philosopher's name Anthony Flew and the second Antony Flew. Which is correct? I'm pretty sure that the answer is Antony Flew, but it's by no means as clear as it should be. First, that unreliable but influential yardstick - the Google hit count - gives Anthony 36,300 and Antony 32,800. (Curiously there are 618 pages that include both forms!) How about publications? Amazon lists his books under both names, but I assumed that this was simply data entry error. But then I consulted my bookshelf, and found both forms!

Perhaps we should simply use the construction which appears in much of his professional vita: A. G. N. Flew (or even AGN Flew).

Why settle for less?

Check out The Applestore of the future. I particularly liked AppleTherapy and the ThoughtPort....

Better late than never, I guess

According to San Diego's 10News: "Kenneth Starr says he never should have led the investigation that resulted in the impeachment of former President Bill Clinton."

(Via Salon.com.)

I out-eek Alec Muffett

alec muffett :: dropsafe :: articles : life : I have worked 1/3rd of my life for Sun Microsystems (12 out of 36 years). For me, the numbers are 19 and 54, meaning that I've worked here for 35% of my life. "eek", indeed. I'm still having fun, though....

OK, it's a spoof - but a nice one

The Swift Report: Christian Gamers Resurrect Christ--and Profits--in Global Video Game Market : "...with expectations high for Gibson's movie-to-game gamble on The Passion, the question on analysts's minds: What Would Jesus Play?"

(Via Sully, who seems to have been taken in by it.)

OK, it's a spoof - but a nice one

The Swift Report: Christian Gamers Resurrect Christ--and Profits--in Global Video Game Market : "...with expectations high for Gibson's movie-to-game gamble on The Passion, the question on analysts's minds: What Would Jesus Play?"

(Via Sully, who seems to have been taken in by it.)

Blogger code

Apparently my blogger code is B5 d+ t+ k+ s u- f+ i+ o x- e l c--. Is this the MBTI of the new millennium?

It's too early in the season for this kind of thing

We're not yet half way through November, but winter can't wait. The picture is from a traffic webcam about a mile from where I live in Brookline, MA. According to the NWS, Boston got 4 inches and Milton got 6.8 inches; we're half-way between those points, so figure about 5+ inches. That's what it felt like as I lugged the trash to the curbside.

Good grief

File under "nobody would believe you if you made it up": Oslo Girl: "I saw on TV2 news last night that there was a march in the center of Oslo yesterday to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Kristallnacht. Jews, apparently, were forbidden to participate. Technically, they could join the demonstration as long as they refrained from showing any Jewish symbols, like the Star of David. The rule was enforced in order to "avoid any conflicts.""

(Via Heretic's Almanac. And Sully has also got it now.)

UPDATE/CORRECTION (from Sully's Letters page): "There were Jews present in the demonstration. The arrangers, SOS Rasisme, makes it very clear that not only will they never exclude Jews from their activities, but they have always invited Jewish organisations to participate.

A statement from Norsk Forening Mot Antisemitism (Norwegian Society Against Anti-Semitism, NFMA) also condemned the action as historyless and unworthy."

Book game, again

Terry announced: "Book game (cause it isn't really a meme): Nearest Book, Page 23, Fifth sentence, Posted, with explanation." OK, here goes:

When we talk of a green sensation, this talk is not equivalent simply to talk of “a state that is caused by grass, trees, and so on”.

We are talking about the phenomenal quality that generally occurs when a state is caused by grass and trees. If there is a causal analysis in the vicinity, it is something like “the kind of phenomenal state that is caused by grass, trees, and so on”. The phenomenal element in the concept prevents an analysis in purely functional terms.

(We played this game before - a few months back, IIRC - but unlike some of these blog games it's pretty much guaranteed to be different each time around.)

Huh?

Israeli Woman Motorists Dance Nude in India?: "India's northwestern state of Rajasthan has punished local officials after residents complained a group of Israeli women motorists had danced in the nude near a town revered by Hindus, a newspaper reported on Wednesday."

Why punish the "local officials", I wonder? /me shakes head

Not your grandfather's Vatican...

With the blessing of the Vatican, two Italian theologians have just published a book on sex for Catholics, entitled It's A Sin Not To Do It. One might be forgiven for thinking that this is just a way to get the faithful to increase the Catholic birth-rate; far from it. It's much more expansive in scope. For example, as the Telegraph reports, the book "unearths theological justification for post-coital masturbation for women who fail to achieve orgasm during intercourse". How times change. Mentioning something like that in the Catholic school I attended back in the early 1960s would have meant six of the best. (But I thought Catholic teaching was supposed to be inerrant and eternal....)

Jurisdiction? Sovereignty? What quaint notions....

Here's the latest twist in the saga of the seizure of Indymedia's web servers. This ought to be an urgent and compelling story of international law and data protection, but unfortunately everything seems to be covered by secrecy agreements, and so all we can do is speculate. However the bottom line seems to be that an Italian judge was able to persuade the FBI to seize computer systems in England, possibly violating several UK laws, without the involvement of UK law enforcement agencies. The way things are going, I'm probably breaking the law (somewhere - does that matter any more?) just by blogging about the affair. Paging George Orwell....

Amother web quiz (sillier than usual)

Which Nigerian spammer are You?

Oh, well...

Hold very tight, please! Ting! Ting!

Is this the first blog devoted to a London Bus route?

Deletions that aren't - M$ style

There's an account here of a delightful little experiment in electronic dumpster-diving. An enterprising hacker crawled all public Micro$oft web sites looking for Office documents that contained interesting data - specifically, text that had been "deleted". The results are predictably entertaining....