Status-Q

[Original Link] Clay Shirky has written a splendid article, discussing this well-known maxim, which teaches us something about statistics, something about catchphrases, and quite a bit about telecoms. [Found on Michael Gilbert’s excellent Nonprofit Online News.]

Update, twenty years later: Clay’s article is no longer at its original location but can be found on the Internet Archive here.

[Original Link] I’m a bit concerned about my weight and my cholesterol level, both of which are rather higher than they should be. I also enjoyed Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. This combination makes me interested in this well-written New York Times article in which Gary Taubes asks whether the dramatic rise in obesity recently has come about because of, rather than in spite of, the received wisdom on how to tackle it. Could the Atkins diet live again?

I like the banner on Ximian’s site:

A good friend of mine told me a nice story. The poet W.H.Auden once asked him, “Don’t you think Tolkien is a wonderful writer?” To which my friend replied that no, he didn’t really think so. “I respect you for saying that”, said Auden, “but I’ll never trust your opinion again.”

[Original Link] Ross Anderson has written a very good FAQ about the Intel/Microsoft plans for control/protection of digital content. I’m worried about this stuff, but I was worried about .NET and Passport/Hailstorm. Still, that was just Microsoft, and however big they were, you could choose to ignore them; enough people did, fortunately.

If the motherboard manufacturers adopt TCPA/Palladium, on the other hand, it may be rather harder. It has potentially worrying implications for Linux, Mac and other platforms. If somebody sends you a Word document in future, you might not only need a Microsoft software package to read it, you might also need an Intel motherboard. It’s a good thing there’s all this anti-monopoly legislation around, isn’t it?

(About a year ago, Microsoft even wanted me to change my name!)

[Original Link] The scourge of web design is the “javascript:” link. Agreed. Javascript, if used at all, should augment normal web activity, not replace it.

[Original Link] John Naughton’s column about the changing role of MI5.

From the New York Times: Etherlinx, a company based (of course) in a Silicon Valley garage, is developing a modified 802.11 for connecting the ‘last mile’ to homes. Or, in their case, up to the last 20 miles. Their box goes on the wall of the house and has two radio cards: one talking to their base stations and one doing WiFi into the home.

And from MacCentral:
IBM is rolling out large amounts of 802.11 on corporate campuses and is investigating the idea of national networks. It’ll be interesting if they ever get further than talking about it.

[Original Link] Aaron Swartz came up with a way of allowing Blogger sites to produce an RSS feed. Julian Bond has made a version of the service available on his site.

The collaboration of all these helpful people means that is much easier for me to read my friend Laura’s weblog. What a wonderful world!

[Original Link] “Months go by and I don’t receive any telemarketing calls, but I just got off the phone with the nice people at Precision Telemarketing, who got my name and unlisted phone number from Time Warner Cable (against my explicit directions upon signup, and their explicit promises) in order to try to sell me a subscription for TV Guide. I used the JunkBusters anti-telemarketing script to tell them to put me on their “do not call” list. In accordance with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, Precision Telemarketing will not be calling me again on behalf of TV Guide or any other company for the next 10 years.”

[dive into mark]

[Original Link] Agreed.