the art of writing is discovering what you believe
OBEISANCE – Definition by HyperDictionary.com
As a synonym for obeisance . . . . it seems to have a snide connotation, where one pays courtesies to someone who doesn’t deserve them.
See also: compliance, curtsey, curtsy, genuflection, genuflexion, gesture, kotow, kowtow, motion, salaam, scrape, scraping, submission, truckling
Ars Technica: The Beatles are suing Apple… again
Now it looks like Apple Computer is in the crosshairs of the lawyers again. Rumors of a potential suit started to circulate early in the summer, but there was no strong evidence that Apple was going to get dragged into court again. Now FoxNews is saying that papers have been filed in the UK. Given the fact that Apple Computer has already been nailed once, the prospects don’t look all that great. To be sure, I don’t think Apple can brush this off with two chuckles and a “wow, how GREAT!” If a suit really does ensue, it will be interesting to see how the iTunes Music Store fits into the courts’ understanding of the music business. Is Apple producing music or are they merely selling it?
I always thought it was no coincidence that the Beatles are no shows in the iTunes Music Store. I suppose if they were making money from it, it would seem hypocritical to sue. Like this looks any more savory?
Preparations are in high gear for this summer’s move by the University of Washington School of Law into its new building, William H. Gates Hall. The building is 85 percent complete, with a ‘substantial completion’ date of June 24th.
Well, here we are in early September and the building isn’t ready, the old building is closed for renovations, and I get to work from home.
We’ll see how it goes. For once, I’m at a loss for words about how this process is going. The summary in the paragraph above is all I can say about it.
Societies have invested more than a trillion dollars in software and have grotesquely enriched minimally competent software producers whose marketing skills far exceed their programming skills. Despite this enormous long-run investment in software, economists were unable to detect overall gains in economic productivity from information technology until perhaps the mid-1990s or later; the economist Robert Solow once remarked that computers showed up everywhere except in productivity statistics.
Interesting thread, at least til you get to the bottom where I show up.
William Shakespeare: Henry VI, Part II.
The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.
Talking to (or being spoken at) by a law professor this morning, I was presented with the idea that lawyers regard themselves as self-sacrificing creatures who have to read all the things no one else wants, eating spinach, in other words.
Of course, it was presented in such a way as to imply that everyone who isn’t a lawyer is an idiot, and we should count ourselves lucky we have lawyers to do all that drudgery for us.
Evidently, this idea was common 400 years ago in Shakespeare’s time, so the rest of us haven’t gotten any more clueful nor have the learned brethren gotten any less arrogant.
(and who writes all the stuff none of us want to read? Lawyers, of course.)
Boeing move to Texas hurt shuttle analysis-report
Some 80 percent of the 500 Boeing technical engineers in Huntington Beach, California, declined to move to Houston with the NASA program, requiring Boeing to hire and train engineers locally that lacked the experience of the existing team, the [Los Angeles] Times reported.
The Boeing team’s assessment that Columbia was relatively intact helped NASA leaders decide to continue with normal landing procedures.
According to the Times, Boeing engineers in Huntington Beach have said they would have reached a different conclusion, which Boeing denied.
“The Huntington Beach engineers were part of the analysis, so it would be hard to come up with a different conclusion,” Memi said. “If there were engineers at Huntington Beach not involved in the analysis who felt otherwise, they never made their concerns known.”
An interesting story to follow to see if the lack of continuity doomed the crew of Columbia . . . .
But it does raise the old question about work, even knowledge work, requiring one’s physical presence. What would the costs have been to keep the team together, despite the distance between management and the engineers? And if all the engineers stayed within Boeing, that sounds like the replacements were hired as additional staff — 80% of 500 is 400, so something doesn’t make sense.
O’Reilly Network: Unsung Heros and Other iTunes Tips [July 31, 2003]
[ . . . . ] there’s a lot of good music on my iPod that I just don’t seem to get to. And that’s a waste.
[ . . . . ] So I created a new smart playlist titled “Unsung Heros.” In the parameters for the list I set Last Played -> is not in the last -> 30 days, and then I set up a couple more limiters such as Album -> does not contain -> Christmas so Bing Crosby doesn’t constantly appear at the top of my list. One other parameter I set is Limit to 50 songs -> selected by song name.
But not like this:
BBC NEWS | Technology | UK bans iPod gadget
A N Micro, the UK distributor of the iTrip, said use of the device was prohibited under the Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1949.
Gmane — Gmane Address Obfuscation
Not So Hard Encryption
While a real encryption algorithm is used, it will probably be possible to find the encryption key over time, since the number of encrypted/unencrypted pairs will be somewhat huge after a while. That’s not the point — the point is simply to make it somewhat harder for address gathering robots to get to the mail addresses.
If every entity that provided email addresses did this, I think spam would dry up quite quickly.
After all, encryption, even strong commerce-quality encryption, has been about making it harder, while not impossible, to get at some information. In the case of email, this scheme seems robust enough.
I decided I would see if I could sell a Tom Scholz Rockman headphone amp I haven’t used in ages. I saw a few for sale, in various states of completeness, came up with a price, wrote some sales copy, and it was gone in an hour.
I wish I had put the price higher.
So that’s another package to take to the post office . . . .
I’m hunting around to see what I can sell . . . .
eBay item 2537570281 (Ends Jun-19-03 08:55:01 PDT ) – Pignose Amplifier Brand new In box
I’m listening to The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars on my iPod and digging the simple and raw sound on this 30+ year old gem. It may be apocryphal, but I had heard that Mick Ronson played all his stuff through a PigNose, the 9 volt powered 8th Wonder of the World, complete with pig snout-shaped on/off/volume knob.
Ebay’s got ’em, of course, but do I need one?