If you read Jim Kunstler’s Web site, you’ll probably find his comment on Harry Shearer as humorous as I do: So Shearer was on the radio and I’m not crazy about his show because he puts across a self-congratulatory air of moral superiority that, after a while, gets on my nerves.
Tim O’Reilly has published excerpts of a debate he and Lauren Weinstein have been having over whether it’s ethical for Google to scan copyrighted works and let people search the contents without compensating the owners of the copyright. There’s one angle that is not brought up in the debate. Google already scans billions of copyrighted works and provides access to them via search – I refer of course to works published on the Internet. Newspaper and magazine articles, software documentation, weblog entries, academic pieces; all of these are works protected by copyright and yet Google and other search engines index them to enable the rest of us to access them easily. ...
Anybody know where I can download a Movable Type template that provides an RSS 2.0 feed of the comments that are posted to a weblog? I was planning on creating such a template myself, but hopefully someone else has already done so.
Mark Schmitt has a post explaining why factcheck.org is unreliable. I’ve referred to that site on a number of occasions, and will probably stop doing so in the future. The site promotes itself as in impartial arbiter of the truth of various political claims, and seems to fail in that role. I’m glad someone is calling them out on it.
Derek Powazek has advance notice of some really cool features coming down the pike from Flickr.
I am sorely tempted to start sending strongly worded emails to people who maintain Web sites that use Western (ISO-8859-1) encoding but lead my browser to believe they are encoded in Unicode. Is that wrong?
Adam Shostack predicts that phishing will kill online banking unless banks start using email more intelligently. His recommendations make sense for any business that uses email to communicate with its customers.
Steven A. Shaw argues in the New York Times that we should do away with tipping. Here’s the crux of the matter: Customers believe in tipping because they think it makes economic sense. “Waiters know that they won’t get paid if they don’t do a good job,” is how most advocates of the system (meaning most everybody in America) would put it. To be sure, this is a seductive, apparently rational statement about economic theory, but it appears to have little applicability to the real world of restaurants. ...
Here’s what Miguel de Icaza has to say about MVC architecture for Web applications: The development model in ASP.NET is lighter than the development model with J2EE. J2EE has taken this approach of Model-View-Controller, which is a beautiful thing from an academic perspective, but it does add a burden. At Ximian we consulted with a number of software companies. They said, “We can develop applications 20 to 25% faster than with ASP.NET than we can with J2EE.” Developers like ASP.NET because you don’t have these three layers of Model-View-Controller. Instead there is the presentation layer, and the model is the database. You don’t have this intermediate layer. ...
Last week I linked to Cory Doctorow’s rant against Apple supporting and utilizing the Trusted Computing platform in the version of Mac OS X for Intel processors. I’d be a fool not to link to John Gruber’s response as well. Cory’s rant was a visceral shot across the bow, warning Apple away from a worst case scenario. John’s response takes a look at where Apple really is and how they’ve behaved historically. To me, both pieces are important. ...