Halley: "Multi-tasker, thy name is mother."
6:39:36 PM  #   your two cents []

From John Paczkowski's ever-wonderfully-acerbic Good Morning Silicon Valley:

But ... but ... but ... we believed those guys! And they ... they ... they lied! Investors who claimed Merrill Lynch & Co. was to blame for their stock market losses were given a slap in the face Tuesday when a federal judge dismissed their suit against the brokerage and reprimanded them for their own greed and stupidity. It was the market crash, not Merrill's fraudulent research that caused the losses (see "Henry, portrait for a portfolio killer, redux"). In a scathing 43-page decision, Judge Milton Pollack in Federal District Court in Manhattan called the investors "high-risk spectators" who knew full well the risks they were undertaking but were hoping to "twist the federal securities laws into a scheme of cost-free speculators' insurance." He went on: "Seeking to lay the blame for the enormous Internet bubble solely at the feet of Merrill Lynch, plaintiffs would have this court conclude that the federal securities laws were meant to underwrite, subsidize and encourage their rash speculation in joining a freewheeling casino that lured thousands obsessed with the fantasy of Olympian riches."

6:18:22 PM  #   your two cents []

 I've not been doing much with the site lately -- a combination of travelling, having way too much to do, and having my sister in law Dawn (the Saucy Aussie!) staying at my place for the stretch of the Special Olympics, which she works for. It was pretty mad all week long. I'm sure a major highlight for Dawn was bumping into Louis Walsh in a hotel bar, who proceeded to give Dawn and two friends front rows seats for Westlife (warning: boy band flash intro) that evening! Heh!! That's Dawn, taken with the Nokia 3650 camera phone, waiting for the cab this morning to take her to Dublin Airport.

Meanwhile I had to go over to London for work and had a great room overlooking Big Ben (which bonged regularly through the night, but only woke me once or twice...:^)...). Got a chance to check out some new mobile stuff coming down the pipe -- I was especially interested in the new version of O2's XDA (a PocketPC with built-in phone), which looks very cool -- better screen, Bluetooth, camera, etc. It should be available by Christmas, says O2.

Just to give the rivals a test drive as well, I brought along a laptop equipped with Vodafone's GPRS Mobile Connect card. After some intitial confusion I got the thing working and it did so very smoothly -- you pop up a tiny antenna and the card makes a GPRS connection, enabling you to go online with your PC virtually anywhere, no fiddling with a mobile phone linkup. The connection is reasonable but you wouldn't want to do lots and lots of web surfing with it as page downloads will remind you of 1995 dial-up speeds. An excellent solution for people wanting to get email/web access on the move, into their laptop rather than a handheld or mobile, without having to be in their hotel room. Save the heavy surfing for an ethernet link in the hotel.

11:42:33 AM  #   your two cents []

Interesting -- from John Naughton:

Blogs have legal protection -- at least in the US

Wired story. "The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last Tuesday that Web loggers, website operators and e-mail list editors can't be held responsible for libel for information they republish, extending crucial First Amendment protections to do-it-yourself online publishers. Online free speech advocates praised the decision as a victory. The ruling effectively differentiates conventional news media, which can be sued relatively easily for libel, from certain forms of online communication such as moderated e-mail lists. One implication is that DIY publishers like bloggers cannot be sued as easily. "One-way news publications have editors and fact-checkers, and they're not just selling information -- they're selling reliability," said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "But on blogs or e-mail lists, people aren't necessarily selling anything, they're just engaging in speech. That freedom of speech wouldn't exist if you were held liable for every piece of information you cut, paste and forward." [Memex 1.1]

10:58:02 AM  #   your two cents []

Carl Sagan. "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." [Quotes of the Day]
10:54:11 AM  #   your two cents []

From the Guardian's blog: Breakfast with Bill. USA Today goes 10 (short) rounds with the co-founder of Microsoft. [onlineblog.com]
10:50:11 AM  #   your two cents []

Farewell Kate, always one of my favourites on the screen. A friend who attended, then worked for, the famous women's (now mixed) college in Philadelphia, Bryn Mawr, once showed me the room Hepburn had in the dorms there as a student -- before she got kicked out for being caught smoking (and probably some other things, too...!). Katharine Hepburn, 1907-2003. An appreciation of Hollywood's smartest, tartest star, who began her career as "box office poison" and became one of the silver screen's most beloved and memorable figures. [Salon.com]
10:49:03 AM  #   your two cents []

P2P alliance to counter RIAA?. Sharman Networks, maker of Kazaa software, plans to launch a group to push the case for the peer-to-peer industry in the face of the record labels' campaign. [CNET News.com]
10:45:17 AM  #   your two cents []