Digital property - more lawyers should read stuff like this, especially lawyers who deal with intellectual property. I suppose it is arrogance to say that a Copernican revolution is taking place. Let's just leave it at "we don't know how it will turn out." It doesn't matter where we are, especially if things are changing? Where are we going? That's the question to ask. But don't ask someone who has a vested interest in a map that might become obsolete.
3:33:05 PM
Sniping at journalists - I'm glad they caught the snipers. It means the end of a horrible reign of terror, but sadly it will not curtail the reign of terrible reporting that I have been exposed to of late. First, in fairness to the many competent journalists that I have listened to (people like Steve Croft of CBS, who last night admitted that "if we reported only what we actually knew we'd have about six lines to report"), I am talking only about the really bad journalists. I don't know what the ratio of good to bad is. All I know is that there are some people out there who are armed with access to the airwaves and they should be considered dangerous. Or at least "dangerously ignorant."
For example: early yesterday evening I heard (as I was passing a TV in the lockeroom of my gym) Brit Hume say that once we caught the sniper we would learn a number of things, among them "whether he is rational." What? Rational? The guy next to me just looked at me and we both shrugged. The one thing I figured we could safely assume was that whoever was doing the shooting was not "rational." Or has the definition of that word changed recently?
Driving home while listening to am radio I heard a guy who sounded like a carnival barker prodding people to listen to the morning talk show with this gem: "The sniper wants the police to give him millions of dollars to stop the violence. Should we give him money? Tomorrow we'll take your calls." What is the point of hearing mostly uninformed people discuss these questions? Perhaps (and I'm speculating wildly here) I'm not among the target audience. But let's not be too hard on local am radio, especially when the national news organizations are available.
On CNN last night Connie Chung had the opportunity to interview a woman who lived next to the house in Tacoma that was being examined by police. The woman said that she had called the police many months back about gunfire, which may have come from the house with the yard that was being searched. Chung asked the woman about the gunfire. The woman said that the gunfire occurred before the current occupants moved in. Chung then turned to asking if the woman could tell from the sound of the gun whether it was a high powered rifle, or what kind of rifle it might be (a question not likely to elict a meaningful response). It never occurred to Chung to ask if the woman knew, or could say anything about, the previous occupant of the house. Maybe the woman didn't know the prior occupant. But that question is more likely to reveal meaningful information than the questions that Chung did ask her.
I'm not going to start the debate about bloggers versus professional journalists. I said up front there are a lot of good professional journalists, and I like them and respect them and hope they move up the food chain. I thought Larry King did a good job of asking questions of the guests he had on his show. But there are some real dodo-birds out there, and from my little "news consumer" perch it looks like the gene-pool isn't getting better, it's getting worse. How can we make it better? I don't know. Maybe we need a news superhero to swoop in and clean up the mess.
Instapundit would you mind taking over control of the media for us? The noise is starting to hurt my ears.
2:36:11 PM
Stupid Google Tricks - more from David Weinberger. Google really is amazing, isn't it?
1:53:02 PM
Music Industry sending bots to do a human thug's job - read this.
10:51:13 AM
