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Wednesday, April 16, 2003 |
PC Magazine: "The Web still has hundreds of thousands of free personal sites, but most of the solid, factual, trustworthy information lies behind gates. Search engines may or may not have icons that distinguish pay content from free; my hope is that they will." I don't agree with that as an assessment of the present state. I think paid content is still the exception; PC Magazine itself is an example of good free content. Today, as Dave Winer says, "If you want to be in Google, you gotta be on the Web". But it could change. As the referenced article indicates, search engines could work out arrangements for indexing paid content. But then there will be all the weblogs...
2:02:15 PM 
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The wireless telephone industry appealed to a federal court in Washington yesterday to block a government effort to allow consumers to keep their cellphone numbers when they switch mobile phone carriers. Wouldn't this be great? Not suprising that the cell phone companies all oppose it--it would be a big step toward commoditizing cell phone service, and would make an increasingly competitive industry brutally so. Of course, they complain about how much it will cost. The generic argument that this new, mandated service comes at a cost is undoubtedly legitimate, but it is a smokescreen. If they were going to put forth the argument in an intellectually honest way (of course that never happens in these kinds of debates), they would say: we recognize that this is a vitally useful service for consumers. However, it carries a significant cost to implement and maintain. Our calculations show that that cost is in the range of $X-Y. So, to recover our cost and make an economic profit, we feel that a regulatory fee of Z should be included for cost recovery.
11:50:54 AM
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I'm surprised anyone could give credence to the notion that SARS might have been the product of terrorist bio-engineering. It is a gross violation of the "law" known as Occam's Razor (what an odd name): given several possible explanations for an event, the simplest is the most likely. Of course, in this particular case, giving bio-terrorism the benefit of the doubt as a "possible" cause is even stretching it. Right--the bio-terrorists invent a totally new virus, make it only modestly lethal (3-4%), and then release it in an obscure, backward province of China that just happens to already be well-established as a premier breeding ground for well-known infectious diseases, such as influenza.
Okay, I'm not really that surprised that ordinary people--out of the usual factors of fear, fixation, myopia, "preference" for the sensational--would do so. What I find objectionable is that professional journalists implicitly give it credence by not deprecating the notion. For instance, the article in question reasonably could have included a statement to the effect: "finally conclusively proving what the medical community has always been certain of: the cause of SARS was mother nature, not bio-engineering".
11:48:34 AM
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Articles on tablet PCs. First of all, for the forseeable future, I see tablets being limited to vertical markets. With that in mind, I'm excited to see designs that are filling in the gap between a sub-notebook and a handheld. 3 years ago, when consulting for a hospital, I wrote an internal white-paper suggesting that the the ideal form factor for a machine used by a doctor or nurse making rounds and charting (i.e., taking notes) would be:
- small enough to wear, albeit maybe requiring a special-purpose holster
- have a bigger, brighter screen than any PDA
- have wireless connectivity.
11:41:35 AM
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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/16/opinion/16FRIE.html
Thomas Friedman: Iraq is the only Arab country that combines
oil, water, brains and secularism. Lebanon has water, brains,
secularism and a liberal tradition. The Palestinians have a similar
potential. Which is why I favor "triple self-determination."
If Lebanon, Iraq and a Palestinian state could all be made into
functioning, decent, free-market, self-governing societies, it
would be enough to tilt the entire Arab world onto a modernizing
track.
11:10:05 AM
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http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/politics/national/features/n_8621/
Zakaria became a conservative, he says, from observing the Indian
state. “People often say, ‘How could you, living in India, end
up a Reaganite?’ Well, the answer is, live in India. There are
two things that people don’t understand. One is the degree to
which a highly regulated economy produces masses of corruption
because it empowers bureaucrats. It just has to be seen to be
believed.
11:08:55 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Erik Neu.
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