If you want a quick read on whether your local newspaper understands the impact of RSS, check to see if the online versions of its movie reviews tell you the highest number of stars it can award. If instead a review shows you, say, three stars but not three out of how many, then the paper doesn’t understand that people are getting there not because of a previous relationship with the paper but simply because the page is part of the World Wide Cuisinart Web. [Tags: media entertainment Web2.0]

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Asked what he would say if he ran into Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela who had just spent two hours denouncing the US to a cheering crowd of 25,000, our president said:

“I will, of course, be polite That’s what the American people expect their president to do, is to be a polite person.”

A seemingly reasonable answer. We do, after all, expect our president to be polite. Then why does this strike me as so disconnected from reality as to constitute a reverse paranoia in which you think no one is out to get you?

1. I imagine Bill Clinton would have said something like: “I’d grab him aside and sit down with him. In the interest of maintaining the long and good relationship between our two countries, I would see if there were more productive ways we could address the issues together.” In that light, Bush’s answer sounds like what it is: “Go fuck yourself,” uttered over tea, with one’s pinky finger properly extended.

2. Imagine how this strikes the Venezuelan people. They can protest all they want, but they’re not going to get anything more than a “And how’s the missus?” from our polite president.

3. As an American citizen, do I expect our president to be polite? Yes, I do. But that’s not where my expectations end. I also expect him to be engaged. I’m also not sure that turning America into the world’s bully constitutes being polite. I don’t know — is “warmongering” even covered by Emily Post? [Tags: GeorgeBush bush politics argentina venezuela]

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Jeneane rewrites an Ad Age piece about blogging so that it blurts out more of the truth… [Tags: JeneaneSessum blogs humor]

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My computer has been acting funny — Word and Powerpoint say that all my Office files are “not available” even though they open fine if I move them to my laptop; a saved game from Serious Same 2 was corrupted yesterday — so I ran AVG’s detailed scan to check for viruses. I switched from Norton Antivirus to AVG about 1.5 yrs ago because I got tired of Norton’s belief that my computer is its plaything. AVG didn’t find any viruses. So I ran Norton and it found four: Hacktool (2 files); Trojan.ByteVerify, and W32Mydoom.BN@mm.

I doubt these are causing my problem. For example, the MyDoom was in an email in my Thunderbird Trash bin. So, the question is whether Norton actually beat AVG or does Norton simply over-report?

Anyway, now I’m moving on to a chkdsk to see if I’m about to lose yet another hard drive… [Tags: viruses]

Nothing that a complete reinstall of Office won’t fix. But now my task bar isn’t loading correctly. It sure feels like a virus…

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As it becomes increasingly difficult to separate real news from The Onion, the US Patent Office will today publish the first application for a patent for a story line. This particular story line — and note that the patent is not for the story but for the idea of the story — involves a college student who falls asleep for thirty years and discovers upon waking that he’s been living a zombie-like life in the interim. The only requirement for patenting your story line is that it be novel and nonobvious. Talk about your chilling effects.

Patenting story lines is the stupidest idea since Nero appointed his horse to the Senate™

[Tags: UnbelievableStupidity]

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A new CBS News poll puts Bush’s job approval rating at 35%, the lowest for any president at this point in the term since Nixon.

It seems to me that 15.7% of the country owes the rest of us an apology, in return for which we will promise not to waggle our fingers and say “We told you so.”

By the way, Cheney’s approval rating is 19%, an astounding figure since it means about 60% of Republicans are waggling their fingers at him. [Joho’s pledge: All math performed in this blog is guaranteed to be flawed.] [Tags: GeorgeBush politics cheney]

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I tried Plaxo early on. It rubbed me the wrong way . Then, as I occasionally have updated my contacts with info sent by Plaxo, I’ve come to tolerate it.

Today I hate it again. I got an update notice from someone and noticed that my own info was out of date. So I took the seemingly innocuous step of updating my phone number.

Lo and behold, Plaxo apparently took that as a command to send mail to everyone in my address book (actually, I don’t know whose address book) that I have new info that they simply must attend to. I am, I seem, an inadvertent Plaxo spammer and unintentional narcissist.

If Plaxo alerted you, I apologize. [Tags: plaxo]

[LATER that day:] Stacy Martin, Plaxo’s Privacy Officer, responds in the comments below, explaining what happened. It’s not as bad as I thought, but it’s somewhat worse than I’d like. (Thanks for the explanation, Stacy.)

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I just watched a webcast of a very informal talk given by Alexander Macgillivray, Senior Product and Intellectual Property Counsel at Google, at Oxford, teleconnected to the Berkman Center. A couple of points arose:

1. Alex says that Google is not becoming an ISP. It has wired a local pizza place and a local gym, and has put in a bid to wire SF (where wire=go wireless). It’s buying up dark fiber for its own internal use. But it’s not going to become an ISP. [Too bad. Somone has to save the Internet. Might as well be Google.]

2. He was asked how frequently Google is asked by governments to give up information. He carefully said that he’s not allowed to say, but it’s less than other big companies. He also noted that the law prevents him from giving a trustworthy answer to this question.

3. Jonathan Zittrain checked the Google user license which turns out to say that if Google is sold, users will be notified that their data is going into new hands, but there is no language giving users the ability to opt out. Alex said that he’d raise that back at HQ.

4. I asked him whether “Don’t be evil” translates to “Trust Sergey and Larry,” and whether that scales. He answered that Google’s culture is strong. But that’s exactly the problem. “Don’t be evil” only makes sense in an homogeneous culture. It’s great that Google has morality in mind, but the “Don’t be evil” slogan makes it sound like it’s clear what’s good and what’s evil. How about “Try to make the world better,” or “Be aware” or “Muddle through”? Just thinking out loud… [Tags: google berkman oxford]

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David Berlind reports that a bill has been introduced in the Massachusetts legislature to keep the state from following through on its decision to require all state-purchased office products to support open document standards.

Yeah, wouldn’t want to have them open document standards when we can all be under the benevolent protection of Microsoft… [Tags: microsoft odf massachusetts]

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The other day — actually, the other year — I couldn’t find an offprint from an article I wrote when I was still an academic. So, last month I tracked it down in Harvard’s Widener Library and made a photocopy. Now I’ve posted it.

It’s called “Austin’s Flying Arrow: A Missing Metaphysics of Language and World,” published in Man and World, 1984, vol 17, pp 175-195. It’s an appreciation of John Austin from a Heideggerian point of view, and I think it tries to point out that the delightful Austin’s ideas about language harbor a hidden metaphysics, but I’m not sure because when I went to read it a couple of days ago I couldn’t get all the way through it.

So why post it? 1. In case someone else wants to try reading it. 2. So I won’t have to talk back through Fort Widener to track it down again.

The PDF is here, and there’s an unedited, nonsensical character-mis-recognized html version here. [Tags: austin heidegger philosophy]

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