Love Communications made an ad for Ricoh copiers featuring two models chatting backstage:
Model 1: But if quantum mechanics isn’t physics in the usual sense - if it’s not about matter, or energy, or waves - then what is it about? Model 2: Well, from my perspective, it’s about information, probabilities, and observables, and how they relate to each other. Model 1: That’s interesting!
Thing is though, this dialogue is remarkably similar (minus the “That’s interesting” bit) to one of Scott Aaronson’s lectures:
But if quantum mechanics isn’t physics in the usual sense — if it’s not about matter, or energy, or waves, or particles — then what is it about? From my perspective, it’s about information and probabilities and observables, and how they relate to each other.
Scott relays this appropriation on his blog with an invite to his readers:
For almost the first time in my life, I’m at a loss for words. I don’t know how to respond. I don’t know which of 500,000 possible jokes to make. Help me, readers. Should I be flattered? Should I be calling a lawyer?
While many commenters suggested a laugh and enjoy it approach, from what I could tell anyway, just as many were suggesting legal action. Seriously.
I joined in the fray with a comment of my own:
Sure the ad company was sloppy and they SHOULD have asked for permission prior to using the snippet. But what’s there really to compensate? It’s a few sentences out of a much longer work.
Sometimes I wonder how much we actually lose as a community when even the smallest thing is reduced to a monetary value in this increasingly user-pays world.
As far as compensation goes legally, it would first come down to the substantiality of the excerpt and if there were any fair dealing exceptions. What a court will decide is substantial is always going to depend on the work and thus be uncertain.
But I think the more important question is what does the community consider should be the law? On this issue, I found the knee-jerk reaction of many of the readers to sue really worrying.
It made me wonder what space is there in the world for uses that are not entirely fair and wholesome but maybe should still be tolerated. After all, if you reduce the boundaries to ensure that that marginally unfair thing is protected against, you will undoubtedly include many fairer uses along with it.
If it was just one sentence, instead of two would it have made a difference? Judging from the response in this case, I’d say probably not. So then, can we really say that we should be able to own, extract rent from and control the use of one sentence? I find that possibility incredibly oppressive. However, and I can’t help playing devil’s advocate even to myself, suppose that sentence was a haiku or some similar bit of poetry - would that make a difference?
Reminds me of a story I heard from a literary agent. One of their authors wanted to quote a line in a song but the permissions route looked arduous (and expensive) so they had another of their poets write the line into a poem which was published and then duly quoted gratis (except maybe for a bottle of good wine). So the appropriation in the poem was accepted as not a copyright infringement but it was expected that the quote would have been. Hmmm… strange but true.
Eeeek! How quickly two months go by! I’ve had a horrible (southern hemisphere) winter with a series of afflictions - flus, colds and I even managed to injure a core muscle in my hand in a cooking accident. Now I’m battling a nasty case of bronchitis and the flu, yay!
Anyway, I’ve set a new, hopefully achievable, goal of writing a new post at least once a week (and preferably on a Wednesday). I may end up writing more, or I may disappear for another two months…
It’s actually not that long a list, I’d have expected it to be longer if I had thought about it. Anyway it begins with a few little digs before launching into the list:
One statement that has been sometimes called an error is Britannica’s statement in the article “Encyclopedia Britannica” that it is the “oldest and largest English-language general encyclopedia.” If Wikipedia’s claim to be an encyclopedia is accepted, then this statement is erroneous because Wikipedia contains more words and articles than Britannica. Although Britannica has at times referred to Wikipedia as an encyclopedia, it has also referred to Wikipedia as “the Internet database that allows anyone… to edit” when responding to Nature’s defense of Wikipedia, apparently rejecting Wikipedia’s claim to be an encyclopedia. It is perhaps worth noting that the accuracy of the label “oldest English-language general encyclopedia” hinges on the meaning of the words “oldest” and “general”. Encyclopedia Britannica is certainly not the first English-language encyclopedia; though it may be considered the one with the greatest longevity, as many of the earlier English-language encyclopedias are no longer published.
They have a point about the “largest” but I think it’s pretty reasonable to use “oldest” to mean “oldest to have survived”.
I was actually thinking of getting the Encyclopedia Britannica again a while ago. Wikipedia is brilliant but if you were to list the errors that it has published at one time or another…
President Kennedy was supposed to launch this historic moment in communications with a trans-Atlantic press conference, but the transmission signal was acquired before JFK was ready, so Ernie Banks may have been the first human image relayed across the Atlantic. Needing to kill a little time, the producers picked up a TV broadcast of a major league ballgame between the Philadelphia Phillies and Chicago Cubs from Wrigley Field.
Australian’s incumbent telecommunications provider Telstra recently announced that they would be ceasing to provide their i-mode service that they launched so expensively only a few years ago. The news is that UK operator O2 has done the same.
The Register has an interesting op-ed by Bill Ray on why the i-mode failed: Culture matters: Why i-mode failed and why the hype about broadcast mobile TV may also be misplaced in the West. The main difference between the two cultures is the lack of TVs and personal computers in bedrooms (often there is just not the space). So the mobile platform is going to much more attractive as it’s your most convenient source of the internet than when you have it pretty much on tap in the privacy of your own room.
O2 and Telstra will be rueing an expensive mistake with i-mode. Half the money spent on a decent WAP billing platform would have given them all the important functionality, but they saw the success of i-mode in Japan and thought customers were buying a technology, when in reality they wanted an experience suited to their culture.
So, ultimately it looks like we can learn an interesting tidbit from this whole mini-debacle: if the Parakey co-founder is chipping in on something pertaining to friend request confirmation, that could be a cool peek into what’s to come from Facebook’s new buy.Well they’ve bought some of Mozilla’s brains anyway. Should provide some interesting competion to Google Gears. I wonder if this will mean there’s a chance the platform will open up?
Social networking site Facebook has bought internet start-up, Parakey, run by two of the co-creators of the popular web browser, Mozilla Firefox.
Parakey is described as a platform that “bridges the gap between information on the web and the desktop”.
As part of the deal, which is for an undisclosed sum, Mozilla Firefox founders Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt will help to develop the Facebook site.
[EDIT: Just reading about a Facebook glitch and lo and behold, it’s Blake Ross who is doing the announcing:
A comment on the Mashable post Sunday night from Blake Ross, co-founder of recent Facebook acquisition Parakey, explained, “This is a bug that will be fixed soon. Trust me, we find this as annoying as you do,” Ross wrote.
So, ultimately it looks like we can learn an interesting tidbit from this whole mini-debacle: if the Parakey co-founder is chipping in on something pertaining to friend request confirmation, that could be a cool peek into what’s to come from Facebook’s new buy.
There was a time when babies were pinched to make them cry and worked a full day. But now, at least in California, there are work rules for babies.
They can’t work until they are 15 days old, and the production must have a nurse on the set and a teacher for every baby. There are also time limits, so while the babies can spend two hours on the set, they can do only 20 minutes of work.
That means several babies may be needed to complete a role. It took three newborns to play the baby in the recent drama “Waitress.”
There’s also also a quote from a producer who probably has one of the worst jobs in town:
“See, this is what strikes me as funny. Most of the time you are
rejecting babies,” said Leslie Patson of Baby Style. “I know, it’s
horrible, yeah. They’re just babies. It’s business.”
Piracy: It’s far too awesomely swashbuckling a name to give to an altogether mundane activity — using digital network technology to send and receive data, as though digital network technology was built to do just that. Oh, you’re in the restricting-access-to-data business? Good luck with that. You can’t keelhaul us all, guvnor! Arrrr.
I remember reading a post by a Microsoft employee saying that even with Microsoft’s huge resources many wished-for functionalities in core software aren’t developed because budgets need to end somewhere. Likewise in quality testing, there’s a limit to how much you can actually test for - both in terms of resources but also in terms of time.
Techies and the love of all things green make uncomfortable but not uncommon bedfellows. Phil Manchester asks the question Is ‘green’ software possible? (Reg Developer) and finds that Microsoft isn’t too bad.
Fortunately, there’s some hope in the future for IT development and enviromental responsibility to coexist:
Two topical trends in software development could also make software production greener. One is open source software, now widely supported by the green lobby. Open source tends to use less resources and - because of the collaborative development process - to be more efficient.
More efficient, ‘greener’ coding strategies could, ironically, also come from developments in high performance computing. The requirement to devise smarter software to exploit parallel, multiprocessor architectures will inevitably mean more efficient use of hardware resources and better coding techniques all round. It could even mark a return to the obsessions of an earlier age of software development when resources were scarce - when, indeed, hardware was big, energy inefficient and expensive.
