Via Crooked Timber and BoingBoing:

Thomson Reuters demands $10 million and an injunction to stop George Mason University from distributing its new Web browser application, Zotero software, an open-source format that allows users to convert Reuters' EndNote Software. Reuters claims George Mason is violating its license agreement and destroying the EndNote customer base. (Courthouse News)

So, putting this into context... if I, through the sweat of my own brow, manually enter hundreds of bibliographical citations into EndNote, the owners of EndNote are telling me that I can't use a third-party tool in order to convert that information (that I, myself, entered) into a different format.

Every door on every floor is closed, whether or not students are present. This seems so different from my days as a student, when you always left your door open if you were in, I suppose to signal your willingness to talk and to avoid homework if you could just find the smallest pretext to do so. It helped with circulation as well, also a crucial matter in our un-air conditioned rooms.

These days you could launch a flare and not harm a single student. The students who answer their doors invite us in kindly, and seem generally pleased with the attention. Some of them have maintenance complaints, which we address. All of them have television sets connected to cable (cable TV had not yet hit Southwestern in my era), and of course each student has a computer, and an Ipod, and usually video games. Each room seems so self-contained, so independent, and seemingly so isolated from any group activity. -- Todd Diacon, Inside Higher Ed

When I first introduced my Seton Hill students to blogging in 2003, before Facebook had mainstreamed social networking into a neatly wrapped package, my students posted a mixture of personal and academic material.  Now that even my committed bloggers do most of their social networking elsewhere, I have started pitching the academic blogs as a more professional practice for real-world writing.  But my student Andy LoNigro just posted a thoughtful reflection on the weblog taxonomy promoted by Crawford Kilian in Writing for the Web 3.0.  Andy pushes back a little, in a way that makes me think that perhaps the reports of the death of social blogging have been greatly exaggerated.

I began to think about what categories our blogs for Dr. Jerz would fall into? I first thought about a category called Academic Blogs but what we write isn't always for academics. We have the opportunity to express our freedom and creative abilities. The more I looked into it and thought about it I realized that my blog here at SHU has an aspect of each of the categories that Kilian talks about in this section, thus creating a blend of all of them spawning the name: Blender Blog. It's like taking all of the cateogories and throwing them in a blender. -- Andy LoNigro

So, will "blender blogging" catch on?  My colleague Mike Arnzen coined the term "pedablogue," I use "xenoblogging" in my blogging rubrics, and my former student Evan Reynolds coined the wonderful term "drive-by blogging" (to describe the sudden bursts of not-too-terribly-focused blogging energy necessary to catch up when a blogging portfolio is fast approaching).

As it happens, in another class I teach a design tool called Blender 3D, and there are plenty of hits for "blender blog" in that sense.

Blogging this to show to my kids later.

This is from the robots category of Paleo-Future, which also has categories devoted to picturephones, jetpacks, and each decade's collected futurism (that is, see what our future looked like to people writing in the 1880s, the 1930s, or the 1980s).

Try as it might the robot could not make its desired turn. Its little broken wheel jerked and jumped, but to no avail. Malorie then started crying uncontrollably, quietly pleading, "Why won't someone help that robot! All he wants to do is pick up the ball and put it in the middle so that he can get some points!"

This may be an extreme example, but it illustrates our ability to anthropomorphize robots.

Pew Internet:

Game playing is universal, with almost all teens playing games and at least half playing games on a given day. Game playing experiences are diverse, with the most popular games falling into the racing, puzzle, sports, action and adventure categories.

Game playing is also social, with most teens playing games with others at least some of the time and can incorporate many aspects of civic and political life.

Kotaku reports:

Is it finally game over for Florida lawyer and violent video game opponent Jack Thompson? Judgment has been entered in the case that started last year and came to a head when Judge Dava Tunis recommended permanent disbarment for the bombastic, showboating law man. The court has approved the report and has ordered that JT is officially disbarred as of 30 days from today.

During the Great Depression, Americans flocked to the movies to escape the harsh realities of their daily lives. As the stock market tumbled and loved ones went off to war, Americans disappeared into dark theaters, where Shirley Temple sang and tap danced her way into their heavy hearts.

Now, as the nation faces arguably the worst financial crisis since the Depression, video games may be playing the role movies once filled in hard economic times. (NPR)

Students in my "Media Projects" class are getting practice learning complex, new systems quickly. We've learned Blender 3D, we've started on Inform 7, and later we'll move to Flash. My sister (or possibly her husband, who sometimes uses her e-mail address) sent me a link to an editorial on what it's like to learn a new software system while you're also dealing with the daily deadlines that define the news business.  I hope that my New Media Journalism students will be well-prepared to excel in an environment where their ability to do their job depends so heavily on their ability to adapt to new tools.

Many of you can relate to the learning curve and butterflies that come with switching over to ever more complex and powerful work technology. All of that comes with a few added wrinkles in this business.

Because we create our products entirely anew seven days a week, we can't ease the transition by working ahead or catching up when things settle down. Every day brings a new race against the clock.

Someone at our place likened it to changing a tire on a car while it's hurtling down the highway. I like to think of it in terms of the movie "Speed": The bus doesn't blow up if you don't slow down.

But many of us have been through this drill before, nearly a decade ago when the system we're getting ready to junk was the next big thing. And while the new system we're going live on requires increasingly fine-tuned skills, the circumstances last time were more challenging. (Pat Howard, Erie Times-News)

The technical term is "deep packet inspection," a process by which universities can examine the contents of electronic files that pass back and forth on their networks to see if they contain copyrighted material like the latest M.I.A. single or an episode of Gossip Girl. It's the equivalent of requiring institutions to steam open and read every letter that passes through the campus mail. It's also expensive, slows down the entire network, and won't actually work, because the small number of students who are responsible for the most egregious piracy also tend to be the students with the technical know-how needed to stay three steps ahead of whatever new filtering mechanisms the university might devise.

The entertainment industry insists that it doesn't necessarily want to go this way, but that's obviously a lie. Earlier this year, it supported legislation in Illinois and Tennessee that would have required colleges to implement "technology-based deterrents" to piracy if they received more than a certain number of infringement notices. Around the same time, colleges across the country began seeing a 20-fold increase in the number of infringement notices they received.. When colleges protested the new burden, the RIAA said their past voluntary cooperation meant they were legally obligated to comply in the future. (Inside Higher Ed)

My provost sent this link to the English faculty, inviting us to share our responses.

My father succinctly summarized his feelings about my choice to dedicate my 20s to writing fiction. "You're not living in the real world," he said. I reacted with a young man's defensiveness, but in retrospect his assessment seems less critical than a matter of fact.

Which is where teaching comes in. It provides all the practical things that can help prop us up above the morass of our insane callings, not to mention something we can wave at the world like a badge. And don't forget this bonus: other people. How delightful to work on this thing called a hallway, populated not just by colleagues but by students, all committed to, or at the very least interested in, writing. And this is all without even mentioning the teaching itself. I love teaching. There is a deep pleasure in sharing the things that you have labored to learn in solitude. It's inspiring work -- rewarding, interactive, human work so different from what we do at our desks -- and it turns out that writers, many of us natural entertainers, often do it quite well. (David Gessner, New York Times)

Coming from a school where the teaching load is 4/4, his 2/2 load seems like luxury, though of course I'm aware that the reduced teaching load carries with it an increased expectation of publication.  After almost 10 years as a full-time faculty member, I'm still adjusting to the feeling of watching conference deadlines, opportunities to contribute to anthologies, and the ghosts of book proposals go whizzing past me as I patiently explain to yet another class of freshmen how to download an e-mail attachment or how to do the pagination in an MLA style paper. As a grad student, I feared that I wouldn't have enough to say; my reality is that I have plenty to say -- both to my students and my colleagues, but never enough time.

Or, to be more precise, the conventions of the student-centered classroom mean I have to make my points in parallel to or as part of the substructure for the student conversation. I don't have 45 unbroken minutes to speak (saving 5 minutes at the end for questions), so I never quite get to drop the kinds of pearls of wisdom that I recall and treasure from my own undergraduate experience.  And at this phase in my life, I never have the 8 or 12 hours of uninterrupted time that I found were necessary to churn out the chapters of my dissertation -- and even the once or twice a week that I can get to the office during the summer are often only useful to dig myself out from under the backlog.

Nevertheless, I will never find myself in the soul-sucking position of working on  writing project because I *have to* -- everything I've written, I wrote because I wanted to, and it just happens to be a benefit that I get to list it as an accomplishment on an annual report.

CMJ_Ewoks.mp3 (2min 10sec, 2.2Mb)

The audio is a little over 2 minutes long. Listen to my daughter's final tearful, generous, heart-felt wish for George Lucas, and then take a look at the chronology below.

Ewoks: The Battle for Endor (1985)
Howard the Duck (1986)

An informative review of Crystal's Txtng: The Gr8 Db8, a book I need to put on my reading list.  I've said many times that I've *never* encountered a student who absolutely cannot switch between txtspk and standard English.  Thus, to unpack that double-negative, I think students can and do regularly make the shift between social texting and more formal writing  -- though I do think I'm seeing more instances of the lowercase "I" than when I first started teaching.

Crystal does an excellent job exposing these illusions in Txtng, even if he doesn't designate them as such. And people seem to be listening. On his blog, Crystal notes that British media coverage has fairly addressed the book's six main points. The first three map precisely to the Zwickyan trifecta of illusions:

• Text messages aren't full of abbreviations - typically less than ten percent of the words use them. [Frequency Illusion]
• These abbreviations aren't a new language - they've been around for decades. [Recency Illusion]
• They aren't just used by kids - adults of all ages and institutions are the leading texters these days. [Adolescent Illusion]

For completeness, here are Crystal's other main points about texting:

• Pupils don't routinely put them into their school-work or examinations.
• It isn't a cause of bad spelling: you have to know how to spell before you can text.
• Texting actually improves your literacy, as it gives you more practice in reading and writing.

It remains to be seen if American media outlets will be as responsive to Crystal's arguments. (The book was released in the UK in the beginning of July and in the US in the beginning of September.) Here's hoping they get the (text) message.

When I went off to college (late 80s) I bought a handful of very cheap classical music cassette tapes, simply because I needed some music I could listen to on headphones to drown out the noise in the dorms.  I've also got a CD of classical marches, but again the reason is practical -- I put it on when I have to clean up old papers or my e-mail in-box, and the music helps me stay focused.

But I don't really like listening to music.

Renowned scientist Stephen Hawking is going to unveil a remarkable clock that has no hands and shows time with the help of light. Known as the Corpus Clock, the machine has been invented by and designed by Dr John Taylor for Corpus Christi College Cambridge for the exterior of the college's new library building. The Clock will be unveiled on 19th September by Stephen Hawking, cosmologist and author of the global bestseller, A Brief History of Time. Dr Taylor, an inventor and horologist, has put 500,000 pounds of his own money and seven years into developing the clock, which has been inspired from a design by a clock made by the legendary John Harrison, the pioneer of longitude. Of John Harrison's many innovations, he came up with the 'grasshopper escapement, explained Dr Taylor, referring to the device used by Harrison to turn rotational motion into a pendulum motion for timekeeping. No one knows how a grasshopper escapement works, so I decided to turn the clock inside out and, instead of making the escapement 35 mm across, it is 1.5 m across, he said.

What my students and I are talking about in Writing for the Internet often intersects with current events and ongoing issues. Here are a few such issues and reflections.

Palin's Private E-Mail Hacked
Bloggers have alleged that David Kernell, 20, is the one who has claimed responsibility for breaking into the Alaska governor's e-mail account. (Background and snarking via- Metafilter)

Zounds! New "Dit-Dah" Lingo of Telegraph Operators Threatens Standard English! ;-)
I doubt that many visor-wearing telegraph operators or gin-soaked news-hacks found themselves accidentally writing "dit-dit-dah-dah" or "in this reporter's opinion" in a letter home to mum. (Also... how should journalists treat text messages? Quote them letter-for-letter, thus making the users look illiterate? Translate them to standard English, thus changing the tone? Discuss)

Tools for Coping with the Flood of Words
Some people are turning to filters such as YouTube Comment Snob, or they are balancing the benefits of a truly open society with the benefits of discouraging bad behavior (thus trolls may find their posts disemvoweled).

Assessment of Online Writing
Learning in the Webiverse: How Do You Grade a Conversation? (See also, Evaluating Blogging; compare a blogging rubric from several years ago to how I now introduce blogging and the portfolio assignments -- see this example from another class.)

Old Media Mocks Mariotti's Newfound Disdain for Newspapers
High-profile ports columnist Jay Mariotti, who dramatically quit the Sun-Times, saying newspapers are a dying industry, seems to have fallen in love with the Web. His former old media comrades aren't buying it. (Ebert; Deluca)

Wikipedia -- the User-edited Encyclopedia
Lisa Spiro notes that professors are citing Wikipedia in their own research, media employees are leaking news to Wikipedia before the reporters can publish the story.  (Note that simply using Wikipedia is different from plagiarizing from it.) But does the world really need to know what a car mechanic has to say about genetics? Is a free-for-all world of amateurs really better than a world in which knowledge is managed by experts?

We don't have cable TV in my household.

Rather than pay the cable bill every month, we buy a few DVDs when they hit the bargain bins, or we just check them out of the library. My wife also makes regular trips to Blockbuster. I'm not a TV-free purist. I've even browsed through websites giving plot summaries of Lost and the new Battlestar Galactica, and I'd probably give Code Monkey a shot and check out how The Simpsons are holding up (now that it's been about five years since I've seen a new episode). 

My kids don't watch Nickelodeon or The Disney Channel, but they did go through their Barney phase, their Wiggles phase, and we've bought every one of the VeggieTales shows (except for a few compilation sing-alongs).

Last year, a grocery store cashier made a friendly reference to SpongeBob Squarepants, and when my son made it clear he didn't know the character, the cashier gave him a look of genuine pity. (Since then he's seen an episode or two on the TV in a play area in a Burger King, and I agree they're better than lots of the stuff I watched when I was a kid, in the era of NBC/ABC/CBS, just because I was too lazy to get up and change the channel.)

While strapped down in the car during long rides, my kids are likely to have conversations like this:

Peter: You're a Union artilleryman. Your officer tells you to go into a forest and hunt for rebels.
Carolyn: I've got a musket.
Peter: The forest is dark.
Carolyn: I pull a flashlight from my pack.
Peter: Flashlights haven't been invented yet.
Carolyn: I pull a candle from my pack.
Peter: You need a match.
Carolyn: I have one in my pocket. I light it.
Peter: It went out.
Carolyn: I light another one.

This will go on for hours, with Peter making sound effects, and Carolyn sometimes trying to insert comedy -- her character will faint, or have to go to the bathroom at times that are inconvenient to the plot, or find a group of lost babies. 

I feel rather pleased that my children are likely to run around the house pretending to be civil war soldiers, or Doctor Who (from the 1970s Tom Baker era), or even -- and this gives me a real thrill -- re-living the "Captain Gearhart and the Magnificent Blimpship" bedtime stories I've been telling them for several months. (My six-year-old daughter loves adventure and romance, and my ten-year-old son loves technology... no genre holds their combined attention quite like steampunk.)

This is a form of interaction that they've developed on their own.  Even when they aren't buckled in on a car ride, they will often narrate their actions, possibly because when they were little and I would make adventures for them with their toys, I always had the characters discussing their motivations, so that the play unfolded with words as much as actions.

When I say that I tell them bedtime stories, it's really more like I will briefly set up a scenario, for example, Count Catastrophe lures Smart Carolyn from the Moon into his lair and promises to give her a clockwork doll (that has a clockwork teddy bear in its backpack), if only Smart Carolyn will agree to aid the count in his dastardly plot to win control of the moon.

Then, once the "plot time" is over, the "interactive time" begins, and the kids role-play within the story for a while, occasionally vetoing their suggestion ("No, Moonbot does not have rockets that pop out of his legs. Try something else."), and trying to end with a cliffhanger that makes them wake up wanting to talk to each other about what's going to happen next.

Several times, I've had my daughter weeping because the characters seem to be in so much trouble.  When I have a particularly good night of story-telling, I have to write down the key points so I don't get them mixed up.

Truth be told, I can't remember the last time I had a spare moment and chose to put on a DVD for myself. My wife buys me movies for my birthday and Christmas, but they stack up faster than I watch them.  I still haven't watched the special edition of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan that she gave me a year ago, or the bargain VHS of Star Trek: Insurrection that we picked up in the grocery store probably six years ago.  (I just checked Wikipedia... that movie came out ten years ago!)

When I want to kill time, I'd rather browse Wikipedia or YouTube, or (gasp!) try some classic literature. This summer I returned to The War of the Worlds and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (both of which I head read as a teenager), and just yesterday I finished Moby Dick for the first time.

TV is just not my preferred medium. Every time I read a story about the declining viewership for broadcast TV, I feel a bit of schadenfreude. 

So I found the recent Wired article on the survival of the TV business to be enlightening.

Ben Silverman, NBC's head programmer, may fret when one of his network's shows struggles against a basic-cable hit like Bravo's Top Chef or the Sci Fi Channel's Battlestar Galactica. But his boss, NBC Universal C.E.O. Jeff Zucker, will rest easy, because his company also owns Bravo. And the Sci Fi Channel. And a whole lot more. The notion that the "500-channel universe" is a pie being cut into ever-tinier slivers ignores the fact that the vast majority of what we watch fills the coffers of a small handful of megaliths, just as it always has.

Take a closer look at that pie:

• Besides Bravo and Sci Fi, NBC Universal also owns USA, the highest-rated ad-supported cable channel; MSNBC; CNBC; ShopNBC; Oxygen; Telemundo; and one-third of A&E Television, itself a conglomeration that includes A&E, the History Channel, and the Biography Channel.
• Disney owns ABC, ESPN, SoapNet, ABC Family, its own one-third share of A&E, and half of Lifetime. It also, of course, owns the Disney Channel, the top-rated basic-cable outlet of any kind.
• Viacom and CBS, though now traded separately on Wall Street, are both controlled by one man, Sumner Redstone. CBS owns Showtime, the Movie Channel, and half of the CW. Viacom's list of properties includes MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Spike TV, BET, and Comedy Central.
• Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. owns Fox, Fox News, FX, and, well, everything with the word Fox in it, from Fox College Sports to the Fox Reality Channel.
• Time Warner owns the other half of the CW, as well as CNN, TNT, TBS, TCM, HBO, Cinemax, the Cartoon Network, and TruTV (formerly CourtTV).

So a half-dozen companies own not only five broadcast networks but also a majority of the cable channels that anyone actually watches--including all 10 of prime time's highest-rated cable networks, which together accounted for more than 18 million viewers a night last year. To anyone worried about where network viewers have gone: They may have left the building, but they haven't escaped the compound.

In many ways, things have never been better for book readers. Amazon puts reviews at your fingertips, we have easy access to out-of-print titles through eBay and efficient inter-library loan services, and tons of out-of-copyright classics are only a click away. But as this NYMag article ("The End") spells it out, the publishing industry is reeling from the changes.

The demise of publishing has been predicted since the days of Gutenberg. But for most of the past century--through wars and depressions--the business of books has jogged along at a steady pace. It's one of the main (some would say only) advantages of working in a "mature" industry: no unsustainable highs, no devastating lows. A stoic calm, peppered with a bit of gallows humor, prevailed in the industry.

Survey New York's oldest culture industry this season, however, and you won't find many stoics. What you will find are prophets of doom, Cassandras in blazers and black dresses arguing at elegant lunches over What Is to Be Done. Even best-selling publishers and agents fresh from seven-figure deals worry about what's coming next. Two, five years from now--who knows? Life moves fast in the waning era of print; publishing doesn't.

Peter (age 10, having just read another book on the Civil War): Daddy, what do you know about William TECK-um-suh Sherman?

Me: Te-CUM-suh.  Not much. Other than during the Civil War, he lead a march to the sea that split the Confederacy into north and south sections, which pretty much led to the end of the Civil War.

Peter: (disappointed) Daddy, It was more like east and west.

Me: Northeast and southwest? (I take a bite of dinner.)

Peter: It just gets preciser and preciser. (Quickly, before I can say anything.) Except for my grammar.

Me: (After swallowing) Peter, did I tell you today that I love you?

(I go into the next room and start typing.)

Peter: Are you blogging this?

Me: Yes.

Peter: Make sure you cite your sources!

A random observation that floored me, reminding me just how different today's Internet is from the trusty, dusty, crusty home PCs on which I first learned the command-line interface.

Today's front page of The New York Times is over 129 kilobytes of code alone, with another 461 KB of supporting code, give or take. That's over a third of a floppy. Oh noes! (crd704ige)

Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's private Yahoo e-mail account was hacked, and some of its contents posted on the internet Wednesday. (Wired)

Was Palin's personal account fair game because she has been accused of using her personal account to conduct public business? If there really is damning evidence in that account, and a judge delivers a search warrant, I'm sure that Yahoo can pull the whole thing from a backup tape, even if Palin has deleted the account.

Seton Hill's e-mail servers go down every night from 2 to about 5:30, and I'm sorry to say that I'm often up that late, so I often use my Yahoo account when I am contacting other professors for research projects.  For along time my Yahoo account was much better at blocking spam than my university account, so I always use my Yahoo account to sign up for subscription-only content. 

I'm generally reluctant to use any e-mail account to give out grades or adjudicate disputes between student editors, and there's a boilerplate legalistic disclaimer that we're supposed to append to all our messages.  (I tack on that message where I explicitly say something about a grade or a student's performance; I don't add it to routine replies such as "Thanks for telling me how much you enjoyed my website.")

I'm looking for a current event that will be of interest to my "Writing for the Internet" students, and I wonder if this will fit the bill. But it might be a little too early in the course... we've had a brief unit on e-mail and we're talking about smileys now, but we're mostly focusing on hand-coding HTML.  Today we spent a whole class period on basic file management, since most of these point-and-clickers had never heard terms like "subdirectory," and I notice that once I start asking students to post their online work in directories ("JoeStudent/project1: and "JoeStudent/project2") there's often a bit of backsliding in the confidence level and an uptick in the tension level.

Well, I'll see how the media machine treats this story.

The Commonwealth of Virginia announces plans for a free, open-source physics textbook.

The Virginia Physics "Flexbook" project is a collaborative effort of the Secretaries of Education and Technology and the Department of Education that seeks to elevate the quality of physics instruction across the Commonwealth. Participating educators will create and compile supplemental materials relating to 21st century physics in an open-source format that can be used to strengthen existing physics content. The Commonwealth is partnering with CK-12 (www.ck12.org) on this initiative as they will provide the free, open-source technology platform to facilitate the publication of the newly developed content as a "Flexbook" - defined simply as an adaptive, web-based set of instructional materials.

Good editing skills and random, candid video = 2 minutes of awesomeness. This is why I love the internet.

Takes just a tad too long to get started -- give it about 45 seconds before you decide to bail out. You'll be hooked by the second time you see the flip-flops. Via.

"Ah-ah-ah ooh, ah-ah, ah-ah-ah-ah ooh!"  I'll be humming it all week.

Thanks, Karissa, for sending this collection of reasons why it makes sense to be careful when you post photos online..

5. Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of Rum

What do you do with a drunken pirate? Throw her in the brig--or, if you're Millersville University, deny her a teaching degree. That's what happened to Stacey Snyder, a then-27-year-old student teacher who posted a self portrait to her MySpace page under the caption "drunk pirate," even though it was not clear from the photo exactly what liquid was in her plastic cup. The Pennsylvania-based university decided the picture was "unprofessional" enough to rescind Snyder's degree, just days before it was to be awarded in May 2006. Snyder sued the university in federal court, claiming it violated her First Amendment rights (not to mention, of course, her Right to Paaaaar-tay). As of publication date of this story, that suit is still active.

Karissa also sends a story that notes YouTube is relying on its users to police its site for inappropriate videos. Every 5 mintes, 13 new hours of video are being uploaded to YouTube.

At the beginning of last semester, when I called roll in a class that included a student with the last name "Gearhart," I have been telling steampunk bedtime stories to my kids (Peter, 10; and Carolyn, 6). 

Each night, after my daughter has finished the tooth-brushing and prayer-saying, in total darkness I try to advance the plot for about ten minutes, then give the kids some "interactive time," where they role-play various characters.

Tonight, Captain Rod Gearhart, having been prodded by his older brother, the banking tycooon Maximillian Gearhart, finally decided he will declare his love for Miss de Meaner, the science officer from a rival blimpship (the Dark Blimpship of Count Catastrophe). After a quick visit to his quarters to freshen up, he strides down to sickbay, where Miss de Meaner is recovering from an injury received in a pirate attack. She is asleep, so he sits on the edge of her bed and declares his love for her (in an appropriately stiff-upper-lip, stuffed-shirt, all-work-and-no-play kind of way).  When he finishes, the figure in the bed sits up -- it is not Miss de Meaner after all, but one of her biobot crew members (artificial humans, picked up in an earlier adventure).  The biobot says that the devious Solomonder told him to load Miss de Meaner into an escape pod and then lie down in her bed and pretend to be her.

I heard the children gasp, and Carolyn -- who loves the romantic subplots as much as Peter loves the etherpunk technology -- fumbled for my hand in the darkness.  All week I was planning that twist, even having Solomonder snicker under his breath "Heh, heh heh!" after he requested permission to leave the ship, and establishing that one of the biobot crew members is missing.

I should admit to myself.. that SD card reader is gone. It's gone.

I didn't lose any important data, but it was a 2G card. Sigh.

I haven't seen the ads in question, but thought this InformationWeek commentary was blogworthy.

"Some may wonder what Jerry Seinfeld helping Bill Gates pick out a new pair of shoes has to do with software," Microsoft concedes. No, probably everyone who watched the ad is wondering what shoes and Seinfeld have to do with software.

The answer, Microsoft says, is nothing. Oh, right -- that's so very Seinfeld.

The deliberate obscurity shows just how sclerotic Microsoft has become. It's a form of brand-first advertising that says, "Never mind our products, hooking up with Microsoft is a gas." It's just like hanging out with Jerry, Elaine, and the rest of the gang at the coffee shop.

(Apologies to readers under 30 who don't get these references, but you can catch reruns on Fox after the nightly news. Sorry, "nightly news" was a form of broadcast journalism where highly paid anchors once ... never mind.)

Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines (a government website that identifies research backing up good web design practices).

A wonderfully expressive, almost wordless essay on language, problem-solving, and code.
The Synonym Problem  (See also Jono DiCarlo's "These Things I Believe" -- a humanist manifesto about computer code.)

Groklaw has a good analysis of the recent Harry Potter Lexicon smackdown. Fair use good, too much verbatim copying bad.

The fact is, Rowling and her editor led the defendant on with praise of his website work, such that there was a suggestion by him that he might be the editor of the official encyclopedia, a suggestion that was turned down. Her prior praise of his fan site weighed against her. But she did tell him he had no role as her editor, and he went ahead with his own book anyway, with some marketing that the judge found misleading. So the question was, is it fair use? It certainly could have been, since a copyright owner can't control transformative derivative works totally, but where the defendant failed was in the how of it, how he went about it.

The impression I get from the Order is that if he'd been less of a fan and copied less and written more of his own words instead, it would have worked out better for him. The court, despite finding against fair use, found the defendant at the time had a reasonable belief that it was fair, and that shows me how close the call was, but in analyzing the four factors courts use for fair use determinations case by case, this judge decided it didn't pass ultimately.

But he managed to do so without, in my view, damaging the field for transformative fair use works. Let me show you what I mean. You'll see how carefully the judge annotates his ruling with prior case law, and if you wish to understand his decision, you really would have to read all the citations, because that is where the judge tells you why he decided each element.