Scripting News

Sun, 21 Sep 2003 00:01:25 GMT

Chris Lydon interviews NY Times columnist Paul Krugman.

Sat, 20 Sep 2003 19:13:47 GMT

Earlier this year, Terry Fisher, the director of Berkman Center, outlined a proposal that would flow money to the recording industry by taxing Internet usage and devices used to record and play back music. While I think the proposal is brilliant, I also think it's unworkable because it's unfair.

Sat, 20 Sep 2003 16:44:29 GMT

Brian Buck: "People use the word friend too casually, but the counterpoint to that is that is that people use the term family too strictly."

Sat, 20 Sep 2003 16:32:21 GMT

Press release: "The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the New York City Department of Education today announced a $51.2 million effort that will support the creation of 67 new small, challenging high schools."

Sat, 20 Sep 2003 15:12:28 GMT

A new more complete rendition of the BloggerCon blogroll.

Sat, 20 Sep 2003 13:03:55 GMT

Essay: What is friendship?

Sat, 20 Sep 2003 13:48:37 GMT

More -- what happens when friends are full of shit?

Sat, 20 Sep 2003 13:43:25 GMT

Speaking of people who could be friends who are full of shit -- today Joi Ito sings a well-sung but false song about Microsoft screwing with nascent standards. Joi, in RSS-land, MS is playing fair and square, so far (and so are AOL and Yahoo, btw). The people who are pissing in the soup are people you don't have the guts to criticize. You're in their blogroll, they're in yours. Dig deeper dear Joi, really disassemble the lunacy of our little world, and do what you can to unravel it. Then, when and if Microsoft screws with us, you'll have some credibility. Right now you haven't got a leg to stand on.

Sat, 20 Sep 2003 13:47:35 GMT

Three years ago today: What is P2P?

Sat, 20 Sep 2003 12:20:34 GMT

Last year on this day Morning Coffee Notes re-appear.

Sat, 20 Sep 2003 11:09:14 GMT

Jon Udell: "Doing more with less is the theme of Michael Lewis' terrific new book, Moneyball."

Verizon economics

Sat, 20 Sep 2003 11:22:50 GMT

BTW, the 1.5 week outage, it turns out, was Verizon's fault. It took four multi-hour phone conversations to convince them that the problem was on their end. In each of the first three conversations they said the issue was closed. One time they thought it was a problem with my Linksys router, another time, a problem with my email service provider.

All the while there was a short on their wire, and a quick test they can run to prove it. According to their economics, the time of an employee and a customer is much less valuable than the time of a diagnostic device. I can understand (somewhat) they're throwing out my time, but what about the people they're paying to support customers? Even if they worked in Bangalore (they don't, I asked) it would still be diseconomic, it seems.

A throwback to the time of punch cards and mainframes when computer time was more expensive than human time, but I thought we crossed over that line a long time ago.