Given that traditional academic clothing, mortarboard hat and black robe, has religious origins, does that mean that it is now illegal for French scholars or teachers to dress as scholars? Also, since it is traditional for American high school students to graduate wearing mortarboard and cape, perhaps the students of the American School of Paris would be expelled were they at a public school. Perhaps next time professors parade around the Sorbonne in traditional garb for a formal occasion, someone should test France’s proposed law and demand their expulsion. Satire aside, this excellent New York Times article outlines some of the real complexities of the issue. 1. It is backed by the head of the Paris Mosque who: “praised today’s vote as “impressive” and a “buffer” against Muslim fundamentalists intruding into French secular institutions” 2. Communism has been historically agressively secular but French Communists are among the few detractors of…
Jon Udell looks at multiple metadata values within CSS class attributes. CSS is the logical place to put metadata in that metadata often, but not always, needs to be styled – e.g. a ‘headline’ might be big bold and blue. But the main problem for me is that by using attributes in HTML tags to define metadata you have to count nested tags in a parser, which is a total pain and can cause problems if fragments of information are syndicated. Wouldn’t it be much better if HTML were amended to include closing attributes? i.e. you could say: <pre class="headline">DOJ sues Microsoft</pre class="headline"> instead of: <pre class="headline">DOJ sues Microsoft</pre> That way people wouldn’t have to invent tags, which couldn’t be styled, such as: <headline>DOJ sues Microsoft</headline>
TiVo and PVR wishlist: 1. All PVR’s are sold as commodity hardware with no signup or subscription fee or tie in to Cable or Satellite. 2. TV listings are provided for free by ad supported online services. 3. Opt-in targeted ads based upon your personal and viewing profile (with ability to remove items from viewing profile) are served alongside listings. 4. You have total control and ownership of your profile to block certain advertisers or limit your profile. 5. Either onscreen or via a webpage you can buy from ads based on what you have watched. For example if you watched a travel show about Hawaii you can choose special vacation deals from your nearest airport (you can store your zipcode in the profile), if you want to buy what they are wearing on Sex in the City (heaven forbid), then you can. Basically I want to walk into a…
The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow. Jim Crow Stories . Democratic Party | PBS “The South remained a one-party region until the Civil Rights movement began in the 1960s. Northern Democrats, most of whom had prejudicial attitudes towards blacks, offered no challenge to the discriminatory policies of the Southern Democrats.” Clearly the Democratic party is now the more tolerant party. When did it change?
I don’t mind the guy, but can’t help thinking of this similarity (they really should give that scream bloke some botox injections):
UPI has compiled a list of the nationalities of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay from analysis of multiple news sources. The results: almost half the foreigners taken from Afghanistan were from the Arabian peninsula (160 from Saudi Arabia, 253, from the Arabian peninsula as a whole), less than 0.2% were from Iraq and there are more Brits than from any other European country. Going to war with Iraq, meant that you removed a tyrant and had control over almost exactly the same oil reserves (Iraq plus Kuwait) as Saudi Arabia. This would mean that you could tighten the screws there, or be covered if there were a revolution, without drying up the pipeline of oil. Playing hardball with Saudi directly would not have been possible. Just a thought. Saudi Arabia 160 Yemen 85 Pakistan 82 Afghanistan 80 Jordan 30 Egypt 30 Algeria 19 Morocco 18 Kuwait 12 China 12 Tajikistan 11…
iTunes wishlist: 1. Ability to create a list of personal favorite songs as playlists/wishlists and publish on a weblog with links to iTunes (newsblogger for iTunes). 2. Affiliate program for above playlists (an Amazon style affiliate program with no physical product to deliver). 3. Ability to send someone a gift of a song with a picture and message (a value added online greetings card). 4. iTunes Music Store API. 5. Publication of aggregated affiliate playlists from weblogs on the iTunes site (iTunes celebrity playlists, but for everyone). 6. iTunes charts by song instead of by album, with cut and paste adsense like code to publish on affiliate sites. I guess the problem is that the iTunes model is the reverse of the Gillette Razor model i.e. Apple makes money on the handle (the iPod) rather than the blades (songs). But the fact that the songs are a loss leader is…
The head of the BBC resigned over exactly the same allegation that the Independent makes today. So either the Independent is guilty of far worse than the charges levelled at the BBC, under which circumstances one would expect a gagging order – or – the BBC had covered the truth but couldn’t prove it.
“[I]ntelligence-gathering, like reporting, is an imperfect business”. After years of hide and seek with Saddam Hussein one might have some sympathy with intelligence services that may have made mistakes about WMD, particularly when interpretations of findings would naturally filter, like a game of telephone, to reflect what governments wanted to hear, as documents moved up the food chain. Sympathy for intelligence gatherers and reporters alike might also be needed for the usually bullet proof Bair. Just when he was riding high on the outcome of the Hutton report and a critical government vote, came the bolt. Blair’s accidental betrayal came from his main ally over WMD
Ah, Waldrobemalfunction.com – obviously a site about difficulties with IKEA’s (un)dresser called Janet.
Sixapart are in a position to dominate the weblog publishing market, they have the best pro tool, Moveable type and the best service, Typepad. But the pro tool is used for free by many people (cough), and the service which is easier for new users is paid for and competes against free services. Wouldn’t it be better to have the Moveable Type as a paid for tool – the Dreamweaver of blogging and Typepad as an ad supported free service?