Just another nerd.
The Washington Post recruited some musicians to judge the quality of different music encoding formats, such as MP3, Vorbis, Windows Audio Media, etc. Overall their judges seemd to have preferred WMA, but there’s a fatal flaw in the story — The Post doesn’t say at what bit rate they were encoding their music for the various formats. Without that information, the comparisons are largely pointless.
USA Today sports columnist Jon Saraceno ran a column filled with his impressions of the best and worst moments of Major League Baseball’s All Star Game. His comments on Dale Earnhardt Jr., however, have to qualify as the dumbest thing anyone said about the game:
Worst All-Star Game Move: Dale Earnhardt Jr., introduced to the crowd, saluted fans by hoisting a beer bottle, then taking a hearty swig from it. The moment, captured on Safeco Field’s giant screen, looked scripted. If so, it was a crass marketing ploy likely hatched by his race-car sponsor, a major brewery. It was a bush-league move because of the indelible image and message it left on young, impressionable minds: It’s cool to drink alcohol.
Right on. If this keeps up, the next thing you know they’ll even start selling alcohol at baseball stadiums!
I thought American courts were weird, but the BBC reports that France’s highest appeals court has upheld the principle that families of handicapped children can sue doctors for failing to detect birth defects in utero and giving the mother the opportunity to have an abortion.
Last year a severely retarded boy in France was awarded damages on the grounds that had it not been for a doctor’s error, his mother would have chosen to abort him, so, in effect, the doctor’s negligence is to blame from the boy’s birth defects.
This is an insane legal principle that would seem to lead to even more bizarre outcomes.
For example, if a doctor can be said to have harmed retarded child by failing to detect his birth defect so that his mother might have aborted him, it’s not much of a leap to suing on behalf of a retarded child whose mother never bothered to have her fetus screened for birth defects.
Or what about a woman who knows that her child will be born retarded but chooses to carry him to term anyway? The sort of logic used in this case strongly implies that the woman is committing a tort against her child.
Think about this applied to genetic diseases. Some people in my family suffer from Huntington’s disease (quick summary — if you’ve got it, you’ll die in a very unpleasant way by your mid-40s). Many people whose parents are Huntington carriers never get tested for the disease; they don’t want to know. If such a person has a baby who is born with the disease, is that negligence?
What about parents who choose to have children even though they will have a high risk of passing on sickle cell anemia or Tay-Sachs?
There simply is no right not to be born and trying to invent such a right leads quickly to a number of absurdities.
Despite some of the spin from some quarters that Microsoft’s appeals court victory was really a loss, New Mexico saw the writing on the wall and withdrew from the states’ antitrust lawsuit against the software company.
Microsoft’s minor concessions the other day apparently prompted the attorney general there to rethink the wisdom of sending more money pursuing the company. The concessions were roundly denounced by many as “cosmetic,” but that was a brilliant move by Microsoft. The critics of the changes seem to forget that it wasn’t too long ago that Microsoft’s rigid control over the appearance of the Windows Desktop was at the core of the main charge against Microsoft. Here’s a quote from the Department of Justice’s filing with the Appeals Court:
Microsoft’s restrictions on OEMs went further. Microsoft feared that OEMs might promote the use of Navigator rather than IE by configuring the icons on the initial Windows desktop screen or the “Start” menu entries, or arranging the Windows boot (start-up) sequence. FF 202-03 (JA 2296-97).(26) Microsoft thus “threatened to terminate the Windows license of any OEM” that made such changes or added “programs that promoted third-party software to the Windows ‘boot’ sequence.
…The court found that these licensing and coercive measures, which “guaranteed the presence of Internet Explorer on every new Windows PC system,” had no technical justification. FF 158, 175-76 (JA 2287, 2291).(28) The forbidden OEM conduct, although facilitating the distribution of Navigator, “would not compromise the quality or consistency of Windows any more than the modifications that Microsoft currently permits.” FF 221-23 (JA 2302-03).
So before any new judge can conduct new hearings on possible remedies against Microsoft, the company steps forward and say, “fine, you were right, we were wrong, we’ll act on our own initiative before a penalty hearing to comply with this part of the ruling against us.”
Microsoft’s critics might get some visceral joy out of doing so, but the argument that Microsoft is being deceptive by eliminating a practice that the Court found to be illegal isn’t likely to be a winning legal theory.
Like most people I receive a lot of spam, although most of it amuses me more than irritates me (I especially find the foreign language spam amusing). But a lot of people hate spam to the point where sometimes I suspect the anti-spam zealots are as bad, if not worse, than the spammers.
Case in point is this comment posted by Jamie McCarthy at Slashdot today,
Costs have to be attached to sending mail to strangers, either micropayments or risk of jail. As long as mail’s dirt-cheap to send, spam will be vying for our attention, scurrying-around clean-up crews notwithstanding.
Everytime a stranger e-mails me, they should have to risk going to jail or have to pay some sort of per-email charge? Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.