Day: June 17, 2008

Sparing you the details ….

Went to the doctor yesterday, asked him how his tropical medicine chops were. Told him about Bengaluru two weeks ago and my intestinal health ever since. Let’s just say it’s an effective diet, but a heck of a long way to go to lose ten pounds. Poor doctor, he spends his day listening to people beef about their hay fever, and I come in and start conjuring up symptoms of Dengue Fever.

Oh well, just a way to make an excuse for a) not blogging a lot, b) not going to RTP this week (I swear it is not the heat) c) not exercising.

Side note, was watching Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations on the Travel Channel last night (his Kitchen Confidential is a fave, as is his NYC bistro, Les Halles). He was in Ghana and Uzbekistan. He ate some room temperature lamb brain, made a comment about “bleeding out into a toilet,” and I realized what I want to be when I grow up — a travel dude to weird places. If my stomach permits that is.

Final spasms of a dying beast

Associated Press expects you to pay to license 5-word quotations (and reserves the right to terminate your license) – Boing Boing

Oh dear. From Boing Boing comes this piece of news,  like IDG’s infamous anti-linking edict of a few years back, one of those dumbass King Canute edicts destined to be swept away by the tide of progress. Here’s the deal: The Associated Press, a coprolite concept of a global news syndicate used by newspapers to fill their editorial holes with standard news (bus plunges, fungible coverage of the world’s events, items from outside of the local circulation foot print) and to share their original reportage back into the pool in return, has decided that bloggers must pay by the word when they quote from an AP article.

To me that’s like asking me to pay a toll to get off the superhighway and visit a dying town that time has forgotten.

“In the name of “defin[ing] clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt” the Associated Press is now selling “quotation licenses” that allow bloggers, journallers, and people who forward quotations from articles to co-workers to quote their articles. The licenses start at $12.50 for quotations of 5-25 words. The licensing system exhorts you to snitch on people who publish without paying the blood-money, offering up to $1 million in reward money (they also think that “fair use” — the right to copy without permission — means “Contact the owner of the work to be sure you are covered under fair use.”).”

Full disclosure, I am total copyleftist. I hate crap like this. Whenever an organization with an intellectual property axe to grind (MPAA, RIAA) starts getting “smart” about the digital world, they almost always put on the egg makeup.

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