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Saturday, October 25, 2003 |
Three to investigate from the New York Times Business section tomorrow:
- The Opt-Out Revolution. Many high-powered women today don't ever hit the glass ceiling, choosing to leave the workplace for motherhood. Is this the failure of one movement or the beginning of another? By Lisa Belkin.
- Playing, and Working, the Telephone Game. Everybody knows this about telephones: They do not respect privacy. That was true long before the advent of the cellphone and is even more obvious in the movable workplace that is the 24/7 office of the 21st century. To paraphrase Joe Louis, By Lawrence Van Gelder.
- It's a Girl! (Will the Economy Suffer?). Couples with boys tend invest more in their families and divorce less often than couples with girls. By David Leonhardt.
8:04:13 PM 
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Good thinking from a good thinker --
The Best Search Idea Since Google: How Amazon can make money from books you already own.
By Steven Johnson, in Slate.
We tend to think of search requests as generally taking the form of "find me something I've never seen before." But real-life search is often different: You're looking for something you have seen before, but you've somehow mislaid or only half-remembered. You search for your glasses or your car keys. Or, in the case of books, you search for that paragraph about the Russian revolution's impact on literacy rates that you read somewhere a few years ago. You know it's in a book somewhere on your shelf, you just can't remember which one.
"Search inside" could be the perfect solution to this common problem.
Some of the previous coverage of amazon.com's search inside project here at A blog doesn't need a clever name.
3:12:21 PM
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Porno Karaoke a Hit (Sky News).
Yes, you've got the idea.
In Berlin and Hamburg. (Like that's not stereotypical.) Sounds like a fun entertainment, though.
12:05:32 PM
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DirecTV Takes No Prisoners. DirecTV has been waging a war on piracy that makes the record labels look nonchalant. Lucas Graves interviews the company's enforcement chief, Larry Rissler. From Wired magazine. [Wired News]
9:16:37 AM
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Microsoft Puts DRM into Office. This "Information Rights Management" scheme in the latest Microsoft Office will have some value for paranoid corporate types. For the rest of us it's an absolute disaster, and we should resist. [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
Information Rights Management, at Microsoft.
Philosophical background for Dan's position, from Privacy, Technology, and Care:
[T]he choices we make, each of us, each day, in adopting given forms of technology, offer the opportunity to exhibit care and stand in solidarity with others, or to fail to do so. Individual choice "means more" in this framework because it reaches farther. My bad decisions, analyzed individualistically, amount to "too bad for me" (plus, perhaps, some social costs of cleaning up my mess). But attending to these social aspects of technological choices means seeing that in some of my choices I am acting not just for myself but "for all humankind"--not in the manner of the philosophers' categorical imperative, but in the manner of the economists' network effects.
When we make these choices, as we do daily, we stand in for others, effectively making choices for them, and our ethics for deciding what we ought to do should be a fiduciary ethics.
9:11:47 AM
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AOL quietly changes Windows settings to combat pop-up spam (AP)
They are trying to do the right thing ... but you sort of
feel dirty after you hear it, said Bruce Schneier, chief technology
officer for Counterpane Internet Security Inc. It's a very dangerous
precedent in having companies go into your computer and turn things on and
off.
2:43:45 AM
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