Backstroke of the West

Backstroke of West is the direct English to Chinese translation of Revenge of the Sith. More at
http://www.winterson.com.nyud.net:8090/2005/06/episode-iii-backstroke-of-west.html


Backstroke of West is the direct English to Chinese translation of Revenge of the Sith. More at http://www.winterson.com.nyud.net:8090/2005/06/episode-iii-backstroke-of-west.html

I miss the Ewoks

Windows Puns

The Monthly Palladium Office Quotable Conversation

Quan: How come we have so much liquids in here? (Referring to the numerous half-filled bottles of mineral water and near-empty cups of vendo coffee)

Sarj blushes.

Cliff: Yeah, what are we? Terrorists?

free

www.bbc.co.uk

Sony's Reader = the new ebook

Mark thought of developing a product like this early this year. Simultaneous inspiration, I guess. And lots of capital backing.

SONY READER SPECS
Display: 15cm diagonally
Battery life: 7,500 pages before recharge
Formats: BBeB/PDF/JPEG/MP3
Size: 175mm x 124mm x 14mm
Weight: 250g

Sony Reader targets book lovers
By Alfred Hermida Technology editor, BBC News website in Las Vegas

Sony boss Howard Stringer unveiled the Reader at CESSony is trying to do for e-books what Apple has done for downloadable digital music. It has launched a handheld device designed for electronic books- dubbed the Sony Reader - at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

It has a screen made from electronic paper that makes text look almost as sharp as it is on a printed page.

Sony hopes the gadget will tempt more people to download and read books in digital, rather than paper, format.

Electronic ink

E-books have not made much of an impact as the experience of reading on-screen has failed to live up to expectations. As a result although sales of e-books are growing they still account for only a tiny fraction of the overall book market.

The electronics giant aims to address this with the electronic paper used for the display in the Sony Reader. It says the six-inch black and white screen will be as easy to read as the printed page.

The technology used means the screen is not backlit, avoiding screen flicker, which can put a strain on the eyes.

The device's display uses technology developed by US-based firm E-Ink which works by electronically arranging thousands of tiny black and white capsules to form characters.

"In recent years millions of people have become comfortable downloading and enjoying digital media, including e-books," said Ron Hawkins of Sony Electronics.
"But until now, there has not been a good device on which to read."
Publishers onboard

The Reader is about the size of a paperback, is 14mm thick at its widest and weighs little more than 250g.

The slim device is the size of a paperback bookIt will go on sale in the spring and is expected to sell for between $300 and $400 in the US.

Sony has realised the importance of making sure there is good content for a gadget like this.

It has done deals with major publishers, including Random House, Penguin and HarperCollins, to sell digital e-books via its Connect online store.

This is similar to what Apple has done with its iTunes music store, which effectively created the market for digital music downloads. But Sony faces a number of challenges.

This is the second time the Japanese electronics giant has tested the waters with an e-book reader.

In 2004 it launched a similar device called the Librie in Japan, which failed to take off due to its high price and the restrictions it imposed on readers.

Additionally other companies are also working on devices using the same E Ink technology. And some are working on flexible electronic paper displays that can be rolled up.

Are we robots?

We've all got a list of things that would make us happy:

Call it our Happiness Wish List:
- more money
- a good relationship
- world peace
- better hair...

Of course, making a list is never the problem......

the problem is making the list happen: the world, after all, is a difficult place to control. But the reason we keep going, the reason we keep trying every day, is the firm belief that if we really could get all the things in our list, we'd end up being substantially happier than we are now.

More from http://www.consciousrobots.co.uk/

waiting two hours for the departed

Last night was the lousiest night I've ever had. I'm estopped from complaining but here's what should have happened: I should have said no to waiting for 2 hours to watch a 10:10 film and insisted to get out of here to catch a 9 p.m. showing and dinner in Greenhills. Cliff is right. I don't know what I'm doing with where I am. I should get out of it. Relationships are overrated. The only fun part is the beginning.

High Court in Britain Loosens Strict Libel Law

By SARAH LYALL
Published: October 12, 2006

LONDON, Oct. 11 — Britain’s highest court ruled Wednesday for the first time that journalists have the right to publish allegations about public figures, as long as their reporting is responsible and in the public interest.

The ruling, a unanimous judgment by the Law Lords, is a huge shift in British law and significantly improves journalists’ chances of winning libel cases in a court system that until now has been stacked against them.

English judges have traditionally been so sympathetic to libel plaintiffs that many people from abroad have sued in English courts — even if the publications in question have tiny circulations here — because they have had a much better chance of winning here than at home.

Newspaper editors said the decision, in the case of Jameel v. Wall Street Journal Europe, would free them to pursue stories vigorously without constant fear of lawsuits.

“This will lead to a greater robustness and willingness to tackle serious stories, which is what the judges said they wanted,” said Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian. Until now, he said in an interview, newspapers have had to police themselves to the point where “stories weren’t getting in the paper or were being neutered by clever lawyers who knew how to play the game.”

The case concerned an article published on Feb. 6, 2002, in The Wall Street Journal and in its European edition, The Wall Street Journal Europe, which has a daily circulation of 18,000 in Britain.

The article said that at the request of the United States, Saudi Arabia was monitoring bank accounts of prominent Saudi businesses and individuals to trace whether they were being used, possibly unwittingly, to siphon money to terrorist groups.

One of the businesses mentioned, Abdul Latif Jameel Company Ltd., sued the newspaper, as did Muhammed Abdul Latif Jameel, its general manager and president. Under British libel law, newspapers being sued are required to prove the truth of the allegations they print — the opposite of the situation in the United States, where the burden of proof falls heavily on plaintiffs.

But that was a practical impossibility in this case, a member of the panel that ruled on Wednesday, Lord Hoffmann, wrote in his decision.

“In the nature of things, the existence of surveillance by the highly secretive Saudi authorities would have been impossible to prove by evidence in open court,” he said. The paper argued that the article was in the public interest — that is, important to the debate about terrorism and the authorities’ efforts to combat it.

A court ruling in a case several years ago involving The Times of London first seemed to open the door to such an argument. But that decision set out what some lawyers say was a prohibitively high set of standards for newspapers and other news media to meet, forcing them to defend their reporting practices to satisfy the subjective opinions of individual English judges.

In the Jameel case, a lower court jury rejected The Journal’s public-interest argument, finding that the article was defamatory. The Journal was ordered to pay £40,000 — or about $74,000 — in damages. An appeals court affirmed the ruling.

The Law Lords overturned the decision. In a ringing rebuke to the lower court judge’s conclusion that the article was not in the public interest, in part because it flouted an agreement between the United States and Saudi Arabia to keep the monitoring program secret, Lord Hoffmann declared it to be “a serious contribution in measured tone to a subject of very considerable importance.”

Another member of the panel, Lord Scott of Foscote, defended the right of news organizations to publish material deemed private by the government.

“It is no part of the duty of the press to cooperate with any government, let alone foreign governments, whether friendly or not, in order to keep from the public information of public interest the disclosure of which cannot be said to be damaging to national interests,” he wrote.

A third member, Baroness Hale of Richmond, wrote, “We need more such serious journalism in this country, and our defamation law should encourage rather than discourage it.”
Keith Mathieson, a partner specializing in media law at the firm of Reynolds Porter Chamberlain, said the ruling would make it easier for newspapers to rely on confidential sources, as long as the articles were responsibly reported and in the public interest.

“It should make it easier for newspapers in the U.K. to publish serious stories where they cannot prove that allegations are true,” he said in an interview.

Stuart Karle, The Wall Street Journal’s general counsel, said that the newspaper had spent millions of dollars on the case and that the decision represented an important turning point. “The history of English libel law was that essentially no decision was final in a newsroom until a judge, several years later, agreed with you,” he said in an interview.

“Going forward,” he said, “this decision means that if you’re a quality news organization you can fully and fairly cover the important issues of the day without this nagging problem of having a libel judge in London basically engage in an autopsy of every single thing you did and decide whether he agrees with your editorial judgment.”

available at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/12/world/europe/12britain.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin

a place i miss the most

Puddle