Stories

Bulwer-Lytton

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A Microsoft employee has won the Oscar of bad prose – and no, he isn’t even a weblogger.

Every year the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest honors the best attempts to parody bad fiction. It’s judged by Professor Scott Rice at San Jose State University in California, and is now in its 22nd year.

It’s an impressive achievement, as the bar has been pushed ever higher over the years. For example, it’s hard to imagine anyone topping 2002’s winning submission from Rephah Berg:

On reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll gets a little squashed so it hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you can hear the rest going bumpity-bumpity in its holder until you go nuts and push it back into shape, a degree of annoyance that Angela had now almost attained.

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After Grokster: why (almost) everything we’re told about P2P is wrong

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Emerging Bicycle

Grokster! Is it the end of the world as we know it? No, it isn’t. But before we examine how the two lobbies, the technology lobby and the recording industry lobby, have let us down so badly, let’s pause for a moment to consider how the press has let us down this week, too.

The first rule of punditry is that you must never, ever let the facts get in the way of an argument. Especially if it’s an argument you’ve been rehearsing for days, weeks or even years.

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Tag me stupid, baby!

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This postbag contains small pieces of irony or humor which may choke small children or law professors

Perhaps we should call them The New Literalists. Or is Nitpickers a better word? Or how about Pixel Pedants?

The Road to Hell looks like it’s going to be Tagged With Good Intentions, if you pardon the twisted idiom. There are indeed some painfully earnest people who want to avoid any misunderstanding in our online communications through the sheer power of angle brackets.

No, we’re not talking about the Creative Commons crew – but about the quite wonderful taxonomy proposed by former newspaper columnist Dan Gillmor that’s designed to promote honest n’healthy discourse: Honor Tags.

(See Are you trying to be funny? If so check [ ] this box).

Here at El Reg, we view it as an extension of our sadly-abandoned Humor Tags initiative, that we first thought of about four years ago.

Now here’s what you think of the idea of tagging yourself stupid.

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On Computers, Creativity and Copyright

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“We’d run out of ironic things to say”
Neil Tennant

Creative Commons is an intriguing experiment to granulize the rights a creator has over his or her work, and to formalize what today is largely spontaneous and informal. What we rarely see when it is discussed, is a genuine attempt to answer the question “Why is it needed?”

For a very self-consciously idealistic “movement” this, absence of an explanation is surprising.

Behind the scheme is the recognition of a very real problem. The permission mechanisms by which rights holders grant or deny the reproduction of artistic works haven’t kept pace with technology. It’s now very easy to reproduce an image or a piece of music, but it remains just as easy, or difficult, to get the permission to use it. We now have an abundance of material available to us, they ask, so can’t we do more with it?

It’s a reasonable question, and Creative Commons is an attempt to answer it.

Let’s look closer at what it is.

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Are you trying to be funny? If so check [ ] this box

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The return of the irony tag

After ten years of the net, few amongst us have yet to realize that computer networks can be a lousy communication medium. Against all the good things that we’ve gained – such as the disappearance of physical distance, traversed by very slow moving postal workers – we must stack up the losses. And top of that list is the fact that most of the delicious ambiguities of language that we enjoy in everyday life simply aren’t conveyed online.

While today’s hive-minded tech evangelists view their digital exchanges as a kind of telepathy, it’s more like a stuttering Morse Code tapped out on a keyboard where the dash key isn’t working.

So all kinds of hilarious misunderstandings ensue. Factor in the frightful earnestness and literalism of some participants, who seem to be disproportionately represented online, and huge swathes of meaning are guaranteed to go undetected.

This is one of our favorite examples.

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‘Sims school’ abandons books for laptops

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Technology vendors have long viewed the state of Arizona as rich pickings. In addition to the Federal pork barrel, state tax payers have found over $60m dollars for IT investment.

Now a high school in Tuscon is abandoning textbooks entirely, at the urging of the school district’s technology evangelist, who appears to have caught the religion big time.

Instead of spending $600 per head on textbooks, Vail High School in Tucson will buy each of its 350 sophomores an $850 laptop. That shouldn’t be too difficult – the school itself is located in a science park. But the Tucson school district’s superinterindent, an enthusiastic technology evangelist called Calvin Baker, candidly admits he doesn’t know quite how it will all work.

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For ambulance-chasing bloggers, tragedy equals opportunity

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No human disaster these days is complete without two things, both of which can be guaranteed to surface within 24 hours of the event.

First, virus writers will release a topical new piece of malware. And then weblog evangelists proclaim how terrific the catastrophe is for the internet. It doesn’t seem to matter how high the bodies are piled – neither party can be deterred from its task.

For the technology evangelists, the glee is barely containable. The daily business of congratulating each other jumps to a whole new level with all the bloggers marveling in unison at their ability to detail real-time tragedy.

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Lawrence Lessig’s other court case

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A dramatic update on Professor Lawrence Lessig’s other court case written by his friend John Heilemann appears in New York Metro magazine this week. And this is a battle that critics as well as supporters are praying will end in victory for the lawyer and scholar this time.

Lessig is representing John Hardwicke, who like himself is a former pupil of the American Boychoir School (now the Columbus Boychoir School) in Princeton, New Jersey. Hardwicke claims he was abused by multiple staff including the music director. The school argued it should be immune from such negligence lawsuits, and a trial court had agreed. Incredibly, the school even claimed the sex between now fugitive choir director and Hardwicke was consensual. The case was heard by the state’s supreme court, and in what reads like a movie script, the evidence turned on Lessig himself.

In front of the state supreme court, Lessig tore up the rule book and confronted years of private torment by revealing that he had been abused himself at the school.

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Valley execs’ greed returns to dotcom levels

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While record numbers of tech jobs were shipped offshore last year, Silicon Valley’s tech execs gorged themselves at levels unseen since the dot com boom.

Tech executives pocketed an astonishing $2.1bn in compensation last year, every cent at the shareholders’ expense. That’s the highest level since $2.1bn recorded in 1999, the San Jose Mercury reports in its annual survey of fatcat pay. Median executive pay rose 57 per last year.

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Lookout, France! Google hires neo-con headbanger

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Axis of Do No Evil

The company that prides itself on “Doing No Evil” isn’t taking any chances with its latest executive appointment. Dan Senor, the company’s new Global Communications and Strategy VP, has a CV guaranteed to have Register columnist Otto Z Stern firing a celebratory fusillade skywards from his compound in New Mexico.

A former Senior Associate at the Carlyle Group, Senor was briefly Scott McLellan’s deputy as White House spokesman before becoming head of the the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq’s information department. The White House web site bills him as Senior Advisor to Presidential Envoy L. Paul Bremer III. Fox News hired Senor as a panelist in February. While in Iraq Senor showed his loyalty by going jogging in a Bush-Cheney ’04 tracksuit.

Not everyone is impressed.

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