No, the threat of force (by dismissal or even by offers of violence) compels people to work together despite their differences. And sometimes not even that: People walk away, people go on strike. Money is just money -- and sometimes that is not enough.

Okay, the Three Laws of Robotics rewritten into legalese. How is that an improvement? The words of Asimov's laws are clear and concise; the new laws are vague ('system'? 'ethics'?) and open to wide interpretation. No, let's leave these 'alternative' laws in the vertical file where they belong.

If it reaches the point where Belgium, which is notorious for its disruptive behavior on the Internet, tries to extract money out of Yahoo! on the grounds of tortuous logic, as its press wing has tried to extort money out of Google, then maybe it is now time to dissolve the Belgian State and distribute its three regions between the Netherlands (Flanders), France (Wallonia) and Germany (Eupen). These groups do not get along, anyway; and the only reason there is still a Belgium is that nobody knows what to do with the capital, Brussels, when the country does break up.

There was an Ars Technica article that discusses font licensing issues and how they would pour ice water on the potential for @font-face:

The hazy future of Web typography

Until those issues are resolved, don't expect @font-face to make the Web more than bland.

This is the sort of nonsense that makes me never take Gardner seriously. These are the same people that years ago publicly advised Apple to drop their software line and to have Dell build their hardware. The advantages of wired LANs are obvious to us; why is it that they are not obvious to these supposed IT analysts?

No, Goggle does not. Google is primarily a search engine, whose ads on results make most of its profits. Among the hundreds of millions of Web pages and thousands of sites out there, there are bound to enough sites both useful and popular to make Google enough of a profit to afford the loss of a sideline or two. And Google News is just a sideline.

Green? It is hard for AP to play ball with Google when Google owns the baseball diamond. All Google has to do is remove all AP articles from News, as YouTube has removed all music video access to Britain, and then wait for the pain on the AP side to become intolerable. There is no naïvité in that tactic.

how easy it is to add the User Agent Switcher to Firefox and set Firefox up to pretend it is IE6.

But then, anyone who does know would not entrust any kind of data to someone's unguarded desktop workstation (as opposed to, say, a firewalled server). It doesn't speak well, not just to the IE fan but also to the State of Colorado for being so cheap as to hire him in the first place and make him use his workstation as a OIT server.

Sorry for my screwing up the tag setting. Anyway, that last sentence should say "I know people who work in its call center, and IBM is doing a really crappy job." The workers themselves are doing a great job in the miserable environment that they have to work in.

<p>It is not as if there wasn't any warning. IBM has been poorly run for a long time, and has been shedding American workers big time. The Cringley dude has been talking about this since 2006. To quote one of his posts from his defunct PBS site: <q cite="http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20071228_003726.html">IBM is the poster child for bad management. IBM's leadership appears transfixed on two things -- selling and cutting costs. They are pushing their sales force very hard and squeezing commissions at the same time. They are cutting everyone and everything.</q></p><p>And evidently they are still cutting.</p> <p>I am just waiting to see whether it gets around to dumping the Medicaid project my state's governor sold to them. I know people who work in its call centers, and they are doing a really crappy job.</p>

LibraryThing sells the :Cue:Cat for fifteen bucks to its users to make entering book info easier by scanning the barcode off the books. (Of course, for the really old stuff, you still need to type it all in.)