From the New York Times: “Despite an improved economy, many Japanese are feeling a sense of insecurity about the nation’s schools, which once turned out students who consistently ranked at the top of international tests. That is no longer true, which is why many people here are looking for lessons from India, the country the Japanese see as the world’s ascendant education superpower.”
Move over, Asimov! Warren Ellis, master of the “decompressed” style of storytelling in comic books, has come up with his own Three Laws of Robotics.
I like the second law: “Robots do not want to have sex with you. Are you listening, Japan?”
In Robert Downey Sr.’s movie, Putney Swope, there’s a scene in which the title character meets with photographer Mark Focus (great name!). Things go badly for Mark when they start negotiating price…
As the blog Photo Business News & Forum puts it, it’s “further evidence of the negotiation axiom “whoever speaks first loses” after price is discussed.
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Gag Orders in a Facebook Age
“For 24 hours, newspapers, TV and radio stations were legally forbidden to release Stefanie Rengel’s name [a teenage girl in Toronto allegedly murdered by a teenage boy, allegedly at the request of his girlfriend, also a teen], but on the Internet tributes to the slain teen – and the names of her accused killers – sprang up almost immediately, including on the social networking site Facebook.“
My favourite line from the O’Reilly OnLAMP.com article What the Perl 6 and Parrot Hackers Did on their Christmas Vacation: “A running joke in the Perl 6 world is that we’ll release a stable Perl 6.0.0 by Christmas. We just won’t tell you which Christmas.”
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The Coming 2008 Dot-Com Crash
The Coming 2008 Dot-Com Crash. Greg Linden writes: “I am only going to make one prediction, but one with broad impact. We will see a dot-com crash in 2008. It will be more prolonged and deeper than the crash of 2000.”
Back in late 2006, I wrote an article about how they’ve been predicting that for the fourth year in a row, someone has declared that “this is the year RSS will be big!”.
I also wrote:
Perhaps I should start a betting pool on when the pundits will stop predicting that RSS will go mainstream next year. I’ll put money down on 2009. Any takers?
I’m glad I didn’t put money down on 2008, as someone has declared 2008 as the “Year of RSS”. Yes, it was a blog called Enterprise RSS, but still…
I think that “The Year of RSS” is turning into “The Rapture” — always imminent, but never actually coming to pass.