Month: February 2004

In all the resignations, accusations, protests and so on surrounding the BBC and its reporting of the pre-war intelligence that Lord Hutton now says was
not “sexed up”, I always wondered why Andrew Gilligan, the BBC reporter, or the organization itself wasn't risking some legal sanction if it was, in
fact, so wrong.
Conor Gearty asks — and answers — that very question in the current issue of the London Review of Books.:

A Misreading of the Law

Why didn't Campbell sue?
“If Gilligan's broadcast was so terrible, if the Blairs were having
sleepless nights as a result of being accused of deceit, if the prime
minister was shunned at home and abroad as a liar, the law has a simple
remedy, the one adopted by Albert Reynolds in the case that Hutton makes so
much of: sue for libel.”

For good or bad, I'm usually computing on three or four different machines. On each machine I'm receiving e-mail and surfing the Web. Generally, when I find something interesting, I plop the URL or the document into electronic Inbaskets I have on each machine with the intention of going through that inbasket and taking a closer look at what I've hauled in. This weekend was the one for going through the Inbasket on the G4 Cube I have in the home office. There's a pile of stuff in there, some of it really cool, some of it dated and trashed.
One of the coolest things in that inbasket, though, may be old news to many readers of this blog — this made its first round on the Internet several months ago — but if you haven't seen it yet check out this Honda commercial. (This is a 3.2 MB QuickTime file). So far as I know it aired only in the UK. It's a marvel of engineering (and some pretty decent cinematography, too: It's just one very long shot or take.)

Now this is rich: Janet Jackson's Super Bowl boob stunt has now been
condemned by the Free Speech Coalition, the U.S. trade association of the
adult entertainment industry.
In a press release the group put out yesterday, executive director Kat
Sunlove said “the entire half-time performance had distinctly sexual
overtones and was therefore inappropriate for a family show such as
Superbowl. We see it as a matter of giving parents adequate and timely
warning that such adult-oriented material is coming up. For example, people
and parents
know what children will see if they let them watch “Sex in the City”, or
programs
labeled as adult themed. That is obviously not the case with the Superbowl,
which is
expected to be family fare, a G rating, not PG-13. The adult entertainment
industry would never have
offered such titillating fare for a family show. There is a time and a place
for adult
entertainment and the Superbowl is neither.”

My friend Tyler Hamilton reports in today's Toronto Star that Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. is about to become the first Canadian municipality to roll out residential high-speed Internet service which uses power lines to carry data traffic. The Soo's local public utilities commission (PUC) will use Wi-Fi transmitters on hydro poles as its last-mile solution but power lines will be used as the transmission layer back to the PUC's central office where fibre will continue to be the main backbone to the wider Internet.