15 February 2010

Some Snow Day This Is

Just a few quick notes today — single parents don't get federal holidays...

  • It looks like Southwest Airlines has decided that Amazon is the model of appropriate public relations. It's not just that Southwest threw Kevin Smith off a flight for taking up too much space... it's the reaction (or lack thereof).
  • Robert McCrum writes well out of character in The Observer by acknowledging that the GBS battle is not exactly a new and unique one. Now if he'll just bring more understanding of historical context to his regular commentary...
  • Hillary Clinton claims that Iran is in danger of becoming a military dictatorship. <SARCASM> And that is different from a theocratic dictatorship, or a CIA/MI5-sponsored military dictatorship, or outright colonialism, or two thousand years of absolute monarchism, in what way? </SARCASM> Persia/Iran doesn't have a history of anything except totalitarianism.
  • In yet more fallout of AmazonFail 3.21, Google appears to be in the process of allowing publishers to set prices for its Google Editions service. <SARCASM> And there's no connection whatsoever to the GBS settlement and its projected profit stream, as Google still believes the settlement should (and will) be approved substantially as it now exists. </SARCASM>
  • Meanwhile, PW continues to demonstrate that it can't be bothered to ask for assistance from the thousand (no, that's not much of an exaggeration) lawyers elsewhere in the Reed empire with this incredibly imperceptive reading of Google's "brief" supporting the GBS settlement. The scare quotes are there because it barely qualifies as a brief — which is supposed to bear at least some resemblance to reality, and instead takes more than a few liberties with both the facts and the law.