Maszman Speaks!

Find the frog

Orig­i­nally uploaded by tom­masz

In the creek near my house.

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Orig­i­nally uploaded by tom­masz

It took us mul­ti­ple tries, but we finally found the Rock of Ages geo­cache over on the MCC ground. This has been our most elu­sive cache so far.

The Con­fer­ence Board of Canada issued a report this week on Intel­lec­tual Prop­erty issues in Canada. But in a ironic twist it turns out the report was mostly pla­gia­rized from a report by the Inter­na­tional Intel­lec­tual Prop­erty Alliance. Oops. After ini­tially stand­ing behind the report, they later recalled it because it “did not fol­low the high qual­ity research stan­dards of The Con­fer­ence Board of Canada.” (ital­ics mine) Prob­a­bly because it’s not actu­ally research at all, but why quib­ble over details?

And to add insult to injury, the Busi­ness Soft­ware Alliance (the guys who pro­duce those scary anti-piracy ads that no one pays atten­tion to) admit­ted that its Cana­dian soft­ware piracy num­bers were “esti­mates”, and no actual sur­veys had been done.

Even as news­pa­pers strug­gle to fig­ure out how to charge for web con­tent, the fact remains that they failed to report about the con­di­tions that led to the cur­rent reces­sion. But given how they failed to report accu­rately on WMDs in Iraq (instead just par­rot­ing what was given them), is any­one really sur­prised? When there’s some­thing impor­tant you need to know, it’s becom­ing less and less likely a news­pa­per will be report­ing it.

I per­son­ally can’t wait for the news­pa­pers to fail. As a mat­ter of fact, since their demise will only be has­tened by erect­ing pay­walls I hope their recent meet­ing bears fruit.

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Orig­i­nally uploaded by tom­masz

Yesterday’s wild weather resulted in some very dark skies.

My Way News — Fix­ing Hub­ble: No sweat; Watch­ing a movie: No way