Time to end the copyright race
I dimly remember that in India, Shantiniketan has been granted a similar special-case extension of copyright on Tagore’s work.

And yes.
Wishing both my regular readers a very happy Deepawali!

Intentia International, which makes collaborative business software, charged that Reuters hacked into the Intentia Web site to gain access to Intentia’s third quarter financial report before the report was released publicly.
Reuters claims that all its reporter did was access the same URL that Intentia used to post its second-quarter results, then change the characters “2Q” in the URL of the older Web page to “3Q” to access the new financial results.
“… no fooling around with a password, numeric code or whatever,” said Reuters spokesman Peter Thomas. Internet Week via Webjives
This is getting sillier all the time. First it was don’t link. Now it is don’t access.
And in unrelated news, “The Examined Life” now requires you to request for permission by email before you click on any link on this site. The email id can be found here

Only one of this is true

I couldn’t resist completing the link cycle. So here goes:
Netahoy’s Blog
One more fact about TNT – Really stupid security policies b by Ravikiran [via S Anand ]

Now my turn:

One more fact about TNT: Boom Bam Crash for India Today’s TNT
TNT is dead [via S Anand ]

We thank you for your support to TheNewspaperToday, India’s first online newspaper. Unfortunately, due to unavoidable circumstances, TNT has become an unviable business proposition.
So, India Today Group Online has decided to merge its news operations with the group’s mother site, the online version of India Today, from November 1, 2002.

Excuse me, but how on earth did TNT become an “unviable business proposition”? India Today is a newsmagazine. They have a TV channel (Aaj Tak) under their command. Certainly they don’t lack for news sources. When they say that the business model didn’t work out, are they saying that they couldn’t get enough suckers people to sign up to defray the cost of just running the site – the hardware, bandwidth and some 2-3 guys to administer the thing?
Possible, but I have another idea. They must have figured out that no one visits their India Today site either and the reason they don’t is that it is updated only once a week. (And is hidden behind a 4-digit number.) So how do you get people to go there? Have a continuously updated news feed for free of course. Those who come to read the news might just stay and pay for the articles. But of course, you can’t give away for free in one site what you charge 499 bucks a year for in another.

Laika, the first dog in space was actually female. I didn’t know that. I guess it is no longer okay to call a non-human female a bitch.

The handshake went through a Phantom — a device that combines robotic and force-sensing technology to detect the feel of a surface by the way it reacts to a probe. The vibrations set up in this way are digitised and transmitted over the Internet to another hand-held object, which is made to vibrate in sy?pathy to the original probe. “You can not only feel the resulting force, but you can also get a sense of the quality of the object you’re feeling — whether it’s soft or hard, wood-like or fleshy said Mel Slater, Professor of Computer Science at University College London (UCL) and one of the leaders of the research effort. ZDNet
Interesting. But where does Internet 2 come into the picture? They have also gratuitously thrown in IPV6.

I have decided to solve the Kaveri dispute. Seriously! Every one else has tried to and failed. They have tried

• Negotiations: Didn’t work. This is a zero-sum game. Both Karnataka and Tamil Nadu want the water and if it doesn’t rain enough, there just isn’t enough water for everyone. So a negotiated solution will simply mean that both chief ministers play politics every year and there is a lot of bitterness all around.
• the Judicial solution: Won’t work. There really isn’t any law or any question of fairness involved. Outside those domains, any solution a court conjures up is completely arbitrary. If it tries to impose that solution, the inevitable result will be that the authority of the court gets eroded.
• the Paternalistic solution: Won’t work. There is a very good reason the Centre is not getting involved in the whole problem. Any solution it comes up with will piss off at least one, and possibly both the states. That means the BJP loses votes.

  So we have a real problem. When it rains a lot in that year, everyone gets water, but when it doesn’t, many cities don’t get water to drink, and some farms have to lie fallow that year. As long as this is a political question, there is no real way of figuring out who has to sacrifice. (And “why can’t we all do with a little less?” may not be an acceptable solution. As long as it is drinking-bathing water, a 20% cut may mean that we don’t bathe on weekends. But a 20% cut across the board for farms may mean 100% destruction of crops because of insufficient water. I don’t really know. ) So I think we should go in for:

• the Capitalist solution: Form a Kaveri River Authority. Auction the water to groups of farmers (district associations? perhaps. whatever is the smallest unit at which the tap can be turned on or off. ) Whatever money you raise from the auction, distribute it to the others who do not get the water.

So if it rains less in one year, the price of water goes up, and more farmers will decide to keep their land fallow, collect the money and do something else. If it rains much, basically, the price goes down and it makes more sense to till the land.
Voila! You have a working solution. Of course, there are some rough edges to be worked out. For example, how do we identify the farmers who are entitled to cash? When will the auction take place? After the rainy season starts or before? But at least this solution will ensure that the yearly riots don’t take place.

India, of course, is central to the exhibition. The photographs tell the stories – the ayahs, the railways, the tiffin and the regiments. So do the models of those magnificent Indian steam trains, the huge oil painting of the Great Delhi Durbar of 1903 (effectively paralleled by a jerky old film of the same event), the commentaries and the statistics. Upstairs, in a spacious area for special exhibitions and temporary displays, the museum has assembled an impressive collection of pioneering photographs of India from 1850 until 1900, illuminating the daily life of the Raj. Times Online

Just a thought. Have we ruled ourselves any better than the British did? I am not asking whether we are better off now than we were 55 years ago. We definitely are. My question is whether we wouldn’t have been even better off if we had simply continued the policies that the British followed rather than substitute those policies with socialism.

I have decided to change my tagline to
“The Examined Life – your one-stop source on the web for information about average heights of men and women”.
Why does it look as if all over the world, anyone who is interested in heights of men and women land up at my site?
These are some search strings through which people came to my site in the past one week!

• average height of woman man
• women taller than men
• woman height 6’5”
• average height men
• “average height” men women
• average woman’s height

and some guys who can’t do maths landed up too.

• 5 feet and 6 inches is how many metres in height
• what is 1.77 metres in feet height (My site came first for this and gave him an answer)

These search queries form the majority of search requests in my referrer logs. All because of one stupid puzzle which I posted and no one answered .

Other people peeked in their server logs and saw .NET CLR penetration at around 6 – 8%. Some very consumer oriented sites are seeing even less (2-3&#37. –Joel Spolsky

That is funny. My server logs indicate that 100% of my regular visitors have the .Net runtime.
[You mean both of them? – ed.]
[Yes. Ravi @office and Ravi @home. – Ravikiran ]