Gleanings

I’ve been kind of busy, in part due to my employer having made some sort of announcement approximately every fifteen minutes for the last three months. I’m still behind on more or less everything, but here are some things that have built up in my tabs bar that I just can’t bring myself to bypass. Item: Quoting Simon Phipps: “It seems to me inevitable that eventually, the nobility of the old world will turn up at the doors of the frontiersmen of the new world and demand payment of tribute in the form of patents royalties.” Item: Br’er Rob channels Georg channeling God. Item: Zawodny: Do Search Engines Censor Bloggers? Good question; the one time I’ve dropped into unmitigated-flame mode here about a company, the result is that if you type their name into Google, my flame’s right there beside their homepage. I feel guilty even though they entirely earned the flame; people’s jobs are at stake. Item: Good Richard Pryor eulogy. I still think the original Richard Pryor Live video is maybe the funniest thing I’ve ever seen, comedy striving for the divine and not missing by much. Item: IBM licensing its patent portfolio to startups via VCs. This deserves more attention than it’s received. My initial reaction is visceral horror, does it mean you can’t safely start a company without taking VC money? Item: Beau Hartshorne has abandoned databases in favor of Atom. Item: Amazingly cool optical illusion. Unifying theme: None.