Future of the newspapers

Many people seems to be wondering how the future of newspapers will look like. I cannot claim I can foresee it, but some trends seem obvious.
There will be some consolidation. Not necessarily reduction in the number of brands, but possibly in the contents. It seems easy to imagine that New York Times will move to a seller of coverage of general (world-wide, nation-wide) news. Local newspaper will buy these stories and add their local bit - something they know way better than NYT (think San Diego Tribune).
There are probably more things to be said, but maybe later...

National Parks

There are plenty of things that simply suck in the US, but National Parks make it up. For a comprehensive set of pictures from our trip, check Katarina's Picasa page. For a special selection, check mine.
The sky was like I have never seen. Grand Canyon is simply unbelievable, and so are Sequoia trees. And Yosemite valley is just beautiful.

Different style

I have overdrawn my account (not completely my fault), for which a significant fine was imposed. One email was enough to get a refund.

Compared to Czech Republic, I'm happy for this, a little different style.

Law and Order

I have always preferred Law and Order to CSI because of more realistic stories and script. However, after watching season finale of SVU, I can't stop thinking how lame the script is. Imagine a no-lawyer self-defending himself who questions basics of standard techniques police uses or a cop, who goes to get his partner who was kidnapped and DOES NOT TELL anyone. More stupidities keep coming, as the story unravels. I guess 18 years is 18 years. But it seems more acceptable that Maggie did not age during that same time.

Louis Vuitton

I always consider LV as a firm which existence I have to accept, but will never be really happy about. I could not articulate why, but this is one of the good reasons:

An artist named Nadia Plesner recently put together a project to try to raise money for the victims of genocide in Darfur. As part of the campaign, she created a t-shirt with a drawn image of a Darfur victim "pimped" out to look like Paris Hilton -- that is, carrying a designer handbag and a small dressed up dog. The entire profits from the t-shirts are going to help the victims. The handbag drawn in the image is not specifically a Louis Vuitton bag, but the design firm seems to have gone ballistic, claiming all sorts of intellectual property rights it simply does not possess. First, it sent a (admittedly friendly) cease-and-desist, which Plesner wrote about on the site, while responding and telling the company that she would not take down the t-shirt or the image. In response, LV went from friendly to nasty. It sued, demanding $7,500 for each day she keeps selling the product, $7,500 for each day she displays its original cease-and-desist letter and (my favorite) $7,500 for each day she mentions the name "Louis Vuitton" on her website.

Czech Academy of Sciences

... is famous again. But not for what you would expect:

But the IFPI says that the research institute was in fact the unwitting host of a server that powered one of the largest pre-release music archives in the world, and with the help of Czech police, the server and its 4TB of data has been shut down.

Given my insider knowledge into piracy at Czech Universities, I'm not sure that "unwitting" is the right word. Still, 4Tb of pre-release music? Even at 700MB/CD (ie, no compression whatsoever), it is about 5700 CDs. There is that much pre-release music?

Academic success

Arnold King:

My tip on becoming a successful academic is to be careful how you define success. Any tenured professor has a great life by most standards. However, the default sentiment in academia is bitter jealousy. The folks at lower-tier schools think they belong at top-20 schools, the folks at other top-20 schools think they belong at Harvard, and the folks at Harvard think that they deserve more recognition than the other folks at Harvard.

While this is mostly true, it is hardly complete explanation. Academics are usually pretty smart people and they choose their careers for three main, partially exclusive, reasons.
1. They want to have a big impact (bigger than just a fat pocket)
2. They want to have comfortable, un-stressful life
3. They want the reputation associated with "tenured professor" status.

While 2 and 3 are not really interesting for me, the first point is the key. Money are not all for these people, and wages of professors are not that bad, either. The biggest goal is thus different - to make a difference. To push the knowledge forward. To figure out something nobody knows yet.

However, it is hard to succeed. Chances are that you will end up fifty-something, your published research is in the low-rank journals and/or not cited anyway. This is huge failure - you gave up money and other possible success two decades ago and for what? That only a couple of grad students read your paper?

Cynicism

Coming from highly cynical country, I don't expect law to be followed, I expect them to be circumvent. Thus, I found this funny:

Sen. John McCain's campaign has announced that it is asking individuals to donate as much as about $70,000 to accounts that could help his campaign. The cap on donations to presidential candidates is $4,600 per election campaign.

Wall Street Journal

Responsible politicians

One tends to think that those politicians who create big budget deficit are irresponsible. But it's not that simple. Imagine that you are a responsible politician in power. You probably know how you could use the money and you think that your ideas are better than your competitors, right?
Well, if YOU don't spend as much money as possible, the other party will eventually win and they will spend them.
So it is your obligation as a responsible politician to create as large budget deficit as possible.

Skynet

Watching Sarah Connor's chronicles and reading about Google, I can't stop wondering whether the first worldwide artificial intelligence will not be a military network, but Google's Cloud.
As this report claims Google has about 1 million computers (other estimates generally agree), plugged into the network, reliable, robust, redundant.