Events

Working at home today (thus the earlier post with the dog). This is why: The National Weather Service says it might melt on Sunday.

If Parker could have read this, he'd have been looking forward to this all day: Yes, I know, I've posted remarkably similar videos before. Who cares? It's a dog having fun in the snow, which I think has universal appeal.

My team are all working from home today because we have the technology to do so, and we saw this: A WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 9 AM THIS MORNING TO MIDNIGHT CST TONIGHT. * TIMING...SNOW WILL DEVELOP DURING THE MID TO LATE MORNING HOURS AND CONTINUE THROUGH THIS AFTERNOON...ENDING TONIGHT. THE HEAVIEST SNOWFALL WILL OCCUR THIS AFTERNOON. * ACCUMULATIONS...SNOWFALL TOTALS OF 5 TO 8 INCHES CAN BE EXPECTED. * HAZARDS...SNOW WILL FALL HEAVILY AT TIMES RESULTING IN REDUCED VISIBILITIES AND...

A couple of things have happened on two issues I mentioned earlier this week: On SOPA, my congressional representative, Mike Quigley, came out with a statement this morning formally declaring his opposition to the bill. Yes, he was also a dollar short...but we'll give him a pass. The Economist spent six column-inches about it in this week's issue explaining how this year's leap second would be the world's last. Today, however, the International Telecommunications Union punted the decision to 2015...

Via reader HF, the Supreme Court today decided Golan v Holder (pdf), in which the court held 6-2 that Congress was within its authority to restore copyright protection to some foreign works that had formerly lapsed into the public domain in the U.S. Writing for the majority, Justice Ginsburg said: "Neither the Copyright and Patent Clause nor the First Amendment, we hold, makes the public domain, in any and all cases, a territory that works may never exit." I'm still digesting the opinion, but let me say...

The Economist this week examines the imminent death of Kodak, which in the 1970s commanded 90% of the film market: Then came digital photography to replace film, and smartphones to replace cameras. Kodak’s revenues peaked at nearly $16 billion in 1996 and its profits at $2.5 billion in 1999. The consensus forecast by analysts is that its revenues in 2011 were $6.2 billion. It recently reported a third-quarter loss of $222m, the ninth quarterly loss in three years. In 1988, Kodak employed over 145,000...

Welcome back. We were html">dark today to protest two flawed legislative proposals, the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act. The administration today hinted at a threat to veto SOPA, while several senators have withdrawn support for PIPA in response to the blackout protests around the Internet: Co-sponsors who say they can no longer support their own legislation include Senators Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican, and Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat. Republican...

To counter SOPA, a Swedish group has gotten official recognition as a religion on the idea of Holy Information: The church, which holds CTRL+C and CTRL+V (shortcuts for copy and paste) as sacred symbols, does not directly promote illegal file sharing, focusing instead on the open distribution of knowledge to all. It was founded by 19-year-old philosophy student and leader Isak Gerson. He hopes that file-sharing will now be given religious protection. "For the Church of Kopimism, information is holy and...

The largest encyclopedia ever assembled will go offline tomorrow to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act, currently working its way through Congress's collective bowels. From Wikipedia's public statement: [T]he Wikimedia Foundation is asked to allocate resources and assist the community in blacking out the project globally for 24 hours starting at 05:00 UTC on January 18, 2012, or at another time as determined by the Wikimedia Foundation. This should be carried out while respecting technical...

We're having a very odd winter. After bottoming out at -15°C just yesterday, the temperature in Chicago has climbed past 6°C and it's getting warmer. Here's one consequence, which you can compare to Thursday: Today's forecast calls for rain and 8°C; the record for January 16 is 14°C.