Starting Early

It's clearly a good day to go on a rant, because I've only been in the office for about half an our (for reference, that makes it 9AM, and there's still no one else here). The first was a news item that Kerry's announcement of Edwards as his running mate hit the web first before hitting the major news services.

The quote that set me off was this one from the end of the article:

"It's gone from being a 24-hour news cycle to a nanosecond news cycle," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a nonprofit organization that studies U.S. Internet use.

I hate to be nit-picky, but I think this whole thing about things happening in "nanoseconds" is really getting over-used. Or maybe I'm just peeved because the work I do actually happens in nanoseconds. In the next couple years it will start happening in picoseconds, and I suppose that will have to console me until the news media latches on to that one, too.

The other article that pissed me off was the BSA's report that world losses to software piracy were $29B. But this is nothing new, the BSA (the poorly-disguised strong-arm of Microsoft) always makes me angry with these numbers. Mainly because, well, they made it up (they call it an "estimate").

It's not like someone cracked the lock on some warehouse, walked in, and loaded up 29 billion dollars worth of pallets of WinXP. It's that in the bizarro world that the BSA inhabits, if all those people actually paid list price for the software they ripped off, that's how much more money we would make. Never mind inconsequential details like the fact that in the countries were most of this software is stolen, the list price of Windows is more than the average monthly salary (I'll try to dig up some figures here).

Maybe I should stick to the Linux news services -- reading them is less stressful.