Janet Reno to host dance party

“We’ve consistently heard from people that if we had a dance party of our own it would be a terrific way to engage young people in the campaign.”

Voter polls show Reno leading the race for the [Florida] Democratic gubernatorial nomination. If she wins the September 10 primary, she will face Republican Gov. Jeb Bush, the younger brother of President Bush, in the November general election.

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There’s a bad news tech story floating around that’s getting spun idiotically as a good news story. Some San Francisco consultancy says that 93 dot-coms have closed down since the beginning of the year. The good news is supposedly that that’s down from the 345 that folded in same period as last year, and the 862 that folded the year before.

What seems to have eluded both InformationWeek (where the story originated) and the AP (which picked it up), is that the dot-com world is hardly the target-rich environment that it was two years ago. Yes, the number of failures is down dramatically; it apparently hasn’t occurred to anyone connected with this story that there are a hell of a lot fewer companies available today to fail.

Let’s put it this way. There are 25 people in a room, and 15 of them die on the first day. Ten more die on the second day. By this consultancy’s reckoning, the second day represents progress, since fewer people died that day than on the first day.

“I believe in equality for everyone, except reporters and photographers.”
— Mahatma Gandhi

Interesting Net-related ruling last week from the New York State Court of Appeals (NY’s highest court).

The question before the court is whether an item on the Web is published when it’s first made available, or when it’s seen? The more aware of technology you are, the more subtle the question may become. Many sites — including this one — don’t create static web pages, but rather generate the content on demand. That means the page you see is different from the page that someone else might see, but that both of them are created especially for you and aren’t necessarily stored anywhere in that precise form.

So if I libel you on a dynamically created page that you don’t see for three years after the offending item is first available, when precisely have I libelled you? When you see it? Or when it was first see-able? It makes a difference because in New York, you have just 1 year after the libel to file suit.

Anyway, the AP reports that in New York, publication happens when an item is first posted:

The Court of Appeals said it made little sense to adopt Mr. Firth’s argument that a new publication took place ÷ and a new limitation period started running ÷ with every downloading of a document.

I’m not sure that’s right technologically, but it feels right on the merits.

Piece this morning in the Wall Street Journal (it’s behind a tollbooth, so no link) about the sorry state of Central American economies tied to coffee prices. Seems that there’s now a global glut; wholesale prices are at 50 cents per pound, while production costs in the high mountains are 80 cents per pound. The result is a lot of people out of work — and the very real possibility that they’ll turn to growing something a whole lot less benign than coffee.

What makes the article worth looking for is a rundown of how high coffee prices were an instrument of American foreign policy during the Cold War: strong prices means stable governments, which meant slim pickings for the Godless Pledge-fearing Commies. Now the Vietnam (speaking of Godless Pledge-fearing Commies) has joined Brazil as a major exporter of low-quality beans, supply outstrips demand.

Not that you’d notice it at the checkout, of course. WSJ points out that while wholesale prices have dropped 80 percent in the last five years, retail prices have dropped 20 percent.

Favorite quote:

“Up to 75% of a typical can of coffee is now made up of the cheap stuff, which they then cut with Central American or Colombian [arabica] beans so your coffee doesn’t taste like a shoe,” says Eric Poncon, director in Nicaragua of ECOM Group.

We’re back.

OTE and the entire Dan Rosenbaum family of fine information products was unexpectedly offline from Friday evening until Monday noon. Some sort of switch problem that knocked out the mail and web servers — and apparently a bunch of other machines.

The good news is that the outage encouraged me to get away from the machines so I had a lovely weekend full of lots of family. The other good news is that I’ve more or less forgotten all the things I wanted to post.

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
— Galileo Galilei.

Walt Kelly. “Now is the time for all good men to come to.” [Quotes of the Day]

You Snooze You Win, Learning Study Reveals

Back in the day, the two major wire services (that’d be UPI and the AP, sonny) got together and issued a consolidated style book. They agreed on things like tricky spellings and usage and correct form for datelines. Each service went a little beyond the basics, though. The UPI Stylebook was studded with entries such as:

burro, burrow: A burro is an ass. A burrow is a hole in the ground. As a journalist, you are expected to know the difference.

That one never made it into the AP version, which is about all you need to know about the difference between UPI and the AP.

Except for this: for years, the AP book was titled “The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual.” It doesn’t take a genius to read that at least two different ways. So I mourned just a little today when I saw that the latest edition — two years old now — is called “The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law.”