Dan's New Blog

The Library of Congress announced — actually, they Tweeted — on Wednesday that they will soon archive every public Tweet since March 2006. I’m not sure Jefferson, who donated his collection of books to replace the library that the friggin Brits burned, would approve.

Then again, maybe he would. And maybe I should stop being an info snob. Twitter’s not all that different than Usenet, which Google archives. Somebody’s gotta do it. And, as with Usenet, there are some interesting threads hidden in that ocean of data.

Google is finally talking about one of the real interesting questions wrt Google Chrome OS: how the heck are you gonna print stuff with a Web-based operating system? More specifically, when you click “print”, will your resume pop up on someone’s printer in Bangalore instead?

Not to worry — Google has created Google Cloud Print, which will be “responsible for sending the print job to the appropriate printer with the particular options the user selected, and returning the job status to the app.”

It seems so simple, right?

Let’s be real, shall we? I truly believe that my printer was sent from Hell to make me miserable. It is worse than a pampered lapdog. If it runs out of paper during a print job, you’d think that it would simply alert me and wait for me to load more paper before continuing. But nooooooo. I have to stop the job, restart the spooler software, then specify the pages that still need to be printed. If it jams, it’s Armageddon time: I have to kill the print job, shut down the printer — sometimes I have to actually unplug it — then restart and resend the print job. And it won’t print black-and-white if it runs out of, say, cyan. So what makes Google think that they’re gonna do any better with the cloud if I can’t get the printer to work properly when it’s 6 inches away from my iMac?

Link via TechCrunch.

From today’s iPhone OS4 media event: iPhone OS4, due out this summer (iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch 3rd gen only) will feature multi-tasking (more or less) and iBooks.

There, I’m done.

The UK’s infamous Digital Economy Bill — otherwise known as DEBill passed the House of Commons last night and appears to be on track for approval in the House of Lords. The bill, which was given the hurry-up treatment so that it would pass ahead of the May 6 general election in the UK, is supposed to combat media pirates. The plan is that content providers will use the nation’s ISPs to police BitTorrenters by “speed blocks, bandwidth shaping, account suspension or other limits.”

(Hmmm … I’ve read something about ISPs throttling-back their customers recently, haven’t I? Oh, yeah.)

Apparently the UK took a page out of Germany’s book and passed an unpopular, unwanted law:

“Heavily lobbied by digital liberties activists, some MPs admit they don’t understand the proposal and many suspect the measures — rather than reduce piracy — will instead punish downloaders’ parents or public WiFi operators, while abusers find workarounds.”

BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow provides us with an example of how much the MPs really don’t understand about all those pipes and wires and blinky lights:

“Here’s Mark Todd, Labour MP for South Derbyshire, explaining why you should have your Internet connection cut off without even a written notice: ‘Is my Hon. Friend sure that a postal delivery will suffice? Many people may have chosen to form a contract with an ISP at some stage before moving, and may not have seen any particular reason to notify the ISP of a change of address.’ Yes, the last time I moved, I simply had the movers run a private fiber loop from my old premises to the new place. It took most of the day and they had to dig up nearly all of central London, but it was lots easier, ultimately, than notifying my ISP of my change of address.”

Comcast won Round 2 of its battle with the Federal Communications Commission this morning when the DC Circuit Court ruled that the FCC “has failed to tie its assertion of ancillary authority over Comcast’s Internet service to any ‘statutorily mandated responsibility’”. Thus, the court granted Comcast’s 2008 appeal of the FCC’s order to stop throttling-back file sharing traffic.

So much for net neutrality.

I’m sure there’ll be Round 3 sometime soon. TechCrunch ponders the FCC’s possible next move. The WSJ Digits blog tells us which of the playahs — and it’s not just Comcast — in this case are smiling and lighting up victory cigars.

True … but I’ll take this one anyway. Only 161 more until the playoffs start.

Eight hundred and forty-one posts about the iPad in my feed reader. I’m declaring iPad article queue bankruptcy. Off to read ESPN Magazine in the sun …

So says Wired. What I never knew is that it took them 7 years to get to the point where they indexed all federal and state courts.

You started us all down this crazy path we’re on. Thanks for the blinky lights.