In the wake of the Hutton Report the debate over the future of the BBC is sure to become even more frenzied. At times like this, it's vital to keep a sense of perspective. Whatever your thoughts regarding the details of Andrew Gilligan's infamous 6.07am report on the Today programme, your position on the Iraqi invasion or even your thoughts on Tony Blair's style of government, ask yourself whether one instance of poor reporting truly justifies undermining the BBC's position as one of the peculiar successes of the British way of government.

Is the BBC staffed by flawed human beings who will occasionally make mistakes? Absolutely. Does it deserve to be criticised when it makes those mistakes. Indisputably. Should heads have rolled in the wake of the mistakes in reporting and management identified in the Hutton report? Yes.

But then, before you conclude that the BBC needs putting it its place, ask the wider questions. Has the BBC acted as a vital counterweight to the commercial interests which run most of British broadcasting? Heck yes. Has there been a government in the last thirty years which hasn't regarded the BBC's journalists as a thorn in its side? Not a single one.

Would we really be better off with a neutered BBC news operation?

A snow leopard in the snow – what could be more perfect?

CHUD's Smilin' Jack Ruby has posted the first part of his report on a visit to the set of CGI-live action hybrid Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. As well as an account of even more eye-popping scenes of Golden Age-style giant robots creating mayhem than we saw in the trailer, the report includes a long interview with producer John Avnet, who is clearly impressed with the possibilities offered by modern technology.

Q: I assume it's been a huge learning curve for you as far as digital filmmaking…

Jon: Yes, enormous. My level of experience prior to this was very small, mostly at the Sundance labs where I've worked with young filmmakers.

Q: Do you think it's the way forward then?

Jon: The next film I'm going to shoot is going to be on film. There will probably be elements I do digitally, but as I said, it is my belief that fairly shortly, you're going to have enough one's and zero's that you'll be able to mimic film. I don't know how quickly you'll be able to plug in a card and say, 'Laszlo Kovacs' or 'Peter Biziou' and shoot the way they would shoot stuff. One of the things we do here that I think we do at a high, high level – I can't say it's better than anywhere else – is a lot of the lighting is done here. It's done digitally. Now, I did that in Red Corner when I shot in China for a little while and shot Richard Gere on a roof in America and had it changed from back light to front light and they just painted out the light, but never have I seen it done to this level where some of the shots of Gwyneth are stunning. They're flat light! That's not interesting, that's amazing. Does it make a movie? In my opinion, no. It doesn't make a movie, but it gives you this control that's amazing. What's it mean to D.P.'s? Who's the D.P.? Is it the guy who shoots it live? Is it the guy who lights it here? Is it the guy who comps it and puts the color in? I mean, it changes so many things and that's why I say it is either a very quiet revolution or a very noisy one. Is it Birth of a Nation or Citizen Kane? Who the hell knows? I doubt it. But on a technical level, there's stuff going on here that's going to change the way things are done.

It's still way too early for anyone to know whether this is going to be a hollow, SFX-laden crapfest or a Raiders of the Lost Ark-quality homage to the age of Buck Rodgers, but the trailer certainly looks the part and I like all the lead actors. Whilst it's impossible to judge minor details like the quality of the script and the work of the first-time director this far out, I'm going to choose to be quietly optimistic for now…

The teaser for Kill Bill: Volume 2 is available online in various formats. I'm not terribly impressed; it's not a patch on the trio of trailers which are included with the soundtrack CD for Volume 1, which contain plenty of footage which is clearly from the second volume. (I assume they were prepared before the decision to split the film in two was confirmed.) Not that a teaser and a trailer serve the same function, granted, but I'd have hoped for something a little more energetic rather than the homage to creaky old thrillers which we get.

Not, you understand, that a lacklustre teaser will stop me showing up at the cinema in May to see The Bride do what she's gotta do.

[Via Amygdala]

Tag and Scan implements a neat idea; mobile phone users can 'tag' physical locations with a message containing a title, a description or a photo. The idea is to overlay the physical landscape with a series of public and private grids, which are then searchable in various ways.

The demo is a big help in visualising how the system works. Just as I was thinking that a user would need some way to ignore tags left by people whose tastes he/she simply disagreed with, I came to a page which explained that tags can be rated by users. I still think they'd need a killfile feature, so that if I find that a particular user in my area invariably offers comments which are useless to me (whilst quite possibly of interest to others) then I can filter them out.

As someone who still doesn't own a mobile phone this isn't a system which I'll benefit from any time soon, but I find the concept of a web – actually, several independent webs – of virtual graffitti overlaid on our surroundings deliciously science fictional.

[Via Play Journal]

The latest casting news for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy film is that Trillian will be played by Zooey Deschanel and Ford Prefect will be played by Mos Def.

As far as I can tell from their filmographies I don't think I've ever seen either actor's work, so I have no idea whether this is good casting. Would any of my American readers care to enlighten me?

I drifted away from Frasier a couple of seasons ago, after the writers made the Moonlighting mistake with Niles and Daphne. It so happens that I caught the start of season 11 as I was ejecting a videotape earlier this evening and I think I'm hooked again. Perhaps it's just that I haven't seen the show for a couple of years and I've been subconsciously missing all the things the show does so well, but I really enjoyed tonight's episode. It helped that the first episode gave Roz a a bit more to do; I felt the show's other big mistake was to push her into the background as it spent less time at KACL and more on the Daphne and Niles romance.

Anyway, the second episode is on in a minute, so I'll post this and see if it maintains the improvement. Right now, it feels good to have an old friend back.

Folklore.org is a web site designed to allow groups of people with a common interest to share their stories online. The emphasis is on making it easy to create links between stories and permit participants to recount their different perspectives on events and allow readers to comment on stories posted on the site.

The first project hosted on the site collects tales about the early years of the Apple Mac; it's a real treasure trove of present-at-the-creation tales. Andy Hertzfeld, who also wrote the Python CGI scripts used to run the site, has posted most of the stories, but there are a smattering of contributions from other Mac pioneers like Susan Kare and Steve Capps.

Hertzfeld's software will be released under the GPL once it has been debugged a little, allowing anyone who likes the idea of the site but doesn't want to join folklore.org to set up a similar site. It'll be interesting to see what other groups decide to share their stories this way.

[Via Slashdot]

Former Clinton White House speechwriter Mark Katz has written what looks to be a highly entertaining account of his years adding jokes to Bill Clinton's speeches.

[Katz has added a joke to the draft of Clinton's speech to the forthcoming White House Correspondents' dinner, likening Republican right wingers to the Taliban]

Ted planned to submit this joke directly to Sandy Berger, the White House national security advisor, for approval. (How cool was that?) This was a threshold I had never crossed in my many years inside the White House joke-vetting process.

The next morning, Ted returned with bad news: "Sandy killed the Taliban joke."

Jeff and I emitted loud, stereophonic groans.

"He didn't think it was funny," Ted explained.

"Say that again?" I asked.

"He didn't like it. He said he didn't think it was funny."

"Ted, hold on," I said in disbelief. "We need some ground rules here: The national security advisor can kill any joke he likes on the grounds that it compromises national security. But he can't kill a joke because he doesn't think it's funny."

Am I the only one who can't help hearing Sam Seaborn delivering that last line?

[Via Amygdala]

I always knew that various satellites in Earth orbit observed icebergs as they break away from the poles, but I didn't realise that they're tracked for years as they cross the oceans.

The Earth Observatory site has some spectacular pictures of iceberg A-38, which broke away from the Antartic ice shelf some five years ago. It's now broken into two parts, A-38A and A-38B which are some 40 and 25 nautical miles long respectively and are presently floating around in the vicinity of South Georgia.

It's good to see that The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is in the running for all the expected Oscar categories. (Ideally I'd have liked to see a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Sean Astin, but that was always an outside bet at best.) Now we just have to hope that the Academy does its duty on February 29 and prevents the Nerd Riots of 2004 from breaking out.

Oh yes, and even though he's unlikely to win Best Actor, it's good to see both Johnny Depp and Bill Murray getting some recognition for comedic performances. As far as I can see, the last time two of the Best Actor nominees were up for comedic roles was 1997, when Jack Nicholson and Dustin Hoffman were up for As Good As It Gets and Wag the Dog respectively. Comedy is hard, dammit!

Call me naive, but I had no idea there was such a thing as a fetish for wet jeans.

"Creepy" most definitely is the word…

I can't quite believe that this advert for a manual typewriter as the perfect replacement for a word processor isn't a spoof.

Apparently you can "Save £1,000!" by stepping back a couple of decades technology-wise and buying this "Rare Classic"…

Say cheese!

[Via GromBlog]

The Inquirer brings us an early contender for IT Headline of the Year: IBM patents method for paying open source volunteers

[Via Slashdot]

Channel Five have decided that what the world is waiting for is Back To Reality a sort of "Reality TV Golden Oldies" programme. According to Ananova:

[...]

Back To Reality will throw together 12 favourites from past reality TV programmes.

Big Brother stars Jade Goody and "Nasty" Nick Bateman, Ricardo from The Salon, Pop Idol loser Rik Waller, James Hewitt from Channel 4's The Games and Sarah Kozer, a contestant on Joe Millionaire, are the first six to sign up.

[...]

Well, that's several hours a week freed up for reading or internet use right there…

Philips have announced mass production of a very tasty looking portable display panel which you can roll up when not in use.

I don't doubt that it'll be expensive, and it's only a monochrome unit, but I have a feeling that I'm looking at the display of my next-but-one PDA. Ideally, it'll use some Bluetooth-style short-range wireless technology so it can act as a display for any compatible gadget within range: my PDA, my MP3 player, my mobile phone, the iMac in the next room, whatever other neat gizmo I can't even imagine carrying round yet.

Just in case anyone thought that browser bugs like Internet Explorer's inability to display in full URLs containing "%01" were of purely theoretical interest, CNet reports that an email scam exploiting this very misfeature to invite US bank customers to visit a fake web site (which is actually located in Pakistan) and enter their bank account details is currently doing the rounds in the USA. (Wow, that was a long sentence!)

[Via Slashdot]

In his latest Crypto-Gram, Bruce Schneier talks a great deal of sense about the policy of fingerprinting visitors to the US.

Schneier's conclusion provides a useful rubric for citizens when considering all sorts of governmental proposals to restrict civil liberties in the interests of increased 'security':

It's bad civic hygiene to build an infrastructure that can be used to facilitate a police state.

Amen to that.

Franklin Foer looks at the world of soccer and sees both the limitations and possibilities of globalisation in Soccer Vs. McWorld.

Foer's description of the effects of globalisation on the top level of the game is fair enough as far as it goes, but he pays no attention to the knock-on effects of the migration of talent and capital on clubs further down the league, where international competitive matches are rare, to say the least. Anyway, it strikes me that soccer, with league structures which maintain the number of teams taking part in each season's competition regardless of the size of the gulf between the top and bottom sides, is something of an anomaly as "globalised" businesses go.

In most industries the larger, richer global players would – to the extent that the regulatory authorities would permit it – either buy up the small fry who compete with them in the home marketplace, or else use their financial muscle to push their domestic competitors into smaller, less profitable niche markets. The sheer financial muscle of the top half dozen clubs gives them a considerable advantage when it comes to maintaining a large enough squad to weather injury crises or poor form, and it may be that the increasing gap between rich and poor will cement that advantage, but even so the fans who attend matches won't, by and large, seriously contemplate migrating to their local, more successful, rivals. Most industries can only engineer that level of customer lock-in by devious means, such as the software industry's use of proprietary file formats.

The bottom line is that soccer is a very odd type of business.

[Via Arts & Letters Daily]