Corporations must be thrilled with the coming generations who seem to be willing to just lie down and be walked all over. As an example, the last graph of a story about Amazon.com, deleting legally purchased Orwell books and DRM in the NYTimes:

“I’d like to live in a perfect world where I own this content and can do whatever I want with it,” said Justin Gawronski, a high school student whose copy of “1984” was erased by Amazon, but who recently declined when a lawyer asked him to join a class-action lawsuit over the incident. Mr. Gawronski said, “This is probably going to happen again and we just have to learn to live with it.”

Just roll over and give up. It’s just that easy in the Information Age. And won’t those in power be happy with that!

via Amazon Faces a Fight Over Its E-Books – NYTimes.com.

The other night, Seattle was lit up by some noctilucent clouds which is a rare event. Why am I talking about this? Because my friends Robert and Jen happened to be awake that night at about 345 AM and was lucky enough to see them and photograph them. As Robert says,

So one of our cats jumped on my head at 3:45 in the morning so I got out of bed to see what the fuss was all about only to find the night sky illuminated way before what could have been sunrise. So I woke up Jen and our nephew Garrett who is staying with us and said I think it might be the Northern Lights. We went out the house and watched the sky for about a half hour. Unconvinced that they were really the Northern Lights we did a little bit of 4:30am research and found out they are Noctilucent clouds.

Neat, no? Better yet, the pictures they took seem to be the only ones people around here got and were picked up by the local ABC affiliate and Wired.

Apropos of Nothing, I guess. But I wanted to share.

Notice something missing in that image? It took five years, tens of millions of users, a couple of notable outages, and countless email messages, but Gmail is officially out of Beta, finally. Why do I care? After Gmail’s last big outage about a year ago, I posted a bit of rant about the ridiculous beta status and got the most comments I’ve ever gotten on a post for it.

Anyway, according to The NYTimes Bits Blog

Gmail is finally shedding the beta label, signaling that Google considers the product to be fully baked. Google is also taking three other applications — Calendar, Docs and Talk — out of beta.

The bottom-line reason for the change given in the post is that Google is standardizing its definition of “beta” for its products in an effort to make some inroads into the corporate productivity sector. However, I think another aspect is at play here. Gmail was first launched on April 1, 2004. Could this be the end of the longest running, and least funny, Google April Fool’s Joke ever? To be fair, Google does have a sense humor about its long-running beta label.

via Gmail and Other Google Apps Finally Shed ‘Beta’ Label – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com.

I keep track of Twitter using an ap called Tweetdeck which–along with the tweets I follow–includes a list of the most popular words on tweets at any given moment, according to Twitscoop (aside: I hate the name Twitter and all its asnine derivations. They all just sound so…dumb, like they’re made for twits). For an hour or so, according to Twitscoop the number one word on Twitter has been Armageddon. Curious, I clicked on it to find out why and saw a number of recent “tweets” about it being the most popular word and asking if we should be worried (natch. because most twitterers are twits, right?) As I get further back in the time line though, I start seeing a bunch of replies about Armageddon to @neilhimself. They’re all about tea vs. Armagedden and which would you choose (tea, personally). So I go to his time line.

One hour ago @neilhimself tweeted (twot?)

“Soon there will be 33,333 of you [people following him]. And then… ARMAGEDDON! Or tea. Hmm.. it could go either way. Okay. Tea it is.”

Turns out, @neilhimself is Neil Gaiman, creator of The Sandman graphic novels and one of my favorite SciFi writers.