Dowbrigade

One of the myriad projects gestating under the wing of
the inexhaustible Sooz, of recent front-page
fame, is a workgroup to
describe, explore and promote the concept of "Citizen
Journalism". What
exactly is a Citizen Journalist? Other than the starting point that they
are most decidedly NOT Professional Journalists, not much is know about
this elusive species.

In an attempt to address this issue and to contribute to Sooz’s effort,
we have been thinking about these questions, about what makes a Citizen
Journalist different from the other strange creatures constituting
the food chain of the news stream, and what a potential Citizen Journalist
should and shouldn’t aspire to. Here’s what we’ve come up with so far:

First, what the budding CJ should NOT try to do:

• Citizen Journalists cannot replace the traditional press as a source
  for history’s raw material. Instead they must augment and ameliorate
  conventional journalism, offering roe perspective, depth and humanity
  to the tone and commentary.

• Citizen Journalists cannot pretend to be neutral and unbiased. Reflecting
  the hallmarks of their origin in the Blogosphere, CJs are bold and
  biased, but wear their biases up front and center for all the world
  to see.

• Citizen Journalists cannot count on the backup of a highly trained
  and paid team of editors, fact-checkers and lawyers ready to back
  them
  up in a
  crisis
  or confrontation. Conversely, they cannot hide behind the anonymity
  of an organization.

• Citizen Journalists cannot take advantage of a network of state-of-the-art
  studios, cameras, equipment and in-house experts. Their entire
  operation is home-made, seat-of-the-pants, spare-time and intensely
  personal.

• Citizen Journalists do not have access to high-ranking officials,
  get invited to press conferences, speak personally and privately
  with high-profile
  news makers or get embedded with US military forces in Iraq.

• Because of the above, Citizen Journalists cannot be bought, bribed
  or threatened with loss of employment or access, or with promises
  of money
  and power. Of
  course, given the trickledown dynamic of the blogosphere, it is inevitable
  that players will try to influence or "buy" power bloggers. The recent
  controversy involving the Dean campaign’s relationship with certain
  bloggers is an early example of this. There are bound to be more.

But of course, this is nothing new and in no way different that the
way players, corporate or governmental, have been in bed with (i.e. screwing)
conventional journalists for decades. We need look no further than the
Bush administrations’ payments to Armstong Williams and other columists for examples of how this game
works.

So, given these limitations, what exactly can Citizen Journalism contribute
to our evolving media infrastructure? Is there enough of a need that
CJ can carve out a niche in the information ecosystem? Here are some
possibilities:

• Because of their ubiquity and distribution, Citizen Journalists will
  often be the first on the scene and provide eye-witness 1st person
  accounts of
  news events around the globe.

• Citizen Journalists can provide a diversity of opinion sorely lacking
  from the mainstream media. As anyone who has lived abroad in a
  country with a truly free press knows, a normal range of journalistic
  opinion
  makes the differences between CNN and FOX look like the differences
  between Greyhound and Peter Pan.

• Citizen Journalists can provide the insight that only a real human
  being whose life has been directly impacted by an event can give. Diametrically
  opposite to the "unaffected-unbiased" sham of the mainstream media
  this perspective holds that we cannot really understand any event
  outside
  of our personal experience without seeing how that event affects
  and is
  perceived
  by someone like us.

• Citizen Journalists can make connections the mainstream press misses.  By
  reading widely and collating and cross-referencing, the CJ
  can often generate insights by relating diverse sources and streams
  that would otherwise go unappreciated.

• Citizen Journalists can encourage and engage in discussions, critiques
  and dialogs, via comments and cross-postings, which the mainstream
  press has neither the time nor the format nor the inclination to include.

• Citizen Journalists can provide instant expert analysis.  With
  a potential data bank of millions of working experts in every imaginable
  field of human endeavor, the CJ can often confirm or reject news from
  the mainstream media faster than they can check on each other. The
  work of the font experts on the Dan Rather Texas Air National Guard
  letters is a case in point.

• Citizen Journalists can create a cumulative groundswell of coverage. Often
  more powerful than one or a few loud voices are hundreds or thousands
  of quieter voices raised in unison, especially if they are not clones
  of each other but individually distinct. The on-line Dean for President
  story is a good example of this.

• Citizen Journalists can keep a story alive that otherwise would disappear
  via the 24 hour news cycle. The strange case of Trent Lott eulogizing
  Strom Thurmon is the most quoted example.

• Citizen Journalists can, by following and cross-referencing individual
  mainstream media writers and stories, function as a much-needed oversight
  on these self-appointed guardians of public opinion and awareness. Logically,
  the mainstream media hate the idea of anyone checking up on them,
  pointing out their inconsistencies and biases, which is why they
  are so upset
  and parochial about the whole concept of Citizen Journalism. Although
  they don’t like to admit it or write about it, professional journalists
  in America today are a privileged class and
  increasingly feel removed from and superior to the average man in the
  street, the consumer of their product. The position and importance
  of the Fifth
  Estate in our society is incontrovertible, and enshrined in the very
  documents which give our democracy life. However, the role of the
  media as a check on governmental power has grown so complex and important
  that we must ask the question: Who will watch the watchers?

Of course, in the end, it is the marketplace which will decide wherever
there is a desire and demand for the Citizen Journalist in Brave New
World of total information access. People will vote with their modems
and their eyeballs, and, in the opinion of the Dowbrigade, it is those
who most successfully meld insight and entertainment who will have
the biggest impact and success in the future.

Most Shared Shows: Number of files shared during the week ending Jan.
16. Source: Big Champagne

The New York Times has a timely article about the increasing popularity
of recording, swapping and downloading TV shows. Apparently, this activity
is illegal. Who knew? Much of the article deals with BitTorrent, which seems to be some kind
of hacker’s Napster…

Created
by Bram Cohen, a 29-year-old programmer in Bellevue, Wash., BitTorrent
breaks files hundreds or thousands of times
bigger than a song file into small pieces to speed its path to the Internet
and then to your computer. On the kind of peer-to-peer site that gave
the music industry night sweats, an episode of "Desperate Housewives" that
some fan copied and posted on the Internet can take hours to download;
on BitTorrent, it arrives in minutes. BitTorrent may sound like some
obscure techno-trickery, but more than 20 million people have already
downloaded the application. Each week dozens of shows are shared by hundreds
of thousands of people. "The Simpsons," "Family Guy" and "Friends" top
the most-popular list, but even "SpongeBob SquarePants," "Trading
Spaces" and "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" landed in
the Top 20 for the week ending Jan. 16, according to Big Champagne, which
measures file-sharing activity.

Strange, it took US 12 hours to download the latest
episode of "Desperate Housewives," which we just got through watching
on the laptop snuggled under the down comforter with Norma Yvonne, who
has become a big fan, of Desperate Housewives and the down comforter.
Maybe we need to update our software our upgrade our internet connection.
Of course, we are only previewing the program for inclusion in our American
Culture class at BU. Each week, we have been snipping a few scenes, and
writing exercises exploring the language and cultural themes, like attitudes
towards infidelity, suburban morality between Red States and Blue States
(where does the story take place, anyway?), socioeconomic
stratification on Wisteria Lane, teenage slang and dating habits, pharmacalogical
treatment of psychological disorders, the list goes one and on. Of course,
some weeks we get caught up in a half-hour discussion of "Can anybody
really be as dumb as Susan?" The students love it, and we feel it really
does capture the cultural pulse of the nation in a way NPR can only dream
about.

from the New York Times

It
has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all
the others that have been tried. Winston Churchill said that, supposedly,
although you never can tell in this day and age of contested attribution.
The
elections going on as we write in
Iraq are a case and point illustrating
both the power and the peril of what we often forget was originally
a very revolutionary form of government. Potentially, it still is.

The true power and righteousness of a government by the people, for
the people and of the people is awesome to behold, although in the opinion
of the Dowbrigade it has been quite some time since Our American Breed
of democracy has been anywhere close to that Jeffersonian ideal. And
in terms of spreading democracy around the globe, the Bush administration
need be careful what they ask for, lest they get it – in spades.

It is bizarre to the point of surreal that the turnout
in these Iraqi elections is expected to surpass that of the recently
concluded,
most hotly contested US presidential elections in decades. This is a
country where just walking within a city block of a polling place means
the very
real possibility of being shot or blown up.  Where dozens of people
are being slaughtered in the streets every day just for trying to HOLD
elections. Where names are being taken and retribution is being promised
to anyone daring to exercise their democratic right! And they are expecting
over
70% turnout!

If voting meant risking your life and the safety of your family, how
many Americans do you think would go out to vote?

As far as the theory that exposure to American values
will foster the flourishing of democracy elsewhere it is interesting
to note that of the quarter-million
adult Iraqis living in the United States, only
10% even bothered to register for these elections, for which they
are indeed eligible.

The sad fact is that in truly free, open elections,
those that are hungry, those that are oppressed, and those who are suffering
will turn out at a higher
rate than those whose bellies are full and who are basically satisfied
with the status quo. For better or worse, this facet of democracy lies
at the heart of its radically revolutionary nature.

This is where America must beware. Let’s face it, if
free and open elections tomorrow created governments of, by and for the
people of Pakistan, Jordan, Saudi
Arabia, Iran, the UAE, Egypt, Algeria and many more, we would lose most
of those few allies and negotiating partners we have in that part of
the world. We would also lose access to over half of our imported oil,
which
would throw our economy into a tailspin it would take a generation to
recover from.

What has happened and continues to happen in Venezuela
is an excellent example of the dangers of rampant democracy. By appealing
to the hungry,
dissatisfied masses, who in a county like Venezuela are in a clear majority
(whether or not they agree with Chavez) he got elected by a landslide.
Almost the entire economic power structure of the county and their close
friends
and colleagues
in the US have been trying to get rid of him ever since, but thanks to
access to the oil income and that pesky philosophy democracy (he has
won two recall elections) the Chavez revolution rolls on. Somehow, though,
we suspect its going to end badly for old Hugo.

The point is, free elections are a tricky thing.  You
never know who might get elected.  Don’t forget, the Germans elected
Adolf Hitler in 1933. How’d that work out for them, and for the rest
of us? However, as the Americans have proven, managing elections
is both an art and a science. Obviously, they will be attempting to manage
the new Iraqi elections as artfully as they have managed recent elections
in this country, but it is more difficult in the hinterland, where the
mechanisms of control are not as sophisticated or ingrained.

The ultimate danger to the US Government of this whole
Proselytize Democracy strategy is the boomerang effect. If radical ideas
like transparent government,
official accountability, and participatory democracy with an educated,
involved electorate ever found their way back to the States and infected
the body politic, we could all be in big trouble. Democracy is a revolutionary
idea, especially when the power of a country is concentrated in the hands
of a corrupt regime or a privileged minority. Caveat emptor.

A
Slovak man trapped in his car under an avalanche freed himself by drinking
60 bottles of beer and urinating on the snow to melt it.

Rescue teams found Richard Kral drunk and staggering along a mountain path
four days after his Audi car was buried in the Slovak Tatra mountains.

He told them that after the avalanche, he had opened his car window and
tried to dig his way out.

But as he dug with his hands, he realised the snow would fill his car before
he managed to break through.

He had 60 half-litre bottles of beer in his car as he was going on holiday,
and after cracking one open to think about the problem he realised he could
urinate on the snow to melt it, local media reported.

He said: "I was scooping the snow from above me and packing it down
below the window, and then I peed on it to melt it. It was hard and now
my kidneys and liver hurt. But I’m glad the beer I took on holiday turned
out to be useful and I managed to get out of there.

from Annanova

Indonesians look on as a Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force hovercraft
lands on a beach in Banda Aceh, Indonesia Thursday Jan. 27, 2005. Two
Japanese military hovercrafts landed in tsunami-shattered Aceh on Thursday,
bringing a water purification plant and medical supplies to set in motion
in Japan’s largest-ever overseas relief effort. (AP Photo/Greg Baker)

from AP

Once again the Dowbrigade
is on the cutting edge of haute couteur.  For years our sons have
chided us as we drove them to traveling soccer games or stalked supermarket
aisles in our always-fashionable grey sweatpants, "Dad, your crack’s
showing!"

As this photo of a model presenting
a creation as part of Cavalera’s 2005 Fall/Winter collection show during
Sao Paulo Fashion Week, January 25, 2005 shows,
we were merely years ahead of the fashion wave.  Now all we have to
do is move to Brazil and we won’t have to be pulling our pants up all the
time…

from Reuters

NEW
YORK (Reuters) – Porn star Jenna Jameson is now hawking her "moan
tones."

For $2.50 fans of the ubiquitous porno queen can choose from a variety
of moans, grunts and lurid sexual noises all recorded by the blond bombshell.

If that’s not enough, Jameson will talk dirty to you when you phones rings,
in English or Spanish. Jameson, who recently wrote a best-selling memoir,
has launched the venture with Wicked Wireless, a mobile music and entertainment
company.

Also available are color pictures of the porn star posing naked that can
be displayed on your phone for $2.99.

Jameson’s charms are already being downloaded in Argentina, Ecuador,
Venezuela, and in a couple of weeks will be available from Mexico to
Uruguay.

Latin American users can download a moan or a picture for $1.00 each,
while U.S. customers will pay $2.50 for a moan and $2.99 for a wallpaper
once the service is launched.

The Dowbrigade is investigating the possibility of an unexploited
economic niche importing moans from our connections in Ecuador and
distributing them
in the US
at a 250%
markup!
There are rumors the phone comes in an attractive vaginal pouch…

from Reuters

The
Boston Globe weighed in yesterday (yes, our "real" job
is starting to interfere with our blogging) with their own article on
the science behind Harvard President Lawrence Summers’ comments on women
in the stratosphere of science. It is actually much more soundly
reasoned and unspun than the previous day’s article in sister publication
New York Times.

The Globe article offers the first logical explanation we have heard,
from an evolutionary point of view, of the male dominance at the highest
levels
of science.  It comes from Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, a proponent
of evolutionary biology. We have long been a fan of evolutionary biology
as an overarching context for understanding and explaining human behavior.
The
basic idea
is that
all living organisms tend to behave in ways designed to maximize the chances
of their genes to survive and propagate in future generations.

It obviously doesn’t hold true in every case in the short run (how else
to explain guys who collect comic books and live with their mothers into
their
30′s)
but
remember this is an extemely long-term effect. Over the long haul these
Oedipal onanists will inevitably become extinct.

According to Pinker, the male half of our species not only contains more
geniuses, but also more morons, painfully obvious to anyone who has spent
time in an all-male dormitory or on the professional wrestling circuit. The
explanation for this, according to evolutionary biology, lies in the fact
that high performing men can have hundreds of children, while
even the most brilliant and successful women can only have a dozen or so
kids.

Now, the species benefits if the most talented and genetically endowed
members win the reproductive sweepstakes and have more kids than the dweebs
and dummies.  This is why money and power are aphrodisiacs. Since men
can have so many kids, nature allows them to fall into a wider range of ability
parameters. So what if some of them are incompetent boobs, there will be
plenty at the other end of the extreme to get all the girls and propagate
future generations.  Women reproduce fewer times, so we can’t waste
them, genetically, and need to keep them closer to the mean. Nature tends to play a little more genetic roulette with the males.

At least this is how we understand the theory. It is fascinating to speculate
on how a short term social phenomena – the relative lack of female tenured
professors
in he
physical
sciences
at universities like Harvard – can be connected to the extremely long-term functioning
of evolutionary imperatives.

Once you accept the importance of genetic propagation as a behavioral
motivator, however, much becomes clear. High performing women in the sciences
face a double whammy which significantly lowers their potential to produce,
protect and insure the success of their offspring. First, by devoting the
time to work that is required of a Nobel-worthy scientist, they will be
shortchanging their families, especially their kids if they have them.  Now,
we know that men, especially high-preforming Alpha-type men, have no problem
ignoring their offspring, even denying their existence, and many top male
scientists
are
so engrossed
in their
work
they tend to forget
they even are married and have kids, if they ever remembered to get married
or have kids in the first place. The whole process of procreating is a bit
more complicated and time consuming for women than for men, who really
have to pay attention for only about 90 seconds.

Secondly, due to deeply ingrained psycho-social habits, brainy, successful
women are not seen as desirable for procreative purposes as reasonably
smart but domestically oriented bundles of femininity  The reason
behind this is that basically, the male ego is so fragile that most guys
feel threatened
by women they think are smarter than them. This produces the absurd phenomena
of smart women trying to appear dumber than they really are, and stupid
men trying to appear smart. In terms of evolutionary biology, women can do
more to insure the propagation of their genes by playing dumb and attracting
a rich or smart or physically endowed mate than by going for the golden ring
of scientific stardom.

To the Dowbrigade, all of this stuff is fascinating, and deserves to be
discussed. Unfortunately, the past history of sexual oppression and 5,000
years of patriarchal social dominance make it impossible to consider
these themes impartially or unemotionally. Personally, we don’t see what
everyone is getting so worked up about. So what if most Nobel-level scientists
and Harvard science professors are men?
Most
of
them are neurotic,
driven, obsessed and deeply unhappy individuals with tattered personal
lives and
often perilous personal,
financial
and professional insecurities. Sure, there are a few happy-go-lucky, non-conformist
geniuses, but none of them are on the Harvard faculty either. Be careful
what you wish for ladies, are you sure this is the kind of club you
want to join?

from the Boston Globe

The increasing centralization of media outlets in the
United States is nowhere more apparent than in the traditional powerhouse
of
American Journalism, the daily newspapers. Whereas most major cities
once had 4 or 5 independent dailies, now most are luck to have two papers,
which probably belong to corporate chains. Between them, the Gannett
Co., Knight-Ridder and Rupert Murdock own thousands of papers.

This drama is being played out on a local stage in the ongoing soap
opera in which longtime East Coast old-media heavyweights
and eternal
rivals the Boston Globe and
the New
York Times, a sort of journalistic
Red Sox – Yankees, buried the hatchet and arrived at an incestuous marriage
of
convenience.
Basically,
the
Times bought the Globe from the Taylor family, finally closing
the corporate door behind what had been the last of the privately held,
family-owned major media outlets. While the corporate suits swore complete
editorial autonomy for the Globe, and the article in the posting above proves the
subsidiary product can occasionally surpass that of the home office,
we all knew the Boston Globe was the Gray Lady’s bitch from that point
on.

Now the New York Times syndicate wants to expand the happy family by
adopting idiot bastard son "The Metro", a daily
tabloid-style paper distributed free on the subway. The Metro, unfortunately,
is a real newspaper, part of a chain which claims 14 million readers
every day in 40 cities in 16 countries worldwide, supported completely
by advertising.
Some of the writing is actually decent, and a lot of it is locally produced, although
the whole idea of boiling the
world
down to an entertaining 15-minute read is somehow intellectually insulting, like getting
an intelligence briefing from Paris Hilton. The Times
proposes buying 49 % of the local operation, a move made marginally
more difficult by the reportedly liberal
use of racial slurs including the "N" word by Metro executives at
European conferences, which may play in Prague but doesn’t tend to go
over big in the People’s Republic
by the Charles. There is even a porno
angle.

Meanwhile, cross-town rival the Boston
Herald has written the justice
department a whiny letter in protest and the Feds are "investigating". The Herald has
been flagging lately, and has been offering itself at half-price, trying
to simultaneously compete with the Globe on the upper end and the Metro
on the lower.  The idea that their competition are joining forces
has them shitting bricks.

Actually, almost all daily newspapers are supported chiefly by advertising. Our
students are always dumbfounded the first time we go through a copy
of the Globe and we ask them how much they think it costs to produce
and distribute each copy of the paper. Guesses range from ten cents
to 45 cents (considering they get back 50 cents). The actual figure is about
$1.85. When I ask them straight out how a company can produce something
for $1.85 and sell it for $.50, the light usually goes on in at least one kid’s
head and he or she shouts out "Advertising!".

So this media conglomerate has effectively cornering the highbrow
market and the subterranean levels of news distribution in
Metro Boston, leaving the middle ground to the Boston
Herald and the
near majority of the population who don’t even read a paper daily, get
their news from some other source, or simply don’t give a shit.

Where is our free choice of newspaper POV?  Where is our journalistic smorgasbord?
Where is good old fashioned reporting rivalry, digging for the scoop,
columnists with distinctive voices carping back and forth? Where is the
balls-on prose and the thought-provoking opinion? Where is the vital heart of American journalism today?

We all know the answer
to that one, don’t we?

Academia
is all atwitter over the provocative comments by Harvard President Lawrence
Summers who merely suggested that
innate differences between the sexes might be one factor deserving of
more research as our society tries to understand and rectify the paucity
of women in the upper echelons of hard science. According to the New
York Times:

When Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, suggested this
month that one factor in women’s lagging progress in science and
mathematics
might be innate differences between the sexes, he slapped a bit of
brimstone into a debate that has simmered for decades. And though his comments
elicited so many fierce reactions that he quickly apologized, many
were
left to wonder: Did he have a point?

We certainly think so. Our understanding
of the scientific method is that it encourages the postulation of every
conceivable hypothesis,
even those one finds personally odious, in an effort to disprove and
discard as much as to prove or approve. In fact, we wrote a very thorough
paper on this very topic 30 years ago at Harvard, and although the science
has filled in a lot of the blanks in the intervening decades, our conclusions
were pretty much the same as the current scientific consensus, as described
by this
article.

Has science found compelling evidence of inherent sex disparities
in the relevant skills, or perhaps in the drive to succeed at all costs,
that could help account for the persistent paucity of women in science
generally, and at the upper tiers of the profession in particular?

Talk about asking the wrong question! Just by inserting
the phrase "or perhaps in the drive to succeed at all costs" the Times reporter is
injecting his own spin and interpretation on this issue. Succeed
at what? And how is success measured? And if "at all cost" includes
the neglect of family and children, shouldn’t we be trying to insert
a little balance in the driven MALE researcher’s lives rather than
trying to get women to emulate them?

"We can’t get anywhere denying that there are neurological
and hormonal differences between males and females, because there clearly
are," said Virginia Valian, a psychology professor at Hunter College
who wrote the 1998 book "Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women." "The
trouble we have as scientists is in assessing their significance to
real-life performance."

Our conclusions were remarkably similar. The physical,
neurological and chemical differences are demonstrable and indisputable,
but it is impossible to scientifically demonstrate how much of the observed
performance differential is due to innate differences and how much is
due to cultural and personality factors. We suspected then, and continue
to suspect today, that if the more of the researchers in this topic were
women they would uncover a long list of cognitive and performance areas
in which women are measurably better than men, and we are not talking
about cooking and gardening.

from the New York Times

WASHINGTON, Jan. 23 – The Pentagon has created battlefield intelligence
units that for the first time have been assigned to work directly with
Special Operations forces on secret counterterrorism missions, tasks
that had been largely the province of the Central Intelligence Agency,
senior Defense Department officials said Sunday.

Wasn’t one of the identifiable problems contributing to 9/11 the duplication of effort by agencies doing the same thing and not communicating with each other? The interagency squabble between CIA and Defense has
been going on since long before the neo-cons got hold of the reins
of power.
What the military has against the CIA, basically, is that they are civilians,
which in addition to leaving them outside the warm glow of warrior male
bonding makes them susceptible to accountability and oversight by that
other most odious caldron of civilian interference – the US Congress.

from the New York Times

The Boston
Globe today has an interesting article on the kid who wrote
most of Firefox, the open-source browser that is starting to chip away
at IE’s monopolistic dominance of the number one application class in
the world today.

At 17, Ross and another Netscape programmer, David Hyatt, started a
side project that became Firefox. They wanted to strip down Netscape
and the Mozilla suite on which it is based.

AOL ultimately spun off the project and created the not-for-profit Mozilla
Foundation to develop Firefox and related software.

Hyatt left to design Apple Computer Inc.’s Safari Web browser, but Ross
stayed and helped fix Firefox bugs from college.

Firefox was officially released Nov. 9. It was used by 4.6 percent of
Web surfers in early January, and that number could reach 10 percent
by mid-2005, according to WebSideStory, which tracks browser use. Microsoft’s
Internet Explorer has dropped to 90.6 percent this month from 95.5 percent
in June.

We are in principle in favor of any project that diversifies a market
and especially Bill Gates stranglehold on the world of PC computing.
In addition, we support the idea of open source software, and know a
bunch of really quality people who write the stuff, and have tried many
interesting open-source programs.  However, we don’t use any of
it regularly, at least as far as we know (is bit torrent open source?)

Firefox is as close as we have come in a while. We like the look and
feel, and it’s faaast. Rarely crashes and has tabs, which we
have become addicted to. But the deal breaker is a simple omission which
really puts
a crimp in the Dowbrigade blogging style – the lack of a "copy to clipboard"
option when right-clicking on an image on a web page.

In Safari
(we already eschew IE except when previewing pages designed for clients)
when we right-click (or option-click on the iBook) we get
the menu seen on the right.  If the image already has the desired
size and cropping, we select "Download image as…" However, if we need
to resize, crop, touch up or combine images to get the effect we want,
we "Copy Image to Clipboard" and then paste it into a new document in
Photoshop CS, which we have open on our desktop at all times. Photoshop
5, which we used for years, had a "New image with clipboard" option under
the File menu which is gone now, but when there is an image in the clipboard
the new version opens a blank document of the same dimensions so pasting
the image in is only one addition click away.

The problem
in Firefox is that although the right-click menu we see when we click
on an image is quite a bit longer than the corresponding
version in Safari, the is no "copy to clipboard" to be found.  We
can instantly add a bookmark or view the image in another window.  Copying
the image location just puts the image URL into the clipboard, not the
image itself.

We are forced to save it, then switch to Photoshop and open it, which
involves SEVERAL additional clicks and distractions, interrupting the
creative flow we depend on (the Dowbrigade is easily distracted) and
cutting into our production capacity.  In a life as tightly regimented
as ours, there is precious little time to be lost in unnecessary clicking
and navigating through files.

It seems like such a minor detail, but as they say, that’s where the
devil lives. We really think that if the next version of Firefox fixes
this deficiency, we might cut the cord to Safari forever.

article from the Boston Globe