The Choice To Not Vote

On election day, I wrote:

It's election day in the United States. If you understand and care about the issues and candidates on your local ballot, remember to vote. If, on the other hand, you don't particularly understand or care about matters being polled, then please don't vote! Your vote is important, but not so important that it must be cast, even randomly/arbitrarily/superficially, if your actual interests lie elsewhere. Choosing not to vote on particular questions, or not to vote at all, is a perfectly legitimate decision, and don't let any "more civic than thou" ninnies tell you otherwise.

Do you disagree? In a democracy, should we feel an obligation to vote, even when we know or care little about the issues on the ballot, or when we believe our vote to be irrelevant?

Take issue or contribute your opinion at this QuickTopic discussion.

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eBay Tweaking Bezos?

You may have seen the new "Do It eBay" TV commercial: it features a middle-aged balding fellow, with a cherubic smile, who sings and dances to an eBay jingle which follows the tune of "My Way." More about the ad campaign, and a streamed version of the 1-minute TV spot, is available at this AdAge story.

Am I taking crazy pills here, or does the star of this commercial bear at least a passing resemblance to Jeff Bezos, CEO/Founder of eBay's arch-competitor Amazon.com?

Sure, the "Do It eBay" guy is shorter, balder, and chubby -- but from a distance, with that cheeky smile, that hair pattern, and that blue-and-khaki clothing, the first couple of times I saw this commercial out of the corner of my eye I thought it was Bezos singing and dancing for Amazon.com.

Look for yourself:

Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos	Singing Dancing "Do It eBay" Guy

Was someone at eBay or their ad agency being impish with this casting choice? Is it a coincidental resemblance? (Or am I just imagining things?)

(Images captured from streamed commercial with SnagIt, which has a DirectX mode which grabs images in Windows Media Player other screen-capture facilities miss.)

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When Robots Attack...

I'm pretty far out there when it comes to speculation about the future. Still, some recent bet offerings at the Long Bets website strike me as peculiar. Bet #88 is a rather transparent marketing effort for an upcoming (but vaguely-described) product. (You can't fault this spammer's grandiose ambition: he expects that 3 billion people will use software conforming to his product's UI metaphor by 2025.)

My wacky favorite is Bet #86, where a fellow by the name of Alex K. Rubin posits:

By the year 2150, over 50% of schools in the USA or Western Europe will require classes in defending against robot attacks.

Rubin offers further details in his "pro" argument:

I predict robots with AI will inevitably be uncontrollable and over power their human masters. Schooling and education is what the children of the future need to fend off these super human robots. Therefore, many schools will offer if not require training in robot fighting. The first wave of these schools to offer the class will be around 2120.

The charm of this prediction is how it combines the fantastic (super robots overpower mankind...) with the mundane (...thus kids in the US and Western Europe will have to take a class in anti-robot warfare). I guess that makes it the four R's: readin', 'ritin', 'rithmetic, and repellin' robots.

If Rubin were simply to predict that robots overrun the planet or gracefully succeed/replace humans in the same timeframe, I'd just think, "well, yeah, interesting idea, might happen with runaway technological progress, ok." But instead Rubin's focus on curriculum has me picturing Jimmy, the star quarterback, struggling to pull his grade in 5th-period Robot-Defense up to passing so he can start in the 2124 Homecoming Game.

Of course, if you suspect the robots are already a threat, and you're over the age of 50, Old Glory Insurance offers Robot Attack Insurance for as little as $4 a month!

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Robo-rats and Rat-bots

"You've got circuitry in my rat brains!"

"No, you've got rat brains in my circuitry!"

Two great tastes that go great together: rat brains and computer circuitry. Scientists at SUNY-Brooklyn have wired a computer into a live rat's brain, allowing the researchers to remotely "steer" the rat, while a researcher at Georgia Tech has grafted rat neurons into a robot, allowing the rat brain remnants to steer the robot.

No word yet on when Comedy Central will televise a Rat-bot versus Robo-rat battle-to-the-death.

versus

Rattus norvegicus seems to have pulled far ahead of us homo sapiens in the race toward intimate mammal-machine symbiosis. We'd better rally, lest we find ourselves ferrying cheese to and fro for our new cybernetically-enhanced rat overlords.

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Dewey for President, 1948

If Trent Lott was going to endorse anyone in the 1948 presidential election, he should have at least feigned loyalty to his current party. In 1948, Republicans nominated New York Governor Thomas Dewey for President. Dewey had supported, in 1945, the first-ever state law against racial and religious employment discrimination.

I want to say this about my party: When Thomas Dewey ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if Trent Lott had followed our lead, he wouldn't have had all these problems over all these days, either.

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The Trojan Laptop?

"Technological self-help" against criminals risks liability beyond a certain point. If you fear your laptop will be stolen, you might add a mechanism where it occasionally prompts for a valid password. It's probably alright in the eyes of the law to disable the laptop if the proper password is not given. It's definitely not alright for the laptop to explode, injuring the user.

But how about a more subtle countermeasure where the unauthorized user's activity is monitored, and perhaps exploited to recover the value of the laptop in cash? Crafty, but still illegal.

Now what if you are yourself a technically sophisticated criminal, and want to let "your" laptop be stolen, so as to steal a greater amount from whoever eventually possesses it -- whether that person is a laptop thief or merely the final recipient of stolen goods? You might try the following:

1. Outfit a laptop with custom trojan software which spies on its user, collecting passwords, personal information, credit card and social security numbers, etc. Install this software in a manner which makes it likely to survive even a hard disk wipe and OS reinstall. (For example, put it in the BIOS or use HD boot-sector trickery.)
2. Leave this laptop somewhere that a opportunistic thief will snatch it.
3. Wait.
4. When the trojan software has collected enough data, and furthermore detects an internet connection, have it post the harvested data -- in encrypted form -- to some public net forum. (This could be a website, USENET, whatever.)
5. Collect the data.
6. Use the data to steal from the laptop's current user.

Many laptops so planted would never report back, nor provide much in the way of exploitable info... but if only some did, it could repay the initial criminal investment. Trojan laptops.

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Per-Band Subscription Services?

Tim O'Reilly: Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution

Robert X. Cringely: Curtain Call: Finally, a Business Model for Music in the Internet Age, and Why the Music Industry Probably Won't Go for It

O'Reilly's observations, together with Cringely's suggestions for a scrappy, long-haul new model for musical artists, make me wonder: why aren't individual bands/acts yet offering subscription services to their entire artistic output?

A yearly subscription might be just $30 and include:

• unlimited access to downloadable back-catalog
• unlimited access to downloadable new releases
• online newsletter
• access to special online events
• priority access to concert tickets
• a once-yearly collectible trinket confirming membership
• automatic annual rebilling until cancelled

After all, fans identify with artists rather than labels or the nascent aggregation services. Such per-artist subscriptions would give fans the exact guaranteed-quality music they want, plus the warm fuzzy feeling that they're doing the right thing, and in such a way that less money goes to middlemen.

Possible objections:

• Bands lack the expertise to set up such a system and back-end billing. But a service company could easily offer a turnkey solution. PayPal offers a super-easy system for recurring billing.
• Serving costs would exceed revenues. But a P2P distribution scheme could allow the service site to merely serve as the fallback source iof rich media tracks -- with 99% of transfers going direct between fan machines
• Some people will just sign up, grab everything, and not renew. I'm not sure this is even a bad thing. Some of these people would renew each time new material becomes available. Tweaking the renewal pricing and trickling out new releases year-round could discourage such ins-and-outs.

I suppose Prince's NPG music club was (is?) a little like this. Kelli Richards points out that David Bowie, Elton John, and Todd Rundgren all offer paid fan services of various forms. However, I find that each of these artist websites are crippled by atrocious, awkward, loud, flash-drenched user interfaces -- and so I can't tell if any of them actually offer the artist's oeuvre in any practical form.

(My tip to any acts that want to try a individualized subscription service: drop the garish designs, pop-ups, flash, tiny type, and sluggish captioning. Just say in big clear letters, "For $X a year you get access to all my music and additional benefits A, B, C. Click here to sign up. Thanks!")

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Time Has Come Today

A friend recently called my attention to the fact that clocks and watches in advertising displays -- at least analog clock faces -- usually show the time 10:10. I suppose the reason is the nice -- although not *too* perfect/perpendicular -- symmetry. However, 10:10 even seems preferred to its mirror time, 2:50. Is this merely a tradition among time merchants?

More variety appears on advertised digital timepieces. A recent TV advertisement for a fast-food Simpsons watch giveaway shows all watches with the time 12:22 -- which fills all digit places and as an added benefit, suggests lunchtime.

On a recent flight, perusing the Skymall catalog, I saw the following digital clock ad and had to wonder, "What are they trying to say with their choice of display time?" When I then read the first line of descriptive copy -- "This full-function clock radio has a secret" -- I chuckled out loud. See for yourself:

Skymall Late Spring 2002 p. 151 (111K JPG)
(Image via catalogs.google.com.)

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Chronocentrics Anonymous

Everything that is inevitable has already happened.

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Man-Dolphin Detente

Jonah Goldberg of the National Review doesn't limit his election predictions to the election results. After a rundown of the races, he adds:

Also, I predict that super-intelligent apes will never run the planet but we might discover that dolphins are incredibly intelligent, but despite those laughing sounds they make actually have no sense of humor whatsoever and are actually shockingly bigoted against their fellow mamillian sea creatures ("Orca scum" and such). We will also conclude that we must pay them for the crimes we committed against them when we were ignorant of their sentience, but fortunately they'll accept herring as currency. The term vegetarianism will disappear from common usage as biotechnology makes it possible to grow super tastey and healthy meat in huge industrial vats without ever harming animals. This will cause a massive slaughter of cows who cannot live on their own without human aid. The dolphins will encourage us to push the cows into the sea.

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Vote (or not)

It's election day in the United States. If you understand and care about the issues and candidates on your local ballot, remember to vote. If, on the other hand, you don't particularly understand or care about matters being polled, then please don't vote! Your vote is important, but not so important that it must be cast, even randomly/arbitrarily/superficially, if your actual interests lie elsewhere. Choosing not to vote on particular questions, or not to vote at all, is a perfectly legitimate decision, and don't let any "more civic than thou" ninnies tell you otherwise.

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Kissing Basic Freedoms Goodbye, in Iran and Georgia (US)

What do Iran and a Georgia High School have in common? They both impose harsh penalties for inappropriate forehead kisses. Compare and contrast:

Reuters: Kiss lands Iranian actress and director in court

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Football player suspended for kissing girl on forehead

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Earth Shaking Things Up

Earthquakes in Italy, Alaska, Southern Japan, Northern Japan, Pakistan, and Indonesia. New volcanic activity in Italy, Hawaii, Ecuador, and Pakistan -- and threatening in the Phillipines.

A pattern?

Let's hope no supervolcanoes are on the way!

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CDMA Rising?

Is CDMA set to trounce competing mobile-phone standards over the next few years?

Stewart Alsop provides the 50,000-foot view in Fortune: My Outrageous Cellular Call "Virtually no one is willing to predict that CDMA will unseat GSM. Except me."

Steven Den Beste provides the technical, business, and political nitty-gritty at TCS: Told You So...

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Legamorons

Arnold Kling at TechCentralStation: The Trackable Society

Arnold Kling notes that technology that makes laws easier to enforce will draw attention to those laws which we don't really want to be consistently enforced -- laws he terms legamorons. He writes:

I would argue that many laws are the legal equivalent of oxymorons - legamorons, if you will. A legamoron is any law that could not stand up under widespread enforcement. Laws against marijuana use are a prime example. Rigorous enforcement of these laws on middle-class college campuses would cause a furor.

There are many other legamorons, where we have become accustomed to low levels of enforcement.

• immigration laws


• laws against sexual harassment


• laws against betting on sports


• speed limits


• software licenses


• laws against music sharing


• laws requiring people to pay social security taxes for household workers

In fact, the entire tax system could be viewed as a legamoron. Congress deliberately underfunds the computer systems and audit department of the IRS. Otherwise, if households and businesses had to get everything on their returns exactly right, the cost of tax compliance probably would eat up the entire Gross Domestic Product, and there would be nothing left to tax.

Better enforcement technology, as in the trackable society, would cause us to rethink our legamorons.

I hope we could jettison those laws which would be untenable if consistently enforced! But I worry: both hypocrisy and selective enforcement (against disfavored groups) are deeply ingrained habits of our society. We might get both legamorons and oppressive levels of enforcement.

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Natural Nuclear Reactors, Then (2 Billion Years Ago) and Now

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day: Remnants of ancient, natural nuclear reactors

NASA's page says "No natural reactors exist today, as the relative density of fissile uranium has now decayed below that needed for a sustainable reaction." A geophysicist named J. Marvin Herndon would disagree: he believes the earth's core is a natural nuclear reactor. See:

Discover Magazine: Nuclear Planet "Is there a five-mile-wide ball of hellaciously hot uranium seething at the center of the Earth?"

OK, so let's say the core's a nuclear reactor. On to the sci-fi premise...

What if the core nuclear reactor is not 'natural', but rather was intentionally created as a power-rich habitat for someone? Hell, let's say for a race of super-intelligent computational nanomachines who took up residence billions of years ago. We live -- indeed all surface life has evolved -- on their waste heat and the elemental byproducts of their reactor, as those byproducts have slowly risen to the surface.

But why did these in-dwellers choose a shielded power source at a planet's core, instead of the more plentiful energy from outward-facing stars -- a "Dyson sphere" approach? Well maybe the in-dwellers are prisoners. Or better yet fugitives -- yes, fugitives hiding from a terrible power. They were safe inside, hidden from a vengeful universe, our Earth utterly undeserving of attention from Those Who Would Do Them Harm. But they didn't count on humanity popping up, sending up rockets and radio signals that will be noticed and investigated. Now they've got a problem. And we've got a problem, too... because if the in-dwellers don't decide to snuff us out to maintain their cover, the Vengeful Powers might arrive... and they would judge us as harshly as the in-dwellers...

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In Congress, Right-wingers Strongest Opponents of Law-Enforcement Power Grabs

The New Republic: Civil Right ("Thank Goodness for Dick Armey")

An excerpt:

And when the history of the response to September 11 is written, it will record that evangelical and libertarian conservatives--with their instinctive suspicion of federal authority--did more to defend liberty than mainstream liberal Democrats, who were captives of the public demand for security measures above all.

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Hire Me!

Hire Me!

I am now available for full-time employment!

I am a skilled designer, implementor, troubleshooter, and promoter of innovative Internet applications. Areas of special expertise involve web and custom protocols, highly distributed/heterogenous systems, and object-oriented design and programming. Check out my resume:

Resume (Plain Text) - Gordon Mohr

Ideal engagements would include permanent employment in San Francisco, medium-term contracts (3-6 months) throughout the bay area, or short-term or part-time contracts (<4 months) here or in other interesting locales.

(FYI: My startup, Bitzi, is still operating and growing, and improvements requested by users and partners will continue to appear with regularity. The web site, web service, and contributor community are self-sustaining and financially self-sufficient. However, you know what they say about watched pots never boiling? The same thing goes for oceans. It could be a long time before Bitzi's business operations can justify a full-time, salaried career in its service.)

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Hoppin' Down the Bunny Trail, in Davenport, Iowa

Check out some unlikely street names around 1500 Clay Street Davenport IA 52804.

These are almost certainly cartographer "bunnies", fake features that mapmakers add to their maps to catch copycats.

Given the particular off-color street names used in this case ("Buttlickin Ave" and "Fagdaddy St"), these will probably be editted out soon.

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Negative Target Fixation and Saturation

Miko Matsumura last night mentioned an important concept I hadn't heard before: negative target fixation. Here's an explanation of the term I found on the web (excerpted from deep within this "Miracle Zone" page):

An interesting illustration of the fact that focused attention creates results consistent with that focus of attention is found in a research study that was done to determine the cause of airplane crashes. The study found that 70 per cent of airplane crashes could have been avoided; that is, they were due to pilot error. The study also found that in those crashes that resulted from pilot error, about 70 percent of the pilots had been focusing on where they did not want to land--not on where they wanted to land. For example, they were focusing their attention on a tree or on the roof of a building that was in the way of where they wanted to make their emergency landing, rather than on the space where they wanted to land. The researchers termed this phenomenon �negative target fixation�. The study points out that by focusing on what we do not want to occur, there is a strong tendency to produce the very thing we are trying to avoid.

In the context of entrepreneurship and other endeavors, negative target fixation highlights the danger in concentrating on what you most fear happening, and thus helping make exactly that happen, instead of the range of other possible outcomes.

I think there's another somewhat related phenomenon in the current tech business doldrums, a sort of negative target saturation. Over the past couple of years, we've been treated on a grand scale to a public lesson about the many hundreds or even thousands of different ways a company, product, or strategy can fail. These failures have affected companies young and old, rich and poor, small and large, experienced and inexperienced, dynamic and static. There are so many failures, top-of-mind, that anything now coming along can be quickly associated with multiple, "oh, that's like X, and X blew it" precursors. This leads to a "white-out" in people's ability to discriminate between good and bad courses of action. To extend the flying analogy above -- this negative target saturation doesn't so much lead to self-fulfilling crashes, as much as it deters takeoffs altogether. The airport is fogged-in.

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Neal Stephenson: Jipi and the Paranoid Chip

Neal Stephenson: Jipi and the Paranoid Chip (short story)

Great short-story about a bunch of neat things, including: evolvable software, online chat, ubiquitous networking, turing-test-like situations, epistomology, and paranoid schizophrenia. Originally appeared in a Forbes publication (I think Forbes ASAP) in 1997.

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The Bitzi Merchandise Store Opens -- Buy Bitzi Stuff!

Everyone needs a thneed... but they're hard to come by these days. Bitzi logo wear is nearly as comfortable and stylish, and can be had right now at The Bitzi Store, powered by CafePress.

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Kazaa Unveils New Version, Partners

News.Com: "New Kazaa likely to raise labels' ire"

NYTimes: "Music-Swapping Service Gains Stature in New Deal"

Kazaa has a new version -- "v2" -- and a new copromotion with Tiscali, an Italian broadband provider.

In a feature reminiscent of Bitzi, Kazaa now lets users rate file quality. However, so far, all download links at the Kazaa site still point to the old version, 1.7.2. More on the new Kazaa after I have a chance to try it out...

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Infectious Triggers for Multiple Sclerosis: Controversial or Old Hat?

The Times (UK) reports that an "Upsetting theory of MS sex link is dismissed" -- making it sound like the idea of infectious triggers for Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is new and controversial. But this page about viruses at the National Multiple Sclerosis Society suggests that many viruses have been suggested as potential MS triggers, and that while evidence is inconclusive, more than one study has implicated the HHV-6 human herpes virus. So why does the Times article have such an aghast spin, if the MS society can already discuss the possibility calmly in material composed over a year ago?

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IMbonics?

NYTimes: "Nu Shortcuts in School R 2 Much 4 Teachers"

Kids are getting failing grades for using shorthand from online and telephone keypad instant-messaging culture. By the time these kids themselves have kids in school, can we expect a movement to embrace 'IMbonics' in the curriculum?

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Nifty Word: iatrogenic

iatrogenic - inadvertently induced by medical attention; literally, "physician-generated." This could be an adverse reaction to treatment or advice given -- or even a condition created by the power of suggestion, attention-seeking behavior (eg munchausen syndrome), or a desire to please treatment-givers (as in the origin of the term 'placebo'; literally, "I shall please.").

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We'll know an attack on Iraq is imminent when...

We'll know an attack on Iraq is imminent when we get an "Amber Alert" describing a "burly, moustached, Iraqi dictator" as the suspect in a string of child-snatchings across the western US.

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Sean McCullough: The Society For Creative Capitalism

Sean McCullough, on the occasion of the final legal dissolution of the startup he founded, shares a wonderful idea:

You know how they have the Society for Creative Anachronism? They're the geeks who get dressed up like knights and hit eachother with padded Claymore replicas, revitalizing traditions of yore. Then there's also the Civil War Re-enactment nut-jobs, but unelss you live below the Mason-Dixon line you probably aren't familiar with them.

What about starting a Society for Creative Capitalism? Everyone pretends it's 1999. We could rent out Moscone Center in San Francisco, make up some imaginary (or real, but since mothballed) company to work for (as a Technology Evangelist!) and have a high old time. Instead of jousting or shooting cannons at eachother, we could see who can draft the most powerful Non-Binding Letter of Intent. Instead of selling antiquated hand-bound books at your booth, you could sell old copies of ATG Dynamo or Oracle 8i.

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ActiveBuddy Gets Bogus IM Bot Patent - See Activerse DingBot SDK, 1998

Internetnews.com: "ActiveBuddy's Patent Win Riles IM Bot Developers"

ActiveBuddy, founded in March 2000, filed a patent in August 2000 on a "method and system for interactively responding to instant messaging requests."

Choice quotes:

"We invented interactive agents. Anybody using his or her own tools (to make bots) is obviously using our technology without paying us to license the server, for example. We are a startup company and we have to protect our future. That's basically why we secured this patent," [ActiveBuddy founder Tim] Kay said.

Also:

"I am fairly confident, there were no interactive agents on IM at that point when the application was filed (August 22, 2000). I'm certainly not aware of any," said Kay, who doubles as ActiveBuddy's chief technology officer.

Sorry, Mr. Kay, you were late to the party with an old idea. My company in 1998, Activerse, developed a product called the "DingBot SDK" for creating interactive IM response Bots like those ActiveBuddy claims a patent on. It worked in our own (all-Java, radically peer-to-peer, web-services-like) IM/Presence system, but featured an API specifically designed to allow multi-IM-system bots.

We demoed an early version of the product at the "Demo 98" conference, in February 1998. PCWeek ran an article about us mentioning the DingBot SDK later that month.

The Activerse press release announcing the product's general availability, in November 1998, is still available at the Internet Archive.

ActiveBuddy was founded in March 2000. So, not only were their "IM bots" a old idea by the time they filed their patent (August 2000), a ripoff of both Activerse's offerings and more than a decade of practice on IRC networks and in MUDs/MOOs, but ActiveBuddy's very name was derivative of an existing player in the same market ("Activerse"->"ActiveBuddy") and their main product (an SDK/server) and business model (licensing) closely mimicked Activerse as well.

ActiveBuddy founder Kay claims with a straight face "we invented interactive agents" and "I am fairly confident, there were no interactive agents on IM at that point when the application was filed. I'm certainly not aware of any." That only goes to show you have to be *studiously* ignorant and/or dishonest in order to twist the flaws of the software patent system to personal advantage.

(Postscript on Activerse: It was acquired by high-flying internet conglomerate CMGI in April 1999. Though the initial aim was to expand and promote the Ding IM/bot products throughout the CMGI network of companies, as CMGI itself unravelled, Activerse was dismantled through a series of mostly arbitrary and faddish organizational moves which completely ignored the promise of the growing IM space.)

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Can you find the message?

There's a text message encoded in the following image. Can you find it?

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Wired: Hollywood's Tron-inspired Playbook

My sources tell me that a short piece I wrote for Wired -- drawing parallels between Hollywood's technology crackdowns and the agenda of the evil "Master Control Program" in the movie Tron -- can be found on p. 38 of the September issue, which features a mostly-blue cover with a cover story about artificial eyes. (I haven't located a copy yet and the text won't be available online for a while.)

UPDATE (2002-08-13): It's online, at The Unseen Hand of Tron.

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Arnold Kling: "The communication network will have a fiber skeleton and a wireless skin."

In his TechCentralStation piece, "Moore's Bailiff," Arnold Kling passes along Andy Chapman's prediction that Moore's Law and broadband alternatives will trigger the collapse of one or more baby bells/incumbent local exchange carriers withint the next five years. Kling's compelling description of the foreseen communication architecture:

The way I see it, Moore's Law ultimately will favor shared-spectrum wireless as the solution for last mile connectivity. Today, I am typing this out on my porch, using a laptop that connects wirelessly to a router in my basement, which in turn connects to the local phone company by DSL. My prediction is that eventually I will skip the DSL part, and instead my wireless connection will go to a local wireless network of some sort, and then ultimately to a transmitter on the Internet backbone. The communication network will have a fiber skeleton and a wireless skin. Telephone land lines will be superfluous.

"A fiber skeleton and a wireless skin" is an excellent turn of phrase.

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Helix: RealNetworks shoots Open Source at Microsoft, kills DRM bystander?

NYTimes (Markoff): RealNetworks Poses Challenge to Microsoft

RealNetworks has unveiled an initiative called "Helix," featuring media tools that understand Microsoft Windows Media formats via a clean-room reverse engineering implementation -- rather than licensing from Microsoft. Further, they've committed to releasing large portions of the system under an Open Source license through their HelixCommunity site.

Hmm, if there's open-source Windows Media creation and/or playback software out-and-about... it doesn't seem like artificial DRM locks on individual Windows Media files could survive for vary long.

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The Internet: The Once and Future King of All Media

NYTimes: Investors May Have Repudiated the Internet, but Consumers Have Not

From my perspective, the key point to be taken from this article is that the net is subsuming TV, replacing channel-surfing with web-surfing. An example:

"We see young people who are flowing between TV and the Web almost seamlessly, finding new ways of getting what they want, going to what they want when they want it," said Betsy Frank, executive vice president for research and planning at MTV Networks. "That's what the Web has taught them � you don't have to sit around for something you're not interested in."

Instead of having your intellect be dulled by absorbing someone else's agenda, because it's "what's on right now," with the net you can fill your time with the entertainment, information, and personalities that most captivate you. That's gigantic for learning, participation, enjoyment.

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Ugh, Canada! Mounties go undercover, disregard law in valiant campaign against people who don't buckle-up

Reuters: Fake Squeegee Kids Nab Traffic Scofflaws

So, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the "mounties" of lore, have nothing better to do than harass drivers -- while breaking a local law -- as a way to surrepetitiously peek into private vehicles and cite citizens for a victimless "crime"? If there aren't enough real crimes to keep these police busy, the proper response is layoffs, not frivolous enforcement actions.

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Wireless Music Hacktraptions & BYOJukebox

Dan Kohn writes in his blog:

I finally have my "extreme wireless" home music setup working. In my bedroom, I have a Bang & Olufsen Beosound 9000. This is great for playing 6 CDs, but all of my music is now MP3s. So, I got the Rio Receiver, which pulls MP3s off of any Windows machine on the LAN and outputs them to a stereo system or directly to speakers. However, I have no Ethernet jack in my bedroom, so I hooked the Rio up to this wired to wireless Ethernet converter from Orinoco.

My laptop, a Toshiba Tecra 9000, also includes integrated Wi-Fi (i.e., 802.11b wireless Ethernet). So, the music is being served wirelessly from the laptop in MP3 format, sent through the bedroom wall to the Linksys wireless router in the livingroom, and then sent back through the same wall to the wireless card in the converter. From there it goes by Ethernet to the Rio Receiver, is converted to analog signals and sent via RCA stereo cables to the Beosound and its speakers.

Anyway, this was still not quite meeting my needs because it's hard to read the screen of the Receiver from my bed on the other side of the room. Besides, when I'm using my computer, who wants to locate the remote to change the song or the volume? And so, I was lucky enough to locate these anonymous directions for patching the Rio Receiver (it runs Linux and pulls MP3s over the network using HTTP) so that it is controllable from a web browser. Specifically, the Rio Receiver's IP address now hosts a web server, including a java applet, that shows an image of the Rio's control panel. Thus, I now have complete control of my music from a web browser, and I can also use the remote if (amazingly) I'm reading a book instead of using the computer.

Hmm.

If I had a cafe with background music and wireless internet access -- and what cafe on the left coast doesn't have both? -- I'd be tempted to grab one of these Rio Receivers and connect it to the sound system. Then, hack up some software which lets all local net users contribute their own tracks, round-robin, to the common speaker system. It'd be "BYOJukebox" -- and then some.

I'm sure it'd generate some mighty interesting listening, especially if the contribution system was primarily open/anonymous. (WikiWikiWifiHiFi?) Perhaps it'd even grow into cooperative or competitive live improvisational group performances that draw crowds.

Hmm...

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IETF Brickbats in Slashdot BEEP Discussion

Interesting IETF-related allegations and counter-allegations in this Slashdot thread. Excerpts (in order but without context):

Zeinfeld: The other problem is the nature of the IETF these days. The problem is that they talk a good talk about being open and such, but it is really an old-boys club. The old-fart faction is strong on the IESG and IAB, they have known each other for 20 years and they don't want anyone messing with their turf.

In theory the IETF process is open. In practice there are a bunch of shadowy cliques who make the real decisions in private.

mrose: contrary to popular belief, i don't need to go looking for trouble. in this case, it was a couple of ADs leaving an early sacred meeting, shaking their heads, and then asking me to beat some sense into some folks.

if you're unhappy that i stuck my nose in your business, then all i can suggest is you get more clueful in the application design space, so "the management" doesn't feel they have to go out and get you help. particularly help that you don't like, and especially help that would rather be doing other things with other people.

Zeinfeld:I don't much care for the arrogance of the IETF 'management' as you call them. I certainly don't appreciate folk who think that they have the right to make the type of off-hand blanket pronouncements on other people's work that you and they make habittually without backing it up. Your Xerox comment is absolutely typical of IETF old fartism, you want to have the right to be dismissive, you don't have the technical arguments on your side. So instead of detailing a real technical issue you allude to an earlier system, the more obscure the better. The message: 'I am too important to have to justify my comments but I believe that you are not competent to work on this problem'.

Zeinfeld's comments ring true to me, based on the experience I had in activities related to the IMPP Working Group, 1998-2000. Almost every second of effort devoted to satisfying the (sometimes contradictory) priorities supplied by the IETF "elders" was wasted. Got an interesting protocol idea? Ignore the IETF. Deployed protocols with momentum may be able to survive in the IETF process -- but fresh new proposals only go there to die.

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No More Need To Regulate Radio Broadcasts Than Speech?

In his comments to the FCC (PDF), Timothy J. Shepard draws an analogy between spoken communication in a crowded stadium and radio spectrum usage, to make the point that the need for radio regulation -- such as assigned bandwidths and spectrum auctions -- is receding as technology progresses.

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Sims-like Interface to Real-Time Management Information Systems?

Once upon a time (approximately 1995), I played a game called Transport Tycoon Deluxe. Its interface was a revelation: SimCity on an even grander scale, with *everything* clickable for more information, windows that could "follow" any vehicle in your far-flung empire, alarms when common problems developed requiring further attention, and rich embedded/intuitive reporting lurking behind every discrete entity.

I immediately thought: why can't the top managers of giant organizations -- say, GM or Mobil -- have this same sort of interface on their entire operations? It was only a matter of time, I figured...

Seeing the front page of Bom.com brought back these memories. It's just an animated demo, using the overhead, 3/4s, "isomorphic" projection made popular by the Sims games and various "real-time-strategy" games. But it hints at the same power in comprehending complexity I saw back in Transport Tycoon Deluxe. A flurry of activity is occuring, overwhelming at first, but by mousing over the various participants you can gradually build a picture of what's happening.

I don't think Bom's product uses an interface anything like the illustration.... but it's inevitable. Top managers *will* have a overhead, Sims-like, real-time view of their organizations very soon. They'll be able to drill-down and track any single process, location, or group. They'll be able to set alarms, and dispatch automated monitoring/benchmarking agents to any part of their far-flung, but virtually mapped, empire. It's such a natural and powerful approach I suspect someone, somewhere, is working on it already.

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Would Richard Wallace Pass The Turing Test?

NYTimes: Approximating Life. Richard Wallace battles manic depression and paranoia, scares one of his former classmates (now a professor) so much that a restraining order was granted, and writes award-winning "chat bots" which come closer than any other software to passing the "Turing Test."

I think the tactic his "Alice" uses highlights the ultimate shallowness of the Turing Test: it's only testing "conversational intelligence within a bounded interaction," not "useful intelligence" and definitely not "consciousness" or "self-awareness" (which people often confuse with intelligence). I'm sure there are already programs which can pass the Turing Test -- if you're only given a few minutes to interact with them. In a few years, we'll have programs that can pass the Turing Test even over a period of hours or days, longer if you can't force them to engage in some open-ended complicated task -- like performing work for hire -- between consultations. (And since a real person, if you asked them to spend a few weeks gaining real-world experience in some new field, would likely say, "sorry, I haven't the time," a program's protestations would be credible as well.)

Even when we get to the point that a program can fool a person indefinitely, that program may not be useful -- it may be effectively simulating an annoying or unproductive person! -- and won't necessarily be "self-aware", even if it has been trained to say, "yes, I know what you're talking about, I have a strong sense of self," etc.

We're going to need better tests and standards for deciding when our creations rate as having reached human-level intelligence.

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Energy Trains, Subs, and Political Bandits

Wired: Choo-Choo Trains on Energy Crunch. Oakdale, California's Sierra Railroad proposes using locomotive engines to generate electricity for California during crunch times. A bonus is that the engines can be moved near where they're most needed.

I proposed something vaguely similar, but more fantastical, back when California faced rolling blackouts, in this message to the FoRK list:

Anyone here know enough about naval nuclear reactors to say whether parking a few subs and aircraft carriers in the bay and cabling them to the local power grid could save silicon valley from rolling blackouts?

Just wondering.

If this would work, I'd suggest tethering a sub in the Berkeley marina, for optimal irony generation.

Turns out the Russians had used tethered subs to generate electricity for onshore purposes before, so I further refined the idea here:

Gray Davis should get Vladimir Putin on the line; a quick deal would help restore Russian pride after the Kursk incident, provide Russia with hard currency, and make Davis the clear front runner for the 2004 Democratic Party presidential nomination.

(Even I'm not sure if I'm serious or not.)

(I suppose that was an example of "Ha Ha Only Serious.")

Instead, Gray Davis signed long-term, overpriced electricity contracts that he now wants to reneg on; blamed everyone except for the boneheaded regulators and legislators who, in a phony "deregulation", actually constrained the California energy market to be fragile and manipulable; and bailed out his giant political contributor, PG&E -- at the time the third largest bankruptcy ever -- with new policies making it illegal to buy electricity from anyone else.

The phony deregulation (passed while Davis, as Lt. Governor, presided over the state senate), the panicked reaction (under Davis as governor), and the bailout of his monopolist sponsors (engineered by Davis) will continue to cost the state billions years into the future. In a more efficient and enlightened world, Davis wouldn't be facing a tough reelection battle, he'd already have been impeached and removed from office.

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All The World's Information, In A U-Haul Trailer

OK, if you can get 1 terabyte inside a 1-cubic-centimeter volume...

...and according to this UC-Berkeley study, the world produces about 1.5 billion gigabytes (1.5 million terabytes) of information each year...

Then, you could fit the entire world's yearly production of information inside a cube that measured...

cube-root(1.5 million) ~= 115 cm

..per side. That is, not as long in any dimension as most adults are tall, and only 1.5 cubic meters (53 cubic feet) in total volume.

Two whole copies would fit in U-Haul's smallest trailer.

OK, so how about we create a couple of these every year, and launch them into space, just in case something goes horribly awry with our planet?

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I hate it when you check your own blog for updates, but there aren't any.

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Paul Graham: Adoption Via Repetition

Paul Graham captures a crucial point in his essay, Being Popular:

So anyone who invents something new has to expect to keep repeating their message for years before people will start to get it. We wrote what was, as far as I know, the first web-server based application, and it took us years to get it through to people that it didn't have to be downloaded. It wasn't that they were stupid. They just had us tuned out.

The good news is, simple repetition solves the problem. All you have to do is keep telling your story, and eventually people will start to hear. It's not when people notice you're there that they pay attention; it's when they notice you're still there.

The rest of the essay is chock full of acquired wisdom, as well. I'm beginning to buy his implication that Lisp is due for a renaissance, perhaps helped along by his Arc project.

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The recession must be over, the Pets.com puppet has found a new gig.

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Who says: Hard times?
I'm used to them
The speeding planet burns
I'm used to that
My life's so common it disappears
And sometimes even music
Cannot substitute for tears

Paul Simon, "The Cool, Cool River," on "The Rhythm of the Saints"

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Kevin Marks: Canonical, Universal Content Identifiers Wanted

A fellow named Kevin Marks writes in his blog, Epeus' epigone:

This is what we need for other media - a canonical, universal way to refer to a particular piece of music or other recording, that we can excerpt and link to as part of our own creation. Sending compressed copies of tunes synchronously once to a few listeners is imposing the limitations of radio onto a new medium that has the potential to be far more flexible and expressive - it is like early cinema, where a single fixed camera would film a whole play, with the proscenium arch neatly framed in the shot.

While we don't have excerpting down, the reliable identifiers used by Bitzi can refer to exact instances of media, and the MAGNET-URI proposal provides a way to handoff further processing from a website to one or more helper apps, such as cataloguing, sharing, or content-delivery utilities.

Further, the "Judio: P2P-Leveraged Net Radio" concept a few entries down is a more radical formulation of something Mr. Marks was also musing about recently. He suggested using actual local CD-tracks to feed virtual net radio channels, where I suggest P2P networks.

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Palladium: Dead DRM Warmed Over

Steven Levy in Newsweek/MNSNBC: The Big Secret, about a Microsoft plan, called Palladium, to rearchitect the PC to ensure total creation-to-grave information control (aka "security").

It'll never work, at least not as a way to prevent the intentional copying of mass-market media. It will fool many people for a few more years into believing that DRM -- if only backed by Microsoft -- could work. (As such, it will draw a number of companies and individuals in as willing accomplices to the further expansion of Microsoft's market power, in the name of "data security.")

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If there's one thing I've learned in all my days, it's that you can't have too much ambiguity in your life.

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Judio: P2P Leveraged Net Radio

We need net "radio" that pulls its content, as-needed, from a P2P sharing space.

The "broadcaster" would really just provide an ever-refreshing playlist, a window on the last X minutes of contiguous content, with reliable (hash) identifiers naming each segment of media to play. "Tuners" would fetch the playlist, and scour any and all available sources for matching content fragments, grabbing them seconds to minutes before they are needed, playing them for the local listener in order and without gaps, resharing them for as long as possible, discarding them when necessary.

Some of the fragments might be content that is already widely available (popular tracks), perhaps listed as a series of acceptable alternates, while other fragments would be custom content, recorded and shared out over P2P networks nearly-live.

Call it "Judio", for "Judo-radio", because it emphasizes the use of a tiny, smart control channel to leverage a giant amount of content on outside networks. Generalization to video or other media content is an obvious extension. Latest-on-top blogs/feeds are the new broadcast networks, and all that jazz.

Gnutella and other P2P networks could conceivably be (or grow into) the role of being the content-cloud.

Would a station publishing such a playlist require a broadcasting license for the copyrighted content to which they refer? They are not making any copies; that is left up to the listeners.

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MAGNET-URI Proposal

I've cooked up a proposal for a generic, "open standard" way for websites to display links that handoff operations to client-side applications -- like file-management tools and P2P content-delivery networks or file-sharing applications.

It involves a new URI scheme called "magnet:".

(URIs, or Uniform/Universal Resource Identifiers, are the more general class of identifier-like things of which Uniform Resource Names (URNs) are just one kind.)

In a way, "magnet:" URIs could be thought of as project- and vendor- neutral versions of the P2P-system-specific URIs that have been proliferating. (Examples include "ed2k", "freenet", "mnet", "sig2dat", and probably others.) However, "magnet" URIs are more general and fuzzy in meaning -- a "magnet:" URI will bring up a list of locally available options, instead of telling a single program, which monopolizes the "magnet:" type, an exact action to take.

These URIs could be very useful for activating Gnutella servents, but would not be Gnutella-only.

For more info, please check out the details and examples at:

http://magnet-uri.sourceforge.net

Comments welcome in the "magnet-uri" YahooGroup. Ideas for how this could be made more robust, general, & useful would be especially appreciated!

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Media Companies Wise Up & Loosen Up

Common sense about digital media is breaking out all over -- even in the biggie media companies!

C|Net: Universal, Sony to trim download prices. Universal and Sony have started to sell individual downloadable singles, for $0.99-$1.49, which can be burnt to CD or transferred to portable music players. They're not yet in a totally flexible format like MP3, and I suspect the hassle of making individual payment decisions is still more of a deterrent than the price itself, but it's a step in the right direction. Which brings us to...

LATimes: AOL Selling Songs Online in Unprotected Format. Real, honest-to-goodness MP3s to do with as you wish for $0.99. Further, the charge is simply added to your AOL bill -- making it an easy impulse buy. (No word yet on whether the MP3s are individually serialized, so that if you share what you buy, AOL hits you like a ton of bricks.) At least for the duration of this test program, AOLTW seems willing to entertain the notion that the costs of "protecting content" outweight the benefits. Which brings us to...

New Scientist: Harry Potter released unprotected. Warner Home Video, another AOLTW division, has decided to leave off the "Macrovision" copy-fouling signal from the VHS and DVD versions of Harry Potter and the Sorecerer's Stone. Macrovision seems none too pleased, losing about 5¢ per shipped title in licensing fees, but Warner is being perfectly rational. Macrovision never stopped serious pirates -- who could easily work around it. (Perhaps it should be called "Maginotvision.") It only inconvenienced casual home copying. But nowadays, casual home copying will involve computers and the net, and Macrovisioning every physical copy won't prevent some dedicated person, somewhere, from creating and then making widely available good-quality digital copies.

Implications for the future? Spending money on futile mechanisms to constrain consumers' choices is going to look increasingly silly. It just doesn't add to the bottom line. Complicated DRM schemes won't draw further investment or media-company customers.

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Broadcast TV Under Attack From All Quarters

Broadcast TV is under attack from all quarters:

Andrew Odlyzko, Communications Professor, in Internet TV: Implications for the long distance network, July 2001:

The Internet is likely to have a a much larger impact on TV than TV will have on Internet backbones. There is vastly more storage than transmission capacity, and this is likely to continue. Together with the the requirements of mobility, and the need to satisfy human desires for convenience and instant gratification, this is likely to induce a migration towards a store-and-replay model, away from the current real-time streaming model of the broadcast world. Further, HDTV may finally get a chance to come into widespread use. The flexibility of the Internet is its biggest advantage, and will allow for continued experimentation with novel services.

Thomas W. Hazlett, Economist, in Abolish television, a week ago:

Nicolas Negroponte famously opined that while we were born into a world in which our phone calls were made over wires and our TV shows beamed through the air, we would die in a world in which this had been reversed. The digital moment has now come: toss the Negroponte switch. Countries further down the path to universal subscription TV - Belgium is now surpassing 96 per cent cable penetration - may well take the lead. Eliminating the wasteful duplication of off-air TV enforced by regulation would be popular with consumers and unlock exciting new opportunities for wireless entrepreneurs.

Stewart Alsop, in I Want My File-Served TV!, in this upcoming week's Fortune:

So if you believe that people do want to watch whatever they want whenever they want, you need a massively distributed system. Which brings us to "file-served television" and that TiVo board meeting. Having a PVR's really big hard disk in many living rooms creates a massively distributed system: Instead of relatively few hard disks owned by the cable operators, you have hundreds of thousands of hard disks owned by everybody. And thus the space to store a million hours of video content.

...Alsop continues...

That's file-served television. It is very different from today's TV: The popularity of content is controlled by users rather than broadcasters. It's a system flexible enough to adapt to a new TV standard like HDTV over time. It's a vision that's big enough, in fact, to contain all the previous visions of the television industry.

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Longevity in Viruses?

CNN tells us Longevity lies in genes, and that scientists are looking for specific genes that confer extremely long life.

Equivalently, they should be looking for viruses that confer extremely long life.

Viruses are packages of portable genetic material that can cause a wide range of changes in infected organisms. We focus on -- and almost exclusively look for -- the bad, but since reading a David Brin short story ("The Giving Plague") 8 years ago, it has seemed perfectly natural to me that there should be subtly beneficial contagions all around us as well.

(I suggest that once a group of viruses that have net-beneficial effects on health are discovered, they be christened 'saluviruses' -- from the latin 'salus' for health. As of this moment, 'saluvirus' and 'saluviruses' return no hits on Google. They would be part of a larger group of long-term residents of the human body called commensal flora.)

Who knows? It may turn out that "infectious" optimism really is!

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Machiavelli's Innovator's Dilemma

Machiavelli recognized a sort of "innovator's dilemma" in The Prince, nearly 500 years ago:

It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from the fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them.

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Will messages to the future (or from the past) be at the nano-scale?

Storage decays. Paper rots, fades, crumbles. Optical storage like CDs can become unreadable in a decade or two -- much sooner if exposed to sunlight or other stresses. Magnetic storage fades. None of these media are the stuff of a fossil record.

As a result, any project that hopes to communicate complex thoughts to the distant future may need to invent its own mass-density, long-lived archival media. For the Rosetta Project, as initiated by the Long Now Foundation, that media is a laser-etched nickel plate. But such plates still only have an expected usable life of 2,000 years.

Might molecular-level memories -- such as IBM's recently-announced "Millipede" -- be even more robust? If they could be mass-produced, and stored away from the rampant chemical and nuclear processes (life and sunlight) that lead to decay, might they have a chance to persist for millions of years?

Sure, only advanced technology could read these tiny, molecular digital messages. But if tiny molecular digital messages are the only media that endure, then tiny molecular digital messages will be all we can consider sending to the distant future.

Or all we might expect to get from the distant past.

Perhaps the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) should be using microscopes as much as radio telescopes -- microscopes pointed at hard material scooped from places unlikely to have been disturbed for millions of years. Some terrestrial geologic formations might qualify, but nearby regions of outer space seem a better bet.

The closest thing to a 2001-like obelisk that humanity ever discovers might be a pockmarked speck of dirt. Rosetta dust.

Biovariant: If you can't guarantee that a storage medium will be undisturbed, you could make it self-replenishing, with the ability to copy and rebuild itself in reaction to external stresses. Hmm, do we know of any information-dense molecular entities that behave that way? Say, DNA? Might the Earth's genome have begun as a consciously-designed storage mechanism and/or intentional communication-to-the-future? Might any part of the original message still be recoverable at this point? (This idea also appeared in a 1993 Star Trek:TNG episode called The Chase, and a short story called We'll Return, After This Message, by AutoDesk founder John Walker, written in 1989 and published in 1993.)

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NYTimes: IBM's Nanotech Punchcards

Wow. In A New System for Storing Data: Think Punch Cards, but Tiny, we get a clear description of IBM research in persistent molecular memory that may offer storage densities 25 times that available in today's magnetic hard disks.

160GB hard drives now go for under $250. What happens when 4 terabyte drives are available for the same price? That's the equivalent of 210 double-sided, double-layered DVDs, or 840 DVD-quality 2-hour movies, or around 5,000 almost-DVD-quality Divx-encoded 2-hour movies. In a single desktop drive. Perhaps by about 2010, it will be possible to wear a complete copy of all music ever recorded as a piece of jewelry, perhaps a bracelet or an oversized earring.

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THEX Specification Draft Available

A draft of the Tree Hash Exchange (THEX) format, a specification by Justin Chapweske to which I've contributed, is now available. Hash trees can be used to efficiently perform fine-grained integrity checking of content within distributed content delivery networks. Comments would be best directed to the Open-Content Network developer discussion email list (ocn-dev).

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"DRM Helmets: An Idea Whose Time Has Come" Slashdotted

My OReillyNet weblog entry, DRM Helmets: An Idea Whose Time Has Come, has been Slashdotted. An excerpt from the piece:

I humbly suggest the most cost-effective and reliable solution to the copyright industries' troubles will be DRM helmets, bolted onto each dutiful consumer at the neck. When these helmets sense watermarked audio or video within earshot/eyeshot, they check their local license manager and instantly "fog up" if payment has not been delivered.

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David Bowie Tells It Like It Is

David Bowie sees the future clearly in this NYTimes story:

His deal with Sony is a short-term one while he gets his label started and watches the Internet's effect on careers. "I don't even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don't think it's going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way," he said. "The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing."

"Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity," he added. "So it's like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left. It's terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn't matter if you think it's exciting or not; it's what's going to happen."

Update: Monday night on Letterman, discussing the fact that "Heathen" is being released on both vinyl and CD:

LETTERMAN: "Why do people still want some of them on vinyl?"
BOWIE: "They're crazy! I download everything on the Internet. I don't bother with any format."

(As reported by Brad Hill.)

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Nifty Word: diegesis

diegesis - the imaginary world in which a story (or film) takes place. Also: diegetic- present in that world.

For example, music that the characters hear is diegetic; mood music for the external audience is non-diegetic.

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The Danger Of The Low-Cost Cruise Missile

Could effective cruise missiles be assembled from relatively cheap and easy-to-acquire technology? This Kiwi thinks so: The Danger Of The Low-Cost Cruise Missile

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Nifty Word: anhedonia

anhedonia-- inability to experience pleasure, or take interest, in normally pleasurable acts.

(Well, it's not so nifty of a word if you're experiencing it.)

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Gatto on the real lessons of public schools

John Taylor Gatto nails it in this biting essay, The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher. The concluding thought:

School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.

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Nigerian Millions Can Be Yours, Too

People complain about all the Nigerian "help-us-get-this-pile-of-money-out-of-the-country" spam they've been receiving.

But I say: don't knock it 'til you've tried it!

I made $117.5 million last year by accepting such deposits.

Few people realize that Nigerians send HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS in ill-gotten funds to the USA each year, through people just like you and me! All you need is a Hotmail address (free!) and a checking account (sometimes free!).

Keep an eye out for my late-night infomercial, "How To Make Money From Shady Nigerian Contractors, Bureaucrats, Bankers, Princes, and Politicians".

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