Month: March 2004

Brad Choate: A Non-Funky MT RSS 2 Template

Well, after a lot of hunting around and head-scratching, I finally have validated full and excerpted RSS feeds. I shoulda come to Brad’s site first . . . . .

Is there any reason why this isn’t something you get with MovableType out of the box or tarball, as it were? I realize they’re pretty heads down with the 3.0 release and their new TypePad venture, but how hard would it be to find a reliable version of all the ones out there and bless it?

So here are the new feeds:
The full feed (no comments, just the main and extended entry text) is at index-full.xml and the traditional truncated feed is index.xml.

Educated Guesswork: March 2004 Archives:

Is Kristoff’s problem that the CEOs are being paid more than is efficient or that their pay is somehow unfair regardless of whether it’s efficient. The main thrust of the argument is the former, but the invocation of athletes and movie stars suggests the latter. As far as I know there is a free market for athletes (and probably movie stars). It’s not as if the boards of sports teams are packed with athletes voting themselves high salaries. Does Kristoff have any data to suggest otherwise or is he just offended that they’re making so much money?

Interesting. I think it’s safe to say that the market for athletes and movie stars has some limits (athletes have more constrained careers, based on their age, movie stars likewise, based on their appeal). Meanwhile, business executives can stay in the game until they come out of their offices feet first.

Also, entertainers (to conflate the two categories) get paid based on how many butts they put in the seats, whether it be at the stadium or the local multiplex, or units of some commodity they sell. Determining if there’s been an over- or under-valuation is quite simple.

I agree that many of the execs make far too much and that their pay is rarely tied to performance. Shareholders and boards don’t vote for them the same way they do for the movies they watch or music they buy.

What if they did? We see too much emphasis on the short-term as it is . . . .

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: March 07, 2004 – March 13, 2004 Archives: On the notion (apparently under consideration) of using Ground Zero for the president’s acceptance speech.

The question is whether it’s possible to imagine anything more crass. Isn’t ground zero something like a graveyard?

What could be more worse? The president addressing the crowd wearing a pelt from a recently executed Guantanamo prisoner? Personally executing Saddam on stage with a scimitar?

Not to be flippant, but could anything be more crass than accepting a presidential nomination on ground that is still mixed with the bodies of thousands of Americans?

Lincoln dedicated a cemetary at Gettysburg; he didn’t hold the 1864 Republican convention there.

CNN.com – Gates: Buy stamps to send e-mail – Mar. 5, 2004

Does anyone else think that charging for email — now that we all have gotten use to it being free and ubiquitous — will be a good idea?

Interesting article with a variety of viewpoints, but I doubt this will work. The spammers have proven to be adaptable and more nimble than anyone could have expected. My guess is that when free email is outlawed, only outlaws will use free email. Trouble is, this plan purports to make it harder to send: why not find a way to make it more difficult to receive junk mail?

After all, they’ll just pass along the cost, and the more determined clients will continue to pay.

If the leading distributers of email software and services started pushing for digital signatures and verifiable IDs, and did a good job of integrating them into popular email client software, it would then be possible to filter out all unsigned mail, just as some services use “whitelists” now. As nimble as they are, I don’t know if the spammers can get verifiable IDs quickly enough to make their game pay.

And what about the people who pay the bills? It would be informative to collect the names and contact information from a reasonable large corpus of spam and see what the FTC and FCC think about that.

I guess this is one of the new ones I keep hearing about (Netsky, Bagel, et al). It seems to be making really malformed http requests: you can see that they are running about 6 kbytes on size (an average line is about 160 bytes).

# tail -1 httpd-access.log | wc
1 12 6405


Just a lot of crap following a NULL.IDA? query. Interestingly, it’s all coming from one PC (located at 61.62.23.41) on Sony Network Taiwan Limited’s network.

The Underground Man: The Rights of Man

Reading these, it’s interesting to see where they echo the Declaration of Independence and Constitution and where they differ. I especially like Article 4:

Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be determined by law.

The language seems a little stilted, and I assume it’s the translation (in article 4, I think anything makes more sense than everything.

And this document acknowledges a Supreme Being explicitly, rather than a Creator (which need be a Being at all).

It would be interesting to compare and contrast these documents from different countries: where do various cultures draw the line between rights and responsibilities?