the art of writing is discovering what you believe
Mena’s Corner: Barak at Six Apart: “Tonight, on the eve of a change of position, I write about Barak Berkowitz who will be taking over my role of CEO.”
Mena’s Corner: Barak at Six Apart:
Tonight, on the eve of a change of position, I write about Barak Berkowitz who will be taking over my role of CEO.
Mena Trott steps down as CEO of SixApart, relinquishing control to a board member who joined in the wake of their VC funding.
Read it and see if you get the same vibe.
Guardian Unlimited | Online | The second browser war: However, what would happen if people’s web browsers were capable of running complex applications, with code based on openly published specifications? Two things: first, the operating system would become irrelevant, so there would be no need to upgrade to the next version of Windows, and second, the playing field for everything else would be thus levelled. The majority of Microsoft’s business, therefore, could have been threatened if the IE browser team had continued past 2001. The concept of running applications within the web browser is not a new one, and indeed has been tried before and failed. But today, with a combination of cheaper bandwidth and improvements in storage and clustering technology, things are looking promising.
Guardian Unlimited | Online | The second browser war:
However, what would happen if people’s web browsers were capable of running complex applications, with code based on openly published specifications? Two things: first, the operating system would become irrelevant, so there would be no need to upgrade to the next version of Windows, and second, the playing field for everything else would be thus levelled. [ . . .]
The concept of running applications within the web browser is not a new one, and indeed has been tried before and failed. But today, with a combination of cheaper bandwidth and improvements in storage and clustering technology, things are looking promising.
All well and good. The ideas of networked applications and storage/CPU power on demand are not new.
Mark Twain “The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.”
Mark Twain
“The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.” [Motivational Quotes of the Day]
Crypto-Gram: July 15, 2004: Torture has been in the news since 9/11, most recently regarding the U.S. military’s practices at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Politics isn’t my area of expertise, and I don’t want to debate the politics of the scandal. I don’t even want to debate the moral issues: Is it moral to torture a bomber to find a hidden ticking bomb, is it moral to torture an innocent to get someone to defuse a ticking bomb, is it moral to torture N-1 people to save N lives? What interests me more are the security implications of torture: How well does it work as a security countermeasure, and what are the trade-offs?… Given that torture doesn’t actually produce useful intelligence, why in the world are we spending so much good will on the world stage to do it.
Torture has been in the news since 9/11, most recently regarding the U.S. military’s practices at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Politics isn’t my area of expertise, and I don’t want to debate the politics of the scandal. I don’t even want to debate the moral issues: Is it moral to torture a bomber to find a hidden ticking bomb, is it moral to torture an innocent to get someone to defuse a ticking bomb, is it moral to torture N-1 people to save N lives? What interests me more are the security implications of torture: How well does it work as a security countermeasure, and what are the trade-offs? This is an excellent pair of essays[1] about how ineffective torture really is. Given that torture doesn’t actually produce useful intelligence, why in the world are we spending so much good will on the world stage to do it.
I haven’t read these — as described, they run counter to popular myth — so if Schneier says they’re worth the time, they’re at the links below. So why are we doing it again? Oh, yes, for revenge.
fn1. Torture’s dark allure and Does torture work? There’s another — Of Human Bondage — by the same author that spells out the various forms of torture, where they were devised and how they have been used.
I have been reading Guns, Germs and Steel this week. It’s an interesting walk through human history and has clarified or just covered things I hadn’t thought much about.
I have been reading Guns, Germs and Steel this week. It’s an interesting walk through human history and has clarified or just covered things I hadn’t thought much about.
The parts about domesticating plants, how it works, reminded me of The Botany of Desire: where Diamond talks about early people’s domesticated plants, Pollan makes a convincing case that they domesticated each other. Not that Pollan contradicts or disputes Diamond: I find they complemented each other on this point.
So far, one of Diamond’s central arguments is that the switch from subsistence hunting and gathering to agriculture is how civilizations got their start: the regions of the world with wild grasses that could be harvested and later planted systematically were able to support non-farm specialist classes (bureaucrats and politicos, to make a short list). The grasses he mentions were plentiful in the Fertile Crescent (the SW Asian highlands or modern Iraq, Jordan, Turkey, et al), less so in Europe and almost non-existent in other climatically similar areas. And to narrow the odds still further, the process of domestication stems from mutations: where true-breeding wild grains might drop seeds when ripe, making them inaccessible by hunter/gatherers, certain mutants would keep their seeds, allowing our ancient forebears to collect them and either thresh and grind them now or save them for later planting.
That, and his argument that the demise of certain large mammals on each continent is extricably tied to the arrival of early humans as they spread out from Africa and Asia, got me to thinking about how that maps onto modern society. As the modern world runs on energy, electricity specifically, but oil more generally as the chief means of generating it, are we hunter/gatherers or farmers? Do we harvest energy as our forebears harvested crops? Or do we slash and burn our way through, always expecting we’ll find more over the next ridge? The complex societies we know all stem from the ability or discovery of surpluses and the resulting freedom from subsistence food production/gathering.
I’ll be thinking more about this as I work through the book, but it seemed there was something resonating from the headlines. Diamond makes the point that not all cultures went into agriculture, even when their neighbors did, even if they traded with agricultural societies: that also resonates, since not all nations produce energy but they all use it, at increasing rates.
now playing: Pursuance (Part 3)/Psalm (Part 4) from the album A Love Supreme by John Coltrane | Buy it
Operation Desert Fox: OPERATION NAME: Operation Desert Fox MISSION: To strike military and security targets in Iraq that contribute to Iraq’s ability to produce, store, maintain and deliver weapons of mass destruction.
I ran across some trolls over here and the last blast I got before I gave up was some gibbering equating Operation Desert Fox and Operation Iraqi Freedom, as the invasion was formally known. Pretty simple to look up the mission statements . . .
OPERATION NAME: Operation Desert Fox
MISSION: To strike military and security targets in Iraq that contribute to Iraq’s ability to produce, store, maintain and deliver weapons of mass destruction.
Attacking Iraq – Operation Iraqi Freedom:
At 9:34 PM EST on March 19, 2003 (5:34 AM local time in Baghdad on March 20), United States and United Kingdom forces consisting of 40 cruise missiles and strikes led by 2 F-117s from the 8th Fighter Squadron (supported by Navy EA-6B Prowlers) and other aircraft began conducting military operations against the state of Iraq designed to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction and to remove the Iraqi Regime from power.
Where one was in support of the containment doctrine that evidence now tells us was effective, the other was expressly to remove the regime from power.
I’m sure whatever it is, it’s all Clinton’s fault, perhaps even Carter’s.
Terror in the Skies, Again? – WomensWallStreet: “Terror in the Skies, Again?”
Terror in the Skies, Again? – WomensWallStreet:
This article seemed by turns frightening and then hysterical (not in the funny sense), particularly when the author used Ann Coulter as a source, but it appears to be bona fide. An airliner full of passengers flying from Detroit to LA escaped being blown up as a group of hijackers assembled bombs from components they carried individually.
This article seems to corroborate the story. What isn’t clear from the first-hand account is, what happened to whatever they were building? Where did all the parts end up?
[source]
<update> In the cool clear light of morning, this may be a load of hokum: there’s a lot of snark in this refutation, and given the lack of any physical evidence (did they eat the “bomb” components?), I suspect it’s a hoax. But I don’t doubt that the “one piece at a time” strategy could be employed, even across multiple flights.
<update> Even Bruce Schneier found this to be credible. While I agree that a different approach to security — less predictable, more thoughtful — would help, I’m uneasy about declaring activities to be suspicious that might just be misunderstood.
<update> And it seems that while part of the story is true — there were air marshals on the flight and they were aware of a situation in progress — the perpetrator of the disturbance was the frightened passenger who over-reacted. Seems the swarthy and ominous types were none other than the musical accompanists for an artists best described as the Syrian Wayne Newton.
I installed Dean Allen’s refer apparatus the other day, and just remembered to take a look at it.
I installed Dean Allen’s refer apparatus the other day, and just remembered to take a look at it. One jumped out at me: someone at the State is looking into the term “Avignon Presidency?”
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Melting ice: the threat to London’s future: “He said the heatwave of last summer in which 25,000 Europeans died had killed more people than terrorism, yet had not been given anything like the same level of attention.”
25,000 people on one continent as a result of a man-made activity.
What was it?
Continue reading “what man-made event killed 25,000 Europeans in 2003?”
Red or Blue—Which Are You? – Take the Slate quiz. By Anne E. Kornblut
You are in the middle.
Where do you place?