Category: books

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? 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.

CNN.com – A dream of a 1,000-year camera – Jun 29, 2004:

The proposal: Position cameras above all major American cities and shoot one frame — a 24th of a second of film — each day at noon. The frames would be strung together gradually to create a continuous chronicle of each city’s development.

“It’s the same idea of all time-lapse photography, but over an outrageous amount of time,” Raimi told The Associated Press in an interview to promote “Spider-Man 2.” “So you could watch the city of Los Angeles rise, and maybe an earthquake might come in 300 years or a tidal wave.”

Echoes of the Clock of the Long Now project.

Presidential Courtesy @ Oliver Willis: Like Kryptonite to Stupid:

Many-to-Many: MT Licensing vs Weblogs.com Shutdown:

Last month, Six Apart changed the terms of their software licensing, for a new product. Public reaction was swift and scathing. Hundreds of users tracked back to Mena’s announcement of the changes, most of them outraged by the lack of warning, and the impact on current users. (I was one of those who expressed concerns.) [ . . . ] And, as many people pointed out, their announcements had no effect on existing sites, which continued to run under the original license.

In contrast, this past weekend, Dave Winer pulled the plug on ~3,000 weblogs that had been hosted on the weblogs.com server. He did this with no warning to the writers involved. All links to those sites now point to this page, which has only an audio file from Dave to explain the reasoning decision—meaning it can’t be quoted or searched (or even accessed at all by those who are deaf, hard of hearing, or unable to listen to sound files on their computer).

Count me in as one of those who grumbled about the licensing for MT 3.0 and how the lack of communication was beyond ironic . . . now we have Dave Winer just dropping 3000 people’s content on the floor, no warning, no links to backups, nothing, and for reasons I don’t understand (though Liz’s assumptions above make sense, given his track record), his explanation is an audio file. No text, not even a transcription of the audio.

As noted here:

How does Dave Winer handle criticism? He deletes what he doesn’t like. It may not be personal, it may even be on topic, but if it’s not what he wants to see, it’s gone. See here.

What a strange little man . . . .
Continue reading “respect is all you have in a reputation/gift economy”

Bye, CNet
CNet (“News.com”) has recently switched to headline-only feeds. I certainly don’t require (and don’t provide) full-content feeds, but the headlines just don’t tell me enough to make a decision whether or not to visit. So I unsubscribed. It’s a pity, because they are a good news source. Maybe I’m just looking in the wrong place? [ongoing]

I haven’t unsubscribed yet — for no other reason than laziness — but I wonder what made them decide to switch feed formats? And I wonder if they have noticed a. traffic going up or down, as a result, and b. any change in the number of subscribers to the RSS feeds?

My technique, to misuse the word, for tallying subscribers is to simply count all requests for *.(xml|rss|atom) files, with some rudimentary tidying after the fact. I wonder what other people use?

Can’t add a thing to this post of Wendy Seltzer’s.

Record Labels Can’t Find Artists, Can Find Grandma

The major record labels couldn’t find some big-name artists to whom they owed royalties, but they could find another grandmother to sue.

Good work from NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer gets the record labels to track down such artists as Luciano Pavarotti and the estate of Elvis Presley, whom they couldn’t seem to find in order to deliver royalty checks. Says Spitzer of the live performers, “It’s not like it’s hard to find them. You could go to a concert and throw the check at them onstage.”

Maybe the failure to find artists comes from the record labels’ other preoccupation, dragnetting John and Jane Does in the war against filesharers. Among the dolphins caught in the last round was a Fayetteville grandmother targetted for her grandson’s music downloads. Let’s get priorities straight here.

[Wendy’s Blog: Legal Tags]

I was going to order this anyway, but Ben’s note makes it a must.

Dark Age Ahead

Alright, so it’s a descent into schilling, but there can be no more exciting news to greet a sunny Monday morning than that of a new book by Jane Jacobs.

Not content with blowing out the back of my intellectual skull with the Death and Life of Great American Cities, she goes and writes another that sounds right down my trousers: Dark Age Ahead. Here’s the blurb:

In Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs identifies five pillars of our culture that we depend on but which are in serious decline: community and family; higher education; the effective practice of science; taxation and government; and self-policing by learned professions. The decay of these pillars, Jacobs contends, is behind such ills as environmental crisis, racism and the growing gulf between rich and poor; their continued degradation could lead us into a new Dark Age, a period of cultural collapse in which all that keeps a society alive and vibrant is forgotten. But this is a hopeful book as well as a warning. Jacobs draws on her vast frame of reference — from fifteenth-century Chinese shipbuilding to zoning regulations in Brampton, Ontario — and in highly readable, invigorating prose offers proposals that could arrest the cycles of decay and turn them into beneficent ones. Wise, worldly, full of real-life examples and accessible concepts, this book is an essential read for perilous times.

[Ben Hammersley’s Dangerous Precedent]

Hmm, contrast that with this in yesterday’s local paper:
The Seattle Times: Books: ‘Dark Age Ahead’: End of the road for a civilization of drivers?:

There are other good points in this short and snappy book and much spirit from a still-lively mind. But if Jacobs wanted to write about cars, which she clearly did, she should have done it openly and not disguised it as a book about the eclipse of civilization.

The book isn’t about cars, from what I can gather, but it appears the reviewer is unable to work that out. Without having read it, I can’t refute the charges, but from the blurb, it’s hard to see how the reviewer saw this as a book about cars. The snarky aside where the reviewer reveals he never knew about the auto cartel’s destruction of many cities public transportation systems[1] makes me wonder why he was given this book to review at all. (see also this page.)

fn1. In the 1930s and 1940s, Firestone Tire and Rubber Company conspired with Standard Oil of California and General Motors to replace highly-efficient urban electric transit systems with bus operations using petroleum. They formed National City Lines, which by the mid-1950s had completed the motorization of electric transit systems in sixteen states. This included the destruction of the Pacific Electric System in Southern California, which operated 3,000 trains through 56 cities and carried 80 million passengers annually. General Motors was convicted of conspiracy in 1949 and fined $5,000.

buckman’s magnatune blog: Record sales up, shows Soundscan, RIAA playing with stats?

Ton points out that the RIAA’s “sky is falling” argument is based on (surprise) an outmoded understanding of how modern retailing works.

Roger Goff, an Entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles confirms that, indeed, retail has reacted this way in the Post-Napster era. “Retail used to buy 10 weeks-worth [of records] and now they realize, in most cases, they don’t have to carry more than two weeks-worth.” In other words, retail has adapted to more of an “on demand” model (similar to the Internet) as opposed to the, accepting-tons-of-product-shoved-down-the-pipeline model record companies imposed on them in the past.

Failure to adapt is what leads to extinction, from my understanding of science. Is there a more obvious display?