Category: del.icio.us

perspective on the real vs wired worlds

I have been more or less offline these past few days with my laptop in the shop, but I found a wrapup of the James Kim story at my local blood donation center today, after my appointment. There was some mention of it on a news roundtable on the radio today, with some reporters relating they were hearing both sides, that Kim was a hero or a unprepared fool. Interestingly, one panelist, stationed here from the Netherlands, said she didn’t realize when she came that you could die in the wilderness: they don’t have any wilderness in the Netherlands. But someone within driving distance of real wilderness should know better.

The story isn’t pretty. When you read passages like:

They passed signs warning Bear Camp Road may be blocked by snow but kept going. At times James Kim stuck his head out the window to see through the falling snow,

I can’t help but be infuriated. Maps are important, but common sense is more so. I mourn the loss the family must feel but a cascade of mistakes — missing the turnoff and not turning back to the known route, following seasonal roads in the off-season, turning off the seasonal roads, driving in unsafe conditions, and finally leaving the car (cars are always found, and the car was located before his body was)– all of which were avoidable, make me hope someone else learns from this.

The vandals who enabled the Kims to travel that road — someone cut open a gate — are partly to blame, but there were a lot of choices that could have been made differently. And that made the difference.

More, better-written, and to the point commentary here.

links for 2006-12-04

is this a meme waiting to happen?

Chad asks “What was your first Amazon order? (and why George Jones matters).”

I looked mine up:
1Stamazon

It’s interesting that they’re both photography books, since I seem to have taken it up again, but I don’t think those are my first items purchased. I’m pretty I bought some stuff earlier than that, because of where I was working at the time. Of course, this was back when Netscape Navigator was made by an outfit called Mosaic Communications and was still in .9x release numbers and Amazon didn’t sell anything but books 😉

According to this article, it was founded in 1994 and here it’s listed having opened for sales in 1995. That makes sense.

Anyway, it’s interesting to consider how long Amazon has been around and how much things have changed as a result.

Scott Adams is an idiot

Scott Adams is an idiot:

A wry commentator on office life, he may be, but he should probably reserve his opinions on politics. His assessment of the Presidency:

I doubt Bill Gates is considering a run for president right now, largely because it’s so hard to make a difference from that job.

You’d think that Adams had been living under a rock these past six years. There are several million people in Iraq who I’m sure would be happy to tell him how big a difference George W Bush has made in their lives.

… to say nothing of the families of the WTC victims and the families of the 3,000+ serviceman and women filled in Iraq and the tens of thousands wounded.

<update: added the link to the original Adams piece> I think there have been some holders of that office who made a difference (the two Roosevelts come to mind, Lincoln as well). So the idea that the executive branch is a poor choice for a dynamic leader to aspire to is bunk, especially when you consider how much power the incumbent has amassed. Imagine a leader who could cut defense spending to something less that what the rest of the world spends combined, and plow the rest into stuff that doesn’t kill people: I expect there is more to be gained from that than the Gates Foundation can dream of.

links for 2006-12-01

links for 2006-11-30

links for 2006-11-29

paying for TV

CBC prez: High-def TV has no business model:

Cory Doctorow:
CBC president Robert Rabinovich has decried high-def TV as having no business model. This wouldn’t be newsworthy except that the promise of HDTV is the excuse given for the Broadcast Flag, which says that paranoid studio executives should be in charge of what features TVs are allowed to have.

The idea is that if you don’t give them their design-veto, they won’t put movies on high-def, and then the money won’t come in. But when the head of Canada’s national broadcaster announces that there’s just no way any broadcaster is going to make its money back on high-def, it makes you wonder if the Brits don’t have the right idea.

In the UK, a digital TV system called “Freeview” gives the public 30 free standard-definition TV channels, for life, over the air, for one setup payment. Instead of trying to lure people into throwing away their old sets and buying all new, Hollywood-crippled ones, the Brits just created free cable for life. Amazingly, lots of people voluntarily switched — and soon they’ll be able to shut off the old analog towers and use that spectrum for better, more internetty things.

“There’s no evidence either in Canada or the United States that we have found for advertisers willing to pay a premium for a program that’s in HD,” Mr. Rabinovich said. “So basically they’re saying if you want to shoot in HD, that’s your business, we’re not going to pay you more.”

The one setup payment comes with the TV License requirement as well, I expect. If you live and watch TV in England and it’s related states, you pay an annual fee to the privilege and in return you get Doctor Who and similarly un-airable-in-the-US shows, without commercials (at least on BBC1/2). Here we sell TV based on advertising, so we get Desperate Housewives.

The difference between the two approaches has been a lively debate topic on USENET in the past, with so-called libertarians claiming the state-owned (ie, owned by me and you) is evil and the communards of the TV license scheme suggesting that selling eyeballs and attention results in pretty crappy product. I’m sure you can’t guess where my sympathies lie.

For more on how the domestic broadcasting model came to be, look for this book.