Category: freecycling

DHS secretary Tom Ridge has investments in many of the companies that do business with DHS and hope to do more: conflict of interest?

In response to a late afternoon telephone inquiry, DHS spokesman Brian Roehrkasse first said the department did not have enough time to answer questions about the disclosure form. Pressed further, he shouted an expletive to a reporter and hung up.

Later, in a second telephone conversation, Roehrkasse said, “I don’t know where we are in the process. I don’t know . . . I can’t validate any information you’ve got,” and repeated a string of expletives.

Spokesmen are more plain-spoken these days, it seems.

Now playing:Spine by They Might Be Giants from the album “The Spine” | Buy it

I missed this earlier in the week when Gary originally posted it, but caught the echoes of it this weekend.

TeledyN: Living with Webservices:

Of course, it’s early now and history tells us that the early market-share owners tend to have a large say in the eventual standards, but history also tells us we don’t get far with divide-and-conquer market strategies. Whether it’s Skype or FlickR, Amazon reviews, FOAF files or bookmarks, I’ve said it before and I say it again, the better strategy is to make the pond as large as possible lest you become the fat fish in a shot-glass.

The old quote — the best way to predict the future is to invent it[1] — comes to mind. It’s interesting to ponder the services mentioned in Gary’s piece and reflect how open infrastructures and ideas have fared in the market vs closed or proprietary ones. While the closed variety often gets out to a commanding lead in mind and marketshare, when the reasons for adopting that strategy — marketshare and revenue — are relegated behind openness, cooperations, respect for users, etc., it helps to remember that “it’s early yet.”

Gary has stuffed a lot of insight and experience into this essay: he’s been working on and with the internet since before most of us had heard of it or knew what it was. (That includes me: I was using packet-switched networking to get to the WELL via CompuServe’s dialup service, but I was unaware of what it meant. I just knew I was able to make a local call and teleport my mind across the country.) Some of these things — Flickr, del.icio.us — I have yet to really look at. I’ll be re-reading this a time or two more.

fn1. Alan Kay.

Now playing: Aztec Camera: Good Morning Britain from the album “The Best Of Aztec Camera” | Buy it

You seem to have a Type B personality. Your personality draws characteristics from each of the other personality types, that is, Type A and Type C. Either you adjust your behavior depending on the situation, or you tend to be moderated in your attitudes. In any case, you are the most balanced of the three personality types.

I scored 45 out of 100.

tip of the beanie to [Michael Hanscom]

Daring Fireball: We’ve Never Even Heard of This ‘iTunes Music Store’ of Which You Speak:

I mean, what’s Microsoft supposed to do? Release their new music on Wednesdays?

Hmm, this would have been a good bit of snark if “New Music Tuesday” wasn’t a staple of commercial radio for the past 10 years or so.

<update> Mr. Gruber was reminded by many correspondents that New Music Tuesday wasn’t Apple’s invention: could MSFT be following a convention, dare we call it a standard? As he points out, the MSN music store is a knock-off of the iTMS, as anyone reading the article in the Seattle Times will realize.

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: August 15, 2004 – August 21, 2004 Archives:

Catching a liar lying isn’t a coup; it’s a definition.

Nice quote there: the context of the quote is priceless. One of the veterans/right-wing operatives attacking Kerry’s service refused to supply his own service records, claiming he was afraid they would be used against him. So the Washington Post got them through a FOIA request and, surprise, Kerry’s version of history matches the evidence.

I am also working my way through this lengthy screed on conservatism. I don’t have the book learnin’ to verify his claims, though some of it rings true. (I remember being struck by the story some years back on Wm F Buckley Jr learning an instrument in his retirement. Seems he had always had the desire but never the time. Now, I think of a well-read, erudite person learning an instrument and guess the piano, the cello, perhaps the violin, maybe the classical or Spanish guitar. He chose the harpsichord, an instrument that has been, if not obsolete, a period piece for 200 years. Reading this piece on his flavor of dogma drives home the idea that his philosophy is similarly out of date.)

The core issue — the idea of framing and the use of language to attack your opponents’ ideas without really discussing or refuting them — is one I’m all too familiar with. Coming from the South where code words for racist or other discriminatory ideas are commonplace gives a person a crash course in the fine art of framing.

This is also getting a good bit of Technorati love.

Comic books? At my age?

Well, not exactly. I have been reading the Sandman series in the collected volumes, at the expense of a lot of my other reading. It’s amazing stuff, even if you like Gaiman as I do.

I suppose I’m late to the party with these, but they’re too good to miss. If you like fantasy at all, have a passing interest in mythology, or just like a good story and don’t mind having it with a generous helping of dynamic art, track these down.

I’ve also read Maus and Here my Troubles Began. Also recommended but make sure you keep it out of the sight of the young and impressionable: not exactly for kids, even considering the value of the lessons.

And if you still think illustrated novels/graphic novels/comics are kids stuff, I commend Understanding Comics to you. If nothing else, it’s a devastatingly quick but thorough history of art, storytelling, and literature. (Hmm, Amazon tells me he has a new one I need to check out.)

now playing: Kite from the album All That You Can’t Leave Behind by U2 | Buy it

AlterNet: MediaCulture: Fox News: Unfair and Unbalanced:

As Robert Greenwald’s film “Outfoxed” generates controversy and acclaim, AlterNet joins MoveOn.org in a major campaign to challenge Fox as a partisan news channel – a 24/7 commercial for a political party, and an insult to America’s media consumers. And we’re going to need your help to carry the battle forward.

That’s why AlterNet has established a media fund to help cover the expensive legal costs connected with this challenge to Fox, and to support the research and investigation that will further reveal Fox’s blatant bias masquerading as journalism. For a minimum of a $30 contribution to the AlterNet “Fight Fox” fund, we’ll send you a free copy of Robert Greenwald’s powerful documentary “OutFoxed.” We appreciate your support.

I don’t watch TV, much less TV news, so I only know how bad Fox is from what I hear and read (this includes people who like it as well as those who don’t: if Sean Hannity or Newt Gingrich have free rein, that’s all I need to know).

As noted in the piece at AlterNet, Fox tried to claim ownership of the phrase “fair and balanced” (is there a better example of the Big Lie[1] currently at work?) in its suit against Al Franken, but thought better of it when the judge suggested it might be indefensible.

fn1. Joseph Goebbels: some of his techniques below.
* “The bigger the lie, the more it will be believed”
* “The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly… it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”
* ” …the rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious.”

I don’t know if these numbers are adjusted to take inflation into account.

Harper’s Index for July 2004 (Harpers.org):

Annual spending on the Marshall Plan, per European it was meant to serve : $96.45 [George C. Marshall Foundation (Lexington, Va.) ]

Amount the United States allocated this year for Iraq’s reconstruction, per Iraqi : $727.27 [U.S. Congressional Budget Office/U.S. Census Bureau ]

Interesting to see how this plays out.

[IP] A washingtonpost.com article from: spaf@acm.org:

On Dec. 8, 1941, the Signals Intelligence elements of the U.S. government were in a quandary. How could Pearl Harbor have occurred, given their spectacular success in breaking Japan’s top diplomatic code? The answer was simple: In their zeal to succeed in the diplomatic arena, they had failed to place enough emphasis on Japanese naval traffic, the one source that could have given some warning of the attack.

Although they are more than a half-century old, Pearl Harbor’s lessons are relevant today. Indeed, given the current debate about the role of intelligence in assessing Iraq’s efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction and in disasters such as that of Sept. 11, 2001, history compels us to ask if we are once again allowing technological success to blind us to an emerging threat.

So the Sept 11 report is out and we can all learn about the “failure of imagination” that led to the attacks. It seems to be a nuanced conclusion: we know that the idea of airliners as missiles had been discussed and watched for 5 years earlier. In the run-up to the report, the hearings, testimony, and analysis, I’m persuaded that Bush administration’s neglect of the tactics laid out and successfully pursued by the Clinton administration (yes, I know there were attacks on US forces overseas, but I can’t equate them with the the domestic attacks and anyone who does is an idiot) opened the door for the Sept 11 attacks.

I don’t think a “failure of imagination” is accurate. I think an overactive imagination, one that saw WMDs all over Iraq, that saw Ahmed Chalabi as an honest broker, that assumed the people of Iraq would welcome the troops as liberators, that saw the overthrow of Saddam as the calalyst for a democratic domino effect through the Middle East, is more to blame.