Category: observations

Why is Microsoft Nastier than Linux?:

I do, in general, advocate clicking banner ads you find even remotely interesting—everyone should click at least one GoogleAd or other banner every online day—your thoughtfulness in responding to these ads helps hone and guide web advertisers into acceptable best practices, and each click helps preserve the free access to information; because it’s easier to ignore, web advertising is less intrusive than television, and because you register your attention by voting with each click, you can personally influence their strategies.

Yes, please.

I think we should probably stop calling it syndication (kottke.org)

Duh. This is one of those ‘elephant in the drawing room’ moments: we all know a thing is there but we don’t acknowledge its presence.

Syndication is defined as  selling (an article or cartoon) for publication in many magazines or newspapers at the same time; “he received a comfortable income from the syndication of his work”.

So unless your stuff is being harvested and republished (the Remix Culture rears it’s head), syndication is not an accurate description: publishing is a perfectly fine one, though.

We see a lot of work being done on clients and new feed formats (the seven nine flavors of RSS and now Atom) but what about tools that take and remix feeds, that take related or similar elements of different feeds and repackage those? Suppose I want BoingBoing‘s Japanese pop culture tidbits, Wonkette‘s laceratingly snarky coverage of the presidential campaign and Gary Murphy‘s notes of networked knowledge applications, all in one feed. Any way to do that without rolling my own tool?

Hmm, sounds a lot like that personalized newspaper we’ve been hearing about since Marc Andreesen was in short pants. But that’s syndication in action.

from a mailing list:

On December 18, 2001, by a vote of 407-0, Congress designated September 11th as Patriot Day. We believe the most patriotic gesture citizens can make on this day is to come together in public places like local libraries. Through talks, roundtables, deliberations, and performances, citizens will participate collectively and think creatively about our country, our government, our community, and encourage and support the
well-informed voice of the American citizenry.

Public libraries provide all citizens open and free access to information. Almost all communities in the US have at least one library. There are over 16,000 public libraries in the US, and that’s not including university libraries, K-12 libraries, and church libraries. In other words, libraries constitute an already existing national infrastructure. Moreover, 96% of all public libraries in the US are wired, partly due to the Gates Foundation’s successful library initiative. Therefore, libraries also constitute a national and distributed media infrastructure.

The September Project has three goals:

1. to coordinate with all libraries — public, university, research;
local, national, global — to foster multiple public spaces for citizens to come together and participate in events on September 11, 2004;

2. to work with all modes of media — popular and alternative;
streaming/digital media, radio, television, print — in order to transform local conversations into national and international interactions;

3. to continue doing this annually and internationally on September 11th.

The aim of The September Project is to create a day of engagement, a day of community, a day of democracy. Our goal is to foster a tradition for citizens around the world to recognize and give meaning to September 11th.

We invite you to visit our web site and to get involved. Although our initial organizational strategies have been focused primarily on the US, our aim is international. Thank you for your time

Remarks by the President to the Travel Pool:

THE PRESIDENT: My response was exactly like then as it is today, that I asked for the Central Intelligence Agency to give me an update on any terrorist threats. And the PDB was no indication of a terrorist threat. There was not a time and place of an attack. It said Osama bin Laden had designs on America. Well, I knew that. What I wanted to know was, is there anything specifically going to take place in America that we needed to react to?

Interesting that in the case of Bin Laden, the administration was content to wait for something to react to, but in Iraq, pre-emption was the preferred course: Saddam Hussein bluffed that he had weapons, and that was enough to launch an invasion. Bin Laden had no weapons but he was on the radar as a threat, with a motive — the release of Sheik Rahman, who plotted the 1993 WTC bombing — and the names of the two eventual target cities were in the briefing.

Op-Ed Columnist: We’re More Productive. Who Gets the Money?:

[According to a recent study,] “This is the first time we’ve ever had a case where two years into a recovery, corporate profits got a larger share of the growth of national income than labor did. Normally labor gets about 65 percent and corporate profits about 15 to 18 percent. This time profits got 41 percent and labor [meaning all forms of employee compensation, including wages, benefits, salaries and the percentage of payroll taxes paid by employers] got 38 percent.”

The study said: “In no other recovery from a post-World War II recession did corporate profits ever account for as much as 20 percent of the growth in national income. And at no time did corporate profits ever increase by a greater amount than labor compensation.”

In other words, an awful lot of American workers have been had. Fleeced. Taken to the cleaners.

The recent productivity gains have been widely acknowledged. But workers are not being compensated for this. During the past two years, increases in wages and benefits have been very weak, or nonexistent. And despite the growth of jobs in March that had the Bush crowd dancing in the White House halls last Friday, there has been no net increase in formal payroll employment since the end of the recession. We have lost jobs. There are fewer payroll jobs now than there were when the recession ended in November 2001.

Josh Marshall is getting updates on current events in Iraq:

I refer to this entire mess as the second Intifada of Iraq. The first Intifida was last August in Fallujah when US soldiers killed 15-17 Iraqis and Fallujah fell into revolt.

I wonder how many of the armchair generals or even the ones in the field are aware of how Iraq’s last liberation by a Western democracy worked out.

Telegraph | Opinion | This Vietnam generation of Americans has not learnt the lessons of history:

What happened in Iraq last week so closely resembles the events of 1920 that only a historical ignoramus could be surprised. It began in May, just after the announcement that Iraq would henceforth be a League of Nations “mandate” under British trusteeship. (Nota bene, if you think a handover to the UN would solve everything.) Anti-British demonstrations began in Baghdad mosques, spread to the Shi’ite holy centre of Karbala, swept on through Rumaytha and Samawa – where British forces were besieged – and reached as far as Kirkuk.

The words of Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Stanley Maude — “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators” — in 1917 sound eerily like the propaganda surrounding the current war. [more links here]

It took the rest of the year — 1920 — to restore order: what if the current strife will still be raging come the end of this year? And bear in mind that three years elapsed from the general’s words to when order was restored. So much for bringing the troops home by Christmas Election Day.

And what does this mean for the idea that the Iraqi people would welcome the coalition forces as liberators? How does it match up against the assumptions that the Iraqis were somehow of one mind and would take the initiative to build their own nation once Saddam Hussein was gone? How many casualties will US forces have to suffer before these or similar questions are answered?

SCOTT ARMSTRONG: Questions for Dr. Rice

PETER BERGEN: Questions for Dr. Rice

I almost don’t want these questions asked: I don’t want to hear the answers.

Civilian employees of Dick Cheney’s former company are carrying out military missions around the world – for profit

After my post about the use of the word “mercenary” to refer to the civilian contractors in Iraq, I have read up a little more on it. I haven’t changed my mind (I would have to change the definition, and it makes clear that the soldiers thus named are from another country, not one of the ones engaged), but I think “soldiers of fortune” is both more appropriate and more evocative. There is a fair amount of money at play here — yours and mine, if you’re a US taxpayer — and whatever these contract workers’ politics, it’s not unreasonable to assume the pay is part of the appeal.

On a certain level, doesn’t the phrase fit a large contingent of the current administration?

This looked interesting . . . . XML-based network packets.

TCP is So Over
Most of us have been hearing rumors about this skunkworks XCP thing for some time, but now they seem to be open to the public. As they say, “Light the Fiber!” Think about it this way: I first went to the mat with TCP/IP in 1984, when 4.2bsd hit the streets. A twenty-year run is plenty for most technologies, and I’d say TCP has pretty well had its time in the sun. [ongoing]
Continue reading “If it starts with an X, it must be good”

I’m NOT Going to Pay a Lot for This Baby!

Belle compares the costs of — and general sense of confidence in — healthcare in the US and Singapore. As noted here (a link I found on Crooked Timber where Belle is a new artist in residence), it’s possible to have both socially progressive policy and a robust economy: the hard part seems to be believing you can. Here in the land of the vanishing middle class, I wonder if it will ever happen.

I can only assume this is rooted in the worst period of American history, when the Puritans held sway. There’s still a strong sense of moral superiority held by those who have been swaddled in entitlements and other advantages without realizing it: for them the poor deserve to be so, as though they themselves have worked for their advantages.

The best descriptive term I have heard — uniquely American as it is — refers to this as “born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.” The unfairness of this is obvious, but fans of the game know that a triple is the hardest hit to manage.