EU farming subsidy reform

Good to see at least some progress made on abolishing the Common Agricultural Policy subsidies, AKA “let’s destroy the developing world’s ability to feed itself”.

Under this reform the size of the subsidy stays the same (£31 billion a year) but the size of each payment is now decoupled from quantity produced. This should check excess production and the environmental and social damage it caused.

A better explanation can be found here.

[/economics] posted at 23:19 #

Briefly

• As more companies like T-Mobile start remotely removing functionality, more people will start realising the necessity of open platforms.

• The “$3.99 for anything” ShippingOnly.com is the internet’s answer to a 1 pound shop. But what is $25 of PCMCIA network card doing there? Google tells me to look here for more.

• Old but very funny Onion piece.

• MP blogger Tom Watson interviewed.

• NAT is slowing progress (particularly in VoIP I presume): “Bob Frankston, who worked at Microsoft to develop home networking the mid-90s, told me in late 2002 that he calls himself the father of NAT and said that NAT was one of the biggest mistakes he made. He shoulda gone with IPv6, he said.”

[/misc] posted at 10:33 #

Getting used to their teachers having lives

Want to see what the society’s slide to transparency looks like on the ground?

Here’s one case:

This diary clearly made the students uncomfortable. There was, for one thing, a perception that she was writing about them (though I didn’t see it), but also a general discomfort with the idea of a teacher frankly discussing her sex life (which I also missed, apparently… I’m not sure the students and I visited the same link, now that you mention it). Or is it just the familiar student awkwardness at accepting teachers as human beings? How did that feel at 18? It’s hard for me to get a sense of that, because my parents were (are) teachers most of my life, and I’ve always thought of teachers as having lives outside the classroom.

[/society] posted at 10:02 #

Liberia

The craziness in Liberia is easy to view as little more than another African civil war, but Liberia has a fascinating history and unique culture.

First settled at the organisation of the American Colonial Society in 1822. Initially an American colony with the expressed purpose of repatriating freed slaves. Became an independent republic in 1847. Has been in economic straits since.

In Africa, only it and Ethiopia were never colonised.

[/misc] posted at 09:56 #

Sometimes (sur)real life:

imitates jingoistic comedy action figures:

At least we now have some idea of where Saddam is hiding.

[/misc] posted at 09:21 #

Blair as Mussolini

There’s still time for a 16 year old somewhere to memorise this and write it as their history exam essay.

They’d have to get an A, for the punch line alone.

[/politics] posted at 20:34 #

802.11i

802.11i is the spec designed to beef up security for Wi-Fi.

Why is this interesting? Because according to Wi-Fi Networking News:

The last piece to deal with is to “agree on solution for secure fast roaming to support voice applications.”

So that’s encrypted roaming VoIP over Wi-Fi, due May 2004. The drum beat gets louder.

[/technology] posted at 15:49 #

Open Source in the developing world

It’s a pleasant surprise to see MSNBC (via Newsweek) laying into one of their proprietors so harshly, but it needs to be said.

After the South African government threw its support behind the open-source movement last year, Microsoft offered to supply free software to government-run schools in South Africa. Hilton Theunissen, the project manager at Nooitgedacht Primary School, is skeptical of Microsoft’s sudden altruism. “For years and years I was writing letters to Microsoft, always asking for software donations,” he says. “What I ended up receiving was either a negative reply or no reply at all.”

Microsoft is behaving like a crack dealer.

[/technology] posted at 14:09 #

Another Westminster blog

Richard Allan is the second UK MP to have a weblog (that I’m aware of).

I just bumped into Tom Watson MP in the corridors of the House of Commons and we greeted each other for the first time in the real world! Funny business this that we have exchanged comments through our blogs but never spoken to each other before.

[/technology] posted at 21:20 #

On what would have been Orwell’s 100th birthday - William Gibson writes about the coming transparent society:

As individuals steadily lose degrees of privacy, so, too, do corporations and states. Loss of traditional privacies may seem in the short term to be driven by issues of national security, but this may prove in time to have been intrinsic to the nature of ubiquitous information.

The constant elusiveness of truth:

A world of informational transparency will necessarily be one of deliriously multiple viewpoints, shot through with misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories and a quotidian degree of madness. We may be able to see what’s going on more quickly, but that doesn’t mean we’ll agree about it any more readily.

How Orwell’s medicine was preventative:

Orwell did the job he set out to do, did it forcefully and brilliantly, in the painstaking creation of our best-known dystopia. I’ve seen it said that because he chose to go there, as rigorously and fearlessly as he did, we don’t have to.

It might be a good idea to get another prescription soon.

[/society] posted at 20:41 #

The Next World Order?

Bruce Sterling:

The New World Order, proclaimed in Gulf War I, died in Gulf War II. The Next World Order has means, motive, and opportunity now. Instead of the customary 20th-century hot air and phony baloney, it might turn out to be rather hands-on, tough-minded, and practical. There are good reasons to think this will happen, with or without American cooperation. The Next World Order may well look like nothing we previously were led to expect.

George Monbiot:

The UN Security Council should be scrapped, and its powers vested in a reformulated UN General Assembly. This would be democratised by means of weighted voting: nations’ votes would increase according to both the size of their populations and their positions on a global democracy index. Perhaps most importantly, the people of the world would elect representatives to a global parliament, whose purpose would be to hold the other international bodies to account.

I have also suggested some cruel and unusual means by which these proposals might be implemented. Poor nations, for example, now owe so much that they own, in effect, the world’s financial systems. The threat of a sudden collective default on their debts unless they get what they want would concentrate the minds of even the most obdurate global powers.

That kind of threat is simultaneously fascinating and terrifying. International financial suicide bombers.

[/society] posted at 16:18 #

Here’s preparation for the joys that even a compromised copyright reform will bring.

Black popular music c1940’s to 1970’s … Music from both Jamaica and America

At the moment there are 145 top sounds to play (mp3) for your musical pleasure, 7 per page, marked with S, and over 995 fascinating record labels to view, they are added to at about 10 a week.

via a cryptic mefi post

[/misc] posted at 21:32 #

Tim O’Reilly thinks a lot

Thanks to a (hopefully not too impressionist) “Impressionistic transcript” from Cory Doctorow, we can sample Tim O’Reilly’s incredible brain dump at Reboot:

We’re in the middle of another paradigm shift:

Linux critic: Linux isn’t user-friendly

Linux geek: Linux will be better in the next rev

They’re both wrong: the apps that run on Linux are Google,
Amazon, etc. Not shrinkwrapped apps, but new platforms.

Platforms made a lot more financially viable, precisely because they run on free software and commodity hardware.

This ties up with Jason Pellerin’s point that LAMP is a saviour much more than Mozilla.

Shirky’s “Listening to Napster:” You can build a big database by:

1. Paying people (Yahoo)

2. Getting volunteers (DMOZ)

3. Architect the system so that users’ natural activity yeilds a
database (Napster)

That’s the secret of what’s happening on the Internet today.
Every time you make a link, you contribute to Google. Amazon
reviewers improve Amazon. This outstrips OSS projects for
collaboration.

There’s so much innovation still coming up in the use of networks. Today, no-one really understands how to use a networked computer.

What keeps me up at night?

• No one in OSS seems to care about Google/Amazon/eBay (I told
  Bezos off for pissing in the well when he sued BN.com)

• Users don’t own their data — who cares about source when your
  data is locked in?

O’Reilly implies a solution for the first: Don’t abuse the excess IP protection offered by bribed legislatures, stick to open innovation. He addresses the second in more depth here.

I’d also suggest state mandated exportability of personal data from all applications, web or desktop… but I hear people don’t like that sort of thing. The market will get there alone, but being nudged toward the eventual - more open - compromise would help everyone.

[/technology] posted at 16:01 #

John Kay

Financial Times columnist John Kay has some great articles on his site including, but by no means limited to…

Bayesian probability and the law:

Thomas Bayes, an 18th-century Nonconformist clergyman, discovered that his game of billiards was improved by an understanding of contingent probabilities - the likelihood that an event will occur if some other event has already occurred.

The demise of economics:

Back in the 1960s, when I decided to take up the subject, economists were living in a golden age. The world economy had experienced two decades of unprecedented growth and stability. It seemed that Keynesian policies could cure unemployment and control the business cycle.

[/economics] posted at 15:51 #

Illegal Art

Illegal Art. Suggests the possibility of eventual widespread everyman support for copyright reform.

Mickey mouse gasmask:

via Tim O’Reilly

[/society] posted at 18:09 #

The Phone Co-op

One of my Grandfathers believed in the The Co-operative Group and worked for them for many years. He also worked for British Telecom. When they were privatised he refused on principle to take any of the shares options he was entitled to.

He would have been pleased to see The Phone Co-op.

Marketing appears to only work on a profit motivated basis though.

[/economics] posted at 12:09 #

An imagined parallel, I hope

San Francisco today:

The latest episode to anger legislators was a decision by the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights to post on the Internet partial Social Security numbers of lawmakers who did not support the latest attempt to increase protections on personal financial information.

vs.

The now imprisoned Jim Bell in 1997:

Assassination Politics I speculated on the question of whether an organization could be set up to legally announce that it would be awarding a cash prize to somebody who correctly “predicted” the death of one of a list of violators of rights, usually either government employees, officeholders, or appointees. It could ask for anonymous contributions from the public, and individuals would be able send those contributions using digital cash.

[/politics] posted at 11:14 #

Zero Knowledge

Ever wondered what happened to Zero Knowledge, the 1997 Canadian start-up with a board of advisors featuring Lawrence Lessig and Bruce “Blowfish” Schneier? They lured Mozilla’s Mike Shaver away at the peak of the boom to build ”’Freedom’ technology … provides pseudonyms, encryption, and an anonymizing network to protect privacy online”.

Well, they survived the crash, but only by selling antivirus/firewall/popup-block boredom to customers and privacy policy management packages to business.

Now the happier part, ‘Freedom’ now does provide the encrypted anonymous web surfing service expected, after dropping cross OS support and being renamed to ‘Freedom WebSecure’. $60/month. Check out the ‘rave reviews’.

[/technology] posted at 22:30 #

Loving is not funding

I took this photo here in east Oxford last week. It is a UK government advert “Targeting benefit fraud”. Someone has pasted “Love thy neighbour?” over the top.

Pure insanity.

[/society] posted at 16:38 #

Undesigned

Those of you reading this in an aggregator can completely ignore this.

Those in a browser will have noticed that things are looking a little plainer round here. What started out as an intended transition to CSS, turned into a full blown redesign.

The trickyness of pixel-perfect cross-browser CSS designs push non-designers like me towards simplicity. This is probably a good thing.

[/meta] posted at 16:14 #

Blogging not on the radar for most CIOs

John Patrick (former IBM chief dreamer) reports that the CIOs he’s met “… think they need blogging like they need a hole in the head”.

During the past week, I had the pleasure of meeting with quite a few senior executives — mostly CIO’s — of major corporations. They were all familiar to varying degrees with WiFi but not one had even heard of blogging. One said, “blobbing?”.

Once I explain what blogging is all about, the typical response from people is that they are already in “information overload” to how could they possibly take on reading or writing a blog?

via Due Diligence

[/technology] posted at 22:47 #

US current account deficit

This piece about the current account deficit has been all over the blogosphere recently. It’s position reminded me of one of the things this guy/crank has been saying for years.

The idea that imperialism has a tendency to financially overstretch is comforting, and has historic precedence, but I don’t have the economic understanding to know whether it is correct as presented.

The Economist has this which gives a slightly more credible correction scenario.

[/economics] posted at 09:49 #

A TiVo for daily life

Here’s something I will be loving once it is a more mature (and discrete!) technology. The equivalent of a TiVo for your daily life. Glimpses and glances will become solid referenced memories.

Once you get enough capacity to store the whole day and some kind of AI that can intelligently process the data, things start to get very interesting.

If that sounds far fetched, bear in mind that it’s a subset of DARPA’s LifeLog. The whole project also includes recording audio and positioning data.

[/technology] posted at 09:22 #

Monthly update

Well, it’s been a month since I started doing this in real-time. It’s been fun and educational, and I still find writing well incredibly difficult.

I regret that soon after I started blogging, I lost the time I needed to study a wide of variety of subjects. Work on my dissertation is engaging and the framework already functions as a basic RSS aggregator. But I don’t want to post about BEGIN block behaviour under mod_perl or RSS 1.0 using the obscure “W3CDTF” date format - and that is what I have to spend my time thinking about at the moment.

Maybe this is a useful feedback mechanism. If I don’t want to write about it, how interested do I really find it?

Basically, that is my excuse for topic drift. Normal service can now resume…

[/meta] posted at 09:18 #

Quick Links

The Washington Post tries to introduce some objectivity into Jessica Lynch debate. Good luck.

These guys are reverse engineering the iTunes protocols and creating open components for a global jukebox as they do so.

Joel brings news of Salam Pax’s photoblog.

[/misc] posted at 11:52 #

Pizza for homeless billboards

The first person to introduce this in Oxford would make a killing. There seem to be more panhandlers (per-person) here than anywhere I’ve been to. A result of the easy student pickings, no doubt.

Instead of going Dumpster-diving for maybe a half-eaten sandwich and some cold fries, Peter Schoeff, a 20-year-old homeless man, was served a slice of hot pizza dripping with cheese.

All he had to do was hold a sign for about 40 minutes that read: “Pizza Schmizza paid me to hold this sign instead of asking for money.”

Minimum wage what?

[/society] posted at 11:41 #

Gates backs Mesh WiFi

Here’s a surprise. Bill Gates has come out saying he expects mesh WiFi to provide universal broadband access and replace cell networks for many.

I need to recalibrate my pie-in-the-sky-ometer.

[/technology] posted at 11:31 #

Kickstarting WiFi demand

Glenn Fleishman has a viable theory as to what will kick-start WiFi demand.

… the catalyst for widescale uptake in hot spot network subscriptions is that 25 of the top 35 airports in the US will offer substantial Wi-Fi service throughout their terminals. The minute a business traveler truly understands that in the majority of their travels, for a flat rate of $30 to $50 per month (depending on operator), they can have unlimited access, then the wall falls down, and the customer base surges.

[/technology] posted at 11:31 #

Iraqi Suffering

Never let anyone tell you freedom isn’t expensive. Iraqis are just starting to find out with their first boy band. This is the most incredible quote:

“We lived under dictatorship for 35 years. I’m not prepared to go through that again, and I don’t think anybody is,” said lead singer Nadeem Hamed, a 20-year-old biology student. “If people attack us for being in a band, that’s terrorism.”

It seems even non-native speakers of english have absorbed the redefinition of terrorism.

Let’s hope they can just compromise on a law forbidding the sale of music to under 16’s.

[/society] posted at 11:30 #

In Brief

Glass That Glows and Gives Stock Information.

Karoshi - death from over work - recorded cases have more doubled between 2001 and 2002. Via Phil Wolff.

Social engineering still the way to go

Lawrence Lessig and Matt Oppenheim (the RIAA’s senior VP of business and legal affairs) touch gloves but throw few punches.

Importance of permalinks as enabler of global overlapping conversations becoming clearer.

Finally, a couple of earth as a computer metaphors:

• Hard-drive
• Motherboard

[/misc] posted at 09:09 #

A history of Political Spectrum

Over at kuro5hin there is a article covering the history of political spectrums which introduces (to me) the Vosem chart. It is 3-dimensional, the new dimension being pro/anti corporate.

The Nolan was introduced to help the Libertarian debate, and I guess this is being introducted to try to assist in anti-corporate debate.

The ASCII art diagrams are worth checking out.

     Revolutionary     Revolutionary reactionary
        radical   xxxxxx  
               xx        xx  Reactionary
     Radical  x            x
             x              x  Standpat
             x              x
    Liberal  x              x
             x              x Conservative
              x            x
               xx        xx
                  xxxxxx

                 Centrist

[/politics] posted at 08:58 #

Bhutan’s pursuit of cathode-ray happiness

The Guardian has this piece on the social destruction apparently caused by the introduction of TV in Bhutan. I’m just going to quote the utilitarian tragedy:

“His Majesty decided that, as a spiritual society, happiness was the most important thing for us - something that had never been discussed before as a policy goal or pronounced as the responsibility of the state.” And so, in 1998, the Dragon King defined his nation’s guiding principle as Gross National Happiness.

But happiness proved to be an elusive concept. The Bhutanese wondered whether it increased with a bigger house or the number of revolutions of a prayer wheel. A delegation from the foreign ministry was sent abroad to investigate whether happiness could be measured. They finally found a Dutch professor who had made its study his life’s work and were disappointed to learn that his conclusion was that happiness equalled UKP 6,400 a year - the minimum on which one could live comfortably. It was a bald and irrelevant answer for the Bhutanese middle classes, whose average annual salary was barely UKP 1,000 and whose outlook was slightly more metaphysical.

I can image the constitution: “Life, liberty and the state standardised level of happiness”.

[/society] posted at 10:51 #

Browser developments

Microsoft conceed the Mac browser market to Apple:

“The feedback we’re getting from our customers and the features they’re asking for is all pointing to Apple and Safari,” said Sommer. “Apple has better resources because they have Safari and the operating system.”

Sommer is Jessica Sommer, Product Manager for Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit.

Meanwhile, Mozilla (Firebird) is now so good even former ‘softie Joel Spolsky has switched to it.

There was a time when Microsoft looked set to use ISS and IE to remake the web in their proprietory image. That time is over. HTML and HTTP are staying open. Mozilla and Apache need more respect for that.

The battle now starts over the next layer of abstraction.

[/technology] posted at 10:19 #

Gentle Moderation

Proof that there’s plenty of innovation left to come even in areas of the web
that seem mature. Sam Ruby has invented a gentle form of discussion moderation. Any flamebait in his comment section is struck through and linked to a page explaining why.

At the moment, the best solution I have come up with is to mark up the portions I find objectionable with links to this page. No words are added, deleted, or rearranged in the process.

Mark Pilgrim has also adopted the technique and provides a more eloquent description than I can.

I will annotate comments, and portions of comments, that I feel are personal attacks against me or others. Such flames will be marked as deleted and linked to this page.

This is an idea built on the assumptions of hyperlinking and text styling. I’m watching with interest.

[/technology] posted at 08:41 #

The Homeless Guy

After the thrill of finding Salam Pax blogging from Baghdad I completely forgot about The Homeless Guy blogging from a library in Tennessee.

He looks set to get an apartment soon, but it’s still an interesting preview of the kinds of conversation that will emerge as technology distributes.

[/society] posted at 11:09 #

Stanton Warriors at Oxford (finally)

My ears are still ringing from last night. Stanton Warriors (rescheduled from 2 weeks ago) at Ponana here in Oxford. It was awesome, as expected.

A lot of criticism of dance music is focused at DJs as mere players of other peoples records. This misses the benefit of having a free market in music selection and compilation. Impartial and self-motivated, the DJ is a naturally emerging division of the labour required to produce a sequence of music to be danced to.

The music selection methods for other genres are less dynamic and flawed. Almost all breaking classical music in the UK has been featured in a TV advert, therefore the selectors are advertising agencies. Popular pop/rock has to first be chosen by a record company and then stamped with the approval of Radio/TV.

[/misc] posted at 11:08 #

Having others do your RSS research for you

Articles titled “How to consume RSS safely?” are useful when your dissertation project is all about RSS, but somehow this has been turned into ammunition for yet another RSS flame war.

Weak analogy: conducting flame wars over multiple blogs (and their comments) is guerilla warfare. Trench warfare like flaming still exists on mailing-lists/discussion-boards. This is progress of sorts.

[/technology] posted at 11:08 #

Cell biology related to distributed computing

Something ingenious I missed the first time via, uh, Sam Ruby.

If you sort biological organisms by size, you will see a point at which the strategy shifts from making larger cells to making more cells. Cells are surrounded by a trust boundary. Cells communicate by two basic mechanisms.

In the first mechanism, the sender determines the action to be taken. The request penetrates the membrane and then employs the machinery within the cell to execute per the instructions contained within the message.

In the second mechanism, the receiver determines the action to be taken. The request matches a receptacle on the membrane and the cell uses this information to trigger biological processes.

In biological terms, the agent of the first mechanism is called a virus, and the agent of the second mechanism is called a hormone. In larger organisms, there is a strong preference for the second mechanism.

[/technology] posted at 11:07 #

Senator Jerry Springer?

Jerry Springer has a website up for the purpose of “exploring a Senate run in 2004”. It looks like he is running on one of the most populist platforms ever.

… let me sum up what we face in the following quote from a right wing journalist recently appearing on CNN with Wolf Blitzer:

“Voter turnout is not a glorious thing. If Jerry Springer shows up, he’ll bring all these new people to the polls. They will be slack-jawed yokels, hicks, weirdos, pervs, and whatnot.”

That’s what they think about ‘all these new people’ getting involved and threatening the hold of elites on this country. That’s what they think about most of us! That’s why we have this exploratory site.

That’s not what they think about you Jerry. It’s what they think about the folks you’re targetting your campaign at.

It’s the dishonesty that makes false populists like Springer annoy me more
than the elitist politicos he is targetting.

[/politics] posted at 11:04 #

Matrix Reloaded Debrief

Seen the Matrix Reloaded? Make sure you understood it (major spoilers if you haven’t):

• Exhaustive discussion
• Possible hidden meaning extracted by looking at a draft copy of the script
• A draft copy of the script

I’m still not sure I do.

To fully appreciate the visuals read up on why they are truly revolutionary.

[/misc] posted at 00:25 #

An algorithm for soul-searching

Sadly unimplementable.

1. Classify personality traits into nature (evolved) or nurture (learned).
2. For learned traits: identify the lessons and assess the general viability of the learned response.
3. For evolved traits: identify benefits gained from trait and assess relevance to modern world.

[/misc] posted at 00:25 #

Hair, rackets and turned cheeks

Early humans lost hair to beat bugs :

“In animals, ectoparasites like biting flies, exert tremendous fitness costs - they really affect our health,” he told New Scientist. “Our view is that hairlessness is an adaptation for reducing the ectoparasite load.”

Protection rackets appearing in “The Sims” virtual world:

“They show up at your house and they request protection money. `You have to pay me 100,000 simolians if you don’t want your house torn down.’ It’s technically harassment.”

Someone is probably working on a sociology paper covering this already.

Finally, although I don’t share it’s basis or conclusions I’m happy to see Christian anti-Bush backlash starting.

[/misc] posted at 18:45 #

Auto DJ software I can’t use

Ask the DJ is an idea I’ve had before but assumed would be difficult to implement. It’s iTunes/MacOS-X only - hence the title - and so I still don’t know how difficult it would be to do well.

Unlike any other software, Ask the DJ analyses beats to perform truly seamless transitions between tracks. Like a real DJ, it matches beats and adapts tempos whenever needed so the music always flows, even when cross-fading between tracks with different bpms.

Linux needs a media framework as inviting to developers as iTunes seems to be. Researchless, XMMS or Gstreamer come to mind as possible contenders.

[/technology] posted at 18:44 #

Mobile email creating ‘Computer Refuseniks’

Phone text messaging in Japan is different to the SMS messaging offered in Europe and the US. Each user has an email address, and each message is effectively an email. One surprising (to me) outcome of that is it delays the age by which Japanese become computer proficient.

Japan Media Review labels these people ‘Computer Refuseniks’

“Five years ago, before cell phone e-mail came into such widespread use, all college students felt the need to own their own PCs,” says Hiroshi Hanamoto of the online marketing firm Promotions. “Today, students with cell phone mail can easily get by without buying their own computers. Besides, they don’t have the money.”

[/society] posted at 21:36 #

Britain and the Euro

An economists view on the arguments for and against Britain joining the Euro. Brad Delong has interesting commentary and pointers.

[/economics] posted at 21:35 #

Visual babelfish

Nice to see progress on the visual/text babelfish coming along nicely. When finished I want this overlaid in real-time on my glasses.

Researchers in Hewlett-Packard’s labs have developed their own method of pairing a digital camera and computing device to translate signs and text in a foreign language back into English. The technology, a software applet running on an Hewlett-Packard iPaq PDA, will hopefully form the foundation for an eventual product, researchers said.

via gizmodo

[/technology] posted at 21:35 #

Guardian adapting to the new rules of media

The Guardian’s efforts to adapt to the emerging world of an audience poised to “fact check your ass” give hope. At least some of the old media press will maintain some credibility through the transition.

On Wednesday, journalists on the Guardian’s website were alerted to a story running in the German press, in which the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, was said to have admitted, in effect, that oil was the main reason for the war in Iraq. The German sources were found, translated, and at 4.30pm that day a story sourced to them was posted on the website under the heading, “Wolfowitz: Iraq war was about oil”.

Mr Wolfowitz, in fact, had said nothing of the kind, as a deluge of email, most of it from the US, was quick to point out. Some of it registered disappointment more than anything else - disappointment that a valued source of news and liberal comment had in this instance let them down. “The briefest of searches will bring up articles to totally discredit your story,” one complained.

[/media] posted at 10:17 #

Bruce Sterling reveals his strangely binary view of the Transparent Society. I need to read his book.

[/society] posted at 01:17 #

Feudalism, capitalism and socialism

Capitalism is alive and well, living inside a greatly transformed feudalism.

What does socialism need capitalism for? Wealth.

What does capitalism need feudalism for? Security.

The chains of loyalty and honor and oath taking that was feudalism are still existant, the form has just evolved into the modern military, law enforcement, and nation-state government.

— Mark Atwood

[/society] posted at 01:15 #

Bezos working on his whuffie

Jeff Bezos is looking a bit cooler after he bigged up Cory Doctorow on NPR for his (Creative Commons licenced) book and particularly it’s reputation system - Whuffie. More interesting commentary on Whuffie can be over a AKMA’s Random Thoughts - in Raph Levian’s comment.

In fact, there are systems which attempt to measure Whuffie. I did my PhD research on “trust metrics,” which are basically the same thing. Google’s PageRank is also a decent model of Whuffie in the web world.

Saying “AKMA is a good person” is nice, but doesn’t help identify the source or credibility of that opinion. By contrast, “AKMA has lots of Whuffie” clearly identifies the opinion as coming from someone who is very up to date in the online world.

Actually my real motivation for this post is that it gives an excuse to mention Cory’s collaborative work-in-progress with Charlie Stross. Unwirer is both:

• an exploration of the value of wireless networking in a USA with a regulated internet
• an insight into the craft of collaborative short story writing

[/misc] posted at 01:15 #

G in Baghdad

Salam Pax brings news that his friend ‘G’ has just started a blog. Inside he reveals the current firearms allowance in Baghdad to be one Kalashnikov and one pistol. I wonder if the NRA would accept that kind of compromise?

The result of one day enforcing this limit in “a sweep on one of the poor neighborhoods on the south tip of Baghdad” ?

after 8 long hours.…. the Americans left, confiscating 6 antiaircraft heavy machine gun bullets form over than 40 houses.

[/society] posted at 19:20 #

Evolutionary Psychology

One man’s explorations in Evolutionary Psychology contains such gems as :

Why Pigeons Don’t Know They’re Alive

If you were designing a creature, would you give it the ability to over-ride good sensible instincts, when that creature is not intelligent enough to guess the likely outcomes of these over-rides? I think not.

Why Samurai Killed Themselves

Families, not wishing to be harmed by the actions of one rogue family member, would for the sake of their genes demand that the one erring member should kill himself rather than damage the whole family gene pool.

… the attitude to suicide amongst the general peasantry was very different. It was considered a crime. A peasant man was valued for his ability to feed his family. Whereas a noble could be confident that someone would look after his children, and that there was no danger of their starving, a peasant was not in this position. A peasant who killed himself would be significantly harming the chances of his children to grow up properly fed. The nobles relied for their income on the labours of the poor in their area, so they didn’t want their peasants killing themselves off.

Why asking her out is terrifying

Today, … a man can afford to be rejected almost all the time, so long as some women consent. This was not the world our foraging ancestors lived in. Back then, the world was sparsely populated. A man might live in a band of about twenty-five people, of whom perhaps six at most would be women of reproductive age, and most of these would be spoken for. It would be common that the man would only have frequent encounters with one or two potential mates. A wise designer of human instinct would therefore give men a fear of ‘blowing it’ with such rare and precious women. The maxim ‘There are plenty more fish in the sea’ would be even less of a comfort to a man who knows that he might not set eyes on another single woman for months.

[/society] posted at 13:32 #

ESR gets worse

NTK have been doing a good job recently of covering the excesses of (Open Source uberpimp turned political zealot) Eric Raymond.

Their latest reveals him abusing his maintainership of the Jargon File to promote his own NeoCon agenda.

Repeated reading of a second-hand copy of ‘The Hacker’s Dictionary’ (the print edition of the Jargon File) was my introduction to the world of computing, so I have a strong desire to see it properly maintained.

Fortunately, the File is in the public domain, so:

… if someone did want to fork the Jargon File, now would be the time to do it. Raymond’s previous googlejuice at tuxedo.org has been cast to the winds. A new, reformatted and popularly linked-to upstart could quickly seize the top Google slot.

Any takers?

[/technology] posted at 13:31 #

Slammer Worm debrief

Wired’s Slammer Worm debrief is worth checking out for the awesome graphics courtesy of Akamai and Paul Boutin’s ability to evoke an image of a dying internet:

By 12:45 am, huge sections of the Internet began to wink out of existence. Net Access Corporation, one of the Northeast’s largest ISPs, sent out an early SOS: “Nearly half our ports are in delta alarm right now.” Up on the big screen, Maresh could see backbone carrier Level 3’s transcontinental chain of routers trying to find working paths to the rest of the world - and failing. Three hundred thousand cable modems in Portugal went dark, and South Korea fell right off the map: no cell phone or Internet service for 27 million people. Five of the Internet’s 13 root-name servers - hardened systems, all - succumbed to the squall of packets.

[/technology] posted at 13:31 #

Geocaching

It seems I have been failing to pay attention because today was the first I heard of Geocaching and it’s already under attack.

From geocaching.com’s faq:

Geocaching is an entertaining adventure game for gps users. Participating in a cache hunt is a good way to take advantage of the wonderful features and capability of a gps unit. The basic idea is to have individuals and organizations set up caches all over the world and share the locations of these caches on the internet. GPS users can then use the location coordinates to find the caches. Once found, a cache may provide the visitor with a wide variety of rewards. All the visitor is asked to do is if they get something they should try to leave something for the cache.

It is deceptively easy. It’s one thing to see where an item is, it’s a totally different story to actually get there.

As for the attack:

“It’s good, clean, wholesome fun - just do it someplace else,” said Brian Adams, chief of resource protection for the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway, which has banned geocaching.

As someone without a GPS I can’t really appreciate the appeal but it seems likely to have some merit. The sense of community and reciprocation is warming but probably only exists because of the high cost of entry into the geocaching world. What makes it particularly interesting is that it heralds the start of the descriptive markup of the physical world.

[/society] posted at 20:33 #

Bush’s sensible position on Israeli settlements?

This, from the Washington Post, is via another DeLong: “We need a better press corp” piece so it should probably be taken with a shaker of salt. However, even the implication that the US could force a deal on Israel involving abandoning the settlements surprised me.

The president has baffled some of his aides with comments they thought minimized the obstacles toward the two-state solution he talks about. For instance, the president has told aides that the Israelis are wasting their money on expanding settlements in the West Bank because ultimately those projects will become housing developments for Palestinians.

Some aides suggest this is a naive view of the settlement issue, noting that experts on both sides of the issue believe unchecked expansion of the settlements would make it impossible to create a viable Palestinian state. Other Bush advisers say the president’s comments simply reflected his determination to create a Palestinian state.

[/politics] posted at 19:07 #

Salam Pax on Baghdad’s tech recovery

Good update on the state of technology in Baghdad from Salam Pax:

The old state owned Internet center in Adil district has been taken over by anarchists and they are offering internet access for FREE. You just need to dial up a number, no password, no special settings. Whoever heard of anyone doing that?

Baghdad will also be getting its first GSM network in about two weeks. A couple of thousand lines as a first step, mainly for NGOs and Administration. I think it is going to be MCI who will set this up.

via: Due Diligence

[/technology] posted at 10:22 #

In brief

Something I had long given up hoping for: the first signs of a healthily competitive online music business.

Good to see Franks already working hard on his legacy: How Tommy Franks won the Iraq war

Swarm crime could be the killer app to drive a more even distribution of technology.

US army continues attempts to seduce geekish doves.

[/misc] posted at 11:35 #

Simulations

The title: “The Simulation Argument: Why the Probability that You Are Living in a Matrix is Quite High” is strange as the first paragraph directly contradicts it: “The Matrix got many otherwise not-so-philosophical minds ruminating on the nature of reality. But the scenario depicted in the movie is ridiculous: human brains being kept in tanks by intelligent machines just to produce power.”

Nevertheless, this is interesting stuff.

Now we get to the core of the simulation argument. This does not purport to demonstrate that you are in a simulation. Instead, it shows that we should accept as true at least one of the following three propositions:

(1) The chances that a species at our current level of development can avoid going extinct before becoming technologically mature is negligibly small

(2) Almost no technologically mature civilisations are interested in running computer simulations of minds like ours

(3) You are almost certainly in a simulation.

These arguments assume finite computational power. If you also consider the possibility of infinite computational power and infinite storage (a real stretch, I know) then simulations could be recursive. The probability of being in a simulation becomes even higher and our ‘God’ is also probably in a simulation.

Via Slashdot

[/society] posted at 11:34 #

Palm WiFi

Palm look like they have a clue:

The Tungsten C is Palm’s first handheld with Wi-Fi built in.

Then show that they don’t:

The Tungsten W is a combination phone, organizer and e-mail device and shares a similar design with the Tungsten C. Instead of a Wi-Fi radio chip built in, though, it has a GSM/GPRS (Global System for Mobile Communications/General Packet Radio Service) chip so it can access cellular networks.

Instead of?

[/technology] posted at 11:31 #