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Wednesday, August 7, 2002
ShortWord 
| | The headline roughly means "shortcut through a word." Which is roughly my understanding of what ActiveWords does (which I know is good, but I don't use Windows much, so I don't really know. Now here's something way cool: |
It's gotta be the heat
Bad tune
| | Thanks for the pointage goes to Sheila Lennon and Jim Romenesko, who also points to an actual blog, edited by Banjo Himself. The July 30 entry is titled "Strum, strum strum," and says "The news of our demise has been greatly exaggerated." and "The power of the press is awesome, especially if you own one, which we do, sort of." |
Like viruses in the world's petri dish
EFF'n A.
Read it and creep
| | Who's That Girl? is a terrific piece by Lynn Hirschberg in the Sunday New York Times about the making of the next Britney (bigger even than 5-Grammy Alicia!). It's a look at the star-making machinery at work. |
Peaceblogging, cont'd
| | Eric Olsen has a nice summary of the whole "who do we humiliate, why, how much and how quickly?" conversation going on among the warbloggers, who have recently been joined by two techbloggers: Dave and myself. |
| | My problem from the beginning has been with the imprecise characterization of The Enemy as "the Arab world." Glenn clarifies the matter: |
| | In answer to the last questions: What groups is it most okay to kill? The ones who want to kill us. And how does that okayness vary with our distance and difference from them? Not a hell of a lot. But there are a lot of people who currently believe that it's their divine mission on Earth to kill as many Americans as they can. And they think that's okay because of the "difference" they see in America. |
| | Doc sees Iraq, and certainly the Islamic world in general, as not rising to the same level where "inflicting a lesser misery to end a greater one" would be appropriate. But Doc perhaps doesn't realize that Islamist militancy has infected much of the Islamic world, and that militancy is a grave danger to the world at large. It caused 9/11, it is behind Saudi fundamentalist efforts, it has become conflated with the Palestinian cause, and the irreligious dictator Saddam has wrapped himself in its cloak. |
| | Saddam must be defeated because of the direct and immediate danger that he is, BUT, as Nick says, he must also be defeated utterly, abjectly, to discredit once and for all - like fascism and Japan's "divine" nationalism were discredited - the way of thinking that ultimately led to 9/11: Islam is the only true religion, all nonbelievers are inferior and to be subjugated by any means necessary, theocracy is the only legitimate form of government, Allah will do whatever it takes to assert the truth of #s 1, 2 and 3. |
| | If the Armies of Allah are defeated, humiliated, crushed, scattered upon the four winds, then the whole philosophical house of cards collapses and you have a beaten, malleable people willing to accept a new way of life, such as Japan after WWII. |
| | We can't look at the puzzle piecemeal any longer: we can't look at al Qaeda, Hamas, Saddam, wahabbisam, Afghanistan, or militant Islam anywhere as separate entities. We must see the whole puzzle for what it is, and end the threat behind them all once and for all; this is exactly "inflicting a lesser misery to end a greater one." |
| | Again, "much of the Arab world" is not the whole thing, and "the puzzle" in the last paragraph is pretty damn complicated. |
| | Glenn is right to say the arguments against the war, from the New York Times to the feeble peaceblogging movement (which isn't one, since it seems to consist at the moment of a few reluctant volunteers), are late to the game and go lame when they stoop to name-calling. |
| | That last point is rougly the same as mine. Characterization of the enemy as "the Arab world" is a close kin to name-calling. And making an enemy of a whole ethnic world is an agenda more characteristic of Slobodan Milosevic than of George W. Bush. |
| | We need to face the fact that one reason Islamic militarism and anti-Americanism both exist is that we've lost a lot of propaganda battles. The truth about who we are and what we're about is not familiar to much of The Arab World. Telling them their world needs to be humiliated isn't going to win the next propaganda battle, either. |
| | War is a conversation by enemies among themselves, but never between them. It's what happens when your the apparent choice is to kill. |
| | Peace is a conversation between enemies as well as aomong each side. Or at least between constructive voices on both sides. |
| | I like to think we can have a war against terrorism while having a peaceful conversation with constructive voices in the Arab world. And the latter can't help bringing the former to a better (rather than a bitter) end. |
| | And with that I've said my peace. I see Dave just said his. Carry on, ya'll. I gotta work. |
Harbingery
| | Monotionik is a Net music label that exclusively releases music online in the mp3 format. All of our releases are freely downloadable and distributable, and we've been releasing .mp3 and .mod files online since May 1996. The label was founded by h0l as an outlet for talented electronic musicians who weren't getting the attention they deserved. |
Convers'ions
| | I have to admit, I came outta that meeting with one thought: "That may be the most boring thing that I've ever heard of." But three nights later, I awoke in a cold sweat -- saying to myself, "Holy shit is that big! It changes everything!" |
| | One thing that I'm happy about: conversation. productive disagreement. see, we can actually talk about this without casting MSFT as the Great Satan, Sony as their handmaiden, and the creator of content as some poor, marxian hero. |
| | So, Jonathon and Doc and even Eric all seem to be converging on a commen theme with me — that DRM is an attempt to replicate a centralised 'content distribution' business by ignoring or outlawing the fundamentally one to one, conversational marketplace that is the net. |
| | I don't expect the copyright cartel and the free-for-all memes to converge anytime soon. We need a new meme to fill in the missing middle ground — eBay did it for garage sales, after all. |
Caring less than ever
| | This means analog TV really will go away. Familiar old TV antennas will become relics. You'll get all your signals by cable, satellite or much smaller TV antennas that point at new HDTV transmitting antennas at the stations' existing analog transmitter sites. Eventually the analog transmitters go the way of steam engines, along with the TVs you're watching now. All the old channels you watch, from 2 through 69, will no longer refer to slices of spectrum, but to the addresses of wireless digital broadband stream sources. |
| | It's long overdue modernization. Analog TV takes up an enormous percentage of the radio spectrum. (The FM band, which starts right above TV Channel 6, takes up about as much room as two TV channels.) Analog stations also suck huge amounts of power off the grid. Its brute force transmission system depends on effective radiated powers of up to 5 million watts for the biggest UHF stations. Most of that wattage is gained at the antenna, but the power consumption is still enormous compared to what digital transmission requires. |
| | What's missing, however, is a similar mandate for radio. Making it happen will be a huge mess. TV stations in most cities are generally all about the same size, coverage-wise, and all share the same transmitter sites. Not so with AM and FM radio stations. In Los Angeles, for example, even the FM stations radiating from Mt. Wilson all have different power levels and coverage footprints, and AM stations radiate with widely varied coverage patterns from sites all over the map. Converting either AM or FM to digital transmission has been a huge engineering challenge for many years, and there doesn't seem to be a resolution in sight. So: no FCC mandates. Analog it stays. |
| | Meanwhile, the ubiquitious broadband wireless Internet is on the way. Once that happens, old fashioned radio becomes 100% obsolete. Who wants to keep hitting SCAN on the car radio, hoping to get something other than the next KISS FM, when a whole world of radio, consisting of connoisseurs sharing every imaginable taste, backed by endlessly large record collections — not to mention talk and news from all over the world — is right there on the Internet's infinitely wide radio dial? |
| | Which is another reason why the record industry is stabbing Internet radio in the cradle, while the National Association of Broadcasters stands aside approvingly. |
Couldn't happen to nicer behemoths
| | Eric Boehlert in Salon: Radio Titan hits the skids and The Empire Strikes Back. Both excellent. On the one hand, Eric paints an ugly picture of what's happened to radio. On the other, he suggests that we've found the bottom of this thing, and that there are encouraging signs. |
| | Any hope of returning to a Golden Age is long gone, though. The most telling thing he reports (in the first piece) is that teenage radio listening is sharply down. (See Read it and creep, above) |
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