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Tuesday, September 10, 2002
Flog of the day 
| | The Dream of Reason replaced the Holy. Reason gave us business plans, engineering, computers, economics, profit and loss, and the imaginary world of Brands and Spectacle. For awhile it gave us Epistemology, Ontology, Ethics, Theory of Justice and other hocus pocus. Then Reason made three related announcements... |
| | Authored mostly by The Happy Tutor, who says this in his bio, |
| | Jesus scourged the money changers from the Temple. I continue his work by inviting Wealth-holders to become my Private Clients. The Best Practices they learn as Dominants and Submissives here in Wealth Bondage serve them well in both their Corporate and Personal Lives. |
| | And explains a bit more with this: |
| | "When I was a kid roaming the streets, I didn't have any money to go to the movies like the rich kids. So I used to go down to the city dump on Saturday nights and shoot rats with a .22. That was the beginning of my interest in reforming civil society." |
| | At least he didn't shoot the rich kids. Well, at least not back then. |
And why not?
Filling in the outline
| | Here's what I just wrote in Omni Outliner 2.1 and exported to HTML: |
| | - ❑ Testing <a href="http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnioutliner/";>Omni Outliner</a>
- ❑ Wow, it feels like MORE.
- ❑ Is it like MORE?
- ❑ Enter doesn't open a comments window. That's okay.
- ❑ Cmd-L and Cmd-R both work the same.
- ❑ So do Cmd-U and Cmd-D
- ❑ Line breaks are close. Hoist and de-hoist are different. So are expand and collapse.
- ❑ Can't jump to the end of a line with opt-leftarrow or opt-rightarrow. Can't jump from word to word with cmd-arrow either. That's cool.
- ❑ I miss Rules (a much hated/loved MORE feature that I happened to love).
- ❑ One request: links. I would write in this program if I could insert a link with a command.
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| | I had to take out all the returns to make it work in the Radio Userland's outliner (a more direct descendant of MORE). Let's see how it looks... |
| | Not too bad. I didn't even know there was a tag for dropshadow bullet boxes (not that I want them, really). Working with links is clearly a problem. Why even bother to export to HTML if you're not going to support links in a nonclunky way? Think: text editor. That's what MORE was, in a way. |
| | But hey: maybe I'm missing something here. Happens. |
| | Like I just said, make it possible to write with links (in a WYSIWYG way), and I'm all over it. |
Meldi media
| | Note that all of the plans have a mast to replace the lost pylon that differentiated the North tower from the South. That mast contained the antenas for all of New York's major TV stations, plus a few of its FM stations as well. The transmitters occupied the uppermost story of the North tower, and ironically are rarely mentioned in 9/11 stories, perhaps because nobody who was there lived to tell. We have heard reports that nobody was able to get up on the roof, yet six engineers were reported missing that day (I haven' t found a report on how many died), and presumably any one of them would have had roof-access privileges. In any case, the smoke looked even worse up on the top than on floors below. (Here is a large site dedicated to the WTC transmitting facility.) |
| | I wonder if anybody is asking about the necessity of replicating the lost TV mast. With old-fashioned analog TV, range was limited by line-of-sight from one spot. Height was everything. With today's technologies, including satellite and cellular methods in addition to hard wiring, do we need old fashioned brute-force TV transmission? Analog TV is outlawed after 2006 anyway. Digital TV still requires maximum height to reach the maximum number of TV sets over the air, but how many will be viewing over the air? And do they all need to point to one high antenna? Can't other transmitters be distributed around the area, much like cellular telephony? |
| | And how many people in the New York area notice today that their reception is worse, on either TV or FM, now that the highest transmitter site in Manhattan has been lost? For that matter, how many noticed improvements in reception when the transmitters were moved to the WTC from the Empire State Building in 1972? As I recall at the time (I lived there, and was a young wannabe broadcast engineer), the change was a mixed bag. Stations had to drop their output power as a trade-off against height, and increased reception in one directin (South, into New Jersey) as offset by worse reception in the other (North into Midtown and beyond, where the Empire State Building site kicked ass). |
| | One reason for moving the transmitters to the WTC was to eliminate shadowing to the South caused by the towers themselves, as well as reflections up toward the Bronx. Special UHF translators pointing Bronxward were installed on the South Tower once it as built, and operated until the mast on the North tower was finished and operational. If the replacement buildings themselves are shorter than the WTC towers were, why bother to move the transmitters back off the Empire State Building again? |
| | Just wondering. Maybe some of the real engineers among ya'll have the answers there. |
Tough choice
| | The retention of WMD capacities by Iraq is self-evidently the core objective of the regime, for it has sacrificed all other domestic and foreign policy goals to this singular aim. |
| | This Strategic Dossier does not attempt to make a case, either way, as to whether Saddam Hussein¹s WMD arsenal is a casus belli per se. Wait and the threat will grow; strike and the threat may be used. |
Reality gulps
RIAA nightmare: a jury of peers
| | Attorneys for the record labels, movie studios and music publishers trade groups filed papers Monday asking a federal judge for summary judgment, or a ruling against the file-swapping companies before going to a full trial. The groups submitted sealed arguments they said stemmed from six months of investigation proving the file-swapping companies knowingly contributed to widespread copyright infringement. |
| | The suit began here on October 2, 2001, with MGM et al v. Grokster et al, Case No. 01-CV-8541 SVW. |
| | Meanwhile, the EFF reports that a number of equal and apposite motions on behalf of the defendants have also been filed: |
| | Attorneys for StreamCast Networks, developers of the popular Morpheus peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing software, today filed briefs in federal court seeking a ruling that distribution of the software does not violate copyright law. |
| | In their briefs seeking summary judgment, attorneys from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the law firm of Brobeck, Phleger and Harrison argued that distribution of the software is legal because the product is capable of substantial noninfringing uses and because StreamCast cannot control the various uses of the software. |
| | Supporting StreamCast in the motion is nine time Grammy nominee, Janis Ian, who believes that peer-to-peer software represents important new opportunities for artists. |
| | More briefs are expected. Oral arguments are set for December 2, before Federal District Court Judge Stephen Wilson in Los Angeles. |
| | Here's the EFF archive. It contains a hearing transcript on what apears to be a motion to dismiss by Streamcast's attorneys. The court rejected the motion. Reading that transcript does not whet my optimism for the defendants. |
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