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Friday, December 29, 2006
Better than The Fly, I guess 
| | Says here I'm Spider-Man. You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility. I'd say that's maybe three or four out of five. |
What he said I said I would say
| | Seems Vista's "content protection" requirements will force hardware makers to do several awful things at once, mostly by burning DRM into hardware. Needless to say, this will screw up things for Linux's customary hermit-crab approach to running on generic hardware. Because, if Microsoft succeeds, there won't be generic hardware. White boxes won¹t be able to run Vista. They'll only run Vista's ancestors and competitors. Vista-ready boxes will be white in the manner of Apple's: in color only. |
| | For those of us old enough to remember, this approach calls to mind IBM's suicidal Microchannel bus, back in the late 80s. Microchannel was a PC backplane lock-in strategy that rode to market inside a Trojan Horse of improvements over the aging PC (ISA) bus. The Microchannel horse was transparent as well as lame, and the market didn' t buy it. Instead the market eventually bought the PCI bus, which was open and useful for everybody. |
| | Micrsoft hides its hardware lock-in strategy inside a transparent Trojan Horse of "protectection" for "premium content". As we know, "premium content" is produced mostly by the entertainment industry. Not by You. Thus the Vista Content Protection spec is a kiss for Hollywood and a fart for everybody else. |
Big bang
Getting on board the relations ship
| | Another VRM challenge is improving relations between public broadcasting and its customers. Public broadcasting is in an unusual and privileged position: its consumers are also its customers. For commercial broadcasters, those two populations are split. Advertisers pay for commercial broadcasting. Not the viewers and listeners, who consume the goods but don't pay for them. Viewers and listeners are not really in the market for commercial broadcasting's goods. In fact, viewers and listeners are the product commercial broadcasters sell to its real customers: the advertisers. (Specifically, they sell the attention of consumers.) Meanwhile, public broadcasting actually sells its products directly to viewers and listeners. True, ten percent of that population pays for what a hundred percent get for free. But shouldn't that ten percent should get something more out of their relationships with stations than promotional cups and CDs? And hey, wouldn't more viewers and listeners buy public broadcasting's goods and services if an actual relationship were involved? How can we facilitate that? Certainly we can do better than what we have now: stations turning off regular programming for two weeks, pleading poverty, threatening to go off the air or drop programming "unless you help" and promising schwag to "supporters" who call volunteers on the phone. |
The Because cause
| | So you've got San Francisco, on a mission to make $100 million, and you've got Los Angeles, actually making money, but less than $100 million. Of course the question is how much less, and I can't say, but it's not so much less that anybody's crying for the Los Angeles guys and their terrible loss. Oh no, quite the opposite. The guy from Los Angeles I was talking to, I think he was incredibly cool not to be wearing a shit-eating grin all day long. |
| | I think what's going on here is that the venture capital system is based around the idea that companies require substantial investment to get going. But that isn't true any more. (Huge hour-long mp3 behind the link, absolutely worth it.) Infrastructure means open source software and bandwidth. Bandwidth is cheap, and open source is free. |
| | Every venture capitalist wants that huge success, the big disruptive innovation that destroys old industries and makes them millions. |
| | The irony is, the biggest disruptive innovation that ever came from the Internet could in fact be open source software, and the old industry it destroys will probably be venture capital. |
| | Think about it. Free software and cheap infrastructure basically eliminates the whole raison d'etre for venture capitalists. Companies are cheap to start. All the stuff you used to need millions for is now free. That means venture capitalists just don't matter any more. It isn't about being lucky enough to get $5 million in funding; it's about starting something with the cash in your pocket. If you make something and it's good enough, the guys with $5 million in funding will come to you, because those guys are basically just money in search of intelligence, and it's a lot better to be intelligence in search of money. If you're intelligence in search of money, you'll choose the best way to get money. The best way to get money isn't to find some VCs to beg, borrow, or steal from; the best way to get money is to make something people will pay for. So if you're intelligence in search of money, you'll make stuff people want to pay for, and you won't even bother with the VCs, because they need you more than you need them. |
| | That's one of the best Because Effect explanations I've ever run across. |
Top of the worlds
| | Bad Astronomy is a good blog by Phil Plait, who says I am an astronomer, writer, and skeptic. I like reality the way it is, and I aims to keep it that way. |
Continuing endings
| | When Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser died suddenly of a heart attack in 1970, Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban said (and I quote from memory here) "It's a shame we must depend on the viscicitudes of nature to rid the world of tyrants". Such will not be the case with Saddam Hussein. Some news reports suggest that Saddam will be executed by Sunday, marking completion of a primary objective of the U.S. war against terror in the Middle East. I am sure President Bush will use the phrase "Iraqi people" and "justice" in his remarks after the execution is performed. |
| | So now comes the part where a monster, reduced to a ridiculous cranky old man, will have a rope put around his neck and take his drop. For civilized people it is impossible not to feel some empathy with any man's mortality in the cold moment of execution. In my house we have a joke. Saddam doesn't like Fruit Loops. More for us. Now, No Fruit Loops guy is going to get it. Even more for us. |
| | We all know the enormity of his crimes, and many of us know men and women who are dead because of him. But the only satisfaction I'll feel with his death is to know that there is still justice that is carried to termination and not cynically subverted in this world. It is only more death on top of death after that. |
| | I was writing those words above when my buddy Sig called, maybe around 11 p.m. last night. His contractor pals in Iraq figure it's already happened. Sig, a San Antonio Express-News reporter in the invasion with three or four more trips to Iraq behind him, honored me by calling me first when he wanted to talk about it. |
| | "Death upon death". There are good cognitive reasons why we see death as a thing, as something substantial. But death is subtraction. In the remarkable Lady's Choice: Ethel Waxham's Journals & Letters, 1905-1910., Ethel Waxham Love (whom many of us met as a leading character in John McPhee's Rising From the Plains) writes about justice in the Wyoming frontier where she she ranched with cowboys that included her husband and two sons. When truly bad guys were dispatched by amateur executioners it was often said that the deceased "needed killin'". Meaning that the world was better off without them. The practitioners of frontier justice were choosing, in the words of Eban, not to depend on the viscicitudes of nature. |
| | But war is different. "War is murder wrapped in a flag", Dorothy Day said. I've never disagreed, yet the quote haunts me because some part of me — a small part that somehow coexists with my pacifisim — believes that some people "need killin'". That some wars are necessary. That some evils must be defeated, and that violence is sometimes the only means: a necessary evil. |
| | But its occasional necessity makes war no less evil in itself. It is the dark hollow of humanity's persistent and perhaps suicidal failing as a species. Suicidal or not, we do like to kill. We certainly like to fantasize about it, to sublimate and rationalize and intellectualize about it. And to have fun with it — or else we wouldn't have a zillion of our computer and video games. |
| | Regardless of our affection for it, war should always be a last resort. It wasn't in Iraq, and it won't be in Iran — should we choose to pick a fight there too. |
| | Anyway, on the eve of the subtraction of Saddam from our midst, I went looking through Middle Eastern blogs for some views. Strong stuff there. |
| | A day in the life of the average Iraqi has been reduced to identifying corpses, avoiding car bombs and attempting to keep track of which family members have been detained, which ones have been exiled and which ones have been abducted. |
| | 2006 has been, decidedly, the worst year yet. No - really. The magnitude of this war and occupation is only now hitting the country full force. It's like having a big piece of hard, dry earth you are determined to break apart. You drive in the first stake in the form of an infrastructure damaged with missiles and the newest in arms technology, the first cracks begin to form. Several smaller stakes come in the form of politicians like Chalabi, Al Hakim, Talbani, Pachachi, Allawi and Maliki. The cracks slowly begin to multiply and stretch across the once solid piece of earth, reaching out towards its edges like so many skeletal hands. And you apply pressure. You surround it from all sides and push and pull. Slowly, but surely, it begins coming apart - a chip here, a chunk there. |
| | That is Iraq right now. The Americans have done a fine job of working to break it apart. This last year has nearly everyone convinced that that was the plan right from the start. There were too many blunders for them to actually have been, simply, blunders. The 'mistakes' were too catastrophic. The people the Bush administration chose to support and promote were openly and publicly terrible- from the conman and embezzler Chalabi, to the terrorist Jaffari, to the militia man Maliki. The decisions, like disbanding the Iraqi army, abolishing the original constitution, and allowing militias to take over Iraqi security were too damaging to be anything but intentional. |
| | The question now is, but why? I really have been asking myself that these last few days. What does America possibly gain by damaging Iraq to this extent? I'm certain only raving idiots still believe this war and occupation were about WMD or an actual fear of Saddam. |
| | Al Qaeda? That's laughable. Bush has effectively created more terrorists in Iraq these last 4 years than Osama could have created in 10 different terrorist camps in the distant hills of Afghanistan. Our children now play games of 'sniper' and 'jihadi', pretending that one hit an American soldier between the eyes and this one overturned a Humvee. |
| | This last year especially has been a turning point. Nearly every Iraqi has lost so much. So much. There's no way to describe the loss we've experienced with this war and occupation. There are no words to relay the feelings that come with the knowledge that daily almost 40 corpses are found in different states of decay and mutilation. There is no compensation for the dense, black cloud of fear that hangs over the head of every Iraqi. Fear of things so out of ones hands, it borders on the ridiculous- like whether your name is 'too Sunni' or 'too Shia'. Fear of the larger things- like the Americans in the tank, the police patrolling your area in black bandanas and green banners, and the Iraqi soldiers wearing black masks at the checkpoint. |
| | To put it simply; saying that a policy that aims at ridding the world of regimes and criminals such as Saddam, al-Qaeda, Ahmadinejad or Assad is a wrong policy that breeds extremism is utterly stupid. |
| | I personally do not think that America changed its policy from victory to exit but I see that it hasn't been good at expressing its intentions nor sending the right signals, and when I say right I mean clear even to those who have a problem understanding things. |
| | What the free world needs to do, the US and UK in particular, is to make their messages clear and loud so that wrong interpretations by extremists do not cost us losses that can be otherwise avoided. |
| | The message ought to be clear and loud that the change in strategy will be to renew and empower the strategy from one of victory to one of nothing but victory. |
| | Here I see steps such as considering adding more troops in Iraq and imposing sanctions on Iran to have a positive impact; more strategic than tactical though as this will express beyond doubt that nothing short of victory would be the goal of the new strategy. |
| | There are basically two camps in Iraq now. Not a Shiite Camp and A Sunni camp, but a camp for the new order including a majority of the Shiites, the Kurds, and many Sunnis (for example the tribes of the Anbar Salvation Council, and many, many other Sunnis), and another camp that is composed of sectarian factions totally opposed to Democracy and pluralism including anarchistic revenge groups and gangs of both sects. The first camp is by far the majority of the people. |
| | The strategic instinct of President Bush is guiding him in the right direction again despite all the confusion and pressures. I have always said that it is necessary not to lose site of the fundamentals of a situation, never to jeopardize the strategic base for the sake of any temporary tactical maneuvers. It is not a question of taking sides in a sectarian struggle. It is question of knowing where one¹s real popular base is; of knowing who has real interest in seeing the success of one¹s strategic goals and objectives. Nothing encourages the enemy like seeing confusion and disorientation of the Western leadership; and nothing discourages him more than seeing resolve and commitment otherwise. The enemies have be tackled one a time, and opening many fronts at the same time should be avoided, a fairly obvious axiom which is so often forgotten. If a fight is necessary, so be it; one side has to emerge victorious. This will only take place when the backbone of the enemy is broken thoroughly and definitively. History teaches us this. America itself would not be the Great nation that it is today had it not been for the victories of the American Revolution, and the American Civil War. This is the eighty percent strategy, this is right. |
| | The Iraqis no longer know the taste of these feasts, and what it tastes like to live in a city basking in peace and calm! |
| | Iraq is burning with the fire of a stupid war, which left no house there unharmed, one way or anotherŠ |
| | For the Iraqi families either lost some of its members by death, detention, kidnapping, or assassination, or the family run away leaving its house, neighbors, and memories, or else lost its livelihood method, and its financial conditions deteriorated from bad to worstŠ |
| | And we are all being patient; each of us is patiently waiting for this fire to die down, for things to be fixed well, and the wheels of life to resume turning in a normal way; security, stability, jobs, schools and universities, students- boys and girls, and mothers and fathers and children living in houses that has water and electricity, who go out to markets, to clean, quiet streets, full of cars, and traffic lights that actually workŠ. These are the features of cities living normal livesŠ |
| | But in Iraq, these features vanished little by littleŠ. |
| | When will life there go back to its normal image? |
| | Not even Bush, the hero, or his comrades who planned and waged the war upon us, not even they know when or how to get out of this impasseŠ |
| | While Hoder, an Iranian living in Toronto, says this about the drift of U.S. policy toward his native country: |
| | The more the clash between the West and Iran escalates, the more convinced I become that soon I have to take one side in this nasty conflict. Between Bush and Khamanei, I definitely take Khamanei's side. |
| | Islamic Republic and Khamenei's worst is way better than anything that the United States or the European Union can bring to Iran. |
| | And I'm saying this as a well-traveled Atheist who enjoys his best days of life in the wonderful capitals of Europe and who dreams of a secular Iran, run by a totally open democracy, with total peace with its neighbors including Israel. Not as a fanatic, religious support of Khamenei or Ahmadinejad or even Khatami. |
| | My strong support for the reformists in Iran is more a matter of pragmatism, than an ideological one. I can't even tolerate having dinner with most of these people who still believe in God and heaven and hell -- and obviously never have tasted the joy of drinking May, or wine as it's known in Persian literature. |
| | If the US waged a war against Iran, I'd absolutely go back and defend Iran. I can't let myself to sit down for a moment and watch they make a Baghdad out of Tehran. |
| | Fortunately, I'm not alone. |
| | Feeling better? Me either. |
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