After years of trying to cloud the public mind by calling it “piracy” instead of “unauthorised downloading,” key copyright industry reps are starting to realize that “piracy” actually sounds kind of cool. So now they’re lobbying for the even less intellectually rigorous term “theft,” which describes an entirely different offence, enumerated in an altogether different section of the lawbooks.
This has all the dishonesty of calling everything you don’t like “terrorism” (or as my friend Ian Brown says, it’s like rebranding jaywalking as “road rape”).
Cory Doctorow, “Entertainment industry sours on term ‘pirate’ — too sexy”, BoingBoing, 2010-03-18
March 19, 2010
QotD: The term “pirate” is too sexy
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March 16, 2010
QotD: The iPhone vision of the mobile internet
The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.
I hate it.
I hate it even though the iPhone hardware and software are great, because freedom’s not just another word for anything, nor is it an optional ingredient.
The big thing about the Web isn’t the technology, it’s that it’s the first-ever platform without a vendor (credit for first pointing this out goes to Dave Winer). From that follows almost everything that matters, and it matters a lot now, to a huge number of people. It’s the only kind of platform I want to help build.
Apple apparently thinks you can have the benefits of the Internet while at the same time controlling what programs can be run and what parts of the stack can be accessed and what developers can say to each other.
I think they’re wrong and see this job as a chance to help prove it.
The tragedy is that Apple builds some great open platforms; I’ve been a happy buyer of their computing systems for some years now and, despite my current irritation, will probably go on using them.
Tim Bray, “Now a No-Evil Zone”, ongoing, 2010-03-15
March 15, 2010
March 13, 2010
QotD: Walking the dog
The ancient struggle between dog-lovers and cat-lovers traditionally has favoured the canines, at least in the English-speaking world. Dogs were the manly animals, guarded the hearth, herded the sheep, helped at the hunt and shoot, retrieved the newspaper and were usually gentle with children.
Cats cannot really be put to any domestic use, except apprehension of mice and rats. They are often affectionate, but are not very demonstrative companions. But they require almost no attention, don’t need help or advice going to the bathroom, rarely mind being left outside, because even pampered housecats can usually catch their own dinner, and they are magnificent physical machines. The feline faction has gained ground in recent years, because of the profusion of working couples who could not leave a dog indoors all day.
My purpose here is to de-escalate, even slightly, the friction between the vast opposing armies of feline and canine admirers. This reflects my own circumstances, as my wife Barbara has become, in my brief and untoward absence, a caricature of a dog-lover, setting out from our homes in Toronto and Palm Beach kitted out like a British girls’ public school games-mistress with a variety of leashes, whistles, timepieces, enticements and fecal-disposal apparatus. She defiantly sends me, a traditional cat-fancier, photographs portraying her as an apparent fugitive from an Agatha Christie movie who has turned walking the dogs into exotic simulations of an all-weather, open-ended, search and rescue mission.
Conrad Black, “The truth about cats and dogs”, National Post, 2010-03-13
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March 11, 2010
QotD: Green jobs
[G]reen jobs have become the ginseng of progressive politics: a sort of broad-spectrum snake oil that cures whatever happens to ail you. They are the antidote to economic malaise, an underskilled labor force, the inherent unwillingness of the public to suffer any significant economic and personal dislocation in order to save the environment. They enhance nationalistic vigor. (If we don’t act now, the Chinese will steal all of our green jobs!) They stave off aging of stale political platforms. And I’m pretty sure they’re good for bunions, too.
Megan McArdle, “The Jobs Are Always Greener…”, The Atlantic, 2010-03-11
March 9, 2010
QotD: Early America
Early America enjoyed, perhaps, a little more participatory local democracy than Britain, and had a slightly broader electorate and already the highest standard of living in the world. But the revolution so rapturously mythologized by Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry and others, was really, as Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, Madison and Adams did not forget, a somewhat grubby contest over taxes.
In one of the greatest feats of statesmanship of all history, the Americans, and especially Benjamin Franklin, persuaded the British to expel the French from North America, and then persuaded the French to provide the margin of victory in evicting the British themselves. This precocious manipulation of the world’s two greatest powers by a group of colonists showed astounding finesse and precocity, made more piquant and ironic by the fact that their rebellion was against paying the colonies’ share of the cost of removing the French, and the French were recruited to save the Americans their proportionate share of the cost of their own eviction.
All countries swaddle themselves in myths, and the Americans aren’t more self-indulgent than others; only more successful and operating on the grand scale of a country that in two long lifetimes grew to possess completely unprecedented power and influence in the world.
Even without the great pre-eminence of America, the founders of the country possessed a presentational skill that vastly exceeded the procession of demagogues and lunatics that sent and followed each other to the guillotine in the French Revolution. And they were certainly more persuasive and sophisticated than the British spokesmen for constitutional monarchy.
But their unintended legacy of this gift for theatricality is the endless hyperbole and hucksterism of American materialism and individuality.
Conrad Black, “Send in the clowns”, National Post, 2010-03-09
March 5, 2010
QotD: Rescuing science from the AGW disaster
. . . this news story is a warning to all scientists: if you don’t want creationists to get traction, you can’t just treat this as someone else’s problem. You have to clean house. You have tolerated liars and rascals like Phil Jones and Rajendra Pachauri in your midst too long; you need to throw them out.
A diplomatic way for any random professional society to do this would be to demand that all climate science must be held to the strictest standards of methodological scrutiny. All data, including primary un-”corrected” datasets, must be available for auditing by third parties. All modeling code must be published. The assumptions made in data reduction and smoothing must be an explicitly documented part of the work product.
These requirements would kill off AGW alarmism as surely as a bullet through the head. But its credibility is already collapsing; the rising issue, now, is to prevent collateral damage from the scientific community’s failure to insist on them sooner. Every day you delay will strengthen the creationists and the flat-earthers and all the other monsters begotten from the sleep of reason.
Eric S. Raymond, “Lies and consequences”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-03-04
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March 4, 2010
QotD: The problem with modern journalism
The Times seems to have forgotten the most important aspect of the news business. For years now ’skeptic’ has been a dirty word at the Times when the subject of climate change comes up. Excuse me, but reporters are supposed to be skeptics. They are supposed to be cynical, hard bitten people who trust their mothers — but cut the cards. They are supposed to think that scientists are probably too much in love with their data, that issue advocates have hidden agendas, that high-toned rhetoric is often a cover for naked self interest, that bloviating politicians have cynical motives and that heroes, even Nobel Prize laureates, have feet of clay. That is their job; it is why we respect them and why we pay attention to what they write.
Reporters are not supposed to be wide-eyed gee-whiz college kids believing everything they hear and using the news columns of the paper to promote a social agenda. They are wet blankets, not cheerleaders, Eeyores, not Piglets and they can safely leave all the advocacy and flag-waving to the editorial writers and the op-ed pages.
This is not just a question of liberal bias. The same wide-eyed gee-whiz culture shaped much of the reporting on the run-up to the Iraq War. Maybe the word we are looking for when trying to describe what’s wrong with the mainstream press isn’t ‘liberal’ — maybe the term is something like ‘credulous’ or ‘naive.’ The gradual substitution of ‘professional journalists’ for the old hard boiled hacks may have given us a generation of journalists who are used to trusting reputable authority. They honestly think that people with good credentials and good manners don’t lie.
Today’s journalists are much too well-bred and well-connected to stand there in the crowd shouting “The emperor has no clothes!” They’ve worked with the tailors, they have had long background interviews with the tailors, they’ve been present for some of the fittings. Of course the emperor’s new clothes are fantastic; only those rude and uncouth ‘clothing deniers’ still have any doubts.
Walter Russell Mead, “Treason is a matter of dates”, The American Interest Online, 2010-03-03
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March 3, 2010
March 2, 2010
QotD: The true nature of school
If you objected to high school students getting spied on in their homes by school district-issued webcams, maybe junior high students under nonstop cam surveillance on school grounds by a tubby administrator with a chinbeard (but no chin) will be the charm [. . .] I’m creeped out by the obvious glee with which Beardy McBeardsworth describes his prey at a Bronx junior high school in almost exactly the same tones you hear from Air Force flacks narrating thermal footage of hits on insurgents. But I must acknowledge that the concept of school as a place where the rights of students are severely curtailed dates back at least to my own schooling during King Philip’s War, was recently upheld by the Supreme Court in the Bong Hits 4 Jesus case, and seems to enjoy broad popular support. For the majority of Americans alive today, the function of school has always been to break you for a workplace where you will meet obstruction and indignity every day, be subject to every type of invasive surveillance, and generally, as even that greatest of working stiffs Jerry Langford put it, “have idiots plaguing your life.”
Tim Cavanaugh, “Junior High Lives of Others”, Hit and Run, 2010-03-01
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March 1, 2010
QotD: The game
It may not have been the most important hockey game in Canadian history; the 1972 Summit Series has a pretty good argument, and does the 1987 Canada Cup. There were no political implications here, just sporting ones.
Nation-stopping sporting ones, true. If you ever wanted to knock off a bank in Lloydminster, Sask., this was probably a good day to try.
The game was played with a desperate ferocity, and at eye-watering speed. Every goal-mouth scrum was the fall of Saigon; bodies were being thrown around as if everyone involved forgot there is a quarter of the NHL season left to play. Every puck mattered; every play mattered. Everything mattered.
And there was hostility but no fighting; hitting but no headshots; talent so rich that when the NHL starts again today, it will look like a pale shadow of what the game can be.
“I think both teams are winners,” said Wilson. “And maybe more than anything, hockey in general.”
Bruce Arthur, “Crosby makes leap from superstar to legend”, CBC Vancouver Now, 2010-02-28
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February 20, 2010
February 18, 2010
QotD: Where are the (American) media?
If it’s true that right wing bloggers and right wing Brit newspapers are now savaging the Warmists completely wrongly, well, isn’t that a story in its own right, given the huge scale of this phenomenon? Aren’t these bad bloggers and cynical Brit journos threatening the very future of the planet? And you guys are ignoring that? Why aren’t you grilling these bad, bad people? Why no big exposures of the wrongness and wickedness of Steve McIntyre? Why no stuff saying “What’s up with Watt’s Up With That??” One way or another, this is a huge story.
Trouble is, I guess they want the story to go one way, but that if they investigate it properly they fear that they’ll find it going the other way.
Brian Micklethwait, “Making the US old media notice Climategate”, Samizdata, 2010-02-17
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February 16, 2010
QotD: Football
The Super Bowl is one of those great annual events that is uniquely American — except for the Roman numerals. I think those still belong to the Vatican.
If you missed it, the final score was Saints, XXXI and Colts, XVII.
The Super Bowl represents what we Americans are all about: creative commercials occasionally interrupted by violence. During the six-hour broadcast, there were only 11 minutes of actual, live football action. Some of the commercial breaks were so long that, when we finally came back to the game, I had forgotten which teams were playing.
And what better Norman Rockwell-esque ritual could I have with my kids than to watch 20 erectile dysfunction commercials to every snap of the football? “Daddy, why are those people in bathtubs watching the sun set?” I just tell them the people lost their homes to foreclosure.
Football is a lot like sex: countless hours of advertising how good it will be with only 11 minutes of actual action. Then, for me, there is always that awkward moment at the end when my credit card is declined.
Ron Hart, “Super Bowl: Uniquely American – except the Roman numerals”, Orange County Register, 2010-02-10
February 15, 2010
QotD: “I was disappointed in the opening ceremonies because . . .”
Holy smack people. We spent about a billion gazillion dollars on this thing. Every fourth person in the country has had their picture in the paper after getting a chance to carry the Olympic torch on some weird relay race around the country. We’ve been warned that anyone hinting these games aren’t the absolute bestest thing that ever happened in Canada will be drawn up on treason charges. And when the thing finally gets underway (hallelujah!), all we can think of is finding people who are “disappointed” because their particular race/creed/colour/language group wasn’t better represented.
My God. Vanoc should have asked Stats Canada to drawn up a statistical breakdown of the country, and then awarded spaces at the ceremonies strictly on that basis: 4.2 French-speaking non-Quebec First Nations people; 0.6 Presbyterian Metis single mothers; 1 Catholic that everyone else is allowed to make fun of; exactly 50% female representation, subdivided among the top 34 national racial, ethnic and religious groups; no men.
Then everyone would be happy, right? Actually, I doubt it.
Kelly McParland, “I was disappointed in the opening ceremonies because . . . (fill in beef here)”, National Post, 2010-02-15
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