Salon is expanding its coverage of The Slugfest in the States, the Brawl for All America, DubZilla vs. Frankenstein, or whatever you want to call the upcoming election. It’s opened a DC bureau under Sidney Blumenthal, it’s publsihing “The New Pentagon Papers,” it’s teaming up with Rolling Stone, Air America (the new liberal talk radio network) and The Guardian.

Salon has 74,000 subscribers. For $29, you could make it 74,001. Salon is one of my favorite daily reads, so I’m just being selfish when I ask you to subscribe.

After all, Scott Rosenberg, has added a notice that now his blog is “New! Improved! Now Fair and Balanced!” Isn’t that worth something? (Also, Salon has one of the more innovative ways of enabling readers who don’t want to pony up the subscription fee to still get full access to the articles on the site.)

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If I could quiz one of the tens of millions of reasonable, good-hearted Americans who oppose same-sex marriage, here are the questions I’d ask.

Set #1

Do you believe that same-sex couples can fall in love?

Is their love lesser than that of contra-sex couples?

Can same-sex couples form commitments as strong, lasting and valuable as those of contra-sex couples?

Are same-sex couples as likely as contra-sex couples to raise children well?

If yes to all of the above, what is the relevant difference between same-sex and contra-sex couples that justifies treating them differently with regard to marriage? [Note: a relevant difference is one that is relevant to the distinction in treatment. E.g., the Supreme Court decided in 1967 that race was not a relevant difference when it comes to marriage, although weight may be a relevant difference when it comes to choosing jockeys.]

Set #2

Do you believe that if same-sex couples are allowed to marry, it will affect contra-sex marriages? If so, how? Is there evidence to support this prediction?

Do you believe that which gender one finds sexually attractive is a matter of choice? Is there an element of choice in it?

If it’s a least partially an element of choice, are there reasons — other than the discriminatory culture in which we live — to make one choice over the other? That is, in a culture that didn’t discriminate, is heterosexuality a better choice than homosexuality? If so, for what type of reasons? Moral? Psychological?

If so, are the reasons to prefer heterosexuality sufficiently strong, and the overall consequences of same-sex marriage sufficiently negative, to ban same-sex marriage?

Set #3

Let’s say your daughter is 28 and has been in a loving relationship for six years with Pat, a person you’ve come to like and respect. She comes home one night and announces that Pat has popped the question and she’s accepted. She’s obviously delighted. In case #1, Pat is a man and you share your daughter’s joy. In case #2, Pat is a woman. Do you react differently? How? Is the difference in reaction justifiable? Why?

I don’t mean to state these questions as if the answers were obvious, although I’m sure my partisanship is evident. I don’t have fixed opinions about some of these questions, and I’d like to know where my thinking diverges from those who have come to a different conclusion on this issue.
Cross-posted at Loose Democracy

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Syberia II is out! At long last! The first game was an arbitrary scavenger hunt that forced you back and forth across an Alpine village that became less charming with each traversal.

I played the demo of the sequel last night. After walking along some crisply rendered mountain paths along tracks without choices, you and your dog come upon a mansion. Inside you pixel hunt until you find a book. It’s boring. But you need to know that golden salmon eat green frogs and swim downstream from waterfalls. You go in the only direction you’re allowed, through the mansion and onto a dock downstreadm from a waterfall. There’s a fishing rod and a tacklebox. Bait the line with the green lure, cast it into the water, and watch the charming animation as your character reels in a fish. Is it a golden salmon? Too small to tell. The animation finishes with you unhooking the fish, putting it on the dock, and then chastising the dog who eats it. Lather, rinse, repeat. Are you off by a few pixels in where you’re casting? Do you need to use lures in some particular order? Is the program wired so that the Big Event — you catch a fish, you hook a tire, you beat the freaking dog senseless with the boring fishing book — occurs on the sixth try? Was there some magic berry you didn’t notice when you were running through the mountains nine screens ago? Did you give up caring twenty minutes ago?

Ah, Syberia! Taking the adventure out of adventure games.

Tron 2, on the other hand, is actually pretty good. The game is fun to play, with an occasional exit too hard to find and an occasional enemy too hard to beat. That’s why we have cheats and walkthroughs, bless their hearts. But it’s imaginative, occasionally funny, and the graphics are consistently astounding: original and sometimes beautiful.

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When I tried to log in to eBay tonight, my password wouldn’t work. So, I had eBay send me my login name. Sure enough, it’s not mine. Somehow, another name has been attached to my email address. Not good. My credit card companies don’t report any unusual activity, though.

eBay doesn’t make it easy to report this problem. Their “Contact us about security page” has a small tree of choices, and this isn’t one of them. Their “email us” button nonsensically reports that I haven’t filled in all fields, when there were no fields at all to fill in. So, I’m sitting in their live help chat client, waiting an average of 28 minutes, to chat with a support person.

And, no, I didn’t fall for one of the eBay scams that has me “update my records.”

Later Ok, since last June, eBay has been warning us that it was going to disallow email addresses as logins, a reasonable precaution. They promulgated this warning via emails, but since I get a couple of spoof eBay messages a day, who pays attention to eBay messages. And they use popups. But who has popups turned on these days? So, I never protected myself straight into fearful ignorance.

Am I mistaken or has this blog become nothing but an account of the many ways in which I am a moron?

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Jeneane has announced PhoneCon, the first annual Telephone Users Conference. Sounds fascinating! No buzy signals allowed!

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Mark Hurst’s latest GoodExperience newsletter reports on a performance at TED:

Jennifer Lin is a fourteen-year-old pianist from southern California. She began her presentation by playing two very difficult classical pieces; to my untrained ears, she sounded as good as any professional performer two or three times her age.

It was her third piece that brought the house down. She announced that she would like to improvise a song… and asked an audience member to select five notes, at random, from the C scale. She got the sequence C, G, B, A, E.

Fourteen years old, with a live audience of 800 adults awaiting a brand new piece of music, based on a theme of five notes just handed to her. She had ten seconds to prepare.

It was a masterpiece.

Chris Anderson, TED conference host, was nice enough to post the performance online at the TED site. I highly recommend spending a few minutes listening to the whole piece, to get a touch of the experience that Jennifer created.

1. Go to http://www.ted.com

2. Click “Magic moments from TED2004”. (If the link disappears suddenly, roll the mouse over the “Home” link and it will reappear.) [Yeah, the UI is problematic – dw]

3. A window called “TED 2004 Summary Slides” will appear and start loading. Slide 1 should play momentarily.

NOTE: Slide 2 of 5 is the beginning of Jennifer Lin’s performance, where she gets the five notes (yes, that’s Goldie Hawn) and sits down to play. When that slide finishes playing, you’re JUST about to get to the good stuff.

If Slide 3 doesn’t start playing, click the right arrow-button on the bottom of the window to advance past the end of Slide 2.

Slide 3 plays the audio of Jennifer’s incredible improvisation, and shows a slideshow of TED photos on top of that. Enjoy the photos but pay close attention to the music: remember, Jennifer is playing this multi-movement piece “cold”, with no prior knowledge of the five-note theme, in front of an audience of several hundred.

You can’t see it in the video, but many audience members were crying at the end of the performance.

Mark’s more enthusiastic about it than I am. The fact that she’s 14 makes it more impressive, which means that the music on its own didn’t affect me the way it affected the audience. But, I sure feel grinchy saying it because for a 14 year old it’s pretty freaking amazing.

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Ok, I admit I was a bit testy last night. I have the flu, I have a father-in-law for whom I’ve bought two computers and three operating systems (XP, Linux, Mac) who still can’t pick up his frigging email, and I just wanted to go to sleep.

Instead, I found myself doing Kafka’s version of the Turing Test: Can a computer convince you that it’s usable if you’re connected by telephone to an intelligent human who, when it comes to computers, knows how to move a mouse and find letters on a keyboard but little more?

Anyway, thanks for the suggestions in the comments section of the previous post, including your restraint in offering rude suggestions.

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I just spent an hour on the phone with my father-in-law failing to help him find his email client. It used to be there, but it vanished from the tool bar at the bottom. Now we can’t get it back. None of the Finder options seem to actually help us find anything.

I know it’s there. I know it’s “easy.” But it sure ain’t intuitive. Anyone want to give me the most basic instruction about how to find things on the !@#$% Mac, OS X?

As Dr. Dean would say, “Aaaaaaarrrrrrggggghhhh!”

[Ten minutes later] I can’t even walk my father-in-law through the process of using Safari to get to his ISP’s home page so he can use the Web client to get his mail. He clicks into the adress bar. It highlights. He presses the Delete key. It clears. He types in “www.rcn.com” and presses the Return key. (Why isn’t it called the Enter key? Why is Mac still stuck in the world of typewriters?) A window comes down, obscuring the address bar, telling him that the server can’t be found because somehow the address has become http://wwwwww.rcn.comcom (or something like that). We try it three times. I give up.

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Scott Kirsner in The Boston Globe (link will break tomorrow) writes about companies trying to enhance eBay. His lead example is a storefront operation run by AuctionDrop that operates as a consignment shop: You bring in your old goods, they place them on eBay, you split the winnings. It sounds like a cool idea until you get to the final paragraphs of the piece: Their 75 employees and 20,000 square feet of warehouse space brought in $1.3M in revenues last year. Ulp.

Scott cites other companies that have failed, sometimes because eBay sued them into failure. An eBay spokesperson says:

“We are happy to see this universe of different kinds of companies offer services that extend the eBay marketplace in new and innovative ways,” says Hani Durzy, an eBay spokesman. But Durzy says it is in eBay’s best interest to ensure that tools offered by third parties work well, and that data from the site is used in a way that protects “the integrity of the marketplace.”

That’s not why they sued BiddersEdge.com into oblivion. BiddersEdge consolidated auctions across auction sites, so you could find which site was offering the Princess Di Beanie Baby at the lowest price. BiddersEdge helped preserve the “integrity of the marketplace”…unless you define “the marketplace” as “eBay.” Yet eBay tolerates (how magnanimous!) AuctionSniper and other such sites that, for a fee, place your bid at the last possible second before a bid closes. Does this protect “the integrity of the marketplace”? Maybe, maybe not, but it does ensure that eBay gets the highest price that robots can provide.

I’ve lost bids to auction snipers. As a customer, I feel cheated, even though, of course, I could take a sniper’s eye-view of the transaction. Even if letting robots game the auction doesn’t affect the integrity of the marketplace, they sure take the fun out of it. And that’s part of eBay’s value as well.

Cross-posted at Many2Many

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RCN, my ISP, has recently upped its performance to 5 gigabits. (I sometimes get my units confused so go ahead and have a good laugh at a dumb liberal arts major.) According to DSLreports. I’m running at 4.1 and SpeedCheck says I’m at 4.4. I don’t mean to rub your faces in it, but downloading is pretty durn peppy. Why, my pornographic spam is downloading in a fraction of the time that it used to! (Upload times are still under 700kbps.)

So, when will RCN start offering Voice over IP?

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