The TSA wants 77 airlines to turn over information about everyone who traveled domestically during June so it can be compared with a “newly concentrated security watch list.” Some of the names would be compared with bank, mortgage and credit agency databases. This compels all airlines to turn over personal information that JetBlue and Northwest were embarrassed to be caught turning over voluntarily, according to the NY Times. It’s a replacement for the CAPPS 2 system that caused a ruckus among civil liberties folks. Unlike CAPPS 2, it would not also be used to find people wanted on outstanding warrants, etc.

David Stephenson, a security consultant, thinks this is real bad. For one thing, he has no faith in the “imbeciles at Acxiom” that will participate in the mess. The ACLU says:

For example, it appeared that security decisions will be made based on frequently inaccurate information contained in secret “black boxes ” maintained at the Terrorism Screening Center that are completely inaccessible to the public and effectively shielded from scrutiny or correction. According to news reports, the Terrorism Screening Center will maintain watch lists that will be used under Secure Flight for identifying passengers to be screened as “selectees” or placed on a “no-fly” list, leaving innocent travelers who are caught up in the system with no fair way to have their names removed.

I guess I don’t have a lot of faith in the ability of database mining to uncover terrorists accurately enough to be worth the false positives (AKA violation of our constitutional rights), but I might be ok with that if this didn’t put our civil liberties into a black box guarded by F. Kafka.

BTW, Stephenson suggests that TSA play Cat Steven’s Peace Train as they pat down those who are profiled into the possible-terrorist category…

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My one-month-old Thinkpad X40 needs a new motherboard. Yesterday, it stopped noticing what was plugged into its USB ports. Today it can’t find its audio board. IBM has authorized the repair.

This occurred while I was on the road, lending credence to the theory that my electrical problems are not due to bad wiring in my house but in fact stem from some sort of perturbance in my aura. Or possibly an electrolyte balance. Ultimately, I think, we have to blame it on Karl Rove.

By the way, not having my laptop for the next few days is pretty much a freaking disaster since I’m leaving to give a talk early next week.

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At the World Economic Forum meeting today, so not a lot of time to blog. So, here’s the Top Ten list Kerry read on Letterman last night:

Top 10 Bush Tax Proposals

10. No estate tax for families with at least two U.S. presidents.

9. W-2 Form is now Dubya-2 Form.

8. Under the simplified tax code, your refund check goes directly to Halliburton.

7. The reduced earned income tax credit is so unfair, it just makes me want to tear out my lustrous, finely groomed hair.

6. Attorney General (John) Ashcroft gets to write off the entire U.S. Constitution.

5. Texas Rangers can take a business loss for trading Sammy Sosa.

4. Eliminate all income taxes; just ask Teresa (Heinz Kerry) to cover the whole damn thing.

3. Cheney can claim Bush as a dependent.

2. Hundred-dollar penalty if you pronounce it “nuclear” instead of “nucular.”

And Bush’s number one tax proposal:

1. George W. Bush gets a deduction for mortgaging our entire future.

FWIW and BTW, I thought Kerry did well overall…a lot better than he did with Jon Stewart.

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I’m going to NYC today for a meeting sponsored by the World Economic Forum tomorrow, isolated and secure on Governor’s Island. (Jeez, have they no sense of: a) sybmolism; b) irony ?) I don’t actually understand what the meeting is about or for, but the attendees seem to be about 35 people from the entertainment industry and a few miscellaneous others. The title of the event is “Barbarians at the Gate.”

Here’s a draft of what I plan on saying during my 7 minute slot on the first panel of the morning. Your comments and suggestions would be greatly appreciated because I’m feeling quite insecure about this:

I’m a capitalist of sorts and a writer of sorts, so I am sympathetic to the idea that creators should be paid for their work. But, I’m also a citizen and a member of cultural communities. So, for one moment, I’d like you to perform an exercise in selective attention. Forget every other consideration — even though they’re fair and important considerations — and see if you can acknowledge that a world in which everyone has free access to every work of creativity in the world is a better world. Imagine your children could listen to any song ever created anywhere. What a blessing that would be!

Now, I know it takes a Zen-like awareness to keep that one idea there purely, and to beat back the Buts that want to crowd in. And I by no means deny the validity of those Buts. “But if access were free, then artists couldn’t support themselves. ” I won’t want argue with that. “But it wouldn’t be fair.” I won’t argue that either, at least not here. All I want to do is put on the table a value that I think too often is left on the floor because, among commercial media companies, it has no champion: All things being equal, a world that shares art freely is a better world than one where access to art is stifled. And that’s at least as important as Sony making its quarterly numbers.

Let me stress that I am not arguing for free music, for no copyright, for not paying artists. I am only pointing to a value that should influence the discussion of how to pay for music, how long copyright should hold, and how artists should be supported.

Now, the right thing would be to explain my plan for how we can balance these interests. But I don’t have one. I’m drawn to the EFF’s plan for voluntary collective licensing, but I don’t understand the issues well enough to have an actual opinion. So, instead of offering a positive plan, I want to point to an assumption that I believe should not be made in the discussions of this issue: Pay-per-use looks seductively like the fairest solution, but it is not.

Pay-per-use is certainly fair for goods that are depleted with every use. But, of course, we don’t always insist on it. Not all highways have toll booths and even childless couples pay for public schools. That’s because we all benefit indirectly from having freedom of movement and an educated society. While art could be considered a public good of that sort, I think there’s an additional reason why we have to resist the temptation to move towards a pay-per-use model.

Compare a song or a book with a bicycle. A bike is an object that can move through the economy, being sold and resold at will without itself changing. Songs, books and movies have a bike-like side, but we do this weird thing to them that we don’t do with bikes: We publish them. And publishing is a unique and uniquely valuable process.

We publish stuff that gets its meaning and its reality by being read, viewed or heard. An unpublished novel is about as meaningful and real as an imaginary novel. It needs its readers to be. But readers aren’t passive consumers. We reimagine the book, we complete the vision of the book. Readers appropriate works, make them their own. Listeners and viewers, too. In making a work public, artists enter into partnership with their audience. The work succeeds insofar as the audience makes it their own, takes it up, understands it within their own unpredictable circumstances. It leaves the artist’s hands and enters our lives. And that’s not a betrayal of the work. That’s its success. It succeeds insofar as we hum it, quote it, appropriate it so thoroughly that we no longer remember where the phrase came from. That’s artistic success, although it’s a branding failure.

Stifle that appropriation and you have literally killed culture. You stifle it by making every use of a creative work subject to legal and contractual guidelines. You stifle it by tracking every use of your bits.We need our appropriation of culture to be unimpeded by niggling concerns about nickels and galactic concerns about dimes. Culture grows in cracks in the sidewalk.

So, although I promised not to be practical, I think this suggests a guideline for a compromise that supports the highest value of enabling culture to thrive and the lesser and contributing value of enabling artists to make money from their works.

Distinguish works from effects. Artists should be compensated if we reproduce their bits outside our home. Not pay-per-view or even pay-per-bit. But tying compensation to the moving of bits like bikes makes sense. But loosen up the strictures on how we appropriate works of art. Ease up on the copyright insanity; you’ve really gone overboard with that one. End the war on your customers. That’s not just evil, it’s bad business. Let us do what we want with your bits in our own homes. In the US, don’t support the Broadcast Flag. Let us appropriate creative works because that’s what it means to be a creative work. Keep fair use as the norm and compensated use as the exception. Cut us some freaking slack, because that’s where and how culture grows.

One more thing. I’ve been arguing for using our new, remarkble global connectedness (unevenly distributed, to be sure) to foster the growth of cullture and civilization. That would make you the barbarians, I believe.

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I got a msg from the Bush campaign (I’m a member of GOP TeamLeader) touting an HBO movie, 9 Innings from Ground Zero. The msg links to a clip about Bush throwing out the first pitch. In it, W lets us know the pressure on him not to “bounce” it.

I can see why the Republicans are circulating it. It’s a good piece of tape, in a patriotic-cum-Riefenstahl sense. And, on the other hand, it’s maybe the most absurd reduction of a serious issue I have ever seen.

You want to see American political cynicism at its worst? This is it: The drama of the President throwing out the first pitch.

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Microsoft Word corrects many of my typos and misspellings as I type. I’m not sure exactly how I turned it on, how to turn it off, or where the list of errors is maintained, but it’s pretty helpful.

…Except that it corrects my trademark violations. For example, if I type “laundromat,” it goes tut-tut and changes it to “Laundromat.” I violate trademarks with pride and I don’t want to be in a culture war with my word processor. Besides, is Microsoft going to issue a patch so it slaps a trademark on “That’s hot” now that Paris Hilton has trademarked it?

(Pssst, Paris, I own “You’re a waste of an inheritance.” Want to buy it from me?)

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I just sold my 22″ CRT and have replaced it with a 17″ Advueu 723A from NewEgg. (NewEgg has become one of my very favorite online stores. Fast, honest, reliable, cheap…and customer reviews.) I want to add a second LCD. The Advueue is so bright that I’m getting glasses-shaped tan lines on my face.I’m wondering whether it’s worth an extra $80 to get an LCD with a DVI interface. Will that actually set fire to my hair? (I’m looking at the Samsung 710T.)

I don’t do a lot of image work, but I do play 3D games. Does the DVI interface really make that much difference?

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I was talking with Mark Dionne a couple of days ago about my failed attempt to create a hand gesture that apologizes to drivers for unwarranted honks of annoyance. Today Mark passed along a link to “a car that can wag its tail” that the Car Talk guys mentioned. (Photo here, once you click past the obnoxious overlay ad.)

Little does Mark know that I was on the verge of publishing my own breakthrough idea about this. A few days ago, I nearly hit a car that was making a left into the street because its turn signal simply was not visible from my direction. See the example below.

So, why not make a signal device that’s visible from all angles?

I call it an intention vane. It’s sure to catch on, don’t you think?

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Over at BlogCritics.org I’ve posted a review of the classic British mystery, “The Singing Sands,” by Josephine Tey. I liked it a lot when I read it in high school. I did not like it a lot this time through…

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The multiple tab feature of Firefox (and Opera before it) is enough of a reason to drop Microsoft Internet Explorer … which, apparently, people are doing at an increased pace, although IE still has something like 93% of the market.

But I currently have 31 instances of Firefox open, each with 1-4 tabs. So, I’d like an extension that lists all the open tabs in all the open instances. My dream extension would let me jump to any of those tabs. It would also let me close them or close multiple instances with a single click. And it would give fabulous back massages.

Any takers? Or can anyone point me to sufficient Firefox JavaScript examples that I could try to do this on my own?

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