September 17, 2002
Axis of Everything
Pick any three countries and see what they’re the axis of. Great site.
Speaker info
Atom Feed
Odlyzko on Broadband Adoption
Andrew Odlyzko sent the following to the attendees of a small conference I was at recently:
U.S. Broadband Lines U.S. Cell Phones Dec 1999 2.8 M Dec 1989 3.5 M Dec 2000 7.1 Dec 1990 5.3 Dec 2001 12.8 Dec 1991 7.6 Dec 2002 20.0 (est.) Dec 1992 11.0   Dec 1993 16.0 Dec 1994 24.1 Broadband data for 1999-2001 from FCC statistics, covering both business and residential connections, with broadband defined as anything with more than 200 Kbps in at least one direction, cell phone data from CTIA Thus broadband growth in three years equals cell phone growth over 5 years. Hence even though cell phones beat broadband connections by almost exactly a 10:1 margin as of Dec. 2001, they spread more slowly.
These figures come from an article called “The Many Paradoxes of Broadband.”
September 16, 2002
Deciding the Net’s Future
Dan Gillmor has followed up last week’s column about ten decisions that made the Internet the good thing that it is with a column on the three decisions that are still to be made:
Freedom to create innovate
Customer choice and competition policy
Security and liberty
Dan’s assessment of the decisions we’re in the process of making in each of these areas is pretty glum. And, unfortunately, hard to argue with.
September 15, 2002
Blind to Color Blind
When I was designing my blog, I made the aesthetic decision to remove the underlines from the links because underlines are such horrid little things. Instead, I made my links red, which I thought made them distinctive without making them like they were words I particularly wanted to emphasize.
Ralph Brandi wrote to me yesterday. Ralph is color blind. My links don’t look like links to him. Nor to anyone else with reg-green color blindness. So, the underlines are back in. For example, when I tell you that Ralph’s blog is here, you’ll see “here” underlined.
This being the day before Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, I hope Ralph and his color-blind sisters and brothers will forgive me.
A Global Conspiracy
Chip forwards a link to what may be an important article in the Sunday Herald that claims that the “regime change” in Iraq is part of a larger plan put together by Bush’s cronies before he took office:
Bush planned Iraq ‘regime change’ before becoming President
By Neil Mackay
A SECRET blueprint for US global domination reveals that President Bush and his cabinet were planning a premeditated attack on Iraq to secure ‘regime change’ even before he took power in January 2001.
The blueprint, uncovered by the Sunday Herald, for the creation of a ‘global Pax Americana’ was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice- president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld’s deputy), George W Bush’s younger brother Jeb and Lewis Libby (Cheney’s chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America’s Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, was written in September 2000 by the neo-conservative think-tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
more…
It is literally a plan for US global domination. Or, more exactly, a plan to make our global domination more thorough, direct and undeniable.
Peter Kaminski points us to the actual report, Rebuilding America’s Defenses.
September 14, 2002
Portrait of Bloggers Not Giving Me the Finger
AKMA sends along the following lovely snap of Margaret, Pippa and Si, and fellow bloggers Halley Comment Suitt and Steve OnePotMeal Himmer on a lovely Sunday afternoon in a park in Boston, thinking of me.
Margaret, Pippa, Halley, Steve, and Si.
AKMA is behind the camera, also not giving me the finger.
Why being a liberal really isn’t fun
John D. Erickson took issue with my entry on why being a liberal isn’t fun, writing in an email:
Someone in “Slate” posed the same question a week or two ago. I would say it should be fairly obvious why it’s no fun being a liberal in a nation in which a fascistic, if not a fascist, government is running the show. ..[L]iberals were the most fun during the Kennedy-Johnson eras.
Say, you don’t suppose this has anything to do with being somewhere around 20 years old, do you?
Yeah, I suppose, maybe, mumble mumble. I.e., nail on the head, John.
September 13, 2002
Cynics at the UN
The scene: a conference room in the White House
The players: All the president’s men and women
The topic: Getting to Yes when it comes to war
“Look,” says the senior advisor, “They won’t let us take this bastard out unless we have [making air quotes with fingers] an ‘international coalition’ behind us to cover our ass? Fine. Let’s go to the UN.”
The air pressure in the room drops as people gasp. There are outraged murmurs of “The UN??,” and “No freaking way we’re going to there!” and “My heavens, why on earth would we cede any authority to that illegitimate attempt to destroy our national sovereignty?”
“No, you’re missing the point. We go to the UN and make our case. But here’s the beauty part. Since we don’t have evidence connecting Iraq to Al Qaeda…”
“Hell,” interrupts someone, “We’d have to bomb Saudi Arabia if that were the point!”
“… And since we don’t have evidence of plants building weapons of mass destruction, we’ll say this is all about his failure to abide by UN resolutions. And we’ll get the UN to issue our ultimatum for us, one that Saddam can’t and won’t honor…”
“Besides,” adds a voice, “‘honoring’ is such a subjective term.” [Snickers]
“… And then we go in with full UN backing.”
A chorus of voices responds:
“Brilliant!”
“We get Saddam and we pervert the UN at the same time!”
“And all without even paying the money we owe to the UN!”
“And we can get Russia to side with us in the Security Council by agreeing to look the other way as they bomb the crap out of Cechnya!”
“Pooty-poot will eat it right up! Sweet!”
“Gentlemen and lady, a toast! To the United Nations, at last showing its value by making the world safe for war.”
Am I Spam? Spam I am
I just heard from a subscriber to my newsletter (which you could be for free if you clicked here) that SpamAssassin and its Windows version, Spamnix, decided that my latest issue was spam and didn’t deliver it. So, now I may have to send a follow-on notice to all my subscribers asking them if they received the issue, the type of needless annoyance we use spam filters to prevent.
By the way, my 70K ASCII newsletter apparently got flagged because I put article titles in caps, because a robot found it pornographic (probably because of my Freudian analysis of Bush), and because it thinks I use “\#” as a filename (I don’t).
You know what? False positives are unacceptable in a spam filter, especially one that doesn’t even tell you what it’s filtering out.
If you subscribe to my newsletter and didn’t get a copy yesterday, please let me know. I bitterly thank you.
New issue of JOHO
I’ve published a new issue of my newsletter. Here are the contents:
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Palladium and the Real World: Microsoft’s bid to make our computers secure will also make them vulnerable to thick-fingered copyright holders. The 3 Rules of Digital Rights Management: There’s nothing wrong with managing copyrighted materials, if you do it right. Real World End User Licenses: Defaulting to Stupidity: The importance of leeway. The Pop-under that Ended Terrorism: Find Osama! Why Vacations Suck: Ten reasons. The Anals of Marketing: Stamps, End User Abuse License, and protecting Godzilla Walking the Walk: Maybe conversation actually is important. Cool Tool: LeXpert and StartUpManager What I’m playing: Clive Barker’s Undying Internetcetera: Spamming the dead Scandal Central: A picture is worth 10-20 years. 4 Conferences, No Wedding: I’m plugging them, even if I’m not going to them. Links: You found ’em. Email, Random Slights and Unsightly Growths: Your excellent emissions. Bogus contest: Open Source Conspiracy Theories, Or Oedipal Bush |
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