Reason Magazine got an exclusive interview with Mickey Mouse:

How do you think it feels? For almost 70 years, I’ve only been allowed to do what the Disney people say I can do. Sometimes someone comes up with a new idea, and I think to myself, “Great! Here’s a chance to stretch myself!” But of course they won’t let me leave the reservation. If I do, they send out their lawyers to bring me home.

http://www.reason.com/links/links011703.shtml

I was fairly certain of my future a few days ago. I believe in the power of the law. I believe that the law is a slow-moving system, yes, but remarkably resiliant. Our courts are far more stable, true, and just than our legislature. It is ironic, of course, because our courts are the only branch that is not elected. But our courts draw on legislative, constitutional, and judicial tradition and history to apply law to our society. The court must back up each action with citation, and that is its biggest strength: it is the only branch of government that really has a firm grasp of the history of America, that can and must look back at other decisions and findings in order to interpret what is presented today. The court is conservative, meaning that it is resistant to change, but it able to take change into account and act on it.

The problems I have seen are in how the court handles new issues introduced by the internet. The internet is a fundamentally different medium, and often the old analogies do not apply. Meanwhile, our jurists, wise members of society who are generally aged, do not necessarily grasp the implications of some new technologies. We need action to change how intellectual property, fair use, free speech, interstate commerce, and free access are interpreted (not to mention acted upon by the legislature). This is what I hoped to pursue.

All this has changed now that the Supreme Court has ruled on Eldred. In one swift act, our most learned and thoughtful court has once again shown that it can fail, and fail miserably. The first notable instance for me was Bush v. Gore, in which I hoped the court could draw on its wisdom and massive knowledge and bring us to a fair and equitable and just outcome. Instead, we have a decision that any first-year legal student (or even undergrad 😉 ) can read and instantly denounce as bad law. Then we have Eldred, wherein the court simply chose to ignore the central argument of the petitioner and instead rule in favor of Congress and the huge media conglomerates, even when such a ruling is clearly wrong.

I have to ask myself — do I really want to be a lawyer when these sort of things are happening? Can I really change things when our highest court can fail so miserably? If my hero, Lawrence Lessig, cannot prevail, what hope do I have? Meanwhile, I’m taking a class called Law, Technology, and Innovation, in which the professor/lawyer confesses willingly that she doesn’t understand new technology and that such an understanding doesn’t matter for this class. The internet is no different, she says, than innovations of yore, this time is much less exciting than the 1900s and the amazing new invention of the automobile, nevermind that we had trains and horses long before then.

The internet is not a newspaper, it is not a book, it is not a town hall. It is all of those things and so much more. It is a platform for change. Marketing tool? Sure. But also peer to peer file trading, bulletin boards, news conglomeration sites, data mining, Lexis-Nexus, raw data, government reports, millions of stories and thoughts and voices all brought together in a gel that anyone can mold and modify and change and create. This is DIFFERENT, and it is worth fighting for, before the outside forces of SAMENESS destroy it’s potential. And if I can’t count on the court, to whom can I turn?

Who knew the excellent author of Ender’s Game is also a political strategist? While I don’t agree with some of his implications regarding the pending attack on Iraq (especially with this article circulating), I do find his analysis of the North Korea position spot-on.

While the website is a bit…interesting, this article is chilling:

In the run-up to the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, there was active consideration of the danger of “a fully loaded, fuelled airliner crashing into the opening ceremony before a worldwide television audience,� according to former Sydney police superintendent Paul McKinnon. Osama bin Laden was considered the number one threat, he said. IOC officials said plane-crash catastrophes have been incorporated into security planning for every Olympics since 1972.

And the people helping them plan for and prevent these attacks? The FBI of course. Here’s the article.

More in the airport-security genre, the latest “Ask the Pilot” on Salon.com focuses on the effectiveness and convenience of those wonderful new bomb-testing procedures at our airports. His most important point? It’s gonna bankrupt the airlines. Well, I certainly wasn’t thinking about that, but it does make sense…

Penn (of “and Teller” fame) took a very very minor incident and made it a big deal. I think it’s kinda funny, although I don’t think it was the best “incident.” Getting a poor minimum-wage worker fired ove something this silly is mean and uncalled for. But I do agree that something has to be done, and soon.

The ACLU has a nice exhibit up about cartooning in wartime.

Apparently comments were broken (thanks Aron!) so that might explain why no one was, ya know, commenting. Now you can, so please do! It makes me happy. 😛

Secondly, I had to do a server restore just now, so this post and a few sleep-related comments were lost. Sorry about that.

Things I’ve learned from not sleeping:
Days lose all sense of meaning. My doctors appointment it today, which yesterday seemed like tomorrow, but tomorrow was still that day because the clock hadn’t moved yet.
It’s dark at night. You need a lot of light to feel not bad about being awake. I can understand why night shift workers can be so depressed.
When you fall asleep at 7 AM and wake up at 2 PM it completely throws off your experiment. Now I think I probably have to give it up. Next chance I have to try it is the 7 or so days of spring break that I’ll be spending at school without many people around.

I don’t think its bad that I did the experiment. It put me out of phase with reality, but I wasn’t really talking to many people anyway. I didn’t really get much work done, but I never do anyway. I always slept for 8 hrs. or less and woke up feeling refreshed. Much better then going to slee at 12 or 1 or 2 and waking up at noon feeling tired, which was my old routine.

As for the future, who knows.

I’m out of sync with the rest of Calfornia because I’m trying this experiment to finally get my sleep problems under control where I try to go forwards around the clock instead of back. Its a bad time because I leave for Boston in 5 days, but I’m doing it anyway. Today is messed up because I’m supposed to sleep from 10AM to 6PM except I have a doctors appointment about sleep at 5PM. Whoops. Well, maybe she’ll tell me I’m an idiot for doing this. I’ll keep ya posted.

Second, I’ve been craving ketchup. I haven’t been out of the house in two days, and on both those days I’ve eaten chicken fingers and hash browns, and both times we’ve been without ketchup, something that never happens in this house but mysteriously has.

If you know me you know I am a ketchup whore, so this is a terrible turn of events. I’ve had to use *shudder* barbecue sauce. And then I’m randomly looking through another blogger’s photo gallery and I stumble upon this. I think I need to cry. 🙁

Glenn Reynolds points out that Montgomery County will be using the tens of thousands of tips that came in during the sniper ordeal to crack down on illegal firearm posession. And this is apparently a bad thing. Says Reynolds:

This is sure to produce less cooperation in the future. And it explains why so many gun owners don’t trust the authorities: They’ve seen things used as excuses for anti-gun sweeps in the past. […] This is just pathetic. How stupid do you have to be to do this kind of stuff? Not too stupid to have a management position at the FBI or ATF, apparently.

And one must logically ask, wha??? First off, the tipsters are not being targeted, only the people who they snitched on. Secondly, is Reynolds defending owners of illegal firearms, or unregistered ones? Gun advocates should be the first to champion upholding gun laws, especially if they hope to make a credible case to those undecided (or uneducated) about gun control legislation. Third, if this turn of events does lead to less cooperation in the future from tipsters, I’d bet that the only tipsters who won’t be responding are those who see second-ammendment concerns under every stone, the same ones who wouldn’t trust the police in the first place. (In addition to the many other segments of society who don’t trust the police, but that is another issue…) If you don’t like the gun laws thats one thing. But if you believe in American democracy, you should also agree that those who break the law must face the consequences.

So explain to me again how this effort is pathetic and stupid?

Here is a case where the last measily broken shreds of my faith in the power of the United States Government (and specifically the military) to understand and implement technology are utterly and completely shattered. A happy little company called TriWest is very upset and worried about some evil peruptrators of cyber-identity theft. It seems that these powerful and malicious hackers broke into their computers and stole sensitive data, including the personal records, social security numbers, and medical histories of some 500,000 U.S. military personnel.

Do you want to know how they did it? Do ya? I’ll tell you. They broke into the office and stole some computers. Yes, apparently common thieves in search of equipment to unload on the black electronics market are now super cyber-criminals. And how did they get this information? Was it through a sophisticated virus, or at least some crazy cryptographic scheme? No, the information was just sitting there, in the clear, meaning without any form of security or encryption or anything, right on the hard disks. Well isn’t that just special.

Our government, and the companies it employs, care so much about the safety and security of our personal and private information that they don’t even bother to put a fricken password on it. Look, if it had been properly encrypted with reasonable software, there would be no possible way for the theives, or anyone else in this world outside of perhaps the NSA, to access it, and this would not be an issue. TriWest would restore the data from a backup tape and go about their business, and no one would give it a second thought. Not even Al-Qaida could get to that data.

Instead, its a national emergency. Because, ya know, no one could have possibly expected that vandals might potentially, I don’t know, vandalize an office. Not in this great country! Those terrorists!

Here is one of the affected with a take on this.

While I doubt anyone reading this will understand this post, I am putting it here for posterity because within 10 seconds of submitting it to E2 it was downvoted, and within 30 seconds (count ’em) it was killed. Sigh. Not sure what I was trying to prove, but I thought it was good, consolidated advice, and obviously TPTB didn’t. (Because I’ve removed the E2 hard links, some things don’t make as much sense)

It is an old adage of the internet — before contributing to a place, you must lurk, learn, and understand. This is called learning by example, and it is not something you should do here.

As Everything has developed, it has become much more complex, and, possibly, more hostile. There are many things that you, the newbie noder will see so often that you will take it as evidence that it is allowed, but it is not. Here are a few pointers (yes there are more and many, but here are the ones I didn’t find in time):

• Don’t node about noding
  
  This node for an example. I, as a current level one, have no business, in the eyes of the e2 community, noding about what one should be noding about. Therefore, I will receive many downvotes. This is an example of what not to do. Ever. In the FAQ it might say you generally should avoid this. That is not true. You must always avoid this.

• Don’t capitalize titles
  
  This node for example. You learn through school and life that A Title Is Capitalized. Not on Everything it ain’t! Capitalize the first word, capitalize nothing else. Don’t use a period, don’t use all caps. Yes, people do it. Those are people who are allowed to do it. If you do it, you get bitchslapped.

• Never, ever, ever mention one of your nodes in the chatterbox
  
  This node for example. Even if a dozen people have /msged you asking for clarification, even if the chatterbox is filled with discussion of your node, don’t you dare link to it or even mention its title. This is called nodevertising and it is bad. Even though the FAQ and the writeup say that it is alright on occasion, they are wrong. It is not.

• Don’t ever link to non-existant nodeshells
  
  This link for example. It doesn’t take you anywhere, therefore it is not useful. You won’t know this when writing your writeup, so you have to go back and fix these things immediately when you find them out.

• Never complain or even mention downvotes
  
  You might be angry, you might be legitimately interested, you might be curious or want to learn. Doesn’t matter. People vote, they don’t explain why, and you just have to deal with it.

• Never give up
  
  I might sound like I hate e2, or I am frustrated. I’m not. Don’t give up. Any meaningful community has a high barrier to entry, that is what makes it so powerful. Communities are always suspicious, wary, even outright hostile towards newcomers and outsiders. Tough it out, give it time, and eventually they will come to accept you as one of their own.

One final word of advice: People are much more vicious in public than in person. Often times /msging someone with a non-confrontational question or reply means the difference between anger and simple disagreement. The content editors and gods got to where they are for a reason. You may disagree with them, but try not to aggrevate them. They can be your best friends and allies.

If I were ever allowed to post this again (which I never will be), I would probably change the ending.

Where is the candidate who asks: Must we sell our soul to win this “war”? Where is the political party that demands respect for principles that I thought were fundamental. If we must detain Arabs, must we do so inhumanely? If we must frisk every air traveler, can’t we at least build in checks to the system to assure that it is not abused? If we must fight to defend America, can it at least be America that we defend?

So says Lawrence Lessig in a short, heart-felt post about American politics.

I think I want to follow him and travel abroad. In fact, i think every American needs to get out of this country for a year and see a few others, preferably a couple in Asia, South American, and the Middle East.

I’ll be putting up a classy new site design soon, complete with lots of XHTML and CSS for those who care, although I don’t pretend to be making it truly “accessible”

In the meantime, I figured I should link to another funny event. This one I’ve linked to before, but I think it needs to be seen again. This is Jim Fingal (a guy I knew in middle school) and his Harvard pals behaving in…well…Harvard-ly ways. Just check it out.

Read Tim Minear (the co-exec producer)’s recollections on the end of Firefly. Very poignant. Quote:

When an actor, usually a guest actor, finishes his or her last scene in an episode, that is what happens. The AD (assistant director) announces, “That’s an episode wrap for so-and-so.”

Doesn’t happen with regulars.

But it did today.

Dear English Teachers –

I try to be a good little student. I try to adhere to your guidelines. Even though I am no longer in high school, I try to avoid contractions and avoid sentence fragments. I attempt to connect my lists with commas, and keep the comma before the “and” even though newspapers tell me not to do so. However, some of your rules just do not apply in real life. For instance, starting a sentence with “for instance” or “however” or “but” is not bad. Nor is it wrong to attempt prettier prose by occasionally flouting standard rules of diction. Most importantly, you absolutely must stop with this silly business about “five-paragraph essays.”

What is the purpose of the “body paragraph?” Allow me to speculate that this structural convention is an attempt to clearly seperate thoughts and ideas into blocks. You are attempting to teach students how to structure their thoughts for maximum effectiveness, and thus the strict code of introduction, quote, analysis, transition, and the like. Certainly this format is appropriate for two or three page essays about one book. It is appropriate when a student is attempting to convey three major ideas with textual evidence. But there are many places when this format is not appropriate.

You may notice that I end each of my paragraphs with a “hook” or “transition” into the next paragraph. Then I launch into the next paragraph with additional explanation leading to a primary point; upon reaching said, I move on to the next paragraph. This format is good and appropriate because it allows both the writer and reader to clearly deliniate disparate thoughts and ideas. The eye is not tired by one long stream of text. The reader can easily jump to an appropriate section. The addition of section headers makes this navigation even easier. This is the new way of writing.

The internet is the new way of publishing. Hundreds of thousands of people keep online journals called “weblogs.” Millions post in online forums, message boards, and chat rooms. Millions more use instant messages to communicate in real time. All of these formats rely on concise bursts of ideas clearly deliniated. In short, these mediums rely on a style completely opposite to your standard five-paragraph essay.

The consequences are clear and widespread. People either rebel against the rules of grammar entirely by refusing to capitalize and use correct punctuation or they attempt to confine their online posts to your standard format. Only those who have learned differently (either through college education, by reading, or another method) can break this nasty habit. And those people are forced to endure the stupidy of a format not meant for this world.

When in life will people write essays and reports in five-paragraph form? Never in business, and rairly in academia. I have never found a college professor who demands a five-paragraph essay. I have never found a book, article, report, or study written as one. I have, however, seen online postings where paragraphs go on for pages, where there is no clear break between ideas, where obligatory quotes to useless information are thrown in because people think they should be.

This format is extremely detrimental to a new digital society that is not only prevalent but is saturated into our culture!

By all means, keep your format. Teach the five-paragraph essay. But while you’re at it, teach students to write in the same format as they read. For once, teach them to use apostrophe, instead of just reading it. Teach the writing of poetry. For goodness sake, teach them how to write basic prose!

For the good of all humankind, do this for us. Teach students that literary analysis has a purpose, but it is not the only way to write. It is not even the standard way to write — in fact, it is a method of writing that is very narrowly defined and generally not used in the real world. It is good for teaching the structure of argument, but it is only one tool among many.

If you disagree with me, take your typical news analysis and combine it into five neat paragraphs. See if you can do it, and then see if its more readable than before.

Next, try a dissertation.

Sincerely,

Danny Silverman

P.S. – You really do spend a lot of time obsessing about line spacing and margin widths as opposed to actual content. Why is that?

I noticed that the wonderful Brin article was taken from a longer piece that he published on his web site. I ran a diff and found out that this longer version contains two or three sections that deal with the development of Western culture without any talk of Tolkien, which could by why Salon excluded them. The font and style make the longer version harder to read, but the inclusions make the article better, so I’ll point to that one as well. (Don’t bother reading both, they’re mostly the same!)

David Brin writes:

For the life of me, I cannot picture more than one truly optimistic portrayal of future society in all of TV or film sci-fi. With the sole exception of “Star Trek,” most of the SF we’ve viewed in the last 40 years has been relentlessly critical of perceived technological or social trends. Far from utopian, these films have served us well by dramatizing potential failures. To coin a term, they have been self-preventing prophecies, helping us work out our fears and exploring dark possibilities.

His missive on Tolkien is one of the best articles I have ever read.