AgPerson

Looks like Matt Sachs finally got a blog. If he actually continues to post, I’ll have to add him to my friends list. His latest words of wisdom on family and relationships: …oh, and it was nice seeing my family, of course. They got a new couch.

General Wesley Clark to Salon about the Iraq war:

You’ve referred to the campaign against Iraq as “elective surgery”; I imagine that means that you support disarming Saddam in principle, just not with the same urgency the Bush administration feels.

My view on it was and has been that at some point you’re going to need to take actions to deal with the problem of Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. But those actions didn’t have to necessarily be military and they didn’t have to be now. It’s the administration that chose to do this set of actions at this time. And the reason they’ve had problems persuading people of the necessity for doing it has been because they couldn’t address the urgency.

My feeling exactly.

Many libertarians seem to dislike the Libertarian Party. Wouldn’t the libertarian thing to do be to set up a competing libertarian party and may the best party win?

Watched episode 2. Uninspiring, too much stuff packed in too quickly, not enough emotion. Too boring/annoying to recap here, even though that was my intention. But I’ll keep watching. For now.

This blog format is too structured, the middle bit will be changing. And I’m going to start categorizing posts, and going back through old ones and categorizing. Just have to decide if I’m sticking with b2 or moving to MovableType when I put it on the new COG box.

What does one do at 3 in the morning on a Saturday? Why, watch Alias, of course. Obvious.

My dad was watching this show, and I’ve been meaning to. It seemed somewhat fun, semi-deep, stylistic, at least a bit, and seems to hinge a lot around Jennifer Garner as the super CIA agent who can do just about anything. Cause she’s super. Almost…gifted. Embued with powers. Chosen.

I’m saying this because I couldn’t figure it out. I watched the pilot, and generally I’m pretty forgiving of pilots, and this one had good and bad. It was very professional, very…cut. It wasn’t like the Buffy pilot.

Wait a minute…powers…chosen…super-girl…Buffy! Yes, I must be incredibly dense, because I didn’t realize why I liked the show until Television Without Pity enlightened me. I’m watching Buffy 2.0. Only…slicker. Network-worthy. Without the humor, the endearing amateruness of the first couple seasons.

I found the layout of the pilot to be very confusing, I felt very little emotion for the dead fiance, and the fight scenes were yawn-inspiring, but something captivated me about the show. It wasn’t the jarring musical switches (something “thematic,” I guess, rock for normal girl, techno for superspy). Yet I do see real potential. Of course, I’m two seasons behind, but I have all the episodes on my computer so I can catch up. If I get bored along the way, I can always stop. But Jennifer Garner in her varied “disguises” is a good pull… They just keep finding weird things to put her in. And she seems to be able to go anywhere, do any mission, know every language and custom. And yet, no super powers. No calling…well, maybe one will be explained.

The two-hour pilot felt very rushed, there was probably a better way to tell the story. And the glitz is annoying. But, again, I see potential. Not really sure why, but I’ll keep watching. We’ll see.

I’m not exactly sure what they’re supposed to be hitting, and how hard, but the networks sure aren’t doing it. In contrast, there is this:

The first time, I was sitting there in my house being bombed, and thinking “OK, bring it on! We will be freed.” We lived about four miles from the shelter that housed women and children — of course then as now, Saddam has kept his weapons in schools and other civilians and institutions. Back then, when I was hiding under the stairwell with my family. I thought OK, anything to get rid of him.

But now … (voice breaks, again) After the bombings, they callously left him there, purposely, because it suited their ends. Now, the same people who made the decisions back then, are arguing for the morality of the decision, as if he wasn’t evil 12 years ago.

It’s really hard for me, as an Iraqi and as an American. For all intents and purposes, America is my country. As an American, if the attempt is to avenge Sept. 11 and Bin Laden, I think this is 180 degrees from what needs to be done. I think it’s a policy of arrogance, and all Americans, we are going to be in danger in ways we don’t even realize it. This just a free campaign of recruitment for bin Laden.

The interviews are at Salon. Stop complaining and get the bloody day pass. Better, subscribe.

XFree86 is a client-server windowing/graphics display system. Its confusing as hell, but basically the “client” spits out the windows, and your “server” puts them on screen. Therefore, I can run a program in, say, France (or Freedom, if you wish), and it can display on my laptop in Portland, Maine. Its not incredibly efficient, mind you — it has to actually send all of the “widgets,” i.e. arrows, buttons, etc. over the net, but it is useful because you can run things remotely.

But most people don’t.

I was just saying to, I think, Jeremy, that X really needs some work — a new approach that is more efficient. If its running on the local computer, drop the client-server model. If its not, offload most of the work to the server and have the client just spit out commands like “draw a button here” instead of “draw this button defined by this graphic here.”

Apparently, this debate is happening in the X development community itself! Not along my lines in terms of a better client-server model, but more of a, “get direct rendering to work well, then worry about remote display” model. Developers are choosing sides, and heavyweight player Alan Cox has recently stated that, “X has to evolve, X has to do cool stuff, X has to let people break stuff, X has to delegate trust to driver maintainers far more. To me it doesn’t matter if Keith and friends spin off an ‘Xperimental’ or XFree itself changes, but that change is vital to the future of X11.”

Yesterday Jeremy, Peter, and I went to the alumni ice cream thing put on by FAB. Realizing quickly that we were out of our element, we left and took a stroll in Sacher woods. The area Brandeis owns goes on for quite a bit, walking-wise, and of course it was dark and foggy, so it was a very, very cool walk. Eventually we got back to where we had started, with only a few almost-trips along the way on leftover frost and snow. I would have loved to have had a flashlight.

Tonight, I walked in place, courtesy of the new exercise equipment in Rosenthal North. Far less satisfying. First off, my dumb old iPod died when I hit the play button, despite saying it had a full battery. Second, a girl was in there watching that idiotic Sandra Bullock watch-me-pretend-to-be-clumsy movie, so after 36 minutes (and 1.6 miles) of trying to read my book and block out the noise, it became unbearable and I left. I was hoping for at least some commercial breaks, but no deal, it was a video, i.e. someone actually bought the darn thing. Sigh.

IMDB reveals that the movie was Miss Congeniality. Hardly.

All I can do is sit here and shout obscenities and repeat over and over to myself, “it is not over.” Because the end of the episode was…death, vaporization, a longing shot of a diamond wedding ring in the wreakage, and then a “To Be Continued…” And then a “thanks” from SciFi for four great years. I’m not even going to warn about what I’m about to say next. Thanks? For a novel published without the final chapter? For a play missing the final act? Thanks? Yeah, fuck you SciFi.

I’ve tuned in to Fox and CNN and ABC, and the war seems to fake and contrived…like a garish reality show complete with spinning graphics and brash patriotic tones. War, peace, its all just a made-for-TV pseudo-event occuring in a world without consequences. Then I watched 24, and saw a nuclear bomb explode. Underplayed, grainy, a mushroom cloud from far away. Quiet, final, no closeups of flesh exploding and trees collapsing. Dramatic, sure. Powerful, even. And it seemed so much more real.

What does this say about me? But more importantly, what does this say about us?

I just finished reading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and I really enjoyed it. I basically agree with the NY Times review that several of the characters were somewhat underdeveloped, and the novel was a bit slim, but the society it envisions is just amazing to think about.

What we’re looking at is technological change that has brought about the end of scarcity and death, the two things that basically drive our capitalist society. Anything can be made almost instantly at very little cost, and everyone lives forever. We move to a reputation-based economy, where everyone’s wealth is based on their Whuffie score, a measure of the conscious and subconscious feelings of everyone in the world. Since everyone is hardwired into a wearable, no, an implantable, a computer in their brain, they are all interconnected in a massive peer-to-peer network. There are goods and bad to this, as the author Cory Doctorow talks about in this absolutely fascinating O’Reilly interview.

He talks about the book and the future, but mostly about how the ideas of the book are reflections of dot-com ideals and the changing markets of today. One choice quote:

[T]he recording industry has a story of, “We do two really important roles. One is to make music available and the other is to compensate artists.” But one of the things we know is that 80 percent of all of the music ever released isn’t for sale anywhere in the world. And another thing we know is that 97 percent of the artists signed to a recording contract earn less than $600 per year off of it. So Napster doesn’t have a better track record at compensating artists, but it sure as shit had a better track record of making music available.

It’s a good read, and goes to my earlier comments about copyright. Doctorow is optimistic, and I am too.

In fact, the whole issue is pretty good. Check it out. (For the registration just put in “justice@brandeis.edu” under returning visitors)

I don’t know what I started with, but somehow in the great dot-com heydey of mid-2000, my stock portfolio was up to $36,000. Wow…the number boggles the mind when compared to where it is now (I hadn’t even looked at it for the last several months): $6,000. That’s 1/6 the 2000 value, for those of you who like numbers.

So much for this whole “college” thing. And Brandeis is raising their tuition again. For shame.

President Bush’s address was detestable because it was filled with lies. I’m not just using rhetoric — he was lying. Specifically, he said that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction. With forged documents, overinflated rhetoric, and, lets face it, other and more blatant lies, misrepresentations, and mistakes, the Bush administration has done nothing to support that assertion. Does Saddam have weapons of “mass destruction,” i.e. weapons that can be dispersed over large distances and cause huge, devestating, and lasting effects? Not that I know of.

Free nations have a duty to defend our people by uniting against the violent, and tonight, as we have done before, America and our allies accept that responsibility.

Apparently, despite what the popular movement says, President Bush is acting “in my name.” Can I sue him for libel?

Interviewed about file trading on campus, Rich said that, “one benchmark is whether you can explain why what you are doing is morally right without legalistic obfuscation. I’m afraid Danny is starting to fail that test.”

Here is an interesting Slashdot post with a pretty insightful analysis:

no blood, no foul – by fermion (Score: 4, Insightful)
U.S. Downloaders Do So To Sample Music, And Believe Their Activities Are Benign

I think that is they key statement. In the U.S., most of the time the things we think are wrong are the things that harm the innocent. We have no problem breaking all sorts of laws when we drive, because we do not think it is likely we will do harm to innocent victims. Industry and government knows this which is why they try to show, for example, the damage that drunk driving causes, or link illegal drugs to terrorism. Of course, some of these links are more valid than others, and such ads do backfire when the assertions are bogus.

Which is of course what is going on with the music industry. The industry wants us to believe we are stealing from artist, even though the artists I talk to say most of the money is made off t-shirts and sometimes concerts. They want us to believe we are harming the local retailer, even though the local retailer is harmed more by Wal-Mart and online sales than by copying. They have thus far resisted the urge to tell us that the high level executes are going to forced to sell their Escalades and give up their trophy spouses if we continue to trade music. They might have a better chance by citing the number of people the industry employs, but in a time when unemployment continues to rise with no end in sight, and no leadership to control it, I do not see that even that will get much sympathy.

I legally “obfuscate” because I have been worried about the legal arguments, not the moral ones. I am comfortable running a service that allows people to download “illegal” music if they so choose. I know that what I am doing is not wrong.

Here is what I told the Justice: “Boogle is just a means to an end, everyone has to decide what they consider to be moral and just behavior. I don’t advocate that people steal files, but there is a very broad and fuzzy line between what is fair use, what is good and productive use, and what is potentially harmful or illegal use.”

The story will be published on Tuesday, and if its any good, I’ll link to it.

Farscape’s cancellation comes at a great terrible time in television history. In the UK 50% or more of content on TV is “reality” based, in the US we’re slightly behind but catching up fast. And it makes sense, of course — so-called reality shows are incredibly cheap and quick to produce, bring in potentially huge ratings, and are just as easy to change, kill-off, or re-envision with another twist to keep viewers interested should they start to decline.

This is not sustainable.

I predict right now that within 18 months the television industry will report major losses, reality will be gone, and they’ll be scrambling to fill the gap in sensible, intelligent, well-written programming. Yes, more expensive to produce, yes hard to franchise, yes less certain, but far, far better for all of us.

Also, the Farscape model will catch on. They make it cheap in Australia, SciFi paid for 50% and the rest was paid by Henson and a consortium of others who showed it in Germany, England, and a few other places. TV will become more international, I predict, and we’ll see how that works out.

Of all people, Steve Forbes has weighed in on the side of Eldred:

The Supreme Court recently ruled that congress’ extending copyright protection for yet another 20 years does not violate the Constitution. The extension was pushed primarily by Disney, which didn’t want any of its old Mickey Mouse cartoons entering the public domain. Now artistic works are protected for the lifetime of the creator plus 70 years; for companies, 95 years. Maybe Congress should just be done with it and declare that a copyright is forever. Disney, of course, hasn’t hesitated to help itself to characters or works in the public domain, such as Pinocchio, Cinderella and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.

The Disney situation is unusual. Only about 2% of copyrighted work between 1923 and 1942 continues to be exploited commercially. Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig has proposed a sensible compromise. Borrowing a page from patent law, wherein holders have to pay a fee every few years to keep their patents current, Lessig would apply that principle to copyrights: After a certain number of years, copyright holders would have to pay a nominal amount of money to maintain protection. If the holder didn’t pay the charge for, say, three years, the work would go into the public domain.

Lessig, who has represented clients who tried to overturn the extension, points out that his compromise would still “make available an extraordinary amount of material. If Congress is listening to the frustration that the court’s decision has created, this would be a simple and effective way for the First Branch to respond.” He’s absolutely right.

Honey, guess what I did at work today? I wore a bomb. A nuclear bomb in a field of flowers. I could get lucky…tomorrow, I could have a bigger bomb. I could kill more people. Maybe they’ll be innocent people. Children, maybe.

One more episode, and it is all over. The most thoughtful series on TV. Save Farscape, please.

I haven’t yet gotten a single deal in my Amazon.com Gold Box that I’ve wanted to purchase. Today my number-one item was the “Misto Gourmet Stainless Steel Olive Oil Sprayer” for $17.59.

Huh?