September 11, 2003
The futile pursuit of happiness
For those who missed it, Sunday's NY Times magazine also carried an interesting article about research into happiness. Catch it before it disappears behind the pay wall.
Ideas as property
Corante's Jonathan Peterson writes about Ideas as Property -- the Big Lie of Big Content. Why suing a 12-year-old girl for sharing her record collection is not the same as protecting your barn from intruders. Thanks to Doc for the pointer.
The BBC's lessons for US media
New dad Larry Lessig had a good essay earlier this week in the Financial Times:
The BBC's lessons for America. Didn't take long for Larry to latch on to the BBC Creative Archive as a lesson for US media companies.
The end of the world as we know it
Ernie points us to a great story spun by James Lileks about 9/11 and the end of the world. (Unfortunately, the brilliant opening that then falls apart into polemic.)
Gen. Clark asked to team up with Dean
Washington Post: Gen. Clark Reportedly Is Asked to Join Dean.
Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean has asked retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark to join his campaign, if the former NATO commander does not jump into the race himself next week, and the two men discussed the vice presidency at a weekend meeting in California, sources familiar with the discussions said.
Let the skeptics scoff. (A little complacency and overconfidence is just what the doctor ordered.) In my book, this is a dream team.
Later: Check out the Libertarians for Dean weblog, including this post, Are Republican-voting libertarians sell-outs?, and this one: A Call for Libertarians to Reform the Democratic Party.
Flypaper said:
There is a lot of information on a possible Clark campaing today at Political Wire.
X1: a desktop search tool
From Rick Lau: Bill Gross has finally launched X1, his fast search tool on the desktop (Web, e-mail, files, and attachments). There is a full-featured, no time limit, free version available. This is a good replacement for the hideous search feature in Outlook.
According to the X1 site: X1 is free PC software that uses an advanced indexing process that lets you find any word in any email or file on your computer, in under a second. ... Search 100,000 emails or files in under a second. ... And it's free.
I'll give it a try. The last software I downloaded toward this end bogged down my system, but then again it indexed all the docs (email and otherwise) on my drive.
Blogging goes corporate
This article in the Washington Post -- "Making Blogs More Than Just What's for Dinner" (c'mon, how many people really do that?) -- looks at how business blogging might succeed in ways e-mail never could, with companies such as Macromedia and Fast Company magazine using blogs to promote their businesses.
Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.
mentor cana said:
Here is what I wrote in my blog on June 23, 2003, in response to another similar article:
"The Corporate Blog Is Catching On" attempts to analyze the role of blogging in the corporate culture.
The article seems to have missed an important point in its analysis. A corporate culture is mostly a closed culture, in principle directly opposite to the open content and open communication culture of blogging.
So, before 'corporate blogging' becomes a meaningful task to positively impact companyís communication with its environment, a culture change/adaptation is necessary as a precondition.
FCC OKs new rules for digital television
San Jose Mercury News: FCC OKs new rules for digital television.
... The agency also adopted rules clarifying consumers' rights to make copies of digital programming, a hotly debated issue that has pitted Hollywood against consumer electronics manufacturers. ...The digital copying agreement would allow consumers to freely make copies of over-the-air broadcasts for personal use. It sets tighter restrictions for making copies of programming on premium services and prevents copying of pay-per-view programming.
No mention of the broadcast flag. I'll post something later today if the EFF or DigitalConsumer.org have an update.
ABC News exposes weakness in homeland security
Howard Kurtz in today's Washington Post: ABC Ships Uranium Overseas for Story. Federal Officials Call Test a Crime.
ABC News says it has exposed a crucial weakness in the nation's port security system by shipping depleted uranium from Jakarta, Indonesia, to Los Angeles. Federal officials say the network seems to have committed a crime."We feel this is a very valid and important test," ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider said yesterday. "This is what journalists do. . . . It was not our intent to defraud the U.S."
But Homeland Security Department spokesman Dennis Murphy said that "it appears they violated the law, and the Justice Department is taking a look at that. Does a news organization have a right to break the law? Can a reporter rob a bank to prove that bank security is weak? My understanding of journalistic ethics is you don't break the law in pursuit of news." ...
Naturally, the feds want to move the spotlight off the glaring gaps in our homeland security and place it elsewhere, changing the discussion to whether a news organization violated the law in pursuit of an important story. This kind of muckraking follows in a tradition that dates back more than a century.
The small-minded Kenneth Starr types at the Justice Dept. may indeed wind up tossing an editor, reporter or two into the slammer, but let's not overlook the service ABC News is performing: trying to goad the government into making us safer as a society. As Republican Senator Chuck Grassley noted, "Time and again, I find federal agencies devoting enormous time and energy to attacking whoever put the spotlight on a government mistake."
The report by ABC's Brian Ross is scheduled to air tonight on "Primetime Thursday." It involves 15 pounds of lead-encased uranium put in a teak trunk along with other furniture in Jakarta, a terrorist hot spot.
Nutch: An open source search engine
John Battelle, former publisher of the Industry Standard and author of an upcoming book about search, has an article on SearchEngineWatch.com: The open-source engine Nutch could rewrite the rules of search development -- especially with an impressive roster of Internet luminaries now lining up behind it. (I can't access Nutch right now ... server getting slammed?)
9/11, two years on
I won't be posting two-year anniversary stories here about 9/11. But the NY Times has an editorial: Two Years On. Excerpt, with an especially poetic ending:
... [W]e have also seen, in the past two years, a regrettable narrowing of our idea of patriotism. It has become, for some people in some ways, a more brittle expression of national sentiment ó a blind statement of faith that does more to divide Americans from one another than to join them together.We need to fear and temper that kind of rigidity. It is not the least bit unpatriotic to question some of the arguments that led to war in Iraq. No national purpose is served by losing our sense of political and historical discrimination in an upwelling of patriotic fervor. ...
For two years, and for many more years to come, we have had a chance to watch how individuals, communities and institutions have absorbed the shock of 9/11. It has illuminated all of us, thrown us all into a peculiar relief. It has taught us important things about who we are, what our government is, and who our elected leaders are and what they make of us. Whether it is the debate over the war in Iraq or over the proper memorial for Lower Manhattan, the memory of 9/11 should provide us with a standard of judgment, of moral assessment, based on our own behavior and on that of others, that is not easily faulted or compromised. Those buildings did not fall or their occupants die to become symbols in an incoherent argument. That outpouring of strength and consideration was never meant to serve as the pretext for false conclusions. The day will slip away from us as time passes, but not the clarity of the actions we took together in response. The purest patriotism we have in us to express was expressed in the common generosity of that moment.
Morrie said:
Thinking of you, your country and its people. Take care.
Dear campaign blog
NY Times: Of the 135 candidates on the ballot running to replace Gov. Gray Davis, scores have Web sites, and at least 14 have started blogs.
Digital Freedom Update
Bill Hobbs has this Digital Freedom Update about the Super-DMCA making its way through the Tennessee legislature.
