Henry Norr has been suspended from the San Francisco Chronicle because the Chronicle doesn't like his views on the war. Ummm, can we say "lawsuit"? Papers have a legitimate need to make sure their journalists don't have conflicts of interest, and so there could exist circumstances where a journalist's private political activities might be taken into account at a newspaper. But, Norr writes about spam! You can look at the Henry Norr Article Archives and see he hasn't written on a political topic all year. I learned of the details of his situation from Dave Winer who gives numerous links. The best is Norr's own account. (scroll down to read it.)
Here's my letter to letters@sfchronicle.com
To the Editor:Shame on the Chronicle for its vengeful suspension of Chronicle technology reporter Henry Norr. I've read your conflict of interest policy and he doesn't have a conflict of interest. He writes about spam for chrissake. Your reporters have a right to participate in politics. When you suspend them after such activity and try to make it seem as if a time card is the issue, it has a chilling effect on the ability of the rest of your staff to freely exercise their rights. You will be lucky if he doesn't sue you and end up owning the Chronicle. The right thing to do at this stage is clear: Announce that you have completed your "investigation" of his time card and found that he took a valid sick day. Reinstate him immediately and pay him for the days missed. Also make it clear to other employees that they are free to participate in political activities, consistent with the Chronicle's stated conflict of interest policy.
If you don't fight for the other guy's freedom, there will be no one left to fight for you when they take away yours.
The Jon Stewart Show on Comedy Central is too funny. Watch this video where Jon discusses the contract the Bush administration has given Cheney's former company Halliburton. Thanks to On Lisa Rein's Radar.
Follow-up to my earlier entry on the US using napalm in Iraq (and denying it) and now apparently covering it up?
If you search Google News for "napalm" you'll find this entry on the second page:
CIA: It really was Saddam on TV
San Jose Mercury News, CA - Mar 20, 2003
... In addition, about 20 GPS-guided 2000-pound bombs, cluster bombs and napalm were to be dropped on an observation post that occupies key terrain, said Col. ...
but if you go to that link, no such text appears in that article. And if you search San Jose Mercury News' website for "napalm" nothing is found. There's no Google cache of the page either.
So did Google make this up? I doubt it. Or is the San Jose Mercury News changing its stories? Are they under pressure to change their stories?
In the article that remains, we hear: "There’s really nothing up here but a bunch of rubble," said Cpl. Graham Ahlstrom, 22, from New York.
Could Cpl. Ahlstrom be referring to Safwan Hill, when he says "up here"? It seems likely.
This New York Times article reports that the World Trade Organization has ruled that the Bush Administration's 30% hike in steel tariffs last year was illegal. The shocking part of this article is that this is the seventh time now that the U.S. has lost such challenges. Can't someone in Washington take a hint? Time to play fair! No giving breaks to your big campaign donors! It just gets us in bigger trouble... Now the U.S. faces trade sanctions. I suppose that's not all that this administration deserves. Those articles of impeachment I wrote about are looking better and better.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday heard oral arguments in Lawrence v. Texas, a case in which a neighbor falsely reported a disturbance next door in order to have police find his neighbor, Mr. Lawrence, engaged in sex with another man. Texas is one of several states that outlaws sodomy only for same-sex couples, but allows it for heterosexual couples. SCOTUSBlog says the Texas D.A. "gave what may have been the worst oral argument in a truly important case in the past decade." The NYTimes transcript above seems to confirm that, as Mr. Rosenthal has to allow the justices to provide his examples for him and he finds himself utterly unable to respond to the line of argument presented at the end of the above transcript, and so he merely changes the subject. Score: Privacy Rights 1, Texas Bigots 0. We'll see how the Justices scored this one in a few months.
Lawrence Lessig discusses a tragic proposal being considered by the Mexican Congress. Mexico would extend copyright from the life of the author plus 70 years, to the life of the author plus 100 years. Also, "at the end of the copyright term, the government has the right to charge royalties for works in the “public domain.”" It's hard to think about much of anything except the war right now, but this is a foolish proposal that will devastate creativity and progress in Mexico for generations. Perhaps it will take someone implementing such horrific steps backwards for people to wake up to the idea that an author's exclusive rights to their works must be balanced by the public's interest in widely available access. If we see Mexico self-destruct, perhaps we'll think twice before doing the same. Unfortunately, Lessig is right that the "harmonization" argument will push others to follow suit. Then, of course, we all end up flushing progress down the drain. Did anyone need another reason to be depressed?
The former U.S. Attorney General, Ramsey Clark, has drafted these articles of impeachment of President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard B. Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, and Attorney General John David Ashcroft. Also, there was a rumor going around that Representative John Conyers wanted to know what the support was for impeachment, which appears to be false. See voice4change.org.
It is a terrible thing to see. It makes me want to cry, scream, and then cry again. But, I think it is an important thing to see. It is easy to say, "We are so proud of our troops who are willing to sacrifice their lives." And we are. We should be. But it is a horrific thing to see the fear in their eyes when they actually face the prospect of that sacrifice. The look in the woman's eyes is the hardest to bear. Put a face to this noble idea of sacrifice. Individualize it. Personalize it. It then becomes a harder thing to ask of them. You want to be completely sure beyond a shadow of a doubt that asking this of them was for a vital cause and that this cause could only be achieved in this way. When you are positive asking this of them was your very last resort, only then could it begin to make sense, and maybe not even then. You can see the footage here, here, or here. Links from The Agonist.
This piece is as well-done as it is frightening. Link from Alan Bostick.
According to this article, the United States dropped napalm on Safwan Hill in Iraq. Conveniently, the US was not a signatory to the 1980 weapons convention which prohibits such actions. When Bush said he wanted to destroy weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, I'm not sure anyone realized he meant our weapons of mass destruction and that he meant he wanted to destroy them by using them. Live and learn. Thanks to Nathan Newman for the link.
Update 3/22: CNN has an article that confirms the use of napalm by the U.S. Read to the bottom to find these paragraphs:
There is a lookout there, a hill referred to as Safwan Hill, on the Iraqi side of the border. It was filled with Iraqi intelligence gathering. From that vantage point, they could look out over all of northern Kuwait.
It is now estimated the hill was hit so badly by missiles, artillery and by the Air Force, that they shaved a couple of feet off it. And anything that was up there that was left after all the explosions was then hit with napalm. And that pretty much put an end to any Iraqi operations up on that hill.
Update 3/23: The Pentagon now denies that the U.S. used napalm in Iraq on Safwan hill, although the Age reporter who filed the report got the information from two marines on the scene and confirmed it with the marines again on Friday. Somehow the Pentagon knows more about what the military is doing than the marines who are there. Doubtful.
Why is this category, which used to contain 50 sites, now missing from Google? Spooky.
Update: It looks like the category has been moved here, but if you didn't know to look for it, you'd never know it was there.
For now anyway, I'm calling this blog "Share Alike". What's that supposed to mean? Well, it comes from the common bit of advice, "Share and share alike". When people say this, they mean two things. The first part of that phrase is an imperative. It, like your kindergarten teacher, is saying: Share. The second part too is an imperative. It suggests that you "share alike" or "share as you have been shared with" or maybe even "share in the manner in which you have been shared with".
These are both good advice.
The first piece of advice, "Share" is good advice because sharing makes the world a nicer place to live. It's not a notion that economists can understand, as they tend to falsely assume that everything that humans do is driven by a profit motive. I think they just had bad kindergarten teachers.
The second piece of advice, "Share alike" is also good advice, and maybe even more important. Once someone shares with you, you ought to take it to be your duty to share with others in the same way that you have been shared with. This amplifies the good done by sharing and makes the world even nicer. Let me give you a simple example:
Yesterday I went to fix my wife's computer at the University where she studies. (Release,Renew,I'm done.--Another story.) As I was sitting in my car in the short-term metered parking area waiting for a spot to become available, a guy who was leaving took the little parking meter slip out of his car, walked over to my car, and said, "Here. It's good for all day." He shared. It made my world much nicer.
As I was leaving, I saw a woman in her truck waiting for my spot. I took the parking meter slip out of my car, walked over to her truck, and said, "Here. It's good for all day." I shared alike. She smiled a really big smile. I am confident it made her world much nicer. (Now, it may even be against the University's parking policies to do that, but don't get me started on the parking nazis.)
Now, if I were merely driven by a profit motive, I could have told her, "Hey! I've got this parking pass good for all day that I'll sell to you for a dollar. It would normally cost you $6!" I am a walking counter-example to classical economic assumptions. There are lots more just like me.
This "Share Alike" notion has also caught on within certain licensing practices. Free Software licenses, like the GNU General Public License, have a "share alike" provision. They encourage you to share the software with others, but require you to share the software on the same terms that you received it. You cannot place additional restrictions on the use of the software. This keeps the software maximally shareable, and makes the world a much nicer place.
The Creative Commons has a license that they actually call "Share Alike" which this very blog is licensed under. (See sidebar.) It means that you can re-use what you find here, under certain specified conditions, so long as you also allow others to use it under those same conditions. This keeps my random musings here shareable, and I hope, makes the world a nicer place.
A link in the prior entry reminded me of the great quotations Senator Robert Byrd chose when arguing that the Congress was wrong to give up the authority to declare war and to hand over their constitutional duty to the executive branch.
Representative Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to William H. Herndon, stated: "Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose - - and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you have given him so much as you propose. If, to-day, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, 'I see no probability of the British invading us' but he will say to you 'be silent; I see it, if you don't.'
"The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood."
and then later Byrd said...
James Madison wrote in 1793, "In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. Beside the objection to such a mixture to heterogeneous powers, the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man...."
I think someone should found a new third party, The Constitutional Party, that actually believes we should do what our own constitution says we should do. It's stunning that such a suggestion would need to be made.
To anyone who reads this message:
Please send help! The U.S. has been overrun by a treacherous dictator. This un-elected "leader" is now waging an undeclared war against another country. The formerly democratic United States of America has been toppled! This tyrant rules with an iron fist. He has imprisoned United States citizens indefinitely without charging them with a crime. He holds prisoners for years at foreign military bases and refuses to give them access to legal counsel, charge them with crimes, or afford them due process of law. He spies on both U.S. citizens and foreign diplomats without seeking constitutionally required warrants. He seeks "total information awareness" about everything his citizens do. Our freedom of travel has been revoked. He can track what we read. His army photographs and video tapes those who oppose him. He has the largest number of weapons of mass destruction in the world, the most powerful military in the world, and now is increasing the money spent on the military when just two years ago more was spent by the U.S. on its military alone than was spent on the militaries of the rest of the world combined. He runs the only country to have used atomic bombs in war. He recently tested the largest conventional weapon ever detonated. He is clearly a threat to the safety of all people in the world and has made this clearly known by beginning to kill people in a foreign land. He is no stranger to killing. He has sanctioned the executions of more prisoners than anyone in the history of the United States. He ignores the constitution this country was founded on, which requires him to uphold our treaties made, by breaking the treaty we signed when we joined the United Nations. He ignores the diplomatic efforts of our allies and chooses his own path bent on destruction and death. This, even after his ambassador assured world leaders that he would work with them rather than automatically pursue his own course of war. Obviously, such a situation makes most in government afraid to disagree with the dictator. We need whatever support you who read this can offer to restore democracy to the United States. Please help!
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article describing the efforts of educators to resolve whether provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) conflict with the recently passed Technology Education and Copyright Harmonization Act (TEACH).
TEACH became law in November 2002 and was intended to "allow college instructors to use nondramatic works, such as news articles and novels, and portions of dramatic works, such as movies, in online courses without paying fees and without seeking the copyright holder's permission". The DMCA has a provision which prohibits circumvention of technologies that block access to copyrighted material.
Educators are concerned that in order to exercise their rights under TEACH (and indeed their fair-use rights) that it may be necessary to circumvent such blocking technologies and thus to run afoul of the DMCA. They would like a clear ruling from the Copyright Office indicating that either the DMCA's provision does not apply to such cases or to expressly create an exception to the DMCA for such cases.
Educators would sometimes need to bypass copying protections to use materials from CDs and DVDs for distance education, as permitted by the Teach Act. "The problem arises when digital materials are not also released in non-digital formats that the colleges can fall back on, such as print." Read the whole article for more.
Well, what we all knew was coming now has a definitive time-table. Here's the kicker: America is no longer a Republic. I don't know of a time in history when this country has had stronger opposition to something their president was doing and were still powerless to do anything about it. One might argue: "But your elected representatives overwhelmingly supported the president's bid for war just months ago! They authorized this, hence the American people authorized this." Actually, that just shows the root of the problem. Our elected representatives no longer represent us. I have almost never in my voting life had a representative do what I thought was right. They don't do what their constituents want. They do what their party wants. And their parties are controlled by the money they receive from corporate donors. So, in a surprising way, what this war shows me is that the most important issue facing this country today is, of all things, campaign finance reform. Until the people take back the congress from the corporations we will have no check on the president and hence no balance of power.
I just read Cory Doctorow's book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom for free online. I have not read a Sci-Fi novel in years, but I burned through this one in two sittings. Now that I'm done I suppose the main reason I would recommend the book is because the world it is premised on is so interesting and so seemingly possible. You'll have the world mostly figured out in a couple chapters, but for me, the story-line was intriguing enough too that I wanted to see how it ended up. The NYTimes review of it has some valid criticisms, but I'd suggest reading the book before reading the review. I like how Doctorow introduces us to his world piece by piece without much explanation, and reading a review like that one spoils all the surprises.
Check out these images of the leaflets the U.S. is dropping on Iraq right now. They are on a .mil site, so I believe they are authentic.
The ones that catch my eye are the numerous ones urging Iraqis not to blow up oil wells. Generally, I've been skeptical of the argument that this is a war solely about oil. So much attention has been paid to this aspect of the situtation that if GW tried to commandeer Iraqi oil for his own purposes there would be a gigantic stink. (At least I'd hope so, but who knows, nobody seems to care when he wants to drill in national parks and people keep on driving their SUVs, so what do I know?) But, now that I look at these leaflets, it becomes a little harder to say. If all GW cares about is making sure Saddam doesn't provide WMD to terrorists, then there's no reason to care whether he blows up the oil wells or not. If you care that much about the preservation of the oil wells, then your motivations for going in there are more complicated than is being let on.
I've been happily using SuSE 8.0 on both my desktop and laptop for about a year now. I think I will upgrade to 8.2 merely to support SuSE.
Sometimes I feel like I should give Red Hat a whirl since it is so widely used. I feel like I may be missing things that thousands of other Linux users take for granted since they use Red Hat every day.
Or I'd like try to get Debian running. I tried 2.2 (potato) a year ago and never really got a functioning desktop running. I was online and even had Samba sharing the internet, but I could never get the Gnome panel to run and so it was wacky. I'd like to use Debian because I could more carefully ensure that everything I installed was truly free software. Problem is no modern graphics cards have GPL'd drivers. No BIOS that actually works is free software, etc. So, trying to be a purist about free software right now is doomed to failure. Nonetheless, I did enjoy Debian's apt-get until I messed it up.
Right now I can't figure out how to compile a new GTK and so can't use the latest GAIM messenger. I've tried and tried. Hopefully 8.2 will just come with the latest version.
This is an entertaining quiz that will tell you what political stereotype you fall in.
The NY Times has an article indicating that Natalie Merchant "will release her next album, a collection of traditional songs called "The House Carpenter's Daughter," on her own label, Myth America Records. It is to be released June 1 through Ms. Merchant's Web site, nataliemerchant .com, and July 1 in stores."
It's stories like these that show the Recording Industry to be such liars and unnecessary middle-men.
From the article:
"The House Carpenter's Daughter" needs to sell only 50,000 copies to break even, less than 15 percent of what "Motherland," her last album for Elektra, sold.
"We're not trying to recoup some enormous debt," Mr. Smith said. "The economics of making this record are very prudent. When we sell 200,000 copies, we'll be standing on our chairs, hollering. If we released this record with these kinds of goals on a major label, we would look like a failure. At Elektra, if you just sell 1.5 million, everyone goes around with their heads down."
Ms. Merchant is not the first well-known musician to become independent. Prince, after battling Warner Records over his desire to release more music in a year than the label thought it could market, started his own company, NPG, and has since released double- and triple-CD sets at whim. Todd Rundgren markets his music directly to subscribers to his Web site, patronet.com"
On Wednesday, NPR's Marketplace had a story on several other musicians who have given up on the big labels and started their own. Read and/or listen.
From the report:
...the big labels are increasingly reluctant to spend their money and time developing artists that don't fit a narrow pop formula. ... The artist contracts are notoriously one-sided. Most major label artists, for example, will never see any money from the sale of a record until that record has sold about a million copies. This is because the major label contract stipulates that artist royalties are paid only after the label has been paid back all the money they've spent on recording the record, promoting it to radio, making videos (usually 50% of this is the artist's responsibility), touring costs and the artist's advance. But these costs can only be paid off using the artist's royalty percentage. In other words, if the artist is supposed to be paid about $1 of the retail price for every CD sold, then only $1 of the income made from the sale of each CD goes against paying off the artist's debt to the label. If the label's costs were a million dollars, which is pretty standard, the artist would have to sell one million CDs to break even.
Not many artists sell a million copies of any of their records. So, except for the advance that labels pay their artists in anticipation of a new record, the vast majority of artists on a major label will never make any money from the sale of their records.
The most shocking part of this story was that Aimee Man's former band 'Til Tuesday (recall Voices Carry from the 80s?) sold over 2 million records for their former label Sony and never made a cent. It's absurd! The big labels are dinosaurs and we are watching them drive themselves into extinction...
The BBC has an article discussing some photographs of Mars that scientists say are evidence of flowing water on Mars. There's also a Slashdot discussion. Strangely, this news is nearly three years old, but I sure don't recall hearing about it. See higher-resolution pictures here.
The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that Virginia Tech's Governing Board has voted to 1) bar advocates of extreme political views from speaking on the campus. Under the new policy, student groups must seek the president's approval if they wish to invite speakers who support or take part in activities that could be construed as "domestic violence or terrorism." and 2) change the university's antidiscrimination clause so that it no longer prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
Where to begin?
First we'll throw out the First Amendment (Everybody's doing it these days. It's quite fashionable, dontchyaknow?) and have the State of Virginia start telling its citizens what sort of speech is acceptable and which sort is just too extreme for our college student's sensitve ears. Second, the justification for this has to return to that now-tired spectre of "terrorism". Please. I also find it odd that they used the phrase "domestic violence". Does this mean that someone convicted of beating his wife is not allowed to speak at Virginia Tech? That might actually be a policy worth thinking over!
But then the "While we're at it why don't we sanction some gay-bashing." is just too laughable for words. They've gone mad!
This board is appointed by the Governor of Virginia. Write him and tell him to remove every one that voted for this nonsense.
Update (3/14): The Washington post has an article that says the Governor is opposed to the board's actions and that the board also did away with affirmative action at that busy meeting on Monday. Up next on their agenda: burn all the library's books.
That's no typo. Apparently Jupiter has a Great Dark Spot near its north pole that is larger than its more famous Great Red Spot (where "larger" means twice the size of Earth-kinda-big!) It turns out that this spot is more ephemeral. Check it out at NASA where you will also find some amazing images. There's also a Slashdot discussion of this.
I just downloaded an MP3 by the Beastie Boys! But wait, don't call the RIAA yet. The Boys are giving it away for free on their site. It's an anti-war song called "In a World Gone Mad". You can also read the lyrics.
Ummm... This is so stupid I thought it was a parody site and not really CNN when I first saw it. I'm afraid it's real.
I wanted to see what happens when I post under a category other than General, so this is a post within the category: Philosophy. I've been operating two sites devoted to philosophers for several years now. The first is Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) and the second is Gottlob Frege (1848-1925). Check 'em out. [Updated links 12/05/03]
Wow. So, I've realized now that the vast majority of the customization of a blog will require actual HTML hackin. I really thought that these programs had it all dummy-proof and you could just point and click your way to super-bloggin' stardom. Hmmm. Interesting. I sort of like it better this way.
Surprised that Google was no help. I finally just decided that it must be in the template somewhere, and sure enough it is. So now I have links. I am even more surprised that bloggers are expected to know a little HTML to include links. This is for the slightly more web-savvy than I imagined. I had gotten the apparently mistaken impression that even people's grandmothers were bloggin' now. Maybe they are...and they know HTML!
The page is looking better with more text on it, but I still need a bit more. I suppose I can rant here for a second about not having any idea how to change the links listed on (hopefully) the bottom right of this page. With less text they get listed on the bottom left, even though their header made it to the right side. Yuck! Perhaps a quick Google search will turn up the answer. Be right back.
So, I get the feeling that this page will look a lot better if I fill it up with some text. With just a single entry, the bottom of the page looks horrible. If I can find the time, I may just take up this blogging thing. It's a weird idea, no? You type to no one in particular and to everyone in the world at the same time, putting on public display whatever is on your mind. Truly, the ability of the individual to communicate with and connect to other individuals separated by great distance, age, culture, and class seems possibly bridged through this medium. Journalism returns to its roots: Everyone is a pamphleteer. Wonder if this thing will ever get a built in spell-checker? Let's see how the page looks now...