Daily Archives: November 6, 2006

Saddam’s trial

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From Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard…

I don’t think the White House needed any “scheming.” The Iraqi court knows exactly what its “mission” is without being explicitly ordered. Coordination doesn’t require command.

The simple fact remains: this verdict represents a last-minute spasm of the GOP’s desperate hang-on-to-power campaign. And the White House is doing its Orwellian part in loudly denying the fact and protesting the Iraqis’ independence.

Sadly for them, the election’s outcome won’t really make a difference to the bloodshed in Iraq, the dynamics of which long ago spun out of American control. And once U.S. forces have abandoned the wreckage of the occupation, how long do you think Saddam’s judges have left to live?

The Wealth of Networks

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Paul Miller has a nice, succinct review in the Financial Times. Sample:

What Benkler sees is an emerging pattern in the way we use network technologies which he thinks is positive for democracy and innovation, but not without its downsides. He argues that the internet is making obvious an existing form of exchange – social sharing – and taking it from the periphery to the mainstream of the economy. Conventional economics can’t explain why volunteer-generated projects such as Wikipedia or open-source software, which are given away for free, have been so successful. He proposes his own theory of “social production” – “commons-based peer production” – to fill the gap.

It’s a counterpoint to the received wisdom that creating and exploiting intellectual property (patents and copyright) is the only way to do business in the 21st century. He points out that in 2003 IBM made twice as much money from providing open-source services as it did from intellectual property – despite the fact that between 1999 and 2004 it created more patents than any other US company. Benkler proposes that this is a pattern we will see repeated. The thesis is unsettling for those businesses, particularly entertainment ones, that have relied on controlling distribution of copyrighted material. He says not that they will disappear overnight but that social production is more than a fad. It is no surprise to Benkler that: “We find ourselves in the midst of a battle over the institutional ecology of the digital environment.”

Electronic Voting Machines

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From Scott Adams’s The Dilbert Blog…

Years ago when I worked at a big bank, one of the hot issues was that many customers didn’t trust our new-fangled ATM machines. Amazingly, this fear had almost nothing to do with the fact that I worked in the ATM department. Indeed, my suggestion to include a paper shredder hole right next to the deposit hole was barely even considered. In the end, ATMs rarely stole anyone’s money and kept it for long. Now most people trust ATMs.

I think about the history of ATMs when I hear all the nervous Nellies wetting their pants over electronic voting machines. I believe those worries are totally misplaced. Now don’t get me wrong – there’s a 100% chance that the voting machines will get hacked and all future elections will be rigged.  But that doesn’t mean we’ll get a worse government. It probably means that the choice of the next American president will be taken out of the hands of deep-pocket, autofellating, corporate shitbags and put it into the hands of some teenager in Finland. How is that not an improvement?

Statistically speaking, any hacker who is skilled enough to rig the elections will also be smart enough to select politicians that believe in . . . oh, let’s say for example, science. Compare that to the current method where big money interests buy political ads that confuse snake-dancing simpletons until they vote for the guy who scares them the least. Then during the period between the election and the impending Rapture, that traditionally elected President will get busy protecting the lives of stem cells while finding creative ways to blow the living crap out of anything that has the audacity to grow up and turn brownish…

Thanks to Boyd Harris for the link.

Brillo Pad rides again!

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Andrew Neil (aka Brillo Pad) gave the Keynote Address to the Society of Editors conference. This picture was taken just as the TV director was switching from a questioner (standing) back to BP.

His Address was an entertaining farrago of insights, half-truths and thinly-veiled attacks on his enemies. It went like this:

New media bring challenges… time for a new mindset…an opportunity not a threat…all technological change brings upheaval…much to be positive about… bad news only for red top tabloids… the Guardian has used the web astutely to reinvent the Guardian brand… Sunday Times is selling more copies today than it did under his editorship…the Economist is doing brilliantly… the FT is thriving again, showing what can be done when a newspaper comes to terms with the Net…journalists who are so good at lecturing others about the need to adapt to disruptive change are not very good at learning to live with it themselves…the days of spending the day working on a piece, filing it just before five and heading off to the pub are over…all media organisations must become 24×7 operations…’reach’ is the key to getting a true measure of our proposition… 38% of people’s leisure time now spent online (more than watching TV) but 38% of advertising spend hasn’t followed it — yet: but that will change as advertisers follow the eyeballs…Google now has more ad revenue than ITV… but Google is growing fat on the backs of poor unpaid journalists and their employers … time for a conversation with Google about this matter …need for a new breed of journalist … journalists will become brands in their own right… broadband has transformed the Net into a multimedia channel… there’s a premium on moving-picture ads…. newspapers must get into that… there’s never been a better time to be a journalist… these new journalist-brands “will write blogs because you wouldn’t give them a column, and then they’ll sell the Blog back to you for an inflated price”…

He finished off with some incomprehensible score-settling about the Scottish Media Group, the Scotsman, the Herald and the unalloyed stupidity of the Scottish political class.

In questioning, he revealed that he had bought Handbag.com for £300,000 and sold it a short time later for £22 million.

Update… Roy Greenslade is also at the conference. Here’s his Blog’s take on Brillo Pad.