The Bush re-election theme: don’t blame me

As intuited by Josh Marshall:

“If you look at the TV ads the president just unveiled today, you quickly see a main — probably the main — theme of his reelection campaign: it’s not my fault.

Yes there are all sort of bad things going on. The economy’s been rough. The deficit is deepening. Job growth is barely registering. There’s all sorts of chaos on the international stage. But it’s not my fault. When I got here there was a recession already, which I didn’t have anything to do with. That was Clinton’s fault. And the same with all the corporate scandals. And then Osama bin Laden got involved and that wasn’t my fault either. And that Iraq thing didn’t completely work out. But that’s the CIA’s fault. So if there’s anything that’s bad now it’s not because of anything I did. It’s because of 9/11. And if it’s not because of 9/11 then it was already broken when I got here. So don’t blame me.”

Oh, and while we’re at it, here’s Bush Yoga.

Cannibals Descend on MP3 Players

Lovely headline, don’t you think? Not mine, alas, but the header on a Wired story about digital photography. Quote:

“Digital photographers have found a source of cheap microdrives for their cameras: Creative Technology’s MuVo2 digital music player.

Like Apple Computer’s iPod mini, the MuVo2 is based on a 4-GB microdrive from Hitachi. But while the Hitachi microdrive retails for about $500 when sold as a storage device for digital cameras, the MuVo2 costs about $200.

As someone put it on a website forum, you get the microdrive for more than 50 percent off, and a free pair of headphones.

“The price was right,” said Norman Yee, a professional photographer who bought a MuVo2 so he could use its hard drive in his Canon EOS 10D digital camera. Yee then took the 1-GB CompactFlash card he was using in the camera and put it in the MuVo2. Both work perfectly, he said. The Hitachi microdrive is the same size as a standard CompactFlash, or CF, card, a popular storage medium for digital cameras. In fact, the drive is designed to be interchangeable with CF cards. The drive can simply be inserted into the camera and formatted to store pictures. The drive can also be read with most CF card readers.”

Worried about your house being flooded? Click here to find out

From a BBC Online report:

“One of the UK’s largest insurers has unveiled technology that will enable it to pinpoint whether individual homes are at risk from flood. At present insurers assess risk through checking if the postcode of the property is in a flood plain.

Nearly five million people live in a flood plain, which makes it hard for them to get cover. Norwich Union has digitally mapped the UK and can now calculate the risk of flood to within a few metres. The insurer will be able to set premiums for home contents insurance based on a particular address rather than just a postcode band, for both residential and commercial properties.”

A serious, non-infringing use of P2P technology

Lindows is reported to be planning to distribute its operating system software using BitTorrent.

“The file-sharing setup means lower networking costs for Lindows and faster downloads for users, the company said. By cutting back on bandwidth rates and on hosting infrastructure such as servers and firewalls, Lindows said it can serve 1,000 or more simultaneous customers rather than the 125 its earlier system could handle.

The company is using a P2P system based on BitTorrent technology, which it expects eventually to become the primary download mechanism for large files. The BitTorrent system breaks a typical 500MB LindowsOS file into about 1,000 pieces to be transported independently for reassembly at the customer’s computer and is significantly faster than traditional FTP-based downloads, Lindows said.”

So SCO is being bankrolled by Microsoft. Well, well…

From Eric Raymond’s site.

“Excuse me, did we say in Halloween IX that Microsoft’s under-the-table payoff to SCO for attacking Linux was just eleven million dollars? Turns out we were off by an order of magnitude — it was much, much more than that.

The document below was emailed to me by an anonymous whistleblower inside SCO. He tells me the typos and syntax bobbles were in the original. I cannot certify its authenticity, but I presume that IBM’s, Red Hat’s, Novell’s, AutoZone’s, and Daimler-Chryler’s lawyers can subpoena the original….”

There then follows a heavily annotated copy of the memo, after which ESR adds this postscript:

“There you have it. A hundred million funnelled from Microsoft to SCO, of which they have $68.5 million left. Their 10Qs reveal that every other line of cash inflow is statistical noise by comparison. The brave new SCOsource business model is now clear: sue your customers, shill for Microsoft, kite your stock, and pray you stay out of jail.”

The illusion of spectrum scarcity

In March last year, David Weinberger wrote a memorable article in Salon highlighting David Reed’s seminal insight that the ‘spectrum scarcity’ which has led to so much government regulation of communications is actually an illusion. Or, more precisely, it is an artefact of the limitations of old analog comms technologies. Analog signals did interfere with one another, and so had to be spread out over the spectrum — which was therefore finite, given the transmission and reception technologies of the day.

But that was then and this is now (to coin a phrase). With smart digital technologies we can now fit a virtually infinite amount of stuff into the electromagnetic spectrum. But we’re still stuck with the mindset which says spectrum is finite. The truth is that we’re no longer running out of spectrum, any more than we are running out of the colour blue. Here’s a lovely exposition of this idea by Gregory Staple & Kevin Werbach.

What this means is that an entire regulatory infrastructure — the FCC in the US, the DTI in the UK, etc. — is actually obsolete because the assumptions on which it is based are becoming obsolescent. Will things change? Hmmm… we’ll see.

Reality dawns at last: UK eUniversity to be, er, restructured

It’s been an open secret in the UK academic world for quite a while that Tony Blair’s ‘eUniversity’ project was a disaster. The only question was how long it would take officialdom to concede this. Now, it seems, the penny has dropped. Or, rather, the £62 million has dropped (that was the sum set aside by the government for this fatuous enterprise.) HEFCE (the body that funds UK universities) has just announced a ‘review’ of the eU. A tersely-worded statement (a classic example of the British mandarin’s mastery of euphemism, by the way) intimates that the plug has finally been pulled.

In the course of its miserable existence, the eU attracted a total of 900 paying customers. That works out at about £69,000 per student. It would have been cheaper to have given these folks £60k each and sent them to Harvard. And just in case you think I am being wise after the event, I gave a Keynote Address to a networking conference in Cambridge in the Spring of 2001 explaining why this venture was doomed. Heads should roll for this debacle, but somehow I doubt that they will for that is not the British Way. Instead, some cove who might otherwise have expected a knighthood will now be denied one.

Colm Toibin on Lady Gregory

Someone once asked a famous writer why he had written such a long book. “Because”, he replied, “I was not clever enough to write a short one”. This is often attributed to George Bernard Shaw, but I’m not sure about its provenence.*

It came to mind a lot this weekend, though, because I’ve read Colm Toibin’s Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush, a gem of a biographical essay on WB Yeats’s friend and collaborator, Lady Augusta Gregory.

It’s a beautiful little (125-page) book, packed full of effortless insight, and fascinating for anyone who (like me) is interested in Yeats. I particularly liked this quote from Yeats about a dispute between English colonial censors and the Abbey Theatre in Dublin (which he and Gregory founded):

“The root of the whole difference between us and England in such matters is that though there might be some truth in the old charge that we are not truthful to one another here in Ireland, we are certainly always true to ourselves. In England, they have learned from commerce to be truthful to one another, but they are great liars when alone”.

Also lots of hilarious quotes from Lady Gregory’s correspondence. On a visit to Washington, for example, she met President Taft. “When I was standing near him talking”, she reported to Yeats, “something soft and pillowy touched me, it was his tummy, which is the size of Sancho Panza’s”.

Speaking of which, I am reminded of a story about Lord Castlerosse, an Irish earl who was a famously indolent gossip correspondent and voluptuary in the 1930s, and who was likewise endowed with a magnificent paunch.

One day he ran into Nancy Cunard in the street and she remonstrated with him about the size of his tummy. “Really, Valentine”, she said, “can you imagine something like that (pointing to his paunch) on a woman”. “My dear”, he responded calmly, “half an hour ago it was”.

*Thanks to Veronica Yuill, who emailed to say that the real source is probably a line in a letter of Blaise Pascal’s: “Je n’ai fait cette lettre-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte” : (roughly) “I’m sorry this letter is so long — I didn’t have time to write a shorter one.” What a wonderful thing it is to have erudite readers.

Clay Shirky on VoIP

Clay Shirky has a new essay out, this time on the subject of internet telephony. As usual, he’s perceptive and on target. And here is Kevin Werbach’s admirably lucid testimony on VoIP to the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.

More on BitTorrent

I wrote about BitTorrent a few weeks ago. Now there’s a good piece in Slate about it. It’s the next rachet up in the file-sharing arms race.