Auden on war
W.H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939”
“All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police
We must love one another or die.”
A plague on all (pro- and anti-) war houses
Thoughtful London Review of Books piece by Perry Anderson which manages to take everyone’s position apart. Confirms my feeling that there are no morally unambiguous stances to be had on this issue.
File-sharers continue to outsmart record labels
BBC Online story.
“The record industry has become the National Rifle Association of showbusiness. It has declared jihad on its customers who it calls pirates,” said Wayne Rosso, head of Grokster.
File-sharing services such as Grokster now boast millions more customers than Napster, the original file-swapping music service, had at its peak.
“Last year, around about the stage that file-sharing was ramping up, there was a huge window of opportunity for the record industry to do something before it became too ingrained but that moment has disappeared,” said Mark Mulligan, senior analyst at Jupiter Research.
Jupiter Research’s latest study reveals that legitimate internet music services are struggling to get off the ground despite the fact that nearly 40% of Europe’s digital music fans are willing to pay for music online.
With the music industry refusing to offer up any but a small percentage of its artists for digital download, millions of music lovers are using services such as Kazaa to swap tracks and build up online libraries of free, if illegal, music.
File-swapping services are becoming almost as easily recognisable as the music labels themselves and boast an enviable number of users.
Why did Google buy Blogger?
Steven Johnson’s answer.
En passant: I have lots of non-techie friends. I wonder what they would make of the above headline.
Repetitive Mistake Syndrome
This is what makes it worth while sitting up late and reading the Web — a lovely, spiky, acute essay by Doc Searls and David Weinberger on the essence of the Net. Here’s a sample:
“When it comes to the Net, a lot of us suffer from Repetitive Mistake Syndrome. This is especially true for magazine and newspaper publishing, broadcasting, cable television, the record industry, the movie industry, and the telephone industry, to name just six.
Thanks to the enormous influence of those industries in Washington, Repetitive Mistake Syndrome also afflicts lawmakers, regulators and even the courts. Last year Internet radio, a promising new industry that threatened to give listeners choices far exceeding anything on the increasingly variety-less (and technologically stone-age) AM and FM bands, was shot in its cradle. Guns, ammo and the occasional “Yee-Haw!” were provided by the recording industry and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which embodies all the fears felt by Hollywood’s alpha dinosaurs when they lobbied the Act through Congress in 1998.
“The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it,” John Gilmore famously said. And it’s true. In the long run, Internet radio will succeed. Instant messaging systems will interoperate. Dumb companies will get smart or die. Stupid laws will be killed or replaced. But then, as John Maynard Keynes also famously said, “In the long run, we’re all dead.”
We’d like to avoid the wait.
All we need to do is pay attention to what the Internet really is. It’s not hard. The Net isn’t rocket science. It isn’t even 6th grade science fair, when you get right down to it. We can end the tragedy of Repetitive Mistake Syndrome in our lifetimes — and save a few trillion dollars? worth of dumb decisions — if we can just remember one simple fact: the Net is a world of ends. You’re at one end, and everybody and everything else are at the other ends.”
Metaphors again
Interesting Weblog reverie by Jonathan Peterson on how to explain the special characteristics of the Net. Think of it as being like the electrical network. “A comparison that David and Doc touched on, but didn?t go into (and which I haven?t seen used much) is the Internet as electricity. Telling people the metaphors they are using are wrong is fine, but people NEED analogies, so putting forth a better analogy and hammering it home seems like a good idea to me.
The electrical network is also a completely dumb network that was terribly underutilized initially (since DC current was generated at neighborhood electrical stations they were largely dormant during the day, as home lighting was the first widespread commercial application of elecricity).
The entire value of electrical networks is delivered by the devices on the end, and those devices are drastically different than those it was designed for (electricity really took off with the invention of home refrigeration, leading to constant demand, from that follow the rise of Tesla?s AC network, which allowed an interconnected grid to replace spot generation. The simularity to the rise of email/web driving people away from the old world of BBSs is left as an exercise is probably not coincidental.”
Professional jokes
One of the other guests at a dinner party the other night was a prominent neurosurgeon. I asked him if medics made jokes about one another the way other professions do. “Of course”, he replied, “would you like to hear some?” It turns out that the butts of most medical jokes are the surgeons. Example:
Q: How do you hide money from a general surgeon?
A: Put it in the case notes.
Q:How do you hide money from an orthopaedic surgeon?
A: Put it in a textbook,
Q: How do you hide money from a plastic surgeon?
A: You can’t hide money from a plastic surgeon!
Johansen back in court on DeCSS charge
According to the Register, the DeCSS kid is not out of the woods yet.:
“Norwegian teenager, Jon Lech Johansen, is to be tried again by an appeal court this summer despite being cleared of cyber piracy crimes earlier this year, his lawyer confirmed last Friday. “DVD Jon” Johansen, 19, was acquitted on criminal charges this January relating to his involvement in creating and distributing a utility for playing back DVDs on his own computer. An Oslo district court decided that Johansen was entitled to copy legally-purchased DVDs using his DeCSS DVD descrambling program, in order to play back movies on his Linux PC. On this basis, Johansen was cleared of piracy and distribution of the DeCSS DVD code-breaking program. Norway’s special division for white-collar crimes, Økokrim, acting at the behest of Hollywood studios, decided to appeal this verdict to the Borgarting appeals court. Økokrim is appealing against the “application of the law and the presentation of evidence” during the original trial, Reuters reports…”
Roger’s gone
Roger Needham, founding Director of the Microsoft Cambridge Lab, died last Friday night. He was a wonderful man, for whom the term unimpeachable might have been invented: he always said what he thought, even when he knew it might prove unpalatable to his audience, or to his friends. He was one of the great pioneering computer scientists. When his friends and colleagues gathered to honour him on February 17, it was extraordinary to be reminded of how many of the most important areas of computer science had his fingerprints all over them. Two of the papers he wrote on authentication, for example, are among the most widely-cited papers of the field. And whenever you type in a password, the chances are that it will be encrypted using an algorithm he published in 1966.
I knew him mainly towards the end of his career, when I became a Fellow of the same college. It was always worth trying to sit next to him at formal dinners because his conversation was never conventional. We talked about the history of the subject, the absurdities of Cambridge, his experiences as a consultant in Silicon Valley, opera in San Francisco and the strange fact that in computer ‘science’, the science usually follows the technology. Attending meetings with him was also an unforgettable experience because he could never remain seated when talking; instead he would pace up and down like a caged leopard.
When I embarked on my history of the Net, the fact that he knew every major figure in the story opened innumerable doors for me. I shall always be grateful to him for introducing me to Bob Taylor, the man who conceived and funded the Arpanet, and with whom I wrote a piece on “Zen and the Art of Research Management” in homage to Roger in the collection of papers presented to him on February 17.
I wrote a tribute to him in my Observer column of February 16. I would like to have said much more, but space precluded a longer piece. The thing that struck me most about him in the end was his extraordinary ability to rise above the field and provide an account of the terrain — in plain English. It was always “the view from 90,000 feet”. He had that amazing confidence that great minds have which enables them to admit that problems are very difficult or even insoluble, rather than having to pretend that everything’s under intellectual control.
I feel privileged to have known him, and to have experienced his friendship. His wife, Karen Sparck-Jones (also a distinguished computer scientist) has written a lovely memoir of her man. There’s a nice photograph here. And Rick Rashid, head of Microsoft Research, has published this tribute.
Update: Just found an insightful piece that Karlin Lillington wrote for Salon when the Cambridge Lab was set up. The New York Times obituary is here.
Richard Dawkins: why should we help Bush get re-elected?
Good polemic from Dawkins. “I am vigorously pro-American”, he writes, “which is one reason why I am anti-Bush. They deserve better.” He also forsees a time when many liberals will no longer want to live in America (shades of the McCarthy era) and might be tempted to Britain — except that of course Britain will be the only serious country in the Western world which supported the Bush project.
