Dubya’s arithmetic

For my money, Paul Krugman of MIT is the best writer on economics currently appearing in the public prints. Here are the opening paras of his analysis of Dubya’s tax-cutting proposals:

“A liberal and a conservative were sitting in a bar. Then Bill Gates walked in. “Hey, we’re rich!” shouted the conservative. “The average person in this bar is now worth more than a billion!” “That’s silly,” replied the liberal. “Bill Gates raises the average, but that doesn’t make you or me any richer.” “Hah!” said the conservative, “I see you’re still practicing the discredited politics of class warfare.”

Am I caricaturing the debate? Alas, not at all. Whenever anyone points out the systematic tilt of the Bush administration toward the rich, the administration and its defenders immediately raise the cry of “class warfare.” Yet when you look at the arguments the administration actually makes on behalf of its policy, they are as silly as that of the conservative in the bar. The difference is that the administration knows exactly what it’s doing. …”

What to do about copyright — the Economist‘s modest proposal

Interesting editorial, arguing that we should go back to the original idea embodied in the US Constitution, but also give the content industries the draconian powers they seek to enforce a 14-year term. Hmmm…

Irish lad writes superfast browser

Intriguing Wired story by Karlin Lillington about an Irish teenager who appears to have come up with an elegant and efficient browser. It includes a search facility involving 120 search engines. And to think that up to this moment I was content with having Google on my Safari menu-bar. Sigh.

The reality of war: something about which Bush and Blair know zilch

Wonderful piece by Robert Fisk, one of the few journalists one can believe when it comes to the Middle East. His book on Lebanon is a scarifying masterpiece. Thanks to Gerard de Vries for the link.

How low can you go?
Andrew Sullivan is outraged at how personal the vitriol against President Bush can be:

Those of us with memories that stretch back to the 1990s will remember that we first descended into the trenches of “coarseness” and “personal demonization” when Bill Clinton took office. Here at Salon we took years of unbelievably “coarse” and vicious e-mails from Clinton-haters: They dreamed up elaborate fates for us, the president and most particularly his wife, deranged fantasies of four-letter-word-driven vitriol, detailing sexually explicit and bloody scenarios that would make a drill sergeant blanch. The anti-Clintonites took the politics of “personal demonization” to incredible new lows in American life, and, fueled by the rise of the Net and right-wing media, made it the norm.

Two wrongs don’t make a right, and I’m sure that the fringe of the opposition to Bush uses rhetoric and imagery that goes overboard in unpleasant and unjustifiable ways. But it was the Clinton-haters — outraged first at a supposed financial scandal that never amounted to anything and then at a sex scandal involving consenting adults — who rolled us into this gutter. The people who are mad at Bush, by contrast are upset about, first, an election that was arguably stolen, and now a likely war that has yet to be justified. There may be no excuse for “personal demonization,” and I won’t defend it, but at least there’s some substance behind what Bush-haters are mad about. [Scott Rosenberg’s Links & Comment]

Kodak runs into trouble, lays off workers

According to the NYT , Kodak is feeling the pinch of digital technology.

Guess who didn’t install the Microsoft security patch to combat SQL Slammer?

NYT story reads, in part: The frantic message came from the corporation’s information technology workers: “HELP NEEDED: If you have servers that are nonessential, please shut down.”

The computer system was under attack by a rogue program called SQL Slammer, which affected servers running Microsoft software that had not been updated with a patch — issued months ago — to fix the vulnerability. The worm hindered the operations of hundreds of thousands of computers, slowed Internet traffic and even disrupted thousands of A.T.M. terminals.

But this wasn’t happening at just any company. It was occurring at Microsoft itself. Some internal servers were affected, and service to users of the Microsoft Network was significantly slowed.

The disruption was particularly embarrassing for Microsoft, which has been preaching the gospel of secure computing. On Jan. 23, the company’s chairman, Bill Gates, sent a memo to customers describing progress in improving its products since he announced a “trustworthy computing” initiative a year ago.

“While we’ve accomplished a lot in the past year, there is still more to do,” he wrote. He cited the hundreds of millions spent to shore up Microsoft’s products, and its plans to deliver more secure products in the future. He also listed “things customers can do to help.” The first item was “stay up to date on patches.”

More on Slammer — Wired story.

Linux on the desktop — someone else’s desktop

What a neat idea — WorkSpot, a Linux machine you can run through a browser, from anywhere. Cost: $9.95 a month. Makes me wonder if there’s some way we could use this for an introductory course on Linux?

PowerPoint and its discontents

My Observer column of January 12 was about the pernicious way PowerPoint has sapped the will to think of the corporate world. Now, courtesy of the wonderful Arts and Letters Daily, comes a flood of insightful pieces on the same topic:

Here, for example, is a lovely essay by Julia Kelly published on January 22. Thomas Stewart is calling for PowerPoint to be banned. And presentation guru Edward Tufte has even entered the fray with a scathing piece on PowerPoint graphics. Quote:

“The original table, so effective, collapses into incoherent chartjunk. … Everything is wrong with these smarmy, chaotic graphics: scaling, low resolution, color codes, breaking data into pieces, branding, an indifference to data and evidence. Poking a finger into the eye of thought, these graphics would turn into a particularly nasty prank if used by cancer patients seeking to discover their survival chances. “

Meanwhile, if Lincoln had had PowerPoint here’s how the Gettysburg Address would look.

Another Microsoft virus goes unreported

“Attack Overwhelms Internet, Slows Traffic”, says an AP report in the NYT. But we get half-way down the story before it is revealed that the new virus is actually exploiting vulnerabilities in, ah, Microsoft software. “Rick Miller, a spokesman for Microsoft Corp., however, confirmed that Internet congestion was interfering with administrators trying to download the crucial software patch that Microsoft made available to protect vulnerable computers.”

But now comes the really funny bit: For it turns out that “the same congestion also completely prevented consumers from contacting Microsoft over the Internet to unlock the anti-piracy features of its latest products, including the Windows XP and Office XP software packages.” Verily, you could not make this stuff up. But why doesn’t the headline say Virus exploits Microsoft vulnerability, screws up Internet?