On my way home this afternoon. iPhone panorama using the Pano App.
Quote of the day
“The Irish banking system is worse than too big to fail; it is too big to save. The first duty of the state is to save itself, not to load its taxpayers with obligations to rescue careless lenders…The Irish state should have saved itself by drastic restructuring of bank liabilities. Bank debt simply cannot be public debt. If bank debt is to be such debt, bankers should be viewed as civil servants and banks as government departments.”
Martin Wolf, writing in today’s Financial Times.
How WikiLeaks stayed online despite the DDOS attack
From Technology Review.
As of this moment, according to Wikileaks itself, the site is under a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack “now exceeding 10 Gigabits a second.” These kinds of attacks are typically carried out by a widely distributed ‘botnet’ of zombie computers under the control of a single or a group of hackers. They are par for the course on the web, and have been used in everything from extortion efforts against businesses to cyberattacks on neighboring countries.
What’s interesting about this attack is that Wikileaks’ webmasters have switched from their usual host, Swedish company PRQ, which has at times also hosted the media pirating site The Pirate Bay, to Amazon’s cloud services.
According to network analyst Andree Tonk, who posted his observations on the mailing list of the esteemed North American Network Operators’ Group, Wikileaks moved to Amazon hosting, in particular Amazon’s EU cluster in Dublin, some time Sunday, when the first denial of service attack was launched against the site.
Hmmm… Yet another way of rationalising my (inordinate) spending on Amazon.
UPDATE (December 4): Scrub that last remark. Amazon dumped them when the going got rough. See later post.
The Tobermory Effect
Brooding on the latest outbreak of Wikileaks, the only thing that came to mind was Ambrose Bierce’s definition of diplomacy as “the patriotic act of lying for one’s country”. And then I came upon The Tobermory Effect, another thoughtful post by Henry Farrell.
My small addition to the piles of verbiage on the newest Wikileaks revelations is to suggest that Saki’s classic short story Tobermory tells you most of what you need to know. Tobermory – the story of a cat that learns to talk, is really about how a small group of people deal with the collapse of the polite fictions through which they paper over individual self-interest and mutual dislike. No-one guards what they say in front of a cat, leading to consternation when Tobermory suddenly learns the English language.
I didn’t know the Saki story until the moment I read that. Now I do. And I recommend it. Perfect for reading over coffee on a cold December morning.
Goodbye Turkey: Why EU expansion is over — for good
Very thoughtful post by Henry Farrell in Crooked Timber.
First, they have to get a majority vote in a referendum in Ireland. This is thanks to a legal ruling (the Crotty ruling) that Treaty texts which have constitutional implications (which any Treaty involving significant further integration obviously would have) require popular assent in a referendum. Given popular anger at the way that the bailout has been structured, I imagine that the chances of Ireland voting ‘yes’ to any new European initiative are close to zero.
Yet even if somehow the Irish people could be persuaded to say yes to some initiative – perhaps because it put in place a more equitable system of fiscal transfers in the case of crisis – it would have to pass through the second veto point – the German Constitutional Court. The Court has made it clear in recent rulings that it is not prepared to countenance major new initiatives that might e.g. shift responsibility for decisions over fiscal policy to the EU level. In other words – any more equitable system of economic governance is likely to be vetoed.
It is extremely hard to envisage Treaty changes that could get a yes vote in Ireland. It is next to impossible to imagine any new Treaty that could both get a yes vote in Ireland, and survive scrutiny in Karlsruhe. Hence – the process of ‘ever closer union’ through Treaty change is effectively dead. One can imagine other mechanisms of change (drift, policy incrementalism, ECJ rulings) coming into play, but they are unlikely to result in any very obvious changes except over the very long run.
Using the Kindle for academic research
Sure, it’s wonderful to be able to pack all those books you need for your research onto a Kindle. But what do you do when you need to cite page references for footnotes? Sarah Lacy is right. You can’t, because the Kindle doesn’t do page numbers.
The vine in Winter
Quote of the Day
“Why did it do that?”
Most common comment from cockpit recordings of test pilots on the original Airbus jumbo airliner.
Dinner with Mundie
One of the more enlightened things that Microsoft does to to maintain a really serious research effort, employing really first-rate people and giving them great freedom. This report of a dinner conversationw ith CEO Craig Mundie suggests that the policy will continue.
The centrally funded model for Microsoft Research is still right: This is especially interesting to me, because I have written two books on corporate research. I can tell you that funding a corporate research operation straight from central corporate coffers — as opposed to via contracts with various business divisions for work they want done — is almost unheard of in this day and age. That’s because most companies believe that in order for their research groups to have good ties to their business needs, labs need to get all, or at least a major part of, their funding from business divisions — for work the business divisions want done. Microsoft’s approach is to let MSR work without those strings, in order to keep researchers more unfettered and open to new things. "I still think that that was and remains a good strategy," Mundie told me. Over the years, many have questioned whether Microsoft’s investment in MSR has been worth it, and everyone from Gates to SVP of research Rick Rashid on down has steadfastly maintained it has been — with contributions to just about every Microsoft product. The way Mundie put it to me: MSR is “just becoming more and more integral.”
(Note: I am talking about research, the ‘R’ part of R&D. The vast majority of Microsoft’s roughly $9 billion annual investment in R&D is for development, with the research labs getting only a fraction of this amount.)
What the EU doesn’t get about Google: it’s a SEARCH engine
Lovely, sarcastic piece by Danny Sullivan about the EU’s attitude towards Google.
I did a search at Google today for “cars” and was shocked. Rather than list links allowing me to search for “cars” on Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Voila, Naver and Yandex, Google instead favored its own search results. I’m glad the EU will be investigating whether this favoritism violates anti-trust laws….