Modern Geekery

Snow?

Yes, snow. It is April 24th, and there is snow on the ground. Hopefully, the herbs I planted last weekend won't suffer too much. Of course, we'd figured that the last cold snap of the year had come and gone, and so Meg's winter coats and other cold-weather paraphenalia were packed up in the basement. We're supposed to have a babysitting co-op picnic today. I'm expecting that turnout will be light.

And speaking of co-ops, I went up to our food co-op yesterday to buy some graham crackers. Now, despite the number of small children whose families shop at this co-op, I was told that the co-op had stopped stocking grahams because they weren't selling well. But, I was "the third person today who has asked for them." What about this picture doesn't make sense?

Not in the internet age

So, tell me why the manufacturer of my vehicle doesn't provide its owner's manual as a pdf online? Instead, I have to look up the part number of the manual in their online database and then call my local dealership to order the book. How convoluted.

Is Charles Cooper any better than a blogger?

I have a theory: CNET can't tell preposterous blustering from real journalism. For years, Cooper has written exactly what he thought, whether or not it had any basis in reality. Sometimes he actually seems to understand the world around him, in which case his columns are a masterpiece of conveying the bleeding obvious. Other times, I wonder if he's spent too long reading "analyst reports" and not enough time actually talking to folks doing the work, using the products, and discussing what's on the bleeding edge of computer technology.

His latest screed, purporting to dissect Google's IPO prospectus, reads like a childish rant. One can easily imagine Cooper thinking, "Damn those meddling kids!" as he contemplates the wealth that Sergey Brin and Larry Page have accrued and will accrue. Perhaps he's jealous that a couple of smart guys who are doing the nearly impossible, i.e. come up with a steady stream of really clever ideas, turn a buck, while keeping their idealism, while he's stuck covering their exploits. In any case, he's been reduced from thoughtful coverage to making incredibly snide ad hominem comments in something that purports to be serious journalism.

Even the teaser blurb is snide: "Charles Cooper wants to get in the last word." Yes, Charles, I bet you do. Unfortunately, his "last word" had nothing to do with the relative merit of the Google IPO, thoughtful consideration of their chances, not even the iconoclastic Dutch auction that they are using to apportion shares. Instead, we see him lambast the duo with such intellectual criticism as "I now see that juvenile pomposity did not go out of style with the passing of the Nehru jacket" and "This just in: Mary Poppins was sighted at 30,000 feet."

If this is the best CNET can do in terms of editorial commentary, which it must be, considering that he is the executive editor of commentary, I believe that CNET is doomed. Cooper, in 2001, stated that he did not think blogs would ever replace traditional journalism. He must be quite confident in that prediction to post an article that read like a not-particularly-savvy blog entry to a mainstream news source.

Consider the source

Recently, Pope John Paul II condemned same-sex marriage, claiming that it degraded the institution.

I consider that quite arrogant. For a man who has never himself been married, who is the head of a leadership body comprised of people who are forbidden to marry, and who oversees an organization that at last count employed over 4,000 people who have allegedly sexually abused over 10,000 children to pass any judgement on the sanctity and moral rectitude of an act of love is the height of human folly.

The Civil Rights Movement of the 21st Century

Currently, the legislature of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is considering altering their state Constitution to prevent gay couples from marrying, in defiance of the Massachusetts Supreme Court's decision requiring it. Massachusetts State Representative Byron Rushing delivered an eloquent oration decrying the denial of the rights to a group of people for the sake of expediency. During this debate, we have seen party lines break down and we have seen such a spectrum of opinion over what constitutes remedy for the injunction passed by the Massachusetts Supreme Court.

People have repeated turned to civil unions as a potential compromise position. This has some siren appeal, as it provides most of the civil benefits of marriage without the messy involvement with the term marriage. The state of Vermont heard that siren song, and were cheered for it. I firmly believe that such a compromise is no compromise at all.

On May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Warren of the United States Supreme Court delivered a unanimous decision in the case of Oliver Brown et al. vs. The Board of Education of Topeka (KS). This decision set aside the inherently discriminatory precedent set by Plessy vs. Ferguson of "separate but equal." In his opinion, he stated "The plaintiffs contend that segregated public schools are not "equal" and cannot be made "equal," and that hence they are deprived of the equal protection of the laws."

Civil unions as they are conceived in current law cannot be made equal to civil marriage for many reasons, including the fact that they do not have to be recognized by other states. They also do not provide critical economic benefits such as the right of survivorship. The boldness and the brazenness of the effort to deny homosexuals from this right of partnership in the face of not only the existence of the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection under the law, but also in the face of the watershed decision in Brown v. Board that established the doctrine that "separate but equal is inherently unequal" is both disgusting and disturbing.

But Massachusetts is not the only battleground for this fight. Legislation has been introduced into the U. S. House of Representatives beginning the process for amending the United States Constitution in order to forbid homosexuals from marrying. This step would mark the first time in our history that our foundational document has been modified in order to explicitly deny rights to a group of people. That we can have the temerity to call ourselves the Land of the Free and consider such an action is the height of hypocrisy.

Media monoculture

Danny Gregory has posted a simple, yet incredibly accurate and heartfelt indictment of modern media. I highly encourage everyone to read what he has to say.

In a world where one small cabal decides what we hear on the air (ClearChannel), what music we are allowed to buy in stores (RIAA), and what gets reported as news (TimeWarner), there is an obscene perversion of not only our culture, but our democracy.

There is an incredible vacuum here that the internet could empower someone or some group to fill. The blog community is getting there, but doesn't quite scratch the itch, for reasons that I think are way more complex that simply the lack of centralized editing. The Indymedia affiliates approach from the other end of the spectrum, but still do not quite scratch the itch. I'm not sure what the right solution is, but I'm confident that "the rest of us" will figure it out before Big Media does.

Ahh, more Christmas spirit.

Sometimes you just have to wonder.

I work for a company whose name might lead one to believe that we were vaguely Christmas-oriented. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. Still, you might (and I do) forgive the occasional call asking if we sell Christmas prints or do Christmas t-shirts.

Nothing in my experience prepared me for the email I received when I checked my email last evening. I don't think I should respond personally, but I will post it here to be lampooned by all and sundry. Since the email is obscene, I won't post it to the front page. Read on for the dirt.

The email:

From: saintysranch@iprimus.com.au (Terry & Kylie St.John)
To: <removed>

I thought you were a traditional reindeer provider, but you were nothing but some money grabbing piece of shit. Merry Xmas to you all Ho-Ho-H-o Fucking Ho you cunt.

How's that for the Christmas spirit, eh? I will leave this up here so that all the spam-harvester bots can grab the address. Oh, and Mr. and Mrs. St. John? If you want this to come off the site, I'll remove it if and when I get a personal request from you following an apology for your vulgarity. Have a nice day.

Score one for the good guys

When Bjorn Lomberg's controversial book, The Skeptical Environmentalist was released, the number of people lined up to excoriate the Danish professor was astounding. Even more astounding was the utter lack of scientific basis to their arguments. People who should know much better attacked the Lomberg ad hominem, instead of investigating his data and analyzing his conclusions. Even the venerable mainstay of science for the educated layman, Scientific American, resorted to threatening to sue Lomberg for using their vitriolic 11-page editorial against his book as part of a detailed rebuttal. So outraged and insensible to rationality were Lomberg's opponents, that they recommended to the Danish Commission on Scientific Dishonesty that they review the work. The DCSD issued a scathing report calling the book "objectively dishonest." However, the report was based on the same emotional vitriol as Lomberg's critics' attacks. Today, the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation has repudiated the DCSD's report, calling it "completely void of argumentation."

I think that these scientists were not as fortunate to have a graduate advisor so demanding as mine was. They have forgotten what science is, and how science is done. Science is not about political platforms, or treaties. Science is about hypotheses, data, and conclusions. Most importantly, the rebuttal of a theory is done by testing and analysis, not by shouting louder than your opponent. I can hear my advisor's words now: "Wishing it does not make it so. Show me data!" They had forgotten that their passion for their studies should never, ever become passion in their studies. There is no room in science for zealotry. Show me the data.

One can easily hazard a guess on the motives of Lomberg's critics. The NSF alone has requested $681M [source: nsf.gov] for the geosciences, which includes study of climate change. As results that run counter to the popular assumptions on the matter are not politically correct, failing to publish the "proper" conclusions could cut off the flow of cash to the honest researcher. As such, you see very little scientific study on the climatological effects of things like the Indonesian peat fires, which are not currently factored into climatological models at all. According to an article in Nature magazine, the Indonesian peat fires, which cover an area the size of Belgium, dumped as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as all man-made sources in Europe. Because we don't have any analysis of this, we don't know whether or not fighting these fires could slow or even reverse the current warming trend that we are seeing. I believe that in dealing with global warming, ignorance is far more dangerous than burning fossil fuels.

Wall Street does get it

Groklaw recently posted a wonderful article about the negative press that SCO is getting from their recent mishaps, including Darl McBride's truly ignorant open letter on copyright law and their recent loss in court. In the article, the point is made that Wall Street is "just beginning to get it" in regards to SCO, based on the recent reaction by various analysts and the drop in SCO's stock price.

I would argue, on the basis of this data, that the market indicates the Wall Street, in the person of the investors, understood the futility and risks of SCO's ploy a long while back. The more SCO postured, the more people bet against them in the form of selling the stock short. As of November 14th, the short interest is over 4 times the daily trading volume, which represents a huge risk for those people in (uncovered) short positions. What this means is that a lot of people with long positions in SCO are beginning to hedge their bets and that speculators are betting heavily against SCO, and that from the increase in short interest over the past 6 months, they've figured SCO was a bad bet for long term since well before the "analysts" figured out how full of crap McBride and Co. are.

Since when is litigation a growth industry?

This is the quote of the day:

"BayStar Capital looks to invest in growth-oriented firms with strong management, substantial market opportunity and solid, comprehensive business plans, and we believe that all of those fundamentals are in place for SCO to succeed," said Lawrence Goldfarb, a BayStar general partner.

This is apparently Goldfarb's justification for funding SCO's strategy of litigating everyone who uses Unix.

Mr. Goldfarb: You must be a lawyer, otherwise you would understand that lawyers do not create products. Lawsuits do not generate revenue for companies, nor do they increase marketshare. They do not make a company's products better. They, in short, do not contribute in any way to a growing healthy economy.

Lawsuits are used to redress wrongs, and to establish a company's rights to do certain things. SCO has no marketshare, no sales, and no product worth buying, nor do they, as has been amply proven with the evidence shown thus far, have any wrongs to redress. For you to say that they are "growth-oriented" and "have a strong business plan," is tantamount to saying, "We believe that we can profit from SCO's strategy of litigating other market players."

You, Mr. Goldfarb, are a thus a parasite. You are not investing your clients' money in order to provide capital to a growth business; you are engaged in risky speculation on the outcome of several lawsuits, any one of which could put your clients' $50M in the hands of IBM, RedHat or a later comer to the field if SCO loses. Sooner or later, you will be called to account for that. If I were one of your clients, it would be sooner.

News flash: Company discovers own incompetence, blames 3rd party

There is nothing that destroys your faith in your fellow man quite so much as the sight of rank stupidity in full action.

Today's case in point is SunnComm's decision to sue a Princeton graduate student for explaining that holding down the shift key disables their (expensive) DRM scheme. I'm sure many other qualified people will talk about the chilling effects of the DMCA. Many others will want to talk about the implications that Sunncomm makes when they claim that disclosing the nature of a file they place on your computer is violating their rights. Instead, I want to talk about what this implies about Sunncomm itself.

Sunncomm complains that Halderman's description of the security file and the shift key to disable the Autorun feature "significantly damaged SunnComm's reputation and caused the market value of SunnComm to drop by more than $10 million." I don't think that it was Halderman who has made the "erroneous assumption" here.

Sunncomm makes this claim, while stating on their website that they are listed only on the OTC board (i.e., they are not regularly traded) and that they have, according to their website, "to date ... earned only insignificant revenue from sales of its products." Given that, I fail to see how Sunncomm can make any claim about its "market value," considering that by most measures of market value, they have none.

And this leads to more insidious problem. I think that perhaps Sunncomm's engineering talent is the key to why their sales revenues are "insignificant." They have been "in the news" for at least 2 years, according to a factoid on their website. And the best their engineers could come up with was to rely on a "magic cookie" on the user's hard drive and an autorun program, either of which is easily defeatable by knowledge that a modestly informed computer user could defeat?

This is tantamount to "encrypting" text with ROT-13, and suing people for circumventing it. It would be funny, if it weren't so terribly pathetic. My guess is that the engineering managers there got desperate for a solution and ran with the best they could come up with, under pressure from higher management and/or their funding sources.

I should hope that whoever is bankrolling Sunncomm would scrutinize their engineering division. If this is truly the best that they could come up with, Sunncomm has many deeper issue to resolve than one clever graduate student and a PR black-eye.