Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

Rather pompous question, rather good answer: a reader asks Roger Ebert

Why do you usually sit in the back of a movie theater? Once, while sitting, as is my wont, in the first row, I heard Susan Sontag, just behind me, expounding her theory that the people who sit in the first two rows are different from other moviegoers. We like to be immersed in the film, to let ourselves float up and into the screen, as it were, and let the story unfold around us. As your reviews demonstrate, you have front-row sensitivity. Why do you sit in the back?

Ebert responds

Because it’s too damned close to the screen. You can immerse yourself in the movie without immersing yourself in the picture. Some front rows are so close the film is actually distorted.  . . .  [I]n a theater, I sit twice as far back as the screen is wide, because of a theory that optically that’s the correct distance.

Expect me to enter my next theatre with a full complement of surveying gear.

Just by way of explanation: Jessamyn maintains a list of books that she’s been reading lately, and in a feat of calculatrix legerdemain she mentioned that she read about 75 books last year. It took me a fair bit of digging to estimate that I read 35 in the same interval. Well I don’t want to dig, when the time comes to do it again; I want to have this list at my disposal. Hence the list in ye olde right column there.

More to the point for people who are not me: since this site tends to write a lot about the books that it — as a website — has read, I figure it makes sense to keep a list close by, probably with links to my reviews. All in good time.

This also helps to put a little something in the right column, which was looking a tad barren for my tastes. If before it was a field under a blanket of snow, now it has a few tiretracks and a little mud. Alas.

Have you seen the transcript of Howard Dean on Diane Sawyer (my cache)? It is a paragon of idiocy; I almost cannot get my head around how rankly stupid the interview was. I give you as evidence:

Diane Sawyer: But it isn’t the first incident in which temper has come into question, and recently a story has been circulating now about the mid-’90s, at a hockey game for your son, which ended in the police being called, and that you were one of the parents there, and then  . . .  then you apologized. You called and apologized.

Howard Dean: That(Inaudible) didn’t(Inaudible) happen(Inaudible) either(Inaudible) A lot of this stuff is urban legend. There was a hockey game where there was an incident on the ice. The team was suspended because the coaches threw sticks out on the ice. Don’t forget, wherever I travelled as governor, I had a police escort. So I think that if there had been a problem, that I would have been taken out by my own police guys for my safety. A lot of this stuff is about urban legend. And, it happens because other people have observed(Inaudible) some of the things I do as anger. I will stand up for what I believe in, and I will stand up to protect weaker people, but I don’t often blow up. I think I did not yell at a staff member in 12 years when I was governor. That’s just not what I do.

Diane Sawyer: So did you lose your temper at the hockey  . . . 

Howard Dean: I never, there certainly was no fighting, there was no  . . .  it was nothing of that sort. I don’t  . . .  I don’t remember exactly what this is talking about, but I’ve never  . . .  never been kicked out of a game, I never have uh, you know, been escorted out by any police or anything like that. I had my own police to follow me around in case there were any problems with other people attacking me. There have never been any fights. So, I’m not sure exactly what the  . . . 

Diane Sawyer: You don’t remember if you blew?

It just keeps going. I am convinced now that Diane Sawyer is a robot.

If these idiots are the ruling class, Dean deserves not to be a member of that class.

Oh, and the Dean campaign has the full transcript and video as well.

Apparently Microsoft is not going to make changes to Internet Explorer just yet to conform to the Eolas patent. This patent should be rejected out of hand because of the damage it will cause to the Internet, not to mention because there was already substantial prior art.

I would like to point out, though, that Microsoft isn’t always the bad guy. I realize that I’m on the record mostly for attacking them, but I’m attacking them for things that they deserve to be attacked for. On the plus side, they have an enormous amount of cash, which means they can fend off ridiculous patents in a way that smaller companies could not. If Microsoft starts enforcing its own ridiculous patents on smaller companies (I’m not sure if it has ridiculous patents, but it’s hard to believe that a company that large would lack them), then we’re in trouble; but as long as it’s merely defending itself from small companies that want to exploit its huge cash reserves, I give Microsoft my full support.

Remember the JetBlue boycott? I first mentioned this in October: JetBlue released the names and, I believe, Social Security numbers of many of its customers to the Federal government as part of an experiment for the CAPPS II program (the one that’s working to flag suspicious people as they arrive at the airport). This would be ethically suspect, but the legally suspect part is that JetBlue was violating its own publicly advertised privacy policy; hence it constituted deceptive marketing, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complain with the Federal Trade Commission.

I emailed back and forth with JetBlue for a bit, then thought for a while that it was okay to drop the boycott, then realized I had spoken too soon.

Well. Now it looks as though Northwest Airlines “provided the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) with three months of passenger information for research purposes.” This is turning into a common theme. And we ought not to be patronizing any company that would treat its privacy so flimsily. More than that, we ought not to patronize any company that would violate its own promises.

The Abusable Technologies Awareness Center has a fascinating description of how porn sites have hacked some anti-spam technologies. You may have noticed that when you sign up for certain websites — I think I’ve seen this on Yahoo!, for instance — they’ll present something to you that only humans can do. Yahoo!’s approach is to give you an image containing text that’s been photoshopped (see? it is a verb) in some way: made blurry, or made wavy, or whatnot. The idea is that a human could still read the text underneath, but a machine could not.

Now, as the article reports,

it appears that pornography sites have set up a man in the middle attack on whereby other people solve the RTT [Reverse Turing Test — the test to make sure that you’re a human] for the automated scripts in extrange [sic] for free porn. This is a case of computers using humans as oracles to answer challenges. If this catches on, it is not clear that RTTs will be effective in the long run.

I can’t help but smile at this. People are really, really clever at hacking their way around any system. It will probably never happen in my lifetime that anyone will develop a hack-proof technology in wide deployment. (I.e., I have no problem imagining that nuclear silos are virtually hackproof, but let those silos wander the countryside and it’s a whole different game.)

I’ve just discovered that Hotmail is bouncing any messages I send to it, and is not telling me this. This is Bad. If 1) you’re a Hotmail user, 2) you’ve sent me messages in the past few weeks, and yet 3) I’ve not responded, that’s why.

Via How Appealing: the DoD has released three teens from Guantanamo Bay. The press release says that

Defense Department senior leadership, in consultation with other senior U.S. government officials, determined that the juvenile detainees no longer posed a threat to our nation, that they have no further intelligence value and that they are not going to be tried by the U.S. government for any crimes.

The press release explains that

[t]he juveniles were removed from the battlefield to prevent further harm to U.S. forces and to themselves. Two of the three juvenile detainees were captured during U.S. and allied forces raids on Taliban camps. One juvenile detainee was captured while trying to obtain weapons to fight American forces.

I’m curious, though: if they were once a threat to this country, why are they no longer? Put another way: if they once were, then aren’t they still? Or equivalently: if they’re not currently a threat, then perhaps they never were?

These kids are going to return to their “home country” (the press release doesn’t say what it is) and probably hate the United States even more than they did before they were imprisoned. Their families will, too. There’s some hope that they’ll support the U.S., given that

every effort was made to provide the juvenile detainees a secure environment free from the influences of the older detainees, as well as providing for their special physical and emotional care. While in detention, these juveniles were provided the opportunity to learn math, as well as reading and writing in their native language. Each took part in at least a portion of the opportunity to better themselves through education and participated in courses to improve their literacy and social skills. The juveniles also participated in daily physical exercise and sports games.

But I worry. I’ve worried from the beginning that our antiterror initiatives are going to turn a generation of the world’s youth against us. I’ve thought from the beginning that a policy of open trials adhering to the American judicial process would show the world that we’re actually committed to democracy. I’ve thought from the beginning that on top of whatever else we’re doing, we need to dispense economic aid on the scale of the Marshall Plan to bring Iraq and Afghanistan back from the devastation they’ve experienced over the years. All of these policies, it seems to me, would be more sensible long-term approaches to what looks like a very protracted battle against terrorism. And they’re all policies that we’re not doing. I’m afraid.

I went through a great deal of work yesterday to export AutoCorrect entries from Microsoft Word at work, so that I could import them into vim at home. I’ll map it out here in case others have the same problem.

(more…)

My lawyerly friends James and Adam have told me that you can’t hack the law: that the public perception may be that you can skirt your way around laws by creatively interpreting the words inside of them, but that in reality judges will enforce the intent of the law and won’t let you get around the law that easily. (James, Adam: is that a legitimate synopsis?) I believe Adam cited this point in response to the Gallery of CSS Descramblers; my understanding was that even though DeCSS violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, those descramblers were all legal because none of them were expressed in computer code. Hence banning them would be a First Amendment violation. Adam’s response (again assuming I’ve mentally abstracted it correctly) was that it’s not that simple: there might be some careful judicial balancing happening, but a violation of the law is a violation of the law. Perhaps the best we can say is that there are competing interests (free speech versus the economic incentives inherent in copyright), and that it’s not prima facie obvious that these descramblers would be legal.

But now I see that Seth Schoen — formerly (or maybe still?) of the Electronic Frontier Foundation — has confessed to writing a DeCSS haiku. When James told me that one can’t hack the law, he cited someone at EFF as the origin of this principle. Schoen cites as one of his influences a plain-English description of DeCSS (“Continue looping while i is less than 5, incrementing i by 1 on each subsequent pass through the loop. When i is equal to 5, exit the loop by jumping to step 20  . . . ”) which comes from that gallery of descramblers.

So what’s the story? Is DeCSS a special case, in that it’s spread too far around the world to be stopped now? And in general, what sort of principle do the legal folks think would apply to cases like this that skirt the dividing line between copyright and free speech?

There we go. Having gone into work at 7 a.m. for the past three days, I decided to “sleep in” today and go to work at the regular time (9 a.m.). I didn’t quite finish the project that was due Wednesday, but got it probably 3/4 done. The people to whom I handed it off seemed okay with that. I’ll finish it off today and tomorrow.

 . . . which will be easier, now that I’ve just gotten about 10 hours of sleep. I feel quite good. Though if my life is like Chris Genovese’s, I’ll end up sick now.

Those of you viewing the RSS feed for this site have probably noticed all kinds of weirdness lately. One friend noted that the feed didn’t validate as proper RSS, and he also mentioned that posts kept showing up as unread within his RSS client, when he had clearly read them before.

Part of this is my fiddling with the feed, and part is my having to fix some parts of the site that would have been annoying otherwise. In the fiddling department, the stories in my RSS feed normally look like

 Title Story Number of comments so far Comments 

But in some readers, the ‘number of comments’ bit was sliding up to the same line as the story, which in my family is just aesthetically not done. So I tweaked the feed a bit to put a <p> at the beginning of the ‘number of comments’ chunk, and a </p> after. That broke validation, because the HTML new-paragraph mark is not a valid XML tag. The solution, as recommended long ago by Jeff Chausse, pointing me to a W3schools.com page on this topic, was to wrap all the offending chunks within XML CDATA. I did that, the feed validated, and all was again well with the world.

Today I upgraded my site to the new version of the entriescache plugin which sits in the background of this here blosxom-powered weblog. It caused one little problem, which you might have noticed: text reading “meta-createddate: . . . ” showed up throughout my posts. I had to fix that tonight by going through every single one of my posts — 1,054 of them at this point — using a Perl script, thank god — and deleting one superfluous line.

So it may happen that your RSS reader tells you that about 1,000 of my posts have changed tonight. I’m sorry about that. There’s really not that much new here, and I doubt I’d be proud if there were.

Drat: a challenge to read 50 books in 2004 (via the Bookslut). I suspect I read somewhere on the order of 35 last year, though I’d need to dig through and check. I was also unemployed. I wonder how I’ll do this year.

Patent 6,671,714. Read it and weep.

John Dvorak has a good piece on why IBM should release Blue Linux (my cache) — that being a version of Linux for the desktop — as soon as possible. He’s right: someone needs to build momentum against Microsoft, and soon.

I’ve been trying for months to make this weblog look more spare. Everywhere that it seems the UI contains something redundant, I try to trim it out. The latest minor removal was the date header from the top of a given day’s posts: since each post already contained the date in small print at the bottom, the top date header was superfluous.

I welcome any suggestions about how to make this site more usable. One thing I need to work on is allowing people to not display posts from any given subject; if you don’t care about — or think I’m talking out of my ass about — Linux, or philosophy, or my own life, then I’d like to make it possible to skip those posts. All in due time.

Here’s a minor quibble, but I thought I’d toss it out there to see whether my view of proper UI is different than it should be. I just noticed an annoying little quirk in how one navigates through the Start Menu with the keyboard. In most other Windows lists that I’m aware of — say, any list of files, or a drop-down list inside a web page — typing ‘S’ will bring you to the first item that begins with S. Then typing ‘H’ a short time after you’ve typed ‘S’ will bring you to the first item that begins with ‘SH’. And so forth. This is very handy: you can jump quickly to the item you want. But within the Start Menu, I just noticed, typing ‘S’ brings you to the first item that begins with S, then typing ‘H’ brings you to the first item beginning with ‘H’. It’s an odd little quirk, and I’m not sure why the behavior here is different than in most of the other Windows lists. Does anyone know why?

(And if you wondered why I’m using Windows at all, given my Linux zealotry, it’s just because I have to use it at work.)

Today’s morning music is Ben Folds Five’s album Whatever and Ever, Amen, which is an underrated work of brilliance. But what caused me to write was the song “Kate,” which is really evocative for me. Not only does it evoke a particular time in my life — high school — but it evokes a particular person. Kate Bloom always struck me as the inspiration for that song: energetic, at times spacey, seemingly always happy, very girly, bouncy, etc. I wonder how she’s doing.

Update: Eliding from Whatever and Ever into The Police’s Outlandos d’Amour works better than you might think. “So Lonely,” in particular, is enough to make a guy jump around in his seat.

Every now and again I find it really hard to shut out all the worries in my head: the finances, the friends, the budding or hopefully-budding or deludedly-budding romances. Even reading a book doesn’t help at those times. Hitting the part of your current book in which the narrator sits naked in prison getting nibbled on by cockroaches and gets abandoned by everyone he knows or has ever cared about it not the best way to recover from such a mood.

Normally I can talk myself down from such moods: “You’re gonna be fine. Everything’s going to work out. Your finances will clear up,” etc. Tonight I’m having a hard time doing that. I think it’s time to sleep; perhaps waking up a couple hours early all week in preparation for a long workday has taken its toll.

So: g’night.

There is so much that’s wrong with Bill Gates’s recent attacks on Linux (my cache) that I don’t even know where to begin. How about the premise, which is that Microsoft OSes — having demonstrated innumerable security flaws — will be inherently more secure than Unices because Microsoft has to face attacks all the time, hence that it’s developing experience with how to handle them. Right. a) Then how come Microsoft OSes don’t get any more secure? And b) This reminds me of a point that David Brooks made in the New York Times a while back: the Bush administration doesn’t commit to any ideologies and handles everything on a case-by-case basis, so it’s going to learn from its mistakes, which is why we should be happy that things are going so horribly wrong in Iraq. I’m paraphrasing, and you probably think I’m joking, but that’s in fact what he said. When work clears up a bit, I’ll find a citation.

Gates goes on to make all kinds of other ridiculous assertions — such as that verifying the sender of an email is “critical for security.” I could go on, but I’ll just paraphrase security consultant Bruce Schneier and point out that Microsoft treats security problems as PR hassles rather than anything they actually need to fix. It’s time to move on to another OS, if only to avoid corporate doublespeak of the Gates variety. Why did they knight this man (my cache; via the pho list)?