Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

Neat: if you use a Mozilla browser, your Google experience will be a little faster.

Google has an incentive to do everything it can to defeat Microsoft; Microsoft is obviously its biggest competitor, and the most obvious threat to Google’s plans for world domination. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that open-source is the biggest threat to Microsoft’s monopoly, so we should expect more large corporations to adopt open-source strategies as a way of taking on Microsoft. IBM, Sun, and to a limited extent Apple have already done so. Google appears to be getting behind Mozilla (not just with this prefetching announcement; there have been a lot of other interesting movements in that direction), and it’ll be interesting to see what the next year brings in the Mozilla-Google collaboration.

I wonder if anything related to CSS is unanswerable in the face of Google and AListApart.com. I wanted to find a way to have the rows in a table alternate colors, so a quick google for “even rows”+”odd rows”+css brings up A List Apart’s page on Zebra Tables. That site has saved my ass more than a few times now, and it happens to be beautiful.

I’m in the middle of Where Wizards Stay Up Late, the history of the Internet. I’ll have more to write about it specifically soon, but I find it really cool that much of the Net’s history is already written — was written, at the time it was happening — in the Request for Comments documents. They’re very formal affairs now, but still fairly penetrable as far as technical docs go. Looking back at the old RFCs, though, they look like memos:

We are currently preparing a clean version of the Network protocol, hopefully suitable for immediate implementation. As advertised, we will send these specs out on April 28.

Since the SJCC is one week later, we will host a discussion meeting in Atlantic City, Thursday, May 7, win the afternoon. The purpose of the discussion meeting will be for us to explicate unclear details of our April 29 document, and for everyone to exchange gripes, suggestions and schedules.

(Note that the network session, chaired by Larry Roberts with papers from BBN, et al is Thursday morning.)

It’s neat to see the openness of the whole process. The Net was built by hackers, in the original sense of the world.

 . . . Actually, can someone out there with access to the online Oxford English Dictionary find me their entry on the evolution of the world “hacker”? When did it start taking on connotations of “evil dudes who break into computers”? I assume it wasn’t a clean break: the original-sense hackers are the only ones who really know the innards of a network, so it’s reasonable that old-sense hackers would be the only candidates to become new-sense hackers.

The plan for this week is to get up every day and get to the Sherman Café by 8:00. I was out of town Monday and Tuesday morning, but Wednesday, at least, is starting well. And I feel super-productive, despite the high blogging frequency.

Via Wendy Seltzer’s blog: Declan McCullagh photographs Wendy blogging the Grokster case from the steps of the Supreme Court. There’s something extremely cool about that.

There ought to be word for this sort of joke-inside-of-a-deliberate-non-joke:

“Australian officials cracked The Da Vinci Code when they discovered illegal drugs hidden inside a copy of the best-selling novel sent to Australia from Britain, Justice Minister Chris Ellison said on Tuesday.”

The drugs in question were anabolic steroids. There’s a Jose Canseco joke somewhere here, but you’ll have to think of it yourself.

I’d like to use CSS so that a long list could be broken automatically into two columns. Let’s say it’s an eight-item list; I’d like items 1-4 to go in column 1 and items 5-8 to go in column 2 — or maybe more sophisticatedly, for items 1, 3, 5 and 7 to go in column 1 and items 2, 4, 6 to go in column 2.

The obvious ways to do this include a) creating a two-column table with a 4-item list in each column, or b) using the same two-column table with one cell per list item. But that doesn’t separate content from presentation enough. There must be a way to do this through CSS. Any ideas?

No one cares to know which radio station is your favorite. I, in particular, am not interested in your predilection for Tim McGraw.

Thank you for playing.

I didn’t realize that so many people owned homes. Roughly 2/3 of “householders” (I assume there’s a precise definition for this term) own homes, or at least have one mortgaged. Of those, some portion will default or will eventually bail give up on homeownership. Even assuming the rate of default is very high, it seems reasonable that at least half the nation’s “householders” own homes. That’s quite impressive.

What’s the one thing that could drive me to wear headphones on the subway and possibly cover both sides of my face with protective cardboard blinders? Hm  . . .  hard to say  . . .  oh right: installing televisions on the T to blare advertising at me.

C-SPAN features a debate today between Fred von Lohmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Theodore Olson, the former U.S. Solicitor General and current MPAA rep, on the subject of the Grokster case.

I’m downloading the debate right now, and I’ll watch it when it’s done. But in the meantime, Copyfight linked to the debate, and also linked to a “working link” for the debate that turns out — as far as I can tell — to be the result of someone holding a badly-focused videocamera up to the television. Please do yourself a favor and avoid watching it; it is a recipe for a headache.

I’ve recently taken on a little work doing web design for a theatre company, and I was a little bummed to hear — as they suggested to me — that I’d have to use FTP to do the job. I’ve always disliked the FTP way of doing site design: edit locally, upload, reload the page you’re interested in, correct errors locally, re-upload and so forth.

I don’t know why it took me more than 10 seconds to discover it, but the theatre company’s website is sshable. I signed in, looked around, changed the default shell from csh to bash, then uploaded my local ssh public key to the remote machine. Voilà: from now on I can sign into their machine from my laptop without a password, which means uploading or downloading a bunch of files from them is a snap. So then I uploaded my local bash and vim configurations. Now the remote machine looks like a copy of my own. It’s running FreeBSD (just like OS X) so it’s got some geek cred already.

My only complaint is that the delete key doesn’t work, and that within vim (version 6.2, with possibly some local customizations) the backspace key doesn’t work either. The TERM variable equals ‘xterm’. Can anyone with more experience in these sorts of things walk me through getting the keys to work properly?

Reading Copyfight’s coverage of the Grokster case, and particularly its coverage of today’s Grokster hearing before the Supreme Court, one really bloody obvious question came to me: why the fuck can’t we just videotape the Court’s proceedings? Why does there have to be a priesthood of journalists conveying their impressions of the Court’s reaction, and the really bizarrely anachronistic oil paintings of the Supremes that end up on the nightly news?

The Court is at least 50 years behind the times.

It’s a fairly nice night out, the sun just set a few minutes ago (leaving the sky a beautiful pink after the rain), and I’m outside the Somerville Public Library, so I decided to pop open my laptop and get a little emailing done. This is nice. It’s doubly nice, given that the weather now permits me to sit outside, and that the library offers free WiFi. Score!

I just spent a while at the Verizon store for a very mundane reason: my cell phone won’t charge anymore; the connector where the charger goes in is busted. It still took me 45 minutes to sit and watch an untrained (or maybe “trained” in quotes is a better way to put it) tech fumble through the procedural hoops.

I think there are two fundamental problems here:

1. Anyone who is sufficiently talented to make this process painless would not work as a tech at Verizon. The same goes for telephone tech-support people at Verizon DSL. Indeed, the same goes for a great many tech jobs.
2. The network isn’t factored correctly: I shouldn’t be buying my phone from the same people who handle the network. I should be able to buy a phone from anyone (Radio Shack, say) and use it on Verizon’s network. It would seem ludicrous to most people if we had to get our computers registered before we could use them on the Internet, but that’s precisely what we do with the cell network.

   Note that this item doesn’t really solve the instant problem; presumably in a world where I got the phone from someone else, I’d have to go to them when I had problems. And they’d be just as likely to be staffed by morons. But somehow a world where the devices are independent of the network seems less prone to interaction with morons; I never find myself talking with tech support for my laptop, and very rarely talk with tech support for Comcast.

He’s writing a totally contentless piece (deliberately contentless this time, as opposed to accidentally so on most days), and he says this:

Finally, a love for a team can be a philosophical love, a love for the Platonic ideal the team embodies. For teams not only play; they come to represent creeds, a way of living in the world. The Red Sox ideal is: nobility through suffering. The Cubs ideal is: It is better to be loved than feared. The Yankee ideal is: All cower before the greatness that is Rome.

The Mets ideal is: God smiles upon his darlings. The history of the Mets teaches that miracles happen and the universe is a happy place. If this is the nature of my love, then I can only love the team so long as it still embodies this ideal.

Wow. I thought he applied his reductive bullshit to politics only, as an underhanded way of attacking liberals while appearing not to. But he can do it with baseball too.

Brazil’s flirtation with the open-source movement continues apace. I’d just like to address one point raised in the article:

“The government shouldn’t be the one who decides what hardware and software will go into these computers,” said Júlio Semeghini, a member of Congress from the opposition Social Democratic Party. “That’s undemocratic.”

It’s an interesting point. In principle there seems to be little wrong with letting consumers choose between Microsoft and open-source. But the benefits accuring to Brazil if it adopts open-source are long-term: it could build an entire domestic software industry, starting from code that’s freely available to its developers. Contrast this with moving to Microsoft, which really buys Brazilians nothing. In fact it just funnels money to the United States, rather than keeping it in Brazil where an indigenous software and support network could develop. This doesn’t seem to me like the kind of policy decision that price signals can encode; the market isn’t going to figure this out. (Though I bet Richard Posner could tell me why I’m wrong.)

In time, it’s totally reasonable to suppose that localized versions of open-source products will spread and help one another. Perhaps Brazil will discover user-interface improvements that it needs to make to open-source to make it work with Brazil’s own peculiarities. Maybe Peru will find that the Brazilian version helps address their needs, and will build on it from there. Depending on Brazil’s reasons for moving to open-source — Lessig suggests that they very much understand the connection between open-source and democracy — they may freely encourage this spreading. The faster open-source develops, the faster the developing world can overcome the massive head start that the U.S. has taken.

The fight against Microsoft isn’t just about maximizing consumer surplus. It’s similar to the fight against Blockbuster: as Roger Ebert points out and I’ve confirmed with friends, Blockbuster sanitized the final few minutes of Y Tu Mamá También in a way that completely changed the film. Or rather, in all likelihood Blockbuster demanded that filmmakers make the change, or they wouldn’t rent out the movie. When a large company makes a demand like this, filmmakers have no choice but to relent; to do otherwise would doom their movie. Which is to say: the danger from a Blockbuster isn’t just in the monopoly prices it can charge, but in the control it can exercise as a result of its dominance. The fight against Microsoft has a lot of the same logic, and developing nations like Brazil would do well to look out for their long-term interests when choosing their software.

Apparently Deep Throat is sick:

Bob Woodward, a reporter on the team that covered the Watergate story, has advised his executive editor at the Washington Post that Throat is ill. And Ben Bradlee, former executive editor of the Post and one of the few people to whom Woodward confided his source’s identity, has publicly acknowledged that he has written Throat’s obituary.

Maybe it’s Rehnquist?

Update: Or maybe it’s famed Plumber Johnnie Cochran.

Update, 31 March 2005: A pretty thorough debunking of the Rehnquist-is-Deep-Throat theory.

I was really hopeful that Brooks would avoid making an ass out of himself this time. No such luck.

After comparing the liberal and conservative reactions to the Schiavo case — and crusing at a fairly rapid clip along the Highway of Reasonableness, only to slip over the Razor Edge Of Overgeneralization and plummet into the Chasm Of Mental Mondrian Paintings, we get this:

The central weakness of the liberal case is that it is morally thin. Once you say that it is up to individuals or families to draw their own lines separating life from existence, and reasonable people will differ, then you are taking a fundamental issue out of the realm of morality and into the realm of relativism and mere taste.

I’ll have to be quick, because attacking Brooks feels like knocking the books out of a schoolboy’s arms.

First, the only “liberal argument” I’ve heard about the Schiavo case is that she wants to die, and that she should be allowed to. Everyone, liberal and conservative, would much prefer to see people sign living wills before they reach Schiavo’s sad, sad state.

Brooks turns this into something about being nonjudgmental, and the stereotyped liberal mushiness:

You are saying, as liberals do say, that society should be neutral and allow people to make their own choices. You are saying, as liberals do say, that we should be tolerant and nonjudgmental toward people who make different choices.

What begins as an appealing notion — that life and death are joined by a continuum — becomes vapid mush, because we are all invited to punt when it comes time to do the hard job of standing up for common principles, arguing right and wrong, and judging those who make bad decisions.

If anything, we’re standing up for freedom of contract, which is what conservatives ostensibly stand for. We’re standing up for the right to self-destiny. That’s all. There’s nothing mushy about it. If I want to die (I have no idea whether Schiavo actually wanted to die — but she’s not the point, is she? This case was about principles from the start), I should be able to put a gun to my head and do it, or request that when the time comes the hospital pull the trigger for me.

Brooks’s fundamental conceit is that there is an overriding principle here, free of any real-life confusion. Oddly, this is the same conceit that drives the assault on “activist judges”; it’s the belief that there is a set of principles out there (moral or legal; it doesn’t especially matter to Brooks et al.) that is inviolable and easy for the whole world to see. If a lawyer sits down at a set of law books, say Brooks and Scalia and their imitators, he will see a single answer. The law, or morals, are like a theorem.

No one really believes that reality is that unclouded. But where else can Brooks be going when he talks like so?

The core belief that social conservatives bring to cases like Terri Schiavo’s is that the value of each individual life is intrinsic. The value of a life doesn’t depend upon what a person can physically do, experience or achieve. The life of a comatose person or a fetus has the same dignity and worth as the life of a fully functioning adult.

I mean  . . .  yes, sure, no one should disagree with that. But it’s not the basis for a policy. The law recognizes the dignity of the living person, but every now and then the state puts certain people to death. Why? Well, because sometimes other rights conflict with the right to life. It’s not fair, and it’s inconsistent with a fundamental respect to life, but we can’t expect strict consistency either from the common law or from the messiness of voting.

It may well be that there is a set of principles from which we could derive ethics that we can all agree on, and among which there are no contradictions. If such a thing is possible, then one of the following is true:

1. The right to life is not fundamental among this system of ethics, or
2. The right to life is fundamental, and it’s thereby morally wrong to sentence humans to death.

And yet the social-conservative wing that Brooks pretends to scorn would, I assume, be the first to assert that sometimes the state has a right to kill people. Where’s the “right to life” here? It’s a right, yes, but it’s not a fundamental right.

I’m very rambly, because it’s very late. I just hate to see this turned into a debate over abstract principles that really have nothing to do with the case at hand. I’ll accept that there is at least one principle undergirding the Schiavo case: people ought to be able, if possible, to choose the way in which they die. This immediately turns away from a question of principle, into one of policy — namely, how do we establish what someone wanted before they became incapable of telling us? Fortunately we have a majestic common law that establishes precisely the will that we’re looking for. When we’re lucky, people leave behind their wills and assign durable power of attorney. Then we know what they want, which should be the only principle that anyone cares about.

When we do get cases like Ms. Schiavo’s, they’re irretrievably messy, and no recourse to hallowed principles is going to clean it up, no matter how much Brooks would wish it to be so.

I wrote all of the above before finishing the final few paragraphs of Brooks’s essay. Finishing it, he’s basically making my point — that liberals focus on laws, whereas conservatives focus on principles:

If you surveyed the avalanche of TV and print commentary that descended upon us this week, you found social conservatives would start the discussion with a moral argument about the sanctity of life, and then social liberals would immediately start talking about jurisdictions, legalisms, politics and procedures. They were more comfortable talking about at what level the decision should be taken than what the decision should be.

Laws exist, at least in part, to codify principles and make them flesh. A law is a philosophy taken out of the academy and applied to real people. Rather than judging each new case as a mere instance of a grand principle, we make a trial out of it and decide the new case based on its particulars. We bring juries in, at least in part, because they might see things in this case that sclerotic judges would have written off as a mere instance of a type that they’d seen thousands of times before. The reason we have laws is because we have explicitly thrown off morals as our guidepost through complex situations.

Perhaps law doesn’t provide as much guidance as a moral, but I thought we considered that a virtue?

 . . . and damn is it good. I’m not a software or a hardware developer, but I do my share of hacking and get just as caught up in the excitement of problem-solving — or the monotony of debugging — as much as a lot of my more tech-savvy friends. The great genius in Soul of a New Machine is that it captures this mood, and the postpartum meltdown after the excitement’s over, in a way that I think most people can relate to.

I imagine that the early days of Groove felt like DG in the ‘70’s.