Burrowowl

Congratulations, Minnesota. Enjoy your new senator. I suppose it’s too early for franken.senate.gov to be up just yet.

I’ve heard a lot about these new-fangled Facebooks and My Spaces and Twitters and such. They’re basically variations on the old-timey bulletin board systems I used to frequent before the world wide web hit. That 2400 baud Hayes modem was big pimpin’. But I digress. I know a lot of people that spend a fair amount of time an energy on Facebook. The CEO of the company I work for has a facebook page. So does my wife. And my sister. But not me.

Why? Well mostly because of how I was first introduced to it. Somebody comes across something interesting, publishes his thoughts about it and maybe a picture onto his page, and sends me a link. Or tweets about it. Or posts to a web forum. Doesn’t matter. I know the person, and am pretty numb regarding nonsense like duckrolls and rickrolls, so I follow it. When it lands on Facebook, the link provided invariably takes me to the following:

No, thank you. I won’t be signing in or signing up to view what amounts to a random blog post. My opinion of the poster takes a hit every time I run across this error, particularly when the link was put somewhere open to the public. This is somehow even more obnoxious than CAPTCHA systems, as those are most frequently employed to deter automated spam.

It’s everywhere. Listen. Listen. Listen. Here come the drums. Here come the drums.

As you may have heard, Iran had their presidential election last Friday. This would come as a surprise to most people who base their knowledge of Iran on the news coverage they receive in the United States, because President Ahmedinejad is frequently referred to as a dictator in the press. We also get the impression that the president of Iran would be in a position to authorize military attacks against other countries. We also get the impression that Iran has been exceptionally belligerent since the 1979 islamic revolution.

None of those impressions are particularly true, but that hardly matters. When the official results were announced, the leading opposition candidate Mousavi cried foul. Credulous bloggers and tweeters around the world stood at attention and immediate cries of election fraud were echoing through the Internet. Ahmedinejad couldn’t have won! 75% of Iranians are under 27 years old! The youth hunger for reform! Mousavi is the great hope for democracy in Iran! Where is my vote! Holy shit, people got shot at the riots!

I’m a knee-jerk skeptic at heart, so I took all of this with a grain of salt and a bit of caution. When storefronts are being vandalized in the midst of a massive political protest, there’s going to be teargas. There are going to be policemen in scary riot armor. People are going to get beaten. This happens in any country over any issue. In most parts of the world, when protests of this scale and character take place, somebody gets shot. Unfortunate, but true.

The main problem I see with the outside world’s reaction to Iran’s election results, whether on blogs or Twitter or CNN or my local newspaper, is that we’re getting the same echo chamber effect I’ve seen before. This is the kind of coverage we got about Panama before we invaded to snatch up Noriega. This is the kind of coverage we got about Iraq before each time we invaded there. This is the kind of coverage we got about Serbia before we started bombing Belgrade and putting soldiers into Kosovo.

Step away from your keyboard for a second. Take a deep breath. Count to ten slowly. Exhale. Think for a second about the tone you’re adding to the public conversation of this matter. Are you being constructive? What are the foreseeable consequences of what you’re contributing to? Are you speaking to the facts, or echoing and amplifying rumor and propaganda?

“Where is my vote?” is a question asked by many in Tehran this week. It was asked by many in Ohio in 2004 and Florida in 2000 and Texas in 1960. In modern democracies we vote anonymously to avoid undue pressure, but anonymity removes accountability and requires some element of trust. Let them work it out.

related:

• Pollster uses two-year-old video (but “does it matter?”)
• A partial account of wildly-inaccurate reporting via Twitter
• and yes, the results really do look implausible. I’m not denying that.

In late 1989, democracy and market capitalism were finally winning the cold war. Solidarity was heading towards political victory against the incumbent Communist party in Poland. Germany was on the road to reunification. Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution was brewing. Hungary was adopting a multi-party electoral system. Bulgaria would follow soon after. The people of Eastern Europe were pulling the plug on International Communism’s life support.

But on June 3rd, twenty years ago today, the government of the People’s Republic of China wasn’t having any of that. Thousands of students and intellectuals seeking political and economic reforms had gathered in Tiananmen Square in April to honor the death of Hu Yaobang, a political reformer. After two weeks of martial law, and protesters blocking soldiers from entering the square, the army got serious and things went south in a hurry. Armored personnel carriers and troopers with fixed bayonets closed in. Shots were fired by the soldiers, firebombs thrown by protesters, and over the next two days an unknown number of people would die.

China’s still a communist dictatorship. Political freedom remains next-to-nonexistant. A great many economic reforms have come through, allowing many to benefit and suffer from the freedom and predations of a limited market economy. A search of images.google.cn for “tiananmen square massacre” still looks just like a search for “tiananmen square,” but at least they’ll bow to explicit searches for “tiananmen square tank.” Maybe there’s some political progress after all.

There was a time when I used to post about Firefox in a kind, generous fashion. Then we had a falling out, but the alternatives just weren’t cutting it for me. I’d keep straying off to another browser for a while, lose interest, and end up back with the the most popular Google-funded communist web browser on the market. Google released Chrome. I’m not a big fan of Google as a company, but I gave it a spin. It was nice, but I don’t like the creepy multiple-year-duration cookies they dish out normally: I sure as heck wasn’t going to do my daily web browsing on something coded by those guys.

But it was pretty neato, so back in September when I found out about SRWare’s Iron browser, a stripped-down version of Chrome that doesn’t phone home, I went out and got it. Hadn’t written anything about it because I was waiting for that new-browser shine to wear off. It’s been a few months and a couple of updates, and I’m ready to render a verdict:

• Iron has Chrome’s tab behavior, which is excellent. You can tear a tab off to form a separate window, consolidate disparate windows into one unit, switch between tabs far more smoothly than in Firefox, Opera, or IE.
• Iron has Chrome’s light and responsive feel. By default it ties up a lot less screen real estate with control mechanisms.
• Iron has Chrome’s nice ctrl+f search function that actually highlights where on the scrollbar you’ll find additional instances of the phrase you’re looking for.
• Iron doesn’t rat you out to Mountain View every time you follow a link.

I recommend at least giving it a test drive. There is some IE-centric content on the ‘net that won’t render right, but that’s a problem I don’t find compelling enough to use IE as my go-to browser of choice. My only real complaint is that Iron doesn’t seem to be able to actually assert itself as the default browser in Windows Vista. This can be a little annoying when following links from other programs.

I never thought I’d see this, but as part of my job I field DMCA take-down requests. My employer is an Internet Service Provider, and from time to time our end-users may take it upon themselves to skirt around the release schedules and pricing schemes of various intellectual property industries. Traditionally the owners of those properties have been quite strident in their tone towards alleged pirates. This morning I noticed that J.K. Rowling’s folks have taken a more fan-friendly approach for an audio-book version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone:

Unauthorized file sharing is illegal.  However, we truly appreciate your
interest in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Audio).  We are making
every attempt to provide this wonderful content to you in a host of
legitimate ways, one of which is through the following
website:

http://www.apple.com/itunes

That’s a big change from the “You’re a criminal and we’ll see your ass in court” approach I’ve been seeing for years. A welcome change that I hope some of the other IP-enforcement types pick up on. Try to win back your customers. Barring that, stop twirling your mustaches and cackling evilly.

Full text of complaint follows
Read the rest of this entry »

A gaffe is roughly defined as “when a politician accidentally tells the truth.” This is the kind of misstatement that results in press offices racing to rephrase things into a carefully-crafted slate of B.S. that fits better with the message of the day. Earlier today Joe Biden, vice president of the United States, was asked what he would tell his own family in regards to the possibility of a pandemic influenza. Don’t go on airplanes, subways, or other confined places where the air recirculates and the flu can easily spread. That was, unfortunately, a pretty good piece of advice, and politically unspeakable at the moment.

Don’t go on public transit if you have symptoms. That’s the official advice. If you have to cough or sneeze, cover your face. Again, the official advice. Wash your hands frequently. Finally some good advice for avoiding a flu. The other advice has to do specifically with not communicating a flu to other people. If you’ve got the dreaded swine flu, staying off the subway isn’t going to help you. If you have reason to think you have it, get your ass to a doctor.

Nobody wants a public panic or anything, but Joe was just telling it like it is. He doesn’t want his family to get sick in the first place. Oh no.

File under O for “obvious.”

Today the Swedish justice system has found four muckey-mucks from The Pirate Bay guilty and subject to a year each in the klink, along with just under $1,000,000 in penalties each. The charge? “Assisting in making copyright content available.” Huh. The Pirate Bay’s administrators and financial backers were assisting in copyright infringement. Who’da thunk it?

One thing I’m quite unclear on about this matter is why they’ve bothered to fight this (including continuing the operation of the torrent tracker) when apparently they’re going the martyr route. They have been able to offer no defense that their site wasn’t intended to assist in infringing copyrights. This was clearly their intention. The Pirate Bay isn’t a massive clearinghouse for open-source freeware and public domain art. If this is an exercise in civil disobedience, they should be pleading guilty and getting to work on the Swedish nerd version of Letters from a Birmingham Prison.

TorrentFreak link

Earlier this evening, the local paper reported that local congressman Mike Thompson’s office has released a list of all the earmarks he requested for the 2010 federal budget. The total dollar amount is just shy of $395,000,000.00. This was even more than what they reported in this morning’s paper about my representative, Lynn Woolsey; she only asked for $285,000,000.00. Most folks these days seem to like to complain about earmarks, so I’m going to air my complaint too.

Why so little, Mrs. Woolsey? What the heck about district 1 merits $110,000,000.00 more in earmarks than district 6? You see, I’m rather a fan of having my representatives bring home the bacon. I pay my taxes and want my area to get its fair share. I didn’t hire my US Rep to go let some pencilneck in a Virginia office building decide where all the money should go. That guy doesn’t know where Occidental is and whether it really needs wastewater treatment plant improvements. He doesn’t see what happens to south-bound traffic on 101 North of Steele Lane at 4pm on a weekday.

Earmarks are more often good than bad. Some congressmen do a better job of separating the wheat from the chaff than others (Thomspon apparently got $1.2 billion in requests and pared it down to under $400 million, much of which will overlap requests from the White House), but the practice itself is fine. If we don’t like the earmarks we’re benefiting from, we can kick the bums out.

TL;DR – “all politics are local” == “fuck you, John McCain.”

Thompson’s list (PDF)
Woolsey’s list (PDF)

There’s a lot of talk about bailing out homeowners that are under water, upside-down, or otherwise looking at being totally screwed by their adjustable-rate or negative-amortization financial death traps. Some people talk about moral hazard, the risk that such action by the federal government will subsidize and therefore encourage bad behavior. This is on top of the usual arguments about it being a bad way to spend taxpayer money, about it not being the proper role of the government as imagined by the founding fathers, and so forth.

Keeping in mind that you can generally deter a behavior (like smoking) by taxing it, much as you can encourage a behavior by subsidizing it (like growing corn), let’s take a look at this from another angle. I submit to you, gentle reader, a proposed solution to the current explosion of foreclosures that doesn’t encourage bad behavior, and doesn’t cost billions in taxpayer funds.

Reduce the occurence of foreclosures by removing the tax incentive to do so. If you get a mortgage for $200,000 and default on it, the bank auctions it off for almost always less that it was worth when purchased. They write off the difference as a loss and reduce their net profit (and thus their tax burden) to suit. So don’t allow them to write off losses resulting from residential foreclosures.

One change in the tax code and the banks would have to change the formulae by which they decide whether to kick you out of your house or renegotiate your loan or let you slide for a little while longer. If your bank can’t handle the risk, maybe they can sell off your note to a financial institution that can (and write off that loss).

I like the idea of a dog-eat-dog market. The bold and the strong succeed. The foolish and the weak perish. Let the market sort it out, but take the tax-man’s thumb off the scale.