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 Wednesday, June 25, 2003
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - A quick Review from PEI.
I finished the book last night (Sunday). Rowling has pulled it off and has turned in another page turner. I can hardly imagine the pressure that she must be under to keep up the standard. Only two books to go. Like much of what is popular today, the book dwells mainly on the split between the corporate and the magic world. The Matrix and Lord of the Rings also speak to the inhuman aspect of the corporate/bureaucratic world and our longing for freedom. In this book, the split is deepened beyond merely the Muggles and the Wizards to include the invasion of Hogwarts by the Bureaucrats from the Ministry of Magic.... [Robert Paterson's Radio Weblog]
Read Robert's extraordinary review of Harry Potter. He comes a little closer to explaining why this book is such a phenomenon. While on some levels it is episodic, with the episodes somehow dosconnected, they do all seem to be coming together. I hope she can continue with the next 2 books. She has set up a task with more mythic requirements than we might suppose. Please have the creative spirit to reach a conclusion befitiing of the previous books. 11:39:20 PM 
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Reconstructive suggestions. In this morning's New York Times, Thomas Friedman busts the Pentagon for the obvious: The Bush Pentagon went into this war assuming that it could decapitate the Iraqi army, bureaucracy and police force, remove the Saddam loyalists and then basically run Iraq through the rump army, bureaucracy and police. Wrong. What happened instead was that they all collapsed, leaving a security and administrative vacuum, which the U.S. military was utterly unprepared to fill.
So Kevin Jones has good idea: You know what I think we should do? Send the guys who created Burning Man over to iraq. They build a better society than the one they left behind every year out in the desert and then burn it down, cuz it's not about stuff or money. It's about creating your reality. And you can create a good one. A just one....
He also provides some helpful reminders: The Venetian empire lasted for 500 years as a world power even though, or maybe because, they were founded on a fragile series of islands in a marshy lagoon. They were able to do it because 1. They knew they pissed in the pool from which they drew their drinking water and which they used as their principle defense. And 2. They were able to subordinate the display of the male ego into actions that benefited society as a whole; 'I will show you my power with this new library,' 'oh yeah, I will build a new gallery and hospital'.... men's need to strut was channeled, so the boys strutted like roosters in their clearly bounded preening pens and society flourished. Second, the Dutch trading empire prior to William of Orange had perfected the highest profit and lowest cost international trade of any empire because they figured out how to respect the others they were encountering and do business in a way that both sides found satisfying so that their military expenditures were much less. They were the only ones the Japanese would do business with. Interestingly, these two intelligent empires were both resource constrained, so they compensated with life giving social structures. The thinker who unsuccessfully lobbied for the Dutch to hold onto their trading IP as a competitive, but ollaborative, differentiator while ceding military power to the rising British empire was Hugo Grotius (1583-1645). He is credited as the founder of international law, which grew into the Hague. We are an empire. You can have a good empire, with enlightened use of soft power. It's happened a few times in history. We need to make it happen again. Burning Man demonstrates the kind of civil-society-building power we could couple with our military power. We can't back away from being the world's dominant global power. But we can use all the kinds of power at our disposal to bring about the world we need to create in order to survive or maybe I should say ensure our mutual survivability.
Clearly speaking loudly and carrying the biggest stick isn't doing the job. [The Doc Searls Weblog]
While I am trying to remove myself from the "It's all that right wing conspiracy's fault" sort of mentality (It is so hard to do;-), I liked Doc's little article. As with so many of our problems we see today, whether they are of our own making or not, require a third way. The big stick path of the right will not work for long. The whining of the left does not solve anything, either. We need to create a new path, a new approach to solving these problems. It will happen, because the tools are there, they only have to be used properly. I would like us to be the ones to use them. 11:25:24 PM
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'Death penalty' for Enron. Enron, the bankrupt energy company, is barred from selling electricity, following a so-called 'death penalty' imposed by regulators. [BBC News | Business | World Edition]
I hope Enron dies a terrible death in Chapter 11. It has caused more economic turmoil through illegal means than any other in recent memory, if not in the history of the US. Its effects on power companies in CA are still being felt. Its illegal manipulation of such a vital portion of the economy should result in its utter and final removal from American business. But it will probably emerge and simply change its name. That is what another company fueled by fraud, Worldcom, is doing. Change the name and its is a whole new world. Just end it now. 11:18:50 PM
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Space impact 'saved Christianity'. Did the explosion from a meteoroid impact convert Constantine to Christianity in AD 312 and alter the course of western history? [BBC News | Science/Nature | World Edition]
On such special events does the history of the world turn. I am sure there will be a nice science fiction story about what would have happened if Constantine had not seen the meteor. 11:13:49 PM
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Glimpse of forgotten treasures. Henry Wellcome was perhaps the most prolific collector of all time - with a passion bordering on obsession. [BBC News | Science/Nature | World Edition]
I find it ironic that the man who created the Wellcome Trust, which was responsible for funding a huge amount of the genomics work done over the last 10 years, could have as a 'nutcase.' His obsessive need to collect, coupled with his huge fortune, is now providing us with some very interesting information. 11:11:31 PM
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'Spammer' protests innocence. A UK man accused by Microsoft of spamming says it is a case of mistaken identity and he will fight to clear his name. [BBC News | Technology | World Edition]
How must it feel to be a small guy suddenly having to come up with tens of thousands of dollars because of a MS publicity stunt? MS has no need to reall make sure it has the right guy. It can always apologize, say it did not mean it, say it was a mistake that could happen to anyone. But if this man is innocent, he should get a huge settlement from MS. And this does nothing to stop real spammers. 11:08:40 PM
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'Probable cause' of shuttle disaster found. A piece of foam from the shuttle's fuel tank striking Columbia's left wing is the most likely cause of the accident, say investigators. [BBC News | Science/Nature | World Edition]
Such a tragedy. All because people did not fully understand the simulations they were using to examine the foam. Many voices rose up to question the process but none were heard at any level that could make a difference. This is the same problem that has led to both shuttle explosions. Unless NASA makes substantial changes in its organization, it will happen again. 11:03:51 PM
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Music labels hunt net 'pirates'. The US record industry is set to take legal action against hundreds of individuals who swap music over the internet. [BBC News | Front Page | World Edition]
The second BBC link and it describes the new ability of the RIAA to go after anyone they feel like it. What a great time it must be to be an IP lawyer. 10:30:12 PM
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BBC Goes RSS, Big-Time. In London two weeks ago I asked the BBC online folks if they'd be doing a big RSS push. The... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
This is great news. The BBC takes the lead with these newsfeeds. I am subscribing to a lot of them. 9:03:03 PM
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Library Filters OK'd, First Amendment Loses. AP: Court OKs Anti-Porn Filters in Libraries. The 6-3 ruling reinstates a law that told libraries to install filters or... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
As I read the Supreme Court ruling, the library HAS to turn off the filters if asked. Otherwise they will be in violation of the ruling, opening themselves up to even more problems. The real problem hear is that no one knows what sites the filters filter. It is all proprietary and the companies have sued people who tried to reverse engineer the databases. So, could a high powered 'investor' provide money to prevent a competitor's sites from being seen? Probably. We have already had instances of these companies filtering pro-gay and well as anti-gay, simply because of the political stance of the site, not for any obscene content. Who watches the cutodians to the Internet? At this point, no one. I am waiting for the first report of real abuse by a filtering company. The temptation is just too great because the customers for the filtering software are not the libraries or the patrons but the shareholders who only care about higher profits. Some company will just not be able to resists. 9:02:13 PM
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Boingo to Support Mac OS X. Sky Dayton is a known fellow traveler in the Mac cosmos, but his Boingo WiFi network has been a Windows-only... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
This is great news. The more WiFi penetrates, the better we will all be. 8:56:48 PM
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Secret 'Justice' a Grotesque Notion. Jeff Jarvis, whom I greatly admire, takes me to task for this recent posting in which I pointed at this... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]
Dan Gilmour is a very good journalist. Not just a good tech journalist, but one of the men that need to be listened to. He has brought up some very good questions that we need to be exploring. What are the legal ramifications of threatening someone with enemy combatant status in order to get a plea? We have seen abuses by the Justice system before when it has pressed innocent people to cop a plea under threat of horrific consequences. Without openess, you can almost guarantee that there will be further abuse. But, of course, since it is all secret, we won't really know about it, will we? This would be dangerous enough for a group of politicians I trusted. But this is the group that brought us Iran-Contra (to my mind, the greatest threat to American government in my life) and got away with it. I will remain skeptical. 8:54:56 PM
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Well, I am playing with my new 250 Gbyte firewire hard drive. While editing my son's soccer games, I realized that 80 Gbytes was just not enough. Now I have about 3 hours of soccer video to edit down. I'm looking forward to it. I've got to think of some appropriate music. 8:45:15 PM
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Analysts: doubtful Power Mac G5 will help Apple increase 'its miniscule market share'. "In launching its next-generation G5 processor, Apple has made some innovative and market-savvy moves, say industry watchers. The company has formed an alliance with tech powerhouse IBM, it has moved into the new world of 64-bit computing, and it can now claim its computers are as fast as -- possibly faster than -- the fastest Windows PCs. Yet doubt remains about the company's prospects for increasing its miniscule market share, which now hovers around 3.5 percent," reports... [MacDailyNews]
Analysts just do not understand what Apple is. Fortune does. This article explains the difference between Oracle (or MS) and Apple. Apple stands for customer choice and innovation. Oracle stands for lockin and shareholder's needs, not the customer. Oracle's model is great for the bottom line and the holders of stock, but awful for everyone else. Eventually, everyone else will realize this and put Oracle in its place. Let's hope Apple is still around by then. 6:57:44 PM
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