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Monday, October 10, 2005
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Dramatic Opportunity. What contemporary political figure will make a better subject for a grand historical drama than Karl Rove?
Not Nixon: there's not much you can do with such a small, petty, angry man, cornered at last. Not Reagan, passing long, hazy days in the Oval Office, scheming to get an extra chocolate chip cookie. Not Clinton: there's just no drama in good government tarnished by personal weakness; not even Gibbon could find the story line though the third century of the Empire offers plenty of Clintonesque examples. And not Bush, who seems to lack either the weight or the awareness you'd need for drama.
At Harvard, I once played Kingmaker with an undergraduate woman whose ancestor was Richard Neville. [Mark Bernstein]
It's worth pointing out that regardless of what anyone may think of Clinton as a good subject for historical drama, he actually was the subject for a comedy.
10:39:54 AM 
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Scott Granneman -
Skype security and privacy concerns - Mr. Granneman agrees with me
that eBay's purchase of Skype bodes ill for Skype's security. I'd
wager they'll put a back-door in their encryption real soon.
That's bad enough, but now Skype is going to be owned by eBay. I know
that lots of people just loooove eBay. I use them myself, most
recently to enhance my Li'l Abner comics collection, but I'm careful
about the information I give them. Why? Well, it seems that there are
three kinds of companies: those that fight for customers' privacy in
the face of the demands of law enforcement; those that require some
sort of official, constitutionally-mandated documents - like, oh, say,
a warrant or subpoena - before handing over customer info to the cops;
and eBay.
Think I'm being a little harsh on eBay? At the CyberCrime 2003
conference, Joseph E. Sullivan, Director of Compliance and Law
Enforcement Relations for eBay,
had this to say to a group of law enforcement officials:
"I know from investigating eBay fraud cases that eBay has probably the
most generous policy of any internet company when it comes to sharing
information. We do not require a subpoena except for very limited
circumstances. We require a subpoena when we need the financial
information from the site, credit card info or sometimes IP
information. ... So, that really opens the door for us. That means
that what our policy is that if you are law enforcement agency you can
fax us on your letterhead to request information: who is that beyond
the seller ID, who is beyond this user ID. We give you their name,
their address, their e-mail address and we can give you their sales
history without a subpoena. ... We will probably tell you too that you
might want to get a subpoena because we are looking for credit card
info and you ask that. ... We also do other things to facilitate your
investigation by looking and doing some searches around on our own,
typically to see if there are some other user ID's associated with
that thing. ... We are doing a lot of work with law enforcement
agencies."
[End the War on Freedom]
As I've mentioned 10:32:58 AM
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Why Do-It-Yourself Photo Printing Doesn't Add Up. Ant writes "CNET News.com and The New Yorks Times (no registration required) report that even though the prices of printers have dropped up to 30 percent in the last few months thanks to a savage price war, buyers are going to pay at least 28 cents a print. This is if you believe the manufacturers' math. It could be closer to 50 cents a print if you trust the testing of product reviewers at Consumer Reports. In the meantime, the price of printing a 4-by-6-inch snapshot at a retailer's photo lab, like those inside a Sam's Club, is as low as 13 cents. Snapfish.com, an online mail-order service, offers prints for a dime each if you prepay. At those prices, why bother printing at home? Consumers seem to be saying just that. For the 12 months ended in July, home printing accounted for just 48 percent of the 7.7 billion digital prints made, down sharply from 64 percent in the previous 12 months, according to the Photo Marketing Association International, a trade group for retailers and camera makers. The number of photos spewing out of home printers is up quite handsomely, however, because of the overall growth of digital photo printing--up about 68 percent from the year-earlier period - but retail labs clearly have the advantage..." [Slashdot]
The cost for an 8x10 print on my Epson 2200 is about $1.50, but the reason for printing at home (or in the office, in my case) has nothing to do with the cost per print. When I make my own prints, they look the way I want them to look, not the way whoever designed the machine wanted them to look. Also, the people who work at those cheap photo places are likely to screw up the negatives. Most people never notice it, because the one set of prints that they ever want come out of the machine at the same time as the negatives, but I often do reprints.
9:11:11 AM
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© Copyright
2005
Ken Hagler.
Last update:
11/3/2005; 10:22:07 AM.
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