Thursday, January 31, 2002
Dave Winer
Bryan's working on a very beautiful new theme. It's like a Japanese garden.
Record Companies on the Defensive
The major record companies, which two weeks ago surprised analysts by seeking a temporary suspension in their copyright lawsuit against Napster, were about to face potentially damaging inquiries into their own behavior on maintaining copyrights.
Busted trust
Ellen Goodman
The only people making a profit off Enron now are cynics selling the souvenirs of their severance on eBay. The hot item on the site is theEnron Code of Ethics: Never Been Read. The bidding is up to $102.
Actually, when I last checked, there seems to be a flood of unread
copies available, so the price is coming down. The supply is greater than the demand...
Game's over for ballpark funds
Joan Vennochi
Welcome to Boston, and forget about getting your mitt on that $100 million in public money. It isn't going anywhere near a ballpark.
Hey, if Bob Kraft can build the Patriots a privately funded stadium, why can't the new owners of the Red Sox do the same for their team?
Souring on Saudi Arabia since Sept. 11
Jeff Jacoby
Saudi Arabia is conventionally described as an important US ally. Americans aren't so sure.
- Bin Laden is pissed that the U.S. has troops stationed in Saudi Arabia.
- Americans are starting to wonder what we're doing in a country that obviously doesn't like us very much.
Maybe we should just leave?
Explosives trace clears terminal
The incident forced officials to hold all 27 outgoing flights from the area and affected at least 20 inbound flights.
We should have Federal employees manning those checkpoints to make sure this doesn't happen again. What's that you say? Those were Federal employees? Oh, never mind...
Scores of priests involved in sex abuse cases
Under an extraordinary cloak of secrecy, the Archdiocese of Boston in the last 10 years has quietly settled child molestation claims against at least 70 priests, according to an investigation by the Globe Spotlight Team.
Damn, this stuff makes me sick.
Dave Winer
I'm also hoping to get Jerry Pournelle using Radio.
I would be psyched to see Chaos Manor published using Radio.
Connectivity: What it is and why it is so important
Bob Frankston
The rise of the Internet in the 1990's (though the process actually started decades earlier) has demonstrated that we can now treat both telephony and television as streams of bits over a packet network. In the network itself all packets are treated the same with no special handling for audio or video streams.
Selling smokers down the river
But that's not how the regulatory mind works. Smoking doesn't worry health commissars half as much as choice. Perish the thought that owners should be able to decide for themselves whether to allow smoking in their places of business or not. Perish the thought that customers should be able to choose between smoke-free and smoking bars.
This is one of those issues that gets me all fired up for some reason (which seems odd, because I think smoking is pretty stupid).
Fliers line up for airline abuse
The one passenger who dared plead quietly for consideration in making his flight received a stony stare. What are you, a terrorist?!
I'm not scared to fly, but I really don't understand how all the security
procedures are improving the safety of air travel.
'To Fight Freedom's Fight'
William Safire
[President Bush] has decided to destroy the destructive potential of the most dangerous states before any of them can credibly threaten to wipe out a U.S. city or infect our nation with an epidemic.
Taking the threats towards Iran, Iraq, and North Korea to their logical conclusion. Really scary stuff.
The Limits of Power
The evolving Bush Doctrine implies a pre-emptive use of conventional force to take out missile launchers, industrial enterprises and facilities that appear to be involved in the fabrication of unconventional weapons.
I hope that this is a misreading of Bush's State of the Union address. So far I've been impressed with the restraint shown by the Bush Administration in their handling of foreign affairs since September 11. Perhaps this is just tough talk
...?
How to tell if your ass is too small
Apparently this is an old joke - but damn! it's funny...
What Is An "Unlawful Combatant," And Why It Matters
Michael Dorf
The Administration's objection to affording al Qaeda and Taliban captives prisoner-of-war status probably has less to do with the conditions in which the captives are held than with what the Administration plans to do with them in the long term.
This article lays out many of the reasons why we want the Taliban and al Qaeda captives to be considered unlawful combatants
and not POWs.
The way I figure it, the captives probably should be classified as unlawful combatants
. However, Article 5 of the 1949 Geneva Convention provides for ambiguity in the status of captives:
Should any doubt arise as to whether persons, having committed a belligerent act and having fallen into the hands of the enemy, belong to any of the categories enumerated in Article 4, such persons shall enjoy the protection of the present Convention until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal.
It seems to me that the proper course of action is to treat the prisoners humanely and settle their eventual disposition in some sort of internationally recognized court. If we want to maintain the moral upper hand, we should not be afraid to cross our t's and dot our i's.
Dull Men's Club
Rotating a Mattress - Bob Westerlund writes to ask,I am hoping for some advice. I got a new mattress two weeks ago. The instructions say to rotate it every two weeks for the first few months, then monthly after that. The instructions aren't clear though. Do they mean turn it completely over or just rotate it without turning it over? And how should it be rotated, clockwise or counterclockwise? Any advice would be greatly appreciated as it's now two weeks and the mattress needs to be rotated. Thank You. Any readers know the answers? Meanwhile, Bob ... don't tear off the label ... which of course as you know is against the law to do.
I think I might qualify for this club.
I found the note from Bob about Rotating a Mattress
(in the Dull Activities
section) to be especially relevant because I encountered the same problem this very evening. I decided to turn the mattress completely over tonight, but other times I've just rotated it. I haven't actually kept track of whether I turn it clockwise or counter-clockwise. In fact, now that I think of it, I've been pretty casual about the whole thing. I think that alternating between turning it completely over and rotating it clockwise is probably the best way to go.
Anyway, that's not what I intended to write about. The advice about not removing the label? If you actually read the label you'll find that it says, UNDER PENALTY OF LAW THIS TAG NOT TO BE REMOVED EXCEPT BY THE CONSUMER
(emphasis added). So Bob (the consumer) is actually free to do whatever he wants to with the label.
