Farewell article by Alex Dalmady.

Excellent and somewhat sad farewell article by Alex Dalmady explaining why he decided to leave Venezuela....

[The Devil's Excrement]

When I read this I didn't think I'd posting... I thought it would be too finantial for me, but I really identified with Alex. I wish I could leave too.

9:07:57 PM  What do you think? ( Thoughts) Who linked? []   

If you're watching everybody, you're watching nobody. John Gilmore's written a great post for Farber's Interesting People list analyzing the failings with the universal surveillance proposals of the current regime.

But even if they have a dozen systems that can read the lettering on a basketball, they can't read the lettering on all the basketballs in the world. Or even all the basketballs in Iraq, or Columbus, Ohio.

So what matters is having good judgment about what to look at. And good judgment is where our intelligence bureacracy, and our current political leadership, both have notoriously bad records. The spy agencies didn't predict the end of the Cold War, didn't predict 9/11, didn't predict the information revolution, are drowning in way too much data with little understanding, and resisted the spread of the encryption that barely protects our infrastructures today. Meanwhile the President and his gang are destroying freedom at home, wasting vast resources on third rate tinpot dictators, destabilizing international law and long-standing peaceful alliances, and supporting criminality and corruption and terrorism all over the world with price supports on illegal drugs.

This government hasn't learned that if you're watching everybody, you're watching nobody. Our society was much safer when it was run by people who knew that if you spend 99% of your time investigating innocent citizens who you have no reason to suspect, you're going to have real trouble catching the people you have actual reasons to suspect. Either these guys are stupid, or they really are trying to build a police state. My friends in government try to convince me that incompetence is far more common than malevolence -- but they forget that positions of power attract such people.

Link

Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]

5:40:31 PM  What do you think? ( Thoughts) Who linked? []   

I just heard that Henry Norr, who I've known for almost 20 years, has been suspended from the San Francisco Chronicle because of his anti-war views. There are quite a few articles about this. "I don't write about national affairs, I don't write about national politics, I write about things like spam," Norr said in an interview. "To me, in any normal understanding of what is a conflict of interest, I didn't have one." [Scripting News]

Want a job? Stop thinking! We learned nothing from history...

12:48:09 PM  What do you think? ( Thoughts) Who linked? []