Sunday, April 28, 2002

Nobody Expects the Boulder Inquisition (to Move) This Blog Has Moved We've decided to move the blog to our own domain, whis.net.  Not sure how to get this communicated to the rest of the world, though. 10:13:14 AM

Thursday, April 25, 2002

The Delusion of Fritz Hollings The lede for today's NYTime Op-Ed piece by Sen. Ernest Hollings reads: But these cries are not really for making trade free — they are for transferring power over trade to the executive branch and favored corporate interests. This should not be the way economic policy works in a democracy. Odd, this stirring protest against "transferring power ... to the executive branch and favored corporate interests" comes from the very same Senator who is attempting to foist onto us legislation that would transfer power over technological innovation and citizens' fair use of copyrighted material to, um, let's see ... the executive branch and favored corporate interests. Feh! 10:18:37 PM

Wednesday, April 24, 2002

Googlewog, or This is Why We Love the Web Doc writes: Our little boy, age 5, brought home a tadpole from preschool yesterday. While we were sitting outside looking at the stars in the evening, he said "I love my tadpole." I told him as gently as I could that the little creature's chances of survival in a cup of pondwater parked in the bathroom were not large. He grew quiet. "Are you sad?" I asked. "Yes." "Are you afraid your tadpole is going to die?" "Yes." After a pause, he added, "What can we do?" "We could let him go out in the stream out back." This wasn't an encouraging idea. The "stream" is a trench that runs between culverts. And it's dry. This is Southern California. "Look on Google," he said. As it happened we had a laptop with us, which we were using to track satellites in the sky. So I looked up "tadpole care." There was an abundance of advice. As I began to read it out loud, I saw the kid was asleep. Now it's the middle of the night and I'm boiling lettuce for a pet the size of a booger. Hope it works. [Doc Searls Weblog] This is why we love the web.  In less than 200 words, Doc has told me a story that is packed with meaning and information.  Because of this story, I now know: Doc Searls, a man I'n not real likely ever to meet in meatspace, but one whose work (insofar as I know it) I admire, is a full-fledged Human Being.  In fact, he's Dad to a five-year-old, just like I am.  I think that's cool. If my kid ever brings home a tadpole, I now know that I can get some advice from the Web, and that Google will help me find it.  (Of course, I'll do just as well if I just call up my own Dad.  Come to think of it, he's likely to be the source of the tadpole!) There's a fantastic site called Heavens Above that will be an enormous boon when my kid's interests reach skywards. I not only have gained information, but I've also been touched and amused by a very short, very well-written snippet of narrative.  All of this, first thing in the morning, because I opened up my web browser, and my default start page is my Radio Userland news aggregator page. Weinberger has it exactly right: Now, if connecting and caring are what make us into human people, then the Web - built out of hyperlinks and energized by people's interests and passions - is a place where we can be better at being people. And that is what the Web is for. And it's why we love the Web. 8:54:24 AM

Tuesday, April 23, 2002

bloviation n., from bloviate: to speak or write at length in a pompous or boastful manner. Bloviate is most closely associated with U.S. President Warren G. Harding, who used it frequently and who was known for long, windy speeches. H.L. Mencken said of him, "He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash." [Dictionary.com] Remind you of anybody, Jack? 11:46:26 PM       Valenti redoubles rhetoric A somewhat more restrained reaction than ours to Jack Valenti's bloviation comes from Seth Schoen over at the EFF's Consensus at Lawyerpoint blog Jack Valenti of the MPAA has delivered some very impressive testimony with a tremendous amount of Valenti's trademark (or should we say copyright?) rhetoric: "thieves", "pirates", "pilfering", etc. ... Look closely at [his] suggestion: Valenti doesn't say that we have to enforce copyright law in order to make legitimate sales viable. He says that, in order to make Hollywood feel comfortable with the Internet, we have to have not one, not two, but three government mandates on major categories of technology (digital TV receivers, video digitizers, and Internet software). 11:41:39 PM       Outrage! Doc has been kind enough to point this out to us.  Good thing, too: our blood pressure was running a little low. Jack Valenti has struck back at reality with a long-winded press release. More at Politechbot, including the full text of Jack's testimony to a congressional subcommittee. A snippet: Brooding over the global reach of the American movie and its persistent success in attracting consumers of every creed, culture and country is thievery, the theft of our movies in both the analog and digital formats. Another: Promoting legitimate alternatives to digital thievery. Keep in mind that movie producers and distributors are filled with optimism over the prospect of the Internet as another new delivery system to dispatch their movies to consumers, at a fair and reasonable price (the defining of Œfair and reasonable¹ to done by the consumer). And of course those very consumers are the ultimate beneficiaries of these new distribution channels, as they will enjoy more choices for accessing the movies they want in high-quality digital format. I love that "dispatch movies to consumers" business. Here's the problem, Jack. We were never just "consumers." We were customers all along, and now we're in a position to become better customers than ever, because there is more technology than ever to create more ways of making and doing business together than ever. And you're kinda calling us thieves. Like here: As I said just a few minutes ago, it is the Internet, that all-embracing technological marvel, which is putting to hazard our attempts to protect precious creative property. Viant, a Boston-based consulting firm, has estimated that some 350,000+ movies are being downloaded from the Internet every day — all of them illegal. My friend Arne just ran the math on that, and told me this outfit is claiming 10^15 bytes (a petabyte) per day. Kinda hard to believe. And, Then there is the mysterious magic of being able, with a simple click of a mouse, to send a full-length movie hurtling with the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) to any part of this wracked and weary old planet. It is that uncomprehending fact of digital life that disturbs the sleep of the entire U.S. film industry. Arne just told me on the phone, "If we could make the Net operate at the speed of light, maybe we could move a petabye per day of movies." [The Doc Searls Weblog] You know what disturbs our sleep here at the Boulder Inquisition?  The mysterious fact that Jack Valenti is still walking, talking, and (one imagines) raking in Big Buck$ when he so painfully obviously doesn't have a thimbleful of a clue in his head.  And that our distinguished congressfolk are perfectly satisfied to sit and listen to even five minutes of twaddle from the mouth attached to the so-called mind that can talk with a straight face about "the Copyright Industries" and can piously pout that, "like virtue, we are everyday besieged." Well, lemme tell ya, Jack: we've gone back to read that pesky old Constitution, and we just can't find a way clear to interpret the clause establishing the law of copyright as having been intended to establish an "industry."  That makes as much sense as calling IBM "the flagship of the Patent Industries."  (Hmm, we may have to rethink our pooh-poohing of that idea.) And Doc's right, Jack: We aren't passive "consumers" of a "product" called "copyright."  We're sometimes your customers and your audience, and some of us are even creative people who get inspired by the art you profit from and exploit.  But above all, we're citizens and human beings, and the high-handed market manipulation that you're engaged in is messing with our fundamental human rights.  (You remember "endowed by their Creator with certain Inalienable Rights," don't you, Jack?) Remember back in '96-'97-'98 when some of our fatter and pastier-faced congressfolk asked us, "Where's the outrage?"  Well, where's the frickin' outrage now?  If a coalition of, say, environmental groups were lobbying Congress this hard for clean air protection half this burdensome and ham-handed, Tom DeLay and Trent Lott would be tap-dancing on the Capitol steps with glee over the political hay they'd be able to make by "defending" industry against "outrageous and heavy-handed government interference."  But when the outrageous and heavy-handed government interference is being advocated by people who have contributed enough cash to the campaign finance scam/system to bail out Argentina three times over (warning: hyperbole in effect!), it's the Righteous By God American Way! All we can say (before we check our B.P. again) is: We gotcha some outrage here, Jack! Therefore I, Dr. Bonzo, by the Grace of God Grand Inquisitor of Boulder, hereby declare the blovation of Jack Valenti to be anathema, and as such to be abhorred and condemned by all right-thinking people. Anathema sit! 11:27:11 PM       Listen to the Technology Over at TechCentralStation, Arnold Kling has written a beautiful piece on the ways that Big Music could be raking in money, if they really wanted to. He concludes: I suspect that fear of this sort of industry change -- and the potential loss of control -- is what is driving the behavior of the music industry today. However, eventually they will have to listen to the technology. [We caught the link over here at EconoBlog] I'd assert that the kind of third-party-unlimited-use-subscription-catalog he suggests could be combined with collaborative-filtering and collaborative-reviewing systems (a la LAUNCHcast and Emergent Music, respectively) to give the industry what it has lacked so painfully for so long: a frickin' clue about what people really want to listen to. 6:04:36 PM       Legitimacy and the Electorate Tom Tomorrow passes along this delicious quip from a New York Times article on Bush Administration involvement in the recent events in Venezuela: Asked whether the administration now recognizes Mr. Chávez as Venezuela's legitimate president, one administration official replied, "He was democratically elected," then added, "Legitimacy is something that is conferred not just by a majority of the voters, however." (Or by a majority of electoral votes, or by a majority of the Supreme Court ...) 7:02:58 AM

Monday, April 22, 2002

Currently Subscribed To, the Sequel We've done a bit more tweaking to Jon's currently subscribed to, and think that we've got it pretty much where we want it. Find the tweaked-up script here . Here's what we've changed: Just a little bit of the table formatting.  Obviously, you are free to tinker with that as much as you please. Pulled out the writing of image tags as a sub-script (is that what it's called in UserTalk?).  That's the "on imgTag(...)" bit right at the start of the script. Most important: we noticed that occasionally our subs() script would get hosed by the addition of a new channel.  All of a sudden, our macro would fail, and we'd get a bizarre error message: "Can't evaluate the expression because the name 'channeltitle' hasn't been defined." Turns out that the error was a genuine one -- but in the RSS feed, not in the script.  We haven't kept careful track of RSS version numbers, and don't know the schema well enough to get haughty about it, but apparently some people are putting feeds out there that don't include the channeltitle element.  Solution: just wrap the code that addresses the channeltitle element in an if that makes sure channeltitle is defined.  I've highlighted that part of the script in bold. P.S. Am I crazy, or are SOAP calls from my template cached, but XML-RPC calls are not? 7:11:30 PM       RIF day I'll write this in the first person, because it's kind of personal and it would be really tacky and unbecoming to adopt the "Inquisitorial We" for this kind of thing. I work at a non-profit, and it's taken the downturn of the late '90's a little longer to hit us than it did most of the for-profit world.  So, today is the day of our building-wide Reduction In Force. Somewhere between 5% and 7% of our staff are going to find out today that their programs or positions have been downsized. Sure, it's not 10,000 people losing their jobs all at once.  Sure, it's a relatively small proportion of the staff.  Sure, I am 90% sure that I'm not getting RIFed today. But it still sucks to be here today. 9:44:43 AM       Piracy: The Big Lie Related to Cory Doctorow's rant (below), this recently in from Consensus at Lawyerpoint: Why is a content protection system necessary for digital over-the-air television? Hollywood representatives have, from the beginning, given one answer: a protection system is needed to prevent "Internet piracy," or even "Napster-ization." There's one problem with this rationale: it's not true. Don't be fooled. The BPDG standard is not about stopping "piracy." It's about Hollywood regaining some measure of control over what you can and can't do with television. It's about cramming the VCR genie back in the bottle, and giving Hollywood the power to bring new technologies to heel before they can deliver new capabilities to consumers. The proposed BPDG standard will have no meaningful impact on unauthorized copying or distribution of televised content. Here's why. 6:57:29 AM

Sunday, April 21, 2002

The Street Finds its Own Use for the Law of Unintended Consequences Over on the O'Reilly Network, Cory Doctorow (of BoingBoing fame) has words of wisdom for us all: The problem with innovation is that you can't predict it. That's what innovation means -- the stuff we haven't thought of yet. Great innovations are ridiculous at the time of invention, startling on implementation, and obvious in hindsight.... The street finds its own use for the law of unintended consequences. Technology will change the way the copyright industry makes its ungodly sums of money, but it won't eliminate it. No one can predict what the innovative ways of selling entertainment will be -- that's innovation for you -- but it will come. It will come, if we're allowed to invent it. It will come, if the world is able to play and invent and innovate. But the controls enacted by the DMCA and the CBDTPA won't afford us that freedom. Under their regimen, new technologies will only be brought to market after a "consensus" on their features is negotiated at lawyerpoint between the technology industry and the Political Officers of the entertainment industry. Once this "consensus" has evolved, it will be illegal to make, sell, or distribute any technology that doesn't conform to it. [O'Reilly Network Articles] 10:31:35 PM       Currently Subscribed To, Redux We've tweaked Jon Udell's script for showing currently-subscribed-to channels, so we'll be including that listing on the front page again, we think. 9:41:04 PM       It Shall Come to Pass Scottish Lass writes: With the dawning of the age of the Google Outline Browser all three predictions are now given earthly form and the wise shall heed the goodness unleashed on all mankind by the guardians of the 'G'. Those whose arms sit at right angles to a body that neither sleeps nor eats shall be the bringers of a new age of knowledge sharing and enlightenment. Here at the inquisition, we absolutely love the Google Outline Browser (in the Radio form provided by Dave Winer).  One thing we noticed immediately (as has Dave, of course) is that every node that we expand will appear among its descendants (because "what's related" is a pretty much reciprocal relation).  We wish that there were a way to distinguish visually a node that has already appeared elsewhere in the tree. 5:19:35 PM       The Selling of an Energy Policy It's nice to hear from Al Gore again.  In a New York Times Op-Ed piece today, he writes: Under the presidency of George W. Bush, the environmental and energy policies of our government are completely dominated by a group of current and former oil and chemical company executives who are trying to dismantle America's ability to force them to reduce the extremely dangerous levels of pollution in the earth's atmosphere. This doesn't come as real news to most of us, of course, but it's moderately heartening to hear someone who might still be a contender raising his voice about it. Much the same thing has been the stock-in-trade of one of our favorite opinion-expressers, Molly Ivins, ever since it looked like Shrub might become (P)resident.  In a recent effort, Molly pointed out that: [last] month, the Senate voted 62-38 to postpone, yet again, increasing the fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks. According to the Sierra Club, the average fuel economy of cars sold in 2000 was 24 miles per gallon, the lowest since 1979. The failed fuel efficiency proposal could have saved the country up to 1 million barrels of oil a day by 2016 - as much as the United States currently imports from Iraq and Kuwait. You will doubtlessly be less than amazed to learn that the auto industry spent heavily to defeat any improvement in fuel efficiency. According to Public Campaign - a campaign finance reform group - on average, the 62 senators who voted with the industry received $18,000 from auto companies. The 38 senators who wanted stronger standards got a measly $5,900 each. Since 1989, the auto companies have given $9.9 million to federal candidates and parties. I know, it's not new, but it does matter. We say that it's time to pull the rug out from under the auto industry's arguments that tightened fuel standards will force them to make cars that people won't buy.  Instead, let's place the economic decision fully in the hands of consumers -- but in a way that forces them (us) to account for the costs to the nation and to the world of excessive fuel consumption. Here's the scheme:  We impose a new-vehicle tax on passenger vehicles, to be paid at the time of purchase, which is proportional to the difference between the new vehicle's fuel efficiency rating and the average rating for passenger vehicles sold in the previous year.  Make the tax cut both ways: if you buy a relatively inefficient car, the cost of the car is effectively increased.  If, however, you buy a relatively more efficient car, the "tax" is negative, and the cost of your new car is reduced. There are, of course, a couple of "gotchas" (aside from the natural knee-jerk reaction on the part of Big Biz to any attempt to get them, and us, to Do the Right Thing): The biggest auto-industry loophole in the current regulatory scheme -- the classification of SUVs as "trucks" rather than as passenger cars -- would have to be eliminated.  We'dhave to find a way to distinguish trucks that are genuinely used for "heavy lifting" (farm work, work equipment transportation) from those in passenger and recreational use.  In any case, Mercedes SUVs do not qualify as "farm vehicles". If the policy has the desired effect, the average fuel efficiency of this year's vehicle purchases will always exceed last year's, so the the "tax" is, in fact, a net money-loser for the gov't.  Since adding a net dollar cost to the policy would make it even more difficult to pass the thing through Congress, some other way around would have to be found. Biggest challenge: how to set the rate at which vehicle efficiency differences are taxed?  This is where we ask an economist to instruct us further in the mysteries of elasticity, hmm?  Or maybe someone wants to step up to the plate and estimate the real cost to society of excess fuel consumption (in dollars per excess gallon). It occurs to us, too, that maybe the mean fuel efficiency rating from the previous year isn't the right benchmark: perhaps it should be the median? We can work the details out later.  They key here is to change our current approach from "we won't let you buy a car that's too inefficient" to "we'll let you buy anything you damned well please, but you're going to pay through the nose if you insist on getting a gas-guzzler that imposes enormous direct and indirect costs on the people around you." 3:28:17 AM

Saturday, April 20, 2002

Sleater-Kinney, You're No Rock n' Roll Fun Punk - Sassy candy-punk [Best of Emergent Music] And we love it! We also love the Best of Emergent Music blog and the accompanying RSS feed (Radio users, subscribe now!).  Many, many thanks (as usual!) to The Shifted Librarian  for pointing out the Emergent Music feed. 11:25:58 PM       Concrete Blonde: Group Therapy We've always had soft spots in our hearts for Johnette Napolitano's voice and the music of Concrete Blonde, so we were ecstatic when we saw that the trio have reunited to produce a new album, Group Therapy, their first since Mexican Moon. Once we had it home and in the CD player, we weren't disappointed.  Napolitano's voice, James Mankey's guitar, and Harry Rushakoff's drums are as finely honed as ever.  The seven-year break since these three last recorded together has, we think, put a patina of experience on their music -- a layer of knowing-about-the-world that almost, but not quite, crosses over into world-weariness. This is an album that is going to get a lot of play in the Bonzo household. 4:48:29 PM       But what we really want is one of these: 4:12:11 PM       More playing with Amazon I've got my scripts working to produce an Amazon item image linked to the the Amazon item page. My macro call looks like this: <%amazon.macros.linkedItemImage("Colson Whitehead Intuitionist","0385493002")%> but I'm still playing with the scripts to get it "just right." (By the way, it's a great book.) 3:35:38 PM       Playing with the Amazon API We know that Dave has grave reservations about working with the Amazon API, and we share his "no more pesos for Señor Bezos" ideology to a small degree.  Nonetheless, we here at the Boulder Inquisition always enjoy new toys, and this certainly qualifies. The first thing we did was to follow Rogers Cadenhead's script for viewing amazon bestsellers in the news aggregator.  Nice, but not exactly what we had in mind.  (We're thinking we'd like to use the interface to include cover shots [with affiliate links, of course] for books, music, movies that we discuss over in Bonzo I/O.) So, what to do?  What we've learned tonight is that Radio is painfully easy to learn how to script.  With Rogers' code and Dave's googlebox script in front of us, we've made it about halfway towards creating a macro that will make the call to Amazon and munge the XML that gets returned into something useful. Along the way, we figured out a moderately clever way to get that item-specific information we were wanting.  We just perform a bestsellers-by-keywords search that includes the ISBN or ASIN code as one of the search terms: (example) (Atta boy, Bonzo!) 3:14:07 AM

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