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-- Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel" |
viernes, mayo 31, 2002
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linkydink "Two weeks ago, this column showed how the Bivings Group, a PR company contracted to Monsanto, had invented fake citizens to post messages on internet listservers. These phantoms had launched a campaign to force Nature magazine to retract a paper it had published, alleging that native corn in Mexico had been contaminated with GM pollen. But this, it now seems, is just one of hundreds of critical interventions with which PR companies hired by big business have secretly guided the biotech debate over the past few years."
jueves, mayo 30, 2002
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linkydink This recent interview with Chris "Windowlicker" Cunningham has a really scary photo from the next Aphex Twin video and some words about the Cunningham/Gibson/Neuromancer rumors....
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linkydink "On 6 June 1944, a unit of 29 amphibious tanks launched from Allied ships to attack the Nazi-held Normandy beaches - only two made land. Brett Phaneuf went in search of those lost beneath the waves for almost 60 years."
miércoles, mayo 29, 2002
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linkydink I'd like to point out that Salman Rushdie quoted The Spice Girls to make a point about Indian/Pakistani nuclear war.
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linkydink "A team of microbiologists from the University of East London (UEL) are examining if the microbes play an active role in the formation of clouds and making it rain."
martes, mayo 28, 2002
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linkydink Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena of Case Western Reserve University and his colleagues announced in Nature that they had crippled a mosquito's ability to transmit malaria. Mosquitoes pick up the malaria parasite by sucking blood from an infected person. But this mosquito has an added gene for a substance that blocks the parasite's movement out of the insect's gut and into its saliva, keeping its next bite from being infectious.
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linkydink "Stiglitz, 58, is hardly the first person to accuse the IMF of operating undemocratically and exacerbating Third World poverty. But he is by far the most prominent, and his emergence as a critic marks an important shift in the intellectual landscape. Only a few years ago, it was possible for pundits to claim that no mainstream economist, certainly nobody of Stiglitz's stature, took the criticism of free trade and globalization seriously. Such claims are no longer credible..."
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linkydink "To earn the Stress Less badge, Girl Scouts have to meet 10 requirements, which teach them how to relax and put things in perspective."
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linkydink hi, im blogging from a small internet cafe in france, and am having a great deal of difficulty adjusting to french keyboards so this will be fairly quick. for those of you who dont allready know im spending the rest of may and all of june here in a program through jacksonville university taking photography and a crash course in french. the family im staying with speaks no english- and what little french i know is broken and terible. for the time being Ive got a roomate who speaks a good deal of french, but when she leaves at the end of the week im on my own. the best way to keep in touch with me right now is to send me paper mail, as e mail winds up costing me a bundle due to slow connections and awkward keyboards, i can send the address to anyone who would like it. congratulations to those of you who graduated, and i hope youre well.
miércoles, mayo 22, 2002
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linkydink "It sounded plausible, but I was in no mood to discuss the superstitious complexities of Islam with a hash-addled neurotic whose crippling fear of crowded intersections had just caused me to miss tonight's Chamber of Commerce-sponsored dinner at the Mangy Moose. I bought his bogus speed and a copy of People, and then ordered him back onto the freeway."
sábado, mayo 18, 2002
viernes, mayo 17, 2002
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linkydink I've just been checking out the winners of Warp Records' Squarepusher animation contest.
miércoles, mayo 15, 2002
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linkydink I never thought we'd be discussing this, but... Kirsten Dunst is most attractive (and she is quite attractive ;) in The Virgin Suicides. Recognize! ... or do I smell a new poll coming on?
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linkydink jimmy: dictionaraoke had everyone in my room on the floor giggling last night. thanks. my $0.02 re Spiderman: crawling up the wall scenes? very cool. swinging from the web scenes? awesome. fight scenes? too computer-animated. my willing suspension of disbelief went out the window. angsty love scenes? blech. the upside-down, half-masked kiss? HOT. overall? very entertaining. i'd watch it again. re kirsten dunst: i'm not sure whose side to take on this one. she's undoubtedly pretty, but i don't think red hair looks very good on her. y'all should go watch Bring It On; it's hilarious, and she looks better as a blonde.
martes, mayo 14, 2002
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linkydink Another post from Slashdot: Dictionaraoke. Basically, Breakcharmer needs to listen to I Feel Good.
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linkydink From Wired, via Slashdot: Aphex Twin appears to have sneaked the digital image of a devilish face onto one of his songs... the spooky image of a creature with a diabolical grin has been accidentally discovered on Aphex Twin's Windowlicker EP...I knew there was something funny with Windowlicker's Track 2!
lunes, mayo 13, 2002
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linkydink from the pages of rotten.com/news/: Israeli Army Really Giving a Shit. I am (by culture, knee-jerk reaction, and heritage) Jewish. I really really want to believe that Israel is doing the right thing, and that everything they/we do to the Palestinians is justified. And every day it gets harder. This article in particular just makes me so sad - stupid fuckers just don't know how to act like civilized beings. Makes me want to renounce humanity, much less Judaism.
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linkydink Let it be known that I started my Miller post before cmoore decided to kill the subject... By no means did I mean to spawn further discussion. :) Also; let's please refrain from the "it's Miller-time" jokes... they're so unbecoming.
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linkydink Although I'm fashionably late in joining the Jim Miller Hour, I couldn't resist sounding off on the subject. 1-cent email tax. My first thought is: where would the money go? E-mail and the Internet in general are worldwide phenomena - and I wouldn't dare open the can of worms of trying to regulate technologies with taxes. For fun, let's think of a world in where the US imposed a 1-cent tax on email and all the technological impracticalities of the situation fluttered away like so many butterflies being set on fire. What peripheral laws would have to be passed to avoid bypassing such taxation? Think DMCA on a grander scale. Yikes, that's no fun. Will Boredom Doom Linux? Well, no. As was recently brought to light in the ongoing Microsoft trial -- *gasp* -- anything's possible with software! And in an environment where your imagination and initiative dictates your level of involvement, I can't see boredom ever really coming into play. Case in point, who remembers the Doom interface for killing stray processes? One could probably argue that such a program was a *product* of boredom, and so boredom in part is what keeps Linux interesting. :)
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linkydink ::grin:: okay, okay, i'll let it drop. thanks for responding to the 1-cent email thing, y'all. it was fun.
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linkydink cmoore: Once again, Jim Miller is wrong in so many ways that it hardly seems worth the effort anymore to correct him. I'd hate to think that your blog is going to have its very own Jon Katz.
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linkydink cmoore: okay, now you're just trying to get a rise out of us. As of yet, the evidence and history clearly favors Free software being more secure and more reliable. I'll believe Microsoft and c|net's propaganda to the contrary when that situation shows any significant change - there has been much hand-waving in the commercial software industry about programmers not being interested in Linux, but as of yet it hasn't been a problem.
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linkydink another jim miller post: Will Boredom Doom Linux? in my experience, most people find programming in general boring. there are, however, some of us who are detail-oriented (read: anal-retentive) enough to enjoy such things. and the payoff, of course, is a) having a better-working operating system, and b) feeling l33t for fixing a Linux bug. do y'all think there are really a shortage of Linux geeks to upkeep the code?
domingo, mayo 12, 2002
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linkydink Since this whole 1 cent idea was brought to us by Jim Miller, I'll be addressing him, but ya'll feel free to chime in... Jim writes here that "We should all have to pay to send e-mail. Imposing a cost of just one cent to send an e-mail would significantly reduce the amount of spam."I already pay my normal ISP fees to send email, and probably at a higher rate than 1 cent per. Spammers also pay their normal ISP fees to send spam, and though I haven't done the math, I would guess also at more than 1 cent per. However, the amount of spam has been steadily growing. I have evidence to back up my claims, but what about Jim? Later, cmoore posts on Jim's behalf here: "Economists believe the way to get the optimal amount of pollution is to impose a tax on polluters. There is an externality whenever someone sends me an e-mail. This externality should be internalized with a tax."However, it is well known that any tax imposed on a company is passed to the consumer, so in effect the customer would be subsidizing the company's pollution, just as the recipient of spam already shares the cost of communication with the spammer. In addition, there is no externality because all pollution is toxic but not all email is spam. Lastly, Jim fails to present any argument as to why this internal world should mirror the external world. For your consideration, this is a different world that does not limit us to the same old "solutions". The Internet is built on trust and cooperation, but it is not an anarchy. I pay my ISP to take my packets and send it to its ISP, who does the same all the way "up" to the backbones, where the process reverses itself to my packets' destination. Any node along these branches could decide to stop passing my packets if it didn't trust that the node that it had received the packets from weren't abusive (where abuse could include (but not be limited to): hacking attempts, denial of service attacks, and spam). So, a novel solution would be to create a system where by any given node could learn whether to trust any other node. Thankfully, systems like that have already been developed, such as the MAPS Realtime Blackhole List, where by users submit reports of systems that permit spam so that other systems will not pass that system's traffic. The effect is a very direct cost to ISPs that are irresponsible in policiing their users, who have not spent time (and thus, money) on preventing spam because it has not affected their bottom line. If the ISP is blackholed, then none of their users can send or receive email. The ISP can then choose to either be more responsible, at which point they will have the blackhole removed, or they can choose to lose their customers. Naturally, someone will be concerned with the issue of watching the watchmen, but with sufficient transparency, I can't imagine why systems such as MAPS couldn't be trusted. In the mean time, it remains up to each user to defend themselves from spam by setting up their own personal blackholes, a cost I imagine many would gladly pay more for if they could find an ISP to do it for them.
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linkydink "If there's one thing I learned from this trip to Israel, Jordan, Dubai and Indonesia, it's this: thanks to the Internet and satellite TV, the world is being wired together technologically, but not socially, politically or culturally. We are now seeing and hearing one another faster and better, but with no corresponding improvement in our ability to learn from, or understand, one another. So integration, at this stage, is producing more anger than anything else...""Global Village Idiocy": A provocative editorial from NYTimes columnist Thomas Friedman. Ten years ago, this would have sounded like dystopic science fiction.
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linkydink Pop's Bootleg Remix: "Songs like this one, which combine different hits without adding any original music, may represent the first significant new musical genre to be lifted out of the underground, developed and then spread, mostly via the Web."
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linkydink here's a bit of a rebuttal. not fully developed, since i've been semi-comatose for the last few days, but maybe i'll develop it later. for starters, if you approach it as a sort of environmental pollution problem then yes, there should be a per-email fee. as with all flat-fee charges, "free" email leads to overuse and waste of resource, so imposing a per-email cost would bring the number of emails sent closer to the "environmentally" optimal level. by this logic, all email use should be reduced, from Spam to the one you just sent your mom for Mother's Day. however, while charging at all would almost certainly reduce email use, most of that reduction would come from personal emails, not Spam. as KB mentioned, the 1 cent per email price tag would deter people who use email as a free and rapid means of communication, not people who use it as a means for making money. and as Michael pointed out, 1 cent isn't a lot to pay when you're selling a mass-marketed product. i'm sure it costs more per listener for radio and television ads. basically, i think Jim's tilting at the wrong windmill with this one. and even if it was the right one, it's still just a windmill. also, from a technical standpoint, it would be prohibitively expensive to set up the necessary infrastructure to deal with the money collection. not only is email used worldwide, but i (in Massachussetts) could sign up for an email account from a company based in Finland and use it to correspond with people in China. or (even better), i could plug my own computer into the internet, install & configure SMTP, and voila, i've got my own email server. if any idiot off the street can do this, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to make people pay for email. particularly since, as far as i know, there's not much difference between an email packet and a web packet when it's moseying through your server. the internet works because it's such a well-distributed system. this also makes it very difficult to regulate, for better or worse. back to the economic viewpoint: Spammers are customers just like anyone else who buys service from an ISP (in fact, i recently got a bit of Spam mail from an ISP targeted directly at Spammers). ISPs have motivation to screen out incoming Spam - it saves them server space and makes their customers happy - but have no motivation to curb outgoing Spam sent by these paying customers. if we could find a way to keep Spam from being sent, we'd have a more feasible solution to the problem. (breakcharmer, that's your cue to step in.) and on that note, i'm off to bed.
sábado, mayo 11, 2002
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linkydink just checked my email and found a response to the 1cent/email proposition from a random internet stranger. here's what he had to say:
viernes, mayo 10, 2002
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linkydink I see a lot of logistical concerns to such a fee. who would get the money? who would collect it? would it be the responsibility of the sender of the recipient to make sure that someone had paid up? what about egroups, list servers or any message with more than one recipient? would non profit fan groups such as tmbglist or dorthyl wind up footing huge bills just to maintain their current levels of membership? or would the cost fall upon the members of said groups? even harder to monitor would be groups run through free services. I used to be a member of an egroup centered around a high school club. Though it was primarily a forum for jokes, articles, or arguments about movies and games, it was also a really useful way to reach most of my friends with information about a party or cancelled club meeting. I don't know that I ever would have used it as such if I'd had to pay even a single cent for it. we could talk of imposing some sort of bulk rate, but this would provide an easy loophole for junk peddlers making sure the only people affected by the fee would be individuals. And even if there was an easy way to make sure that corporations were charged while nonprofits were left alone, a single penny doesn't seem likely to discourage large companies from sending you junk mail. It would, however, irk most private individuals on principle. And what about people without access to credit cards or online banking? I know of many people who's only access to the internet or e mail is through the use of yahoo or hotmail at the local library, who would get charged for their correspondence? as a multi-year AOL user, I had much time to aquaint myself with mailboxes filled with all sorts of raunchy SPAM, but since switching over to a mail account at mac.com, I have yet to receive a single bit of unwanted mail. perhaps a better thing to focus on would be good filtration software, which, though it will inevitably be rendered useless, might at least force SPAM'ers to be a little more cunning.
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linkydink jimmy: you have your tastes, I got mine. Mine happen to be the right ones, but I wouldn't want to force you to be right-thinking, so I'll just let this foolish infatuation with ms. Dunst pass. This time.
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linkydink the gauntlet has been thrown. i better see some responses or i'll kick your asses.
jueves, mayo 09, 2002
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linkydink I saw Spider Man last night, so can now add my own words to the dialogue y'all were having about it: It totally ruled. Most fun moviewatching experience I've had in a long time. Dafoe and Dunst were both awesome. (Fuz- Sorry to disagree, but I think Kirsten is hella hot, and an impressive actress to boot. Yowza.) Raimi gone back to what he's best at--slapstick and monsters--but suddenly now with a touching three-dimensional humanity about all of the characters! I love art that blends the heartfelt with the cartoonish; Spider Man does this brilliantly. Plus it had cameos from Bruce Campbell, Macy Gray, and Randy Macho Man Savage! What more do you need? I think someone (Raimi?) should make a movie about just those three, perhaps joining together as a badass crimefighting trio to combat the well-meaning but misguided Jimmy Miller.
miércoles, mayo 08, 2002
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linkydink Whoah! "Frustrations surrounding the role of Queer Alliance (QA) in the Wesleyan community reached a climax during a QA meeting on Wednesday when many members voiced a desire to see QA dissolve. The result of that meeting was, indeed, the dissolution of QA as a campus organization."
lunes, mayo 06, 2002
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linkydink Actually, if you think about it ,a stretchable neck means Mr. Fantastic doesn't really need Sue around, anyway.
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linkydink heh. If I could think of a better analogy, I would have gone right out and said it. I couldn't, see, which is why I made a disparaging remark about electronic-to-physical analogies in the first place. The problem for me in this particular case is that email is essentially trust-based - I don't connect directly to you to send email by any stretch. I write email on my local computer, using Eudora. Then I connect to my mail server (www.fuzrocks.com), and ask it to send my mail for me. fuzrocks has a restricted list of hosts which it will send from, but my computer is on that list, so it sends for me. But it doesn't usually send the email in one piece, and it probably doesn't send it direct to your mail server - it sends it to some other server (something at UMass I think), which in turn passes it on, and so forth. I could be wrong, I'm not entirely clear on the specifics. Point is, the very architecture of email is based on free cooperation between servers. And what's more, I could pretty easily set up my own SMTP server, and hook into the net.. although I'm thinking my own understanding fails here. I think that Miller is trying to set up a barrier-of-entry to email, so that spammers would have a hard time sending out mass emails. Problem is, there isn't much in the real world that a) has no pre-existing barrier of entry and b) is abusable by any random schmoe. I guess the best analogy I can think of is charging admission to sidewalks in the hope of preventing marathons. Or making everyone who goes into the Empire State Building go through a security checkpoint, in order to prevent them from flying a plane into the building. Oh wait, that's a horrible analogy. Same basic premise though.
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linkydink fuz: thanks for the review. graeme didn't really like amelie either (whereas i loved it), and he's a huge comic book afficionado, so i'm inclined (as usual) to form my own opinion about the movie.
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linkydink now, kids, play nice. breakcharmer: epithets don't do much to prove your point, only your vehemence about it. care to expand on your opinion? fuz: can you think of a better analogy? jimmy: no more drugs for you.
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linkydink cmoore: On Spider-Man: well, I certainly don't agree with graeme's review... I thought the movie was excellent. However, in the interest of sounding balanced, I will list things I didn't like. 1) The dialog was occasionally.. strained. Particularly the impassioned speeches. Ran a bit long. 2) There were a couple aspects where they broke canon, one of which I found upsetting, but nobody else I saw it with found them annoying. YMMV. I'd say more, but I'm avoiding spoilers. IM me if you want spoilers - AIM:fuzzefuz Yahoo!:fuzzrock22 ICQ:151381828. Or just IM me for fun, if you're bored. 3) I don't think Kirsten Dunst (Mary Jane) is attractive. Again, YMMV.
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linkydink cmoore: Jim Miller is a fuckwit. I say we should take upon ourselves the cost of other's greed and pay 1 cent per glass of water to eliminate toxic dumping. Who's with me?
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linkydink fuz: well? how was spiderman? i'm itching to see it, and the only post-viewing review i've read of it is graeme's.
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linkydink Jim Miller says we should pay 1 cent per email to eliminate spam. i say: people already pay for email, just not on a per-email basis. people - particularly businesses that conduct much of their internal communications via email - would be more angry at having to pay per email than relieved at having less spam. i would think it would be prohibitively expensive to set up the infrastructure necessary to regulate and collect money for email. spam is annoying, yes, but how much do you think the average citizen would actually be willing to pay to get rid of those "Herbal Viagra" ads? also, forcing people to pay to send regular mail hasn't eliminated annoying paper spam, it's just made advertisers more clever at finding their target markets. there is really only one provider of paper mail service, making it easy to charge everyone to send mail. there are thousands of providers of email working from all over the world, making it virtually impossible to enforce any sort of consistent payment system.
domingo, mayo 05, 2002
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linkydink jimmy: How right you are. The MIB series has been some of the most enjoyable sci-fi I have ever experienced, and from the trailer, I'm almost certain to not be disappointed. Thanks for the link.
sábado, mayo 04, 2002
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linkydink "The Seven Deadly Sins are those transgressions which are fatal to spiritual progress. You probably commit some of them every day without thinking about the rich tradition of eternal damnation in which you're participating."
jueves, mayo 02, 2002
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linkydink Some folks who came to see Titanic Friday night thought about seeing the Punchline standup comedy show that night. Had they gone, they would have had a very interesting time.
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linkydink Just wanted to share the joy I'm feeling now that our apartment is wired for DSL (1.5 MB/s downloads and uploads!). Happy happy joy joy.
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linkydink "You are God... Your people have angered you greatly, and deserve to be punished. Punish away, oh Great One." (or: TPM can take their rational consistency and shove it.)
miércoles, mayo 01, 2002
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linkydink on religion: I've taken other tests with TPM in the past, and I usually have problems* with them... this case is no exception. In particular, I got hit when I when I agreed that evolution was rational to believe in, and then said that there was a requirement for certain, irrevocable proof for the existence of god. They say I require a higher standard for the existence of god. I say I don't believe in actually certain, irrevocable proof exists, but the nearest actual equivalent exists for evolution, and would need to for God. I do have believe a god-being would be able to do "impossible" things like create a square circle, which they have a problem with. I just don't think our handle on reality is all that solid. But if they want to give me a hit for that they're entitled. breakcharmer: I might borrow that book from christopher... right after I finish Tam Lin, which has almost made me miss my stop on the subway. Twice. Might have to stop reading that on my way to and from work.
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linkydink fuz: I don't have time to do peer review for these guys, but I did read a good article a while ago that might interest you. Written by Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, and published in You Are Being Lied To, edited by Russ Kick (of disinfo.com fame), it does a keen job of exposing the hypocrisy behind many environmental movements including Greenpeace's. I'm sure you could just ask christopher for it. Everyone else, I suppose, will have to buy their own copy of this excellent book.
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linkydink hey! i got the "TPM Medal of Distinction." i guess my beliefs (or at least what i chose on that test) are fairly consistent, if a wee bit strange. skeptic that i am, i suppose that's fairly unsurprising.
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