Bruce Schneier's post on the Kutztown 13 struck a chord with me. Particular the line about how the kids hadn't committed a crime. In fact, "no malicious acts are alleged", but rather "they outsmarted the district's technology workers." This reminds me of the time I was an undergrad and one of the IT guys for the college accused me of hacking into their network. (I hadn't.) His evidence? Well, none. But when I was brought before the Dean, he explained that since I could have done it, and someone might have been doing it, it was probably me. (It wasn't.) But the real insult wasn't even the accusation -- the real insult was that the Dean put me on probation. Even she admitted that there was nothing to indicate that I had done anything wrong (I hadn't), but that I "shouldn't be concerned about the probation if I wasn't doing anything wrong." Hmm. Proactive punitive rehabilitation without probable cause. A society that fears what it can not control or feels inferior to -- taken to the extreme, you get the Red Guards, the Kansas State Board of Education, and Jean Charles de Menezes.
Google now lets you sign up for a Gmail account via SMS -- why? One theory, it keeps the new-account bar high, preventing fraud and spam accounts. Mobile numbers cost money, and people are more likely to send in their phone number than a credit card (an alternate barrier to fraudulent subscriptions). Another theory? Google's strategy is increasingly looking like they want you to be signed in at all times. It is like the way that they do cookies across mail.google.com and www.google.com -- it used to be gmail.com, but it changed to support this -- when you are signed in for email, you are signed in for search. SMS doesn't have a good mechanism for signin, but if Google can associate your mobile # with your account, then they can personalize/track your mobile searches and tie it together with everything else.
After hearing a bit of Bush and Rumsfeld speak this week about the military, it occurred to me that they aren't being exactly forthright about their aims. The rhetoric was all about needing an even bigger Army so that we could fight a "war on terrorism." But they have it wrong -- you can't fight terroism with an army. You can protect against terrorism, particularly domestically, by helping the states bolster their National Guard and the Coast Guard forces (and then not activate them to go fight wars on foreign soil). In addition, you need to support and fund the FBI nationally. And you act proactively against terrorism abroad by funding the CIA and, even better, through trade and NGO initiatives. You can (must) intervene in the worst global conflicts with troops that you loan to the UN and NATO forces. The standing Army (and Air Force, Navy, etc), is designed for big wars against other nations. And almost by definition, terrorists are not nations. Hence we are fighting this "war" all wrong. (Of course, we would need an Army to wage war on Iraq, but that's not what they are saying we are doing.) Better that we support the Guard and the UN and NATO, if we really want to protect ourselves against terrorism. If you take the White House at its word, then their policy is illogical at best.
I have new respect for those that work two jobs, or go to school while raising a family or working outside the home. M is studying and taking classes for her National Association of Securities Dealers Series 7 exam right now. We leave the apartment before 6 in the morning, and she doesn't get home until well after 6 at night. After this she'll be registered to make trades and be an licensed stockbroker, which is cool and all, but it made me stop and think just how hard life would be if we had kids right now, too. I have nothing but admiration and awe for single parents everywhere who somehow pull it all off.
Speaking of Google (sorry to mention them again, but they are perhaps the second-most influential company of the past 5 years*), I noticed that they aren't really doing much for Mac or Linux. Google Desktop, Google Talk, Google Earth, etc., are all Windows only. But I'm all for alternative OS's, running them exclusively myself. It's great that they are targeting the browser as a platform -- especially since everything works brilliantly in Firefox -- but some neat apps are coming out for the desktop, and it would be fantastic to see a company with Google's influence break down some barriers here. It would take a company-wide mandate to support Mac and Linux equally, but that's a mandate well worth it, in my opinion.
Does anyone know if there is parking around the 22nd or 4th street Caltrain stations in San Francisco? The commute down to Palo Alto is breaking me. And after putting gas in my little car yesterday for $3.17/gallon, I am wondering if I'm just wasting money too. (Though part of me likes the high gas prices -- they are really sticking it to the owners of those SUVs.) Taking the N-Judah from Carl and Cole down to the train station takes something like 40-minutes. And four hours a day is just too much time to waste on a commute... So the new plan would be to drop M off, park at the train, take a baby bullet, and still get to work by 7:00 AM or so. It all depends on the parking -- any ideas?
There was a bad batch of heroin and a homicide in NYC this week. And it made headline news. Now stop and think about this -- bad heroin, and a single homicide made news in New York. Twenty years ago that could have happened in your own apartment building and you'd just step over the bodies and get on with your day. I recently mentioned how nice downtown Seattle looked, but that is nothing compared to the improvement in NYC. Hopefully we'll still be able to afford rent on the LES when we move back.
Does Atom 1.0 have a viable shot at dethroning RSS 2.0 as the most popular syndication format? Atom offers more structure and formality than RSS does, but -- how do I say this delicately -- so what? RSS is really popular because it is stupidly simple. Too simple for some, but what they may not fully appreciate is that RSS is also very extensible. Case in point, I was looking at better ways to handle something that RSS does in a brain-dead way -- i.e., handle encoded
<description/> elements -- and I figured out a half dozen ways to work around the problem. Even better, some of those ways were already in common use. Microsoft added their list extensions. A9 added search extensions. Dublin Core adds missing metadata. Is it a little messy and haphazard? Well, sure. But it does do the job it is meant to -- and a number of jobs it was never designed to. Would Atom 1.0 have been the standard of choice if it was released two years ago? Probably. But it wasn't, so it and RSS will probably just have to live side-by-side as friends. (I'm not sure how I feel about RSS 3, though. A little bothered by it, but I can't articulate why just yet.)Can anyone recommend an alternative to Bloglines? I still want a server-side blog-reader/aggregator, but my love of Bloglines is waning. I can't wait to try out FeedLounge -- I'd pay for it, or any other online blogreader that impresses me.
Back to work...
*Halliburton could well be number one.