The Blog From Another Dimension

Jury Duty

One of the bloggers at This Modern World got called in for jury duty, and that reminded me: so did I. That is to say that my father informed me on Skype that I got a notice in the mail telling me that I'd have to show up.

Fine with me, so long as they fork over the airfare.

It's pretty interesting, but I guess that they don't necessarily have a way of telling whether someone on the absentee ballot list is permanently residing overseas or if they're just traveling abroad temporarily.

This is the second time I've been called in for jury duty--and the second time that my location has gotten me out of it. The first time it happened, I was called in to appear just a week or so after my planned move to another county. When I called the courthouse to tell them about this, the person at the other end joked, "Some people will do anything to get out of jury duty!"

Well, this time it's not so close a call--I've been living in Japan for eight years straight (or will have been in two months), so nobody can accuse me of fleeing the country to avoid forty bucks a day.

Raiders of the DaVinci Code

One story in the press this week is about the supposed discovery of the tombs of Jesus, Mary Magdalena, and their conjectured son Judah. Behind it are the "Exodus Code" producers Simcha Jacobovici and James Cameron.

From what I understand, the tombs will be opened on live TV, whereupon ghostly apparitions will fly out, and James Cameron's face will melt while Jacobovici's head will explode.

Seriously, what the hell is with Cameron? He used to make awesome films. I guess he got all the money he needed after Titanic, and can do whatever the hell he wants now. I can understand why he went on a decade-long kick on deep-sea submersibles and just made documentaries about Titanic and related subjects--the guy probably just loved doing it and figured he'd focus on that.

But now Cameron seems to be behind a new string of Christian-themed movies-of-the-month, becoming a new huckster for cheap religion-masquerading-as-science crapola. A new hobby I can understand, but a Bible fetish and spurious claims of having proven the Red Sea parting or finding Jesus' tomb... that's straying well into wacko territory.

What happened, did a cult get their hands on him or something?

Government As Business

The U.S. Postal Service is hiking rates again, but is making a big deal out of its "Forever Stamps." The stamps, to be sold at 41 cents, will suffice for first-class postage for as long as the USPS exists.

The problem: the price of stamps rises at about the same rate as inflation in general--meaning that you get no benefit from the purchase. In fact, since you could invest the money and make interest off of it instead of holding on to stamps, the stamps will turn out to be a bad idea--and that's assuming that the stamps don't get damaged or lost over time. True, it would end the annoyance of buying 2- or 3-cent stamps to add to your old first-class stamps whenever there's a price increase, but you may end up paying a lot more for avoiding that annoyance than is worth it. (Really, a single trip to the post office every several years and having to put more than one stamp on a letter? Heavens to Betsy, however have we survived up until now?)

The thing is, keeping them long enough to get any "value" out of them means keeping them for at least 2-3 years minimum, the shortest probable span between price hikes for stamps. You'd probably have to buy 5 years' worth or more to have any "effect," and the longer they are kept, the greater the chance that a lot of those stamps will be lost in one way or another. Seniors may go for this idea in a serious way, meaning that when they die, the stamps may not even be redeemed. Meanwhile, the Postal Service makes interest off that money instead of you.

This seems to be part of a new trend in government to take on business-like tactics. Take the U.S. Mint, for example, and their series of State Quarters and now President Dollar Coins. The idea seems less and less about providing a simple, basic public service, and more and more to market the service in the best possible way to get people to spend their money to put more cash in the government's hands.

I suppose the trend started (or at least accelerated) in the Lottery Boom a few decades ago, instituting a kind of Idiot Tax (or, alternatively, a Fantasize-About-A-Rich-Life Tax). Remember how the states rationalized it by saying that all or most of the proceeds would go to public schools? Naturally, that was yet another fraud: if school districts actually wound up getting any money, it was snatched right back away again by de-funding the districts' original budget--taking money out of one pocket while your putting money into another.

And like the Stamp and Coin campaigns, the lotteries similarly are financially smart business propositions for the state governments, who of course pay out the money over 20 years (giving you the option to take a much-reduced lump sum). Th odds of winning are so small, you get cases like this where the guy who actually beats the astronomical odds doesn't realize he's won for a month and a half. Apparently, he rationally believed that he had a snowball's chance in hell of winning, so irony stepped in and gave him the winning number.

In short, we seem to be seeing more and more get-revenues-quick marketing ploys executed by the government--ploys that probably get most of their money by getting people in the lower income brackets to buy into stupid ideas or otherwise throw their money away, into the hands of the government--which is steadily decreasing the tax burden of wealthy people. Add the fact that government is cutting services to lower-income citizens more and more, and you have an interesting combined effect.

So, what's next? Government-sponsored Pyramid schemes? Casinos operated by the IRS? Privatized Social Security Accounts?

I'm not joking on that last one--it's a pure gamble. The stock market gets depressed when you retire, and you're SOL. But then, the attitude reflected by this new trend of Government-as-Sham-Business seems to be, "if you're stupid enough to buy into it, then you deserve what you get out of it."

Gore Wins at Oscars

...But I have heard that Bush is demanding a recount.

Sorry, I couldn't help myself. But indeed Gore did win; An Inconvenient Truth won not only Best Documentary, but it also scored Best Original Song, "I Need to Wake Up" by Melissa Etheridge.

CNN has a predictable take on it; their headline: "Gore uses Oscar speech to plug environmental cause." As if it were inappropriate. Well, duh he used the speech to plug the message. Gore wins an Oscar for making a documentary on the environment, you think he's gonna talk about Britney Spears? The Oscar is a strong kind of public validation for his documentary and its message, the award stage is completely appropriate for that message.

The right wingers will, naturally, blow this all off as Doofus Al Gore getting kudos from ultra-liberal Hollywood, as if that's enough reason to further entrench themselves in the belief that Gore is wrong, and that a Gore presidency would have been a disaster.

However, let's look at two key pieces of evidence in plain sight. First, Al Gore did not just jump on the global climate change bandwagon yesterday. He was way ahead of the curve, trying to spread the word for the past three decades. As he makes clear in the documentary, he was turned on initially by evidence that greenhouse gas emissions and global temperatures were both rising at the same time; he studied the subject seriously, saw much farther than a lot of others on the subject, and has been vindicated by ever-growing scientific consensus that global climate change is real and is man-made.

This just a few weeks ago from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), a highly-regarded scientific organization made up of top scientists studying climate change:

• Warming of the climate system is unequivocal
• Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely (greater than 90% likely) due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (human) greenhouse gas concentrations
• The probability that this is caused by natural climatic processes alone is less than 5%

It is becoming more and more clear that Gore was right on this all along. Early action to stem the crisis could potentially save the U.S. trillions of dollars down the road. The right wing's reaction: let's distort what he's saying and ridicule him.

Second point: Al Gore saw the Internet coming, understood its value long before most others, and made its present form possible.

Gore saw the value of a high-speed national computer network as far back as the 1970's (when the Internet was still in its infancy); in the 1980's, when civilian use of the Internet was being defunded by the Pentagon, Gore pushed for it to be used beyond strict scientific research, and eventually got the "Gore Bill" passed--officially, the "High Performance Computing and Communications Act" of 1991, which was at the time aimed at creating "a high-tech 'data superhighway'" that would "link computers in the nation's research, education and military establishments" and "eventually will evolve into a universally available National Public Telecomputing Network that may be the successor to the telephone system, marrying the entertainment, communications and computer industries." This act led to billion-dollar funding for the development of the Internet.

It is the contention of the creators of the Internet that Al Gore was instrumental to building the foundation of the Internet as we know it today; without the legislation authored and pushed by Al Gore, the Internet boom of the 90's, with its value of trillions of dollars to the U.S. economy, would have been far less than it was.

The right wing's reaction: twist Gore's words taking credit for his actions, and ridicule him mercilessly.

So when the right wing derides Gore for winning an Oscar tonight, they'll be right on the same track they've always been on.

The thing is, on two major subjects of great importance to our society, Al Gore was prescient, seeing the value of both issues decades before they gained popular acceptance.

Isn't that a quality you would want in a leader? Take a look at George W. Bush. His major prediction about what is important was the invasion of Iraq, and on just about every single aspect of the operation including its overall necessity, he was dead wrong. The result: The United States has lost significant power as a world leader, the region is erupting into chaos, our military has been weakened to the point of breaking, terrorist organizations are thriving, and our country is paying in thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars.

And the right wing lauds this man as a visionary and a hero.

Some dare to speak of Al Gore running for president. A tough sell in a Democratic field already choked with strong contenders, and more set to enter soon. Despite Gore's clear vision and achievements, the public image of a man ridiculed is still strong, and Gore himself has said he would not run. The "Draft Gore" movement might have the right man and a strong will, and personally I would have a tough time finding anyone more capable than Gore to be president.

Unfortunately for us, that will probably not happen. Fortunately, however, Gore is still going to be around and very visible in pushing for a better world.

Red-flanked Bluetail

Just two years and thirteen days ago, I spotted a nice Red-flanked Bluetail in my neighborhood park:

It was nice, but it was also the less-colorful female. Today, I asked Sachi to go on a walk through that park again to see if we could spot one--and indeed we did. Or, I should say, Sachi did--she's got sharp eyes. After a minute of her pointing out its location, I took a large number of shots--95% of which I couldn't use because the bird was hiding in the shade, and most of the images (at only 1/15th of a second exposure) we too blurry. However, a few were good enough to print, and shows that we got a beautiful blue male in good color:

But here's the best shot before it flew off:

Nice little birdie!

The interesting thing is that we saw Great Tits, a Red-flanked Bluetail, crows, bulbuls, a Dusky Thrush, Tree Sparrows, and a few Black Kites. That was the whole roster--and looking at my post from two years ago, that was exactly the list of birds I saw back then.

Morphing Corporate Baseball Teams

In the United States, sports stadiums have started changing names due to corporate sponsorship--note Candlestick Park in San Francisco, which has gone through the names 3Com Park and now Monster Park. But the names of the teams change only when a franchise moves to a new city.

In Japan, however, franchises are not awarded by location; you don't really hear about a city getting a baseball team, rather a corporation getting one. Baseball teams take on whatever name the owners desire, which means that you've got names of the teams themselves morphing from one to another. I just saw a story about the Softbank Hawks, and thought, wha? They used to be the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks (Daiei is a supermarket chain), though when I first came to Japan, they were the Nankai Hawks (Nankai is a railway firm).

Other teams have similar name histories. The Swallows were originally the Kokutetsu Swallows (another railroad firm, this one the now-defunct JNR, the national railway corporation), then they were briefly the Sankei (newspaper) Atoms, then they became the Yakult (beverage) Swallows. The Yokohama Baystars started out as the Taiyo (?) Whales, became the Taiyo-Shochiku (alcoholic beverage) Robins, then the Taiyo Whales again, and then the Yokohama Taiyo Whales.

Then there is the Hankyu (railway) Braves, which became the Orix (financial group) BlueWave, which merged in a businesslike manner with the Kintetsu Buffaloes (formerly the Kintetsu Buffalo before the herd increased I guess, and before that, the Kintetsu Pearls, owned by the hilariously-named Kinki Nippon Railway) and became the Orix Kintetsu Buffaloes, later to be renamed the Orix Buffaloes.

One team name I particularly enjoy is the Nippon Ham (meat-packing company) Fighters, now the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters. Often the name of the team is misinterpreted as the "Ham Fighters," which I think is much better than just "Fighters," myself.

One note: for a sport which claims to have acquired its own unique Japanese identity, the names are all English--including even the more-Asian-flavored names, the Carp and the Dragons. The Giants are sometimes called the "Kyojin" (Japanese for "Giants"), but that's a nickname, not an official one. I have to wonder if that's a rule or something, because you gotta figure that "Samurai" would be the perfect name for a Japanese team. However, Japanese people would find such names odd. What might appeal to English speakers would sound strange or even comical to Japanese--take the name "Ninjas," for example. A Japanese person would laugh at any baseball team with that name.

In the meantime, you gotta have a scorecard to keep track of the name changes.

Quick Vid

Go check out the YouTube video Paul found. It's a hilarious Conan O'Brien piece. Yes, I know, I could embed it here myself. But Paul found it, and you should check out his blog anyway.

Birdies

I went to Tokyo Port Wild Bird Park a little bit ago. I don't know about the claim that December to February are the best birding months. I've heard people say that, and I did miss the first two months of that... but if February is any indication, I haven't been missing much. Though I am focusing more on waterfowl, and maybe I should be looking for passerines much more. But there were a few birds there which provided interesting shots.

A Mejiro (Japanese White-Eye) in flight.

Common Buzzards at a distance. The second one is to the left of the first, very hard to see. Can you pick it out?

A Common Sandpiper came close.

An Oriental Turtledove, even closer. A beautiful bird, the Turtledove. Lovely plumage.

This photo just struck me as funny. The Cormorant drying off, the ducks on one foot, and the gull ducking. A lot of little stuff in a small arc.

And a Little Egret posing among the ducks.

Boiled Down

There's been so much on Iraq lately. Nine U.S. helicopters shot down in five weeks. Several blasts using chlorine trucks as dirty bombs as part of a new offensive by the insurgents. Six months of escalated deaths of our soldiers, averaging three of our best killed every day for half a year straight--the longest sustained death rate at that level in the war so far. The "Surge" forcing thousands upon thousands of servicemen and women to return for second and third tours of duty, hardship beyond reason.

And on the political side, Republicans using the filibuster to repeatedly block even the weakest joint non-binding resolution speaking out against Bush's war, signaling even greater opposition should Democrats attempt to take any action stronger than that--and then Republicans whip around and lash out at Democrats for not having the "will" to do anything. All this while Dick Cheney becomes the Nth Bush ally to say for the Nth time that opposition to the Bush war is tantamount to treason, and how opposing whatever Bush dictates is equal to selling out to al Qaeda, an echo of the 2004 GOP line that a vote for Kerry was a vote for bin Laden.

Essentially, it boils down to the simple fact that Democrats would call the troops home today if they had the ability to do so. This is crystal clear. They do not have that ability; that is just as clear. Any such decision would be filibustered by Republicans in Congress, and even if it got past that, it would carry so few Republican votes that Bush would instantly veto it without the slightest worry over Congress overriding the veto. Just as Democrats are blamed for allowing the war by voting for the war powers resolution--despite the fact that had every Democratic senator voted "Nay," Republicans still would have passed it, and nothing would have differed in terms of outcome. Democrats have been powerless to stop this since the beginning, and still are now--not for lack of trying, but because they do not have enough votes to carry through anything that would have any real effect. Witness that they cannot even pass a non-binding resolution in the Senate.

I would take bitter satisfaction in knowing that the catastrophic outcome which this will inevitably bring would be seen as Bush's legacy, except for two things. First, it looks more and more like the Democrats will be blamed, for not stopping Bush even as Bush ironically is given a bye on this whole debacle for having strong convictions and doing it all in the name of the war on terror. And second, even if Bush does get the blame, it will be the worst sort of Pyrrhic victory, won with the blood of thousands of our people, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, the breakdown of what little stability there used to be in the Middle East, the decimation of our military, the soiling of our image in the world, the loss of our civil liberties, rights, and freedoms, and the stark division of our country at the hands of "a Uniter, not a Divider."

It is sometimes hard to remember that things are bound to get better for no other reason than that they can hardly get worse.

Watch This Guy

Josh Marshall just posted this video, and I can see why. You really should watch it. It is Barack Obama in a discussion from November 2002, months before the Iraq invasion.

This guy foresaw the sectarian divisions, the long-term quagmire, and stated that had he been a Senator then, he would have voted "Nay" on the war powers resolution. This is before the war started, back when the country was still in high-flag-waving gear.

Is this not the sort of person you would want making decisions? People talk about his inexperience. Well, how many people with more experience than Obama made the wrong decision? I don't care if Obama has only been a senator for less than two years.

Having good sense and the courage to say and do the right thing does not require experience, and having experience does not ensure good sense and the courage to say and do the right thing.

Always When You're Not Ready for It

When I left home this morning, I knew it might rain tonight, so I wanted to keep the bulk of my backpack down. So I decided not to take my digital camera with me, figuring that there would not be anything worth photographing, anyway.

Soon after leaving home, traffic on a one-lane avenue was stalled. I was annoyed until I got around the bend in the road and saw what the problem was--and then I wished I had brought my camera. A truck carrying large boxes of toilet paper had lost a case. Ever see a road teepeed? Now I have. At the point of impact, the asphalt was half-carpeted in white. Better yet, it happened just as the road sloped down a hill, so rolls of toilet paper leaving long, white trails behind them streaked the road all the way to the bottom. All this as the truck's two occupants scrambled to pick everything up.

I gotta start bringing my camera with me wherever I go. Or at least get a cheap second camera that'll fit into a pocket.

Addendum: By the way, 1300 days of nonstop blogging today.

Different Party, Different Coverage

About a week and a half ago, the mainstream media went into high gear to play the right-wing's fantasies about Nancy Pelosi "demanding" a very large and luxurious jet so she could ferry around her contributors, cronies and lobbyists. Of course, it turns out that the entire story was a completely fabricated lie based upon nothing more than the unimpeachable House Sergeant-at-Arms requesting a jet for Pelosi that could fly non-stop to San Francisco, thus avoiding security problems with unexpected layovers. The press, however, just went with the right-wing version of it, and went with it big. The lie was aimed at making Pelosi seem like some prima donna who didn't want to demean herself to flying with the lowly public.

Certainly the media would act in exactly the same way if a major Republican figure were to be caught in a similar fiasco? Right? Right?

Well, guess what? It now looks like the newest Republican front-runner for the 2008 presidential race, Rudy Giuliani, has his own hot story involving a jet and demands for luxurious perks--and the media is studiously ignoring it. Right now, it's running on The Smoking Gun web site. While I am not sure if it has been verified as 100% true yet, the media didn't wait around for the Pelosi story to be verified, and The Smoking Gun has a pretty good track record on this kind of thing.

The five-page contract which outlines Giuliani's requirements for his $100,000 speaking engagement includes an option for a private jet, and the agreement emphasizes in bold lettering that "the private aircraft MUST BE a Gulfstream IV or bigger." Giuliani also demands a "pre-registered, large two bedroom, non-smoking suite with a king-size bed, on an upper floor, with a balcony and view if applicable." In addition, four other rooms on the same floor are demanded for Giuliani's entourage. Giuliani specifies exactly what sort of photographs may be taken ("without flash bulbs"), and that no "candid" shots be taken.

So, is the media going into a frenzy over the juicy details? Are they reporting for days on end about how Giuliani is a glutton for opulence and considers himself above the rest of us? The answer is, in a nutshell, no. One or two stories ran (Raw Story and NY Daily News) in major media outlets. That's it. Google News produces a list of nearly a thousand stories when searching for "Pelosi jet," but almost nothing on Giuliani's story appears.

Now, I am not suggesting that Giuliani is out of line for demanding what he does. He's a big name, and big names can draw big speaking fees with all sorts of great perks. Nothing wrong with that.

But the issue here is parity. A fabricated lie about the Democratic Speaker of the House (who is not running for anything at the moment) demanding a jet is swarmed over by the media, primarily on the basis that Pelosi is being a diva and insisting on swanky, queen-bee perks; a more-likely-true leak about Giuliani demanding a jet with his own classy perks is virtually ignored--despite the fact that this guy just announced that he's running for president and is considered one of two front-runners for his party's ticket. Yes, the Pelosi jet story concerned use of public funds--but that was not what the stories zeroed in on, rather it was Pelosi acting imperiously and demanding lavishness.

The clear conclusion, of course, is that there is nothing close to parity in the coverage here. It's just that damned liberal media, at it again.

If Only

You may or may not have heard of a company called Steorn, which is hyping a product called "Orbo." Despite the names, the company is not Norwegian--it's Irish (though the name "Steorn" is Norwegian, meaning to guide or manage). And the product is not a new piece of computer equipment or fashion accessory, it is, supposedly, a source of free energy:

Orbo produces free, clean and constant energy - that is our claim. By free we mean that the energy produced is done so without recourse to external source. By clean we mean that during operation the technology produces no emissions. By constant we mean that with the exception of mechanical failure the technology will continue to operate indefinitely.

Okay, already your skeptic's hat is firmly planted atop your head by now, no doubt. Interestingly, on the exact same page the above claim is made, the entrepreneurs themselves admit that "The sum of these claims for our Orbo technology is a violation of the principle of conservation of energy, perhaps the most fundamental of scientific principles."

Every so often, you get claims like this. Sometimes it's a promise of an invisibility cloak, other times it's a car that gets 200 miles to the gallon, but usually it's like the contention above--a free, clean energy technology which is also potentially a perpetual-motion machine, or close enough to one.

The interesting thing about this claim is that it's just odd and bold enough to make your tinfoil hat slip ever so slightly off-center so that the bozo rays from this company make you wonder just a tiny bit if there's actually something to it.

And admit it: you want it to be true. It would be so cool.

Here's the deal: these guys published a full-page ad in The Economist (which likely cost $160,000) last year claiming that they developed a technology which provides a "free, clean, and constant energy" source. They have invited skeptics and scientists to come and review the technology first-hand. The firm's CEO is not some conspiracy-theory nutcase (he says he doesn't believe in them), is not claiming that anyone is trying to suppress their findings, and promises to reveal and license the technology later this year after the independent scientific review has been completed. The noises they're making sound very much on-the-level ("until this thing is validated by science we won't be doing anything commercial with it"), and their process of validation seems like they're willing to pony up the goods for independent verification.

Facts like these are what makes the claim intriguing. On the other hand, the company has released no firm explanation or proof of the new technology; it has a very shaky financial history; and, let's face it, the technology they claim to have would violate the first law of thermodynamics. That being the case, a patent for the whole technology cannot be granted, which is convenient as a way to avoid revealing the whole technology in a patent application.

Nevertheless, the claims are enticing if vaporish:

Sean McCarthy stated in an RTE radio interview that, "What we have developed is a way to construct magnetic fields so that when you travel round the magnetic fields, starting and stopping at the same position, you have gained energy... The energy isn't being converted from any other source such as the energy within the magnet. It's literally created. Once the technology operates it provides a constant stream of clean energy."

In a demonstration to The Guardian at Steorn's office, a computer display reported the device to have an efficiency of 285%. The article goes on to say that Steorn claims to have measured efficiencies up to 400%. The device has been reported to be an all-magnet motor, with no electromagnetic component. Steorn also claims that according to its research the device can be scaled to almost any size, powering anything from a flashlight to an airplane.

None of these claims have been independently verified.

There is a huge chance that these guys are very clever scam artists who are trying to get investors to pour money into a fake technology which they can claim was an honest but failed attempt at a free and clean energy source (apparently, they have raised two and a half million euros, though that was before the public announcement--they claim that since the announcement and until the results of the validation are complete, they will raise no new investments).

But in the same way you hope that this time your lottery ticket will have the winning numbers, you find yourself willing, even if just a little bit, to suspend disbelief and imagine what it would be like if these guys were actually on the level and actually had something here.

Here's the CEO of the company talking about the whole shebang:

Vote For Me, Al Franken

Unlike his comedy bit from way back, this time Al Franken is running for something. And despite the media attention he's been getting, I think that he has a much better chance of winning Paul Wellstone's seat than the commentators give him credit for. If you haven't listened to him on his radio show for more than a few minutes at a time, then you don't know the reason why. If you have listened to him extensively and you still don't like him or think he's electable, then we simply disagree--because I think he's got a lot going for him. Watch the recorded message above and you'll get a bit of an idea why.

Despite his usual placement in media coverage as being opposite Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Bill O'Reilly (he has to cover those three and sometimes more, because there are for too many more conservatives with their own shows or widespread coverage than there are liberals), Franken is not equal to them in temperament. In fact, his character is as opposite theirs as his politics is; instead of arrogant and fatuous like Limbaugh, Franken is generally mild-mannered and self-effacing; instead of being outrageously offensive to bait the other side, he is simply opinionated, and can get along with people he doesn't agree with quite well (as he did with Arianna Huffington when she was still a conservative); and unlike O'Reilly, Franken does not have a complete disregard for the facts, nor does he treat anyone like garbage. Franken may be painted as some ultra-liberal nutball by the right wing, but then again, the right wing tries to paint every liberal as an ultra-liberal nutball. It's their way of saying, "we hate your guts because you disagree with us."

But Franken is also heartfelt and caring. His concern for the soldiery, for example, is something which is impossible to miss. Whereas right-wingers tend to disregard and mistreat the troops they use as political props, Franken is a long-time entertainer for the troops, having done at least seven USO tours, including at least two that went through Europe to Bosnia and Kosovo in '99 and 2000, and several in Iraq and Afghanistan, the last one being just a few months ago. He honestly and strongly respects the troops, and when he sees them as being mistreated, he gets very, very emotional about it. And one can't simply dismiss this as a political hopeful posing--unless you figure Franken has been posing for eight years now at least.

Despite his books which devastate Limbaugh and O'Reilly, listening to Franken, you don't get the feeling that he's mean-spirited in the least (unless you are Limbaugh or O'Reilly, one must suppose). Franken's a satirist. He lampoons people he sees as pompous and overbearing for a living. But you don't come away feeling like he truly hates their guts and wants to hurt them, not like when you listen to Limbaugh and O'Reilly themselves. He'll say what he says with wryness and a chuckle, and will just as easily slip into Stewart Smalley and make fun of himself.

But none of these are the best reasons for hoping that Franken makes it into a senate seat. The best reason is his intellect. Not that he's never made a mistake or been wrong about anything. Rather, the man has an open mind and most importantly a respect for the facts. He doesn't just blow out commentaries without knowing what he' talking about, and when he gets something wrong--usually minor details if anything--he quickly and readily admits it and moves onward. He is smart, and doggone it, people like him.

Well, not all conservatives, to be sure.

The thing is, Franken gets it. He understands what's important. He understands the issues, and you can bet on his making the move he feels is right, not the move he feels is politically sound.

A few articles on him have voiced concerns over celebrity politicians, especially Jesse Ventura, his having been a Minnesota pol himself. But Ventura was a brassy showman--you could tell before he entered office that it would be about Ventura being a star. It's impossible to even imagine Franken would be like that. Franken is more like the politician you'd like to see in office, but got sidetracked by a career as a comic.

If Franken doesn't make it through the primaries as the Democratic candidate, then it'll be the party's loss; if he doesn't get elected to the Senate, then it's a loss for Minnesotans and the rest of us. This is a good guy. A wiseass, but still, a good guy.

New Spam Activity

Something that I just noticed: spammers are now adding a new tactic to their spamming: searching my blog. Not with Google, but rather using my own blog's internal software. My blog's internal search engine records the searches done by visitors; usually it just reads search keywords like "nova drug arrest," "hypnotoad," "right eye twitching," or "google video," to name four legitimate searches done in the past few days.

However, I am now seeing a few hundred searches performed every week which look for spam keywords; apparently, the spammers have automated programs access my blog's search engine script to look for spam terms they have undoubtedly tried to get past my filters in comment spam. In the past one week, 127 searches were made for URLs for legitimate sites (usually educational addresses), with words like "viagra" or "cialis" tacked onto the end. Another 44 searches were made directly for the spam terms themselves, like "used rolex," airline flight tickets cheap airline tickets," or even strings like "This excellent site!!! Want you good luck!!!" (clearly one of the fake compliments posted riding a spam link).

Apparently, Google ain't good enough for them. Now they have to directly access the blog's own search engine script to see if their spam has stuck. Which, of course, it hasn't. In the same 1-week period, SpamLookup blocked 1,681 comment spam. MT-Blacklist blocks a lot more than that--between 1,000 and 1,500 on any given day. MT-Blacklist blocks spam which matches the blacklist filter; SpamLookup stops the rest that get through, usually on the basis of having URLs or recognized spammer IP addresses, or whatnot.

But to the best of my knowledge, out of 2,301 blog posts and 5,513 comments over the past four years minus a few months, not a single shred or hint of spam exists on this blog. That ain't gonna stop 'em from continuing their barrage, of course.

Macrovision's Statement on DRM

Steve Job's polemic on DRM drew many responses, but they're essentially all the same: full of hot air and horse manure. As a representative sample, here's the one from Fred Amoroso, CEO & President of Macrovision, a company that specializes in the production of DRM schemes:

DRM is broader than just music --
While your thoughts are seemingly directed solely to the music industry, the fact is that DRM also has a broad impact across many different forms of content and across many media devices. Therefore, the discussion should not be limited to just music.

He's right. DRM should be removed from all media, not just music. DVD region encoding, for example, is in place for no other reason than to defeat the open marketplace and gouge customers in each region for as much as they can be shaken down for. And Jobs' argument applies equally well to all DRM: it can be and regularly is broken, and so DRM, in every form, does nothing but hobble honest, paying customers so that the companies applying the DRM can cheat them. The entire argument that DRM has anything at all to do with piracy is bunk--it is clearly and simply about controlling media after a customer has bought it so that the paying customer must pay the highest price possible, and pay that price again and again for the same media.

DRM increases not decreases consumer value --
I believe that most piracy occurs because the technology available today has not yet been widely deployed to make DRM-protected legitimate content as easily accessible and convenient as unprotected illegitimate content is to consumers. The solution is to accelerate the deployment of convenient DRM-protected distribution channels—not to abandon them.

This is just one of the many places in this argument where Macrovision's bias as a DRM-producing company shows through. The point Jobs made, the point which is absolutely and glaringly true and real, is that DRM will never work. So long as there is a clear picture and clear sound output at one end, pirates will always find a way around whatever DRM scheme is thrown at them. Macrovision just wants to get the perpetual contracts to make yet another DRM scheme when each successive one is defeated.

Without a reasonable, consistent and transparent DRM we will only delay consumers in receiving premium content in the home, in the way they want it.

There's a bald-faced lie if there ever was one. The way customers want it is without DRM. What Amoroso is saying here is supposedly that DRM can allow a customer to choose between delivery systems and viewing devices. What he really means is that without DRM, a customer would actually be able to view media without restrictions--i.e., you buy it, you own it--and that's the last thing Macrovision or the media producers want. They want to charge the customer for the same media again and again and again, as many times as they can. Pay once for viewing over cable, again for renting, again for buying to watch on TV, again for buying to watch on your iPod, and so forth and so on.

Abandoning DRM now will unnecessarily doom all consumers to a "one size fits all" situation that will increase costs for many of them.

Yeah, customers would really hate owning something outright after paying for it, without restrictions about how how and where and how often they can play it. That would suck. What Amoroso is probably talking about, however, is the idea that without DRM, one high price would have to be paid instead of many small prices. Which, of course, is BS. It all tracks back to the idea that somehow media can't be made available without DRM--that if even one version is free and clear, it will ruin all other sales. But since most media is sold without DRM, and all DRM is breakable, and yet the media producers are still making many, many billions in a lucrative business, that's clearly bull.

Besides which, it does not mean that DRM must be universally applied. Want to DRM a rental movie which is only intended to play 2 or 3 times? Fine. If I rent it, then I don't own it, so DRM away; I don't expect rental material to be permanent, or else I would wonder why NetFlix wanted their DVD back. You think that DRM is necessary for the subscription music services, where people pay for access and not ownership? Again, fine--if ownership stays in your hands, you may DRM till the cows come home. But if I pay to own the media, then keep your grubby little DRM paws off of it, thank you very much. I just paid your highest price, the "one size fits all," and now it's mine.

In fact, Amoroso's statement itself suggests that the highest price to be paid deserves no DRM. The "one price fits all" he mentioned must be the highest possible price, and that price is for outright ownership--and Amoroso said plainly that such a price would be tied to "abandoning DRM." Thanks, Fred! You just made Steve Jobs' case for him.

DRM will increase electronic distribution--

... Quite simply, if the owners of high-value video entertainment are asked to enter, or stay in a digital world that is free of DRM, without protection for their content, then there will be no reason for them to enter, or to stay if they've already entered. The risk will be too great.

You mean like every single movie and TV show now made, which are all transferred eagerly to DVDs which have either no DRM, or DRM that is so easy to break that there is no practical difference? What horse crap. All music and all video is already in a DRM-free world, in that every single piece of media can be separated from DRM easily and effortlessly by pirates, which is supposed to be the whole purpose of DRM, right? And yet all these media producers just can't wait to release their material because of the immense profits waiting for them despite the "devastating" effect of piracy (which, of course, is little or no effect at all).

In short, adding DRM will not increase the release of media at all, for the simple reason that all media which can be released, is being released already. You can't increase the amount being released when everything is being released. And with DVD sales now exceeding box office revenues, the suggestion that movie studios would pull out of the DVD market if DRM were not available is so ludicrous as to be laughable.

DRM needs to be interoperable and open –

No need to go over this--the paragraph is simply a swipe at Steve Jobs, daring him to license FairPlay, with the insinuation that he's the one ruining things by running a monopoly.

The rest of the statement is more PR gobbledygook, essentially saying that a reliable and pirate-proof DRM can be achieved (wrong), and the good people at Macrovision are just the people to do it. Blah blah blah.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: DRM has no relation to piracy, zero. It's about shaking down paying customers for more. It's like the guy who ties a string around a quarter so that after the vending machine accepts it, he can yank it back out; the content producers want to use DRM as the string around the media they "sell" to you, so that after you pay them for it, they can still yank it back and keep charging you for it.

To Upgrade, or Not To Upgrade

One and a half years ago, I made the decision to buy a new 1.67 GHz G4 PowerBook, even though it had just been announced that Apple would switch to Intel. Part of that decision was based upon the announcement that the transition would begin one year later and might take another year before all the models had made the switch; that meant a potential 2-year wait for a high-end laptop to come out.

Another part of the decision has to do with my standard 3-year turnover with such purchases, and the idea that early adopters sometimes get burned with problems in the new hardware. I decided that if I bought a PowerBook G4 in June 2005, I would then wait 1-2 years for a new Intel model to come out, then another year or so for the second-generation model to be released, and that would mean a smooth transition.

One other factor that motivated me was that I was, at the time, stuck with an 800MHz PowerBook G4 that was way too slow for me, and was itching to upgrade. So I made the decision to go for the 1.67 GHz G4.

Well, Apple switched to Intel way faster than anyone anticipated; in fact, the MacBook Pro was one of the first new Intel models to come out, in January of 2006, just six months after my purchase. Furthermore, there were no significant reports of problems with the new hardware, so early adopters weren't really burned.

So, a year after the MacTels came out, I'm saddled with a G4 PowerBook that will have to last me for another year and a half. Not the first wrong move I've ever made, that's for sure.

But just yesterday, I came across an article that caught my attention. The story was on the excellent resale value of Macs, something that helped me make the decision to get this G4 PowerBook in 2005: I was able to sell my aging 800 MHz machine for ¥80,000, which subsidized maybe 30% of my new purchase. My current PowerBook now has a resale value of $975. At almost the same time as I found the first article, I saw a report on refurbished MacBooks, where a top-of-the-line black MacBook model is selling for $1300. That got me to thinking. A refurbished MacBook with a new 1-year warranty could very easily outshine my old, out-of-warranty PowerBook, and it would cost me a lot less than a brand-new computer would.

Hmmm...

Of course, there's more to it than that. The models are fairly different from each other. I'd have to give up my 15" screen for a 13.3" one; however, the smaller screen would have nearly the same resolution, and perhaps better contrast & brightness, so that's kind of a wash. The MacBook has no PC Card slot, which for me is a bit of a big thing as I always use that to load my digital camera images via a Compact Flash card reader. However, I could just bite the bullet and start using the camera-to-computer USB cable like most people use (I just don't like to carry cables around). The new MacBook also has an inferior graphics card (an Intel GMA 950 versus the G4's Radeon 9700--I think the Radeon is much better, I'll have to research that). The MacBook has fewer ports, but none that I'd miss; the FireWire 800 port is the only one not matched, and I never use that anyway. Also, the MacBook's DVD burner is 6x speed, as opposed to the G4's 8x--a difference I'd hardly notice--just as I'd never use the MacBook's dual-layer option.

These disadvantages are minor, however, compared to the plusses of the MacBook. First, it has a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, which is a huge leap ahead of the 1.67 GHz G4. The MacBook also sports a 4MB L2 cache and 667 MHz system bus, compared to the G4's weak-ass 512 KB cache and 167 MHz bus. The hard drive is bigger (120GB vs. 80GB). The MacBook also comes with an iSight camera, one of those magnetic power adaptors, and might even have the upgradable WiFi-n option (I'd have to look that up as well). The MacBook is also smaller and a little lighter.

Additionally, the ability to run Windows using Parallels would be a huge thing, as I teach Windows in my Computer course and XP under Virtual PC on an aging G4 just isn't cutting it. Using Parallels would be a major improvement for me.

The MacBook comes with Apple's crappy new 2-chip RAM arrangement, with 1 GB built-in, meaning that if I want to match my current 1.5 GB of RAM, I'd have to shell out close to $90 for a 1GB replacement chip, or $180 if I wanted to go for 2GB (which is likely).

SofMap says that they would pay ¥108,000 ($900) for the G4 I have now. That's their top range and could be reduced if they find anything they don't like, but this machine is in good shape and even has an extra GB of RAM inside. If I tried to sell the computer through ads, I might get an extra ten thousand yen or two.

The refurbished MacBook is $1400 including tax. Add $70 for shipping from the U.S., and $180 for new RAM, and it comes to a whopping $1650. That would make the difference $750 (or $590 to $670 if I can get a better price by selling via an ad)--more than a thousand dollars less than the same un-refurbished MacBook would cost with the same configuration ($1812, add $70 for shipping).

This idea has occurred to me just now, and this blog post is kind of a part of my rumination process on the issue; I am still pretty far from making a final choice, and have some looking-into to do (e.g., are there refurbished MacBooks here in Japan and for how much, etc.). I'd love your feedback as well, of course, and any alternate ideas or information.

The Best "Defense"?

Well, in case you had some doubt, here's proof that conservatives are not just trying to "protect marriage," but in fact are aggressively trying to bash gays. Kevin Drum notes a report on one consequence of Michigan's "defense of marriage" law, which stated "The union of one man and one woman in marriage shall be the only agreement recognized as a marriage or similar union for any purpose." At the time, it was sold as simply keeping gays from marrying. But now, it has been used by the Republican state attorney general to actively ban any state-run institution from offering spousal benefits to gay people. It looks like it's going to be upheld and that next year, gay people who receive such benefits will be cut off.

Now, consider that for a moment. The idea that allowing gays to marry will somehow harm the institution of marriage is already a grotesquely transparent excuse for homophobia. But to accept this new attack as anything but pure gay bashing would suggest that there are actually people out there who would rethink the idea of heterosexual marriage because the state of Michigan extends family support benefits to gay people.

Even the most hardcore fundamentalist bigots would not be able to suppress their gag reflex upon trying to swallow that particular throbbing foot-long delivery of homophobic pseudo-logic.

Good Lord, That's Bad

Here's a video clip from Fox's new show, The 1/2 Hour News Hour. Intended to be the right wing's answer to The Daily Show, you can see that they ripped off the studio design, camera moves, music style, and even the feel of the graphics directly from the Comedy Central show. Unfortunately, they couldn't rip off a good sense of humor or a talented host.

The clip is almost painful to watch. The best gag they have is the name of a magazine for Barack Obama: "BO." That's about as good as it gets. But the bad jokes are not what's painful--it's the laugh track. During the in-studio news desk bits, the laughter comes from a live audience, but it is clearly forced, and sounds angry; for example, when Obama is stuck with a barb, the laughter seems to come mostly from three or four conspicuously loud men in the audience, one of whom shouts, "Yeah!!"

But during the video piece, the laughter is clearly canned. Aside from being very different in quality than the live-audience laughter a few moments before, each burst of laughter sounds nearly identical, and artificially timed. There is also too much effort to shove each joke in your face: in the piece, the "BO" magazine has five gag headlines; if The Daily Show makes such a mock-up, they might mention one or two and then comment on how people taping the show will be able to view the rest. On The 1/2 Hour News Hour, they painfully zoom in on every last one to make sure you don't miss their cleverness, with the canned laughter punctuating each one, turning neatly to applause at the end.

The anchors themselves look like SNL "Weekend Update" rejects, reading their cue-card-driven conversation with less skill than an Academy Awards show presenter. The Daily Show became popular because Jon Stewart has real talent; this show is based rather on sheer political will in the absence of comic talent. And Stewart is not only clever, he also clearly enjoys himself and is open about the gags; the Fox hosts are rigid and posing, taking themselves as seriously as Colbert ironically pretends to. They lack the ability to project that we're all having a good time, and come across more like amateurs reading cue cards with jokes they don't quite get themselves.

As so many are pointing out, this show is not really a comedy show, it is a right-wing political attack show disguised as comedy. The Daily Show combs the news for anything that's funny, and runs with that. They'll go after anything stupid, a key strategy. If the Democrats can bolster their control of Congress and elect a president in 2008, you know that The Daily Show will shift focus onto them, simply because they'll be in the news doing the most stupid stuff--and their liberal-leaning audience will still love the show. This new Fox show simply throws vicious barbs at Democrats; were the Republicans to take over Congress again and get a Republican in the White House in 2008, the show would just scrape deeper and deeper into the crap barrel for something angry to throw at what little there was to say about Democrats. They're not going after anything stupid, they're going after anything liberal. If Jon Stewart took the same strategy in the other direction, he'd fall flat and people would stop watching.

The question now is, will the show were to last for more than a few months. It'll certainly gain the hardcore crowd that loves Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, but it will never gain the much broader audience that Stewart and Colbert enjoy. If it stays on the air for more than just the short time it'll take for people to figure out it sucks, it'll be because Murdoch and Fox are subsidizing it in the hope that one day it'll catch on--like Bill Gates is doing with the Zune.

But just in case you want to see more really bad comedy, here you go.

Truck Parking Lot

In Japan, roads can be pretty narrow, and it's not uncommon to find a street which is so narrow that you can hardly believe it's even a one-way street, and then you realize it's used for two-way traffic. Wide roads exist, but they are few and far between. A three- or four-lane road is fairly hard to find in Japan, with highways (expressways) being no exception to that rule. Commonly, two lanes is a wide thoroughfare in Japan, and most of the major traffic arteries in Tokyo are two lanes almost all the way.

So naturally, truckers make parking lots out of them. I see this pretty much every day on the way to work. I take Route 20, or Koushu Kaido, one of the major east-west routes going through western Tokyo Prefecture. And on the stretches where there are not many businesses, trucks are commonly parked along the side of the road, their drivers taking a nap or break or something. Here's one I spotted yesterday. In the photo, with time frozen, it's kind of hard to see that the purple truck on the left is not moving (I should have taken a longer exposure to blur moving traffic), but you can see its parking lights are on. Also note the no-parking sign at top left.

And no, there are no construction sites nearby to explain why they've stopped at that location--no unloading is going on, nothing. They're just parked there. While this happens mostly on the major roads, I've seen it on most two-lane streets that I regularly drive on.

This of course forces all traffic for about a hundred meters or more behind the truck to merge into a single lane, and I have often seen three or four trucks parked like this along a few hundred meter's stretch of road, essentially making a major boulevard into a one-lane street for a considerable length--enough to cause traffic jams.

And, as is usual for this kind of thing in Japan, nobody seems to mind or care or complain. Certainly the police never do anything about it.

Very Clever

Last year, the Washington Supreme Court, by a 5-4 decision, upheld a ban on gay marriage. The decision specifically cited the production of children to be a core reason for the decision to limit the definition of marriage to include only same-sex partners:

...encouraging procreation between opposite-sex individuals within the framework of marriage is a legitimate government interest furthered by limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples.

Angered by this decision, some gay rights activists are trying to expose the flawed logic behind this ruling by taking it to the logical extreme: if the legally defined purpose of marriage is to procreate, then all people who cannot or do not procreate must be barred from the institution of marriage.

Thus Initiative 957, called the "Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance," was born. It is a referendum proposed for the state ballot that would require procreation for a marriage to be legitimate. Any married couple unable to produce children within three years would have their marriage annulled until such time as they could produce children. Otherwise, they would have to make do with a legally unrecognized "social union."

Now, it is fair: if you're going to exclude gays on the basis of inability to procreate, you should not discriminate--the principle should be applied universally. If the true purpose of marriage is to procreate, then it should be legitimate to ban all non-procreators, not just the same-sex ones.

Of course, this very act of fairness shows up the idiocy of the principle. Marriage is not just about procreation. Which, of course, is the whole point. The idea of I-957 is not to have the measure passed, it is to call attention to the flaw in the stated reasoning of the so-called "defense of marriage" campaign sweeping the country. The "logic" and legitimacy of using the yardstick of procreation to define marriage falls to pieces when you realize that it must also exclude childless straight couples, else be discriminatory by nature.

If these "defense of marriage" yahoos want to discriminate against gays, they should simply come out and say so. And of course, they'd probably love to. But then, if they did, they'd never get any anti-gay laws passed, because these days you can't get bigoted laws passed unless you dress them up real pretty.

Fukutoshin Line

This is The Line Formerly Known As Line 13, as it were. The new subway line opening between Ikebukuro and Shibuya is now officially the 副都心線, or Fukutoshin Line--literally, the "secondary redevelopment effects on a city center as a result of suburban development" ... er, "line," as defined by EDICT. Though that translation may be a tad stodgy. The three characters are "secondary" (or "vice-"), "metropolitan," and "heart." I guess "Secondary City Central Line" might be a better way to put it.

However, the line will not be opening as soon as I had thought. Many sources placed the opening in 2007, but the same article that reveals the name claims the line will open in June 2008.

The line is of particular interest to me because it includes a station less than a block from my work, and would do away with a 10-minute walk now required in my commute. I was hoping it would open in June this year--a nice birthday present for me--but instead I'll have to wait another year.

Darn

I tried to get this blog listed in Google News, after seeing a good number of other political blogs and plain-simple web sites included. Google wrote back:

Thank you for your note. We've reviewed http://www.blogd.com but are unable to include it in Google News at this time. We don't include sites that are written and maintained by one individual. We appreciate your taking the time to contact us and will log your site for consideration should our requirements change.

Japanese Anti-Piracy Movie Trailers Become Even More Ridiculous

Until late last year, this was the trailer playing in just about every Japanese movie theater to discourage piracy. (For irony, see the pirate-video-cam version of the trailer on YouTube.) This trailer has been around for a few years, and tells the audience: "Our enjoyment (of movies) is being stolen. Important things will be destroyed. I won't watch, I won't buy (pirated movies)." The following text appears during the trailer: I want to protect movies, I want to protect our enjoyment (of movies). ... Don't watch or buy illegal downloads and pirated DVDs. The campaign is called "Save Our Movies." As if, of course, they are greatly imperiled by movie pirates.

There are several things wrong with the ad. First of all, it is shown pretty much exclusively to people who just plunked down $15 a head to see a movie in the theater, so it's hard to say what the effect will be of either boring non-downloading patrons with such an ad, or insulting them with the accusation that they do so. Secondly, the ad is pretty strange. Artistic, perhaps, but my own reaction to it was to roll my eyes at the over-dramatization. Maybe some are impressionable enough to be affected by this message, but I have the feeling that most people scoff at it.

But they've gotten even worse in their latest trailer which I've seen several times now. Instead of the girl crying pirate-black tears, they now have a set of bizarre cartoon frames. I wish I could show them to you, but I cannot find them anywhere on the web. One frame, for example, shows a movie pirate in the back of a theater with a camera up on a tripod, wearing an evil grin, while other patrons stand and shout in anger. One male patron is caught in a ridiculous mid-shout while his girlfriend is crying miserably (while also shouting). Cut to another frame showing the pirate at home insidiously working his home computer with the movie, his hands caught in a villainous rigor.

Now, of course, you would expect this to be ironic, perhaps even self-effacing, intended as comic relief to make light of a situation while still sending the message. The thing is, that's not the tone of the trailer at all. It comes across as serious, even somber--not like they're trying to make fun of it at all. It could be tongue-in-cheek, I suppose, but nobody is laughing at it at the screenings I've seen. And it is all too similar to similar cartoons shown on Japanese subways to discourage impolite behavior, like talking on your cell phone or spreading your legs out while seated--cartoons with a caricatured offender with bystanders showing ridiculously exaggerated expressions of annoyance or distress.

Maybe I'm just not getting it. Maybe it's low-key, nobody-laughs comedy like Bunraku. But I have the feeling that it's not.

Imagining the Unimaginable

There is no doubt left that this administration, in fact, seriously desires a conflict with Iran, and is doing everything it can to prepare for and provoke a war. This from Newsweek:

Some view the spiraling attacks as a strand in a worrisome pattern. At least one former White House official contends that some Bush advisers secretly want an excuse to attack Iran. "They intend to be as provocative as possible and make the Iranians do something [America] would be forced to retaliate for," says Hillary Mann, the administration's former National Security Council director for Iran and Persian Gulf Affairs. U.S. officials insist they have no intention of provoking or otherwise starting a war with Iran, and they were also quick to deny any link to Sharafi's kidnapping. But the fact remains that the longstanding war of words between Washington and Tehran is edging toward something more dangerous. A second Navy carrier group is steaming toward the Persian Gulf, and NEWSWEEK has learned that a third carrier will likely follow. Iran shot off a few missiles in those same tense waters last week, in a highly publicized test. With Americans and Iranians jousting on the chaotic battleground of Iraq, the chances of a small incident's spiraling into a crisis are higher than they've been in years.

Add to that this even more stark revelation from the Washington Post:

Some senior administration officials still relish the notion of a direct confrontation. One ambassador in Washington said he was taken aback when John Hannah, Vice President Cheney's national security adviser, said during a recent meeting that the administration considers 2007 "the year of Iran" and indicated that a U.S. attack was a real possibility.

From one perspective, you can see it easily: Iran is seen as a major threat to stability in the region, and before some peacenik gets elected to the White House, those presently in power wish for a conflict to begin so that even if it cannot be ended within the current administration's timeline, it will at least be waged in the next one. There are without doubt many within the Bush administration who see a war with Iran as a sheer necessity. There are other advantages as well: after Iraq, Bush and the Republicans got a substantial boost in popularity, second only to 9/11; a war in Iran might also boost their fortunes and entrap the Democrats just as a critically important election looms on the horizon. A conflict with Iran could be what Republicans need to win back control of Congress and retake the White House to boot. The internal and external politics couldn't be better for a new war in the Gulf.

From that perspective (from within the White House), a war with Iran makes perfect sense. But from a different perspective, it is outright insanity. Afghanistan should always have been our focus; that's where the terrorists really were, that's where the attack on our country originated from, that's where Democracy could have been born in the Middle East had we concentrated our willpower, firepower, and economic resources at it. Moving into Iraq was disastrous: it sapped our manpower and economic resources so that Afghanistan became less manageable and slipped out of our control, not to mention that it has broken both our budget and our military strength to their breaking points. Despite administration bluster that the world now trembles at even the hint of American might being pointed their way, the fact remains that the American military is now stretched so thin that it is weaker than it has been for decades, perhaps weaker than it has been in modern times. We are in no shape whatsoever to begin a new conflict, much less one with far a country with more strength than Iraq had.

The pro-war element has been spiraling to a self-perpetuated escalation, however; each new step makes the next one even more inevitable. Had we stayed and focused in Afghanistan, instability could have been contained; for all his evil, Hussein held Iraq, a lynchpin in the Middle East, in more stable control than anyone else could have. And by invading Iraq and thundering about the "Axis of Evil," this administration has only inflamed Iran. We invaded the countries to its western and eastern borders and went ballistic in rhetoric about how Iran is pure evil, leaving them little doubt about our intentions--and accordingly, they have responded in kind. It is more than arguable that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is seen as unstable and potentially dangerous, was elected precisely because America was making itself far more a threat to Iran than it needed to. Ahmadinejad was, in a very real sense, created by the Bush administration to be the threat he now is. Had we stayed in Afghanistan only and stemmed the "evil" rhetoric, relations with Iran would be far different now.

A war with Iran is more frightening than one might imagine. Some seem to believe that we could simply bomb the country and therefore neutralize it, and that Iran would not respond beyond shaking in anger. But Iran is not Iraq, and short of overwhelming it with a massive invasion force, it cannot be easily quelled; Saddam Hussein discovered this. But the real disaster scenario would come when Iran figures out that America's military might is stretched to the breaking point, and that if Iran's military were to be fully applied toward an invasion of Iraq, no amount of American willpower could create enough new troops to handle the bloody chaos that would ensue. And with both Ahmadinejad's political tilt and his economic woes, we should not think that such a war would not be exactly what he wants as well. It is far from unimaginable that he believes he could potentially win such a conflict.

There is very little doubt also that America could not, at present, handle a full-on assault by Iran. Already we cannot handle the Iraq insurgency alone. Iran could potentially throw half a million soldiers at the conflict, far more than any number we could conceivably muster--and the likelihood of other nations coming to our aid now is virtually nil, after Bush has so carefully alienated just about everybody who could potentially be of meaningful help to us. (Would you want to pour your forces into that kind of a conflict?)

Bush would be faced with a stark option: concede defeat or go nuclear. And while some in his administration might believe that the threat of going nuclear would be enough to contain the situation, or that nuclear weapons could be used without America being irreparably damaged in its relations with the world, I believe the truth is far different.

Perhaps I am being too pessimistic, as I was four years ago when I feared that Iraq would strike Israel in response to a U.S. invasion, and that Israel would respond with nuclear weapons. In fact, I hope that I am as mistaken as that. But as wrong as I was about that point, I was prescient in so many other fears about a conflict with Iraq, and I am not all that happy that my present fears may be just as well founded. America is weaker now because of the Bush administration, and the stakes in starting a war with Iran are far higher than they were with Iraq. Iran is larger, more populous, and more powerful than Iraq ever was, and we have driven them to a point where a conflict may be inevitable--and we may have convinced ourselves that Iran will be as much a pushover as we thought Iraq would be. And that would be a grave error.

Yep, It's Still a "Liberal" Media

That is, if by "Liberal" you mean "Conservative." I opened up Google News and was greeted by two headlines showing potential front-runners formally announcing their candidacies in the upcoming presidential race:

The obstacles that could devour Obama
Senator must clear Clinton and funding hurdles

Giuliani greeted warmly by GOP
The former N.Y. mayor tells state Republicans he hopes they'll back him for president.

Now, that could be random chance--Google might just have put a positive Giuliani and negative Obama story up front by coincidence. However, when I went to the Google Page which listed all the stories under the general category for each candidate, almost all for Obama were non-committal: Obama throws his hat in the ring, Obama to run for presidency, It's official: Obama is running for president, or Black candidate launches White House bid--the only positive ones were ones that quoted Obama directly, as in Obama Launches Bid To 'Transform' Us. He also got headlines like Donner Party Began Here Too, and Black voters still unsure about Obama, for example.

Giuliani, on the other hand, got a few negative headlines, a fair number of noncommittal lot of favorable-sounding headlines:Giuliani rouses the GOP faithful in California, Giuliani leads GOP supply-siders out of the gate, Giuliani fares well for GOP social moderate, and Rudy's California Gold Rush.

The thing is, you have to really look through the headlines to notice these things, otherwise it just seems like you just saw a news story that's reasonable and fair. You notice two or three which have different slants, you might think that everything's being represented equally. But a look at the broader picture reveals a bias. After all, Obama has fewer skeletons in his closet (that we know about) than Giuliani. Giuliani cheated on his wife and had a messy divorce; Obama has a fantastic wife who as seen as a great asset--though neither of these are covered in the mainstream media nowadays. Giuliani is known to be hot-tempered; Obama has widespread appeal.

Almost the only positive Giuliani has is that he was mayor of New York City when 9/11 hit, and like Bush, he got catapulted to high popularity not because he did anything worthy of note, but because he was there and got on camera. This article debunks the Giuliani-as-hero myth, and this article covers his darker side in general--especially making the astute point that had Giuliani been the mayor of New Orleans, he wouldn't have been so lionized. His "heroic" leadership only looked heroic because of the context, not because of anything he actually accomplished.

And will the media pay attention to the rather unsavory parts of Giuliani's past? He would likely lose support from the minority communities once people start remembering people like Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima, Robert Reynoso, and Juval Green, and how Giuliani encouraged police brutality, standing by the police even when they sodomized a Hatian immigrant with a baton or shot an unarmed black man 41 times. If, that is, the media ever gets tired of reporting on fake scandals about Obama ginned up by the Washington Times, and starts focusing on real scandals in Rudy's past.

So why is it that the media has so much more positive exposure of Giuliani and so little of Obama? Why focus so much on Giuliani's positives and on Obama's obstacles?

Gee whiz, you don't think there's a conservative element at work in the media, do you? Nah, couldn't be.

You Were Saying, Bill?

Bill Gates said of the Mac OS in a Newsweek interview:

Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.

What Gates was referring to was the MOAB, or "Month of Apple Bugs," an attack on Mac security taken by people who are obviously irritated and annoyed by claims of superior Mac security.

Of course, that claim is not nearly as bad as Gates makes it out to be. First of all, it was kept up for one month only--not every day of every year. They clearly planned for a month because they found 31 bugs, not 365 in a year. Second, not all the bugs were Apple's--only 22 or 23 of the 31 presented dealt with software created by Apple, the rest were 3rd-party bugs. And finally, Gates wildly exaggerated their seriousness when he claimed that each of these "daily" bugs could "totally" take over the machine. In fact, most were not nearly as caustic, causing instead local shutdowns of specific apps like Safari. And let's remember that we still have never seen any of these exploits do much damage if any at all in the wild--whereas Windows exploits have commonly produced massive damage. A friend of mine had to wipe her hard drive and re-install everything--twice--due to viral infections. That has never happened on a Mac.

But what about Gate's challenge for his own OS? "I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine." Well, it's already happened. With Vista, no less, which has only been widely released for a week or two now, and was heralded by Gates as being the most secure OS ever. First, we saw that really embarrassing vulnerability where a sound file could start hacking into the system. And now there are reports of far more serious hacks, including a work-around of one of Vista's most-ballyhooed security improvements, one that limits administrative access:

Russian hackers posted instructions to an underground forum describing how to implement "privilege escalation," which could bypass some Vista security measures. This hack could escalate the "privileges" of a normal Vista user into that of a "superuser," allowing him to change anything he desired on the system. This would be particularly dangerous in a corporate environment where normal computer users have limited privileges, in that they cannot install programs, visit certain Web sites, etc. This threat is considered so serious that Microsoft has scrambled its "Security Response Center," which is ostensibly still trying to figure out what to do.

So, it looks like we have at least two exploits that are at least the equivalent of the MOAB in just one week--and there's no organization which has had time to stockpile Vista bugs and is now trying to publicize one-a-day Vista exploits. However, there are reports that many more exist.

Case in point: just because your copy of Vista hasn't been hit yet, don't feel all warm and fuzzy:

Reports are that, in order to steal as much money as possible, computer criminals are biding their time and building their arsenals, waiting for Vista to be installed on more computers around the world before unleashing their most powerful Vista-busting weapons.

The article reports "ongoing eBay-style black hat hacker auctions where attack programs that can be used to compromise Vista computers are being bought and sold for as much as $50,000." Certainly, it will be interesting to see if Leopard can be hacked this much this soon after its official release.

The Norman Transcript Report ends with a quote from "very irritated and frustrated Vista early adopter": "I should have bought a Mac."

No Tokyo Snow

Ever since they started taking records in 1876, there has always been snow in Tokyo by February 10--the latest recorded snowfall being February 10, 1960.

Not this year. It's February 11, no snowfall in Tokyo so far, and today's low was 7 degrees Celsius (45º Fahrenheit), with a high of 14º C (57º F). The forecast for the next week at least shows little change, and no chance of snow foreseen. We might go without snow at all this season, and I've heard that the skiing industry up north ain't having too much of a fun time.

Over the past several years, the first snow has come in December or January. On December 9, 2002, it came just as I was leaving for the U.S., and trains were shut down in much of Tokyo--including the Narita Express--almost preventing me from getting to Narita for my departure.

So, what's the cause? Everyone is thinking global climate change, and it might just be so. But the better test for that would be in snow not falling in Tokyo for several years. Still, it's strange not getting at least one snowfall.

In Your Face

Via Pharyngula, there is an editorial from a newspaper that has a "Faith & Values" section. The editorial does not focus on this bit, but it caught my eye anyway. Apparently the newspaper sometimes prints stuff about other religions in addition to Christianity. The reaction:

Recent articles about Buddhism and Islam in the Faith & Values section have brought accusations from a few readers that The Dispatch has begun promoting these faiths while downplaying Christianity, the dominant religion in central Ohio.

A couple of critics wanted to know why we were wasting ink on these "false" beliefs when Christ is the only path to salvation. Another caller said he was tired of having "that Islam religion … shoved in my face."

This despite the fact that 80% of the articles in the section covered Christianity, and only 4.1% were about Islam.

I am pretty certain that these are the exact same people who would stare at you blankly, or even be offended or outraged, if you were to suggest that their pushing Christianity on you was objectionable in some way. These are almost certainly the same people who want the Ten Commandments plastered everywhere, and who want to force your kids to pray in the classroom. The same people who think that there's an O'Reillian "War on Christmas" despite Christmas being overwhelmingly dominant among year-end celebrations. In short, the angry white male Christian who gets the best of everything but feels like he's a persecuted victim suffering at the hands of the minority.

The conclusion of the editorial, however, is surprising and hopeful: the writer realizes that while about 12% of the population is "nonreligious," the newspaper prints little or nothing that covers their beliefs. So:

Although Faith & Values isn’t ignoring Christians, my tally does suggest that we are giving nonreligious people less attention than they deserve. We’re already taking steps to correct that.

Wow. Considering that Atheists are despised in America more than gays and Muslims, that's a very progressive attitude. Kudos for this guy.

The New Attack on Obama

They couldn't get him on the "Madrassa" smear. They couldn't make him out to be a closet Muslim (and you know what that means!). So now they're trying another tack: Obama is a dirty, low-down smoker. That's right! He even bums cigarettes off of other lawmakers! And once in a while, he even has a drink! Where other people can see him! Incredible! The question is quick to the talking heads' hot, quivering lips: could America ever elect someone who smokes cigarettes? Unimaginable!

On the one hand (as with the "madrassa" smear), if the worst kind of thing that Obama's detractor's can come up with is that he's trying to quit smoking, then he's in good shape. On the other hand, it's pretty disgusting to see people taking this kind of thing seriously. I don't have a recording or transcript yet, so the recall is not perfect, but on Paula Zahn's show this morning, the smoking issue was presented as if it could seriously hobble Obama--with one expert suggesting that this kind of addiction suggested a weak personality, someone who could never be president. And I immediately thought of George W. Bush, whose alcohol addiction was well-known, and whose cocaine addiction was covered up but pretty much just as certain. I certainly don't recall the mass media calling Bush's alcoholism into this kind of question.

Besides which, Americans have recently been exposed to a very popular president who was a "stealth smoker," as some are putting it. A president who had a habit he was trying to quit but sometimes indulged in, and who even bummed smokes off of journalists on Air Force One. It was, of course, a fictional president--Jeb Bartlet, from The West Wing--but it was something that Americans saw and accepted. True, the fictional president tried to hide it from the press and it did cause the occasional embarrassment, but it was, if anything, a more humanizing element of the character. And when it comes down to it, who the hell really cares?

Hell, I hate smoking myself. It literally makes me ill. And yet, if Rudy Giuliani or John McCain were smokers, it wouldn't even occur to me to bring this up as a point against them. And this has been brought up in the media: that while smoking itself is unpopular nowadays, smokers are not seen as bad or weak people.

The only good news in this is that while some "journalists" are seriously presenting this as a serious issue, many seem almost embarrassed to bring it up. As well they should be.

And While It Should Be the End...

The House Sergeant at Arms, appointed by Republicans, has made this statement about the Pelosi jet flap:

As the Sergeant at Arms, I have the responsibility to ensure the security of the members of the House of Representatives, to include the Speaker of the House.  The Speaker requires additional precautions due to her responsibilities as the leader of the House and her Constitutional position as second in the line of succession to the presidency.

In a post 9/11 threat environment, it is reasonable and prudent to provide military aircraft to the Speaker for official travel between Washington and her district.  The practice began with Speaker Hastert and I have recommended that it continue with Speaker Pelosi.  The fact that Speaker Pelosi lives in California compelled me to request an aircraft that is capable of making non-stop flights for security purposes, unless such an aircraft is unavailable.  This will ensure communications capabilities and also enhance security.  I made the recommendation to use military aircraft based upon the need to provide necessary levels of security for ranking national leaders, such as the Speaker.  I regret that an issue that is exclusively considered and decided in a security context has evolved into a political issue.

How much more conclusive can you get? Bill Livingood, a thirty-one year veteran of the Secret Service, was appointed by the Republican House after they took over in 1994. He comes out and states flatly that it was his idea, he made the request, and it was based upon security and nothing else.

Pelosi then appeared on Fox News (which has been milking this story itself) and made clear that she had not made any such request, and had even stated a preference for flying commercial. Livingood had told her that a plane was necessary for national security. The only insistence Pelosi made was that the plane could go the distance: "I have never asked for any larger plane. I have said that I am happy to ride commercial if the plane they have doesn't go coast to coast." This is completely understandable: if faced with the probability, twice a week, of having your flight grounded and being stuck on the ground somewhere for hours, would you not rather just take a commercial non-stop flight in Business class?

The final nail in the coffin came when even the White House, apparently sensing how stupid and futile the whole smear campaign was, took Pelosi's side: "This is a silly story and I think it's been unfair to the speaker," Tony Snow said.

Or at least you would think it was the final nail in the coffin. Even after the story was clarified beyond all doubt, even after the unimpeachable House Sergeant at Arms made his statement, even after the White House said it was "silly," the RNC persisted in trying to make a scandal of it. After all the aforementioned, the RNC released a statement titled "Pelosi's power trip: Non-stop Nancy seeks flight of fancy." [The release was apparently yanked from the GOP servers, but it is reproduced in this GOP blog.] The press release repeats just about every since-debunked lie and then some.

Tony Snow responded by making the following comment:

... as Speaker of the House, she is entitled to military transport, and that the arrangements, the proper arrangements are being made between the Sergeant of Arms office in the House of Representatives and the U.S. Department of Defense. We think it's appropriate, and so, again, I think this is much ado about not a whole lot. It is important for the Speaker to have this kind of protection and travel. It was certainly appropriate for Speaker Hastert.

The members of the press tried to get Snow to comment further on the RNC press release, but he declined--obviously, any statement made would have to point out what idiots they are.

So, how much longer will the GOP try to egg this smear campaign on? Stay Tuned.

Whining Louder than Jet Engines

Conservatives have their panties all in a bunch over arrangements being made for Speaker Pelosi's air travel accommodations. Since 9/11, the Speaker of the House, being next in line after the Vice President to take over the leadership of the nation, was given access to an Air Force jet, as the president and vice president are. The reason is security; in a time of emergency, the Speaker must be kept safe.

When this policy was implemented when Hastert was Speaker, neither conservatives nor liberals had a problem with it. When Hastert was given private use of a C-20D, the Air Force version of a Gulfstream III executive jet, it was seen as a security measure. It fit the bill, and the range allowed for non-stop travel to Illinois, where Hastert's district is. No one objected, even when Hastert used it for more than just his back-and-forth travel.

Now Pelosi has to have a jet arranged--and Republicans and conservatives are whining because she is asking for security to be maintained. Pelosi's district is on the California coast--and the C-20D Hastert used can only go coast-to-coast in perfect wind conditions, meaning that the plane will usually have to stop along the way to refuel. As far as security is concerned, that's a clearly stupid condition. If there is a crisis in progress, you don't want to pin your leaders to the ground; it would defeat the whole purpose of using a jet for security.

Not to mention the day-to-day logistical nightmare of contingency planning for an unplanned emergency landing should prevailing winds not allow the jet to make it all the way. What if the weather doesn't allow for the plane to land short? What if traffic is backed up at the layover? (Republicans would love it if Pelosi was given clearance ahead of passenger jets--it'd be Bill Clinton getting a tarmac haircut all over again!) The whole idea of a C-20D for a San Francisco shuttle doesn't make any sense--especially from a security standpoint, which is supposed to be what this is all about in the first place. So the request was made for a plane that could fly non-stop.

Naturally, Republicans smelled blood. Any chance nowadays to smear a Democrat is a call for a feeding frenzy on the right wing. Got a random picture of Kerry sitting at a table with a few empty seats? The soldiers hate Kerry! A right-wing rag prints a suggestive article about how Obama went to a "madrassa"? Obama's a radical muslim terrorist, and Hillary's the one smearing him! Who cares if they're blatant lies? The right wing certainly doesn't, and when the lies are shown up and debunked, that doesn't even stop them from continuing to spread the story.

So when Pelosi made a very reasonable request based upon security concerns, the right wing jumped on it as an unreasonable extravagance based upon arrogance and corruption. They instantly fabricated all kinds of bullshit, like that Pelosi demanded a huge Boeing 757-200, with "sleeping quarters" which would become a "Lincoln Bedroom" on "Air Force III." Stories have been coming hot and heavy with suggestions of corruption: "Some Republicans have argued that Pelosi could offer trips to top political donors," the AP juicily dishes up. Yeah, that's right. She wants the plane just so she can do favors for lobbyists. Because lobbyists wouldn't be caught dead in this ragged old C-20D that Hastert used:

In fact, Hastert didn't just use it for himself--he let his political bedfellows use it independently at his whim, shuttling conservatives around in luxury simply because they could.

"Nonstop service is not guaranteed, meaning she's getting Hastert's plane and nothing bigger," a conservative congressional source petulantly concluded.

Right-wingers are saying Pelosi is demanding a C-32, a version of a Boeing 757-200. However, no such request was made. Pelosi simply requested any available Air Force jet that can fly non-stop, and left it up to the Air Force to decide on the craft. Which means that the Air Force will likely just upgrade Pelosi to the C-20H, or a Gulfstream IV, which can make the flight non-stop. Pelosi has already stated flatly that the plane will not be used for political travel. Everything else beyond that is nothing more or less than right-wing fantasizing and fiction; the whole Boeing 757-200 thing is completely made up.

And now the mainstream media is picking up the smear. Lou Dobbs has trumpeted the corruption and greed fantasy for six straight days, repeating the right-wing lies. Reports are going out in the mainstream press all over the place. And yet right-wing rags are whining that the media is "skipping over the story."

These people know no shame; there is no depth they won't sink to in the hopes that the slime they dredge up from those depths may stick to a Democrat or two.

Steve Jobs Gets It

This is one of the reasons I like Steve Jobs. He wrote (or at least published under his name) an article about DRM (Digital Rights Management software) on the Apple web site. DRM is what restricts your use of music or video from playing and copying freely. I have highlighted (boldface mine) the key parts of the following paragraphs:

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

One has to wonder what the Big Four think of this letter. On the one hand, it must piss them off to be called stupid, albeit in such a subtle way. On the other hand, what Jobs says is so blindingly obvious, they should be perfectly willing to be called stupid. They should read this and say, we're just not doing this right, we overreacted and have required this completely unnecessary system that does not stop piracy one bit and just hamstrings paying customers, and yet we stick with it either through continued panic or just because it's there.

Of course, I then remind myself that we're talking about the music labels here, the genius folk which constitute the RIAA. "Stupid" is their business. And the video content producers are not much different.

What Steve Jobs is saying here is, naturally, not a new revelation. Almost a year ago on this blog, I myself wrote about DRM-laden video:

The copy-protect and limitations on which OS, browser, and media players can be used are stupid as hell. We're talking about movies that have already been ripped and are available for full-quality download over the Internet. So what is the copy-protect protecting? Not a damned thing. People downloading it for free from the Internet can do anything they want with the movie, watch it on any player, in any format. But paying customers hit all these restrictions. Stupid!

So what does DRM accomplish then, as Jobs asks? Here's another take, again from one of my past blog posts on DRM:

Copy protection is never perfect; somebody always finds a way around it. The only people it really hobbles are the people who buy the product and want to use it legally.

And that has always been at the heart of the whole "digital rights" problem--the makers of the media try to control their product long after they sell it or give it away, for fear that after it is sold, it will be taken and redistributed or resold at a later time. That attempt at control causes problems because it tries to reach criminals by running over legitimate users. ...

And that brings up the question of how much right the seller of a product has to follow a product after a sale. Not only for protection against illegal copying, but for control over what happens to a product and how it is used once it is privately owned. Because recent developments have companies using "digital rights management" to do far more than just protect against copying. ...

They want to ride the illegal-download horse all the way into your living room, and assert permanent control over the media on the supposed grounds that it might at some point leave your home and go to someone else's. But you soon find out that it is less about hindering criminals than it is about hindering you, limiting your abilities so you'll pay them again to do what you should have been able to do in the first place. They don't just want to control the distribution of the media; they want to control every aspect of how you use the media in the privacy of your home, which is far in excess of their actual rights.

And that, essentially, is what DRM is all about: an attempt to control and limit use so they can sell you the same thing again and again, and/or sell to different people at different prices so they can charge all the market can bear in each separate situation. For them, that DRM-free content is on CDs and elsewhere is not an argument to make everything DRM-free, it is a reason to make all the DRM-free content covered by DRM somehow. The content producers want the opposite of what Jobs is calling for. They have tried again and again to apply DRM to CDs and other media. They are frustrated that it has failed, but they will still try again and again.

Now, you can hedge Job's remarks any way you like. You can point out that Jobs profits from the iPods and not the music, so the DRM is not as important to him. You can speculate that he's saying this as a tactic in dealing with European demands that Apple's FairPlay DRM be scrapped. You might even say that he doesn't really mean any of this.

None of that, however, will make what he wrote not true. And at least on the face of things, one cannot blame Jobs for the DRM that chains the music sold by Apple to the iPod. Jobs is now on the record as saying that he wants those chains gone. It won't change the minds of all the critics, but at the very least it's pretty impressive that someone like Jobs said the kind of thing that he said.

Stupid News from Japan

You can't get anything past the Japanese boys in blue:

A man stole a police car from outside a post office in Maebashi on Monday because he was too tired to walk home....

The policemen who drove the patrol car left it idling in the parking lot. I know Japan is a relatively safe country, but this is still pretty stupid. The man apparently did not even drive the patrol car all the way home. Instead, he stopped 5 km later and told a woman that he was a police officer and needed her car.

Nothing you can tell me will shake my conviction that beer was involved in this somewhere.

From the This-Is-What-You-Get-for-Electing-Right-Wingers Department:

On Jan. 27 Japan's Health Minister Hakuo Yanagisawa gave a speech on the country's shrinking population in which he referred to Japanese women of childbearing age as "baby-making machines." He went onto explain that arresting population decline was difficult "because the number of baby-making machines and devices is fixed [in the population]; all we can do is ask them to do their best per head." The 71-year-old Yanagisawa did add, however, "that it may not be so appropriate to call them machines."

Ya think?

And from the irony department:

A former assistant professor of Meiji University's School of Information and Communication plagiarized 96 percent of a report on copyright submitted to the Institute of Intellectual Property, sources said Monday.

Plagiarizing a report on copyrights. Well, you gotta give the guy an A+ for sheer brass balls.

Twice a Victim

Have you ever been assaulted by adware? Have you ever had at least one window open up on your PC without your bidding, and show you an ad for something? Maybe you've gotten that fake dialog-box security-warning attack? The one where it looks like a real warning which says that your computer has porn, or your web surfing history can be compromised, or that your computer is open to attack--and if you click anywhere on the "dialog box," it takes you to a commercial web page selling software of some sort. This fake dialog box may have even popped up when you weren't web surfing, so it looks even more like a real warning from your OS.

If you've been exposed to such a low-key adware trick, then you have only a small taste of what a full-fledged adware attack feels like. A real attack is when your screen fills with browser windows bristling with graphic porn ads, and any attempt to close one window will bring an onslaught of even more ad-riddled windows, in hydra-like fashion. The program must be force-quit to silence the ads, using the task manager (Ctrl+Alt+Delete) to end the process--and then the machine must be cleaned of adware.

It's bad enough to be attacked by spammers in this way. But then imagine being sent to prison for 40 years because you were the victim of such a spam attack.

No, I'm not kidding. If you have been following the case of Julie Amero, you'll know what I'm talking about. Amero is a substitute teacher in Connecticut whose computer suffered a malicious adware attack in her seventh-grade classroom. It almost certainly was not her fault in any way, but she's been prosecuted--and now convicted--for causing "injury or risk of injury to, or impairing morals of, children," and could be sentenced to up to 40 years in prison. No joke.

Here's what happened. Long before Amero even saw the computer, it was infected with adware. A month before the offending incident happened, there was spyware/adware installed on the machine that started tracking the computer's activities. Before Amero's visit, some other teacher or student used to classroom computer to visit a singles dating service, well-known for its porn adware. Several other pieces of adware had already infected the computer before Amero arrived on the scene. Furthermore, the school itself had allowed the computer's parental filter software to lapse, and the machine was no longer protected against such material. The antivirus software was outdated and the firewall was not set up. In short, the school itself was negligent, and other teachers had caused the problems that eventually surfaced. Amero was simply the one present when the eventual attack came about.

On October 19, 2004, the day Amero was teaching, students were allowed access to the computer. The regular teacher logged Amero on to the system, told her that students could have access to it, and even warned her not to shut down the machine, else she and the students would lose access to it. One student visited a hairstyling site, and then 20 minutes later, the Crayola crayon site got visited. The hair style site was still active, however, and redirected to a different hairstyle site--one with porn advertising. The process that then led to the adware attack is laid out in detail here.

The screen filled up with porn windows, and the computer got locked in one of those endless porn loops. It's not clear from the stories I read whether kids were at the computer when the windows came up or not, but it seems that they were not. Still, six kids reported seeing the porn, and even though Amero kept the kids from the computer, and even pushed one student's face away from the screen, she still got into trouble--to put it mildly. The students told their parents, the parents complained loudly to the school--and the school not only fired the teacher, but had her arrested. The prosecutor pushed hard on the case, the police didn't see fit to even check for adware, and the judge denied the defense the full ability to present the case on adware--apparently because the defense was late in bringing that particular defense up for some reason.

The prosecution put on an "expert witness" who claimed that the only way to get those windows would be to intentionally visit a porn site--which supports what my father has always told me about purported "experts": that all too often, they're full of crap. In fact, the software this "expert" claimed proved the teacher went to porn sites could not distinguish between someone typing in a URL and the browser automatically redirecting to one due to adware or javascript.

On the weight of the prosecution's case, however, the jury convicted Amero. Of course, they got a very different view, like the one presented in this article, which claims it was intentional because Amero supposedly changed her claim from "students did it" to "adware attack," and that Amero did not get rid of the attack. However, if Amero was no computer-savvy and students triggered the adware or were at the computer when it came on, then it would indeed look like they started it--just like the judge and jury assumed of Amero, and they were wrong as well. Amero may not have become aware of the adware angle until later; changing a defense strategy in this manner is not evidence of guilt, and it is asinine to suggest otherwise. That Amero did not turn off the computer may have been simply her not knowing how to deal with it, and not thinking of turning the computer off, while thinking the screen was hidden enough not to be a problem.

This is scary. Hell, I've experienced this kind of thing in my own classroom. I teach an introductory computer class, and I give my chapter tests on web pages. A few years back, a female student opened up Explorer to take the test, and her screen filled with porn ads. She called for help, and I went to help, but got the same problem: every window I closed brought up at least three more new ones. I sent the young woman to a free computer, force-quit Explorer, and shut down the machine, not allowing it to be used again until the IT guys could clear it of malware.

If I used a Windows PC (Macs don't get adware, not that I've heard of at least), I might even have had such an attack when giving a demo. As it is, I use a virtual version of XP on which I put nothing but the basic software and use for nothing but teaching, so I'm clean and safe.

But I can fully sympathize with Amero. Unless you know the Ctrl+Alt+Delete trick, shutting down Explorer is near-impossible in that state. Sure, you could shut the whole machine down, but you could just as easily be attacked on startup again. And Amero may not have been computer-savvy enough to handle the situation, especially if it happened as she was teaching a class and could not sit down and troubleshoot a porn attack at the moment. Hell, I know a few teachers at my own school who would be at that much of a loss, at least. Most people would not even know what was hitting them, and so would not know how to handle it at all. Add to that the fact that in today's world, virtually all 12-year-olds, especially boys, have visited porn sites on the Internet themselves.

So of course, we should send this teacher who got caught by an adware attack to prison for 40 years. Since the verdict was handed down, it hit the newswires, and virtually the entire technical world is shouting down the decision, decrying it for the outright miscarriage of justice it so clearly is. Sentencing has not yet taken place, and in light of the whole furor now taking place (Norwich police admit to being "thrashed" by complaints and criticism), the judge will hopefully not sentence Amero to any jail time at all, and Amero can hopefully then work as a free woman to have the conviction thrown out and erased from her record.

However, since the prosecution is insisting that Amero intentionally visited porn sites, she may be marked forever as some sort of unfit teacher, and not hired by schools again because they would not want to take the risk that the accusations, however questionable, might be true. And so a teacher may have her career trashed and her life derailed because of spam, paranoid and overprotective parents, overzealous prosecutors, and lay people who just don't know enough about computers, who listen to legal "experts" who know almost as little themselves.

Filibuster

Remember back when Republicans considered the filibuster to be pure evil? Whenever Democratic politicians used it, say, to block the umpteenth attempt to nominate the same extremist hardcore right-wing nutballs into high court positions, the Republicans, furious that they could only get 95% of their nominees forced through the Senate, screamed bloody murder and threatened to outlaw the filibuster altogether with what they called the "nuclear option" (sorry, the "constitutional option")?

Yeah, Republicans despise the filibuster. Not just because it was used to deny them total and absolute dominance, of course--they loathed the filibuster in principle, and made a big thing of it. After all, the filibuster denied a straight up-or-down vote! What were those sneaky, underhanded Democrats up to, if they were so chicken as to not want a simple, apple-pie American procedure like a straight up-or-down vote! Those weasels!

I mean, if Republicans ever lost their majority in the Senate, they would never resort to such a nasty, underhanded, un-American, pinko commie... uh... err....

Okay, sarcasm off.

You of course by now have used your incredible psychic powers of clairvoyance to determine that--yes, you guessed it--Republicans in the Senate wasted no time at all in resorting to using the filibuster, and from their speed in adopting the tactic, are likely to start using it far more often than Democrats used to. Which is fine: that's how things are supposed to work. Better the government be hog-tied than to allow one party to run wild. Democrats didn't use it enough when they were in the minority; now you can expect Republicans, despite their former hatred of the procedure on principles, to go nuts with it.

Democrats don't like it and will complain, but they're not going to go "nuclear" over it; it's the Republicans who are the hypocrites here.

Already Senate Republicans are using the filibuster to block a straight up-or-down vote on a resolution to oppose Bush's "Surge™" in Iraq.

Note, however, that the media, at least at this time, is scared gutless of using the "F" word to describe what Republicans are doing. Read the USA Today article I linked to just above, you'll see that they "blocked" and "sidetracked" the vote, which "was 49-47, or 11 short of the 60 needed to go ahead with debate." They didn't even use the word "cloture," for Christ's sake. The only mainstream story I could find that used the word "filibuster" to describe the Iraq War resolution vote was US News & World Report. Everybody else I could find used words like "block" or "stop"--and neither representative article mentions the "F" word anywhere.

Meanwhile, Republicans in the Senate used a version of the filibuster in committee to stop a bill designed to make it easier to form unions (how horrible! America has never been about forming unions! That's commie talk!), and while the press did use the "F" word then, it was only in forms like "rare filibuster" and "mini filibuster."

So, Republicans are being rank hypocrites and the media is too weak-kneed to even come close to calling them on it. Looks like business as usual.

Voting "For" the Iraq War

One thing that has been on my mind for a while: should we really be so critical of Democrats who voted for the resolution that allowed Bush to go to war in Iraq? This is one of those questions that is not quite so black-and-white.

On the one hand, the resolution was not simply one that said, "Okay, start a war." It was a resolution that gave the president the authority to go to war if he deemed it necessary. The context of the moment was that Bush needed the authority so as to pressure Iraq to allow inspections and disarm; if Congress denied him this, then his hand against Iraq would be weak, practically impotent, and Hussein could have simply thumbed his nose at us. Additionally, there were guarantees made by the administration that I blogged on more than a year ago, that the authority would only be used as a last resort:

"Later this week, the United States Congress will vote on this matter. I have asked Congress to authorize the use of America's military, if it proves necessary, to enforce U.N. Security Council demands. Approving this resolution does not mean that military action is imminent or unavoidable."

Additionally, Bush promised Senators that the force authorized by the resolution would be used only as a last resort.

On the other hand, one could easily say that Bush's words were insincere, and that the senators should have been able to see through that. While Bush was saying that he would only go in as a last resort, he was also saying everything possible to make Hussein look more evil than Adolf Hitler, and potentially more dangerous. It did not take much to see that handing over the authority would virtually guarantee a war; using the "last resort" promise could seem like little more than political ass-covering.

However, there were several mitigating circumstances. First, Bush had already built up U.S. forces around Iraq--cocked the pistol, so to speak--thus painting the U.S. into a corner: had we backed down and not taken military action even though Hussein had not given in, it would be a body blow to U.S. influence. Second, Bush's request, though transparently insincere, was on the face of things quite necessary: we could indeed not put respectable pressure on Iraq unless it could be backed up; a bluff would not work.

And third, the political pressure was tremendous; any senator voting "no" would potentially be setting him/herself up for political annihilation in the following election, especially given the massive fear and paranoia the country was still feeling so soon after 9/11. Credit can be given to those who voted against the resolution, but I don't necessarily feel that equal blame can be assessed to those who voted for it because the pressure was so great. Furthermore, those who voted against the resolution may have had an easier choice: because they knew the resolution would pass and their 'nay' votes would amount to little more than a protest vote, they did not have to deal with the real obstacles mentioned in the previous paragraph. Had each of these senators been faced with a tie-breaking vote and still voted against, that would have been a true test of political and moral resolution.

One cannot completely avoid assigning a certain amount of blame and shame upon the senators who voted for the resolution, and these senators are now paying the price by having it on their records, while those who voted against it can claim the high ground. But I would not completely dismiss anyone who made that choice.

Let's face it--in the end, this is George Bush's war. It was his idea, he put the pieces into place, he used 9/11 to create massive public fear and pressure to invade, he placed America's reputation on the line, he cherry-picked and exaggerated and lied to make it an imperative. There's no way around that. Even if the Democrats had controlled a majority of the Senate and could have decided the vote, by that time Bush had engineered so massive a wave of political thrust that to deny him the authority would have taken a political will and a political risk greater than just about any we've seen for a very long time. In hindsight, we can comfortably call the Democratic politicians who voted 'aye' enablers and worse, but it could not be called so easy a choice to make even if it were to be meaningful in practical respect.

Cormorant 0, Fish 1

Cormorants are pretty common birds in this area. You see them all over the rivers and bay areas. You may even have seen them on TV, in some documentary about Japan: they are the birds used by fisherman to collect fish in the rivers at special times of the year. The fishermen tie a rope around the neck of the bird so it can't swallow the fish, and collect the catch when the bird comes back up.

Ironically, this particular cormorant I saw today could have used that kind of help.

It was just past 11:30 am when I saw other bird watchers snapping images excitedly: a cormorant had caught a fish.

I took a few pictures, like the one above, and then figured that the excitement was over; the bird would swallow the fish, and that would be that. However, a few minutes later, I caught these images:

Apparently this cormorant had bitten off more than he could chew. Most of the fish was in his gullet, but the tail was still sticking out his bill. The poor bird was having trouble swallowing the fish, and to make matters worse, the other cormorants were ganging up on their beleaguered acquaintance and were fighting to get the fish for themselves.

Five minutes after the bird first caught the fish, it was still struggling:

The cormorant was still trying to get the fish down, and now it was ducking its head underwater more often than it stayed up, either in an attempt to maneuver the fish into a better position to swallow, or to keep it away from the other birds, or possibly both.

The bird was getting more and more tired. It would struggle, and then come up and try to swallow again, fighting off its competitors. The image just below was taken eight minutes after the initial catch, and it almost seems like the fish is going to come out:

Just after this shot, the cormorant was coming up less and less frequently. One complication may have been that cormorants' feathers aren't waterproof; this guy was probably getting soaked and heavy just as he was also likely struggling for air. By this time, he would stay with his head underwater for a fair amount of time, and every so often would muster strength in his wings and come back up for a moment... but each time he came up, he stayed up for less time and seemed to have less energy than the time before.

The other cormorants stayed by him, sometimes going underwater in what seemed like another attempt to steal the fish. In the image below, it's almost as if the remaining fellow cormorant was trying to figure out what was with his cousin.

Eventually, however, the poor cormorant stopped moving. A little more than ten minutes after the whole drama started, it was over. I can't tell you the fate of the fish, but the fate of the cormorant was pretty clear. The other birds just left, and the still body just drifted with the tide waters until it went out of sight.

A sad little drama of life and death in nature. It might or might not be so unusual, but it was certainly not something that you see every day as a birdwatcher.

New Bird, Cute Bird, Strange Bird

I went birding today at the Tokyo Minato Wild Bird Park and at Kasai Rinkai. I intended to do more birding in the December-to-Febriuary period, but have been too busy on the weekends to get around to it. However, seeing as how there were hardly any birds around except huge flocks of ducks--all of which are standard varieties--I wonder if I've really been missing out on much.

I did, however, get a new species today: a Bullfinch.

Pretty little guy. I wish I could have gotten more images--there were actually four of them in a tree, posing quite nicely, when a bicyclist raced by, scaring them all off.

Not a new bird by any means, this White Wagtail was nevertheless very close and posed quite nicely as well:

Those two images have 1000-pixel versions available if you click on them, by the way.

Finally, there was something strange in the park: what appeared to be a homeless man who strayed into the closed-off bird sanctuary and started to settle down for a nice afternoon. I'd never seen that before...

There were a few other feathered variety of creatures I got images of, but nothing much else worthy of printing. Except, of course, for a sequence of photos of an otherwise normal bird playing out a rather startling drama.

... In the next blog post.

Splogs

Yes, yet another weird new word describing something to do with those danged Internet tubes. This is one that I actually reported on six and a half months ago--though at the time, I did not know the name for it. I called them "Spam Blogs," and have since found that the abbreviated name "Splog" has been applied. An ugly word for an ugly practice, fitting enough.

A Splog is a fake, auto-generated blog that acts as a platform for spam links, or for AdSense or Amazon Associates links that will generate money for the spammer. The idea is to horn in on the keywords generated by blog posts to get listed in search engines, which will lead to people linking in and using the outbound links, thus generating cash for the spammer.

If that weren't bad enough, these splogs don't generate their own content. You do it for them, if you have a blog. The splog first finds your blog, then it grabs the text you wrote and automatically slaps all or selected parts of your entry into the splog. One way to discover if your site is being mined by splogs is to search for unique content on your site in Google's Blog search engine, and then see if more than just your entry comes up. I did a post on "Maeuri-ken," or advance ticket sales in Japan, just a few days ago... and within two days a splog had swiped my text and used it to try to generate themselves some cash. Here are the results from the Google Blog search (results will disappear after a few weeks of this post).

Here's the original post, in part (image):

And here's what comes out on the splog:

The splog page has links to dog breeding and pet care sites, as well as cross-links to other splogs and spam stuff. As splogs go, it is relatively inoffensive. It actually links back to the blog post it stole from, does not go overboard on spammy stuff like some splogs do, and does not inject spam links into the stolen text directly, as has been reported to happen. Also, note that in this case, the splog does not reprint the full text of my post, or even a coherent paragraph. It is more like the result of a search engine query looking for the keywords "small," "dog," and "sale," all of which appear in that post.

That doesn't mean that it is inoffensive, it just means that it is slightly less offensive than the many other splogs I've found mining my writing for their sleazy profit.

MegaMacs MegaScam?

A few weeks ago I blogged on the MegaFattening MegaMac at Mickey D's here in Japan. Since then, as reader Jeff pointed out, reports have come out that the MegaMac is so popular that it sells out too quickly--and McDonald's stores have had to limit sales of the burger at each store to ration the item.

Customers who go away disappointed are given a rain-check coupon to get the MegaMac at another time for a discount--190 yen instead of the regular 350 yen. One such coupon is pictured below; Sachi got one when she tried to order a MegaMac and was told that they were sold out. (Though I have no idea why she would want one--hell, the burger is almost bigger than she is.)

McD's outlets have limited sales of the special item to "dozens or hundreds" per store per day.

Frankly speaking, I smell a marketing scam. First of all, how could they "run out"? The MegaMac is essentially a Big Mac with two extra patties. Is McDonald's running out of Big Macs and patties? Nope. So what's the problem? Do they actual have the materials but their accounting system can't allow parts for one burger to be used for a different burger? Sounds ludicrous, but I suppose it's possible.

However, I think that it is more likely that McDonald's saw an opportunity for a PR device. After all, just introducing a new product will not get them publicity. Even selling a huge number of them might not get printed up. But running out of a specialty product because it's so popular and then having to give discount coupons... sure enough, that got McDonald's into the press. That got people's attention, and has probably generated a lot more sales.

But how can McD's get more profit by turning away customers? Probably because those customers don't turn away--they wind up getting something else on the menu. The coupon means they are more likely to return as a repeat customer, and will have the feeling that McDonald's was generous and that they "won" something.

In the meantime, the franchise gets free press equivalent to free advertising, and their MegaFat specialty item gets the aura of being so popular that only lucky customers get one--kind of like the fast-food equivalent of Louis Vuitton handbags or something.

In the end, they get more money and your arteries get harder. So everybody wins!

Will This One Make Headlines?

Infractions committed by members of the U.S. military in Japan, sometimes even relatively minor ones, tend to make headline news here. So the question should be: when U.S. soldiers immediately come to the rescue of a Japanese man who fell onto the subway train tracks at Roppongi station (when no other bystanders moved to help), will this also be recognized in the Japanese media? Especially when such rescues are often reported when they do not involve American servicemen?

I'm not holding my breath. So far, only Stars and Stripes has the story of the rescue--which happened almost two weeks ago.

Vista "Vulnerability"

While the Mac OS has not yet been exposed to a virus or other malware that could actually spread and be a threat to anyone, there have been many "proof of concept" hacks and a host of "vulnerabilities," or potential attacks that were never actually carried out. Many of these depended on a set of highly unlikely circumstances, like having two Bluetooth-enabled Macs which had not been software-updated within the past eight months operating in the same room with Bluetooth set to "Discoverable" and one of the owners foolish enough to manually allow a reported "device" that did not exist to be accepted by the computer.

Well, now Vista has joined that club--albeit in a way that makes Microsoft seem a hell of a lot more stupid than Apple ever looked. A new vulnerability reported on Vista just a few days after its release involves the OS's speech recognition. Now, speech recognition on a Mac requires a keyboard button to be depressed while a command is given (with an option to instead have the user to speak a definable keyword before the spoken command). This is to ensure that speech commands will not be taken by the computer by mistake when the feature is turned on.

Apparently Microsoft didn't take these rather obvious security steps. It seems that when Vista's speech recognition is turned on and a microphone is active (which is usually the case, if there is a built-in mic), any speech that matches the commands in the computer's vocabulary will be executed.

The potential hack: a sound file which starts giving speech commands to open Windows Explorer and delete files. Delivery is simple: a web site that starts playing a sound file when you arrive there. It could also be delivered in any number of other ways, including fake song files that begin with real music and then start issuing voice commands, or even a malware solution of some sort.

Now, like many of the Mac vulnerabilities, this Vista vulnerability is highly unlikely. While it will be common to find Vista users with active speakers and mics, it would be less common to find users who have speech recognition turned on. But the greatest unlikelihood would be the user who would just sit there and watch while their computer started speaking to itself, giving commands to delete files.

Now, on the other hand, this set of events is not impossible by a long shot. I have known a good many people who are computer-unsavvy enough that they'd be stymied long enough not to know what to do if their computer started doing that. Alternately, some users could be unlucky enough to be out of the room when the commands started being issued. Unlikely, yes, but not impossible. Still, I would doubt that this will ever really hit anyone.

Regardless of whether the hack ever happens or succeeds, the fact remains that it makes Microsoft look really stupid. I mean, that a computer's security system could be overridden by a frickin' sound file is just embarrassing. In their defense, Microsoft points out that because Vista no longer makes the primary user the system administrator by default, only files in the user's directories can be affected. Which is small consolation, as that represents all the personal files of the user; it just means that Vista itself will not be hurt. Whoopee.

Of course, there is one other thing that makes the exploit truly unlikely: Vista's speech recognition sucks. Okay, commonly available speech recognition all sucks, but Vista is certainly no exception, as this demo gone awry which I reported on six months ago clearly shows. Nevertheless, some people reported actually being able to make the sound file hack work.

It should also be pointed out that Vista is still vulnerable to some of the most common pre-exiting malware, which can blow through Vista's much-ballyhooed defenses, and that Vista is not exactly immune to the host of new viruses that will inevitably appear in the coming months.

People Starting to Fight Back against the RIAA

The RIAA sued Patti Santangelo two years ago, but when she fought back, they eventually dropped the suit--only to switch over to suing her 16-year-old son, Robert, and her daughter Michelle, 20. Michelle failed to show up in court and so lost by default, but Robert is fighting back--not only by fighting the claim, but also by filing a counter-claim saying that the RIAA damaged his reputation, distracted him from school and cost him legal fees. Further:

The papers allege that the companies, "ostensibly competitors in the recording industry, are a cartel acting collusively in violation of the antitrust laws and public policy'' by bringing the piracy cases jointly and using the same agency "to make extortionate threats ... to force defendants to pay.''

The RIAA responded publicly by issuing this statement:

The record industry has suffered enormously due to piracy. That includes thousands of layoffs. We must protect our rights. Nothing in a filing full of recycled charges that have gone nowhere in the past changes that fact.

Naturally, one can assume the claim is pure BS. As this blogger points out, the drop in sales was not due to piracy, it was due to the economy failing and the record labels simultaneously scaling back releases. The "thousands of layoffs," if they ever really happened, were not connected to piracy, and the music industry itself was likely the most responsible for them.

In fact, when file-sharing began its meteoric rise, music sales were booming; this went on for a few years, in fact. The sales drop coincided with the aforementioned economic bust and the industry's cutback in production, and there has been absolutely no correlation found between music sales and online piracy, according to this 2004 study reported in the New York Times.

So Robert Santangelo might have a strong case there. Go get 'em, kid.

Nova High

Here come the mandatory drug tests for Nova teachers again, as seven Nova teachers from Saitama are arrested for pot and coke possession.

Like Zune, Like Windows

Just as the Zune was thoroughly hyped and failed to sell well, so goes Windows Vista. In Denver, initial sales have been slow:

Consumers in the metro area are apparently taking a wait-and-see attitude toward Vista - just as experts have advised them to do.

Stores haven't seen hordes of consumers lining up to buy the new Microsoft operating system.

"We've been selling a fair amount. There's definitely not high demand," said Jarred Dotterer, warehouse associate at Micro Center at the Denver Tech Center. "We're not low on stock."

The same is being reported in Jackson, Mississippi ("Jackson store reports slow sales of Windows Vista"). And Chillicothe, Ohio ("New Windows Vista not breaking any sales records around here"). And San Francisco, California ("No one is lining up for Windows Vista in San Francisco"), where crowds lined up to buy Mac OS 10.4 in 2005.

In fact, sales are slow everywhere; while some stores had even a few dozen people lining up at midnight, sales dropped off after the few eager beavers got their fix. It seems that everyone is realizing that Vista just ain't all that hot, just like they realized with the Zune. Unlike Steve Jobs, Bill Gates just does not know how to excite the fan base all that much--much less the public in general. Jobs has got everyone in a lather over a cell phone that'll sell for up to six times as much as Vista, and one can bet that a lot more people will line up to buy OS X 10.5 Leopard when it gets released--despite Apple having only about 1/20th the market that Windows has. (Some suggest that Steve Jobs missed a golden opportunity and should have opened up the Mac OS to work on PCs.)

Factors detracting from Vista sales are, of course, the fact that it is not revolutionary and contains nothing truly exciting, that XP works well enough for most, and that many would have to pop for a new computer to satisfy Vista's memory- and processor-hog appetites. And even some of its new features are disappointing--like the new-and-"improved" security, which is not only annoyingly intrusive, but also has been hacked and broken already.

What is happening is probably that most people are thinking, "ehh, I'll just wait 'til I get a new machine, and Vista will be on it then."

This cannot be good for Microsoft. Behemoth it may be, it is no longer a juggernaut. It has worked for five years to produce a single new version of an operating system, its flagship product, and virtually no one is all that interested in it. It will sell, eventually, if for no reason except that Windows comes on all new PC computers by default.

Some people are even looking at Macs because of Vista--and, factor in my Mac bias as much as you care to, it makes perfect sense, after all: if you're going to buy a new machine anyway, why not get a Mac? Not only do they cost much closer to PCs nowadays, but they even run Vista if you want 'em to.

Though my school is Windows-centric, the faculty is virtually all Mac now. In addition to myself, three other faculty and staff were already Mac users (myself and one other having recently bought new machines), but three others have switched and bought new Macs recently, and one more is on the verge of getting a nice Macbook. Two of my students just bought Macbooks as well. Now, I'd love to take credit for it all, but most of these switchers did it on the advice of others, though they of course heard my input as well.

Naturally, that's a microcosm. Hardly a trend. But then again, with Mac market share steadily rising, it is without doubt one small part of a much larger trend.