Related link: http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,47111,00.html

Incredible assertion that “Americans have no reasonable expectation of privacy in the identities of their e-mail correspondents, or the addresses of Web pages they visit.” Cites two senators who I’d thought to be more clueful (Orrin Hatch and Chuck Schumer).

Some good points and some one-sided judgments in the article ‘New Economy’ Is a Thing of the Past.

I can’t understand the “bigger is better” claim. The World Trade Center was
way big. Centralized computer networks will provide the same temptations the
WTC did.

If new technology was just a kind of conspicuous consumption, it could be
dispensed with. But some
technologies can potentially make real-life processes much more efficient,
and these technologies (used properly) are needed more than ever. Still, I
believe their deployment will be held up because of a general unwillingness
to experiment. We’re all pulling inward these days and being more cautious
about everything.

I’ll just say a bit about peer-to-peer, since I’ve followed (and generated)
news about it. P2P may be one of those technologies that enable efficiency.
With the right load and the right division of labor, it might make computers
more efficient. Even more important, because it leaves files near the
creators and users of the files, it might make organizations more efficient.
If system administrators can be persuaded that they don’t need to spend
hours every day updating a corporate intranet, they could become very
interested in P2P solutions.

But I’m also worried about the future of P2P and the whole distributed
ideal. The reason is that security now becomes so important. People are
going to reduce the number of servers they run, disconnect from the net
more, and check users very carefully using out-of-bound channels before the
users are allowed any access to services.

September 13, 2001

The horror that began September 11 called upon each individual to make a statement. We all had to speak to ourselves, to our family members, or to anyone who would listen. I myself had to discuss with my children why my aunt by marriage died in a plane hitting the World Trade Center (answer: I don’t know why). I have read many other excellent statements on politics and society before writing my own.

We don’t know the psychology of the people who destroyed the World Trade Center, but we know that they forged their plan around an abstraction. Whatever world view they possessed, the World Trade Center was just a symbol within it, and the presence of 50,000 people in that building was just a factor in its symbolic value. And we know this kind of sickness is nothing new; it has been criticized by thousands of authors before. The Jews were an abstraction in Hitler’s plan, millions died in the Soviet Union to serve an abstract goal, and the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki became reduced to an abstraction during American calculations to end World War II.

So I cannot sit here and write a grand sociological treatise; I will not paint abstractions of the world’s political landscape. I hereby pledge to bring reality into every discussion in which I participate. So it is time for the U.S. to relinquish some destructive abstractions of its own.

Our dominant abstraction is the rosy spectacles of neoliberal capitalism. In this view, international capital flows to countries that most closely follow the virtues laid out in glossy journals. The brilliant entrepreneur is rewarded in the mechanical turnings of a well-tuned market, while governments discreetly get out of the way. Although this entrepreneur is usually light-skinned, diversity thrives within institutions because an enlightened management recognizes the need for a global reach. Science ensures a plentiful supply of energy and food.

I don’t disparage the many accomplishments of our economy in this era. But what will happen if we all pledge to view reality instead of our pleasing abstraction?

• When reformers reveal the cronyism and corruption that lie behind major business deals, we will organize them into a fighting force instead of talking up the healing power of international financial flows (and refusing to say whom Vice President Cheney met with the previous month).
• When laborers complain that they need two or three jobs to pay the rent, and millions cry out that they have to struggle to get each meal, we will demand higher wages instead of telling them to wait for a restructuring of the regional economy.
• We will no longer ignore the terror of disease that stalks entire subcontinents, or the devastation of earth and water, or the plight of those living by rising seas, and we will provide some response besides, “Don’t put barriers in front of commercial development.”

I need say no more; the rest can be found in position papers in every language. What blinds us from action is the triumph of our abstraction. It has already claimed its share of victims. During the Cold War it left a trail of bodies from Guatemala to East Timor. Ironically, our government thought it would just be unbelievably clever to land a blow against the Soviet Union by supporting the Taliban and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Thus, our government’s last battle against the distorted remnants of the liberatory impulse behind the 1917 revolution led to grotesque casualties here at home.

Perhaps the recognition of how firmly we have lived in the grip of this abstraction will help us to understand how other people could fall murderously under the sway of a different one.

Please be gentle; this is a time to tolerate exploration and self-expression.

Related link: http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991192

Computer scientists at OASIS have formed the HumanML technical committee, whose mission is to create an XML spec for cross-cultural meaning. HumanML is an extension of the “Semantic Web” concept applied to actual human language, where authors can code the subtext to their words, and have that subtext be preserved across translations of that text.

Think of it as a DTD for emoticons… ;)

From the article:

“With HumanML, web pages could be used to express meaning to someone who speaks an entirely different language. Humour is often lost during translation, but could be tagged as funny in HumanML. This could then be represented in a HumanML-enabled browser as pictures, sounds or words.”

“The creators of HumanML believe that eventually the language might make an ideal communications tool for virtual reality or artificial intelligence programs.”

Linguists have struggled with machine translations for decades, and yet Babelfish still only produces vaguely similar translations of web pages. Could HumanML be the answer?

All UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems keep a running count of the number of seconds that have elapsed since midnight GMT on January 1, 1970, a moment referred to as the “Epoch”.*

This count, which hackers call “UNIX time”, or sometimes “the UNIX clock”, is in theory the same on every single UNIX machine the world ’round, and is used for countless diverse but important things, from real-time event scheduling to stamping database records to seeding pseudorandom number sequences.

At 01:46:40 GMT on Sunday, September 9, 2001 (or 21:46:40 EDT Saturday), the UNIX clock will turn 10 digits for the first time ever, as it clicks over from 999,999,999 to 1 billion.

This sort of numerological trivia is precisely the kind of thing that titillates hackers to no end, and it should come as no surprise that more than a few informal parties have been planned all across the world to celebrate the historic moment. While it’s no Y2K, speculation has been abroad for some time that 1e9 Day, as the event’s been dubbed, may expose similar kinds of foolish treatment of date and time values.

Meanwhile, you too can participate at home! If you’ve got a UNIX shell handy, you can try the following to get your very own countdown timer:


$ perl -e '$|++; printf( "\r%010d",1e9-time ), sleep(1) while 1'


Or, in the hackish spirit of the event, you might try the obfuscated perl version, suggested by Nat Torkington and Jon Orwant:


$ yes|perl -ne'$|=sleep printf"\r%010d",1e9-time'


Finally, if you just want to witness the seconds ticking forward from the comfort of your own browser, you can watch your very own Javascript UNIX clock, courtesy of our very own Tim Allwine.

Enjoy, and Happy 1e9 Day! May the next billion seconds of UNIX time be filled with even more innovation and creativity than the first billion!

* More or less, according to O’Reilly’s The Perl Cookbook, by Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington, which has the following to say on the subject (p. 71, footnote):

Related link: http://www.wired.com/news/antitrust/0,1551,46597,00.html

“What’s good for GM is good for the country” used to stand for corporate hubris in the face of civic responsibility. Now that Microsoft has evaded a breakup, despite their guilt in various monopoly cases, many believe this adage stands for the Bush Administration’s view of domestic policy, where corporations have usurped the rights of civilians:

“Economists and lawyers also felt that money came into the Justice Department’s decision, but didn’t think a payoff had occurred. They said that pursuing the case against Microsoft simply is impossible and unwise in the current economy.

“‘Can you imagine the havoc that the stock market would descend to if Microsoft was forced to split? One of the few tech stocks that isn’t dying in front of our eyes, and the government is going to kill it off? I don?t think so,’ said broker Anthony Torres.”

Should a corporation be shielded from prosecution once they’ve reached a certain level of marketshare? Does the possible economic effect on the nation of a Microsoft split outweigh the rights of all the other companies and their employees who’ve been wronged by Microsoft?

Was GM just ahead of its time?

Was GM just ahead of its time?