Entries from August 2002 ↓

Palm’s m130 handheld is only capable of displaying 4,096 colors per pixel, instead of the 65,000 colors Palm had originally claimed. So, of course, someone is suing. I think the plaintiffs should win only if they can correctly identify the colors they were deprived of.

The Christian Science Monitor had an article on Friday about the inrease in portrayals of torture on TV over the past year. Their research showed “70 instances of scenes of graphic torture or sadism on network entertainment TV from Sept. 1, 2001, until earlier this month. In the two-year period previous to this, it logged 79.” Twice as many.

Repeated exposure to images like this can’t help but inure us to the real pain and terror of physical and psychological torture as practiced around the world. I wonder if it’s any coincidence that Time magazine reported in April that “45% of Americans surveyed supported torture to prevent attacks.”

What do we imagine when we think of torture as it may be practiced by our own government? It wouldn’t be ripping out fingernails, would it? Electrical charges to the testicles? Mock executions? No. We’re the good guys. We’d do something simple and humane like a “truth serum“, right?

And, anyway, even if we did torture those suicidal Taliban down at Camp Delta, it couldn’t be more horrible than when Willow ripped off Warren’s skin on the season finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, could it?

Could it?

(via Rebecca Blood)

I was in Seattle a couple of years ago with a co-worker for the annual Thunder Lizard Macromedia conference. It was a good show at a good time. Flash usage was expanding, and developers were starting to realize that Flash could be used for more than Wow splash screens and cartoons. Many of the presenters we saw have since gone on to write books about Flash and Web Development: Kelly Goto, Todd Purgason, Hillman Curtis.

The company put us up at the Renaissance Madison Hotel, a pretty tony place for me, but I wasn’t paying, the company was. (Of course, nowadays, no one is paying!) The conference was being held at the Washington State Convention Center, just a short walk from the hotel through Freeway Park [Quicktime]. It’s a strange little park, full of nooks and crannies, concrete benches, boxes and waterfalls, built on a lid over I-5, the 10-lane interstate highway that runs from the Mexican border in California through Seattle and up to the Canadian border.

As we walked through Freeway Park each day, I thought about what a nice use of land it was. The roar of the waterfalls and the thick stands of trees blocked out the noise of the highway below us. The air was freshened by the foliage, and the dozens of nooks and crannies made for some quiet intimate spaces in which to relax. All in all, it just added to my impression of Seattle as an accessible, human-sized city.

Of course, my perception of the park is colored by my being 6’4″ (193 cm), a healthy white male, with a sheltered place to sleep at night, no substance dependencies, no (serious) psychological traumas, no (major) diminshment of my senses. The complete opposite of RaeAnn Champaco, a deaf and mute homeless woman who was stabbed to death in the restroom of Freeway Park at 10:15 am on January 18 of this year.

Even if she could have screamed, no one would have heard her above the roar of the waterfalls I found so soothing. Even if she had been capable of hearing her attacker coming, she might not have been able to escape him through the frequent twists and turns and sudden ledges I found so bucolic. Even if police had arrived immediately, they might not have been able to find the attacker amongst the maze of plantings and blind alleys I found so intimate.

It’s not the first time a horrible crime has happened there. Since the park opened in 1976, there have been a number of murders, accidental deaths, robberies, rapes and other crimes. An article in The Stranger, Seattle’s alternative weekly, seeks to bring some of this to light. Entitled “Topography of Terror“, the author makes the point that the danger of the park is in its design. The same features its award-winning architect, Lawrence Halprin, and I saw as a beautiful haven in the urban landscape, have made the place a preying ground for some of the worst parts of modern society.

There’s always a flip-side to any urban design. There’s always a danger that a beautiful public structure can be perverted. The challenge for modern urban planning is to take into account the beauty and the evil it attracts.

Okay, so maybe I’m dense, but I just realized why the MP3 situation is so frustrating to the entertainment industry that they’ve been buying House members and Senators and rewriting the Constitution, as well as calling their own clients criminals in reaction. It was this article in Wednesday’s WaPo which opened my eyes.

In the past, whenever consumers swooned for a new music format, like CDs, the record industry made a fortune from the conversion. This time, millions of listeners are again getting their music in a new medium — MP3s and other modem-friendly formats — but the labels aren’t profiting from the revolution. This time the revolution is actually hurting them.

I’m thinking of “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band“. I bought it on vinyl as one of my first album purchases ever. My father bought an 8-track player for our 1965 Chevy station wagon when we moved out to Long Island in 1970 and he had an hour-long commute to work. For Hannukah one year, he bought me a copy of Sgt. Pepper in that (terrible) format. When cassettes became popular, I went around replicating most of my (very small) album collection on the much more durable format, since I’d never been very good at vinyl — scratching, skipping, replacing needles, and a complete inability to balance the damned tone arm. I replaced the tape when CDs came out, but kept the album around both for cleaning pot and for attempting to identify the members of the crowd surrounding Paul’s grave.

I’m the kind of sucker who would’ve probably purchased a CD of MP3s of the album, especially if they packaged it with a full-sized poster of the album cover! And I’m sure I’m not alone. And, then, there’d be the conversion to the next format and the next and the next…

Look what Texas has given us over the past couple of years: George W, a rate of executions which puts us in the same league as Iran, Enron, and the Tulia racism/drug scandal.

You haven’t heard about the Tulia affair? It’s not Bob Herbert‘s fault. (NYT registration req’d.) In a series of editorials [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] Herbert has exposed the plight of a large part of the black population of Tulia, Texas beginning on July 23, 1999. Ten percent of the town’s black population was rounded up and arrested on the unsubstantiated testimony of Tom Coleman, an undercover narcotics agent. Three years later, many of the people are still in jail. Until recently corrected, the US Justice Department has maintained that they completed a criminal investigation into this travesty and that the matter had been closed.

Meanwhile, Herbert’s spotlight on the matter has helped the groups working with the Tulia defendants to get some momentum going. The last defendant had her case dismissed when she was able to prove she wasn’t even in the same state when Coleman claimed he bought cocaine from her. The Swisher County DA has remained unrepentent about the arrests, but Texas Attorney General John Cornyn (running for the US Senate this November) is facing some heat over his claim that his hands are tied in disposing of the matter. This member of the staunchly “states’ rights” (pdf) Texas GOP has passed the buck, claiming the US Justice Department should intervene.

There has been some positive outcome from this whole horrible affair. Texas passed a law requiring that the testimony of a non-police officer in a drug trial must be corroborated by other evidence. The application of this law resulted in dozens of drug convictions being overturned in Dallas earlier this year, after it was discovered that the “evidence” in a string of cocaine busts was nothing more than ground-up sheetrock! And it has also led to increasing criticism of the extra-legal activities of regional drug task forces.

After seeing all the pictures of those thousands of candle-light vigil-ers at Graceland last week, its not surprising to find out that Elvis Presley is Forbes’ top-earning dead celebrity for the second year in a row. In fact, he increased his take over last year by an extra US$2m, to US$37m. He’s way ahead of this year’s second most well-heeled corpse, Charles M. Schulz who only earned US$28m in 2001-02.

Newly minted decedents Dale Earnhardt (#4), George Harrison (#6), Tupac Shakur (#10) and Robert Ludlum (#13) sent a few of last year’s notables into limbo with their spectacular post-mortem careers. (In fact, Forbes notes that Tupac has released more albums dead than alive.) Falling off the list this year were Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, James Dean, and Frank “Chairman of the Board” Sinatra. (Maybe he could get a little help from JXL this year.)

In an effort to promote sales of WinXP by independent consultants and VARs (Value-Added Resellers), Microsoft is running a promotion for its US-based “Partners” where you can buy a copy of XP Professional for US$39.99 plus US$8.95 ground shipping & handling. Besides the “Not for resale or distribution” copy, you also get an “official commemorative baseball, limited edition Eddy ‘Reliable’ Trustman Bobblehead collectible, a pack of Big League Chew Bubblegum (2.10-ounce package), and baseball cards for the ‘Professional Team’” — whatever that is.

In order to get this stuff, you’ve gotta give up some info to Big Bill & Co. You’ve gotta register your business — you do have a business don’t you? — by creating a Passport account with a non-Hotmail address. Then pay your money & wait the 6-8 weeks for delivery. Better than paying the US$190 for the upgrade

Next time I’m in New York after September 23, I plan on checking out the new New York City Museum of Sex on 5th Ave at 27th St. If the museum is half as much fun as its exhibition website, “1001 Nights in Manhattan“, it should be a pretty good ride.

The Flash-based 1001 Nights site is a map of Manhattan, enhanced with the sounds of the city and with pop-up annotations to some of the more notable and notorious places related to New York’s sex history. But the coolest feature is that the map is also a bulletin board, allowing visitors to enter their own annotations to memorable NYC sexual memories.

It’s a great idea for a site, and a terrific realization of the idea– so its no surprise that it comes from Entropy8Zuper. They’ve been doing net art for years, participating in the SFMOMA’s 010101 show with a wild artwork called Eden Garden 1.1, which reads a website, converting the text and html commands into rabbits, robots, Adam, Eve and lots of bunnies. You have to see it for yourself. (You can just drag this link to your Links bar in IE to view whatever page you’re looking at in Eden.Garden.)

Be sure to check out the Heavenly Airport page to see some of e8z’s older work.

Suppose I were a programmer of some skill and maybe some sublety. Or suppose I had access to a good set of instructions. Suppose I used this skill and sublety or these instructions to create a worm — a simple, harmless worm which did nothing more than get into your computer — via a file-sharing network, or perhaps via an instant messaging program — and once it is inside your machine, it crawls inside your music files, say, and just sits inert. Copyright attaches to the worm — a small piece of computer software — as soon as I create it, and now my copyrighted work is sitting on your machine.

Representative Berman’s new bill, introduced into Congress just before the August recess gives “copyright owners the right to violate the law in their efforts to stop the unauthorized circulation of their works on peer-to-peer networks.”

If this bill becomes law, all I need to do is notify the Attorney General 7 days in advance of my action, and I am immune from prosecution for my denial of service attacks, my hacking into your computer, my destruction of your MP3 files, my disruption of your instant messenger service, my deactivation of any DLL files necessary for the use of your file-sharing software.

Representative Berman — who is probably not as much of an idiot as this fiasco makes him seem — wrote this bill at the behest of some of his biggest donors (including Disney), who, in their typical short-sighted view of the world, assumed that only the Copyright Cartel would be able to use the provisions of the law. Guess again, and prepare for Armageddon.

I’ve been thinking about a post I made on Knowledge Pool a couple of weeks ago, regarding frames of reference. It had to do with the Beloit College Mindset list, which gives some relevant pointers to the cultural references an incoming freshman might or might not have. For instance, the class of 2005 was born in the same year as the Macintosh. They’ve never known a world without personal computers.

There are plenty of words and phrases we use all the time which derive from technologies and customs no longer in existence. I wonder if other — younger — people wonder about the origin of terms like:

• flip-side — deals with phonograph records (I believe) and refers to the often-ignored second side of a single
• winding down — when was the last time you saw a wind-up watch?
• carbon copy — this one lives on in the “cc” block of our email programs, but, how many people still use carbon paper, and where do they buy it?
• ditto — anyone who went to school in the 60s & 70s remembers sniffing the newly-printed test papers, made on the Ditto machine, hoping the methanol fumes would get you high

Any others come to mind?