Copyright infringement is not the killer feature of YouTube. It’s a killer app because it makes the videos that define our times easily accessible. Much of the stuff you can find on YouTube simply isn’t available anywhere else. The problem, of course, is that a lot of it is protected by copyright, but that to me just illustrates how badly the copyright laws are failing us.

Are you a sports fan? Where else can you easily watch The Play? Or the Immaculate Reception? Or the shot heard ’round the world? Or the World Cup goal of the century? Or the famous call of the miracle on ice?

If you’re a political junkie, YouTube is essential. You can find just about every bizarre and embarrassing political ad you hear about. Obscure politician makes a gaffe in a speech? You’ll find it on YouTube.

We live in the era of video (and have been living in it for a long time). The world is missing a library of video that enables people to see that famous movie clip they were talking about over dinner, or that embarrassing Tom Cruise interview with Oprah, or all of those other video clips that everybody remembers but you never get to see again. In some ways, YouTube reminds me of Wikipedia, with thousands of volunteers gathering up all of the little bits of video that people care about and putting them in one place, so that they can be referenced by anyone with Internet access.

When I think about it that way, suddenly Google’s purchase of YouTube makes even more sense to me. Google says its mission is “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Maintaining what is becoming the canonical collection of video clips seems to fit well with that mission.

Today’s Washington Post article on Vice President Cheney’s enthusiastic endorsement of waterboarding in an interview finally does what I wish more torture-related articles do, which is give a full background of the technique in question. Here’s how the article ends:

In waterboarding — one of a number of drowning-simulation techniques that date to the Spanish Inquisition — a prisoner is generally strapped down with his feet higher than his head. Water is then poured on his face while his nose and mouth are covered by a cloth. The technique produces an intense sensation of being close to suffocation and drowning, according to interrogation experts and human rights advocates.

The Khmer Rouge and other outlaw regimes have employed the method, and it has been condemned by many human rights and military lawyers as a clear example of illegal torture.

In 1947, the United States prosecuted a Japanese soldier for war crimes and sentenced him to 15 years hard labor for using the technique on a U.S. prisoner.

When torture proponents discuss waterboarding and other forms of torture, they use the same approach I talked about yesterday with Rush Limbaugh’s response to Michael J Fox’s ad, which is to deny the facts and instead pretend like torture is no big deal. It’s essential that the media educate people on what these approaches are and how they have been used in the past. Glad to see the Washington Post taking on that responsibility.

You are probably familiar with the Michael J Fox campaign ads being shown in support of Democratic candidates who are running against Republicans who voted against federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. If so, you’ve also read that Rush Limbaugh accused Michael J Fox of faking, going off his medication, or at least playing up his symptoms in the ad in order to elicit sympathy.

Limbaugh may be a monster, but he’s a calculating monster. The ad itself is very compelling. Would you want to be the person to tell someone in such condition that you’re politically opposed to research that may help them out? The best way to enable people to ignore the ad is to enable them to deny to themselves that Michael J Fox is as bad off as he appears, and Limbaugh understands that.

This is the same approach that the Bush administration has taken with Iraq. If you read the papers or watch the news, you know that Iraq is a terminal patient. President Bush, Dick Cheney, and friends keep telling us that people reporting from Iraq are liars and that the patient is on the road to recovery.

They’re not trying to win skeptics over to their side, they’re trying to refuel the deep well of denial that keeps their true believers from jumping ship.

Is it just me, or are all of the Sourceforge mirrors gone? For every package I try to download, I find that only the University of Kent (UK) server is available. Needless to say, it’s not responding. The Sourceforge status page has nothing about this seeming outage.

Update: The mirrors all seem to be back now.

Firefox 2.0 uses tabs more aggressively than Firefox 1.5 did. In Firefox 1.5, if you clicked on a link that attempted to spawn a new window (not a popup, just another regular browser window), Firefox did as it was asked. Now it opens those links in a new tab in the current window. As before, if you open a URL from another application, it opens that link in a new tab in the foremost browser window.

I like tabs, so I’m generally OK with that behavior, except for one thing. Some of the time, I have a small window open, usually thanks to my Movable Type “quick post” bookmarklet. I never want the browser to open a new tab in that window. In fact, if it’s the only window that’s open, I would prefer the browser open a new window entirely. I expect most other users feel the same way.

Thinking like a programmer, this looks like a problem that could be solved cleverly through code. Basically, when deciding where to put the results of an “display URL in a new window/tab” action, the browser could examine the size of the open windows, and pick one that is the same size as a new window would be if you opened a new window from the file menu. There may even be a variable that could be checked to see whether a window was opened by normal means or opened as a custom-sized window from a web page, and only use “normal” windows.

Chances are I’m not the only person annoyed by this behavior. I’m going to do some digging today to see if I can find any existing solutions.

How does someone go from writing an article as smart as Spotting the Losers: Seven Signs of Non-Competitive States to drawing silly maps of the optimal Middle East? I can’t think of any pundit who has fallen father in my estimation than Ralph Peters.

Update: don’t miss Andrew Brown’s comment, which illustrates Peters’ psychosis nicely.

Today O’Reilly Radar has a post about homophily, the tendency to congregate with people with the same interests as your own. The article explains how application developers can enable their users to move beyond homophily and make serendipitous discoveries.

I find that weblogs are a vaccine against homophily. Most people have plenty of widely varied interests, and unless we’re very careful, mingling with people with whom we share an interest will expose us to plenty of other information that we maybe aren’t so interested in. I encounter the same effect when reading weblogs. I may read a weblog because it’s got useful information about Ruby on Rails, but what I wind up finding is a new band I want to listen to or a way to manage my time more effectively.

In general, I think that homophily is overblown as a syndrome that affects people on the Internet. If anything, I find that there’s too much surprising new stuff on the web to investigate rather than too little. The separate discussion about how to account for it in your applications is interesting, though, and I encourage you to read it.

I’m not an economist but I’m a big believer in incentives. In this Err the Blog post on his Ruby on Rails toolbox, he has this to say about the excellent exception_notification plugin for Ruby on Rails:

E-mails us whenever an exception is raised on the site. Some days I just gather up the exceptions in my Inbox and bang away on those bugs for an hour or two. Then, no more e-mails. It’s very gratifying.

There are two reasons I love this plugin. The first is that those problems that you missed during testing are brought to your attention immediately. No more grepping log files, looking for problems you might have missed. When a user hits a land mine, there’s an email in your in box letting you know.

The second is that if your site is busy at all, you have a very powerful incentive to fix the bug ASAP. If the problem is catastrophic, suddenly you’re getting a whole lot of email that you have to delete, all saying the same thing. Is it painful? Of course. But it insures that fixing the bug is the most efficient course of action for even the laziest programmer. Being bombarded with pointless email is a powerful incentive to make the pain stop. I like that.

Anyone know of a similar tool for Java? There’s an email appender for log4j, but I’ve always found it to be kind of a pain to deal with.

Did a legitimate venture capital firm just fund a gossip blog to the tune of $5 million? What’s Pink is the New Blog worth, $50 million?