Posts

Amanda Simon is blogging the debate over the amendments to the FISA bill for the ACLU. This is a tough one to take, and honestly I don’t expect the next President to make things any better regardless of who it is. Here’s Gore Vidal in September 2000: You have two candidates. Gore is by far the better trained and more intelligent and is going to win. It’s as simple as that. But I worry because he, too, is funded by corporate America. Luckily he’s intelligent and will hopefully turn out pretty well. But what I’m concerned about is how the corruption of the system has become totally accepted. This can be changed by an act of Congress, but no one will be propose it. ...

From the comments on Wired News’ Hans Reiser article today: but in all seriousness, the reason so many of us are motivated about this trial is because we can project ourselves into the defense seat. watching as 12 hopelessly irrational commoners convict us super-brights on nothing but a pool of circumstantial evidence. its a scary thought. Working in the world of software development you see this kind of arrogance frequently. ...

We’re reorganizing the closet, and I had the chance to get down all of the boxes of CDs that I’ve accumulated over the years. The question is, what do I do with them? I never touch them any more, because I’ve ripped them all. I have a copy on my laptop, a backup on an external hard drive, and another backup copy on my iPod. Do I really need the CDs any more? ...

How did Barack Obama go from saying this on January 28: Ever since 9/11, this Administration has put forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand. The FISA court works. The separation of powers works. We can trace, track down and take out terrorists while ensuring that our actions are subject to vigorous oversight, and do not undermine the very laws and freedom that we are fighting to defend. ...

Tyler Cowen agrees with and expands on Chris Anderson’s response to Anita Elberse’s article arguing against the existence of a “long tail” effect enabled by online retailing.

My previous post on the Boing Boing controversy generated some pushback from readers who argue that deleting posts is changing history, and that bloggers just shouldn’t do it. (As I mentioned in the comments, I have never gone back and deleted old posts and don’t foresee doing so.) I agree completely with the idea that deleting old content breaks the web and can be seen as an attempt to change history. It’s Orwellian to go back and alter or delete content when your opinion changes. If a newspaper went back and removed all of the stories in favor of the war in Iraq, it would lose any standing it might have as a respectable media outlet. And I feel the same way about blogs. Deleting old content is in all likelihood an act of dishonesty. ...

Harvard marketing professor Anita Elberse has conducted a study which seems to reveal that customer purchasing behavior with regard to hits is the same online as it is offline. In her Harvard Business Review article, she reports: For Chris Anderson, the strategic implications of the digital environment seem clear. “The companies that will prosper,” he declares, “will be those that switch out of lowest-common-denominator mode and figure out how to address niches.” But my research indicates otherwise. Although no one disputes the lengthening of the tail (clearly, more obscure products are being made available for purchase every day), the tail is likely to be extremely flat and populated by titles that are mostly a diversion for consumers whose appetite for true blockbusters continues to grow. It is therefore highly disputable that much money can be made in the tail. In sales of both videos and recorded music—in many ways the perfect products to test the long-tail theory—we see that hits are and probably will remain dominant. That is the reality that should inform retailers as they struggle to offer their customers a satisfying assortment cost-efficiently. And it’s the unavoidable challenge to producers. The companies that will prosper are the ones most capable of capitalizing on individual best sellers. ...

Looks like one argument against building Web sites in Flash is going to bite the dust. You still shouldn’t build Web sites in Flash.

jQuery creator John Resig explains the advances that FireBug brought to JavaScript development. I’d say that I didn’t really take JavaScript seriously until I started using FireBug. He also has a list of potential improvements to FireBug, including porting it to work with Internet Explorer. Given the amount of time Web developers spend debugging weird issues in Internet Explorer, a tool like FireBug would literally be life changing.

Here’s Xeni Jardin on why they unpublished some old posts after a disagreement with the person who was the subject of those posts: This is a directory of wonderful things. If we no longer think something is wonderful, we have every right to remove it from this directory. I’m not sure what I think of that. It’s clearly trivially true. They could take the whole site down tomorrow if they wanted to. But is it ethical to selectively remove posts as they have? ...