The White House is refusing to hand over the text of a speech that Condi Rice was scheduled to give on September 11, 2001 on the grounds that it is confidential. Regardless of what you think about the utility of these hearings, you have to appreciate the absurdity of asserting that a speech that was intended for public presentation is now secret because its contents make the administration look like it was barking up the wrong tree. ...
Slate ran an interesting article yesterday by Jim Lewis about the wisdom of newspapers publishing violent images. I can hardly bear to look at such images myself, and agree with the author that used improperly they can tend to overwhelm the news message that the editors are attempting to convey. But the other side of it is that they work at a visceral level that cannot be duplicated. I find this to be more true when it comes to people being wounded rather than killed. To me, dead is dead. When people say hundreds of civilians have died, I know what that means. Wounded, on the other hand, conveys a wider range of meaning. Last year a British journalist who has a weblog lost his foot to a land mine in northern Iraq. Seeing the pictures of his leg all bandaged up after surgery really brought things home in a way that just reading about a missing foot could not. More recently Boing Boing linked to pictures of an Iraqi man who had just been shot in the arm. “Shot in the arm” didn’t sound that horrific to me, but the pictures of a man’s forearm basically turned inside out certainly were. Most people, myself included, are willing to sanction violence in service to other ends, and most people will hopefully never see the immediate effects of that violence first hand. I think people should have enough exposure to the consequences of supporting such violence to absorb some of the implications of it. The author of the article specifically mentions some pictures he took in Congo of bodies of people who were slaughtered using machetes, and that were never published. A few years ago, National Geographic ran some pictures of people who survived machete attacks during the Rwandan genocide. I’ll never forget those pictures, and the main thing they made me feel was rotten that the rest of the world let that genocide begin and commence until at least half a million people were killed. So I can’t say that I’m against the use of violent images in the media. ...
Boing Boing is at the inversion point that all wildly successful hobby sites arrive at eventually, the point where they need cash from visitors to keep things rolling. This is such a common phenomenon that it really deserves a name. Other sites that recently arrived at that point were The Whiskey Bar and Intel Dump. I’ll be interested to see how Boing Boing addresses the problem. (It won’t surprise anyone to learn that given my traffic and its lazy growth curve, I’ll never have to contend with that problem. Prices for bandwidth go down faster than my traffic goes up. That said, I’m incredibly flattered by the traffic I do get, it constantly exceeds my expectations.) ...
Word is that Sun vice president Rich Green quit in disgust after the deal that Sun announced with Microsoft last week. I can’t wait until the day when I have enough money in the bank to quit a job in disgust. I’ve toiled for my entire career in a near constant state of disgust about this or that and never had the financial freedom to tell my bosses to take this job and shove it. It’s disappointing. ...
Playfair is an application that strips the DRM out of files purchased from the iTunes Music Store. Get it fast before somebody hammers them with a lawsuit under the DMCA and Apple patches iTunes to disable the application.
John Anderson at genehack.org made a great catch when digging through a stack of old Wired magazines. Tim Bray: Why I Hate the Web. I had similar feelings about the Web when I first encountered it, in 1994.
On March 28, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq closed down a newspaper run by a radical Shiite group because it incited violence. Shutting down the paper seems to have incited a lot more violence than the paper ever did before it was shut down. One of the lessons from the New Yorker biography of Ayman al Zawahiri was that the radicals in the Islamic Brotherhood turned to violence when the Egyptian government denied them the opportunity for peaceful political expression. The government curried their favor when it was needed, but then never followed through when the immediate need had passed. I wonder if the Sadrists in Iraq are feeling gamed in the same way. The thought of a popular uprising among Shiites is too depressing to really contemplate. In other news, here’s why you might not see many major media reports of the uprising. ...
Somehow I missed this survey of Word documents from microsoft.com and the revisions that were not expunged before they were published.
This program saved my life tonight: phpCodeBeautifier. It’s amazing how much more readable properly indented code is.
William Saletan points out that George W Bush creates the flip-floppers he later attacks.