Whatever happened to Amazon's lousy service?

Is this the sign of new trend? At one time Amazon had a reputation for awful customer service; only a wizard could locate their hidden customer service number.

No longer. Their product return service is fully automated and very effective. Most impressive, is their eStara powered online phone service. When a USPS package went misssing recently it took only one or two clicks to get eStrata to call me back. The problem was resolved almost immediately.

Impressive, and expensive. Amazon is making a big bet that customer service counts. Maybe the pendulum is swinging at last. Dell is no doubt taking notes.

Blumenthal's indictment of Bush - the worst ever (Salon)

Salon has reprinted the introduction to Sidney Blumenthal's new book, "How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime. The introduction is a fairly lengthy indictment of GWB beginning with the days he was considered a “moderate” to the conclusion that he’s probably the worst president in the history of the United States.

It’s probably true that Bush was always this bad, but many people who knew him before seem to think he’s really changed. I’ve often wondered about some unusual organic brain disorder or a significant head injury with post-traumatic deficits.

Garrison Keillor on homeland security

It’s not just funny. I think he spent quite a while thinking this through. It’s a good short course in what’s wrong with our security model, though he’s wrong about the profiling. Competent terrorist would use plain looking euros, we’ve just been lucky current crop is no more competent than the Bush administration…

Guns on a plane | Salon.com

... Sept. 13, 2006 | And now you can't bring your cup of coffee on board the airplane. It's the latest new rule laid down by the nation's security wizards…

But we ditch our venti latte in the trash barrel (goodbye, four bucks) and board the flight, and there we read in the paper that aggressive CIA questioning of an al-Qaida bigwig -- stripping him, turning the air conditioner to 40 degrees, blasting him with Red Hot Chili Peppers music -- broke him, so he ratted on Jose Padilla, a terrorist who set out to make a dirty bomb and who believed that by swinging a bucket of uranium in a circle over his head he could separate plutonium. It's like a cartoon.

The way to stop terrorists on planes is to encourage passengers to bring loaded firearms aboard: guys in orange vests sitting in exit rows with deer rifles on their laps…

This way, if some guy in a burnoose sets up a chemistry lab in Row 24 and mixes hydrogen peroxide, sulfuric acid and acetone in a big beaker that is packed in 15 pounds of dry ice to keep it cool, and cooks up some triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, the passengers will be able, in the several hours it will take him to make the deadly explosive, to bring him under control, assuming the fumes haven't knocked Ahmed out. And they could nab the mastermind too, the monocled guy in first class petting the white cat.

It all began with the name Homeland Security. Somebody with a tin ear came up with that, maybe the pest exterminator from Texas, or Adm. Poinduster, because, friends, Americans don't refer to this as our homeland…

"Homeland" was a word you heard shrieked by a cruel man flicking his riding crop against his shiny black boots: "Zie homeland -- ve shall defend it at all costs, achwohl!" Americans live in Our Country, America, the nation of nations, the good old USA.

… God forbid, somebody shows up at an airport somewhere in the world with an explosive tucked up in his lower colon. The Achtung people will come up with some new security procedures that will effectively kill airline travel, and then this enormous bureaucracy can turn its attention to the nation's highways. Pull over at the checkpoint, get out of the car, open the trunk, take off your shoes, put your hands on the top of the car, turn your head to the right, and cough.

They can search each laptop for possible terrorist-type writing and confiscate cellphones, white powder, shoelaces, car keys, pencils, anything sharp or cylindrical or made of glass, and interrogate people randomly, putting them naked into cold rooms with ugly music played at top volume. It's all fine with me. I'm a liberal and we love ridiculous government programs that intrude on personal freedom. But where are the conservatives who used to object to this sort of thing? ...

I think we know where those old conservatives are nowadays …

Tidbits notices: iTunes and families don't go together

Ahh. Someone who has readership finally noticed this. The problem with most tech geeks is they don’t seem to have families, or even longterm relationships. They don’t seem to notice that you can’t merge iPhoto Libraries or that iTunes is fundamentally designed for a single user environment (see also and this). The Tidbits group is older, and so they noticed …

TidBITS - Apple Updates iPods, Introduces Movies, Previews iTV

... As far as we can tell, iTunes 7 in no way improves the situation of a family that wants to have a single music archive that's shared by multiple computers. Built-in sharing works poorly because only one computer can make playlists, rate songs, and so on, and maintaining a shared music folder on a centralized server works acceptably, but each computer must add new music manually. The one new feature here is that iTunes now supports multiple libraries like iPhoto does; hold down the Option key when launching iTunes to create or switch between libraries. The only real utility we can see to this feature, though, is having a relatively small library on a laptop for travelling, but having another library that points at a shared storage folder when you're at home. ...

The technical problem is bigger than it looks. iPods are also designed to hold contacts, photos, etc. Those are all user-specific. So you want sync to be user specific, but also support shared Libraries with personalized and shared playlists. A bit tricky … but there’s a shark in this pool.

You see, we only think we buy music for a family. The copyright holders would say we buy it for ourselves. If your son wants to hear “Yellow Submarine” he should buy his own copy. DRM rights, you see, are personal, not familial. Feel that noose?

So sharing iTunes Libraries is a bit trickier than it looks …

How bad is the new GOP? Old GOP stalwarts yearn for defeat

Shrillblog detects the end-times. Old-time GOP stalwarts seek defeat, and likely lust for Clinton:

Shrillblog: Breaking News: Shrillness Singularity Discovered!

…George H.W. Bush speechwriter Christopher Buckley, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush advisor Bruce Bartlett, former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough, Cato Institute Chairman William A Niskanen, conservative constitutional lawyer and activist Bruce Fein, Ronald Reagan speechwriter and former National Review editor Jeffrey Hart, and ConservativeHQ.com Chairman Richard Viguerie all write in to say...

… They hope the Republicans lose in 2006 ...Well, let’s be diplomatic and say they’d prefer divided government—soon …

I’m sure they weren’t quite so direct as the above paraphrasing implies, but anyone from the old-time respectable GOP must feel the same way.

The Bush/Cheney/Rove/Rumsfeld GOP practices an authoritarian populism familiar to students of history and of South American politics. It’s not the GOP I grew up with. I didn’t like Reagan or Bush I, but that was before I experienced Rove’s GOP. Now even Reagan, demented though he was, shines like a beacon in the harbor. (Were it not for his unforgivable crime of handing a gun to his enemies Clinton’s retrospective radiance would blind unprotected eyes).

It’s difficult, and painful, to remember what competent governance was like. An entire generation of young voters has no experience with government that’s worthy of the name.

Using Google co-op for health information.

Somehow I missed Google Co-op. Here it's being used to define resoures health information. These collaborative bookmarking, path sharing projects are all the rage, though until now I've not found one that worked for me.

The Google Co-op project is intriguing of course, it's getting hard to keep up with all of their inventiveness -- is Google trying to advance The Singularity all by itself?

Needless to say, the memex had this feature. Vannevar Bush's 1945 prototype for the WWW+ involved the sharing of links, connections and paths in a collaborative development effort.

PS. Visiting my all-but-forgotten del.ici.us site I was intrigued to see the vanity feature -- an ancient link to Gordon's Tech under the old name is on a few other people's lists. I'll have to add all of my blogs and key pages there to see how many others have been found ... Clearly, I've not thought enough about these emergent collaboration sites ...

The magic of the blog: critique a product, the CEO responds

In addition to this opinion blog, I write a tech blog that’s mostly a reference for myself and friends, a little read special needs blog, and an announcements blog for a local special needs hockey team. These have miniscule readerships, but the web works in strange ways.

Recently I wrote two posts on products I use quite a bit. One was an affectionate announcement of the long (long) anticipated release of an iPhoto product I love, the other was a comparison: Gordon's Tech: SmugMug + PictureSync vs. Google Picasa Web Albums.

Within 12 hours of the original posts comments appeared from both the CEO of SmugMug and the author of Keyword Assistant.

Is this a sort of ‘long tail’ variant? Something interesting is going on in our world at the level of feedback loops.

Now if only we could fix planetary heating this way …

The insanity of using SSN as a password

When corporations outsource various HR functions, the disparate contractors all need an identify management process. They can get IDs easily enough, but not passwords. So they need to give everyone a password.

Typically they use a password that consists of some combination of one’s name and a portion of the SSN. For the past few years they’ve routinely used the last four digits of the SSN. Of course since everyone in the world uses the last four digits for authentication that information is now widely distributed and cannot be considered even remotely confidential.

So today one of these vendors asked me for the last six digits of my SSN.

I think you can guess where this is going. We have 3 digits to go.

Blithering idiocy.

The Ten Greatest Privacy Disasters

This is a handy list to review. It started on Wired, Schneier then pointed to this comment he liked: Concurring Opinions: The Ten Greatest Privacy Disasters.

I agree with Solove's opinion on the list, the SSN problem was not the identifier, but rather the essentially fraudulent way it was presented to the public and managed ever after. In essence the US implemented a national identifier while constantly denying it had a national identifier. This is a far worse situation than if we had an official identifier with a body of law to protect us from both private and governmental abuse.

I also agree about his comments on omissions. TIA never died, it only mutated, splintered, and went underground where it's harder to monitor and control. A bit like al Qaeda I suppose, which is interesting from a systems analysis perspective.

Anthrax: remember that?

Funny, Bush never talks about the anthrax terrorist. He also never talks about his rather suspiciously timed smallpox immunization campaign, and the injuries that caused.

A few remember - at least about the anthrax. Tara Smith write about Anthrax--where are we, almost 5 years later?. Turns out, we seem to be where we started. Some good links. Nice to see she reads the illustrious Mr. Schneier.

TS links to the excellent wikipedia article. A mystery indeed.

Ramsey County Elections: Primary Tuesday 7am-8pm

Ramsey County Elections kindly includes a sample ballot. I could start by ruling out every elected official who's spammed me, but that would eliminate most of the ballot.

Or I could vote on the Republican slate and support one of the whackos running against Mark (GOP? What's the GOP?) Kennedy for US Senator ...

Alas, I'll try to figure out the DFL ballot. The endorsed candidates are here; the state DFL was once a bit loony, but I think they've calmed down (even as I've become a bit of raving loon myself - Bush does that to some).

Looks like it'll be:

Senate: Klobuchar
District 4: McCollum (ultimate safe seat)
Governor: I dislike Mike Hatch, the DFL endorsee. I may have to vote for Becky Lourey, an amazing person who is not the obvious choice to oppose Pawlenty.
Secretary of State: March Ritchie. Also a big spammer.
Attorney General: Steve Kelley (DFL endorsed) is among the worst of the spammers. Grrrrrrrrrr.
County Commissioner District 5: Rafael Ortega, the incumbent.
Judge 28-2nd District Court: Jay Benanav. The incumbent, Otsby, was a Pawlenty appointee. Given that Pawlenty is a much smarter version of George Bush, Benanav is a much better choice.

Refining the Drake equation: earth like planets more common?

One of the explanations of the Fermi Paradox is that earth-like planets are very rare, so technologic civilizations are very rare. This was the premise of a 6/17/2000 Scientific American article that inspired my interest in this topic. Since then, however, every discovery in plantetology has increased the prevalence estimate for earth like planets. Now new models of planetary formation suggest gas giants support, rather than oppose, the formation of earth like planets:

A Plethora of Alien Seas -- Berardelli 2006 (908): 1 -- ScienceNOW

.... The researchers found that when gas giants migrate, they fling lots of rocky debris away from the star and into the habitable zone, where liquid water can exist on a planet's surface. There, the debris frequently coalesces into Earth-sized planets.

This kind of early evolution also perturbs the disk, causing comets outlying billions of kilometers away to dive toward the star. Enough of these ice balls hit the terrestrial planets to deliver large quantities of water. "We were very surprised to learn that these planets are water-rich and probably covered in global oceans," he says.

The findings suggest that thousands of planetary systems within the Milky Way could harbor Earth-like planets, says Rory Barnes, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Still, he cautions that the key question is how many planetary systems have hot Jupiters...

Of course, when you increase the value of one term in the Drake equation, given the 'great silence', you decrease another term. The one that keeps shrinking is the lifespan of technological civilizations interested in travel, exploration, and communication. The civilizations must either all die or all lose interest in communication. (The other explanation for the great silence is the one favored by odd couple of religious fundamentalists and simulationists -- it's by Design.)

TouchGraph AmazonBrowser

TouchGraph AmazonBrowser V1.01 is a graphical network browser for Amazon products. I came across it via Amazon's Solutions Catalog. There's other fascinating stuff there.

Tom Tomorrow - 10/22/2001

Tom Tomorrow is a genius, and brave as well.

Salon.com Comics | This Modern World

"They can't shake the foundations of our secular humanism ..."

The joy of blogs: DeLong vs Mankiw

Greg Mankiw is a very smart Republican economist who worked for Bush and perhaps voted for him (ok, not so smart). Brad DeLong is a smarter economist who despises Bush.

That's the background. The joy is reading the dialog between the two. This one goes to Brad, but Mankiw has his go0d days. His discussion of Healthcare is quite rational and he's strong when he points out that even if inequality is a 'winner take all' phenomena that doesn't mean one should rule out social policy to reduce it:

This analysis, however, does not tell you what to do now. Even if rising inequality is exogenous, the government could still respond to it by making the tax code more progressive. That is a coherent policy viewpoint, driven as much by political philosophy as economics, about which reasonable people can disagree. I am the first to admit that the study of economics by itself does not tell you how to balance efficiency vs equality. And it certainly does not tell you whether it is more noble to be an egalitarian or a libertarian.

In the DeLong vs. Mankiw battles the two often agree on the economics but disagree on policy and values -- but DeLong is usually more careful about what he writes. Mankiw can be sloppy, as with a recent post on reproductive rates and social conservatism.

Still, Mankiw is a Republican I can live with, and I'd even respect him if I knew he didn't vote for Bush in 2004.