Friedman and the summer of war

Excerpted from a longer post, I particularly appreciated the zing on Friedman and the "summer of war" metaphor:

Egregious Moderation: Andrew Northrup on the Journamalism of Tom Friedman

... Of course, this is the same Tom Friedman who was telling us at the time that we needed to invade Iraq because we just had to kill some Arabs. We just had to, OK? Something about a bubble or something, too - you had to be there, man, it all made perfect sense. I know it seems weird now, man, but it was this magical time, like the Golden Age of Athens or some shit - The Summer of War! - when we all just knew we were going to change the world. All that stuff our parents told us about Vietnam and all that shit? We were just going to blow that away, man, just tear down their world and build it all up new, like better than ever, like nothing you’d ever seen before! Reynolds was the man, and den Beste was the brains, and everybody was in it together, for freedom and shit. It was great. And the music … well, the music kind of blew, actually. Nickelback was big. And the drugs were pretty crappy. No sex to speak of. But the blogs! Man, you shoulda seen the blogs! Outtasite!

And where are they now? Steven den Beste has stopped illuminating the great cycles of human history, and now writes exclusively about porny Japanese schoolgirl cartoons. Reynolds never got past that summer, never learned how to change with the times, and now he’s Kid Charlemagne. I don’t know what happened to Friedman - he’s behind the Times Select wall now, probably writing about globalization or whatever, or whatever anime den Beste was into 6 months ago. Funny how everyone grew up.

The past really is another country. I would like to bomb it.

The trajectory of some of these neo-con bloggers is noteworthy.

In a related post, a former neo-con invade-Iraq culture warrior blogger virtually flagellates himself and the world of the blogs. I'm ok with the his flagellation, but I think he should have limited his blog-attack to the ones he reads.

The "surge" turns into a prolonged commitment

The increased US troop presence has improved life in Baghdad (based on my reading of my relatively trusted sources). If it continues to do so, it will be sustained ...

WIRED Blogs: Danger Room:

...When the troop 'surge' in Iraq was initially being discussed, it was billed as a temporary increase in forces -- a matter of months. That never seemed all that credible to me. Now, 'the day-to-day commander of American forces in Iraq' is owning up, recommending 'that the heightened American troop levels there be maintained through February 2008,' the Times reports. Count on an admission, pretty soon, that the surge is going to take a lot more than 21,500 troops...

I'm sure the experts knew the "surge" would become a permanent fixture if it seemed to be working, and a "surge" if it was failing. I suspect if it starts to fail it will again be called a "surge". It there are positive results though, we'll need many, many more troops. I wonder where they'll come from.

Breaking a network: first kill the cadets

I think there are lessons here for corporate downsizing as well as for fighting insurgents. If you want to destroy a cooperative, don't focus on the leaders. Take out the communicators that cross boundaries:

WIRED Blogs: Danger Room

... "Networks are hard to break," Lieutenant Colonel John Graham announced. Then he smiled and said he was going to show us how.

... there are three major vulnerabilities in networks:

1) Density nodes: people with many immediate connections, e.g. leaders
2) Centrality nodes: people with fewer immediate connections but who serve as crossroads in many relationships, e.g. financiers
3) Boundary spanners: people with few (maybe just two) connections but who span long gaps between chunks of the network, e.g. liaisons or messengers

Assuming your resources for attacking a network are limited -- and in the real world, they always are -- who do you hit? Graham asked. Using his own department as an example, he advocated killing just three of the dozens of members. Surprisingly, none were examples of density or centrality, since those were all situated in the meaty middle of the network. The network had enough redundant connections to quickly repair itself after their demise. What Graham wanted to do was hit the network where there were no redundancies, so all of his targets were boundary spanners. By taking out three spanners, Graham showed how you could isolate relatively homogeneous chunks of the network, rendering it stupider and less adaptive than before.

Funny thing is, the spanners in Graham's department's network were mostly low-ranking members such as cadets...

When corporations downsize, I suspect they get rid of a lot of their "spanners". Not intentionally, but because they don't know who they are. They then founder, but never understand why ...

More Dyer articles online - and 9/11 conspiracies

Dyer has several new articles online. Still no RSS feed!

Gwynne Dyer 2007:

February 19	Peter Pace's Choice
February 22	A Quick Fix
February 26	Blame the Iraqis
March 1	What's Wrong with Italy?
March 8	Loose Screws

The last of these, Loose Screws is required reading. It's about "Loose Change", a "documentary" film alleging the WTC was destroyed by explosive charges, not an airplane collision. Dyer is no friend of Bush, but he has no patience for this whackiness:

I cannot absolutely refute the lesser conspiracy theory [jf: Dyer doesn't believe that one either], but I find it extremely implausible. The greater conspiracy theory, on the other hand, is just plain loony -- and yet more and more people are falling for it in the West, where it was once the exclusive domain of people with counter-rotating eyeballs and poor personal hygiene. You cannot overstate the impact of a well-made film.

It sounds like another degree beyond the "JFK" movie. On the one hand I empathize with the impression of vast, powerful and mysterious forces moving the world, but if one abandons logic and reason there's really no stopping point. Maybe invading nanites from Betelgeuse blew up the WTC, or perhaps it was Satan's minions.

I wonder if we'll see even more of this sort of thing as the world gets faster, stranger, and more complex ... I like Dyer's conclusion, and the half-serious comment that the film's biggest beneficiaries are probably Cheney/Bush.

... In normal times you wouldn't waste breath arguing with people who
fall for this kind of rubbish, but the makers of "Loose Change" claim that
their film has already been seen by over 100 million people, and looking at
my e-mail in-tray I believe them. It is a real problem, because by linking
their fantasies about 9/11 to the Bush administration's deliberate
deception of the American people in order to gain support for the invasion
of Iraq, they bring discredit on the truth and the nonsense alike.

You almost wonder if they are secretly working for the Bush
administration.

Gonzales is gone: another man who knows too much

Rove won't wait for an impeachment trial that would drag in people like Harriet Miers. Gonzales is another man who knows too much. They'll find something profitable for him to do. Emphases mine, and congratulations to Newsweek!

Overblown Personnel Matters - Krugman - New York Times

What is surprising is how fast the truth is emerging about what Alberto Gonzales, the attorney general, dismissed just five days ago as an “overblown personnel matter.”

Sources told Newsweek that the list of prosecutors to be fired was drawn up by Mr. Gonzales’s chief of staff, “with input from the White House.” And Allen Weh, the chairman of the New Mexico Republican Party, told McClatchy News that he twice sought Karl Rove’s help — the first time via a liaison, the second time in person — in getting David Iglesias, the state’s U.S. attorney, fired for failing to indict Democrats.

... One of the fired prosecutors was — as he saw it — threatened with retaliation by a senior Justice Department official if he discussed his dismissal in public. Another was rejected for a federal judgeship after administration officials, including then-White House counsel Harriet Miers, informed him that he had “mishandled” the 2004 governor’s race in Washington, won by a Democrat, by failing to pursue vote-fraud charges.

... We now know exactly why Mr. Iglesias was fired, but still have to speculate about some of the other cases — in particular, that of Carol Lam, the U.S. attorney for Southern California.

Ms. Lam had already successfully prosecuted Representative Randy Cunningham, a Republican. Just two days before leaving office she got a grand jury to indict Brent Wilkes, a defense contractor, and Kyle (Dusty) Foggo, the former third-ranking official at the C.I.A. (Mr. Foggo was brought in just after the 2004 election, when, reports said, the administration was trying to purge the C.I.A. of liberals.) And she was investigating Representative Jerry Lewis, Republican of California, the former head of the House Appropriations Committee.

...What we really need — and it will take a lot of legwork — is a portrait of the actual behavior of prosecutors across the country. Did they launch spurious investigations of Democrats, as I suggested last week may have happened in New Jersey? Did they slow-walk investigations of Republican scandals, like the phone-jamming case in New Hampshire?...

Krugman is my hero. Now we all want to know what Carol Lam had on the Mr. Lewis, former head of the House Appropriations Commitee...

Exercise and cognition - I'm still skeptical

I've been skeptical of articles purporting to show a relationship between exercise and cognitive performance. It's not that I don't like exercise (I love it), but I just couldn't see the evolutionary physiology -- and I don't have much faith in case-control studies.

Now I'm moving from more to less skeptical, but I'm still skeptical

Study shows why exercise boosts brainpower - CNN.com

... Tests on mice showed they grew new brain cells [in response to exercise] in a brain region called the dentate gyrus, a part of the hippocampus that is known to be affected in the age-related memory decline that begins around age 30 for most humans.

The researchers used magnetic resonance imaging scans to help document the process in mice -- and then used MRIs to look at the brains of people before and after exercise.

... They recruited 11 healthy adults and made them undergo a three-month aerobic exercise regimen.

They did MRIs of their brains before and after. They also measured the fitness of each volunteer by measuring oxygen volume before and after the training program.

Exercise generated blood flow to the dentate gyrus of the people, and the more fit a person got, the more blood flow the MRI detected, the researchers found.

"The remarkable similarities between the exercise-induced cerebral blood volume changes in the hippocampal formation of mice and humans suggest that the effect is mediated by similar mechanisms," they wrote.

"Our next step is to identify the exercise regimen that is most beneficial to improve cognition and reduce normal memory loss, so that physicians may be able to prescribe specific types of exercise to improve memory," Small said.

I'm still skeptical, but a bit less so.

It was a pretty small study, and it would be hard to separate the effects of exercise and sleep (since sleep improves due to exercise). On the other hand, it's almost plausible that a mechanism that evolved for muscle learning might secondarily benefit other dependent processes (such as recall) ... but it still seems fishy to me.

It might turn out that the benefit is a one time plus for people going from unfit to fit, and then it's done. Or it might turn out that you need to learn new motor actions to benefit, so for most of us taking up snowboarding would help but bicycling wouldn't.

If there is any effect, I'm betting it's small and that sleeping 7+ hours a night is more important.

On the other hand, if my dementia progresses any more quickly every activity will represent new muscle learning opportunities.

Canada and immigration: the undiscovered laboratory

My limited recollection is that between 1950 and 1980 the province/nation of Quebec switched from a theocratic government, devout Catholicism, an average family size of over 5 children, and economic dominance by an ethnic minority (anglo-english) to a secular government, a secular society, an average birthrate of about 1.7, and the relatively silent emigration of that ethnic minority (including me).

That's a rather impressive amount of social transformation, and yet I suspect it's not well studied. Canada is the "dog" of sociology -- a remarkable species that has been falsely assumed to be "ordinary".

Now another experiment is playing out. Canada is a wealthy nation with, compared (only) to the US, a relatively even standard of living with limited pockets of severe poverty and a relatively intact social safety net. That may be why it has a birth rate similar to Italy, Japan, or Denmark -- very low (of course then one might ask why evolution allows relative wealth and prosperity to end reproduction!). Unlike Japan, which seems destined to slowly fade away (Korea's birth rate is too low to provide immigrants and every other nation is too "foreign"), Canada has returned to its historic roots as a nation of immigration.

There's one key difference, however, between Canadian immigration and the US model. Canada has been aggressively managing its immigration stream, with an almost "eugenic" policy of selecting the most economically productive immigrants. This is why I believe Canada will not have a social security crisis. More below ...

CANOE -- CNEWS - Canada: Census: Immigration critical to Canada

OTTAWA (CP) — Two-thirds of Canada’s population growth over the past five years was fuelled by immigrant newcomers...

The country is on track to becoming 100 per cent dependent on immigration for growth...

... That point won’t be reached until after 2030, when the peak of the baby boomers born in the 1950s and early ‘60s reach the end of their lifespans.

... Canada’s net migration, per capita, is among the highest in the world. According to the OECD, Canada’s net migration of 6.5 migrants per 1,000...

Canada’s influx offsets a flacid national birthrate of about 1.5 kids per woman, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 and just below the OECD average.

The United States, by way of example, accepts only 4.4 immigrants per thousand but has a fertility rate 25 per cent higher than Canada.

... A candidate for the ADQ in the Quebec provincial election was dumped by his party on the weekend after telling a weekly newspaper that native Quebecers need to “boost their birth rate, otherwise the ethnics will swamp us.”

... Ontario’s population... increased 6.6 per cent...

...Newfoundland, meanwhile, is on a three-census slide and has seen its population fall to a level not seen since the late 1960s.

Quebec’s population climbed 4.3 percent ... another slight decline in the French-speaking province’s overall share of the Canadian population. [jf: see comment below]

With the federal government poised to bring down a budget next Monday that is expected to reconfigure equalization payments to the provinces and address a so-called fiscal imbalance in the federation, population shifts are of critical importance.

... The census shows that Toronto remains Canada’s biggest metropolitan area, with 5.1 million people.

Montreal, at 3.6 million, and Vancouver at 2.1, were next among megalopoli...

About 35 per cent of Canada’s total population lives in these three metropolitan regions — and they attract more than 80 per cent of immigrant newcomers.

There's a lot here. The writer was careful to steer clear of the extremely sensitive, but inescapable, conclusion that Quebec's "ethnic Quebecois" population is in steep decline, with a birth rate, I suspect, comparable to Japan. Newfoundland is emptying out, rather like North Dakota and much of the American plains states. The nation is becoming very urban, though one should note that all of Canada's cities would fit into a single anonymous urban center in central China.

Canada is one heck of a laboratory. A future US president might learn from this.

Bell's theorem: My reading of it (at last)

It was a supercilious Wired magazine article from earlier this year that inspired me update my 27 you QM knowledge.

Ultimately, the answer is bound to be unnerving: According to a famous doctrine called Bell’s Inequality, for entanglement to square with relativity, either we have no free will or reality is an illusion. Some choice.
- Lucas Graves, New York City-based writer

I turned to the Wikipedia article, but I couldn't make sense of it. Now that I've read a bit more, I think the article is actually quite a mess. It feels like the battleground of a religious conflict, a not implausible scenario. I didn't dare edit it, but I added this as a comment:

I'm not a physicist, so I'm loathe to edit the original article. Based on my slow reading of Gribbin (Schrodinger's Kittens, 1994), however, this comes across as a particularly messy article.

For example, the article refers to von Neumann's proof against local variables, but Gribbin claims that proof was demolished by Bell. If that is true, it should not be mentioned here as it would be of only historic significance.

I'll paraphrase below how Gribbin describes Bell's Theorem and its modern consequences. If this makes sense I suggest it be incorporated with a citation to Gribbin (Schrodinger's Kitten). I think I can see pieces of Gribbin's lucid summary in the article, but the message is fragmented and expressed in unnecessarily formal language.

Bell's Theorem showed that if non-locality ("spooky action at a distance", instaneous correlation of polarization states, etc) were found to occur, irregardless of any interpretation of quantum mechanics, then physics had to abandon one of two cherished beliefs:

1. That the world exists independently of our observations of it.
2. That there is no communication faster than the speed of light.

Subsequently non-locality has been shown, several times, to occur. That means we have to give up on either the "persistent world" or faster than light communications. Not surprisingly, physicists have decided the lesser evil is to accept a faster than light communication -- as long as that communication carries no "meaning". In other words, "meaning" cannot travel faster than light.

How does this translate to Lucas Grave's choice between free will and "reality is an illusion"? The illusion part is easy, that's the #1 choice.

I think the "free will" issues comes as a consequence of "faster than light" communication. In physics "faster than light" has usually been thought to be the equivalent of "traveling backwards in time". If a message is sent from the future and measured in the past, then it seems the future is predestined. The message cannot fail to be sent.

My sense is most physicists have opted for choice #2, but since nobody's figured out a way to send a meaningful or actionable message faster than light, #2 has been expressed (my words) as "Meaning cannot travel faster than light".

I don't know if this gives any options for "free will", but I think that is how the Wired quote came about. A predestined universe seems a bit claustrophobic, so maybe physicists will figure out a way that a meaningless (infinite entropy) message can travel faster than light without implying a retro-temporal signal.

Yech. We need some more options.

Excel: in contradiction to services oriented architecture

In October of 2001 Joel Spolsky described how Excel was built, and why it worked so well:

In Defense of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome - Joel on Software

... I stopped by Andrew Kwatinetz's office. He was my manager at the time and taught me everything I know. "The Excel development team will never accept it," he said. "You know their motto? 'Find the dependencies -- and eliminate them.' They'll never go for something with so many dependencies."

In-ter-est-ing. I hadn't known that. I guess that explained why Excel had its own C compiler.

Not so fast, big boy! The Excel team's ruggedly independent mentality also meant that they always shipped on time, their code was of uniformly high quality, and they had a compiler which, back in the 1980s, generated pcode and could therefore run unmodified on Macintosh's 68000 chip as well as Intel PCs. The pcode also made the executable file about half the size that Intel binaries would have been, which loaded faster from floppy disks and required less RAM...

Uh oh. I've always thought of Excel as the one exception to Microsoft's generally despicable software. So it turns out the secret contradicts my enthusiasms for shared services? Sigh.

Interesting note, by the way, on the value hidden in the archives of blogs. Joel wrote this almost six years ago.

More entrepreneur advice: build your own infrastructure

O'Reilly Radar > Jedi build their own lightsabers is another in an endless stream of 'startup advice' posts, but this one fits into a pattern I like. Recommended particularly for the links.

Are process patents a spammers best friend?

Process patent fears are directly responsible, I claim, for six years of arrested progress in digital image formats. Paul Vixie, quoted in O'Reilly Radar, claims they're also responsible for the spam that's destroying email ...

O'Reilly Radar > Another War We're Not Winning: Us vs Spam

...every potential smtp improvement or replacement that could do anything to actually stop spam, has been systematically patented. the crap that's left isn't going to do any good. we're headed for walled gardens...

This seems credible to me. Process patents have a strangle hold on software development. I assume something will break them, but I don't know what.

In the meantime, I'll put spam into the same category as JPEG -- a consequence of a disastrous decision by the US congress to extend patent law into processes, and then to drastically underfund the patent office.

Quantum mystery, quantum theology

I've been slowly meandering through Gribbin's fascinating book, Schrodinger's Kittens. A chapter on the Copenhagen interpretation of wave function collapse included Wheeler's (serious? frivolous?) speculation that the universe only exists because an intelligent entity perceives it. Bing! A light bulb went off. A small puzzle had just resolved itself.

I'd noticed for a while there were some curious attitudes around discussions of the "reality" (whatever that is) "underlying" the mathematics which predict quantum observations. It's not so much the things that are said, but more the things left unsaid. Now I realized that those curious zones of silence are theological. On one side is a reluctance to state the obvious inference that the First Perceiver would play the role of the typical creator deity, on the other side is a reluctance to admit that the theological implications of the Copenhagen interpretation are very appealing to deists.

Which led me to wonder where the silence is broken. It wasn't hard to imagine a Google search that would expose the discussion: "Did god collapse the wave function of the universe?". The search worked, the Copenhagen interpretation clearly has natural adherents.

The voices are getting louder. In a completely typical bit of modern synchronicity, as I drove home from hockey tonight I heard an NPR guest propose that God could fit readily into the fuzziness of the probability distribution (alas for his credibility, he persistently and repetitively confused "latitude" with "lassitude" -- I hope nobody tells him he was accusing God of laziness).

Quantum physics is bloody weird. It drives big holes in our understanding of time and sequence; it has lots of room for mystery. Humans abhor an intellectual mystery, they always fill it with religion. And so it goes. We shall be hearing quite a bit about the role of God and metaGod in quantum reality. Really, I think theists should focus on the Fermi Paradox instead, but QM is still fertile ground.

Cher, the hidden wounded, and an odd resemblance to WW I

I'd no idea at first how old this Washington Times article, turns out was written in October 2003 (the URL is a clue). I guess the Washington Times hasn't figured out that a web page needs date metadata.

Particularly given the date and her prescience, I'll have to rethink my impression of Cher I had from, oh, about 30 years ago ...

Cher waits turn on C-SPAN call to air views on wounded troops - The Washington Times: Nation/Politics

Celebrities voice their political opinions in many ways. They sign petitions, make donations, appear at rallies and sound off on late-night talk shows.
And sometimes they just stay on hold. That is what Cher did yesterday.

Anonymous and unsolicited, the singer joined the line of callers for C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" shortly after 7 a.m., remaining on hold for about four minutes until her moment came to speak on the war in Iraq.

"Thank you for C-SPAN," she said, simply as a generic "caller from Miami" who offered an immediate and graphic description of wounded soldiers she had met, including "a boy about 19 or 20 who had lost both his arms."

Alert for bogus claims, on-air host Peter Slen pressed the female caller for more information, establishing she had seen the soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, working as an entertainer.

..."Why are Cheney, Wolfowitz, Bremer, the president — why aren't they taking pictures with these guys," she demanded. "I don't understand why these guys are so hidden, why there are no pictures of them."
Cher also chided the news media for omitting the "devastatedly wounded" from their coverage.

"Don't hide them. Let's have some news coverage where people are sitting and talking to these guys and seeing their spirit," the singer said, adding that she watched C-SPAN's morning show daily, along with the BBC and World Link.

I searched Google trying to figure out the date and discovered Cher is widely mocked and despised by the right wingnuts. Thirty years is a long time, apparently Cher moved on. I'll have to reset my expectations and pass on a belated "thank you".

I came to Cher via Frank Rich, who, in an article explaining why Libby will be pardoned (the man knows far too much about how Cheney and Rice cooked up the nuclear story), provides a useful summary of what Cheney/Bush have done to keep the reality of war out of the minds of the American people..

Why Libby’s Pardon Is a Slam Dunk

... The steps the White House took to keep casualties out of view were extraordinary, even as it deployed troops to decorate every presidential victory rally and gave the Pentagon free rein to exploit the sacrifices of Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman in mendacious P.R. stunts.

The administration’s enforcement of a prohibition on photographs of coffins returning from Iraq was the first policy manifestation of the hide-the-carnage strategy. It was complemented by the president’s decision to break with precedent, set by Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter among others, and refuse to attend military funerals, lest he lend them a media spotlight. But Mark Benjamin, who has chronicled the mistreatment of Iraq war veterans since 2003, discovered an equally concerted effort to keep injured troops off camera. Mr. Benjamin wrote in Salon in 2005 that “flights carrying the wounded arrive in the United States only at night” and that both Walter Reed and the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda barred the press “from seeing or photographing incoming patients.”

A particularly vivid example of the extreme measures taken by the White House to cover up the war’s devastation turned up in The Washington Post’s Walter Reed exposé. Sgt. David Thomas, a Tennessee National Guard gunner with a Purple Heart and an amputated leg, found himself left off the guest list for a summer presidential ceremony honoring a fellow amputee after he said he would be wearing shorts, not pants, when occupying a front-row seat in camera range...

The answer is simple: Out of sight, out of mind was the game plan, and it has been enforced down to the tiniest instances. When HBO produced an acclaimed (and apolitical) documentary last year about military medics’ remarkable efforts to save lives in Iraq, “Baghdad ER,” Army brass at the last minute boycotted planned promotional screenings in Washington and at Fort Campbell, Ky. In a memo, Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley warned that the film, though made with Army cooperation, could endanger veterans’ health by provoking symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder...

Advanced medical technology means many who would have died 15 years ago now live, but this means a much higher cost of care and more longterm disability. The use of the so-called "IED" (no longer improvised) means many of our injured have severe brain injuries and, until we learn to repair brains, a high probability of lifelong disability. Cheney/Bush have tried to keep this from our sight, but there's only so much they can do. It's leaking out.

Which brings me to an odd connection. Our soldiers are not dying at even a small fraction of the rate of WW I veterans, but there's one odd resemblance. The medicine of 1912 meant that most injured warriors died, but those who lived had very high amputation rates, and, in an era of manual labor, extended disability. Our warriors, in an era of cognitive labor, may share a similar story. We can't do anything about this until we face the wounded. That, I suspect, will be a task for the next President.

The limits to DRM: my new car stereo

I'm not, by nature, an optimist. I tell my friends that not only do I consider the glass half-empty, I suspect the dregs are poisonous.

So it is not surprising that, for some time, I was pretty pessimistic about Digital Rights Management. The public had no reaction to the DMCA at all. Would the voting population figure out the real costs before Microsoft started selling DRMd retinal implants? I didn't think so.

I started to become a less pessimistic when I realized, a bit ahead of the curve, that it was very hard to manage any DRM solution in a world of disparate disconnected embedded computers [1]. I became slightly optimistic when I formally admitted that humanity's actions, on occasion, seem inexplicably less-than-dumb.

Recently, my new SONY car music player has tipped me into the moderately optimistic range. Ironically, and perhaps not coincidentally, this product comes from a company with a historic (truly) DRM fiasco. I wonder if Jobs was thinking of this sort of product when he wrote his "Nixon in China" essay.

So why does this car player possibly signal the doom of today's DRM? The key is that the player supports MP3/AAC [2] CD-Rs and USB mass storage devices in addition to the iPod. The iPod support is great, but the data CD-Rs are ultra-rugged, cheap, disposable, reliable and very simple to use for playlists. [3] They're also very well supported by iTunes -- as long as you don't have music from the iTunes store. The stereo doesn't support FairPlay, and it can't.

Until now I've allowed a few DRMd tunes to leak into my collection. Freebies mostly, one or two impulse buys, and some gift cert music for the kids. No more. Sure I can easily build iTunes smart lists to filter out protected music [5], but I'm a geek. Even so, it's a nuisance to have to burn my kids favorite tunes to a CD, then re-encode as non-DRMd AAC [4].

Americans live in cars these days. Large personal music collections are a natural fit and devices like this excellent Sony product will become ubiquitous. DRMd music doesn't work in this setting. We are going to hit the limits of this generation's stab at DRM for music very soon. I'll be a rampant optimist and predict complete collapse within 18 months.

---

[1] Our sump pump has an embedded computer system monitoring its health. That computer crashes every few weeks and has to be rebooted. My alarm clock crashes every few weeks. My car stereo has a reset button. The Daylight Savings Time transition is going to remind everyone how many embedded, disconnected, non-updateable, computers they own; we'll be resetting our camera and video clocks four times a year until the last one dies.
[2] And Sony's irrelevant ATRAC standard.
[3] See my review for more details. Using Apple iTunes it's trivially easy to burn a half-dozen data CDs made up of both AAC and MP3 tunes, and very convenient to pop them in a play them. I find it easiest to treat each CD as a unique playlist and not bother with folders, navigation hierarchies, etc. A 700MB playlist is not bad really.
[4] Sure there are applications to do this, but we have so few that matter the CD solution is easier.
[5] Omit KIND contains "protected".

Does Google understand hyperlinks?

Does Google understand how a hyperlink works? I'm beginning to wonder.

I rag on Microsoft Sharepoint 2007 big time for creating a supposed "web" product that uses the file system semantics to generate the URL, thereby ensuring that any file system manipulation will break any link, but really, Google is no better.

The original Blogger allowed users to change blog titles without breaking links, but after Google bought the first revision made the links reflect the title -- so editing a title broke links. The newest Blogger revision [1] changed that, the url is based on the original title but it doesn't change on editing the title -- however changing the date will break the link.

Then there's Google's Picasa Web Albums. Try this experiment:

1. Create an album.
2. Share a link to the album.
3. Edit the album properties and change the name. Note there's nothing to warn you of the consequences of this seemingly benign act.
4. Every link to the album returns a page-not-found. No redirects.

Google's supposed to be composed of very bright math majors, so I'm guessing this isn't mere stupidity. I can only speculate on what's at work, but it's more than annoying. I believe, but have not confirmed, that SmugMug, for all its recent buginess, does at least get this right.

[1] Google may have some warped beliefs about links and metadata, but I can now say, with great caution and trepidation and painful memories of a semi-botched data migration process, that the new Blogger is far better than the old one. Now that I've said that Google will certainly proceed to wipe out all my data ...