The Green[e]house Effect: a Weblog

Follow the Yellow Bridge Road

Since ShiftyEye rightly points to the vintage-Tomorrowland design of the soon-to-come Georgia Aquarium, let me even the scales by talking about a piping-hot aesthetic misfire.

In a stroke of foresight — well, in every sense but the economic — local developers have launched a brownfields reclamation project (called Atlantic Station) that annexes more than a hundred acres to the city’s Midtown. Freeways and railroads had cut the site off from the street grid, but to leapfrog that obstacle, officials proposed construction of a bridge across the Downtown Connector.

Boosters seized on the project as an opportunity to build a gateway to the city, but the Department of Transportation — perhaps focused on saving money for the now all-but-canceled Northern Arc — nixed the more inventive entries in a design competition — which featured architectural luminaries such as Santiago Calatrava — in favor of a steel girder design.

When engineers and workers finished putting the steel up a few weeks ago, locals started scratching their heads at an unexpected quirk. State transportation planners, in a change of heart, had tried to give the bridge a bit of life … by painting it yellow.

What gives? To quote the local paper: “‘The idea was to make the bridge a little more whimsical,’ said Carl Meinhardt, who in his day job works as vice president of design for Winter Properties.”

Um … thanks, I think. But next time you want to do us a favor, do us a favor: don’t do us any favors.

A Man, Not a Herd

Conservatives deride liberals for treating Americans as representatives of ethnic groups, but from John McWhorter — a fellow at the Manhattan Institute — that would sound a bit rich:

There goes another one. Last week 21-year-old Savannah-based rapper Camoflauge was shot to death in front of his toddler son. Only two months before, New York rapper Freaky Tah was killed, at age 27, shot while leaving a party. Last fall pioneer rapper Jam Master Jay was murdered in his Queens, N.Y., studio at 37, leaving behind a wife and children.

Such carnage puts in a certain perspective the mantra that black America is so often taught: “Why can’t whites see blacks as equals?” Many claim that a big problem is the depiction of blacks in the media, and there is a point here—-but no longer the “whitey did it” point that many suppose. Today the biggest image problem for blacks comes from neither the movies nor television but from the rap industry.

Funny — I thought the biggest image problem for blacks came from people who can read an isolated incident as an image problem for blacks. I don’t know Camoflauge, hadn’t heard of him before today, and couldn’t name a single piece of his music, so I don’t see how he has any more to do with me than Trent Lott does with Matthew Yglesias.

Am I missing something here?

Support the Troops, Mr. President

During the 2000 campaign, then-Governor Bush told the audience at the Republican National Convention — in a statement that a senior general immediately contested — that one in five Army divisions were unready to fight:

Bush had said: “If called on by the commander-in-chief today, two entire divisions of the Army would have to report …, ‘Not ready for duty, sir.’”

Has the situation changed? Not for the better. Thanks to Bush, we have a combat-unready Army division in low-level combat.

Senior leaders and logistics experts in the 3rd Infantry say most of the division is not ready for combat. They complain that they have received almost no spare parts to repair damaged tanks and armored personnel carriers — what the military calls Class IX supplies — since they left Kuwait on March 22.

“He is going to get U.S. soldiers needlessly killed if he expects us to go into battle,” a senior noncommissioned officer in the 3rd Infantry said of [Lt. Gen. David] McKiernan. He spoke on condition he not be named for fear of retribution.

The 3rd Infantry’s supply line was a constant problem during initial fighting for control of Iraq. After the fall of Baghdad, senior officers determined the division would be leaving within weeks — and its vehicles would be taken out of service — so they never filled orders for parts.

One battalion’s operations officer said he has more than 2,600 parts on order and that all the tanks in his unit require extensive repairs. A commander said his Bradley Fighting Vehicles all had two-page lists of parts that were ordered but never delivered.

“None of my Bradleys are fully mission capable,” said Capt. Chris Carter, an infantry company commander.

Maintenance personnel report that the treads that propel tanks forward are worn, and the vehicles’ suspensions are badly damaged. That means the tanks could be easily immobilized in battle and could not move well under fire.

One brigade-level officer wrote a four-page letter to the division commander detailing why his unit was not ready for combat operations, a senior officer said on condition of anonymity.

If Bush thought neglecting troops in peacetime was unpardonable, I wonder how he plans to explain neglecting them during a war?

That’s It. He’s Objectively Pro-Saddam.

If you thought the warbloggers were mad when they accused Salam Pax of working for the Mukhabarat, wait until they find out he’s about to write a regular column for ( —gasp!— ) The Guardian. Quelle horrible!

Open Mouth. Insert Foot.

Does anyone in the GOP know how not to sound like an a%$ about rape?

The al-Qaeda threat requires U.S. political leaders to assume a certain patriotic decorum in the nation’s capital. But opportunists of both parties seek any edge, and have come to view the nation’s statehouses, traditionally known as more pragmatic forums, as arenas for ideological combat.

“We are trying to change the tones in the state capitals — and turn them toward bitter nastiness and partisanship,” said Grover Norquist, a leading Republican strategist, who heads a group called Americans for Tax Reform.

”Bipartisanship is another name for date rape,” Norquist, a onetime adviser to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, said, citing an axiom of House conservatives.

A party that would have him as a “leading strategist” is no party to which I care to belong.

Gratuitous Quip of the Day—

Looks like this explains why Lyle Lovett hasn’t had children …

Steal These Buttons

Speaking of Dean: I haven’t decided which presidential candidate to support, but that didn’t keep me from whipping up a slick set of buttons last week for diehard partisans to use free of charge. Here they come:

I should thank Taylor McKnight for the inspiration, along with Eric Barzeski — and while I’m at it, I should point out how simple people have made it to roll your own. Give it a try — but keep this from the Bush people, if you don’t mind.

Notes Around Town

Since everybody and his grandmother in Atlanta seems to want their own hip entertainment guide — check out how the local daily has tarted itself up — I may as well pick a to-do list of my own:

• Shoot the ‘Hooch on Saturday, June 7, with a few dozen of your closest friends at the Back to the Chattahoochee River Race, slated to start down an eight-mile course (ten miles for advanced canoeists) in Roswell at 9 a.m. Wish me luck — something tells me I’ll end up in the soup.
• If Howard Dean turns you on — in a political sense, that is — the next meetup happens at the trés-funky Java Monkey in downtown Decatur on June 4 at 7 p.m. Make sure to take a friend, and — word to the wise — leave your “Don’t Blame Me, I Voted Bush” t-shirt at home.

Exit the Dragon

Can Mozilla survive without Netscape? It looks as though we could find out:

So much for Netscape 8.0.

That’s one upshot of Thursday’s settlement between Microsoft and AOL Time Warner, according to industry analysts who predict that the Netscape browser—currently at version 7.02—will now move from a neglected orphan of AOL Time Warner to a candidate for euthanasia.

“For the most part, it means Netscape is pretty much gone,” said Rob Enderle, an analyst for research firm Giga Information Group. “AOL is going to continue indefinitely now on IE (Internet Explorer) and has no justification really to continue funding Netscape.”

In the settlement, AOL Time Warner inked a seven-year contract to use IE in its flagship service. Company CEO Richard Parsons was vague about the future of Netscape, beyond maintaining it as a subsidiary. He said the media giant is continuing to evaluate Netscape for its value, but pledged the company’s support for IE.

My two cents worth? The king is dead; long live the king.

As much hope as I put in the open source movement, the first iterations of Mozilla were bloate, slow, and well nigh unusable. I won’t miss it. With sprightlier apps popping out of the project now, though — try Firebird and Camino, which both rock — it seems safe to expect a healthy number of power users to keep using the Gecko engine even if AOL Time Warner dumps it.

I’ll miss the Netscape name, mind you. But its spirit should live on.

War Is Over …

… ‘til it isn’t:

“THE WAR has not ended,” the commander, Army Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, said after a U.S. soldier was killed by a rocket-propelled grenade while traveling in supply convoy north of Baghdad — the ninth U.S. service member killed in Iraq this week.

McKiernan, briefing reporters in the Iraqi capital, described the sporadic attacks as a new phase of the military conflict.

Link courtesy of Jim Henley, who adds:

We can be sure of the following: the men and women of [the 3rd Infantry Division], like the rest of us, were lied to on the way to war. They expected a quick victory, a hero’s welcome in Iraq and a quick rotation home. They sort of got one out of three.

Imagine how it must feel to be them now. You’re nowhere you would choose to be, you’re not going home after all, for the foreseeable future, your equipment needs time in the shop, the locals you thought you were helping are getting surly on you - more and more often, lethally surly. There are more and more stories of troops dying at the hands of seemingly innocuous people. You increasingly can’t trust anyone you meet. Prudence dictates that you stay hard and ready and keep the locals at the other end of your gun. Less and less do you feel like helping anybody except your own. This is the thanks you get? Nerves fray, trigger fingers itch. Each new “incident” breeds the next demonstration, the next riot, the next “incident.” All of this does nothing for the Iraqis’ mood either. And it just gets worse. And it will.

And this is a mission accomplished? Some mission. Some accomplishment.

A Matter of Trust

President Bush has said Iraq has weapons of mass destruction; Tony Blair has said Iraq has weapons of mass destruction; Donald Rumsfeld has said Iraq has weapons of mass destruction; Richard Butler has said they do; the United Nations has said they do; the experts have said they do. Iraq says they don’t. You can choose who you want to believe.
— White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, December 5, 2002

Okay — what if I say none of the above?

The Green[e]house Reloaded

Welcome to the new site.

What prompted the move? A couple of factors. Blogspot turned slow last week — if you think that posed a problem with reading it, imagine posting under those conditions. My RSS provider got testy around the same moment, interrupting hundreds of feeds with a tacit warning to pull the plug.

Between those issues, periodic trouble with Haloscan, and a burgeoning interest in Movable Type, I decided over the weekend to take the adage that “you get what you pay for” to heart. Looking for a new hosting service only took a little while — I found out that Cornerhost, which has a solid reputation, has its headquarters just a couple of miles away from my place in Stone Mountain.

What does all this mean? Smoother load times, more reliable service and, after a little more work on my part, a spiffier layout — plus more content, about which I’ll talk later.

I’d like to thank Blogger and Haloscan for a great run. I’d never have gotten off the ground without them. Let’s hope that working with Movable Type proves at least as fruitful.

Okay, that’s enough introduction. On with the show. =,

Can U-Ga. Republicans Minor in Influence Peddling?

Courtesy of a friend, I received a fax last week that could raise some eyebrows among state ethics authorities. It’s from the U-Ga. College Republicans, and advertises the “Ronald Reagan Golf Tournament” — a one-day event scheduled for the first week of October.

The greens fees look steep. (A gold-level sponsorship will set a buyer back $2500.) To make the price worthwhile, though, the college group promises that “sponsoring a team can … have an influence with the Republican officials you sponsor.”

That statement creates a problem: it amounts to an invitation to break the state’s bribery laws. According to O.C.G.A. §16-10-2(a)(1): “A person commits the offense of bribery when he or she gives or offers to give to any person acting for or on behalf of the state or any political subdivision thereof … any benefit, reward, or consideration to which he or she is not entitled with the purpose of influencing him or her in the performance of any act related to the functions of his or her office or employment.”

Maybe they need to ask for a mulligan.

Toast the Buns!

If you need a fix of surrealism, you can get a heady dose from PaRappa the Rappa 2 — a music game that melted my brain Saturday night while I tried to pay attention to a game of chess.

Watching the PlayStation 2 render two-dimensional characters on a wall-sized projection TV would make anyone do a double take. As if that weren’t enough, though, the game designers one-upped that stunt with one of the most daft storylines I’ve ever heard. Stage one of the game looked like an interactive training exercise for a Japanese McDonald’s (“French the fries! Toast the buns! Heat the grill! Better execute faster!”), and stage two featured a sensei — who went by the moniker “Chop Chop Master Onion” — doling out televised lessons in “romantic karate.” (“Love chop! Love kick!”)

Damn — I’ve got the songs stuck in my head again. Better execute faster!

War on War

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That’s clearly what’s needed, in the wake of this stunner:

A small sample of Afghan civilians have shown “astonishing” levels of uranium in their urine, an independent scientist says. . . [b]ut he found no trace of the depleted uranium (DU) some scientists believe is implicated in Gulf War syndrome.

Other researchers suggest new types of radioactive weapons may have been used in Afghanistan.

The scientist is Dr Asaf Durakovic, of the Uranium Medical Research Center (UMRC) based in Washington DC.

Dr Durakovic, a former US army colonel who is now a professor of medicine, said in 2000 he had found “significant” DU levels in two-thirds of the 17 Gulf veterans he had tested.

In May 2002 he sent a team to Afghanistan to interview and examine civilians there.

The UMRC says: “Independent monitoring of the weapon types and delivery systems indicate that radioactive, toxic uranium alloys and hard-target uranium warheads were being used by the coalition forces.”

It says Nangarhar province was a strategic target zone during the Afghan conflict for the deployment of a new generation of deep-penetrating “cave-busting” and seismic shock warheads. . . .

To test its hypothesis that some form of uranium weapon had been used, the UMRC sent urine specimens from 17 Afghans for analysis at an independent UK laboratory.

It says: “Without exception, every person donating urine specimens tested positive for uranium internal contamination.

“The results were astounding: the donors presented concentrations of toxic and radioactive uranium isotopes between 100 and 400 times greater than in the Gulf veterans tested in 1999. . . .

The average for his 17 “randomly-selected” patients was 315.5 nanograms, he said. Some were from Jalalabad, and others from Kabul, Tora Bora, and Mazar-e-Sharif. A 12-year-old boy living near Kabul had 2,031 nanograms.

The maximum permissible level for members of the public in the US is 12 nanograms per litre, Dr Durakovic said.

What I’m about to say may sound out of step or fashion — I mean, right now a decision to ‘merely’ research new designs for more convenient nuclear weapons comes across as the picture of moderation. But may God have mercy on the souls of the people who let this happen.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, Norah Vincent gets it just about right:

We’re sorry that our hardy-har commander in chief dropped like the dopiest of deus ex machinas onto the deck of an aircraft carrier and used you for the cheapest of all cheap photo ops. The sign over his head read “Mission Accomplished,” but you knew better, didn’t you? His mission was accomplished, sure. He’d had his slick victory and come out clean, even if you were left stuck in the mud — or is “quagmire” at long last le mot juste?

Yes, regrettably, as it turns out, your buddies had to die in combat not in order to make the situation better in Iraq but, it seems, to make it worse and, of course, to get the president reelected. We’re really, really, really sorry about that.

But, then, I guess when it comes right down to it, sorry just doesn’t cut it now, does it?

No — no, it doesn’t.

Dead Letter Office

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Another serving of remaindered links, courtesy of the management. I need to come up with a way to implement a remaindered links sidebar, à la Dominey and Kottke — but with this site on Blogspot, the only solutions I come up with involve some ugly coding choices. [For instance, floating frames. Ugh.]

Feh, It can wait until the redesign. Or until greenehouse.typepad.com. At any rate, on with the show.

• Now this site just cries out for a big, fat Googlebomb. Any suggestions?
• Kurt Vonnegut on the world we live in:

  I note that construction has stopped of a Mark Twain Museum here in Hartford — behind the carriage house of the Mark Twain House at 351 Farmington Avenue.

  Work persons have been sent home from that site because American “conservatives,” as they call themselves, on Wall Street and at the head of so many of our corporations, have stolen a major fraction of our private savings, have ruined investors and employees by means of fraud and outright piracy.

  Shock and awe.

  And now, having installed themselves as our federal government, or taken control of it from outside, they have squandered our public treasury and then some. They have created a public debt of such appalling magnitude that our descendants, for whom we had such high hopes, will come into this world as poor as church mice.

• A baseball world cup? Sounds like a stroke of genius. Bring it on.
• George Soros — the man who broke the pound — tees off on the new discount dollar: “I now have a short position against the dollar because I listen to what the secretary of the Treasury is telling me.”
• A shake-your-head-and-cry story from Silver Rights:

  A teacher at Cleveland High School in Seattle was suspended with pay after reportedly referring to an African American student as a “n- - - - -” in front of his classmates.

  The incident happened during a computer class May 2. Several sources say the teacher became upset when a sophomore called an assignment “gay,” sometimes used as a general derogatory term. The teacher, a white male, reportedly called the teen out into the hall and asked him how he’d like to be called a “n- - - - -.”

  Brenda Little, deputy general counsel for Seattle Public Schools, said the teacher then walked back into the classroom with the boy, saying to the class, ” ‘Well, I guess the n- - - - - can come back in.’

  [Link courtesy of George Kelly.]
• Take the Post national? Why not?
• Timothy Bergreen and Donna Brazile, from Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal:

  Democrats need to return to the muscular national security principles of Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy and the other Democrats who understood that only by confronting threats abroad could our party achieve its other great mission of expanding equality, opportunity and progress here at home.

• Yet more provocative thoughts abroad in the land about The Matrix Reloaded;
• Coming soon to ESPN: extreme ironing!
• To wrap up, Kevin Drum:

  [G]iven the fact that over the past 30 years we’ve been steadily cutting taxes on the rich, cutting federal spending, cutting welfare programs, and cutting Social Security, let’s ask the question again: How low is low enough? How much cutting of these programs will satisfy you?

  Or will you not rest until they are gone completely?

The Digital Groundswell

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My boss’s affinity for John Edwards notwithstanding, I have to give props to Howard Dean for doing more than I’ve noticed from any other candidate to spark grassroots support among Democrats. The latest evidence comes in the form of this post-cum-press-release from the Dean Call to Action weblog:

Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean has raised $1 million without serving hors d’oeuvres, hitting the phones or mailing thousands of appeals. The money has come through the Internet, a possible sign of fund-raising trends to come.

The former Vermont governor and self-described underdog has used the Internet to complement traditional fund-raising techniques, collecting contributions through his Web site and e-mail at little cost to his campaign.

Dean hit the $1 million mark in Internet fund raising last week, becoming the first 2004 presidential hopeful to announce he has done so. Dean supporters also are using the Internet to organize volunteers across the country.

Not bad. Not bad at all.

Goin’ to Chicago, Pt. I

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Readers in Chicago should take a look at Gapers Block, a Morning News-style group site launched in the last few days by some of the city’s best bloggers. Looks like a great addition to the blogosphere.

You know, Atlanta could use a site like that. Shifty Eye comes close, but two guys can only do so much. Some great talent lives here . . . Jessica? Reid? Melanie? Janeane? Jenn? Todd? Robert? J.R.? Joe? Frank? What say ye?

The Looting of America (cont’d)

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More accounts of routine business in the time of George Bush:

• Wall Street Journal :: “Chemical Manufacturers Elude Crackdown on Toxic Materials.”

  For months after the terrorist attacks, the impassioned desire to protect Americans led even a Republican administration to crack down on important industries. Once those emotions subsided, Washington reverted to the traditional partisan debate over how deeply government should be involved in the market. Congress is once again weighing chemical security this year, but any law that passes will be much more business-friendly than first envisioned.

  It’s not that the terrorist threat has disappeared. Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security raised its color-coded assessment of the risk of an attack to orange, the second-highest level on the scale. But many policy makers now seem more comfortable with voluntary industry responses, such as the chemical industry’s code urging companies to beef up security whenever the government raises the threat level.

  “Liberals wanted to use the tragedy of Sept. 11 as an excuse to regulate more,” says Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, the lead Republican legislator on chemical security.

• Independent Lens :: Mountaintop Removal Mining:

  Mountaintop removal mining is the practice of blasting off the tops of mountains so machines called draglines can mine coal deposits. Coal mining companies dump the mountaintops into nearby valleys and streams to create “valley fills,” converting mountain landscapes covered in hardwood forests into fields of sparse grass. Coal companies are stripping off the tops of mountains in West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia.

• Seattle Post-Intelligencer :: “SUV tax cut.”

  Under current tax law, it’s permissible to write off $25,000 from your taxes in the first year after the purchase of a 6,000-pound truck or SUV. (Then there’s the gravy of 20 percent a year after that.)

  But the Senate bill increases the tax deduction to $100,000.

  Who did it? We don’t even know, yet. There are no fingerprints on the amendment — legislation was going back and forth so fast Thursday night that this little gem slipped in quietly.

  Fortunately this bill is not law yet — but the House version has a similar proposal.

  But don’t worry too much. Congress isn’t finished yet. Lawmakers are also crafting a new energy bill — and one proposal calls for the elimination of a $2,000 tax deduction for fuel-efficient gas-electric hybrid vehicles.

• Wired News :: “A Spy Machine of DARPA’s Dreams.”

  The Pentagon is about to embark on a stunningly ambitious research project designed to gather every conceivable bit of information about a person’s life, index all the information and make it searchable.

  What national security experts and civil libertarians want to know is, why would the Defense Department want to do such a thing?

  The embryonic LifeLog program would dump everything an individual does into a giant database: every e-mail sent or received, every picture taken, every Web page surfed, every phone call made, every TV show watched, every magazine read.

  All of this — and more — would combine with information gleaned from a variety of sources: a GPS transmitter to keep tabs on where that person went, audio-visual sensors to capture what he or she sees or says, and biomedical monitors to keep track of the individual’s health.

• The Charlotte Observer :: “Hog Farm Waste May Hurt Health.”

  PAULDING, Ohio - Robert Thornell says that five years ago an invisible swirling poison invaded his family farm and the house he had built with his own hands. It took his memory, his balance and his ability to work. It left him with mood swings, a stutter and fistfuls of pills.

  His 14th doctor said he knew the source of the maladies: cesspools the size of football fields belonging to the industrial hog farm a half-mile from the Thornell home.

  A growing number of scientists and public health officials around the country say they have traced a variety of health problems of neighbors of huge industrial farms to vast amounts of concentrated animal waste, which emit toxic gases while collecting in open-air cesspools or evaporating through sprays. The gases, hydrogen sulfide and ammonia, are poisonous.

  The waste is collected in pools because the concentration of hogs is so high that it must be treated before it can be used as fertilizer.

  Livestock trade officials and Bush administration regulators say more study is needed before any cause and effect can be proven. . . [but] in Iowa, one of the country’s two biggest pork-producing states (North Carolina is the other), state environment officials started conducting air quality tests for hydrogen sulfide and ammonia at six neighborhood locations around hog farms last month. Brian Button, an air information specialist with the state, said preliminary data showed that 22 times in April, the gases exceeded the state’s recommended air standards of 15 parts per billion of hydrogen sulfide and 150 parts per billion of ammonia, averaged over an hour.

  [Dr. Kaye] Kilburn [of the University of Southern California], who runs a business diagnosing neurological disorders, said that over the last three years he had seen about 50 patients, including Thornell and his wife, Diane, who had suffered neurological damage he judged to be a result of hydrogen sulfide poisoning from industrial farms. . . .

  Paul Isbell of Houston, Miss., started experiencing seizures after a hog farm moved in down the road. Julie Jansen’s six children suffered flulike symptoms and diarrhea when industrial farms moved into their neighborhood in Renville, Minn. Kilburn found that one of Jansen’s daughters has neurological damage; she has problems with balance and has lost some feeling in her fingers. . . .

  Bush administration officials are negotiating with lobbyists for the livestock farms to establish voluntary monitoring of air pollution, which will give farms amnesty for any Clean Air Act violations while generating data that will enable regulators to track the type and source of pollutants more accurately.

• The New York Times :: “ChevronTexaco to Stop Sponsoring Met’s Broadcasts.”

  ChevronTexaco announced yesterday that it would withdraw its support from the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday afternoon live radio broadcasts after the 2003-4 season, ending the longest continuous commercial sponsorship in broadcast history.

  Joseph Volpe, general manager of the Met, said that he was determined to continue the broadcasts without ChevronTexaco and that he would look for a new sponsor.

  Started on Christmas Day in 1931 with Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel,” the Met matinee broadcasts have introduced opera to millions of people around the world.

  Mr. Volpe said the broadcasts had been “the single most powerful audience development program in introducing opera to families” and had inspired opera stars. “Many of the singers today first discovered opera on the radio broadcasts,” he said.

  Patricia E. Yarrington, ChevronTexaco’s vice president for public and government affairs, said in a statement, “As our business has evolved, we believe it is important to focus more of our resources directly with the countries and markets where we do business.”

It Is Not the Silver Spoon That Bends …

It Is Not the Silver Spoon That Bends . . .
Did anyone — presuming that you and every other sentient being spent time at the multiplex last weekend — notice a brief and well-timed glimpse of a certain Texan during one of the pivotal scenes of The Matrix Reloaded?

Say You Miss Me

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So what happened while I was out?

• Kevin Drum said what I wanted to about Jayson Blair:

  Here’s a question for you: was the infamous “diversity program” that Jayson Blair was part of really an attempt by the New York Times to hire more black reporters? And did they promote Blair too fast and overlook too many mistakes because he was black?

  That’s the conventional wisdom among — well, among people who don’t like affirmative action in the first place — but there’s really something odd about it. After all, the Times is the preeminent paper in the country and can hire practically anyone it wants. If the Times just wanted more black reporters, its reputation and pay scales make it easy to cherry pick the very best of them any time it wants.

• Hezbollah spotted a growth opportunity;
• Texas Democrats took a roadtrip;
• Tom DeLay decided that America needs more submachine guns;
• Interior secretary Gale Norton decided that America has too many trees;
• The Senate concluded that half of a terrible tax cut was better than none;
• Hunt as we might for Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, we still haven’t found what we’re looking for; and . . .
• The Braves went to San Diego and swept the Padres.

Well, at least that went right.

iTunes for the Taking

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A discovery that’s made the rounds on the Pho list blew into the open this morning thanks to a post from Kottke: to wit, anyone with a basic understanding of Cocoa can turn Apple’s updated music software into a Napster-style file sharing machine. The modus operandi involves tweaking a feature that lets users stream music between computers connected to a network:

However, a few enterprising developers looked at how iTunes shares music and have been building applications that provide the other half of the Napster experience, the downloading of music from remote libraries. iLeech is a very simple, tiny program that lets you download music from any publically available iTunes library (and there are other apps that do similar things).

Conventional wisdom is that Apple seriously fucked up, the RIAA is going to sue Apple’s pants off, and Apple’s new iTunes Music Store will be shut down by some seriously pissed off record companies.

I’d like to believe an alternative theory. Apple had to know what they were doing with iTunes. Their engineers aren’t stupid. They left the whole thing wide open and had to know how trivial it would be for developers to figure out the protocol and write apps to download the music directly. Maybe Apple is taking a stand here, saying that this type of software is not illegal and that it is individual users who choose to break the law. Apple knows that it’s in our nature to want to share music, photos, and movies with each other and is building applications (social software?) to support that behavior. Apple wants to make a business out of this and maybe they’re daring the RIAA to sue them over it. Or daring the RIAA not to sue them. After all, Apple and the record companies are all buddy-buddy now with the iTunes Music Store . . . are they willing to sue Apple right after getting Jobs on the cover of Fortune with Sheryl Crow? If Apple is in fact taking a stand here, I say, go Apple!

Count me with Kottke. Should record company attorneys be appalled? Probably — but with renegade users, not Apple. Suing a software developer over the misuse of a legitimate feature makes just about as much sense as the handgun liability suits filed against firearms manufacturers; in each case, the fellow who intentionally misused the product seems more blameworthy than the designer. iTunes can’t steal music by itself, you know.

That said, the music companies do have a remedy in states that enacted the mini-DMCA. The model version of the law lets a “communication service provider” — any company that provides downloadable data, such as a record company, qualifies — petition a court to force the maker of an “unlawful access device” to make “remedial modification[s]” to “any communication or unlawful access device . . . that is in the . . . control of the violator.” As intellectual property attorney Fred von Lohmann — the in-house counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation — puts it:

When coupled with an “auto-update” feature, this provision could empower state courts to order technology companies to force “downgrades” on consumers nation-wide. For example, TiVo retains the ability to upgrade remotely the software on all TiVo units. AOL, Microsoft and Apple also provide automatic upgrade functionality in their software, aimed at giving customers the latest security and feature upgrades. If state court concludes that these vendors have the power to “control” their software, the court would have the power to order the “downgrade” of devices in homes nation-wide (and perhaps world-wide).

That’s a tough argument to make — a plaintiff would have to convince a court that Macintosh owners use iTunes “primarily . . . for the purpose of defeating or circumventing any technology, device, or software . . . to protect any such communication, data, audio or video services, programs, or transmissions from unauthorized receipt.” From a look at the RIAA’s tactics of recent years, though, it wouldn’t surprise me to see it make the attempt.

May 09, 2003

May 01, 2003