| Wednesday, June 26, 2002 |
17:14 - Nasssty Elveses!
http://gtexts.blogspot.com/2002_06_16_gtexts_archive.html#77950793
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I've seen this link kicking around various special-interest regions lately: it's an analysis of why the Elves in Middle-Earth aren't all they're cracked up to be.
Pretty silly and fun. But it also makes one think about the "mythological racism" inherent in stories like Tolkien's. All the merit that various characters have is in their bloodline and the purity of their ancestry, not in their deeds-- or at least, their deeds come to fulfill the high expectations that people have because of their blood. Star Wars has the same kind of thing going.
I've often thought about how the reason why we like stories like LotR and Star Wars is that it gives us a license to indulge in a kind of social outlook that's not politically-correct to espouse in real life; it's escapist fantasy, where racism not only has no negative connotations (anybody who is oppressed because of his or her race, effectively, deserves it), but it is the height of honorable aspiration.
I spent a lot of time being troubled by this, before eventually just deciding "Y'know, screw it"-- it's a story, and I think I (and most people) are capable of handling it as such, and separating it from real life. Just as it's folly to imagine that Quake causes kids to shoot up schoolyards, a study that sets out to prove that Tolkien's writings have inspired generations of white supremacists would probably turn up some pretty sparse results.
UPDATE: Aha-- I knew I remembered reading something high-profile about this before. David Hilvert sends me these two links to thoughts by David Brin on this very subject, both definitely worth reading if the above paragraphs haven't already made you reach for your mouse:
ttp://www.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/1999/06/15/brin_main/
http://www.kithrup.com/brin/starwarsarticle2.html
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| Tuesday, June 25, 2002 |
00:37 - Great. They let the Visionary Intel PC designers have a go at the WTC.
http://isntapundit.com/
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I don't know what the story is with these proposed WTC designs that Isntapundit (note spelling carefully) quite rightly stones to death here, but the WTC2002 design is looking better and better by comparison.
If this is what the architectural art world is like today, I'm tempted to imagine what we'd have been seeing if 9/11 had occurred in, say, 1959.
One shudders, then vomits, then shudders again.
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00:24 - Oh. Right.
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Pursuant to the scanner tale... Chris and I were on the way to a movie. I was telling him about SilverFast, which I described as having "more features than I could shake a fucking stick at."
As I continued talking about it, Chris waited for a breath-pause to ask, "By the way-- can I borrow your fucking-stick?"
"I'm not done shaking it yet," I said.
We'd parked at the theater before we both stopped laughing.
...What? So we're easily amused.
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00:05 - A Voice in the Wilderness
http://www.lasersoft-imaging.com
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My days of scanner purgatory are over.
Anybody who's stuck with me for some time will probably remember my scanner woes-- my Quixotic battles with the beast known as VueScan, my futile attempts to find an A3-sized scanner for less than $3000 or with anything but a SCSI interface-- it seemed my life was doomed to ignominious failure; the Gods of Scanners mocked my every scrabbling.
A few days ago, Think Secret published some screen-shots of native, OS-level scanner support in Jaguar, and my spirits were lifted-- perhaps, who knows, Image Capture will know about my Microtek 6400XL! Maybe, just mayhap, it will lift scanning from the dismal Pit of Despair that is VueScan-- in which your prescan and your full scan passes would have about as much bearing on each other's exposure levels as the Designated Hitter Rule has on wind patterns on Mars-- and give me the ability to transfer things from paper to pixels without physical pain again. Maybe...
...But that's in the future. Jaguar isn't out until "this summer", which we translate to mean "late September". So I'm again returned to my seat of peering at my screen and wishing it to convert itself into a Stargate that I could throw my sketchbook into and have its whole contents converted to JPEGs by the happy little Apple Elves.
Until Saturday, that is.
Saturday, my whole life changed.
I got an e-mail, out of the blue, from someone I'd only run into in passing in a forum somewhere, months and months ago. He said, "Hey-- I don't know if you're still having trouble with your 6400XL. But if so, I found this great piece of scanner software-- it's called SilverFast, and it supports your scanner natively."
No way, I thought. But I went to the website anyway.
And there it was. A very slick, well-polished, full-featured scanner program, with both a Photoshop plug-in version and a standalone version, for Windows (all flavors) and Mac OS 9 and OS X. It supports all kinds of scanners-- three columns' worth of manufacturers. Drill down into "Microtek" and you find pictures of each and every scanner Microtek has made in the last five years. They're all supported, including my 6400XL.
There's a $300 full version (with a demo) and a $50 "SE" version for the low-end. I download the demo and install it. I cross my fingers. I swear under my breath. No way can this be everything I'm looking for. I fire up the plug-in and do a prescan run. And instantly, the prescan appears, scrolling real-time as the data flows in from the scanner. It's non-blocking. I can keep doing things as it scans. And the pre-scan run is fast! Fifteen seconds and it's there, perfectly balanced!
It's then that I notice how perfectly polished everything in the interface is. This isn't just some bad port. This is a gorgeous, carefully laid-out OS X app. The buttons are all spaced right. The labels all update correctly and fit right. When I select a post-processing option of "Unsharp Mask", it gives me a pop-up palette with a "before" and "after" window, and asks me to select a piece of the prescan region; I do, and it snaps off a salute. "Yes, SIR!" And it hurriedly zips to the spot where I clicked, scans that little square, puts the results in the "before" window, does an unsharp mask, and puts the results in "after". Then it stands poised, ready for me to do a real scan and apply that filter inline.
I do a full scan, the tears streaming down my face. A progress bar pops up. It only takes up about 2/3 of the dialog box-- because the rest is taken up by a progressive icon of the scanned image... it updates pixel-by-pixel as the scanner travels down the length of the bed. And it's not just updating once per pixel height... it does one row of pixels then an antialiased row-- then it resamples that row (now that it's finished) and completes it, then goes on to do the next row antialiased. It's a smooth, feathered boundary-- an OS X-native effect, and completely unnecessary-- but the kind of thing that you do if you're a programmer who loves his work.
Fifty bucks has never so violently flown out of my pockets and into the Stargate of my screen.
The SE version is missing a few features from the full version, but not so you'd notice; it still has the contrast-o-meter, some of the post-processing, and all the positioning controls. The only thing it seems not to have is the weird calibration stuff that top-end graphics professionals would demand. But for my purposes, all my deepest desires have been fulfilled. I have since Saturday been drifting in blissful slack detachment, with the same kind of feeling in my limbs of a man who has just been released from a neck brace. My life begins anew.
SilverFast. I sing thee an ode.
And thank you to Chris Pople, the Voice in the Wilderness, to whom I owe my current euphoria.
It would still be nice if OS X could support discovery of SCSI devices that aren't necessarily turned on at boot time, but no! No no no. That's not a complaint that needs to be aired right this minute. That can wait.
Like until after Jaguar, if it's not in by then.
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11:35 - And then there's the Tablet PC...
http://www.macnet2.com/more.php?id=26_0_1_0_M
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Journalists are starting to get their hands on Microsoft's tablet PC-- you know, the one they announced last year in the same week that Sony discontinued theirs due to nonexistent sales.
Handwriting recognition is supposed to be a big thing in the Tablet PC-- "best in the business", say the PR goons.
BEFORE YOU HIT those reviews, let me tell you that Microsoft forced us reviewers to sit through a day and a half of propaganda before it would hand over the test machines. The basic message of this indoctrination (which I understand the North Koreans could have accomplished in six hours or less) is simple: "Handwriting recognition doesn't matter."
Repeat that to yourself for a couple of days, and you'll be right where Microsoft wants you: Ready to accept a Tablet PC with way-less-than-perfect handwriting recognition but a vastly improved system for handling electronic ink on electronic paper. If this is enough for you--and it will be for many users--Tablet PC will make you happy.
Handwriting recognition doesn't matter. Handwriting recognition doesn't matter. Handwriting recognition doesn't matter.
Hmm. I wonder if John Manzione is convinced yet?
THE COMPANY CLAIMS its handwriting recognition is the best in the industry, which it may well be. But, even in Microsoft's own demonstrations, the technology doesn't work very well. Among other things, it's hampered by the most awkward method of making corrections that I've ever seen. Try picking the word you intended from a long list of nonsense "words" that use the same letter combinations, and you have the general idea.
Microsoft's handwriting reco doesn't learn by doing, either, so it won't get any better at mastering your particular handwriting over time. As it is, you can change your handwriting for the recognition engine if you like--just don't expect it to change for you. And people (like me) who print are especially out of luck: The reco is intended for cursive script only.
But remember: "Handwriting recognition doesn't matter."
The Newton is remembered best for its Doonesbury parody-- in fact, in the future, that may well be what Doonesbury is best remembered for, too. It was the height of the comic and an unmitigated coup for the forces of ridicule. No matter how loudly anyone yelled that the Newton's handwriting recognition learned over time and took into account things like printing vs. script characters and eventually became extremely, even uncannily, accurate, it was much more fun in the tech press to gleefully point and laugh at how silly the mistranslations were when you first took the thing out of the box.
What a user-experience nightmare. Can you imagine trying to sell a product that worked worst when it was brand-new? In a world where the first five minutes are absolutely crucial in forming a rapport between a customer and the gadget, trying to promote a product that learned about you while you learned about it had to have been a terrible, thankless task. What a heartbreak to see it so reviled by people who, quite literally, never gave it a chance.
But at least it could handle printed letters, not just cursive. And if Microsoft's software doesn't learn over time, it's taking the easy way out-- but it'll probably sell more. Isn't that a great microcosm of the whole Microsoft-Apple schism, right there? One company "does it right", but there are complications with "doing it right" that make people shun it in the marketplace. The other company copies it, does a shoddy job, but focuses on features that sell well-- and it wins the pot.
Seeing this happen over and over again is what makes me both so bitter about Microsoft's success, and so determined not to see Apple's good deeds go unrewarded. There must be justice in this world, somewhere.
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11:25 - Jaguar's a-comin'
http://www.macnet2.com/more.php?id=26_0_1_0_M
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John Manzione, no ceaseless spewer of pro-Apple propaganda, has a gushing and bubbling reaction to Jaguar. He's as optimistic as they come, on this particular topic.
Ink
You think you know about ‘Ink’. But have you seen it? With a tablet you can input text anywhere, in any application, at anytime. With a click of a preference you can choose to write on a ‘Pad’ that instantly appears on the desktop when you tap it with your pen, or you can choose to use Ink’s writing pad. Simply start to write and the pad appears and converts what you write into text. And it works wonderfully. Nothing to learn, just write as you normally do. Apple has Ink doing all the learning, not you, so the more you write the better ‘Ink’ does at understanding exactly what your wrote. Palm must be nervous; I know I would if I worked there.
Networking
Starting with Jaguar you will no longer need to worry about how to set up your Network or Internet connection. It’s totally automatic, seamless, and transparent. Move into range of another Network and it seamlessly connects to it (if allowed). Want to share something on your computer with someone else in the room running Jaguar? With Rendezvous your Mac recognizes when a Mac gets in range and simply shows up on your computer. Start sharing right away, no fuss, no muss.
Apple has taken the extraordinary step to make your computer more secure, and at the same time more accessible than any other platform. You’ll get instant Firewall protection, and several options for file sharing, but the ability to share or connect to other Macs has never been easier.
I dunno-- I'll believe it when I see it. But I can't deny that I can't sit still, waiting.
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| Monday, June 24, 2002 |
02:05 - This conspiracy goes all the way to the top...
http://www.instapundit.com/archives/002001.php#002001
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Some of us aspire merely to be mentioned in passing by our friends in their blogs or LiveJournals. Some of us are tickled pink to be noticed by Steven den Beste or Glenn Reynolds. But...
LILEKS IN CONGRESS! A reader just emailed that Rep. Tom Tancredo was reading from Lileks' latest Screed on the House floor a few minutes ago.
And here I was worried about how carefully I'd have to watch my writing if I knew that more than a few people in my own social circle were reading it. Congress? Good Lord... I don't know what I'd be feeling if I were James right about now.
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23:03 - The Last Laugh
http://boingboing.net/2002_06_01_archive.html#85195532
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Mark Frauenfelder, the Apple "Switcher" whom John Dvorak refers to as a "goofy looking schlub" who "looks as if he wants to wash a camel with cream cheese", turns out to be a co-founder of BoingBoing, a kickass technology-centric blog.
Given the choice between BoingBoing and Dvorak's PC Mag columns, I can tell you which I'd rather read. And I'm not alone.
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18:51 - Now this is just sad.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,263566,00.asp
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Dvorak is at it again.
Not content with his bizarre anti-Apple rant from a few days ago, or to let Andrew Orlowski's article in The Register take all the spotlight, John Dvorak has written a piece that staggers the mind with its petty crudeness of premise. He thinks Apple's new "Switch" ads are offensive as hell, and (like Orlowski) he ridicules each of the interviewed "Real People" in turn.
(I wonder whether the Real People knew that this was what they were in for? I suppose this is what Orlowski meant by the ad campaign being cruel and manipulative of Mac users.)
Says Dvorak:
Desperation. That's the word that comes to mind when I see the Apple "Switch" ad campaign, also referred to as the "Real People" campaign.
No, it's not desperation-- it's called confidence, you butt-nugget. Apple is turning a profit, their market share is growing, they've got a stable of best-of-breed software, a rock-solid and advanced OS, and computers that everybody's drooling over. Where the hell would desperation come from? This is Apple at the strongest they've been in years, and only now do they have the confidence it takes to run an ad campaign showing people telling real-life stories about their computing experiences and how buying a particular company's products has solved their problems. How the fuck is that offensive to anybody but a columnist who writes articles for that company's competition?
Read the forum discussions. At least the first twenty posts or so, before it devolves into the to-be-expected back-and-forth arguments between some PC guy who can't spell or comprehend what custom icons or drag-and-drop installations are about, and erudite Mac users defending Apple and trying without any success to beat certain basic concepts into this cement-skulled moron's brain.
Up to that point it's great:
Wow. Criticizing the people on physical appearances and then saying that if these people are the future of Apple it's in trouble.
I thought Mac users were supposed to be the elitist ######.
And
Nasty smirk? You may want to take a quick gander at Mr. Dvorak's picture again...
And
Hey, John, I see you still haven't found your missing chromosome. Perhaps if you pulled your head out of your behind, you'd have a better chance of finding it. You sound scared, John. Scared that the rest of the world will find out the truth. Or do you just need to generate hits? It's about time Apple put it out there in plain sight. Macs are superior. XP is a cartoon created by a company with mediocre quality standards. Place a Mac OS X box next to a Win XP box, John, and even an idiot like you would be able to pick the superior Mac instantly. It is funny to see a fat old man criticizing others on their appearance, though. Keep up the bad work, John, you old fool. http://www.apple.com/switch/
The nice thing is that even the people in the forums who don't much like the ads seem well-disposed toward Apple. (Well, except for the odd person who outright rejects such antiquated concepts as "software innovation" as being a reason to endorse a company-- nahh, it's much more important to relegate that company to the dung-heap of history as long as you get to play fucking Neverwinter Nights.) But for the most part, Dvorak has no friends whatsoever in the forums anymore.
What a sorry, bitter, petty old crank.
UPDATE: Oh, now this is too cute for words. John responds in the forums:
I have no axe to grind and don't really care what machine people use. But I'm shocked by the support that the Mac gets on a column running in PC Mag. Of course this may be because the community is loading up on me with shills who will stop returning after the next column -- which I PROMISE -- will not be about the Mac or Apple. Sheesh.
Uh huh. In other words, "Gee-- I didn't think I'd get caught!"
This is the Web, you freakin' nimrod. You think you can post a piece of groundless, vitriolic anti-Apple slander on a website and be safe from Mac users finding out about it because they're not supposed to be reading a PC site? Don't tell me one of the premier technologists of our time is this old-media.
Really, this is pitiful. He read Orlowski's article, then decided that he could say wittier things about the funny-looking people in the ads than Orlowski did. So he wrote up what amounts to a parroting of the latter's piece, only less well-thought-out and less enjoyable even for the PC users in his audience, the majority of whom it turns out disagree with him.
And now he's whining because people have descended from the far corners of the Net to beat his sorry ass into the asphalt, when they weren't even supposed to see him. Jesus Christ.
How tragic to see a once-respected writer sink so very, very low.
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16:02 - Just going over some old chestnuts...
http://www.lileks.com/screed/olivegarden.html
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I was reading the Olive Garden Screed again-- just dancing blithely down the park-path of halcyonity that is online journalism since last fall-- and a thought occurred to me.
"And from the Olive Garden it does seem very distant. Indeed, the whole messy and diverse concept of Europe seems very distant.
Around Birmingham, there is nothing but miles and miles of Alabama."
Apparently around Birmingham England, there is nothing but miles and miles of Belgium, Thailand and the Antarctic Ice Shelf.
Lileks' giggle-fit-inducing rejoinder notwithstanding, I had to wonder something: What does a British person think of the vastness of American territory? What must it be like, coming from a country where you can drive from one end to the other in a day, picking up an atlas of the Lower 48 States and trying to imagine what it's like to live in such a place?
The big cities are probably easy to imagine. Cities are epicenters of activity. Everything you need can be found in any city. A city in a country 3000 miles across isn't that different from London or Paris, not in terms of day-to-day living. It's when you start to get out into those big middle-of-nowhere regions on the map that it starts to get weird. Where do all those long, curving interstates lead to? What's out there in ... Montana? Utah? Kansas? What are people like there? Do they even speak the same language we do?
In fact, coming from England, where one can drive a hundred miles and find oneself surrounded by people whose accent is completely incomprehensible, no doubt it's terrifying to imagine what that difference can be, magnified a hundred times.
To a Brit, America must look the way Siberia or the Australian outback looks to us: a vast, unexplored wasteland, full of mountain ranges and rivers and forests and rampaging tribes of lawless natives, when you're lucky to find traces of humanity at all. It's the realm of loggers and trappers, mountain men and crazy religious isolationists. It's nowhere that a civilized person would go.
But that's just it: that's what's so extraordinary about America. You can travel 3,000 miles and find less difference in people's attitudes, language, and beliefs than you'd find in 100 miles of travel in England or Europe. You can go to the middle of Idaho or Nevada and find every evidence of the thorough penetration of infrastructure: well-maintained roads, post offices, tract homes, 7-11s, new cars, high-speed Internet. You're just as likely to find some blogging technologist in Butte, Montana as you are to find him in Silicon Valley. Rural America might seem eerily menacing to anyone who has seen Deliverance, but even the backwoods of Kentucky have clean restrooms in the gift shops of the Points of Historical Interest that dot the highways, and everybody speaks intelligible English and mows their lawns and washes their cars.
The uniformity of America is a phenomenon in and of itself-- it's not just a "default" condition, an inevitable result of people not caring enough about their regions' traditions to want to fragment into tribes and evolve into freaky mountain people. It's the result of the unique variables that led to America's formation in the first place-- this specific point in technological and political history-- coinciding with a vast territory being overrun by Europeans desperate for land (and willing to shove the existing native people into a ditch in order to get it), every one of those people bearing the same seeds of entrepreneurship that originally got this country moving. The fact that a burger tastes the same in Minnesota as it does in Arizona is not a failing on the part of America's people to all develop their own ideas about what's important; it's the natural result of a people's common goal realized at the personal level, the desire to succeed and to achieve. We're a people determined to maximize what each of us individually can do, and we happen to have an almost incomprehensibly big agar dish on which we can do it. With such a food-rich environment, small wonder we've become as productive and as greedy and as gluttonous as insatiable for more achievement as we have.
So when a Wal-Mart or an Olive Garden springs up in Butte or Birmingham, where some might see a sitcom parody of authentic culture or mercantile, I see another unprecedented phenomenon-- one of those things that seems weird and scary to anyone who didn't grow up in the middle of it, but which to us is the most natural thing in the world. It's not inherently evil; it's just different from everything that's come before.
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15:23 - What, you thought they were going to stop with .NET?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/25843.html
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I'm not wild about the attitude and tone of this Register article (I'm getting vibes of unpleasantness from lots of their writers lately), but the gist of this article deserves attention.
According to Levy, Palladium is a hardware and software combination that will supposedly seal information from attackers, block viruses and worms, eliminate spam, and allow users to control their personal information even after it leaves their computer. It will also implement Digital Rights Management (DRM) for movies and music to allow users to exercise 'fair use' rights of such products. Palladium will essentially create a proprietary computing environment where Microsoft is the trusted gatekeeper, guard, watchstander, and ruler of all it surveys, thus turning the majority of computing users into unwilling corporate serfs and subjects of the Redmond Regime.
Yeah, and just wait'll Palladium is part of everybody's Windows machine-- and then gets hacked. Because it will. You know it will. Microsoft can't make a piece of rock-solid security software all of a sudden now, when for twenty years they've been unable to do that no matter how hard they've tried. Do you want to be in the vicinity when someone gains access to the desktops and hardware of every single Windows machine on Earth?
What's really frightening is the speed with which Microsoft's ventures in this direction are gaining in audacity and scope. Monopoly convictions or no, they're planting one foot firmly in front of the other and stomping off toward the goal of having Passport membership and Windows usership codified into U.S. law, thereby making Windows the only legal OS to run.
Couple that with the laws as they've been passed lately and the more recent Hollings-esque propositions, and you've got the makings of a world where software makers are liable for damages caused by their software-- a world in which open-source development would be impossible. With customers forbidden from revealing security flaws in software and software makers forced to protect themselves with huge legal defense bodies, soon the only people who can develop software will be the huge corporations. Individual people will be denied the right to publish software they've written themselves, and the egalitarian revolution of software will plummet to earth just as it's beginning to take flight. Meanwhile, who benefits? Why, Microsoft, naturally.
So it's now obvious where Windows will be in five years, and where Bill hopes to take it. Who's willing to stand up and shout in favor of this future? Anybody?
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14:53 - What it all comes down to is...
http://armedndangerous.blogspot.com/2002_06_23_armedndangerous_archive.html#78108401
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Eric Raymond has the third part of his piercing look at Islam posted.
We will not be prepared to win the war against Islamic terror until we understand the following things:
- Islam is a religion of war and conversion by the sword, not peace.
- The primary threat of terrorism comes from Arabs and middle-easterners between the ages of fifteen and forty, and we must summon the will to profile accordingly.
- We are dealing with religious fanaticism rather than rational grievances against America or the West.
- Our enemies cannot be reasoned with or appeased anywhere short of surrender and submission to shari'a law.
- Apologists for mainstream Islam are systematically lying to us about Islamic doctrine in order to shield terrorists who they know are acting in strict accordance with that doctrine.
The hardest challenge for Americans is to grasp is the fact that the evil of the 9/11 hijackings, the destruction of the World Trade Center, and the threat of al-Qaeda weapons of mass destruction set off in American cities is not simply the evil of al-Qaeda. It is in fact the Koranically-correct expression of the tendency of Islam (Sunni fundamentalism) which is has been pre-eminent through most of Islamic history and now encompasses over 90% of the worlds Muslims.
We need to face the fact that we are confronting not just a barbaric and evil group of men, but a barbaric and evil religion. To protect ourselves, we must either force the complete reform of Islam (purging it of jihadism and its tendency towards periodic fundamentalist outbreaks) or destroy its hold over its followers...
To win the war on terror, we must understand jihadism and clearly distinguish it from ethical self-defense. We must be prepared not merely to counter fanaticism not merely by killing the fanatical in self-defense, but also by discrediting the doctrines and habits of thought that make fanatics in the first place -- whether they occur in the other guy's religion or our own. Islam has declared itself the immediate adversary of modernity -- but more than one world religion will have to go under the knife before our children can sleep in peace.
Pause a bit. Let this all sink in.
Ready? Good. Let's move on.
What Raymond is saying, then-- and what more and more people in the blogosphere, like Mike Hendrix, are coming to terms with-- is that our terrible choice is becoming clearer with each passing day. We must choose one of exactly two options:
- Surrender utterly to the will of fundamentalist Islam, or
- Destroy religion.
That's right... that's what it comes down to. The sad, tragic fact is that no matter how we try to rationalize the things that are happening in the world, we're on the brink of something unspeakably huge. We're engaged not in a war of economics or oil or land or oppression. We're engaged in perhaps the most significant war in all human history, a war of ideals-- on the one side, science and reason and secular humanism (which for lack of a better catch-all concept I'll call "science")... and on the other side, religion and blind faith and fanaticism and superstition (which for lack of a better catch-all concept I'll call "religion").
We've been fighting this war on the popular level for hundreds of years now, ever since the Renaissance and the rise of the middle class in Europe. Before that time, there was no science-- that was the realm of alchemists and ancient Greeks, and only those results of it that were irrefutable became codified by the religious incumbents, and what was left over was dismissed and shunned. Why not, after all? It's not like it really offered any answers that were better than what the priests had.
But times are different now. Scientific thought is respected, not distrusted-- it has taken us to the moon and fired nuclear power plants. It has leveled Japanese cities and given us flying buses that carry thousands of people around the world every day. None of these very tangible advances owe the slightest thing to the old religious thinkers, whose only purpose now seems to be to tell us which of those advancements we're allowed to use and which we aren't. They can't create anything of their own except rules.
We've been fighting minor skirmishes in this conflict now throughout the history of our country, getting more and more frequent with each new advancement. Roe vs. Wade. Brown vs. Board of Education. Free-speech issues polarize those who want the right to speak against those who want to suppress it, and in most cases these tiny debating figures cast vast shadows on the back walls of the hall: the shadows of these two forces that we're now beginning to see for what they are. The two biggest ideas humans have ever had.
These two ideas have never lived pleasantly together. But now their disagreements have reached a fever pitch; religion has fired the first shot of the full-scale war in the form of the jetliners in New York, and science must now decide whether to fight back or whether to back down and give up all of its hard-earned gains.
I don't think it's going to do so. As anathema as it is for a true follower of Islam to refuse the call to jihad as stated in the Koran, it is just as much so for science to retreat from what it knows to be true. And so the two sides are going to dig in and make their stand, preparing for a pitched battle that will begin just as soon as the participants become willing to accept the magnitude of this war and the choices we are going to have to make.
Those of us who see where this is all going tend to be agnostics and students of science (the two concepts are very much intertwined-- science is founded on logic and the ability to observe facts, and so by definition a scientist cannot "know" that there is or is not a God). We recognize the importance of religion in helping people to live their daily lives, to see beauty in an otherwise dreary and stark world, to hope for something to reward them for a life of hardships and struggle. It's a powerful human tendency, and we're not immune to its allure. Some of the best scientists I've known have been devoutly religious; to them, math and physics reveal part of God's mind and thereby a beauty unfathomable by ordinary humans. You know what? We believe that too; only we have different names that we give God. It's all to do with how we envision our roles in the Universe and how we go about unlocking the mysteries around us. God, to most of us, is that best part of each of us-- that piece of ourselves that makes us want to be good human beings and bring hope and light to our world. Nathan Lane's Catholic priest character in Jeffrey described it as a bunch of people at a picnic, batting a balloon around. Every time the balloon is just about to touch the ground... someone always reaches out to tap it back up. That balloon-- that's God.
But there's a big difference between that balloon and religious fanaticism. And that's what we have now come to realize is the enemy like none we have ever faced before. Organized religion, the drive to band together in huge groups and follow to the letter a document that advocates fiery and bloody death to nonbelievers-- that's the opposite of God; it's the absolute antithesis of what religion at its best is supposed to be about. And ever since September 11, we have known exactly what happens when religious fanaticism gains enough power on a global scale to take literally the prophetic words that call believers to arms. I've been writing since that day about how 9/11 is not a crime perpetrated merely by Muslim extremists, but by religion in general-- fundamentalist fanaticism of any stripe that decides that the threat posed by freedom and science and reason makes those things a worthy target for horrific fiery jihad. It happened to be the Muslims in this phase of history. In another, it could have been the Christians or the Jews or the Buddhists. When religion ceases to be one's personal relationship with God and becomes a cause worth dying for, then the true face of evil takes shape.
That is what attacked us in September. That is what is readying more attacks on us for the near future. And that is what we must realize is the enemy that we've been building ourselves up to fight for centuries. Galileo, Newton, Martin Luther, Copernicus, Franklin, Jefferson, Adam Smith, Lincoln, Watson and Crick, Einstein-- It's all been for this coming confrontation; the one that will define the future of humanity.
According to Mike,
But what if the unthinkable might possibly be true? What if the problem is not restricted access to the fruits of life in a relatively free and secular society, but a deeply-rooted and (in the case of Muslim fundamentalists) religion-mandated opposition to a free and secular society itself? A hatred and mistrust of the things we assume everybody naturally desires? At that point, the sanctified liberal idea of the sameness and unity of all human beings, no matter their culture or philosophy, falls apart. And, in falling apart, the liberal ideal leaves us with a bigger and more insuperable moral hole to fill in: how do you defend yourself against that which you cannot even comprehend? How does a society, any society, defend itself against an enemy it cannot or will not recognize? When even the validity of the concept of having an "enemy" in the first place is questioned, what do you do when the guns start firing and the bombs start going off in your neighborhood?
That's when we start having to choose sides for good. Those who refuse to come down on one side or the other aren't going to benefit from either side's victory. But in the meantime, they're the ones who are keeping us from seeing the real scale of this battle-- a scale that the other side already sees all too clearly. They're already operating on that scale. They're already attuned to images like giant buildings falling down in columns of fire. But we weren't, and we still aren't. That's why disbelief that 9/11 could have happened still hangs over us, and now takes the form of wishing to think of it as a fluke, a freakish aberration in history that nobody-- not even the enemy-- could countenance doing again.
That's just it, though. They can do it again, and they will. It will likely take another attack on the order of 9/11 or bigger to make us see that.
Fortunately, we on the side of science/reason/freedom have an advantage: the things that we believe in work. Science is on our side, and rewards us in ways that Allah does not reward his followers. We're the ones creating the weapons; the other side merely benefits from our ability to provide them. So in the long term, if we decide to escalate this war to the level that the fanatics believe they've already taken it, we will win. But only if we do acknowledge that those are the stakes.
Go to www.islam.org, where you will find a poll that shows you that the vast majority of the site's users believe that the "war on terror" is really, and has always been, a War on Muslims (or a War on Islam). They've been of this mind since the Eleventh. No matter how loudly we tried to proclaim that what we were fighting was terrorism, the enemy used every opportunity to give us to know that they considered Islam to be the victim of our retaliation. That troubled us deeply at the time. It still feels viscerally wrong. But the fact is that Muslims have felt themselves to be under attack ever since 9/11 because they had every reason to expect that they would be-- in terms of jihad, it was absolutely sensible for the West to declare war not on terrorism but on Islam itself. That makes jihad all the more righteous.
And so in turning to face the realities of this upcoming war and stare it in the eyes, we are going to have to ready not only our technology and our science in our defense, but we will have to use the very strengths of freedom and secularism to bolster them on the side where we are specifically being attacked. We have words. We have the ability to use words in a way that they're not allowed to, in a way that they can't fathom. We can barrage the world with ideas. We can blog to the high heavens. We can use flowery and poetic language like Suleiman Abu Gheith and friends. We can parody and satire and Photoshop our way into the minds of anybody with eyes and ears. We can fight on their terms, using the same ideological weapons that they use-- plus a little of our own poison of reason and logic-- to shatter any house of cards that they build up in front of themselves.
They want to fight a war of symbols? They think destroying the World Trade Center will make the United States incapable of trading with the world? Ha-- we'll show them what destroying a symbol is all about.
We've endured the WTC's destruction with anger and sorrow, but without a mosquito's wing's worth of damage to our strength as a nation or our financial power or our core values of freedom and reason. Can Islam withstand the destruction of the Ka'aba with the same resolve and stolid strength?
No, we probably won't actually do this. But can Islam risk it? Is that gamble worth this price-- is the destruction of another American symbol that important? And what symbol do they think will be more important to us than the World Trade Center and its 2833 civilian victims?
Our weapons are poised, and all we need is an excuse. Maybe posing a non-ignorable threat on their own terms, as in the picture at the right, will force a stalemate-- and a stalemate is the best we can hope for at this stage. But once we have the go-ahead to fire, we'll be committing to the greatest war of ideas this world has ever witnessed. It truly will be Armageddon.
UPDATE: Steven den Beste wrote about these issues, just five days after the attacks; he puts it in the terms that Theocracy is just the latest in a string of forms of authoritarianism which we have fought and will conquer: Slavery, Monarchy, Fascism, Communism. I wonder, though, whether Theocracy is possibly the oldest of all these (except possibly Slavery)-- and the most potentially upsetting to humanity as a whole when we engage it in war?
Also, den Beste's essay doesn't go to the extreme of our having to attack Islam, by name, on its own terms. That's something we're only just now seeming to want to discuss.
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| Sunday, June 23, 2002 |
16:59 - And here we ban firecrackers.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_2059000/2059837.stm
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Honestly, this defies commentary.
A wedding feast in north-east Pakistan turned to carnage after a mortar shell launched in celebration misfired, killing 21 people, including the bridegroom.
More than 40 guests were wounded in the accident, which happened in the village of Korez, 250 kilometres (180 miles) south-west of the border city of Peshawar.
Local officials said guests had been "joyously" firing their weapons in the air in a traditional act of celebration, when one of the groom's relatives loaded the mortar "upside-down".
What could I possibly say that could add to this?
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| Friday, June 21, 2002 |
16:26 - Site stats
http://www.coldfury.com/Entries/00000108.html
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Mike says:
As I said to Steven, it really ain't all about who gets the most hits, and I try not to gauge what I do by how many folks read it, but it is definitely nice to be appreciated, and any blogger who claims not to regularly check his site stats is a liar.
I dunno, I have yet to check mine...
Honestly, I have no interest in knowing how many people are reading this site-- I'm operating on the assumption that only two or three people are, and beyond that the prospects get kinda creepy. I suspect that I would change my writing habits if I knew more people were reading me, and I don't want to run that risk.
So I'm content in gauging this blog's popularity by second-hand factors such as how much e-mail I get (next to none, usually) and whether I happen to stumble across somebody who's got me in their blogroll. Beyond that I say, "Who's counting?"
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14:24 - There is a difference
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With this weekend's Lileks Screed in mind, and after meandering through a few discussions in blogland (the latest of which express fresh outrage over the death of Gal, the sweet-faced little girl at the bottom of today's Bleat), I find that the biggest ideological confrontation going on these days seems to be between the outrage of people who want to see the Palestinians defeated (and then rewarded with a state, as with Japan), and the caution of people who see such talk as being tantamount to Naziism.
I tell you, though, I'm getting awfully sick of that accusation. Especially coming from people whose forebears didn't exactly take such caution to heart themselves.
There is a fundamental difference between American public anger against Islamic fundamentalism, and Nazi anti-Semitism. I would have thought that was obvious, but apparently it's not. Evidently the very fact that our enemies seem to speak a common language and worship the same God is enough to make any attack upon them, even a self-defensive one, "racist" and therefore the work of evil monsters.
Take another look, if you will, at Michael Trossman's post from a few days ago-- or read it now if you missed it the first time. Consider how it was that Hitler came to power. Consider the national mood that codified anti-Semitism into law. And imagine that happening in America today with Muslims.
Doesn't really work, does it?
No, because the situations are entirely different.
Hitler wanted to kill the Jews because-- well, because of a personal grudge, evidently. Because it would help him leverage the will of the people to vault himself into power-- find a cheap and easy scapegoat, something that the country can feel that it's "cleansing" itself of by scouring it from within themselves, after which they can consider themselves "pure". Hitler's method was to dig up old racial libels, make propagandistic films, play on Germany's humiliation in the aftermath of WWI, and create a mythological "fatherland" that didn't really exist yet-- but that was only because of this one straw-man obstacle, this enemy-in-our-midst, which-- if they're rounded up and wiped out-- means that the German people would become the rightful inheritors of the Earth.
An ingenious plan, and one that came damned close to working, too.
But for anybody to claim that that's the motivation of the Americans who want to see an end brought to militant Islam-- well, that takes a person with an agenda, an anti-American axe to grind. Because even the most perfunctory glimpse can reveal that it isn't the case.
If America were to go to war against Islam-- a far-fetched concept in itself, because no matter how much proof were offered to the world community of Islam's harmful nature with respect to the modern planet, nobody would endorse us in it-- we would be doing it with deep regret, searching desperately for an alternative right up to the very last minute. We would destroy only the most strategic targets, taking only the bare minimum of lives necessary to remove the threat posed by those who consider 9/11 only to be the first stroke in a grand holy war. We would stop attacking the instant it became clear that the threat had been neutralized in a way that would last. (If that ends up meaning that all of Islam has to be undermined, well, we would deeply regret that too-- but it isn't our fault that Islam was founded with the principles that it was. It predates us. And so we won't stop short of that goal if that's what it takes.)
Hitler took on the Jews for no good reason-- where were the Jewish suicide bombers in Munich and Dresden? Where were the angry Jewish mobs calling for German blood? Where were the militant Jewish factions preaching a bloody end to the European races? Nowhere. Hitler simply needed a scapegoat for political gain, and the Jews were a convenient target. Hitler hated the Jews for ideological and political reasons, not for living historical ones. He hated the Jews for what they were, not for anything they did.
And that's what made his racism evil.
But we are going to war out of self-defense. We've been attacked, and we know that more attacks are coming-- they've only been prevented so far by intense efforts both at home and abroad. It's a sad fact that our enemy is a race, or more accurately (and more troublesome), a religion-- how do we target that enemy without being "racist"? We're bound to get these accusations, but that's the magnitude of the dichotomy that's been thrust upon us. It's really that big a decision to have to make.
We're on the brink of a new sea change in thought regarding race, religion, fascism, democracy, and the like, on the same scale as the one that Hitler brought to the world-- if World War II marked the beginning of the age of the sensibilities we've all known (tolerance, political correctness, anti-discrimination, the "Noble Redman", and the big enemy being Communism), 9/11 has marked the beginning of a new age that's just as important to recognize. A history book written in the year 3000 will use the same bold-face heading to describe World War II and whatever 9/11 has now touched off.
And now, while al Qaeda regroups in countries surrounding Afghanistan and plots the Next Big Move, the Palestinians prove that giving them their own state is not only no longer deserved, but a grave strategic error both in military and cultural terms-- and we have to put up with people who look at five-year-old Palestinian girls deliberately put into the line of Israeli fire and accidentally killed by ricocheting debris (and mourned by Israelis), and five-year-old Israeli girls shot through the head point-blank by Palestinian terrorists invading a home (and cheered by Palestinians)-- and claim that they're morally equivalent.
These are the same people who see the first tentative steps taken by America towards reining in Islam, and shout "Nazi!" at the top of their lungs. They're the people who tell pollsters that they'd be willing to dodge the draft, because, y'know, that means we'd be fighting for The Man and stuff, y'know? They're the people who think that understanding the answer to "Why do they hate us?" means we can pay someone some money, tweak a few buttons or levers in our global financial influence, and al Qaeda would become satisfied and go away. They're the people who say that "violence is not the answer" and talk of a "cycle of violence", as though if the Palestinians stopped blowing up bus stops and hotels, the IDF would keep bulldozing private homes. They're the people who claim that the Palestinian actions are the result of "desperation", when it's affluent and intelligent college students working on their master's theses who do the bombing these days, as happened in one of the recent attacks-- not the poor and desperate, as one might expect.
Some people just don't want to see the US get involved in another war-- even though it's painfully clear that we're already in one, whether we like it or not. We didn't start this one, no matter what "globalization" arguments are brought to bear-- but we will finish it. And we'll do so regardless of whether someone tries to invoke Godwin's Law on America's ass. It doesn't work that way. Thanks for playing.
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10:58 - It's the details, stupid
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I've never really been someone who hated Macs, though I did go through a phase during high school and early in college where I was dismissive of them and engaged in the usual chortling (What's the best way to accelerate a Mac? -9.8 m/s2!). However, as time went on and I learned from experience the difference between Photoshop on Windows and Photoshop on a Mac, I became much more tolerant and open and respectful of Apple's products, and then I had the fortune to work for Pacific Internet for a few years-- an ISP run by a former manager of the WebStar group at StarNine. That meant we were a Mac shop, and it meant I got a Power Mac 7600/120 to use at work. Outstanding little machine. I never wanted for anything-- I liked its telnet better than the Windows equivalents, it had Photoshop and plenty of RAM, and... well, hey, what else was there in 1996?
But I still wasn't interested in making my own personal machine a Mac; no, at that time I was still in that libertarian phase of free computing r00lz & Linux is da b0mb!!111`` in which I spent a futile period trying to make FreeBSD suffice as a desktop OS. (Being used to Photoshop and having to make do with GIMP can make a guy bitter.) The iMacs were out, but that wasn't for me. Nah, I was a geek, right? Those things weren't for geeks.
Some people recently have been seduced to the Mac by OS X. Some people have been drawn in by the iBook or the TiBook or the flat-panel iMac-- irresistibly cool as those things are. Some people have succumbed to peer pressure and bought iPods-- and then decided that they may as well just go all the way, because how can a company that makes something as damn-cool as the iPod be as bad as it's cracked up to be? Then they discover that it's not. Hey, any way of breaching the barriers.
But that's not what sucked me in. No, I was lured in by something much more obscure, but to me earth-shattering: the case design on the G3/G4 PowerMac.
Pull a ring on the side of the case, and... the whole thing just swings open. The motherboard is attached to the door segment. PCI cards and half of the back panel swing out with the door section. Drives are mounted in the body of the case. Cables are routed out of the way. To close the case, just snap it shut. No screwdrivers, no thumbscrews, no cutting your hand open. They made opening the case as simple as opening an oven, yet managed to keep it somewhat "hidden" so as not to be inviting people to open it if they had no reason to. You can even pull a tab out the back panel (which moves an entire plate into interlock) and padlock it shut. How cool is that?
Too cool for any other PC manufacturer, apparently, because nobody else has managed to do anything like this. Not even Dell. Why is this? I'm sure it can't be that Apple has a patent on this kind of design; it's just a clever variation on something that everybody else had been doing for years. It's deceptively simple. So why hasn't anybody else-- even those who specialize in case design-- been able to do anything remotely so good, even after Apple's design hit the market? All I can attribute it to is incompetence, sad to say. Nobody else has the motivation to make screw-free and blood-free cases, because their current products sell just fine-- and people either take their computers in to the shop to be serviced, or they accept that some physical pain is inherent in adding new PCI cards... right?
This case sent me a strong message, in about 1998 when it appeared: it said that Apple is all about geeks. They know what it is we value, and they know what we don't have time for. They were willing to put in the effort to design a case that would make geeks stop short and their jaws hit the floor in amazement at how good it is. Geeks like to be excited by technology, and Apple realized through some stroke of insight that while a case design like this might cost a lot of money in R&D and implementation, it would make drooling fanboys out of people who appreciated that kind of attention to detail-- those who were excited by such things. And hey, it worked.
The current swing-open Power Mac case design has undergone only minor revisions since its introduction in 1998, and it's due for a full-scale revamp-- it's expected in July. Fans of the current case can't much imagine that a new version can be much of an improvement; we can only hope that it won't be worse. But while it's lasted, I know it's made more converts than just myself-- and so whoever had the idea for it initially ought to be given some kind of award for insight above and beyond the call of duty.
And that's just one detail out of thousands.
Do I want to be condemned to a world where nobody has the competence to do the kind of design that Apple has been doing all these years? Obviously nobody's qualified to fill their shoes, otherwise, someone would have done it by now. Do I want to live in a world where mediocrity in design is not only the norm, but the only standard with no superior alternative?
Not just no-- hell no.
Okay-- in the course of his habitual fact-checking of my ass, Chris informs me that Apple does in fact have a patent on this design, and that's why nobody else has done something like it. Well, okay... though I have to imagine that this can't be the only possible good case design that doesn't involve screws or sharp metal edges. Can't someone come up with something else that's just as good, let alone revolutionary? And in any case (hyuck), what's to stop other companies licensing Apple's design for their own cases? Nah, gotta keep those boxes cheap, right?
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| Thursday, June 20, 2002 |
23:39 - Mmmyep. Good Screed.
http://www.lileks.com/screed/college.html
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Lileks is at it again-- and after reading this, I don't know if I've ever felt so distant from the world of college. I'm less than three years out, and I just spent Memorial Day weekend with Mole chums, reminiscing about AMa95 and Ditch Day... but after reading the college-student poll results that he seethes at here, in which the overwhelming majority of the nations Beautiful Young Adults reveal themselves to feel that America is evil and not worth defending against fanatical religious terrorists who, after all, live in cultural purity and don't have McDonald's-- well, I feel like I've suddenly and unexpectedly landed in a whole new tax bracket or something.
I wonder where these poll questions were asked. I somehow have to imagine that, just as with high school, my college experience was somewhat tilted from the norm-- at Caltech, there's no protesting, no hippies (well, there are CS geeks, but while they look similar, they're not), almost no sex, and certainly not much politics. All we cared about was math and physucks. But these polled students seem to be under the impression that just because there's a war on, it automatically means that it's Vietnam all over again-- which means that they, as college students, are required to be against it. Hey, it's tradition, right? And all wars are the same! ...Right?
Hmm. At least there seems to be a healthy majority sympathizing with Israel rather than with the Palestinians. But that's about the only bright spot to be seen.
Read the Screed. You Need a Thneed.
Oh, and by the way-- at the exact same moment that I read "BUT if I’d given in to the temptation to defend the machines, today would be a good example", Homer on TV said "I don't give in to temptation that easily!"
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21:06 - What to do, what to do...
http://armedndangerous.blogspot.com/2002_06_16_armedndangerous_archive.html#77964879
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Okay, so Eric S. Raymond's blog (pointed to via Cold Fury) is turning out to be pretty linkworthy-- well, as long as he's not talking about Linux-- "A reader complains that Linux is difficult to install. Answer: Get thee to the Linux user group near you, who will be more than happy to help you get liberated". This week he's got a series on Islam and its history that is both sobering and enlightening-- I hadn't realized, for instance, that purdah is not in fact required by the Koran.
But, unfortunately, it doesn't much dispel the suspicions that have been gnawing at me over the past several months, regarding the idea that Islam is a religion that is uniquely, inherently, by its very nature, harmful to the rest of the world-- and what is therefore in store for it in the years to come:
This drama keeps getting re-enacted because, in general, these charismatic fundamentalist looney-toons are correct in their criticism of `soft' Islam. The Koran, the actions and statements of the prophet Mohammed, and the witness of the lives of his immediate followers are pretty clear on what the religious duties of a Muslim are. Long before the 9/11 attacks, I read large portions of the Koran (in translation) and more than one history of Islam, because I collect religions. I learned about the Five Pillars and the hadith (the traditional sayings of Mohammed) and the ulama. The picture is not a pretty or reassuring one.
Moderate Muslims trying to argue against the latest version of Islamic fundamentalism are in a difficult situation. All the fundamentalists have to do to support their position is to point at the Koran, which is much more authoritative in an Islamic context than the Bible is in most Christian ones. Moderates are reduced to arguing that the Koran doesn't really mean what it says, or arguing from hadith that qualify or contradict the Koranic text. Since the Koran trumps the hadith, this is generally a losing position.
The grim truth is that Osama bin Laden's fanatic interpretation of Islam is Koranically correct. The God of the Koran and Mohammed truly does demand that idolatry be purged with fire and sword, and that infidels must be forced either to convert to Islam or (as a limited exception for Christians and Jews, the "Peoples of the Book") live as second-class citizens subject to special taxes and legal restrictions. The Koran really does endorse suicidal martyrdom and the indiscriminate killing of infidels for the faith.
So the inevitable question, the one that people have been dancing around but not really asking for a while now, is this:
Does there come a time when a religion must be declared "evil" and incorrigible, and must be therefore stricken from the planet?
Or, more bluntly:
Should we in fact be considering wiping out Islam?
I hope not. And I wish it weren't true that Islam, unlike pretty much any other religion that's big enough to matter, is so dead-set upon these fantasy-novel concepts of Arthurian warriors and Caliphs and carrying sword and fire into the land of the infidels for the glory of Allah. But as Jamie Glazov and others continue to illustrate, Islam has at its core the codified exhortation to subjugate and convert the infidels, and that cannot be changed without involving changes to Shari'a Law and to the Koran itself-- Bida, a new (and therefore unholy) idea. Modern Islam has demonstrated both the will and the ability to attack the secular, Western world-- Quixotic it might be, but that's all part of the romance. And so there's no hope that they will simply get tired of it and give up. If anything, the more desperate their cause appears, the more fiercely they'll fight, and the more extreme techniques they'll employ, because they have less to lose.
How does one wipe out a religion, anyway? It's like banning an idea-- something that we've been very vehement (with the shoe on the other foot) in claiming to be impossible to eradicate or suppress completely. You can't wipe out democracy by burning the Constitution, and you can't erase Christianity by burning Bibles. The ideas live on regardless of whether they're endorsed by the local government, or whether they're declared subversive. And in any case, we've been vociferous in the blogosphere about the nature of randomly developed ideas as being the ingredients in the rich stew of an open culture-- if we truly feel confident in our thought system, we not only do not declare any idea to be blasphemous, we welcome it into the common discourse to be discussed and accepted or rejected, as appropriate, on the popular level. So thinking about attacking the Muslim religion does rather go against the very grain of our creed, as it were.
But as luck would have it, Islam isn't just a set of ideas: it's a set of ideas with actual physical components, relics that exist in the modern world which are said to play a part in the mythology of the past, present, and future. To wit, the Ka'aba-- the black meteoric stone in the square building in the middle of the square in Mecca. The object of the hajj, the pilgrimage that constitutes one of the Five Pillars of Islam, central to the contemporary practice of the faith as well as its storied founding and its prophesied future. For a bellicose and arrogant religion bent on taking on the entire world, it's founded on a remarkably exposed and vulnerable piece of physical reliquary.
So: What would actually happen if we were to put a cruise missile into the Ka'aba?
Would that finally put paid to the idea that everything in the Koran is an unequivocable script for the future of the world-- if the Ka'aba is destroyed, how can it be moved to Jerusalem in the End Times? How can such a thing happen without being mentioned in the predictions in the text? Would that be enough to dissolve Islam's fanatical core, and the Koranically correct notions that keep attracting Muslims back to strict fundamentalism in a way that no other religion does?
And is there any action we can take short of that, that can result in the modern world remaining safe from attack from that quarter in the future? After all, going to that length would be an act of cultural and historical barbarism worse than the Taliban's destruction of the cliffside Buddhas, which they undertook because... uh, because they were threatened by the influence of a competing religion.
One of our big tenets is "freedom of religion"-- we don't tell you what to believe, as long as you don't tell us what to believe. It's that second bit that's important. Self-determination, and the mind-your-own-business attitude that is fostered in the United States, is not an absolute concept; it is tempered by the clause of "As long as such freedom does not threaten our own survival". There haven't been many-- or indeed any-- immediate and direct threats on our country's ideals in our history, on our own ground, until now. And we're still unwilling to believe the magnitude of the decisions we're going to have to make in defense of what we believe to be right and just.
The point where we must all make that decision is coming, and soon.
Wait, I've got an idea. How about if we send into Mecca a cruise missile that's not armed-- instead of blowing up its target, it simply explodes on contact in a shower of Arabic confetti that reads, "The next one won't be corked"? Because just maybe, the knowledge of such chilling vulnerability is all that it would take...
Response from Mike at Cold Fury. Looks like this idea is becoming more than just a guilt-ridden murmur.
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20:27 - Wheee!
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The second printing of FreeBSD Unleashed just came through-- I got a copy in the mail today. It includes (at a brief glance) all the changes that I'd flagged, including the improved disk geometry diagram in Chapter 19.
The fact that it's gone to a second printing is very encouraging. If I'd decided to be in a bad mood tonight, I think this would have put a monkey wrench into those plans.
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18:52 - “Software sucks because users demand it to.”
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/mann0702.asp
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Here's a good, revealing article on software design from Charles C. Mann of Technology Review.
It's got some brusque remarks in it from Microsoft's former CTO (from the 80s era) and the usual kind of comparisons to space-travel technology and car design that you would expect in this kind of article. Most refreshingly, it points out the fact that software design is fundamentally different from other kinds of engineering-- "If a bridge survives a 500-kilogram weight and a 50,000-kilogram weight, Pfleeger notes, engineers can assume that it will bear all the values between. With software, she says, 'I can’t make that assumption—I can’t interpolate.'"
It also notes that software is inherently buggy because customers demand new features all the time. As I've mentioned before, devices like digital cameras and MP3 players are in that bleeding-edge phase that personal computers have exemplified in macrocosm for twenty years now: every six months, a company brings out a device that's twice as good as its previous one, just to keep pace with the competition and the demands of the available technology (which keeps changing just as fast). From a stereo-design or car-design or bridge-design standpoint, such thinking is insane.
How much longer can we expect to keep this up? Moore's Law can't keep on going forever, can it? Will there come a time when CPU cycles and RAM are so cheap that no amount of programmatic complexity can drive hardware upgrades? Obviously not for decades at least, or even centuries-- even when we have fully-functional holodecks and transporters, there will still be a demand for still more complex computing tasks. At least, that's the impression of technology that I get from Star Trek-- even over the course of a few fictional decades of a hypothetical future, such new developments as holographic doctors and food replicators are greeted with the same fervor that we emit today over the newest gadgets and peripherals. And because of the egalitarian nature of software creation, the limits on what software can do are still imposed by hardware rather than by human imagination-- as will continue to be the case for a long time, I suspect.
And we can't treat software as an exception to the rules of engineering, either; as time goes on, software will become more and more important a part of the engineering world-- and sooner or later, mechanical and civil and electrical engineering will be treated as the poor cousins of software engineering, the latter of which will be so ubiquitous that its rules will be the ones bent to accommodate the rest of the world's disciplines, not the other way around. Ready to start thinking about quality-control at Ford in terms of defects per kLOCs?
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18:19 - From the "Leave it to Japan" department...
http://www.mci.panasonic.co.jp/aced/audio/products/2DIN/CQ-TX5500D.html
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In-dash MP3 player. With tube amps.
What more needs to be said?
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17:47 - John C. Qwerty
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Wow. Never in months have I seen this kind of reaction from across the Mac community to a column than to the John Dvorak one from yesterday.
As near as I can tell, he's saying that Apple is the only innovator in the entire computer industry, and that computers are only worth using if they from how they work currently. He's using your basic Shock Jock technique of yellow journalism to generate controversy (Oooh, I'll pick on Apple and people will yap for days about this one!). And, look, it's worked.
I'll say. Here's just a sampling:
Stepping back a bit, this can easily be seen as a microcosm of Mac Evangelism in general: What makes a columnist bash Macs? Even those who clearly have it in for Apple can't be entirely negative these days; some of the things Apple has been doing lately are just too undeniably cool for even the staunchest anti-Mac warrior to fail to concede. So is it just that people like Dvorak (who used to have a Mac-related column, for God's sake!) are bitter and resentful and desperately want some attention-- and are willing to take groundless pot-shots at what's currently stealing the limelight in order to get their own names into Google?
I've been taking some admonishment lately for simply being too much of a Macophile here in this blog-- which, considering that (as I've stated) I never intended this to be a Mac-centric site, I would have to agree has a point. Can't I just accept that Apple's fortunes will go whichever way they'll go, regardless of whether I take up the sword and try to rebut and counter whatever paranoid propaganda spews from the FUD-monkeys in the media? Don't I realize that no matter how much theory I quote or how many documented examples I give in support of my platform, all I'll end up doing is driving people further and further away-- because a zealot with facts backing him up is still a zealot?
On an unrelated note, Apple has posted another round of Real Stories on their site-- letters from users which I would be willing to bet are fully legally documented and traceable to actual humans (so any accusations of their being a "load of BS and “opinionated fact”" will have to be taken up with those people, not with Apple).
When I come home now I immediately start iTunes, which has my entire music collection. Then I begin working on photo albums. In fact, I started a business making iPhoto photo albums. It is amazing. I burn CDs and DVDs with photo albums for customers (in addition to the amazing print copies) set to music. I have even learned to touch up photos with Adobe Elements and iPhoto 1.1.
Look, what I'm trying to do here is celebrate what I see as a genuine force of good in the technology industry. If someone's willing to try to convince me that Apple is in fact a backward and stodgy company that stifles innovation and prevents people from doing great and creative things and whose extermination would in fact greatly liberate the computing industry, they're welcome to try. But if they're unable to convince me of that (and I promise I will make every attempt to listen with an impartial ear), then I will have to continue to do as I have been: when I see someone attacking what I consider to be a force of good, I have to ask what that person's motivations are. What could they possibly find threatening about a company that has less than 4% of the market? Is it purely the fact that almost everybody who uses a Mac loves it? Is that what's so menacing? The thought that something could exist that makes that many of its customers happy?
I'll say it again: I don't like zealotry (any kind of zealotry) any more than anybody else does. But I recognize when a company has something special going on for it, and as far as I'm concerned this is a Golden Age that I will look back on fondly after it's long gone. If that's because Apple is only a memory by that time, and if that's attributable to jealous and bitter columnists mercilessly flogging Apple for succeeding against all odds when it mattered most, then I'm going to be a very angry person later in life.
But I like to think we're better than that. This is America, isn't it?
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14:10 - Let's hear it for the good guys
http://www.palit.com/2002_06_16_tkl_archive.asp
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Blogging from India, Shuman Palit has a list of the top twenty reasons to like/love/admire Israel. Go read it, and be sure to also read the responses from Solly Ezekiel and Michael Trossman.
It's good to see that there are more countries on "our side" than just ourselves. What gets me, though, is that there's this unspoken rule that "you don't help the Israelis"-- almost as though the very fact that they've succeeded using the same methods as America did, with a culture of personal expression and individual freedom and innovation, lumps them into a hated category of countries that nobody is willing to emulate because of their success.
Nobody wants to be like the US, because capitalism and democracy and secularity are seen deep down in other parts of the world as dirty and dehumanizing. Nobody wants to be like Israel, because they've got all the bad aspects of the US, plus they're Jews.
If we weren't concerned with what the rest of the world thinks, or whether it would constitute treason or something, I can imagine that a lot of people in this country would happily form a militia to go to Israel and fight on the side of the people that represents a "right" that no accusations of Naziism can assail: this "right" is one where the only possible casualties are the romanticism and idealism of what has been called the "Old World" for centuries now.
If we were to gather together the countries who seem to "get it"-- America, Israel, Britain, India, Japan, perhaps a few others-- and secede and form our own planet, I've got a guess as to which planet would survive longer.
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09:20 - Wait a minute. What time is it?
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There wasn't much evening bloggage last night because I had what has to be the quickest and most intense fever ever; about eight hours of my life have been sort of snipped out of my consciousness.
I've had a mysterious sore throat for two days, and at about 7:00 last night, after I picked up my car and while Chris and I tried dumbfoundedly to fix a bizarre Sendmail problem, I started feeling really cold. And tired. To steal a line from James Herriot, I felt as though a group of strong men had been kicking me enthusiastically for several hours.
So I got home, I lay down for a while, then moved to the couch downstairs with my comforter, curling up in a desperate attempt to get warm while the TNN Star Trek marathon played. Then dinner was ready-- and as I sat up, suddenly I was unbearably hot. No food could I manage; the best I could do was to go upstairs, fling my window open, and drape myself out into the night air. We didn't seem to have any Tylenol or whatever you're supposed to take in these circumstances; we didn't even have a thermometer, so I have no idea what was going on.
Whenever I've been sick, which is seldom, I tend to always have a single dream which plays for hours and hours, never seeming to make any progress story-wise. Often it's a dream about a bunch of green wire-frame hexagons and squares and pentagons floating about in black space, like a CADKEY project. But not this time; this time I was in charge of removing the foul language from a whole bunch of TV shows. (Apparently these shows were filmed with all the foul language in, which then had to be edited out.) Except the shows weren't on video or anything; they were physical blobs or sticks or something, piled up in a huge sticky mound, and if I cut a piece of bad language from one show, unless I really knew what I was doing, it would appear in a different show. So it was like a game of Jenga or Kalto or something, and I played it all freakin' night.
So now it all seems to be over-- not even my sore throat remains. I'm still a bit dizzy, though... but I don't think I'll stay home. I've never yet missed a day of work due to being sick, and I'm not keen on starting now.
Wish me luck...
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| Wednesday, June 19, 2002 |
14:50 - Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
http://www.thinksecret.com/features/jaguarscannersupport.html
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OS-level scanner driving in Jaguar! Hot damn!
Meanwhile, John C. Dvorak in PC Magazine says that Apple hasn't had an original idea since 1984, and should be exterminated.
(Or maybe that Apple should discontinue the Macintosh and "replace it with something new". Uh... what, so now what you're bitching about is the name? What the hell would constitute a "new computer that is not a Mac"? Something with entirely new hardware, running an entirely new operating system? Uh... 'scuse me, how is that different from the current Macs running OS X?
Wait-- maybe he's saying Apple should stop making proprietary computers, port OS X to Intel, and sell beige boxes. That'd sure be revolutionary. Or maybe he's one of those forward-thinking pundits who thinks Apple should be liquidated, its assets sold to the stockholders, and its intellectual property thrown into a dump (it's no good anyway, is it? After all, if it was any good, wouldn't Apple be the majority player?) Oh, I know. Maybe he thinks Apple should do something totally unprecedented, like a PDA. Everybody likes PDAs! Or maybe a tablet PC with a telepathic interface. Or a teleporter. Anything-- by Christ, we've got to do something! Every day Apple makes computers, they're setting the world's technological frontiers back another two weeks! Nahh, that can't be it. He probably thinks Apple should become a pure software maker, or possibly an Internet portal, serving e-mail and news and weather and sports scores. From there it's only a skip and a jump to being one of those random penny-stock companies juggled around by anonymous German investors, the niche they so richly deserve.
He's positive that now that Apple has released the new iMac (which he calls "I-Mac"), there's nothing else they could possibly do to follow it up with.
Is there any wonder why I have no interest in being part of a community where people like Dvorak are seen as "visionary"?)
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12:07 - Windows Moment of Zen
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I haven't had occasion to mention one of these in a while-- coincidentally since I got the iMac for work and shelved my Windows2000 machine for use in testing Windows apps and playing AVIs with funky encoding that QuickTime doesn't support (not that WMP lets me copy still frames from them or anything).
All I want is to take a screen shot, paste it into Paint, save it into "My Pictures", and then go to the command line to FTP it to my other machine (because the FTP client built into Windows Explorer works not at all).
So I do that. I save it there. The path appears to be Desktop->My Documents->My Pictures. That's where it appears to be. That's where the files are if I double-click on the "My Documents" on my desktop.
But after painstakingly cd'ing through "Documents and Settings" and "briant" and "Desktop" and "My Documents", I find... that it's empty.
There's also a "My Documents" directly under the "BrianT" level, but-- yes, it's also empty.
Hmm, maybe it's in "All Users.WINDOWS" or "Default User.WINDOWS". Nope, not there either. "Administrator"? Nope.
It's only after much scrolling and prodding that we discover that the files, as well as a Word document that seems to be accessible by Word and nothing else, are in a "My Documents" folder directly under the C:\ root. Same with "My Music" and "My Download Files".
What the hell is this? Does every user share these top-level folders? Or does Windows actively copy all the files around the system, out of your user-specific folder and into this top-level thing every time you log in? Is this their helpful way of making the files accessible to you-- shuffling them into a completely backwards and counterintuitive location so you don't have to go down two extra levels in Windows Explorer to find them? Oh, thank you for your generous assistance.
This is Microsoft's idea of a multi-user operating system, is it? Good Lord.
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Brian Tiemann
