one for the “what if?” file

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: March 28, 2004 – April 03, 2004 Archives:

Now in a front page piece in Thursday’s Washington Post we learn that on September 11th, 2001 Condi Rice was scheduled to deliver a major foreign policy address on missile defense as the centerpiece of a new strategy to combat “the threats and problems of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday.”

Then reality intruded.

What if the attacks had come later in the day, after or during the speech?

the gang that couldn’t talk straight does it again

Found at Starbucks: The Pentagon’s Papers – – Center for American Progress:

Talking points, hand-written notes on spin tactics, and a hand-drawn map to the Secretary’s house were found by a resident of DuPont Circle, who made them available to the Center for American Progress. The name of said resident is being withheld at his request, as he fears that he may be accused on national television of being “disgruntled.”

To quote from the Secretary of Defense: “This thing will go away soon and what will keep it alive will be one of us going over the line.”

Do you suppose leaving these papers lying around in public constitutes “going over the line?”

for those of us who prefer pictures

Portgraph: graphing FreeBSD ports dependencies:

Portgraph is a Python program that produces dot (graphviz) output. The output shows a minimal dependency tree of the selected port, based on information from /usr/ports/INDEX. I suspect this is most useful for decorative purposes, though people trying to figure out load-balancing on build clusters might find it useful as well.

I’m currently wrestling with a b*rked ports installation and found this in some search results. At the very bottom of the two graphic maps are the ports I keep stumbling over: libtool, expat, and gettext.

you go first

Boing Boing: Gates’s vision — and failure thereof:

In the same breath, though, Gates predicts that software won’t be free — though he has no good explanation for this (presumably, it’s because universal free software would be bad for his business, so he can’t bring himself to contemplate the possibility).

I saw something about this earlier today and the irony was overwhelming. This is the kind of business partner I want: “hey, I have an idea, let’s give your stuff away while I keep selling mine. Never mind that yours is actually physical stuff that costs money to make while mine is an increasingly marginalized commodity that has production costs approaching zero.”

Another innovative insight . . . .

It does seem likely that hardware, as we currently conceive of it, will drop in price, but to get to zero or damn near suggests there won’t be any new developments: here’s a few that I think we’ll see. Mr Gates’ vision of tablet devices raises a few ideas that would be required, without even thinking that hard: and he expects them to be free?

* increased portability resulting from
** better power management
** more efficient software design
** fewer moving parts/solid state storage
* ubiquitous networking
** broadband everywhere
** wireless everywhere
** robust IP addressing (IPv6?)
** compelling, useful services, that capture some revenue

When you consider how well the various free operating systems support existing consumer electronics, not just traditional computers — check out NetBSD to see what they’ve already done, to say nothing of the various hardware platforms supported by Linux — it seems likely that new hardware will be supported by free OSes almost as quickly as by proprietary ones. Right now, proprietary OSes drive hardware but that may not be the case forever.

a refreshing insight

Mena’s Corner: Where did those 22 other people come from?

Last week it finally sunk in that we’ve done an extremely poor job communicating about the growth of Six Apart to our users and to the weblogging community. This silence can be partly attributed to the sort of confidentiality that’s required when working with partners or brokering deals.

This will be worth following: it’s always refreshing to have someone learn from their mistakes and be open about it all.

I’ve been down on SixApart for this very thing: they haven’t communicated well or much with their installed base. Making an effort like this will go along way to bringing those of us who have become disenchanted back into the fold. Admittedly, the emergence of TypePad, the work going into MT Pro, and the firestorm around TypeKey has probably taken up a lot of their time. Let’s hope this channel stays open . . . .

know thyself

Tickle: IQ and Personality Tests – The Classic IQ Test – Your Results:

Your Intellectual Type is Word Warrior. This means you have exceptional verbal skills. You can easily make sense of complex issues and take an unusually creative approach to solving problems. Your strengths also make you a visionary. Even without trying you’re able to come up with lots of new and creative ideas. And that’s just a small part of what we know about you from your test results.

Yeah, well, that’s all you’ll tell me for free, so it’ll have to do.

They rated me as a 127 IQ: I wish it were closer to my weight.

economist claims “file-sharing isn’t killing record sales”

In fact, just the opposite is true: the effect on sales approaches zero, except for top-selling recordings: for them, sales increase as a function of their popularity on the download networks.

Empirical data on file-sharing’s effect on album sales
Koleman Strumpf, a conservative, Cato-affiliated economist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has just co-authored a paper on the effects of file-sharing on album sales, based on the first-ever empirical data analysis in the field. Koleman watched the file requests on OpenNap servers (to get numbers on which albums’ tracks are being downloaded) and compared them to the sales-figures for each album, correlating file-sharing popularity against sales data. His conclusion: file-sharing isn’t killing record sales.

We analyze a large file sharing dataset which includes 0.01% of the world’s downloads from the last third of 2002. We focus on users located in the U.S. Their audio downloads are matched to the album they were released on, for which we have concurrent U.S. weekly sales data. This allows us to consider the relationship between downloads and sales. To establish causality, we instrument for downloads using technical features related to file sharing (such as network congestion or song length) and international school holidays, both of which are plausibly exogenous to sales. We are able to obtain relatively precise estimates because the data contain over ten thousand album-weeks…

Even in the most pessimistic specification, five thousand downloads are needed to displace a single album sale…high selling albums actually benefit from file sharing.

369K PDF Link

via [Boing Boing Blog]