Tag: reflections

If you haven’t noticed, a lot of people are talking about the religious leader formerly known as "the Pope." The New York Times supplemented the Business, Arts and Metro sections yesterday with a special "John Paul II" section.

While there is an overwhelming amount of news, this article caught my eye. The headline is: 35,000 New Stories on Pope After Death.

By my count, it seems that it is more like 35,001. Either that or it’s time to start a new tally for the number of news stories on the number of news stories about the Pope.

At the Grokster oral argument, the CEA was handing out free "Save Betamax" T-Shirts. Of course, this is a reference to the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Sony v. Universal over betamax technology. The entertainment industry argued that VCR should be illegal. The Supreme Court disagreed and said that any technology with commercially significant non-infringing use is OK. Grokster v. MGM is basically revisiting the issue.

I picked up a "Save Betamax" shirt at the court and was wearing it yesterday. At a fashionable hipster bar, the cute bartender complemented me on my shirt. I said thanks and started chatting with her. It quickly became apparent that she had had no idea that the shirt was in reference Sony v. Universal. She thought it was a cry to save the now-long-dead tape format.

I’ve been told that hipster fashion revolves in part around an aesthetic of both retro and "so uncool it’s cool" — trucker hats, cheap beer, etc. A shirt claiming to want to save a now-totally-defunct recording technology is really uncool so, in her mind, was cool and attractive. I think that by my cute bartenders standards, the fact that the shirt was in fact referencing a now-totally-defunct video tape format only as a way of alluding to a body of copyright and technology jurisprudence is even more uncool and geeky. Following this logic, the shirt was more cool than even she knew.

My trip to the Supreme Court of the United States yesterday to see the Grokster v. MGM oral arguments was eye-opening in a number of respects. Although seeing the arguments was very exciting, the overall experience was incredibly disenchanting. I do not intend to return to the court for oral arguments.

Perhaps naively, I had bought into the idea that the judiciary — and the Supreme Court as its highest representative — is somehow above the normal buying and selling of favor and political power that goes on in Washington. I thought that the court had the potential to be pro-public in a way that money and party politics had made impossible in the legislative and executive branches. I’ve changed my mind.

At least in a sense, the Supreme Court is actively and aggressively anti-public. The court doesn’t want the public in the court room. They don’t want the public exposed to their ritual and processes in any other ways ways except at a delay and or highly mediated. In my opinion, they are easily the least transparent branch of US government and, perhaps most disconcertingly, even their small overtures toward public involvement are just as much for sale as everything else in Washington DC.

Yesterday and the day before, people traveled from all over the country to Washington DC to sleep on the ground with the chance of getting one of the 210 seats (50 of which were reserved for the public we were told) in the room where Grokster would be argued. Less a dozen — maybe closer to half dozen — of the people with me on the ground that night got into the court. There are two major reasons.

The Public Comes Last — But Mostly Not At All

There are 210 gallery seats in the Supreme Court. Supposedly, 50 are reserved for the public but in reality, even these are up for grabs by VIPs. Basically, everybody who is not the public gets a chance at those seats before the public does. That includes: members of the press, members of the Supreme Court bar (basically any lawyer whose practiced for a few years and jumped through a few hoops) and friends of the court: an impossibly broad distinction that seems to boil down to a very long list of rich and powerful people. This means that Jack Valenti can waltz right in 20 minutes before things start while the guy who slept there all night gets turned away.

To make matters worse, the Supreme court batches business in a way that packs the room unnecessarily. The court began by admitting new lawyers to the Supreme Court bar. This basically entails reading the lawyers’ names out and then asking the group to stand at once. Each of these lawyers (and there were several dozens) gets to bring four friends and family members to their big day in the court. This is reasonable. But there is no pause before the arguments so each of those family members takes up one of the precious few seats. It is really necessary to organize these hearings in a way that takes seats away from the public who are interested in seeing a case being argued and gives them to lawyers family members who often don’t care?

Finally, when the public doesn’t get in, they simply don’t get access to the information. CSPAN cannot broadcast the court in progress and nor can anyone else. Transcripts and recordings are taken real-time but are not released for months after the court is over. There is no overflow room with closed circuit video or audio and it would be trivially easy to make one. As it stands, you either get in or you don’t. If you are Jack Valenti, you always do. If you are the interested public with less money and political sway, it almost always means that you don’t.

Line Sitters

By midnight last night when I arrived, there were more than 50 people in line. The majority of these (the vast majority probably) were professional line sitters. It may sound silly but it has evidently become the rage for the well heeled in Washington to get into congressional hearings and — on some nights the Supreme Court as well — by hiring someone from a professional line standing company to stand in line for them overnight.

Call it market efficiency, but the reality of the situation is that those spots reserved for the public are bought and sold just like everything else in Washington. If you happen to be part of that unfortunate majority of the country’s population that has to work a job to pay the bills — but not the kind of job that pays well enough that you can afford to hire a USD 8-35/hour line stander, you will probably not get in in the Supreme Court to hear a popular case.

In the early morning, the nice group of South Asian line-sitters in front of me were replaced by well rested and well dressed MGM and Time Warner executives. While the hirers were almost all industry people, a few folks from the Grokster and Streamcast boards got in using a similar tactic. I arrived after the line had grown past 50. That was generally interpreted to mean that I wouldn’t get in. As a result, I made the somewhat conflicted decision to pay an entertainment industry line sitter who was, as Seth Schoen put it, "not very good at his job," 50 USD to send him home to his bed and to send me to his little patch of concrete. Matt Norwood, who arrived with me and took up the next place in the line was the third person to not get into the court.

General Feelings

It would be simple to set up closed circuit video as they do in the Vatican. It would be simple to release the transcripts that are already written or to broadcast arguments. But it doesn’t happen. The few spots that exist go everywhere but to the general public.

As far as the line sitters go, you can call it a market responding to a need but that doesn’t make me feel any better. I’m not bitter — I got in. However, I am upset that most of the folks who slept on the concrete with me did not. More than half of the folks on the ground who would have got in packed up and went home when their "worms" showed up or their contracts expired. The larger portion of campers were simply turned away at the door.

I understand that the Supreme Court doesn’t want to become part of public life in the same way that other parts of the government are but I think their current behavior goes well beyond that. The court goes out of its way to block any public participation or direct public monitoring of the process. The market (no more than a euphemism for the richest and most powerful) safely snatches up any of the scraps that the court throws to the unwashed hordes.

This is the reality of Supreme Court. Maybe that’s OK and maybe it is not. I only ask that we not not pretend it is any different or any better than this.

Several years ago, I was getting ready to send my passport to the Indian embassy to get a visa and had put my passport in the big front pocket of my hooded sweatshirt. I stopped into a restroom to relieve myself on the way to the mail room. In the shuffling over the toilet, I managed to knock my passport out of my hoody pocket directly into the now very used toilet.

I dried it off the best I could and, using my fingernails, carefully dropped the passport into the envelope and sent it off to the consulate.

I still have the same passport and it’s sometimes fun to remember this event when an immigration officer is pawing my passport and giving me a hard time.

Now let’s see who remember this story at the next big keysigning.

Last week, as I was up on the podium having my talk at XIV CNEIS introduced to a packed room of something like 1,500 people, I opened a bottle of water and placed it on the the cloth-covered row of tables between my laptop and another workstation. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I had in fact placed the bottle precariously on the gap between two tables. Immediately, the water bottle tipped and began to slowly empty its contents into my laptop’s keyboard.

As quickly as possible, I picked the bottle up and tried to right it. It immediately fell the other direction to dump what water remained into the keyboard of the other computer.

I beckoned to someone for a cloth, ignored what was going on as best as I could, and began to speak. I explained that my laptop might catch fire, explode, or simply stop working during the talk. Many people thought I was joking. I wasn’t.

I guess the fact that they thought I was joking is a testament to my ability to act cool under pressure. My laptop — at least it’s keyboard — is not doing as cool.

I wish I could say that last week saw my worst laptop and water related incident. However, last week is in competition with several occasions when I justified the extra price paid for a Panasonic Toughbook CF-25.

On the second most spectacular occasion, I came home late and tip-toed into a room I shared with my girlfriend at the time who was already asleep, I plugged the laptop into its AC adapter and then I proceeded to drop the machine into a square laptop-shaped plastic bucket that I found lying conveniently next to the bed.

It was the bucket of my water my girlfriend had been soaking her feet in and I winced as I heard the splash of my laptop hitting the water and the thud of it hitting the bottom of the bucket.

Due to the toughbook’s water resistant design, last week’s relatively minor incident will almost certainly end up costing me more money to fix than the incident with the Toughbook. On the bright side, the workstation’s keyboard I also nailed last week seems to be fine.

In certain moods, I really like Julie London. Of course in both lyrics and delivery, she can be a little bit over-dramatic. Play Misty For Me is a good example.

Julie opens it claiming, in one of her most seductive voices, that she’s, "as helpless as kitten up a tree." My favorite lines follow:

Walk my way,
And a thousand violins begin to play,
Or it might be the sound of your hello.

You can listen yourself in OGG Vorbis or MP3.

I like the little flurry of instruments when she finishes the line about the thousand violins playing but lets get a couple things straight:

1. There are not 1000 instruments playing. There are two.
2. Those are not violins. Those are flutes.

I guess it just sounds better than:

Walk my way,
And two flutes begin to play.

Many people think that Mika and I have confusingly similar names. Folks think it’s funny that two people with such similar names live together in the same apartment.

Well, in the last day, Mika have put most of North and Central America between us but it doesn’t seem to have disambiguated things very much. Mika is still at Columbia. I’m in Colombia.

As many people know, I can appreciate an informative sign. That’s why I was happy to see this useful sign inside a train bathroom to help remind patrons of the consequences of their presence:

For the last couple months, I’ve been lurking on the public Unicode mailing list. It’s a lot of fun and there are many very smart people who are both serious geeks in technical sense and serious language geeks. I hope that after I take some time to acclimatize myself, I will be able to get more involved and become a productive presence.

Part of being acclimatized is getting used to all of the names for symbols in different scripts. There has been a lot of discussion lately about Arabic’s (apparently very controversial) teh marbuta. In ways I don’t exactly understand, the teh marbuta can change into a teh in certain situations.

Every time I see teh, I can’t help but think it’s a typo made when someone was trying to type a definite article — a very common mistake in places like IRC. I can think of some funny and confusing IRC conversations about the teh and heh code points.

Yesterday, an email yesterday with a lead-in very similar to the following one made it past my spam filter. (I’ve changed all of the details to protect the innocent but it’s true to the style and effect.):

From: Mr. John Richard <presidentialdirection@yahoo.com> Subject: NIGERIA PARTNER Dear Sir, This email may come as a suprise to you but I am very glad to make your acquaintance.

To my surprise (and probably to yours as well) this email was not a 419 scam. It turns out, John is from Nigeria and he really wanted to be a partner on a Free Software project I’m working on! I was glad I read the whole message before hitting delete!

I think this is interesting case for two reasons:

First, I can’t help but think that had I not had been using a machine spam filter, I would have deleted this in a heartbeat. This is a rare example of a mail that could be correctly identified by many (most?) computer spam filters using techniques like Bayesian analysis on the complete message but incorrectly by human filters who make a decision based on the headers and the first paragraph.

Second, it made me think about the impact that these 419 scams must be having on legitimate Nigerian mail. I’ve heard it said that most 419’s were, at least historically, are actually run by Nigerians although I don’t know if this is still the case. In any case, it seems that many people have come to associate Nigeria and Nigerian email writing styles as indicative of scams.

It seems possible that Nigerian Internet cafes are full of emailers with names like Mr. John Richard who use yahoo email addresses and who come from a culture where it is common to write subjects in ALLCAPS. When they write to people they don’t know, they — quite sensibly — start mails apologizing for the fact that they may have surprised their readers with an unannounced missive. Spammers and scammers put all these more upstanding folks at a real disadvantage when it comes to getting their message out.

A few years ago, Enrico Zini and I were talking about spam and he introduced me to an idea that I thought made a lot of sense. Basically, he said that the only real solution to spam is education: Until we educate people to not buy the things advertised in unsolicited email, spam will persist because there will be an economic incentive for it to do so.

There are other ways to stop spam being sent but these alternatives seem to boil down to making the spammers’ medium either prohibitively expensive or regulated — neither of which are solutions I’m comfortable with with a number of reasons.

Enrico’s idea broke down for me today when I received religious "spam." It was a email from someone trying to convert me to Christianity.

As one of my friends put it, it’s surprising that unsolicited religious mail is not more common and I don’t doubt that it will become more so in the future. The problem with the education model for combating spam and these religious mass-marketing campaigns is that there is no reaction that we can educate people not to have that will eliminate the messages. There is no link to click and no phone number to call in the email. Religious spammers have a message and the chance that you might get it and become saved eternally — no matter how improbable — is enough to justify their effort.

At this point, religious spammers are using the tools of the commercially-motivated spam industry so they are connected. However, I can’t help but see this is a profoundly more problematic type of spam creation.

I met a girl named Ionna yesterday.

If I were named Ionna, I would make it one of my life’s goals to live in a spherical home like this at least once in my life:

"No gods, no masters," is a phrase commonly associated with anarchism.

If I go back to school, I would like to get PhD and not bother with a MA or MS. I feel this way because I enjoy doing research and that’s usually easier in a doctoral program. I think it would be fun to tell people that I am choosing a doctorate degree because I am anarchist and am politically opposed to Masters.

Yesterday, Mika and I were talking about seppuku. Mika said she could never do it. Evidently, she doesn’t have the guts.