The fact that London is pretty much completely covered by CCTV and now "Congestion" cams is well known. The former are there as a general purpose crime-prevention and forensic tool, the latter are there to assess the fees imposed for simply diving around London, and are capable of recording license plate numbers from passing cars 24 hours a day.
Lots of civil liberties types don't like this. But because of the cameras, authorities are going to be able to trace the route that yesterday's defused car bombs used to reach their targets. This will be an invaluable lead on finding the bastards who tried this.
Two other tangentally related observations:
1) The Metropolitan Police don't usually carry guns. If you see a police officer walking down the street, he usually isn't armed. But the ones that do carry guns carry big ones, fully-automatic assault rifles. These aren't particularly common, but you will see them around sensitive government sites like Downing St. and Parliament Square.
2) As the UK, like almost all of Europe, has abolished the death penalty, there doesn't seem to be an adequate punishment for the people who did this. Oh well.
Someone tried to blow up a night club about 100 yards from the NDLS building in London, but the plot was averted by alert and diligent emergency responders. Official reports are suggesting a major terror plot, as two cars filled with gasoline and nails and an accelerant were seized on site, and police manually defused them before they had a chance to go off. I'm sure other details will be forthcoming.
Haymarket, a street just across from school, was closed for most of the morning. The link above contains a GoogleMap, and the school building is located just off the southeast end of Haymarket, on Suffolk St.
Before anyone rejoices prematurely, know that I, like everyone else in London, am fine.
A while back there was a piece about how colonizing space is not really feasible. Distances are too great. But now there's a piece about how even contact with extraterrestrials is inadvisable. I think the former article makes the latter irrelevant.
If a message we recently beamed towards M13 will take approximately 25,000 years to get there. If anyone on the other end responds immediately, we won't find about about it until about AD 52,000, assuming there's still anyone around at that point.
But let's say there's someone in our immediate galactic neighborhood, say within 200LY. It'd still take 400 years for a round trip radio message, so we're looking at sometime around AD 2400. But what if instead of sending a reply they immediately launched a fleet of conquest? That probably won't get here for at least 4,000 years, and that's assuming they can achieve .1c pretty quickly. This, as established in the first link above, is really, really hard.
But what if they can travel faster than light? If they can do that, it doesn't really seem to matter whether or not they're friendly. We're toast either way. Breaking that barrier is theoretically possible, but all of the current exceptions involve such massive expenditures of energy that any culture capable of doing it would be so far ahead of us that we'd either be entirely uninteresting or the matter of a quick morning's conquest.
Eventually, it's all probably moot. We've been broadcasting radio into space for about sixty years, and the broadcast of specific intentional messages will more than likely get lost in the static. The sphere of space which is more-or-less saturated by terran radio signals is currently 120LY across.
Unless we have massive increases in our ability to produce and harness energy, space will never be a viable frontier. I'm in favor of occupying near-Earth orbits, the LaGrange points, and the moon, but anything else is probably just a bridge too far.
A few days ago, this story the net. It purports to be an analysis of the class divisions apparent in the ways that people join either Facebook or MySpace. The first time I read it something struck me as wrong about it, and given some time to mull it over I think I can put it into words.
First of all, "class" is no longer really a term that makes any sense in the American context. The author recognizes this, but uses the term for lack of a better one. I think "subculture" is probably a better term, and though her distinction between "hegemonic" and "subaltern" is quite clearly politically motivated, there doesn't seem to be a non-political way of making that distinction (though "mainstream" and "alternative" is perhaps less inflammatory). But as the author recognizes, the terms are not largely economic in nature and describe the as-of-yet intangible melange of lifestyle, race, educational background, economic status, etc. The division does seem to cut cleanly across gender lines though.
But even with that in mind, the author seems to read more into the social groupings here than is strictly necessary. It is true that the "good" kids seem to join Facebook while alternative types and Hispanics tend to join MySpace in greater numbers. The latter I believe can be explained with absolutely no commentary on any kind of class: Facebook is in English. It has no capability that I'm aware of to do business in Spanish. MySpace, on the other hand, is customizable to the n-th degree. Ergo someone who wants their website to be in Spanish is not going to be particularly well-served by Facebook.
A related technological fact explains why the "subalterns" are going to be more attracted to the customizability of MySpace. Facebook is not about presenting a creative website to the world. It's about using established, efficient, polished channels to make connections with people while providing a space to put various "vital" information about yourself online. Originally, there was very little customizability of any kind, simply informational blocks you could fill in. It's only very recently that the admins of Facebook opened up their API to third-party applications, and these have been embraced with varying degrees of enthusiasm. But even to the extent that they have been adopted they're largely ancillary to the purpose of Facebook, which is about connections, not about creativity and individuality. Facebook doesn't even let you change your background, let alone your typeface. As subalterns are pretty much by definition interested in this, they're going to be drawn to a site that provides that functionality.
Same goes for people who self-identify as "queer" or "goth" or make association with any other sub-culture a major part of their identity. Facebook offers the standard binary gender choices for self-identification. The "Interested In" box is the extent to which one's orientation can be indicated beyond that. Someone who thinks that the distinction between "gay" and "queer" is worth making a big deal about isn't going to find these options particularly useful. Facebook is about presenting information in pretty standard categories. If you want to make a choice not on the drop-down list, you have to go somewhere else.
But I'm not sure that the inclusion of "transgendered" or some such would make Facebook any more attractive to that particular community. Facebook isn't about expressing your individuality. It's about presenting information. It's a placeholder, not a work of creativity. It's intended to present specific information in as efficient a manner as possible. If you care enough about your particular sub-culture to find the lack of the option of your choice distressing, you aren't really looking for a glorified digital phonebook (which is almost certainly where they got the name). You're looking for a blog.
Given these facts, I'm not sure that the divisions the author notes are of any significance. All social networking sites are not created equal (anyone remember Friendster or Xanga? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?). This isn't necessarily an example of social groups segregating themselves, especially now that anyone can join Facebook who wants to. It's about users making more-or-less rational choices about which social networking sites provide the functionality which interests them, e.g. a band who wants to have their music playing in the background won't use Facebook, because that site doesn't let you do that.
Though the article has received attention from various parties, I don't think the basic premise is sound. The divisions are caused by technological artifact, not social stratification.
Never, ever exchange currency. If you're traveling overseas, just bring your credit/debit cards and do it that way. Currency exchange places knock about 5-10% off the exchange rate and charge you a fee. Using plastic costs you nothing beyond an ATM surcharge, or if it's direct from a merchant, nothing at all.
London is expensive, but it doesn't have to be unnecessarily so. I withdrew 50 pounds at Gatwick as soon as I hit the ground in the UK, and my bank account only took a $99.97 hit. This is as close to the precise exchange rate as makes no difference.
The introduction of a unified financial system in this way is a truly remarkable achievement. I deposited United States currency at an ATM in Hershey, PA on Saturday, and within 24 hours was withdrawing it in GBP several thousand miles away. The only reason it took that long is because I was actually in transit. If I'd beamed across... somehow... I could have made the withdrawal as soon as the funds hit my account.
Okay, I'm in London. Residing in a University of London undergraduate hall. London is fun, I'm looking forward to classes, etc.
The LAN here apparently filters out .torrent files. This is annoying. The protocol itself isn't blocked--using uTorrent with torrents I've already downloaded seems to work provided I turn encryption on. But actually getting the torrent files not so much.
There has got to be a workaround for this. I tried using a proxy, but that doesn't seem to work. It's not an IP or even a content filter: it seems to be blocking the transmission of anything ending in .torrent. If I could download to a remote location and send it via zip, that'd be easy, but there really does have to be a way of fooling this thing.
Any ideas?
UPDATE: Nevermind. They do actually filter the protocol. The next time I loaded by browser I got a restriction message. So much for that.
Media corporations and their copyright restrictions be damned.
Some interesting reading this morning, mostly by Clay Shirky. First is a review of The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture. It's less a review than Shirky's account of being on a panel discussion about the book. The book is a screed against the Internet and the freedoms and efficiencies it brings.
Shirky points out, as others have, that the Internet presents a fantastic improvement in the ability of people to freely speak, publish, and associate. This does two things. First, it enables people that we didn't necessarily want to speak, publish, or associate to do those things, like racists and pro-anorexia teenage girls. The Internet allows these people to find each other and distribute their ideology with few limitations. But if we actually care about freedom as such, this should be viewed as a necessary result of expanding freedom, not a reason for censorship. Second, it puts people who made money from inefficiences out of business. Just like medieval scribes were unemployed after the advent of moveable type, the Internet is threatening to unemploy people who made their living from publishing. It's just no longer necessary, and to the extent that it is, it's a commodity, not a premium service. The fact that culture is changing does not mean that it's being destroyed. Culture's change. It's what they do.
On that note are two essays written by Shirky in response to the paranoid neo-Luddite currently publishing the Encyclopedia Brittanica, entitled "'Old Revolutions Good, New Revolutions Bad'" and "The Siren Song of Luddism". In both he points out the inherent inconsistencies in arguments advanced by old media executives in a vain attempt to maintain their position as well-paid information gatekeepers. The invention of moveable type put scribes out of business. The Industrial Revolution put medieval weavers out of business. The railroads put canal owners out of business. And the Internet is putting publishers out of business. What they're selling is simply no longer valuable in that form. And yeah, paper really is terrible for storing information that is referenced but not actually read. There's no reason to pull out a fifteen pound dictionary and spend two minutes looking up the definition of a word when I can do exactly the same thing in three dictionaries in about ten seconds with electronic media. Ten minute research tasks take one minute online.
Then, on a related website, comes "The Bayesian Advantage of Youth" in which the author describes the advantage that people born after the invention of the PC have over people born before it. Which came first, the PC or the VCR? For people born in the 1980s, the answer is "Neither", because both were introduced either before we were born or before we were old enough to care. But for someone born in the 1970s or earlier, the answer is "the VCR", and thus because that technology was adopted first, it is instinctively viewed as more reliable and ordinary than these newfangled digital storage media. Money quote:
"IBM learned, from decades of experience, that competitive advantage lay in the hardware; Bill Gates had never had those experiences, and didn’t have to unlearn them. Jerry and David at Yahoo learned, after a few short years, that search was a commodity. Sergey and Larry never knew that. Mark Cuban learned that the infrastructure required for online video made the economics of web video look a lot like TV. That memo was never circulated at YouTube."
I'm hoping to get involved with the myriad legal issues this raises as dinosaurs are replaced by mammals in the information world. Though a lot of the technological change has already happened--and it's impossible to predict what changes are still in store, though I personally think the period of fastest technological change may be behind us--the social and legal implications of this are only now starting to become clear. And as legal institutions change only but slowly, there should be enough work to do to make a career or three.
Now if only I can land a job with such a firm...
There's a standoff brewing in New Hampshire between a crackpot [warning: craziness; warning: website not the most stable in the world] [funny personal note: I browsed to their site from a Department of Justice computer. That oughta freak 'em out.] "tax protestor" and federal agents. Ed and Elaine Brown currently owe over $1 million in back taxes dating to the late 1990s. The Browns refuse to acknowledge that the federal government can impose an income tax.
I'm currently working on a similar case in the Middle District of Penn., where some amateur wannabe lawyer is asserting that because he says he owes no income tax that the government is not permitted to determine whether or not he's correct. He also asserts that federal income taxation only applies to federal employees and people living in the District of Columbia or on federal enclaves. He is obviously incorrect, and the courts have consistently failed to dignify arguments such as this with a response. The arguments are simply summarily dismissed, as answering them might suggest that they possess even colorable merit. The fact that the Brown's aren't legally savvy enough to tell that Title 26, United States Code, Section 1 clearly imposes an income tax on all persons of all marital statuses and all estates/trusts, that isn't anyone's fault but their own.
I hope the Brown's don't kill anyone. I hope they aren't killed. Not because I think that they've got a case here, but because if they are there are hundreds of other crackpots that will view them as martyrs. I want them to be apprehended, indicted, tried, and convicted. They'll probably refuse legal counsel, as no lawyer who remains a member in good standing of any legal bar can present arguments such as theirs without either cracking up laughing or committing major ethics violations.
I've just come from the magistrate courtroom after a morning spent there. Most of the morning was spent watching a series of initial appearances/arraignments. The last half-hour or so was at a hearing for a pro se motion to return property.
What an experience.
About ten people were indicted today. Two of them were white. One of them was female. A plurality were black, with the rest Hispanic. Most indictments involved drugs and/or firearms. About half of the defendants were detained prior to their trial as a flight risk and danger to the community. The statutory maximum penalties for the offenses were generally ten years and $250,000.
Watching this was actually pretty difficult. First of all, it's extraordinarily unlikely that the defendants will be given the statutory maximum. The Federal Sentencing Guidelines rarely include the statutory maximum in their sentencing range. It's entirely impossible that any of the defendants will ever be able to pay anything close to the maximum penalty, even though two of them were involved in drug deals in excess of $10,000. Why does the law impose penalties that are never actually meted out?
Furthermore, what's the rationale for locking someone up for ten, twenty, thirty years for an offense that took twenty seconds to commit? How is that making the punishment fit the crime? Does the simple fact that we have the largest prison system in the world really mean that incarceration is just or even a good idea? I seriously believe that if any of these people are convicted--they all pled "Not Guilty" for what it's worth--it would be better for everyone involved to simply string them up, administer ten or twenty lashes, and turn them loose. No massive expenditures for feeding and housing them, no prolonged legal procedures, and more importantly, no destruction of their lives. You get twenty from the cat and your life sucks for a few months, but you're still living. You get twenty in the pen and everything you knew is gone.
I don't want to do this. My experience at the Department of Justice has been incredibly instructive, and the opportunity to draft a brief for the 3d Circuit is something I will always be glad to have done. But I don't want to be involved in criminal law anymore. I suspected this going into it, but I know it for a fact now.
Charlie Kaufmann's upcoming flick, Synecdoche, New York, is slated to star Phillip Seymour Hoffmann.
Awesome.
There's a good piece on AdBusters (perhaps the most self-defeating publication on the planet) about the victim complex of the American Left. Though it does get some of its critiques right on the money, it's also guilty of engaging in the same kinds of behavior that it criticizes, particularly in its assessment of the state of the media.
I think a truly honest assessment of right-wing talk radio's criticisms of the left isn't that they're representative of a corporatocratic conspiracy but that they're 1) largely accurate, and 2) indicitive of the way that a huge swath of the American public perceives the left, whether or not it's accurate.
Money quote:
"The sad truth is that if the FBI really is following anyone on the American left, it is engaging in a huge waste of time and personnel. No matter what it claims for a self-image, in reality it’s the saddest collection of cowering, ineffectual ninnies ever assembled under one banner on God’s green earth. And its ugly little secret is that it really doesn’t mind being in the position it’s in – politically irrelevant and permanently relegated to the sidelines, tucked into its cozy little cottage industry of polysyllabic, ivory tower criticism. When you get right down to it, the American left is basically just a noisy Upper West side cocktail party for the college-graduate class.
And we all know it. The question is, when will we finally admit it?"
Al Sharpton is probably right about this one. I mean, I don't necessarily want to go the same direction he does with it, but it looks really bad.
UPDATE: She's back in jail. The judge was Not Amused that she'd been released. Her attorney had said that he'd file papers specifying what the undisclosed "medical condition" is that allegedly motivated the sheriff to release her in the first place.
I'm wondering if that "condition" didn't have to do with green in the sheriff's palm.
In an absolutely hilarious turn of events, a Canadian DRM vendor is suing Sony over... AACS, the latest failed attempt to keep consumers from their media. The complaint? AACS violates Certicom patents.
We've reached some kind of tipping point when IP laws start implicating IP obfuscation protection schemes. It's also quite delightful to think that corporations that are absolutely paranoid about anyone else actually being able to use their media don't seem to mind infringing on other people's IP when it suits them.
Some idiot in Fredericksburg is suggesting that we bring back Prohibition.
Say what?
No, he's apparently serious. He says that if we're serious about being a "drug-free culture" we should ban alcohol as well, and makes a swipe at tobacco in the last line.
At first glance, it's hard to fault the logic there--there is no real category distinction between pot and booze--but the logic runs both ways. If we're serious about being a drug-free culture, then we should ban alcohol. We don't ban alcohol. Therefore, we aren't serious about being a drug-free culture. QED.
It's also worth mentioning that there's kind of a series of constitutional amendments about that. We tried Prohibition for, what, fourteen years? And what did we get? Organized crime and the Kennedy family (though perhaps that's redundant). The current "War on Drugs" began almost forty years ago, and that's worked wonderfully.