The Substantially Similar Weblog

I just received this note from Topica:

In an effort to continue to provide our discussion list service at no charge to list owners and subscribers, Topica will shortly be introducing short text advertisements to be featured with some of the the discussion list messages.
[…]

(featured???)

Fortunately, I’ve moved all of the mailing lists I administer over to mailman running on my own server over the last few years. But that still leaves all the Topica lists I’m subscribed to, over which I have no control.

People’s eyes often glaze over when I try to explain why Hotmail and Topica aren’t really “free.” The typical response: “Well, I’m not paying for it. It’s free. Like television.”

How much junk can they force down people’s throats before they finally see that “free” is not “free”? Even setting aside the whole “free beer” vs. “free speech” distinction, isn’t our time and attention itself worth something in monetary terms (i.e., “beer”)?

And what about the fact that we have no say over what changes these services will implement in the future? You get stuck with your “free” email address and your “free” email lists, and there are substantial costs involved in moving to a new service, particularly when your free service tries to make it difficult to switch out (i.e., neither Hotmail nor Yahoo! mail allow you to automatically forward your email to a new address, although GNU/Linux utilities exist that can grab the messages for you—gotmail, YahooPOPs!, FetchYahoo!).

As more and more “free” sites put time consuming and annoying obstacles between us and the services we’re trying to access, I’m hoping people will start to think about “very cheap” as a good alternative to “fake free.” I can provide mailing list services to people at nearly no cost, and I’m involved with a group that’s scaling up for a colocated server that promises to provide storage and bandwidth to friends (and friends of friends) for pennies a month (no profit for us). I’d rather pay 25 cents any day than face the barrage of garbage hotmail and similar sites provide as a condition of getting their free services.

Critical theorist and science philosopher/sociologist Bruno Latour· has a fascinating article in Critical Inquiry·, Why has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern· (alternate version from Latour’s website·).

I was quite influenced by Latour’s book, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society·. Science in Action is a powerful critique of the concept of scientific truth/consensus as such. When I read Science in Action (towards the end of my undergraduate chemistry degree), it confirmed when I had begun to suspect: the general direction of science and widespread acceptance of scientific truth is largely socially constructed. Latour articulated a persuasive narrative of science that I had felt intuitively but not yet been able to fully develop in words myself.

Now, Latour once again puts his finger on a changed problem: “critique” has become so successful that it has become a tool to destroy truth rather than elucidate it. Latour suggests, like old army generals, we (critical theorists) might still be fighting the last war while our cause goes down in flames. Latour writes about the right wing’s success in muddying the waters with respect to global warming science:

Do you see why I am worried? I myself have spent some time in the past trying to show “the lack of scientific certainty” inherent in the construction of facts. I too made it a “primary issue.” But I did not exactly aim at fooling the public by obscuring the certainty of a closed argumentor did I? After all, I have been accused of just that sin. Still, I’d like to believe that, on the contrary, I intended to emancipate the public from prematurely naturalized objectified facts. Was I foolishly mistaken? Have things changed so fast?
In which case the danger would no longer be coming from an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of factas we have learned to combat so efficiently in the pastbut from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases! While we spent years trying to detect the real prejudices hidden behind the appearance of objective statements, do we now have to reveal the real objective and incontrovertible facts hidden behind the illusion of prejudices? And yet entire Ph.D. programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives. Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies? Is it enough to say that we did not really mean what we said? Why does it burn my tongue to say that global warming is a fact whether you like it or not? Why can’t I simply say that the argument is closed for good?

(too bad blosxom, my weblog software, doesn’t support multiple categories—this should obviously be filed in culture and politics.)

According to several knowledgeable sources interviewed by Democracy Now!·, Jean-Bertrand Aristide did not resign but was abducted by American forces as part of a coup d’etat. This is a very different version of the events than that offered, for example, by the New York Times:

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Feb. 29 President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the slum priest who became his country’s first democratically elected president, resigned today under intense pressure from the United States and the threat of an invasion of the capital by armed insurgents, fleeing by jet at dawn under heavy American guard.

You can download the whole show in ogg vorbis format or as a larger mp3 file. Whether or not you agree with Aristide’s lawyer, friend, and Congressmember Maxine Waters (D-CA), this version of the story needs to be more widely disseminated. It’s our duty as citizens of the blogosphere to correct these sorts of omissions and inaccuracies in the mainstream media.

Via Steve: you’ve got to see this advertisement—I feel great. I don’t quite know where it came from or whether it was actually created for real use. If you like that one, check out the Pinata Ad as well.

I expect these links will be making quick rounds of the blogosphere. A Google search on turnpikefilms turns up very little at the moment (only 117 results, most of which are “meta” type content). Let’s check back again in a week.

I’m just finishing studying for my penultimate law school exam ever (my last one is on Thursday), and I realized what makes a law school class great.

A great law school class doesn’t try to cram all of the doctrine from a particular area of the law down your throat. There’s no way you’re going to remember all the rules and details anyway. For many attorneys, much of their real work is legal research. As long as you know the general contours of the rules and where to look, you should be fine.

Instead, a great law school class has a small set of themes, and it attempts to show how those themes run throughout the cases you study. Those themes should be in tension with each other, and there should be instances where a given theme is, itself, self-contradictory. The class should show you how those themes developed historically, and the general “momentum” of the law at present, so you might be able to predict how a court will decide an as-yet undecided issue.

The course should push you to explore those tensions, because that’s exactly where there is an opportunity for creative lawyering.

Karl Klare·, who teaches advanced labor law, presents precisely that kind of course. I wish all law school classes could have been this good.

You might get a little bit of a sense of the course from my class notes, which I put online along with notes from almost every other law school class I’ve taken.

Today is Grey Tuesday·, a protest against the negative impacts of copyright law on artists. Unfortunately, I’m in my last set of final exams and haven’t even had time to make my site grey or post the MP3s. Steve·, however, has a nice little piece and links explaining the whole business·. See also Larry Lessig’s· The Black and White about Grey Tuesday·.

After eight months, I finally completed the Debian New Maintainer process a few minutes ago. I am now ajkessel@debian.org, at least for Debian purposes. I once asked an employer who took 6 months to hire me whether they did hiring by attrition. I think Debian might have a similar process, but it’s probably the only way to weed out people who won’t be sufficiently committed to the project.

Brian McGroarty· (who has a very sparse web page) writes on Linux-Elitists·: Microsoft goes after Linux kernel downloaders?·.

In the wake of the recent accidental leak of the Microsoft Windows Source Code to the Internet·, McGroarty started a BitTorrent· torrent entitled “Kernel source here,” serving up the Linux Kernel·. McGroarty writes:

Imagine my surprise when my DSL stops working this morning, I call my provider, and I learn that I’ve been accused of copyright infringement.
[…]
Now, admittedly I was just asking for it by hinting at something that might offend the big giant. Still, it took them three or four days to issue this letter. In the meantime, shouldn’t they have been able to find someone capable of cracking open a .tar.bz2? Did nobody raise the question of how a leaked CD fits into a 32m file?

Microsoft must be using batch “take down” tactics, similar to the recording industry. You’d think they’d be clever enough to devise a script that could differentiate actual copies of its leaked source code from things that are totally unrelated. Crying wolf could have predictable consequences.

If people really want to make things hard for Microsoft, they would post articles and files all over the Internet entitled “kernel source here.”

DJ Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album· is great. Get it while its available, and spread the word.

Also check out the New Yorker· story on the making of the album: The Mouse That Remixed. Also, from EMI stomps Grey Album·:

So why did EMI yesterday demand that the handful of stores that were selling the album destroy it, and send Cease and Desist letters to Danger Mouse?
…
EMI rigidly controls all Beatles sound recordings for Capitol Records. Sony Music/ATV Publishing controls the publishing side. And both are, of course, founding members of Big Music whose avowed purpose in life is to make sure all music ‘products’ are the sole property of its members.

It’s good to see such a salient conflict between copyright and creativity. The more frequently this occurs, the harder it is to ignore the fact that copyright law so frequently works against its original purpose.

The Marriott Hotel in Manhattan Beach, California provides a host of services through the television in the rooms. These include “movies on demand” at $14 a pop and Sony Playstation 2 for $8 per hour. I can’t imagine anyone paying that much for Playstation unless: (1) someone else is paying their costs (business travellers); (2) their kids are driving them crazy; or (3) money is no object. It’s incredibly frustrating to be charged an amount totally unrelated to the marginal cost of providing a service, but maybe Marriott enjoys a price-insensitive clientele.

My favorite part was when I tried to use the wireless keyboard to access the menu of services. I got the following message:

A required DLL was not found: FILTERS.DLL was not found.

The wireless keyboard provided no way to cancel the error message. In fact, there was no way to make any selections on the menu in the background. All you could do was look at this clever Microsoft error message.

You would think that a simple “black box” type program like a menu of services served over a television would be pretty rock solid. But not when the television server is running Windows NT!