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Month: February 2004

Passionate spam

February 9, 2004
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I got three comments (on the same entry) in my Livejournal mirror encouraging me to go see The Passion of the Christ. This does not, in fact, convince me to adopt the recommended course of action.

This is pretty much the sort of thing that I anticipated: I don’t think Mel Gibson set out to make a dangerous movie, but I thought that it was the kind of movie that would encourage poor behavior unless he took counterbalancing steps. Spam comments aren’t dangerous, but they do show a distinct disregard for social mores. I expect more of the same, and possibly darker actions. Call me a cynic.

(Anonymous comments are still enabled over there, and I still don’t track IP addresses there, but I do screen anonymous comments. I won’t screen anything but spam.)

The next nominee

February 9, 2004
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Kerry has a 23 point lead in Virginia polls and a 24 point lead in Tennessee polls. Edwards needed to win those states, and it’s looking very unlikely.

Kerry also has a fairly commanding lead in the latest polls out of Wisconsin. There’s still a chance someone could turn it around there, but it’s unlikely.

Kings of smarm

February 9, 2004
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Last week’s Apprentice was intensely dull, so I’m only just now getting around to writing about it. Executive summary:

Sex still sells and the women are still using it. The contestants are stuck in the mode of individual achievement these days; they can’t stop running around long enough to delegate to non-contestants. Nick used some pretty good tactics to buy himself an out, and they worked. Bowie got kicked out for no good reason. Omarosa is smart enough to turn people around and get them to like her in one week flat.

This week’s, which I haven’t watched yet, scrambled the teams.

The bar has been set

February 8, 2004
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President Bush says, regarding his National Guard service in Alabama:

 There may be no evidence, but I did report; otherwise, I wouldn’t have been honorably discharged.  In other words, you don’t just say “I did something” without there being verification.  Military doesn’t work that way.  I got an honorable discharge, and I did show up in Alabama.

This really simplifies the question. It’s not about the honorable discharge, or whether or not it was OK to miss some service as long as you got the OK from your CO, or any of that. It’s about whether or not he showed up in Alabama. This isn’t a matter of missing documentation, either; it’s about documents which show no service in Alabama in 1972.

Character WISH

February 6, 2004
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This week’s Game WISH asks:

What are your characters’ mottoes, in ten words or less? Quotes and formal mottoes encouraged.

That’s fun! In no particular order:

Paul/Emoticon: For God, France, and humanity.

Reese: It’s all about the roads.

Mr. Wellstone: Fame follows fashion.

Cian: One must always journey to find wisdom.

Stick: Break dimensions, go to jail.

Clarice: Hail Britannia!

Constantine: Friends and family; blood and bone.

Jayson: Fortune follows.

(That last is a bit of a cheat, being my own family motto. But I like it.)

The record says

February 5, 2004
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So, how’d I do on predictions?

Arizona
I said it’d go Kerry, Clark, Dean in that order. It did.

Missouri
I said Kerry, Edwards, Dean. Yep.

Oklahoma
I said it’d go Clark, Edwards, and Kerry in a tight race. (Polls had Kerry ahead of Edwards for second.) Yep again.

South Carolina
Edwards won it pulling away, as per prediction.

Delaware
I said Lieberman would come in second to Kerry and then quit; I was right but only by a couple of hundred votes. Edwards nearly beat him. Lieberman did quit.

North Dakota
I said it’d be Kerry, then Clark, then Edwards. Dean beat Edwards for third.

New Mexico
I had Kerry beating Dean by only a few percentage points. I missed. Kerry beat Clark by 21 percentage points.

So not too bad. It wasn’t actually hard or anything; I just looked at the polls and then adjusted for the Edwards bounce. Everyone missed Edwards in Iowa and New Hampshire, so I figured they’d miss him again this time, and I was right. Anyone can be a fairly accurate political prognosticator without too much effort.

Time and again

February 5, 2004
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Cory Doctorow’s Eastern Standard Tribe is out. He’s made it available on the Web under a Creative Commons license again, so you can always download it and read it if you aren’t sure about buying it in the store.

This one didn’t work so well for me. As an extrapolation of current cultural trends, I can’t make it dovetail. Doctorow gets the tribal aspect of Internet culture right — we do form tribes across the time zones, driven by our own interests — but I’ve never ever seen a tribe form around a specific time zone. In fact, part of the attraction of the Internet tribe is the knowledge that whenever you log onto the MUD — hit the IRC channel — visit the bulletin board — fire up AIM — whatever — someone will be there. Part of the attraction is that the Internet is always on. Time is irrelevant.

And the tech sucks. One of the McGuffin ideas is broken; one of the character plans to make a fortune from a scheme in which people with more than 10,000 songs on their car MP3 player get to skip tolls. Doctorow loves redistribution of information, which I appreciate, because I do too. However, incentivizing heavy file sharers does not magically pay for itself. Rather, it costs you money because people move towards the behavior which you’re rewarding.

Now, you can fix this by changing the threshold from a fixed number to a percentage; the top 5% by the number of songs shared metric get a free ride on the Mass Pike. But I don’t want to rant endlessly about a single technical point. I want to observe that Doctorow is letting his passions and his technical fondness take over his actual story. He wants extrapolations to say a certain thing, so he writes them that way. Eastern Standard Tribe veers too far towards polemic.