Lessig has posted the opinions in Eldred vs. Ashcroft. Here’s the majority decision, here’s Stevens’ dissent, and here’s Breyer’s dissent.
Population: One
Lessig reports that the Supreme Court has rejected the Eldred challenge to the Sonny Bono law, 7-2. John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer dissented. More details as this develops.
The blogosphere is all excited about moblogging, which I guess is the neologism for mobile blogging. I am too, actually. Mobile blogging is cool.
But I had another thought, which I think was triggered while I was driving around with my brother looking at all the pretty 802.11b networks the other day. What about a non-mobile collaborative blog? What if I stuck a wireless access point somewhere in Harvard Square, and set up a weblog for people using the access point, and only let people post to it if they were coming from the access point’s IP?
That’d be pretty keen. It’d be an ad-hoc collaboration, but it would be tied together by a given community. I’d love to see all the variations on how people perceived the Square (or wherever this was located). You’d probably want to set up a web proxy, so that you could display a little info about the weblog to anyone using it. Otherwise people would never figure out that they could post. It’d be neat if you could do a sidebar with some information on the people using it, but I can’t think of anything that wouldn’t be somewhat invasive of privacy. “Last Ten Mobile Google Searches?” Maybe, maybe.
They say you can’t solve social problems with software, but I believe that you can shape social interactions with technology.
Another interesting DoD briefing yesterday, this one on the all-volunteer armed forces. Obviously, this was prompted by Rangel’s draft proposal. Worth reading, for some interesting statistics.
The most interesting point is that black Americans join the military in a proportion roughly equivalent to the proportion of blacks in society as a whole; the 30% number we’ve heard a lot about is due to the fact that blacks tend to remain in the military at a higher rate than do other ethnicities. Seems to me that the question to ask, therefore, is not “why are there so many black people in the military” but “why is the military such a superior alternative to the rest of society in so many cases?” Maybe it’s something the military is doing; maybe the rest of society just sucks harder. Probably a combination of both. I’d like to see more investigation of this, in any case; I bet there’s something to be learned there.
Also of interest: “Now, college graduate or higher, 22 percent of our enlisted recruits — this goes directly to some of the issues Mr. Rangel is raising, have a father who has a college degree or more, versus 30 percent of the recruit age population. And I’m quite confident once we add the officers in, you’ll see those numbers — that gap between those numbers close. Bottom line, look at this classic measure of socioeconomic status, and enlisted recruits alone, before we even add the officers in, don’t look all that different from the recruit-age population at large.” Actually, a 25% difference does look pretty different to me.
“Now, in terms of median income, for whites — now again, this is enlisted versus – and this is against the entire civilian population, so it’s not quite the right comparison. But for whites, the median total gross household income in 1999 for our enlisted population was about $33,500, versus $44,400 for the civilian population.” Again, pretty substantial difference. This is without the officers included in the figures, though, which as he mentions is important for this comparison. Hopefully they’ll get those figures out soon.
Actually, it occurs to me that since the book has been announced, there’s nothing stopping me from saying “Hey, look at this, I wrote part of it.” So there you are.
Yes, I am a diehard wrestling fan. I have an old LJ post about this which I think I will dig up soon.
A little teaser for the next Special Delivery, although actually, this is the image from the second one that I mentioned. It’s linked to the entire page.
Entries were kinda light over the last few days because I was finishing up my zombies. (No kidding.) They will be light the next few days because I’m starting a new job. (Yay!) But no fear, I’ll be back.
After failing to get to the theater in time to see Catch Me If You Can, my brother and I settled on Narc. It was really good; Joe Carnahan, the director, wanted to make a 70s cop movie and he succeeded.
The plot’s complex enough to be interesting and not entirely obvious, but not so unwieldy that it gets in the way of either the psychological tension or the action. I was a little worried that it would veer into a moralistic frenzy, always a danger in a movie that has so much to do with drugs, but nope. The acting’s excellent. Ray Liotta put on thirty pounds to play his role and it worked perfectly.
The directing — I said before that it was a 70s cop movie, but actually it’s not. It’s more as if Hollywood had been refining and developing the 70s cop movie ever since. Carnahan has a big bag of cinematographic tricks, and uses them with skill. There’s one exceedingly eloquent split screen moment that I won’t spoil, but it took my breath away. Confident and daring work.
Recommendation: see it before it vanishes from theaters.
The Instapundit comes out in favor of racial internments: “The wrongfulness in the World War Two internments, after all, wasn’t that they happened, but that they were unjustified. Had significant numbers of American citizens of Japanese descent actually been working for the enemy, the internments would have been a regrettable necessity rather than an outrageous injustice.” He also quotes reader email, which includes the sentence, “The citizen/alien line—so crucial to the wrongfulness of the Japanese American internment—has now been breached.”
Two things. First off, said reader email also includes the comment “And we often hear that there was not a single documented incident of pro-Axis subversive activity by an American citizen of Japanese ancestry during the war. (As it happens, this is not quite true, but it’s very close to true.)” But then he goes on to claim that a single incident of pro-Al Qaeda subversive activity by an American citizen of Arab ancestry would —
Well, let’s face it. He’s saying that this breaches a line which is crucial to wrongfulness of mass Arab American internment. Is it the only line, in his mind? I dunno, he doesn’t clarify. I would certainly like to know.
So, OK. But it still doesn’t scan. We’ve got one documented example of subversive Arab American activity. He acknowledges that there were few (but at least one) incident of subversive Japanese American activity during WW II, but those incidents did not justify the internments. Why does this one cross the line, while those did not?
Second, and I must acknowledge the reader for making this clear, it’s still bogus. The email makes this clear; Professor Reynolds skips past that in his response. We’re Americans, damn it. We do not sign away the freedoms of some of our citizens in order to gain greater safety for the remainder. Is this somehow unclear? It’s not about being safe. It’s about maintaining our basic values.
Would you meekly submit to internment, knowing you were not a criminal, and also knowing that some small subset of American citizens sharing your ancestry were? If not, why would you expect anyone else to do so?
Since I’ve been boosting the Sidekick excitedly for the last few days, I ought to let people know about a caveat. If you use Keyguard mode, sometimes incoming calls won’t ring, which means you’ll miss the call unless you happen to be looking at the screen when the call comes in. (Keyguard mode automatically locks the screen after a given period of inactivity, to prevent accidental calls.) If you turn Keyguard mode off, no problems.
Danger and T-Mobile both acknowledge the problem; at the message board above, tony is from Danger and morpheus is from T-Mobile. There’s reportedly a fix in beta, but no release date yet.