Where I’m @

20030228

We’re not sure whether to be happy or not that someone was stealing an image from us. It appears that it was found via Google Images, so it’s not like the thief reads us regularly. And that goes double, since the thief in question is a radical right-wing site. However, we have dealt with it in a way that amuses us (rather than using any of Tim’s highly valuable suggestions) and await our no doubt inevitable apology.

20030227

This’ll cheer you up

If you’re having a hard time dealing with the loss of Fred Rogers, as we are, perhaps seeing a (finally) subtitled version of the Kikkoman video will help.

Via, of all places, Dave Barry’s blog. (Psst . . . Dave! Your stylesheet needs help. Ring us up.)

Farewell

He was such an important part of our life when we were young. We used to see him every day after school, and only missed him when there was an overriding concern, or when we had disobeyed our parents (such as when we went to Kevin Jackson’s house after school and watched cartoons all afternoon). We soon thought that we were too old for him, though, and stopped seeing him. It wasn’t a conscious decision, and he took it like the mature and wise adult that he was. He knew that he had made the impression on us that he had intended, and knew or maybe just hoped that he had taught us valuable lessons that we would remember later in life. Indeed, we later looked back with a fondness on time spent with him, and considered that if we ever had children they too would get the opportunity to enjoy and learn from him. Alas, that is not to be, as Fred Rogers has died.

20030225

Marko Karppinen has published the results of his annual survey of World Wide Web Coalition member sites’ web standards compliance, and as in the last two years, the results are poor but spinnable. (Well, two years ago, it was hard to even spin the results into something other than burlap string.)

Our maternal blood uncle is a bit of a geek (nice to know this fascination of ours doesn’t come from nowhere) and was on a standards committee of some sort several years ago. In a discussion about web standards we once had, he said, essentially, that most of the big companies on these standards committees have little interest in full and real implementation of new standards. They see standards as holding them back. The longer they can dither at the meeting table, the longer they delay approving the standards (or—extrapolation—the more they push the standards into the realm of the theoretical; we’re looking at you, XHTML 2), the more they can work on obtaining their market share by hook or by crook. Once they obtain market dominance, their way of doing things becomes the standard.

Case in point: innerHTML. IE used this for many years, and it was indeed a useful property for DHTML work; now it’s been accepted by Mozilla despite that browser’s otherwise close hewing to standards. However, it does not semantically fit with the way web standards are going. If standards are created with the idea that they will still be valid in 50 years, we would ask, “Who will be using HTML in 50 years?” Maybe XML, maybe some other markup language that can benefit from a property that translates into “the content between the delimiters”, but not necessarily HTML at all.

20030218

A few days late and several dollars short, my post about the five questions from the pro-war folks in the Great Cross-Blog War Debate:

1) If you were President of the United States, what would be your policy toward Iraq over the next year? What advantages and disadvantages do you see in your proposed policies versus the current path being pursued by the Bush administration?

To essentialize: The policy toward Iraq would be to isolate it truly, to encourage internal rebellion, and — paradoxically — to draw it into cooperative relationships with the world community. From where we stand, history suggests that the best participants are converts, not conscripts. As for advantages and disadvantages: The primary advantage would be that America’ stature as a world power would become predicated on butter, not guns and would therefore endure. The primary disadvantages are a) that the American people are not known for their patience and b) elections are coming in aught-four and politicians want electability, not sound policy.

2) Is there any circumstance that you can conceive of where the United States would be justified in using military force without the support of the UN Security Council — or does the UN always have a veto against US military action for whatever reason?

The United Nations have a veto over military action by one of its member states when that action requires the consent of the other states. Circular? Absolutely. But as we understand it, the UN Charter guarantees every nation the right to self-defense without the consent of the other states. While the best defense may be a good offense, shooting a trespasser is not really self-defense.

3) American and British military force has allowed Northern Iraq to develop a society which, while imperfect, is clearly a freer and more open society than existed under Saddam Hussein's direct rule. Do you agree that the no-fly zones have been beneficial to Northern Iraq — and if so, why should this concept not be extended to remove Hussein's regime entirely and spread those freedoms to all Iraqis?

Let’s accept the premise for the sake of argument (also because we do not have the knowledge to argue it). If the no-fly zones have be beneficial to the population of northern Iraq, that would seem to be a pretty good argument for containment rather than for blazing a path to Baghdad like Sherman to Atlanta. It could also be a good argument for slowly expanding the no-fly zones (not that we are for that action, but it’s more logical). Should the Iraquis be free? Sure. Is freedom good? Sure? But the U.S. is not currently in the business of liberating people for liberation’s sake, if it ever was. This argument is a bit like states’ rights: It’s not necessarily being used disingenuously, but we’ve never heard it used as the real reason.

4) Do you believe an inspection and sanctions regime is sufficient and capable of keeping weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of the Hussein regime — and should this be a goal of U.S. policy? In what way is an inspection/containment/sanctions regime preferable to invasion? Civilian casualties? Expense? Geopolitical outcome?

Part the first: We don't believe that inspections and sanctions will keep WMD, to use the current hip abbreviation, out of Saddam's hands. Unless the United States is willing to remove its own WMD, we don't think that it's even really a worthwhile goal. If MAD prevented war between the Soviet Union and the United States, how is it that it won’t prevent war between any other two countries?
Part the second: Inspections et al. are better than war in all the ways that peace is better than war, plus it is the only course of action that has been agreed upon multilaterally. Further, we get to devote more of our resources on improving the domestic economy and preventing terrorism before it happens.

5) What, in your opinion, is the source of national sovereignty? If you believe it to be the consent of the governed, should liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein's regime be U.S. policy? If so, how do you propose to accomplish this goal absent military action? (And if in your view the sovereignty of a state does not derive from the consent of the governed, then what is the source of sovereignty?)

National sovereignity is the recognition of a nation-state by the international community. Where is Tibet and what is it? How about Puerto Rico (whose citizens are U.S. citizens but can not vote for their president)? To suggest that the United States is in this war for the purpose of liberating the inhabitants of Iraq bespeaks a naivete on the level of thinking that the Civil War was fought to liberate the slaves. Emancipation was and liberation will/would be either a nice side effect or a means of successfully prosecuting the war, nothing else. This is the only question that we are going to more or less dismiss, since it clearly is designed only to put the alleged bleeding-hearts of the anti-war faction into a tizzy.

Outside of all that, let us be clear: We are in favor of the Bill of Rights and the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man being extended to all peoples everywhere. Heck, we’re in favor of the United States minimum wage being extended to everyone everywhere, too. But there has to be some consistency in our international stand, some respect for the world community that we have agreed to respect, and some political thinking that goes beyond the next election.

20030210

As happens often, Mark Pilgrim succinctly encapsulates (if that’s not redundant) a complex issue. This time, he reports on Clay Shirky’s piece titled “Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality”. Pilgrim’s summation is more or less the reason we persist in writing Bleahh. We’re still in the realm of possibility, since we have not made friends through this blog with whom we could have lunch, and we’re not particularly looking for that. However, we do get people who read occasionally, and if a preexisting friend with whom we don’t communicate much gets to keep up on our life through this means, so much the better. As well, like so many things, it’s worth doing for the doing, not necessarily for the rewards it does or does not bring.

Coming back to the original piece: We would like to see, in the interest of egalitarianism, a refutation of the Shirky piece or at least a constructive argument against all or some of it.

20030203

Since you just really needed something to kill more time while at work, or while unemployed, or suchlike, Activision’s Pitfall has been ported to Shockwave. Ye gods! (Thanx to the ever-inspiring Coudal)