I hesitated before putting this on the public Internets, but now that I’ve allowed it to be posted up on Flickr and on the False Profit site, there’s no longer any reason for the pretense of chastity:

It’s my submission to the EFF’s project, stopthespying.org. They are hoping to pressure Congress into throwing out legislation that will give telcos immunity for having colluded with the Bush administration in warrantless wiretapping of American citizens.

Is putting half-naked pictures of yourself on the Internet a good idea, even if it’s for a good cause? You tell me.

I’m curious about the details, but the peace conference in Goma has supposedly borne some fruit:

Government negotiators and rebel groups reached a deal to end fighting in the vast country’s restive east, where some 800,000 people had to flee their homes over the last year, officials said Monday.

All parties agreed to the accord and scheduled a formal signing for Tuesday, Vital Kamerhe, the president of Congo’s national assembly, announced.

The devil is in the details. This is a conflict over resources as much as it is over ethnic affiliations. Frankly, I’m surprised to see all parties agreeing on anything after just a week of negotiations.

I had good conversations with friends, last weekend. I think most are tuned into what Obama could do for our country. I think I may have even won a handful of people over.

Obama’s got a shot. He does. But as easily as I can imagine him taking the presidency, I can just as easily imagine the crushing disappointment of seeing Clinton standing up there; the last eight years have conditioned me for disappointment.

Clinton could be a perfectly competent president, but Obama could be a great one. As Devon puts it, we’ll all be kicking ourselves if history passes us by by just a few percentage points.

I’ve donated a few hundred dollars to Obama’s campaign, in the past, but today I donated many, many more. South Carolina is coming up. Super Tuesday is coming up. Now is the time.

About a dozen of us got together to discuss CA ballot measures that will be voted on on February 5th. I typed up some rough notes that are after the jump. Anyone who was there should feel free to email me comments or addenda.

We also discussed a local measure for Los Angeles and the Democratic nominees, but I didn’t keep notes on those.

Read the rest of this entry »

Instructables user GorillazMiko is… I don’t know what to say. He’s awesome. He’s on the site almost all the time, reporting bugs, putting encouraging comments on every new Instructable that gets posted (that can be up to a hundred, some days), and making cool ones, himself.

He does all this, and he’s 13 years old. He’s trying to get his parents to bring him to the office, the next time they have a family vacation in San Francisco. His parents must be a little confused as to why their son wants to visit some company while they’re on vacation.

In any case, he really topped himself, today, by painstakingly sketching out his suggestions for a redesign of our front page:

It is so. Effing. Cute. Plus, there are some fun ideas, here, like using the robot as an icon for help. For reference, here’s what the site currently looks like:

He wins, Big. Check out his profile, here.

Fun (click through to see the whole site):

I first heard about Hasbro’s tight grip over IP surrounding the Scrabble board game about a year ago, when they sent Instructables a nastygram over this Instructable:

Well, they’re in the news once again as they’re now going after the immensely popular Scrabulous application on Facebook (the text of that nastygram is here.) I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that Hasbro has decent legal protection around Scrabble, including copyright and trademark, though its patent on part of the game board expired in 1970, which weakens its position somewhat. A fairly thorough treatment of Hasbro’s claims over Scrabble can be found here.

Many, many people (including me) are sad to see this happen. There’s even a Facebook Group now, where Scrabulous users are coordinating letter-writing campaigns to Hasbro. If it’s any reassurance, though, I think it’s possible that Scrabulous will be able to work out a deal with Hasbro. For Hasbro, the lawsuit may simply be negotiating leverage; if the law is on their side, then they’ll be able to take over Scrabulous and all of its users for a pittance.

So, we may have Scrabulous (or a similarly-branded app) for the years to come. It’s mostly sad for the developers of Scrabulous, who have put a lot of sweat into making it great (which, as a little web application, it really is great.) They’ve taken in some advertising revenue, but they’re likely to get raped in this deal. I do wonder on the other hand if some of their online innovations (keeping a particular letter selected on a blank tile, Facebook-specific features around inviting friends to play/chatting, etc.) could be protected. Can innovations in a derivative, infringing work still be copyrighted or patented? I hope those guys have some leverage…

In this case of the Scrabble Instructable (it was a way to print out a compact, travel-sized Scrabble game on a single sheet of paper), the author voluntarily removed the Instructable to avoid any trouble, so Hasbro’s claims weren’t tested.

A few posts back, I linked to a blogger who was protesting an author’s grim characterization of the DRC. The author responded, and the two have had an interesting exchange. Says the author (Rory) of the original book review:

I am sorry if my review of Tim Butcher’s Blood River has upset some DRC residents. I am no Congo expert, but I understand that life in much of the country can be very grim. The Lancet reports that 1,200 people die in the Congo each day through civil unrest. By comparison, post-Saddam Iraq and post-Taliban Afghanistan do not even come close to 1,200 dead per day. As to whether DRC is as grim today as it was at the time of Stanley, this seems to me to be a question that is worth considering — given these and other statistics.

I have no doubt that there are many positive sides to the Congo, and I am sure Kinshasa is safe for expatriates. (But weren’t upwards of 300 people — Congolese, not expats — killed in a gun battle on a main street?) I hope that readers will not misinterpret my closing line. I do not say that it’s not worth going to the Congo, rather I state quite clearly — within the context of the review — that travellers should not visit unless they can deal with the dangers. Consider my last line to be the equivalent of a health warning on a pack of cigarettes!

The blogger (Fred)’s response:

Dear Rory,

Thank you for taking the time to reply.

I assure you I am not upset. It’s true that Congo’s mortality rates are still very high, but this has more to do with poverty and a health infrastructure ruined by years war and mismanagement than direct violence. Much of the country is relatively stable now, apart from a small but very populous area in the east, where fighting continues.

In fact, as recent posts on this blog show, I have no wish to play down the fact that bad things continue to happen in the Congo. A ‘health warning’ is probably appropriate. But living here, I have developed a sensitivity to the endless perpetration of what I might as well call the Heart of Darkness myth. That novel was of course inspired by grim fact, being set in the era of ruthless exploitation that killed millions of Congolese and was ushered in by Stanley’s reporting, as it happens. (I strongly recommend King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild, for a truly gripping account of that history.) But such was the impact of Heart of Darkness that to this day it seems automatically to trigger a knee-jerk set of misleading ideas about this part of the world.

If I were Congolese, I would wish that Conrad had had more courage of a conviction he hints at: that European civilisation was built on ’savage’ inhumanity to man. (Arguably, that was the intolerable secret that destroyed Kurtz, and was ‘too dark’ for Marlow to tell Kurtz’s fiancée at the end.)

But because Conrad was deliberately ambiguous, more interested in psychology than history, and probably a little racist like his most of his contemporaries, what sticks in the mind - and the popular imagination - is the forbidding atmosphere which he so successfully conjures up, distorting the scenery by looking at it through fearful European eyes. His narrator, Marlow, thinks it is the “corrupt”, “impenetrable” wilderness that drove Kurtz mad by awakening his “forgotten, brutal instincts”. So in the end, as if by a trick of the light, it is the Congo’s bountiful, beautiful landscape which is indelibly associated with the terrifying, unknown heart of darkness, and not the greed that drove King Leopold’s monstrous rubber and ivory racket.

I’d rather not quote so extensively (the excerpts above are the bulk of Fred’s post), but it the whole exchange was so interesting.

What is it about hypodermic needles? Whenever I have blood drawn, it makes me sick to my stomach. I’d almost rather someone just cut me than suck out my blood through a parasitic little needle.

Needless to say, I felt queasy throughout this video:

[via Core77]

Tata unveils its new, sub-$1000 car for the domestic market. It gets 50mpg, due to its tiny 33hp motor, but there will be a projected 10 million cars similar to this sold over the next five years in India, as incomes rise.

Most people on this planet are getting richer, which is great. At least for those people, and for now. We’ll see how it goes in the long run…

Photo from a BusinessWeek article about the Nano.