Being "always on" is being always off, to something.
Readings and Remarks: The Harper’s Magazine 150th anniversary, 2000
Topic: Society
7:09 am EDT, Apr 3, 2008
Video from the 150th Anniversary celebration of Harper’s Magazine. Introductory remarks by Robert Polito, John R. MacArthur, and Lewis H. Lapham. Remarks by Annie Dillard, Readings by David Foster Wallace, Mary Gaitskill, Darcy Frey, George Plimpton, Fenton Johnson, George Saunders, Allan Gurganus, Richard Rodriguez, Pico Iyer, Seymour Hersh, and Tom Wolfe.
Foreign Policy: Seven Questions: Waiting for a Cyber Pearl Harbor
Topic: Miscellaneous
7:09 am EDT, Apr 3, 2008
Chinese hackers are growing increasingly bold in probing critical U.S. defense networks. But former U.S. counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke tells FP that if the United States waits for a dramatic, 9/11-style attack on its critical infrastructure to act, it will be missing the real threat.
One could make a strong argument that postindustrial prosperity has helped craftsmanship to thrive. The craft of making wine, for instance, has experienced a renaissance thanks to globalized competition, leading winemakers everywhere to improve their technique dramatically. And those computer programmers whom Mr. Sennett admires are the leading edge of capitalism's most dynamic sector.
Artisanal coffee, hand-made furniture, bespoke suits: Western economies routinely create niche markets for the work of craftsmen. If a lot of what we consume is made without exacting care, it is affordable, something for which many of us are understandably willing to forgo a bit of craftsmanship in our lives. It is to Mr. Sennett's credit that he reminds us of what has been lost thereby.
Goals of this document: ● To prove that one .ISO standard is adequate and in fact desirable (ODF / ISO26300) ● To demonstrate the substantial technical deficiencies of MS-OOXML / ECMA376 ● To debunk some of the fallacies being circulated ● To provide our inputs to the Singapore's council which will vote in the .ISO JTC1 regarding ECMA376's fate
This document proposes a new revenue source for the IETF to support standardization activities: protocol field naming rights, i.e., the association of commercial brands with protocol fields. This memo describes a process for assignment of rights and explores some of the issues associated with the process. Individuals or organizations that wish to purchase naming rights for one or more protocol fields are expected to follow this process.
The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century
Topic: War on Terrorism
7:09 am EDT, Apr 3, 2008
Steve Coll has a new book.
The Bin Ladens rose from poverty to privilege; they loyally served the Saudi royal family for generations—and then one of their number changed history on September 11, 2001. Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Steve Coll tells the epic story of the rise of the Bin Laden family and of the wildly diverse lifestyles of the generation to which Osama bin Laden belongs, and against whom he rebelled. Starting with the family’s escape from famine at the beginning of the twentieth century through its jet-set era in America after the 1970s oil boom, and finally to the family’s attempts to recover from September 11, The Bin Ladens unearths extensive new material about the family and its relationship with the United States, and provides a richly revealing and emblematic narrative of our globally interconnected times.
To a much greater extent than has been previously understood, the Bin Laden family owned an impressive share of the America upon which Osama ultimately declared war—shopping centers, apartment complexes, luxury estates, privatized prisons in Massachusetts, corporate stocks, an airport, and much more. They financed Hollywood movies and negotiated over real estate with Donald Trump. They came to regard George H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, and Prince Charles as friends of their family. And yet, as was true of the larger relationship between the Saudi and American governments, when tested by Osama’s violence, the family’s involvement in the United States proved to be narrow and brittle.
Among the many memorable figures that cross these pages is Osama’s older brother, Salem—a free-living, chainsmoking, guitar-strumming pilot, adventurer, and businessman who cavorted across America and Europe and once proposed marriage to four American and European girlfriends simultaneously, attempting to win a bet with the king of Saudi Arabia. Osama and Salem’s father, Mohamed bin Laden, is another force in the narrative—an illiterate bricklayer who created the family fortune through perspicacity and wit, until his sudden death in an airplane crash in 1967, an accident caused by an error by his American pilot.
At the story’s heart lies an immigrant family’s attempt to adapt simultaneously to Saudi Arabia’s puritanism and America’s myriad temptations. The family generation to which Osama belonged—twenty-five brothers and twenty-nine sisters—had to cope with intense change. Most of them were born into a poor society where religion dominated public life. Yet by the time they became young adults, these Bin Ladens found themselves bombarded by Western-influenced ideas about individual choice, by gleaming new shopping malls and international fashion brands, by Hollywood movies and changing sexual mores—a dizzying world that was theirs for the taking, because they each received annual dividends that started in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. How they navigated these demands is an authentic, humanizing story of Saudi Arabia, America, and the sources of attraction and repulsion still present in the countries’ awkward embrace.
As everyone knows, the Japanese have a highly idiosyncratic brand of trouble with the English language, resulting in enormous quantities of inadvertently hilarious yet weirdly poetic Hello Kitty phrases. No doubt these arise mostly from dictionary-based translations led astray by the unfathomable differences between the two languages, which have little in common beyond using vocalizations and marks on paper to communicate meaning.
It took until the end for me to really understand what the book was: It’s like The Education of Henry Adams, but about a peacemaker, a humanitarian, someone who deals with these broken places. It allows people to access him at the beginning of the book as an idealist and to learn with him in his moments of adaptation, to witness the mistakes he’s making so that we don’t have to make the mistakes ourselves.
The really big change here is that we've got a medium which scales from small groups – me talking to a group of my friends – all the way to "now I am making a public declaration." And because previously, we had a world where, if somebody said "I love you" on the phone, you knew it was meant for you. And if somebody said "I love you" on the TV, you knew it was specifically not meant for you, because the mode of carriage lets us figure out how that message should be interpreted.
And that's now broken. There are people having relatively personal conversations with their friends, yet they're doing it in a public medium. But that's no different from sitting around talking with friends in the food court at the mall. If you want to go down and find a group of teenagers chatting to each other at the mall, you can sit at the next table over and listen in, but then it's pretty clear in that situation that you're the weird one.
What we don't yet have is a set of social norms for figuring out – in a medium like the web, which scales from intimate personal address all the way to full publication – which messages we should be paying attention to and which messages we should be ignoring.
