Will Warming Chill the Global Economy? That's Businessweek's question, and I think the answer's obvious. Of course it will, and the effects will be even more egregious given the uncertaintly about global warming (as readers of this blog will come to know, I believe it's all a lot of, ahem, hot air). It's one thing to spend money on an insurance policy, it's another to do so at the point of a gun, i.e., through taxation.

And to think it's the likes of Al Gore who are responsible. Yeesh.

Boing Boing's at it again, advertising a method for breaking Apple's DRM and thus for violating the terms of one's purchase agreement. Nobody has any excuse at this point for failing to understand that a song bought from iTunes has certain restrictions attached.

If one doesn't like those restrictions, then one buys his music from another source or buys the CD and rips it.

Celebrity Report: Okay, my Google alerts are going crazy, and since it's what I'm working on at the moment, I have yet another Celebrity Report. I mentioned Jon Voigt earlier, and here he is going off on the Left. Here he is again, on video. And here's a decent interview.

Gotta love it.

Celebrity Report: At the risk of turning this nascent blog into a celebrity rag, here's a fictional account about conversations with Jon Voigt and Frank Miller in a surprisingly non-Lefty Malibu venue. I've read some encouraging stuff about Voigt, but I'd always imagined that Miller was a Lefty. I'll have to keep my eye out.

Celebrity Report: It's Bruce Willis again, this time his denying ever offering a reward for finding Saddam Hussein. Funny, but I remember watching an interview where he said something suspiciously like that, and so I'm surprised that he's saying this. I can't find the interview, but I'm still looking.

Why is everything a "hack" today? What we used to call tips, advice, suggestions, recommendations, better ways of doing thing, etc., are now called "hacks". This is ridiculous.

"Exercise Hacks"?!? The Internet is good for many things, but it has a very bad tendency to take intellectual trendiness to a ridiculous degree.

It's cheap humor, to be sure, and probably only funny in it's English translation, but is there really a Taliban leader named Mullah Abdullah?

Oops, my bad. Actually, there only used to be a Mullah Abdullah. Thanks to Little Green Footballs for the story.

Do we have our Resident President to thank? (My apologies: that was really bad...)

Update: Was this guy Abdullah or Dadullah? Either way, it still works (or not, either way).

Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers out there. Light posting today while I take care of the mother in my life.

I've been remiss in failing to mention James Lilek's dismissal. I know little to none of the story, and don't really find it necessary to research it. Suffice to say that he's a tremendous talent and I look forward to reading more of his stuff. I never did read his column, concentrating on his Bleat (maybe the best original-thought blog out there), and so I'll likely not miss much.

I'll not insult him with any of the typical platitudes. He's a far more successful writer than am I, and my words of encouragement really wouldn't mean much.

Update: Here's his farewell column. Again, much good stuff to be found at his Web site, so it's not as if he's going away.

Digg Report: Speaking of Digg, today's #1 Digg, at 3864 Diggs, is a post about a college student who scored a perfect failing grade on a True/False test. The professor's (admittedly valid) response is also posted. Relevance, please?

I may need to revise my position on Digg. It may not only be dominated by Leftists, but it may also be a relatively pure indication of what happens when collectivism replaces the individual in the arena of ideas.

This is a good story, as far as it goes, in the Los Angeles Times on how the mainstream media is altering its news coverage to meet the edicts of Internet popularity. I would take it a step further: social networking sites, Digg, and other Internet phenomena represent a sort of mob rule mentality, where mere popularity is equated with importance, relevance, and truth. The fact that the mainstream media is following along shoud be surprising to noone.

Another example of this is Twitter, where one judges oneself based on how many "friends" are watching the most often boring and trivial aspects of one's life. It doesn't matter who those friends are, or how inane the messages might be; just the fact that hundreds or thousands of people are listening is the exclusive measure. I struggle (but not really) to understand how someone can measure oneself based on such an anti-value.

I think I believe in much of what this story says about open source. It's written in that MTV style that tends not to focus on one thing for too long (defined as long enough for one to think about), but it seems to make some sense. At least, I agree with the very ending, which talks about open source developers tearing apart the very industry that pays for their living and allows them to write software "for free."

I don't find it to be a very "cynical" position, however, at least in the sense that "cynic" is used as a pejorative term. To me, it just makes some good sense.

I find this story about global warming to be interesting, although it also tends to confirm that climate is no longer a science. At least, it's not one that the layman can research, analyze, and draw conclusions from with any clarity. There's just too much there to muddle through, in even a single article.

How can someone come to a rational conclusion when so much is so unclear? Theories that contradict each other, computer simulations that are no longer valid but still referenced as definitive, constantly shifting positions held by proponents of one side or another... They all conspire to make the entire issue unintelligible.

And yet, the economies (and thus standards of living) of the world (or at least, the Western world) are held hostage to it all. One would think that all of the uncertainty would count for something.

Celebrity Report: For my inaugural Celebrity Report, which highlights a rational celebrity who doesn't spend his time bashing the United States, I start with the grandaddy: Bruce Willis. Here, he can be found taking part in a chat (intelligently, I think) on his movies and such. Nothing political here (except a very brief allusion to loving one's country, which for some is probably "political"), and that's the point of this segment.

Celebrities are not necessarily particularly intelligent or well-informed (although many of them are). They have no special knowledge by virtue of being famous, nor from being influential because of their celebrity status. In short, they're not really doctors, although they may play one on TV.

Most celebrities don't understand this. Bruce Willis strikes me as one who does.

I just realized that Blogger has been apparently posting according to Central time, which is how my Google account was originally established before I moved from Chicago to Los Angeles. So, I've changed that, and this is a test to see if I'm now posting at the right time. At the very least, my Digg Report posts are off by two hours, which makes them a bit confusing.

Update: Still not correct. Looks like I'll have to do some digging. This is embarassing; Blogger is hardly complex software.

Update 2: Found the setting, and can't seem to find Pacific Standard Time. So, I'm selecting "Pacific Daylight Time" to see if it does the trick.

As I continue to ponder the concept of DRM, which is to say, intellectual property, I'm often struck by how bankrupt are the arguments presented by those on the other side. This one posits that intellectual property, "ideas," does not constitute a "scarce" resource, and thus economic law cannot be applied to it.

I'm fascinated by this perspective. The writer even goes so far as to compare "ideas" to "air," as in, there's so much of them that "we don't need a market to efficiently allocate it." And so it was said as they were sent to the gulag.

Of course, "ideas" are created by people. There are a lot of us, certainly, but I don't think our "abundance" means that our efforts can be so freely distributed.

What's worst about this story is that it's true. I'm not in favor of spending American lives and resources on nation-building, but we certainly gain nothing by breaking our promises like this. A little gunship support after the first Gulf war might have been enough to bring about regime change in Iraq without spilling much, if any, American blood.

And, in that case, we'd probably be invading Iran today from American military bases built and supported by the Iraqi people. Perhaps an even more pronounced chain reaction would have occurred: unfettered access to Iraqi oil might have reduced our reliance on Saudi Arabia, thus reducing their ability to sponsor groups like Al Qaida and saving the World Trade Center.

Digg Report: Today's #1 Digg (at 1:47pm PST) at 3750 Diggs is a story about a woman who drives into a suprisingly deep puddle. Huh.

This is an example of another Digg trait: stories about stupidity often jump to the top. Nothing nefarious there. Sometimes the stories are even humorous. IT folk do tend to have a sense of humor.

In what will likely be a recurring theme here at DT, let me say: I dislike Boing Boing. In particular, I dislike their take on "digital rights management" or DRM (a misnomer if I've ever seen one, more to come on this topic). For example, the controversy surrounding publication of the HD AACS code is getting on my nerves, while Boing Boing continues to find new and innovative ways to milk the issue for all it's worth.

The $100 notebook project bothers me, as do all feel-good Lefty efforts at making people's lives better in spite of themselves. 100 million dead Communists last century are a testament to the good intentions that pave the road to Hell, and in my mind the $100 notebook is another example.

Will access to information help a starving, tribally oppressed African child? If so, will this happen before or after he is conscripted into some genocidal warlord's militia and she is sent off to some faraway village as a sex slave? The Internet is a great thing, no doubt about it, but it can't alter the underlying philosophical abyss that is the tribal collectivism of Africa.

From this story, it looks like the project is having difficulty getting traction. Probably, the warlords and dictators haven't yet figured out how to use the notebooks to their favor. They'd rather see charity in the form of money and food, that they can funnel away from the intended targets and toward their bands of thugs.