redundapundit

Why do we buy movies?

2006-09-18T08:54:00.000-07:00

Serious question. I know people with huge DVD collections. I don't know anyone with a good reason to have a huge DVD collection. What's the point? How many times do we really rewatch a movie within the lifetime of a given media technology? Yeah, I've touched on this before with the HD DVD vs. Blu Ray post. It still bugs me. The new iTunes and Amazon Unbox movie purchase options made me want to ask the question again. I installed iTunes 7 just to try it. I bought Grosse Point Blank. It looks ok, I guess. Not quite DVD quality, but good for the bitrate. And it plays reasonably well on the laptop I use, though there is some tearing of the image when there are fast horizontal image transitions, and it does stall and stutter if there's any other I/O going on, which is not true of WMP/DiVX/normal Quicktime media. It looks better than the last movies I rented from Movielink or CinemaNow. I'd be satisfied with the quality if it was for a cheap 24-hour rental, but there's no way I'll buy another movie that way. DVD prices for less-than-DVD quality, flexibility or ubiquity. The only upside I see is that with electronic delivery of purchased movies is the better than average chance that you'll lose all those idle, wasted purchases in a hard disk crash, which will at least save you the trouble of unloading all those unwatched DVDs you might have bought at your next garage sale. Seriously, why buy these things?

Subscription model music and 24-hour rental movies, electronically delivered - that's the future. Well, it's the future that I'll buy into at least. Urge or Yahoo Music, with Movielink or CinemaNow movie rentals, until better, cheaper options come along. Oh, and while we're on the subject - Movielink and CinemaNow listen up! Give me better quality and selections before someone else steals your thunder. Take a page from the music guys - electronic delivery frees you up to take advantage of the Long Tail(tm). Take advantage of that. I want access to EVERY MOVIE EVER MADE, in high quality, as rentals. Not your currently lame selection of late-model also-rans in almost-HQ. Get serious or move over for someone better.

It seems so simple....

2006-08-30T14:39:00.000-07:00

Someone make a computer with the Mac Mini's form factor, the new Intel Core 2 processor and a decent video chip. Please. Intel's integrated video is just awful for doing anything remotely intensive. This can't be difficult. The Mac laptops have an ATI 1600 video chip. The new Core 2 processors are a drop in replacement for the Core Duos. It seems so easy....

Arm them!

2006-03-08T07:26:00.000-08:00

Iraq needs more guns. So does Iran. And North Korea. And Sudan. Lots of other places, too.

Sound crazy? Tell that to the fifty workers kidnapped by "insurgents" in Baghdad this morning. It's a distressingly common pratice. Sometimes they are released, or ransomed. Often they are murdered and dumped somewhere, to be discovered later. And it would never happen if they were armed.

How many Rwandan Tutsi and moderate Hutus of the nearly one million killed during the worst part of the genocide would be alive today if they had been armed? Would you want to be an unarmed black non-Muslim in Darfur, Sudan?

But aren't these places already awash in guns? Yes. And those guns aren't going away any time soon. Local governments and international know-nothings are suprisingly effective at disarming the victims of the muderers, rapists, kidnappers, etc., thus paving the way for further and greater crimes, but completely useless when it comes to disarming the criminals. In many cases, the local governments are the criminals, or are closely allied with criminal groups.

If you really want the world to be a better place, here's what we should do. Take every dime now being spent on the U.N. and instead manufacture simple, reliable single-shot handguns and distribute them to every adult on the planet who wants one. Make ammunition freely available. Make it widely know that if you use your modern-day Peacemaker, you are going to be held accountable and will have to explain your actions or face prosecution. Make it a crime to misuse these guns or disarm anyone without due process, with serious penalties for violations.

This isn't a perfect world, and it's never going to be. It could, however, be a world where potential murderers, rapists and kidnappers know that there are no easy victims. A world where monsters are met with strength and determination - where every potential victim has a way to defend themselves. And we should make it so.

Screw 'em redux

2005-12-06T07:54:00.000-08:00

If the product planners at Microsoft are half as astute as I think they are, you will soon be able to buy nearly any kind of digital content using their "Live" services via your Xbox 360/Media Center PC combo. And I'm not talking about just audio and video. This is how they are going to beat Sony - it won't matter the the Xbox 360 has 'only' a standard DVD drive, if no one buys pre-recorded media anymore. Want the next Halo? Click 'buy' on your 360, and the code package gets delivered to your Media Center PC, all nicely protected by DRM, and the Xbox 360 can pull the code from there - no media required. Spiderman 3? Same thing. If they do this right, the Xbox 360/Media Center PC/Xbox Live combination can completely re-invent how we access digital content of all types. And with Microsoft's proven track record of using DRM in ways we can live with, unlike Sony and most of the entertainment industry, I'm willing to bet that people find the value proposition with Microsoft much better than what Apple will offer. I don't want to be locked into iPods. If we have to have DRM, and I don't see any way around that, at least let's have DRM from a company who understands that once we buy content, we should be free to move it between our various devices.

HD DVD vs. Blu-ray? Screw 'em!

2005-11-15T11:55:00.000-08:00

I've bought my last pre-recorded video on physical media. Here's to the post-physical-media future!

The next big winner in the content wars will be the company who offers the most compelling value-proposition on access to on-demand content over the internet. Content protection will be part of that offering, of course, but that protection will be compatible with the way we use content now - in other words, it won't prevent me from moving the content around among my various devices, and it won't lock me into a single-vendor solution.

Nothing about this is very difficult, technically. All of the pieces are out there. First one to put them all together wins.

Festivus Now!

2005-10-28T09:08:00.000-07:00

Christmas is under attack, we're told, by the usual suspects. Hippies, basically. Multi-culti left wingers, determined to stamp out anything that smacks of Western, imperial, white, Christian, traditional, Anglo, capitalist, parochial, patriotic, meritocratic, individualist, globalist, colonialist repression. No more "Merry Christmas!" in schools, Christmas trees in public spaces, etc. Whew!

Sigh. Newsflash! - for most people, "Merry Christmas!" and "Happy Holidays!" are interchangable expressions, and have been for years. Santa Claus, Christmas trees, etc., are part of a secular holiday that, while connected with the Christian religious celebration, is also thing unto itself. We have no problem understanding this, just like people have managed to understand how civil marriage and a "church marriage" are related but separate things.

If someone says to me "Happy Chanukah!", I may wonder why they think I'm Jewish, but I wouldn't be offended. Are non-Christians really offended when they hear "Merry Christmas!"? If so, they are very rare exceptions, in my opinion. "Happy Holidays!" is always there, of course, if you want to be non-sectarian, but that plural and the breathy consonance weaken it as an exclamation. It's time for Festivus!

Yeah, just like in that Seinfeld episode. Non-denominational, inclusive, whacky, made-for-TV Festivus; it's a holiday for everyone. It's singular, and the F makes it cool! "Fantastic Festivus!" "Funky Festivus!" "Freaky Festivus!" "Fabulous!" Even "F-word Festivus!", if you're in a bad mood. You can't go wrong with this holiday. Bothered by the "official" Festivus traditions? Make up your own - who's gonna stop you? If they even try, just grab your Festivus Pole and make them think again! "Fighting Festivus!" "Furious Festivus!" "Festivus Freedom Forever!"

Flexibility vs. The Monolith

2005-09-07T11:03:00.000-07:00

It occurs to me that in at least one way New Orleans was a modern city, before Katrina. A relatively large percentage of the population did not own a car. They relied on public transportation, and that system failed them completely when disaster struck. Families with private cars had the option of evacuating before the storm. Those without had to stay - and we've all seen the results. Of course, for many of these families the lack of private transportation wasn't really a choice. They simply could not afford to own, maintain or operate private vehicles. But surely some could and didn't, for various reasons. And these people not only trapped themselves by their choice, but trapped others they might have been able to help escape.

Reliance on private vehicles for primary transportation has drawbacks. It's expensive. There are significant environmental consequences. Traffic congestion can be a problem. Roads are expensive to build and maintain. It's important to remember, though, that there are corresponding advantages. Among them are flexibility and survivability. Disaster planning includes systems hardening, and that means identifying and mitigating intersystem dependancies. Public transportation can fail catastrophically in many ways. Look at the pictures of flooded city buses in New Orleans, for one great example. Sure, there are thousands of flooded and useless private vehicles in New Orleans also, but since private vehicles aren't concentrated into a few areas during downtime, they are far less likely to suffer the same kind of percentage attrition that the public buses are. They also don't rely on a cadre of professional drivers to be useful - drivers who may be unavailable during disaster scenarios.

London's Cameras

2005-07-08T10:46:00.000-07:00

I have a question. London is one of the most monitored cities in the world. Something on the order of 10,000 video cameras are in operation 24 hours a day, monitoring public areas, streets and the underground. I've seen estimates that an average Londoner appears on 300 video cameras on an average day. Since these cameras only monitor public areas where the people have no reasonable expectation of privacy, opposition to all of this monitoring hasn't been enough to prevent the deployment, growth or use of this system. Here's my question - are the feeds from all of these cameras available to the public? And, if not, why not? Why can't Joe Londoner pull up the feed from camera number 7061 on his PC at home any time he likes? Why should access to this video be limited to the police or to government agencies, if the area being monitored is a public space? Personally, I'd be much less opposed to this kind of system if it was a public resource that the police had access to, rather than a policing system from which the public was excluded.

Give up nothing, for you will get nothing in return

2005-07-08T09:42:00.000-07:00

Security is an illusion.

How can free societies protect their citizens from terrorists? They can't. They never have been able to, and they never will be. Whatever freedoms you surrender on the altar of security are lost, likely forever, and you will receive nothing in return for that loss except the sense of having 'done something'.

Want some more good news? Our government's spies won't ever be able to gather and analyze enough information to prevent more than a fraction of the bad acts of our enemies. All the squawking about 'intelligence failures' after each successful attack is completely useless. As are nearly all of the 'fixes' proposed or enacted to prevent these 'failures'.

So why aren't we all dead already? Simple - the overwhelming majority of people in the world don't want to kill anyone. And the tiny minority of people who do are marginalized and under far more threat from us than we are from them. Want to reduce the threat from them even more? Reduce their numbers, marginalize them further, and increase our efforts to defeat them utterly. Understand - we're never going to win, if we define win as achieving perfect safety. But we absolutely can diminish the ability of our enemies to strike at us. And we must.

It's instructive to consider why most of us feel safe leaving the house while wearing a nice watch, for example. We all know that muggers exist. But we also know that the vast majority of people out there are not muggers, and that mugging is a crime that will, in theory at least, be prosecuted. The police will respond. Arrests will be made. Verdicts will be reached, and sentences imposed. Justice will be done. Not every time, and not perfectly, but where possible. The mugger will be condemned for his crime. Our neighbors will side with us. Our family will support us. We know all this, but we also know that in spite of it all, there are still muggings, assaults, murders, all over a nice watch or a pair of shoes or an iPod. We know we aren't perfectly safe. But we still wear the watch.

Expecting our government to prevent every terroristic attack, or our spies to know about every planned attack before it's carried out, is no more reasonable than expecting our government to prevent every mugging. There has never been a government in the history of the world that has managed that. Even in prisons, crimes occur. We can't buy safety by turning our world into prisons of our own making, and ourselves into prisoners.

Give up nothing. If you are ever safer than you are right now, it won't be because you gave up some liberties in exchange for that safety. All you can buy with those lost freedoms are illusions of safety. Don't settle for illusions.

Do something useful

2005-07-07T12:31:00.000-07:00

Bush and Blair should trash the G8 agenda and propose a USA-GB-Democratic Africa free trade zone.

2005-07-07T06:06:00.000-07:00

Go directly to court!

2005-07-01T11:45:00.000-07:00

AMD is suing Intel, charging that Intel has abused it's monopoly power and denied AMD market access. Sound familiar? You can read the complaint here - http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/DownloadableAssets/AMD-Intel_Full_Complaint.pdf

What AMD alleges is very similar to the compaints against Microsoft. Basically, that Intel used it's monopoly power to coerce PC manufacturers and others to sign exclusive contracts or pay higher prices or otherwise suffer competitive disadvantages. Like the Microsoft case, none of the practices being alleged (as far as I know) are illegal unless Intel is indeed a monopolist. So, just like in the Microsoft case, that's going to be the real crux of the case.

Is Intel a monopolist? Are these contracts or tactics illegal? Who knows? One of the biggest problems with the entire area of law is that no one can know if they are breaking the law until they get hauled into court and a judge consults his Magic 8-Ball. And then there are the appeals.

Wouldn't it make more sense to forget this whole monopoly idea and just make these kinds of marketing tactics and contracts unenforceable for everyone? What do we gain as a society by enforcing these kind of contracts? Let Coke and Pepsi compete without being able to offer perks to customers who sign exclusivity contracts. If manufacturers have to offer products on an equal footing to all potential customers without regard to how those customers trade with the competition, then we can forget all of this pseudo-monopoly nonsense and get back to business.

Drugged!

2005-07-01T07:13:00.000-07:00

Prescription drugs manufactured by American companies in America are more expensive here than they are almost anywhere else in the world. Why? Because almost everywhere else, national governments act as the buyer for all prescription drugs consumed by the populations of those countries, and these state buyers have enormous market power and so force manufacturers to sell to them at lower prices or risk losing access to that market entirely. Also, if I understand correctly, various governments threaten to violate intellectual property law and manufacture the drugs themselves royalty-free, if the drug company refuses to cooperate. The lost revenues caused by these schemes has to be made up somewhere if the drug companies are going to remain profitable and able to invest in developing new drugs. Increasingly, that entire burden falls on Americans alone. Essentially, we subsidize research and development of new drugs for the entire world with the increased cost we pay for drugs in this country.

Americans forced to pay these higher prices for the prescription drugs they need naturally seek to reduce or eliminate this unfair pricing scheme with re-importation. If drugs are cheaper in Canada, they reason, they'll buy Canadian drugs! Simple, right? Of course not. Government functionaries understand that the rent-seeking behavior they are paid to enable or commit would be threatened if massive re-importation reduced drug company profits in America, since that would force drug companies to reduce the delta between American and Canadian pricing. Mon dieu! The whole evil scheme would falter! Something must be done!

The functionaries are right, but the something that needs doing isn't what they think. What we need is a federal law which would force drug manufacturers to sell into the top tier wholesale market in America at prices equal to or less than they what they sell to these national health-care buyers abroad. If Pfizer or whomever will sell a pill to Canada or England or South Africa for fifty cents, they would have to sell that same pill to the largest wholesale buyers in America for fifty cents. That's only fair. The costs of drug development, manufacture and delivery should fall equally on all who benefit from them. Americans should not bear this burden alone - that's not fair to anyone, even the supposed beneficiaries of this unfair system.

IT Security

2005-05-27T13:25:00.000-07:00

Every security fix released to correct weaknesses in computer programs should include a vulnerability simulator and exploit attempt reporting mechanism. A hacker shouldn't be able to know from the results of a probe if your system is truely vulnerable, or a honeypot connected to a law enforcement database. Simple.

Flushing the Koran?

2005-05-15T22:36:00.000-07:00

Lots is going to be said in the next few days about Newsweek correction of their earlier story about personnel at Guantanamo Bay desecration the Koran by flushing pages down the toilet, and the "resulting" protests, during which many people have been killed or injured. The correction? The "desecration" may never have happened. Expect to hear lots of criticism and condemnation aimed at Newsweek, and with good cause.

However.

Newsweek didn't kill or injure anyone. Each and every injury or death was cause by actual people who made the decision to take these actions. The blood is on their hands. There is only one right answer to question "When is it right to attack, injure or kill someone based on reports of them or someone they are connected with doing something that insults my religion or culture?", and that answer is "Never." Someone has to say it, and I'm saying it here. Disagreeing with or being insulted by what someone else says about your culture, religion or anything else, never excuses your bad acts. Never.

Social Security Again

2005-05-03T07:30:00.000-07:00

The simplest summary I can come up with for the President's proposal to reform Social Security is this -

Social Security is trending into the red, so to change that we are going to have to do one or more unpopular things. We will have to tax more and/or pay less. Taxing more would be really bad for the economy, and it's would either make Social Security taxes even less progressive, or force us to break with the notion that Social Security is an insurance program where each person pays his own premiums. Paying less means either slowing or reversing the trend to increase benefit levels, or start paying benefits later, or tax benefits more - with a combination of these approaches being the most likely scenario. There's something to dislike for everyone in this list of bitter medicines. Since we all know that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, the President wants to sweeten the deal by adding private accounts.

Private accounts would help solve several problems with Social Security, both as it is currently constituted, and as it would exist after the reforms. The most important problem in my judgment with the current system is that it's a really bad deal for everyone involved. By this I mean that while Social Security does solve the problem it was created to solve - older or disabled people being forced into poverty when they can no longer work productively - it does so in a very inefficient way. For the vast majority of participants, the return on funds they "invest" in Social Security ranges from -1 to 1% per year. Any way you look at it, that's a bad deal. Simply buying T-bills yourself would net you much better than that, and would have the advantage of actually being your property, which means you could leave something to your heirs when you die. In addition, the current system is a terrible deal to us as taxpayers are well as participants. Since the "surplus" (the difference between what Social Security collects and spends) is "invested" in T-bills, we hide current deficits in the federal budget. This means that down the road we will be worse off than we realize, since those T-bills will one day have to be paid off, and it's us and our descendants who will do the paying. This is a critical point. The "trust fund" is a collection of IOUs we write to our future selves and our kids - those future taxpayers will have to make good on them if the system is to continue making payments - and those future taxpayers are going find making those payments VERY difficult. And since many or most of them didn't have any say in the decision to write the IOUs in the first place, they may well decide that they aren't going to pay them back. Who could blame them? It's tremendously unfair of us to lay this burden on them, and we do ourselves no favor by hiding current budget deficits this way.

Fortunately, there is a better alternative. Modestly slowing the growth of future benefits and introducing progressivity into the slowdown goes a long way to making Social Security solvent over the long term. Allowing people to make up the difference by investing some of their premiums in private accounts would more than make up the difference, and would also give them some actual property of their own to leave to their heirs when they die, which is a first step to moving lower-income Americans into the investor class. We would also enjoy the economic benefits of a better national savings rate, and undo the destructive budgetary illusion that currently masks our true budget deficit. This is, quite literally, good for everyone.

More on Schiavo

2005-03-22T12:58:00.000-08:00

Culture of Life vs. Sanctity of Marriage

Terri and Michael married. They chose to bind their lives together this way. Michael is Terri's Living Will, just as Terri would have been Michael's had the situation been reversed. That's the nature of marriage - its very core. Absent a written Living Will attesting otherwise, Michael's judgment about what Terri would want is the only judgment that counts. Not because Michael holds some unique authority, but because Terri chose him out of all people to act for her in dire circumstances. Respect her choice.

Terri Schiavo

2005-03-18T11:20:00.000-08:00

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't her husband be completely within the law if he simply walked into the hospital, disconnected her from the medical devices, placed her in a wheelchair and took her home? We all have a right to refuse medical treatment, and we can't be held against our will absent a court order or some kind of due process. Since Terri can't act for herself, that authority rests with her husband exclusively, does it not?

How did the national conservative political consensus, to judge from conservative news outlets online and in the MSM, skip completely over the traditional, common-law conservative position that this is a family matter and the husband makes these decisions, and arrive at the profoundly radical view that the state has to intervene and if Florida lawmakers won't cooperate, then the Feds must get involved? If Terri had been at home all along and the state decided to intervene and remove her to a hospital and force these medical treatments on her over her husbands objections, conservatives would be apoplectic! What the hell is going on?

Possible synergy ahead?

2005-03-15T13:30:00.000-08:00

Cell, the new processor architecture co-developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba, looked to me at first glance as the next Crusoe, Emotion Engine or Transputer - past harbingers of revolutions that never were. Uniting on a single piece of silicon a mid-grade PowerPC processor with eight simpler flexible co-processors is an interesting idea, and might even be useful for some purposes, but I didn't see any real general applicability for the design for most of what we do or think we should be doing near-term with computers. Yes, I know, the Cells are supposed to open up some kind of magic window for sharing computing resources with everyone else out there, but that kind of thing takes considerable coordination and cooperation, and I don't see any of the needed groundwork in OS or application-level support for the hype. And what would we really do with the eight co-processors in most computing applications? I foresaw lots of idle time, and idle transistors are a waste of resources.

Two unexpected (to me, anyway) recent announcements have me wondering about my initial reaction, though. First, Ageia announces the PhysX 'physics processor', designed to off-load from the main processor all of the calculations required for solid and fluid behavior in simulated environments, like video games. And they were even smart enough to pick an established API (NovodeX) to access these features, so developers can write to the API and the application will run with or without the PhysX chip, though at vastly different speeds. Needless to say, electronic game developers are very interested. And now a German University has revealed a real-time ray tracing chip called SaarCOR for rendering graphics in a completely different way than the rasterization methods used in essentially all modern graphics processors. If the reports are to be believed, and they look pretty convincing, this technology is going to force a complete reevaluation of imaging engines. Like PhysX, the SaarCOR chip is accessed via an open API - OpenRT. So if you write for OpenRT, you can use or not use the chip and still function, though if you go SaarCOR-less, you'd better have a large network of very fast conventional processors at your back.

So, where does this lead? Maybe nowhere. But, maybe, Cell is perfectly positioned to take advantage of two coming transformational technologies. Those eight co-processors, 'Synergistic Processor Elements', according to the Cell group, sure look like the kind of resources an enterprising developer could leverage to do some NovodeX and OpenRT work, paving the way for Cell2 with on-die PhysX and SaarCOR SPEs in addition to the general purpose ones. No other architecture currently in production could match Cell's advantage in taking this approach, because no other design has so much spare computing power designed specifically for the kind of highly regular, parallel processing necessary for real-time realistic physics and ray-tracing.

But what do I know?

Gimme! a break

2005-03-10T14:16:00.000-08:00

Along with the new Turion processors announced today, AMD also revealed their newest scheme to completely confuse and infuriate you when you try to comparison shop at the local electronics store. The new chips will be designated as the ML-30, -32, -34 and -37, or the MT-30, -32 and -34. M for mobile, so far, so good. L or T for what? Why, for how 'mobile', meaning having a low power budget, the line is. From A to Z, no less, with Z being the most mobile of all! In practice this means that the L line has a 35 watt power budget and the T line has a 25 watt budget. Intel's Pentium M stuff is 27ish, as a reference. Well, at least the numbers should be logical, right? Well, kinda. Higher is faster, but the ML-32 and -34 both run at 1.8GHz. The difference? The -32 only has 512KB of L2 cache (all of the others have 1MB). Why? Is it a different core? A -34 who couldn't pass QA as and got demoted? Who knows? My advice is to skip the ML-32 until more information comes out. You'll want the 1MB cache to help offset the performance penalty of the single-channel memory interface, in any case.

Oh, and lest I forget, Turion64 isn't a processor, it's a 'technology'. You know, like Centrino. In other words, Madison Avenue tech. AMD isn't even trying to hide this fact like Intel does, by forcing you to use their chipsets and wireless stuff in order to use the branding. Mostly because they don't have a chipset or wireless stuff, though they don't explain it that way in the press release!

Gimme! Redux

2005-03-10T14:03:00.000-08:00

AMD announced it's Turion mobile processor line today. SiS announced a mobile chipset to support that line, and ATI has one out as well. Where is my laptop?!?

Anyway, the new processors are all 90nm SOI low-power chips with the latest AMD 64-bit cores - with support for SSE2, SSE3, etc. - though they sport the older Socket-754-style, single memory channel interface with the rest of the system. They won't be outrunning the desktop 64-bit AMD stuff, but they won't fall very far behind them either, and they will do it on far less power and will generate far less heat. They are competitive with Intel's Centrino stuff in this regard, but the Centrino line is still purely 32-bit. Very nice 32-bit, though.

If all goes according to plan, a few laptop makers should have some new designs out later this month sporting these new chips and chipsets. I expect to see mostly the ATI chipset in them, since it's been announced for a few weeks now, and includes a decent video solution right there in the chipset itself. Again, this embedded video won't light the world on fire, but it should be a big step up for most laptops, and you can still use a discrete video solution where warranted.

So, low-power, cool, 64-bit, solid video, PCI Express, all the modern chipset stuff like SATA and too many USB 2.0 ports, and works with standard SO-DIMM PC3200 memory, which can be found with pretty tight timings - the next wave of laptops should be pretty darn sweet.

Gimme!

2005-03-09T07:21:00.000-08:00

Why can't I buy this laptop?

A 15inch or better display, 1280x1024 or better native resolution, an AMD Athlon 64 (the 90nm version for lower power consumption and heat generation), up to 4GB of RAM, an Nvidia GeForce Go 6800 Ultra video chip, a 120GB hard drive, full modern Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and aCD/DVD combo writer? All of these pieces exist in laptops, just not together. Except, maybe, for the 4GB of RAM. It's not like I'm asking for dual processors or SLI video. I don't even care about PCI Express. You could even substitute ATI's Mobility Radeon X800 for the Nvidia video chip. There are literally dozens of boutique laptop makers out there these days, who cater to gamers and others who want kickass laptops, but not one of them offers this particular combination of AMD 64-bit sugar and latest-generation video spice. Battery life be damned! I use my laptop 99% of the time as a desktop replacement. Someone, make this laptop, please!

Chimp vs. Human

2005-03-07T09:57:00.000-08:00

The recent attack by several captive chimpanzees on St. James and LaDonna Davis at a California sanctuary has generated a burst of Internet chatter on the relative bodily strength of these animals as compared to our own. It seems to be almost universally acknowleged that adult chimps are somewhere between four and eight times as strong as are humans despite being somewhat smaller by weight on average than a human of similar age. Mr. Davis was grievously injured in this attack - according to various reports all of his fingers were lost, one foot was severed, much of his face, including his lips, nose and one eye were torn off, etc. Simply awful.

But does it require any kind of immense and seemingly improbable disproportionality of physical strength to inflict injuries like these? Judging solely from the scanty injury reports I've read, my guess is that most of these injuries are bite damage. Most animals have disproportional powerful jaws and teeth compared to humans, and this includes the great apes. So they certainly wouldn't be at a disadvantage to us when it comes to using teeth and jaws to cause injury, and nothing in Mr. Davis' list of injuries seems to me to be beyond what a human could also cause if they were sufficiently enraged and put aside the social constraints that normally limit such behavior. Humans are fully capable of biting off fingers, toes, lips, noses, ears, etc. We don't, as a rule, but we certainly can.

Various sites I've looked at give anecdotal evidence of chimpanzee Herculean feats of strength, but they don't strike me as dispositive. One site mentions that adult chimps have no problem dragging three-hundred pound logs around on the ground - a feat of strength they suggest would be beyond human capacity without specialized training. Frankly, I find this ridiculous. I'm no athlete, but I know I can drag three-hundred pound logs around quite easily. In a pinch, I could probably shoulder a three-hundred pound log and march off with it. And I haven't spent my life climbing trees and otherwise living the chimp life, which offers considerably more opportunity to keep the old body in peak physical condition. Another site offers the results of a test in a zoo enclosure where a metering device was connected to a rope where they could actually measure chimpanzee pull strength. Two examples where presented, one in the eight-hundred pound range and one around twelve-hundred pounds of pull. This they compare to a human effort of two-hundred pounds or so. Again, this seems pretty silly. Weightlifters regularly deadlift more than eight-hundred pounds, and that's a true lift, not a jerk where the body's mass can be used to multiply an instantaneous force.

This is not to say chimps aren't strong - they are clearly very strong indeed. What I think we're seeing here is that people have anthropomorphized chimpanzees to a great extent. The truth is that they are what they are - powerful apes with a very different morphology and lifestyle than ours. Humans are larger on average than chimpanzees, but much of that size is concentrated in our legs, which are much larger proportionally than are the legs of chimps. Interestingly, no site I can find even mentions a comparison between the relative strength of chimp and human legs. The implicit assumption seems to be that upper-body strength should be roughly proportional, which seems pretty strange considering humans and chimps don't live the same way even if all modern cultural and technological adaptations are removed from the scenario. Humans are cursorial, while chimps are arboreal. We are weaker proportionally in the upper body and stronger proportionally in the lower body. How you get from there to the 'four to eight times stronger' position that seems to dominate the conventional wisdom is unclear.

Social Security

2005-03-07T07:34:00.000-08:00

Has anyone out there found a site that really explains the projected outcomes of the various Social Security reformations being pitched? It would be interesting to compare the current system's average payouts per quintile with some obvious alternatives. I'd like to see, for example, what Joe Average would have coming at his retirement if he'd just taken what he and his employer currently pay into SS and instead simply purchased the same bonds the SSA does with its surplus.

Humility

2005-03-04T11:51:00.000-08:00

There is quite a bit of entertaining churn in the Blogiverse recently regarding positive signs in the Middle East, President Bush's justifications for going to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, consternation of Democrats, Europeans, etc., about the prospect of Bush's having been 'right' all along, and so on. And, as expected, counterchurn from Republicans, conservatives, hawks, etc., about how they knew all along, and so on. And counter-counter churn from all sides to all sides about how these are only encouraging signs, it's hardly a done deal, one election does not a democracy make, "The end cannot justify the means", human nature never changes, it really is a different world, and on and on and on. Naturally, I can't let everyone else have all the fun - I have to pile in, adding my own noise in the absence of any signal.

Here's the thing - we are all merely human. Every single one of us. None of us can ever really 'know' the right course of action to take in a given circumstance if the only judgment of the 'rightness' of a given course is its outcome. We aren't capable of knowing that outcome in advance, hence we can't use that outcome as a justification for taking the action. However - and here's the rub - the world isn't random, at least not at the human scale. While we can't 'know' an outcome in advance, we can certainly use what knowledge we've gained in the course of study or living or whatever to inform our actions to the extent that certain outcomes are more or less probable than are others in any given situation. Consider 'reasonable person' doctrines in a legal setting, for example. We aren't blind to future events, but we do see them only dimly through the lens of our own knowledge of the world, and what fogs our future vision is the complexity of the world itself, and of all of the other actors on that stage. Still, having poor vision is no excuse for closing your eyes. Accordingly, and here we find the crux of so many modern problems, we should not fool ourselves about the relative keenness of our or anyone else's prognoses. I see only dimly into the future, and so do you, and so does everyone else - we aren't all equal in the regard, but even the best of us aren't very good at it, at least not on a consistent basis - our very best see quite far on occasion, but even they miss much more than they catch.

This is why "The end cannot justify the means" remains a useful, albeit incomplete, guide to moral behavior. Equally useful, however, is "Lack of certainly cannot excuse inaction". We all have a moral obligation to keep both our limitations and our capabilities firmly in mind when we make judgments about the actions we take, because if we do not, no morally sound judgment is possible, however good or bad the end may be. Of course President Bush cannot morally justify invading Iraq by pointing to the success of recent elections there, but neither can opponents of the invasion claim that these happy ends can have had no moral bearing on the decision to invade. Either position is untenable. The truth must lie somewhere in between.

The difficult reality is that no one has ever been or ever will be gifted enough to know, in advance and with demonstrable certainty, whether or not Invasion A will lead to Happy Ending B. We will also never be able to know if Lack of Invasion C will lead to Horrible Catastrophe D. The world will never be that simple or predictable. This is, believe it or not, a Very Good Thing. Not only is the world too complicated and unpredictable to make that kind of perfect certainty possible, but if it was possible, then the end could be used to justify the means, which would reduce all moral judgment to mere arithmetic. So here we are, imperfect beings in a complex world, forced to make decisions about things we know little about, fully aware that our ability to predict the outcome of any action we take or don't take is extremely limited and unreliable - it's quite wonderful, really. I wouldn't have it any other way.