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Unfortunately... according to an ex-cia officer interviewed in this article, not only don't they have 10,000, they don't have any. He goes on to explain from an operational point of view the difficulties in infiltrating an organization such as the one that orchestrated the attack against the WTC.

It's an interesting read, and like most things is better than senseless speculation. No offense intended.

According to Afghan contacts and Pakistani officials, bin Ladin's men regularly move through Peshawar and use it as a hub for phone, fax, and modem communication with the outside world.

I agree with pretty much everything you said except this:

There are so many ways to infiltrate these groups, there are existing ways to harass their activities both within the US and without.

This is actually one of the areas in which the U.S. has been weak. To illustrate this point allow me to refer you to the opinions of a former CIA agent who operated in Afghanistan.

Golda Meir's decision was for Israel to resort to assassination of those responsible for organizing and carrying out the attack, an operation later referred to be the media as the "Wrath of God". Calahan concludes that method which worked was for Mossad to cut loose from bureaucratic restrictions a mostly independent operating team organized similar to current US special forces. This team was given a list of potential targets, a directive to not harm innocents, and autonomy to go hunting.

I am concerned that it would be simply impossible for any current United States government to authorize similar autonomy despite the necessity of success.

One key difference between then and today is that today's targets might be less inclined to be in Europe, an area in which it was relatively easier for the Israeli assassination teams to operate in than say Afghanistan or Pakistan for Americans. Calahan's thesis also mentions an operation where the proximity of Israel to Lebanon enabled a massive force of dozens of Israeli commandos to kill three major targets and about a hundred Palestinian guerillas.

In another disturbing article The Atlantic Monthly raises the issue of whether the unwillingness and/or inability of United States intelligence agencies to conduct longterm missions to penetrate local populations in areas such as Afghanistan might make any effective action against Osama Bin Laden's organization impossible. The United States doesn't even train agents in the local languages let alone assign agents to become experts specializing in a country.

I don't think you have been following the activities of the secret agencies of the U.S. government. The CIA has done everything that terrorists do.

For example, see this quote from the Atlantic Monthly story, Inside the Department of Dirty Tricks:

"We're not in the Boy Scouts," Richard Helms was fond of saying when he ran the Central Intelligence Agency. He was correct, of course. Boy Scouts do not ordinarily bribe foreign politicians, invade other countries with secret armies, spread lies, conduct medical experiments, build stocks of poison, pass machine guns to people who plan to turn them on their leaders, or plot to kill men such as Lumumba or Castro or others who displeased Washington. The CIA did these things, and more, over a long span of years.

Did you know that Osama bin Laden was trained by the CIA? See the MSNBC article, Bin Laden comes home to roost.

Do you think that Osama bin Laden is a terrorist? Then isn't the agency who trained him a terrorist organization, also?

Here it also says:
Most people (63 percent) fall into an intermediate category that Westin calls "privacy pragmatists." Such people are always balancing the potential benefits and threats involved in sharing information, and are particularly concerned about what Ann Cavoukian described to me as "function creep"--that is, the secondary use (deliberate or inadvertent) of information that was originally divulged for one purpose only. Depending on what privacy pragmatists get in return for their information, they are willing to forsake different degrees of privacy protection.

It's a great article overall and the fact that it was printed in the Atlantic gives hope that some of the less computer savvy but informed intelligentsia are beginning to look at these issues seriously. Since these are the people that also tend to vote more often, it may actually have an effect on the politics of privacy that may in turn force guarentees in the software architectures that users depend on.

Here it also says:
Most people (63 percent) fall into an intermediate category that Westin calls "privacy pragmatists." Such people are always balancing the potential benefits and threats involved in sharing information, and are particularly concerned about what Ann Cavoukian described to me as "function creep"--that is, the secondary use (deliberate or inadvertent) of information that was originally divulged for one purpose only. Depending on what privacy pragmatists get in return for their information, they are willing to forsake different degrees of privacy protection.

It's a great article overall and the fact that it was printed in the Atlantic gives hope that some of the less computer savvy but informed intelligentsia are beginning to look at these issues seriously. Since these are the people that also tend to vote more often, it may actually have an effect on the politics of privacy that may in turn force guarentees in the software architectures that users depend on.

Here it also says:
Most people (63 percent) fall into an intermediate category that Westin calls "privacy pragmatists." Such people are always balancing the potential benefits and threats involved in sharing information, and are particularly concerned about what Ann Cavoukian described to me as "function creep"--that is, the secondary use (deliberate or inadvertent) of information that was originally divulged for one purpose only. Depending on what privacy pragmatists get in return for their information, they are willing to forsake different degrees of privacy protection.

It's a great article overall and the fact that it was printed in the Atlantic gives hope that some of the less computer savvy but informed intelligentsia are beginning to look at these issues seriously. Since these are the people that also tend to vote more often, it may actually have an effect on the politics of privacy that may in turn force guarentees in the software architectures that users depend on.

So, which wireless resources in these areas are these "parasites" sucking dry? Kinda hard to live off the sweet, tasty blood of promises and vaporware.

Weed would probably be a better biological metaphor. Weeds are opportunistic, reproduce handily, and often thrive best in places that are underutilized by "desired" plants (roadsides, fallow fields, vacant lots, transitional areas). In fact, a great many of what folks would consider "weeds" are beneficial plants that can be used as food or medicine, or just plain provide beauty.

So, which wireless resources in these areas are these "parasites" sucking dry? Kinda hard to live off the sweet, tasty blood of promises and vaporware.

Weed would probably be a better biological metaphor. Weeds are opportunistic, reproduce handily, and often thrive best in places that are underutilized by "desired" plants (roadsides, fallow fields, vacant lots, transitional areas). In fact, a great many of what folks would consider "weeds" are beneficial plants that can be used as food or medicine, or just plain provide beauty.

Why not? If fetuses are not human beings, why not make them a marketable item? If they're not human, why would it be morally wrong for a woman to accept money to get pregnant and have an abortion? WHY NOT?

Off topic, but the best opionion I've ever seen on abortion is at http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/95sep/abortion/a bortion.htm

US-Pakistan relations aren't that great.

Check out this article about the difficulty of US counterterrorism in the area - you might find it enlightening.

Quote:

"Where the Taliban and Usama bin Ladin are concerned, Pakistan and the United States aren't allies. Relations between the two countries have been poor for years, owing to American opposition to Pakistan's successful nuclear-weapons program and, more recently, Islamabad's backing of Muslim Kashmiri separatists. Bin Ladin's presence in Afghanistan as a "guest" of the Pakistani-backed Taliban has injected even more distrust and suspicion into the relationship."
--

(And if you're not well familiar with Japan's culture, it's also worth reading the articles now appearing in The Atlantic Monthly.)"

They printed a ridiculously long, biased hatched job called Russia Is Finished back in May to try to get everyone "familiar" with Russia's culture. Intelligent letter-writers have pointed out that it was mostly a crock.

So why would I care what they have to say about Japan?
I think I will stick to what fellow geeks without a political axe to grind tell me.

Well you can't prove morality by logic alone, but you can prove that divorce is bad if by bad you mean harmful to children.

Check out the 1993 article on the subject in Atlantic Monthly. Always a good source...

Interesting you should say that...If a thing like apotemnophilia (where people become convinced they'll be better off without hands or other bits) could be contagious even though `all in the head', why not a few cases of RSI?

The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196

You don't -- you let evolution take care of that. Stupid and selfish people on the whole are less likely to survive, though they may have other dominant traits that help them. For example, if you are smart and selfish, you may still get by quite well. We may not like selfishness, but it is one of those things that helps individuals survive. Selfishness doesn't help the species as a whole survive, and most of us tend to dislike selfish people, while realizing that selfishness is universal, only that some people exhibit it more so than others (or it could be argued that smart people who are selfish don't appear selfish - that's why they are smart)

What's the solution? Awareness and activism, I'd say. If you are more aware of things like those mentioned in the book (an excellent book, by the way, and there's a short article that was based on the book at the Atlantic Monthly which can give you a good idea about the book).

Which is to say, at the very least, we are doing the right thing by having discussions here, and Jon Katz, for all the overreaching arguments he make, is actually providing public service by bringing up topics such as these for debate.

You don't -- you let evolution take care of that. Stupid and selfish people on the whole are less likely to survive, though they may have other dominant traits that help them. For example, if you are smart and selfish, you may still get by quite well. We may not like selfishness, but it is one of those things that helps individuals survive. Selfishness doesn't help the species as a whole survive, and most of us tend to dislike selfish people, while realizing that selfishness is universal, only that some people exhibit it more so than others (or it could be argued that smart people who are selfish don't appear selfish - that's why they are smart)

What's the solution? Awareness and activism, I'd say. If you are more aware of things like those mentioned in the book (an excellent book, by the way, and there's a short article that was based on the book at the Atlantic Monthly which can give you a good idea about the book).

Which is to say, at the very least, we are doing the right thing by having discussions here, and Jon Katz, for all the overreaching arguments he make, is actually providing public service by bringing up topics such as these for debate.

There was an article on this a few months ago, also with Scott McNealy's quip about privacy being dead. I wrote my own short expose on it as well, so I figure I'll just link to it instead of regurgitating it all over a comment.

I'm kind of curious how other people feel about being a private citizen (always using aliases, fake names, online) -vs- being a public citizen (never hiding your true identity or information. Don't get me wrong, there will always be privacy at a certain extent because of security (bank accounts, credit card info), but is it really necessary to hide everything?

---

I've heard a few times about this corporate domination subject... here's a summary of some of the issues. Oh, yeah, that's from 1881; there have been some more recent events.

This is old news but if you can encourage the development of cars like this instead, you'd be improving things across the board.

Using veggie oil in a diesel isn't big news. Diesel engines are vastly more efficient than modern motors. The problem being that modern refined gasoline is too explosive for them (this is a similar problem to using weapons-grade plutonium in a nuclear reactor). Diesel gas is cheaper per mile in a diesel engine, but also is less pure, and that translates into nastier pollution. I've been told (though I grew up on the waning tide of diesel engines so I never personally witnessed any of this, nor would I know how to do it) that you could run a diesel (very inefficiently) on peanut oil or even diluted peanut butter if absolutely required. Depending on exactly how they refine the veggie oil, this book could be useful or it could just be a minor curiousity that's really not worth doing.

The $.50 / gallon is somewhat hard to swallow unless they mean cost of seeds to oil. Vegetable oil at the store is certainly more expensive than that. The other possible comparison could be $.50 per gallon in comparison to the mileage in a normal gasoline powered car. Without knowing exactly where that figure came from (I didn't scope out the site too deeply), it's hard to justify it in any reasonable way. Also of note is that they describe in that book how to actually grow the oil crops and then refine the oil.

In general, I'd relegate this to the "interesting, but not particularly useful" catagory of information. I'd much rather have a light-weight plastic / carbon-fiber car running on Hydrogen Fuel Cells than an old (or even a new) diesel running on anything.

Side question here, but does anyone know if they've been able to reinforce diesel engines to the point that they could take unleaded gasoline directly? If so, that'd be nearly as useful as veggie oil, since I seem to recall diesels being a fair margin more efficient. Just harder to start in a cold winter.

~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
"Veni; Vidi; Vi C++"

Well, they've turned any imaginative and artistic types away from urban planning with the standard ways they do it...

The main constraint for [sub]urban design at present is that over the last 50 years, there has been a network of zoning laws constructed to enforce these designs. So even if your local civic designer *wanted* to reproduce Portland or San Francisco, he couldn't.

Examples:
Divisions are zoned by housing square footage. This segregates the city by wealth, by house size. That's your 'big subdivision here, big apartment complex there' problem.
Commerce must be so-and-so far away from residential. Also, buildings cannot share purpose -- no residential above commercial. Say hello to driving everywhere.
Commerce must have a certain amount of parking per square foot of customer-available space, and they must be set back a certain amount from the street. This destroys the sidewalk, common street area, and street as a social area.
Some places dictate window shape and percentage, and they do it in ways known to be wrong by all architects. Ugliness is enforced.

None of this has anything to do with efficiency. Efficiency involved locating people close to their activities (housing close to commerce close to schools close to small offices etc); and bringing people back into their communities. Opposed to this are the auto makers, auto drivers who can't concieve of another way, white flight, construction industry, short-sighted politicians, and a network of lifetime civic beauracrats enforcing dumb laws instantiated in post-WW2 America, when we decided to begin erecting disposable buildings. Previous to that, a building was assumed to survive for at least 100 years, and the impact on its community over such a span could not be ignored. Now we build everything to throw away, a trend I believe has been enthusiastically accepted by all segments of our society.

Things you might want to read:
Carfree Cities by JH Crawford
A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander
this article in The Atlantic: "Is Main Street your idea of a nice business district? Sorry, your zoning laws won't let you build it, or even extend it where it already exists. Is Elm Street your idea of a nice place to live -- you know, houses with front porches on a tree-lined street? Sorry, Elm Street cannot be assembled under the rules of large-lot zoning and modern traffic engineering. All you can build where I live is another version of Los Angeles -- the zoning laws say so."

Many highways you travel on have cameras that go back to the Department of Transportation, where TV stations, etc., get their live feeds for their news shows. In fact, states like New Jersey are starting to put these camera online. I believe Atlanta and a few other cities have extensive survailence networks; one tiny piece of New York City has so many public and private cameras it isn't funny.

Now IANAL, but I belive the laws in the United States at the moment do *not* cover video survailance. Prosecutions of people spying on other people are normally because someone performed *audio* survailence (i.e., left the microphone running on the camera). There was a case where landlord put a camcorder in a couple's bedroom behind a two-way mirror. The landlord would have actually been within his rights to put a camera there except for the fact he left the microphone attached.

Why do pathologies sometimes arise as if from nowhere? Can the mere description of a condition make it contagious?

The idea of having one's legs amputated might never even enter the minds of some people until it is suggested to them. Yet once it is suggested, and not just suggested but paired with imagery that a person's past may have primed him or her to appreciate, that act becomes possible... Toss this mixture into the vast fan of the Internet and it will be dispersed at speeds unimagined even a decade ago.

Other sources say that there is doubt in the matter, but most say he considered politics above matters of faith. This is very troubling.

The Catholic church now stands ready to make him a Saint... It's very troubling to me, indeed.

--Mike--

A broader article on privacy, and the business of making money by providing it, is in this month's Atlantic, here. And I love the cartoon!

Nixon only resigned because they were going to impeach him like the next day. And unlike in the case of Clinton, there was alot worse going on than getting a blowjob in the whitehouse. Its not like Nixon heard that he had done wrong (being ever the innocent one), realized that the deeds he had done were corrupt, immediatly went on TV, apologized to the nation, restored the national confidence to where it should be and resigned. Rather, Nixon covered everything up from day one and at each step of the way he tried something else, further digging himself a hole until the point where Congress got fed up with it and was ready to impeach his ass (and unlike Clinton, there was NO doubt that he was being kicked out on his fat corrupt ass), then he resigned the day before when there was NO way that he could hold on.

However, this did not stop there, oh no, that would be too easy. They continued to investigate the Watergate happens, as rightly the should have. It took then President Gerald Ford to end all of this by giving Nixon a pardon on a crime that he most definitly committed.

Now, Clinton wasn't the most honest president that we've ever had. In fact, he was kind of slimy, but even mentioning his name in the same breath as Nixon is just wrong... its up there with John Lennon comparing the Beatles with Jesus.

If you want a much more candid opinion on this matter, check out Hunter S. Thompson's obituary for Nixon. Its much more candid and venom dripping than any of us could possibly be. While you're at it, you should read the accompanying article that goes into a bit more of Thompson's feelings on the guy. And unlike most people here on slashdot, Thompson actually lived through Nixon and covered him as a coorispondant back in the day.

Nixon only resigned because they were going to impeach him like the next day. And unlike in the case of Clinton, there was alot worse going on than getting a blowjob in the whitehouse. Its not like Nixon heard that he had done wrong (being ever the innocent one), realized that the deeds he had done were corrupt, immediatly went on TV, apologized to the nation, restored the national confidence to where it should be and resigned. Rather, Nixon covered everything up from day one and at each step of the way he tried something else, further digging himself a hole until the point where Congress got fed up with it and was ready to impeach his ass (and unlike Clinton, there was NO doubt that he was being kicked out on his fat corrupt ass), then he resigned the day before when there was NO way that he could hold on.

However, this did not stop there, oh no, that would be too easy. They continued to investigate the Watergate happens, as rightly the should have. It took then President Gerald Ford to end all of this by giving Nixon a pardon on a crime that he most definitly committed.

Now, Clinton wasn't the most honest president that we've ever had. In fact, he was kind of slimy, but even mentioning his name in the same breath as Nixon is just wrong... its up there with John Lennon comparing the Beatles with Jesus.

If you want a much more candid opinion on this matter, check out Hunter S. Thompson's obituary for Nixon. Its much more candid and venom dripping than any of us could possibly be. While you're at it, you should read the accompanying article that goes into a bit more of Thompson's feelings on the guy. And unlike most people here on slashdot, Thompson actually lived through Nixon and covered him as a coorispondant back in the day.

It might sound silly to some that the Marines are testing out foaming agents, masers, and any number of other nonlethal agents, but if only one of those solutions proves to be viable, the research will have paid off.

Here's an example of why this is important. I was deployed with the 10th MTN Division during operation Restore Hope in Somalia. Our mission was to secure food distribution sites, protect local villages from outside bandits, and help the locals rebuild their own legal and enforcement structure. We were almost always vastly outnumbered by the civilian population.

There were many times when I really would have appreciated a nonlethal option other than hand-to-hand combat. The reality of the situation is that when you're faced with a very hostile crowd and you have only three methods of dealing with that crowd (bullets, the bayonet, or hand-to-hand), there's really only one option that leaves you any chance of surviving.

The flip side of that is that while you may be able to protect your own life by shooting that guy brandishing his AK-74, your long-term odds of escaping alive are seriously compromised. Angry crowds just don't like it when you start killing people.

However, if you can incapacitate someone, you're making the point that you will defend yourself, and the consequences of threatening you will be felt. In essense your response is a means of communication - you are telling people that you respect their lives but that you are in command of the situation.

As soon as the shooting stops, you loose control of the situation, which is the worst position for any combat leader.

Having the option to escalate the situation slowly doesn't always mean that you'll choose a graduated response. Note that recently Special Response police units have really changed their tactics in response to Columbine.

See this article in The Atlantic

The bottom line is that the more options soldiers have, the less likely things will get out of control, which means less loss of life.

An interesting point. I looked up (yahoo search "Cascade space junk orbit") and found this article that says basically, govt regs are in their infancy, the probability of an impact is about 20% a year for the Space Station, and this interesting anecdote:

Engineers took a new look at the shuttle and the International Space Station. Designed in the 1970s, when debris was not considered a factor, the shuttle was determined to be clearly vulnerable. After almost every mission windows on the shuttle are so badly pitted by microscopic debris that they need to be replaced. Soon NASA was flying the shuttle upside down and backward, so that its rockets, rather than the more sensitive crew compartments, would absorb the worst impacts.

Yah, its a problem alright, and not one this company seems to be concerned about.

Not sure if space will be all that wonderful with 50,000 little 1-kg cubes flying around...

...but, hey, that's 50,000 less SUVs I gotta contend with in traffic on the way to work! heh!

We already have a food surplus. The USA and EU feed their grain to animals instead of people, because "economics" says that your hamburger is more important than the life of someone you will never meet. Don't get me started on overfed "right to life" hypocrates.

Of course scientists have already made huge contributions to fighting world hunger, and there's less starvation and malnutrition in the world than ever before.

Let's see, has the idea about putting caring above economics been tried before? Yes, come to think of it, in the USSR and China, among other places. The result? 100 MILLION people died.

Also, what's this bullshit about "right to life" got to do with it? The "right to life" Catholic Church is one of the biggest charity providers in the third world.

Instead, it states that we should be taking advantage of human nature which is a me-first sort of attitude. By providing a reward / punishment system which encourages environmentally sound actions, we can hopefully start to clean up this planet.

- SEAL

Who says we're going to settle on Mars any time soon anyways? Getting into space already costs loads of money so why would a settler want to make the trip.

Besides, Earth isn't going to be running out of resources any time quick so there isn't a need for this. We've found new and clever ways to push the boundry of our population further and further as time goes on. (Just look at history: We supported more people by centralized farming. We supported even more people when we industrialized. etc.) The myth that we need to relocate because we're running out of resources is just paranoia.

Ecologist Paul R. Ehrlich says population growth is outstripping the earth's resources. Economist Julian L. Simon says that human ingenuity keeps the planet's resources from being depleted in the context of property rights and market prices. In 1980, they put their money where their mouths were and made a bet. Simon offered to let anyone pick any natural resource and any future date, and he bet that the price would decline by that date. If the resource really became scarcer as the world's population grew, he reasoned, then its price should rise over time.

Ehrlich and two associates picked quantities of five metals - chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten - then worth a total of $1,000, and chose a ten-year period. If combined prices of the metals were higher in 1990 than in 1980, Simon agreed to pay the Ehrlich group the difference in cash; if the combined prices were lower, they would pay him the difference. Without ceremony last fall, Ehrlich sent Simon a sheet of calculations and a check for $576.07.

Over the ten-year period, each of the five metals had declined in price when adjusted for inflation.

The drop was so sharp that Simon would have come out slightly ahead even without the adjustment for inflation. Prices of food and most natural resources have been falling for decades because of entrepreneurship, changing consumption patterns and continuing technological improvements. Despite that fact, Ehrlich, who had predicted that "before 1985 mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity" including food shortages, now says it will happen sometime in the next century.

So it really isn't a good idea to complain about waiting to colonize Mars when it isn't going to happen any time soon anyways.

Jonathon Rauch's article in this week's Atlantic is a case study of the application of IT to the old economy. It's a very detailed exploration of arguments that partially refute Gordon's stance that productivity growth is very sector limited. (Even Gordon has shifted, I believe he used to claim few manufacturing improvements.)

The author also states that there has been no technological transformation to equal the mail to telegraph transformation. I think the web/internet, in its original (CERN) sense of a way to publish worldwide for pennies, has a potentially equal potential for transformation. A vast amount of human knowledge (yes, and noise, but humans are very good at sorting out noise) can now be published worldwide for an infinitesmal fraction of the pre-1980 cost. Twenty years from now that impact may seem much larger than it does today.

It all depends on where one measures from. I do think that the period from 1965 to 1990 may be considered a time of relative "calm", a period where much was happening below the surface. I suspect, however, that the period from 1990 to 2040 may rival the shocking transformations of the early 20th century. And that prediction, of course, assumes that we don't develop sentient machines (An event that would render all comparisons to past eras irrelevant.)

One last thought (sorry, long post), last year, in their famous millenium issue, the Economist published a graph showing economic output per person over the past 10,000 or so years. I wish I could find a way to link to it (the original may have come from the World Bank). It's a very slightly sloping line until the 18th century, where it starts to head up. Then it heads up very sharply around 1890 and goes exponential. There's another inflection to a higher exponent around 1980/90. Studying that curve is mind boggling.

john
--
John Faughnan

Removing barriers to distribution makes perfect sense to me, academia is a publicly subsidized institution, as such its products should be available without restriction to the public. I think incorporating capitalism's incentive system in academia is dangerous. As you said, education should be the incentive, not money. Having money be the incentive causes researchers to not share their work with each other and undermines the credibility of the academic process. There was a good article in the Atlantic a while back about this, see here.

The biggest barrier that I can see is the cozy relationship between the publishers and the old boy academic network. They both can profit more under restricted distribution than open distribution. More public investment in academia would lessen the need for academics to turn to capitalism for incentive. There is some awareness of this issue afoot on campuses but there is no movement by academics that I am aware of.

The idea of linking to anywhere from anyplace, isn't really new. Vannevar Bush introduced the concept of hypertext already in the 1945 article"As We May Think". This is recommended reading for anyone interested in hypertext as a concept.

The impression I got from BrowseUp is that it is supposed to implement some of his ideas. Whether they are successful or not, I cannot answer. Their idea however, is in no way new or radical

IIRC, Vanavar (sp?) Bush talked about having a global, hypertextual web of information in the late 1940s (48?49?), which is discussed somewhere in Brook's Mythical Man Month I think (or maybe it was Levy's Hackers, I've been reading both in the past few days and they are starting to blend together). Even if he didn't patent anything, his writings are a part of public record. When is BT claiming their patent is from again? ;-)

OK, I actually found some substantive evidence:

• An academic paper segement talking about hypertext, which contains a reference to:
• As We May Think by Vanavar Bush, Atlantic Monthly, 1945. Credited in the academic piece as being the first mention in print of hypertextual documents (and you sort of have to have a hyperlink to have a hypertext).

--

I urge anyone interested in these issues to read this article.

I'm pretty sure it was Stewart Brand. There's a reference to it here

The full quote is "Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine -- too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. The result is a tension that will not go away."

It must be true - I saw it on /.

De Beers managed to increase the preceived value of diamonds though a carefully planned campaign of giving them to female Hollywood stars in the 1940s. Before that they were (rightly, IMO) considered rather boring.

A chunk of a Diamondtalk.com Forum has some nice information on this. In particular, one poster cited an article in The Atlantic entitled "Have you ever tried to sell a diamond?" notably, it says the following:

The major investors in the diamond mines realized that they had no alternative but to merge their interests into a single entity that would be powerful enough to control production and perpetuate the illusion of scarcity of diamonds. The instrument they created, in 1888, was called De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., incorporated in South Africa. As De Beers took control of all aspects of the world diamond trade, it assumed many forms. In London, it operated under the innocuous name of the Diamond Trading Company. In Israel, it was known as "The Syndicate." In Europe, it was called the "C.S.O." -- initials referring to the Central Selling Organization, which was an arm of the Diamond Trading Company. And in black Africa, it disguised its South African origins under subsidiaries with names like Diamond Development Corporation and Mining Services, Inc. At its height -- for most of this century -- it not only either directly owned or controlled all the diamond mines in southern Africa but also owned diamond trading companies in England, Portugal, Israel, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland.

Just like any other cartel, like the Cocaine People(tm).

Yeah, but diamond mining requires moving a huge amount of material to get a few diamonds. Titanium mining requires moving a large amount of material into a smelting facility. This process is not going to substantually change things other than making it cheaper. But it is going to change the lifestyle of titanium salesmen.

That's true now, but remember that previous article in The Atlantic? Well, it links to another article which has this next juicy tidbit:

Diamonds arrived in Namaqualand millions of years ago, tumbling down the rivers and into the sea. When the ocean receded, some of the diamonds remained on the beach.

Namaqualand is described slightly above that snippet of text as "...a sandy slab of South Africa along the Atlantic coast. Namaqualand's pan-hot desert and scraped little hills start north of Cape Town and run up to the Orange River..." which is striking, because what that means is that at one time, you could head off from Cape Town, go to the beach with a rake, and just dig up uncut diamonds.

Also, the American Museum of Natural History has a nice diamond web exhibit which contains, among other things, this page which points out that diamonds were discovered in South Africa by a boy finding one just lying around on his father's farm. Nice anectodal evidence.

And just to make you ill without sending you to goatse.cx, consider this article (in Red Herring) which talks about a company (now called Blue Nile) which got billions of dollars (literally) in two rounds of VC funding in one month.

So when you're forking over two months' salary for an engagement ring like a barmy git, keep in mind that once upon a memory you could walk on the beach in Cape Town and spontaneously find a diamond in your toes. How often do you think that happens nowadays?

Enough data mining for tonight. You're all on your own from here on out.

De Beers managed to increase the preceived value of diamonds though a carefully planned campaign of giving them to female Hollywood stars in the 1940s. Before that they were (rightly, IMO) considered rather boring.

A chunk of a Diamondtalk.com Forum has some nice information on this. In particular, one poster cited an article in The Atlantic entitled "Have you ever tried to sell a diamond?" notably, it says the following:

The major investors in the diamond mines realized that they had no alternative but to merge their interests into a single entity that would be powerful enough to control production and perpetuate the illusion of scarcity of diamonds. The instrument they created, in 1888, was called De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., incorporated in South Africa. As De Beers took control of all aspects of the world diamond trade, it assumed many forms. In London, it operated under the innocuous name of the Diamond Trading Company. In Israel, it was known as "The Syndicate." In Europe, it was called the "C.S.O." -- initials referring to the Central Selling Organization, which was an arm of the Diamond Trading Company. And in black Africa, it disguised its South African origins under subsidiaries with names like Diamond Development Corporation and Mining Services, Inc. At its height -- for most of this century -- it not only either directly owned or controlled all the diamond mines in southern Africa but also owned diamond trading companies in England, Portugal, Israel, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland.

Just like any other cartel, like the Cocaine People(tm).

Yeah, but diamond mining requires moving a huge amount of material to get a few diamonds. Titanium mining requires moving a large amount of material into a smelting facility. This process is not going to substantually change things other than making it cheaper. But it is going to change the lifestyle of titanium salesmen.

That's true now, but remember that previous article in The Atlantic? Well, it links to another article which has this next juicy tidbit:

Diamonds arrived in Namaqualand millions of years ago, tumbling down the rivers and into the sea. When the ocean receded, some of the diamonds remained on the beach.

Namaqualand is described slightly above that snippet of text as "...a sandy slab of South Africa along the Atlantic coast. Namaqualand's pan-hot desert and scraped little hills start north of Cape Town and run up to the Orange River..." which is striking, because what that means is that at one time, you could head off from Cape Town, go to the beach with a rake, and just dig up uncut diamonds.

Also, the American Museum of Natural History has a nice diamond web exhibit which contains, among other things, this page which points out that diamonds were discovered in South Africa by a boy finding one just lying around on his father's farm. Nice anectodal evidence.

And just to make you ill without sending you to goatse.cx, consider this article (in Red Herring) which talks about a company (now called Blue Nile) which got billions of dollars (literally) in two rounds of VC funding in one month.

So when you're forking over two months' salary for an engagement ring like a barmy git, keep in mind that once upon a memory you could walk on the beach in Cape Town and spontaneously find a diamond in your toes. How often do you think that happens nowadays?

Enough data mining for tonight. You're all on your own from here on out.

De Beers managed to increase the preceived value of diamonds though a carefully planned campaign of giving them to female Hollywood stars in the 1940s. Before that they were (rightly, IMO) considered rather boring.

A chunk of a Diamondtalk.com Forum has some nice information on this. In particular, one poster cited an article in The Atlantic entitled "Have you ever tried to sell a diamond?" notably, it says the following:

The major investors in the diamond mines realized that they had no alternative but to merge their interests into a single entity that would be powerful enough to control production and perpetuate the illusion of scarcity of diamonds. The instrument they created, in 1888, was called De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd., incorporated in South Africa. As De Beers took control of all aspects of the world diamond trade, it assumed many forms. In London, it operated under the innocuous name of the Diamond Trading Company. In Israel, it was known as "The Syndicate." In Europe, it was called the "C.S.O." -- initials referring to the Central Selling Organization, which was an arm of the Diamond Trading Company. And in black Africa, it disguised its South African origins under subsidiaries with names like Diamond Development Corporation and Mining Services, Inc. At its height -- for most of this century -- it not only either directly owned or controlled all the diamond mines in southern Africa but also owned diamond trading companies in England, Portugal, Israel, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland.

Just like any other cartel, like the Cocaine People(tm).

Yeah, but diamond mining requires moving a huge amount of material to get a few diamonds. Titanium mining requires moving a large amount of material into a smelting facility. This process is not going to substantually change things other than making it cheaper. But it is going to change the lifestyle of titanium salesmen.

That's true now, but remember that previous article in The Atlantic? Well, it links to another article which has this next juicy tidbit:

Diamonds arrived in Namaqualand millions of years ago, tumbling down the rivers and into the sea. When the ocean receded, some of the diamonds remained on the beach.

Namaqualand is described slightly above that snippet of text as "...a sandy slab of South Africa along the Atlantic coast. Namaqualand's pan-hot desert and scraped little hills start north of Cape Town and run up to the Orange River..." which is striking, because what that means is that at one time, you could head off from Cape Town, go to the beach with a rake, and just dig up uncut diamonds.

Also, the American Museum of Natural History has a nice diamond web exhibit which contains, among other things, this page which points out that diamonds were discovered in South Africa by a boy finding one just lying around on his father's farm. Nice anectodal evidence.

And just to make you ill without sending you to goatse.cx, consider this article (in Red Herring) which talks about a company (now called Blue Nile) which got billions of dollars (literally) in two rounds of VC funding in one month.

So when you're forking over two months' salary for an engagement ring like a barmy git, keep in mind that once upon a memory you could walk on the beach in Cape Town and spontaneously find a diamond in your toes. How often do you think that happens nowadays?

Enough data mining for tonight. You're all on your own from here on out.

Three hundred years ago is when the Little Ice Age happened. It was unusually cold then, so of course it's warmer now.

"The most recent big cooling started about 12,700 years ago, right in the midst of our last global warming. This cold period, known as the Younger Dryas, is named for the pollen of a tundra flower that turned up in a lake bed in Denmark when it shouldn't have. Things had been warming up, and half the ice sheets covering Europe and Canada had already melted. The return to ice-age temperatures lasted 1,300 years. Then, about 11,400 years ago, things suddenly warmed up again, and the earliest agricultural villages were established in the Middle East. An abrupt cooling got started 8,200 years ago, but it aborted within a century, and the temperature changes since then have been gradual in comparison. Indeed, we've had an unprecedented period of climate stability."

You are probably thinking of the hypothetical "memex" device proposed in his article As We May Think that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1945. He did not demonstrate anything, he only described it.

You are probably thinking of the hypothetical "memex" device proposed in his article As We May Think that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1945. He did not demonstrate anything, he only described it.

Exactly. It's as if noone ever traded music before Gnutella came around. "Let's make a case ... Without technology, no one would have ever broken the law!" Ha. The slashdot article from the Atlantic posted a few days ago mentioned that copyright infringement was huge around the turn of the century -- people were bootlegging printed music. I wonder how wide the distribution channel would have been if there was a sheet-music version of gnutella around in 1890.

Actually, the media does a terrible job of policing itself, and one should not assume that because it delights in revealing the foibles of every other aspect of society, it doesn't shy away from revealing the transgressions of other media 'competitor-colleagues'.

Actually, it is not difficult to find examples of media abuses. Not only are they daily occurences, but even reporting of them is not uncommon. However, they rarely get the constant barrage of repitition and reinforcement of corresponding stories in other fields -- a factor that cannot be overestimated. For decades, even issues that were prominently showcased on shows like like, say '60 Minutes' at its height often fizzled without constant multi-source reinforcement. Some of these issues became major issues many years later when the media felt comfortable with making a full barrage

Interestingly, I happened to stumble on an archived article in the June 1968 Atlantic Monthly called "The Media Barons and the Public Interest: An FCC Commissioner's Warning" which predicts many of the risks that we face today. This has been a hot issue since long before Marshal "the medium is the message" McLuhan (60's), and Noam Chomsky [70's] (prominent in AI and natural language beore he went social activist -- and also known for being Marvin Minsky's arch-foe) However, as the risks have come closer to fruition, we hear less and less aboiut them ... predictably

Check out The Kept University in The Atlantic Monthly, March 2000 for a thoroughly researched, thoughtful treatment of this issue.

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See this "Roundtable" on copright, from the archives of The Atlantic Monthly. John Perry Barlow and Lawrence Lessig are among the participants.
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