December 2010
“In 1848, he married Effie Gray, for whom he wrote the early fantasy novel The King of the Golden River. Their marriage was notoriously unhappy, eventually being annulled in 1854 on grounds of his “incurable impotency,”[2] a charge Ruskin later disputed, even going so far as to offer to prove his virility at the court’s request[3]. In court, the Ruskin family counter-attacked Effie as being mentally unbalanced. Effie later married the artist John Everett Millais, who had been Ruskin’s protégé, in July 1855, and bore eight children.”
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John Ruskin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
his is really one of the saddest personal sections i’ve read on wikipedia. (scroll to the part in which Lewis Carroll is a super pervy bad influence)
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Oh man Ruskin. The poor guy. I read one fairly-well researched bio of him that said he loved Effie so much, pursued her forever, married her, and on their wedding night, he was shocked to discover she had public hair - since, being a victorian man, he had no idea adult women had public hair. He only looked at art. So he thought she was deformed, and never made another attempt to sleep with his wife. How depressing is that?
“Whether Manning actually said these things to Lamo could be verified in one minute by “journalist” Kevin Poulsen. He could either say: (1) yes, the chats contain such statements by Manning, and here are the portions where he said these things, or (2) no, the chats contain no such statements by Manning, which means Lamo is either lying or suffers from a very impaired recollection about what Manning said. Poulsen could also provide Lamo — who claims he is no longer in possession of them — with a copy of the chat logs (which Lamo gave him) so that journalists quoting Lamo about Manning’s statements could see the actual evidence rather than relying on Lamo’s claims. Any true “journalist” — or any person minimally interested in revealing the truth — would do exactly that in response to Lamo’s claims as published by The New York Times.”
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The worsening journalistic disgrace at Wired - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com (via Instapaper)
The refusal to do so, however, is not evidence of truth or guilt.
Why does Apple have such a cult following? →
quora.com
Oh and here was my take at an answer (feature request: quora, and all websites, sharing things with Tumblr in addition to Twitter and Facebook):
Looking at this from another angle as a life-long Apple fanboy:
Many technology companies focus on the products that we envision the future having - video phones, lasers, flying cars, whatever. Nerds are excited about products that bring their sci fi future closer.
Apple, however, doesn’t just focus on products that bring the future closer, they focus on bringing that world closer. They focus on the environment, society. A company bringing a new video phone into the world excites a future-enthusiast to some degree. A company that brings video phones to millions of people and brings the world that much closer to the future we envision is a much, much more exciting thing. Those millions of people using the product make more fans, of course, but also move the world closer to a future we pine for.
Why does Apple have such a cult following? →
quora.com
If I wrote a post with this title on TechCrunch, no matter what I actually wrote in the post itself, the first 300 comments would all be complete troll bullshit.
Agreed. But the question is… why? What is it about Quora that enables it to provide such good answers (and community!) without falling prey to the trolls? I ask because I have some pet theories*, but no clear answers.
* it’s all about identity, and yes, that’s my blanket answer to everything now that I’m full-time on about.me
Oh, the trolls are coming to Quora. I think it’s only a matter of time. I’ve had Wikipedian-level anal comments left on some of my answers, and bordering on passive-agressive formatting suggestions. It’s only a matter of time.
“For Google, nearly all of whose profits depend on advertising revenue, dominance expressed as clickstream traffic is the currency. To maintain that dominance the ‘Don’t Be Evil’ company has been willing to go into business in China despite all evidence of rampant human rights violations, get into bed with the worst phone carrier to rape net neutrality, let its ‘walled backlot’ search become a cesspool of SEO swindlers, collect unauthorized data via illegal WiFi mapping all over the globe, risk exposing private email account data in hopes of capturing social graph info by default, favor its own properties in search results in surreptitious ways and so on.”
—
Kontra (via Daring Fireball)
I’m a bit all over the place here but this makes me think a few things:
1) The debate about doing business in China is ages old - it ran through most of the Clinton administration (oh man remember those endless “most favored nation status” debates?), Bush I, Reagan. The US has generally taken a tack that engaging China in a commercial manner will, over time, lead to more human rights, and it is just as morally dubious to leave one sixth of the world’s population isolated. We can agree or disagree with that approach, I think. But I do find it a bit of a stretch to posit that people on either side of that argument are “evil.” Seems to me they are two legitimate viewpoints that good people can debate and disagree on.
2) On Google in general, its search really does suck now, doesn’t it? I mean it has gotten SO BAD. One search of lyrics will show you. Or Colin’s comment about how he looked up an article about what basic training was like, and the top search result was written by a housewife in the midwest. It’s exciting to see competition in search again - not just from Bing, but from Facebook and Twitter, etc. I suspect this will go a long way toward curbing Google’s offenses in SEO manipulation and pointing search to its own properties. They haven’t had a legitimate competitor in a while and have gotten a bit greedy.
3) It’s funny how we hate Verizon because of this net neutrality stuff but are all still desperately waiting for the iPhone to come to Verizon.
“
Here’s the country I want to be a citizen of: the one that decides to buy comfort and convenience by deploying courage.
9/11 · We’re coming up on the tenth anniversary, and can we just get over our sustained episode of collective chickenshittedness? As Bruce Schneier has pointed out repeatedly, terrorists post-9/11 have lost the ability to use planes as weapons, for two reasons: The cockpit doors are strengthened and locked. The passengers have learned that fighting is their best option; butter-knives against machine guns if that’s all there is.
All the extra scanners and pat-downs and machines and line-ups are buying us, unless all the experts I read are wrong, more or less nothing.
Here’s What We Do · Go on X-raying luggage; why not? Plus, don’t let a plane take off if someone has checked in luggage but isn’t on board; easy and almost always non-intrusive. As for passengers, just lighten up. To start with, drop all the silly rules about toothpaste and shoes and laptops having to be out of the bag.
Me, I’d go further, I’d just return to the best practices of around AD 2000. Then I’d slash huge numbers of airport-security drones and replace them with one-tenth the number of elite criminal investigators. Because history should have taught us by now that counterterrorism is police work. And basically, let’s show some courage. Airplanes crash, but they’re safer than driving, and they’d still be safer even with substantially relaxed security.
Why are we letting the terrorists succeed by making us act as if we’re frightened? Most of us aren’t, really.
” —ongoing by Tim Bray · No More Fear
Rafer sez:
Reblogging the entire beautiful post that is my every wet dream.
(via rafer)
I think many people are afraid precisely because this is all we are doing and thinking of. It’s still remarkably easy to blow up a mall or poison our water supply or do any one of a million things that we are NOT defending against. And worse, it seems to us the only way the government does anything to protect against these things is by monitoring the internet - virtually every conspiracy I have read about being busted has happened because they went to the web to look for help or co-conspirators. I can’t see anything we’ve done to protect against a Timothy McVeigh style attack again. I don’t spend much time worrying about this stuff, but when I do, it’s because I can envision so clearly that the next big attack won’t be like 9/11 in the sense that it used planes and buildings, but it will be 9/11 style in the sense that it was obvious to see beforehand, easily preventable, and we didn’t do so.
“For Google, nearly all of whose profits depend on advertising revenue, dominance expressed as clickstream traffic is the currency. To maintain that dominance the ‘Don’t Be Evil’ company has been willing to go into business in China despite all evidence of rampant human rights violations, get into bed with the worst phone carrier to rape net neutrality, let its ‘walled backlot’ search become a cesspool of SEO swindlers, collect unauthorized data via illegal WiFi mapping all over the globe, risk exposing private email account data in hopes of capturing social graph info by default, favor its own properties in search results in surreptitious ways and so on.”
—
Kontra (via Daring Fireball)
I’m a bit all over the place here but this makes me think a few things:
1) The debate about doing business in China is ages old - it ran through most of the Clinton administration (oh man remember those endless “most favored nation status” debates?), Bush I, Reagan. The US has generally taken a tack that engaging China in a commercial manner will, over time, lead to more human rights, and it is just as morally dubious to leave one sixth of the world’s population isolated. We can agree or disagree with that approach, I think. But I do find it a bit of a stretch to posit that people on either side of that argument are “evil.” Seems to me they are two legitimate viewpoints that good people can debate and disagree on.
2) On Google in general, its search really does suck now, doesn’t it? I mean it has gotten SO BAD. One search of lyrics will show you. Or Colin’s comment about how he looked up an article about what basic training was like, and the top search result was written by a housewife in the midwest. It’s exciting to see competition in search again - not just from Bing, but from Facebook and Twitter, etc. I suspect this will go a long way toward curbing Google’s offenses in SEO manipulation and pointing search to its own properties. They haven’t had a legitimate competitor in a while and have gotten a bit greedy.
3) It’s funny how we hate Verizon because of this net neutrality stuff but are all still desperately waiting for the iPhone to come to Verizon.
“
Here’s the country I want to be a citizen of: the one that decides to buy comfort and convenience by deploying courage.
9/11 · We’re coming up on the tenth anniversary, and can we just get over our sustained episode of collective chickenshittedness? As Bruce Schneier has pointed out repeatedly, terrorists post-9/11 have lost the ability to use planes as weapons, for two reasons: The cockpit doors are strengthened and locked. The passengers have learned that fighting is their best option; butter-knives against machine guns if that’s all there is.
All the extra scanners and pat-downs and machines and line-ups are buying us, unless all the experts I read are wrong, more or less nothing.
Here’s What We Do · Go on X-raying luggage; why not? Plus, don’t let a plane take off if someone has checked in luggage but isn’t on board; easy and almost always non-intrusive. As for passengers, just lighten up. To start with, drop all the silly rules about toothpaste and shoes and laptops having to be out of the bag.
Me, I’d go further, I’d just return to the best practices of around AD 2000. Then I’d slash huge numbers of airport-security drones and replace them with one-tenth the number of elite criminal investigators. Because history should have taught us by now that counterterrorism is police work. And basically, let’s show some courage. Airplanes crash, but they’re safer than driving, and they’d still be safer even with substantially relaxed security.
Why are we letting the terrorists succeed by making us act as if we’re frightened? Most of us aren’t, really.
” —ongoing by Tim Bray · No More Fear
Rafer sez:
Reblogging the entire beautiful post that is my every wet dream.
(via rafer)
I think many people are afraid precisely because this is all we are doing and thinking of. It’s still remarkably easy to blow up a mall or poison our water supply or do any one of a million things that we are NOT defending against. And worse, it seems to us the only way the government does anything to protect against these things is by monitoring the internet - virtually every conspiracy I have read about being busted has happened because they went to the web to look for help or co-conspirators. I can’t see anything we’ve done to protect against a Timothy McVeigh style attack again. I don’t spend much time worrying about this stuff, but when I do, it’s because I can envision so clearly that the next big attack won’t be like 9/11 in the sense that it used planes and buildings, but it will be 9/11 style in the sense that it was obvious to see beforehand, easily preventable, and we didn’t do so.
That Greenwald quote is actually a response to the Wired piece you posted. He lists inaccuracy after inaccuracy. You should read it, Wired has no excuse for the litany of lies.
I’ve read pretty much everything out there by both “sides” at this point, and I come down on the Wired side (if there are sides). And I say this as a Wikileaks supporter, albeit a moderate one.
The inaccuracies in Greenwald’s world are far more blatant, and the path to a conspiracy is far more direct for Greenwald than Wired. If we’re looking for an Occam’s Razor of conspiracy motivations, Greenwald wins, hands down, with bright neon signs explaining in very direct terms exactly where his motivations lie. After reading it all I’m still not sure exactly what the Wired conspiracy is even supposed to be. Some hackers knew each other in the old days? These secret transcript snippets contain massive evidence that Wired wouldn’t publish a scoop on if they had it… because… why again? Makes no sense.
Also, anyone who calls themselves a journalist and publishes a sentence like this really pretty much has no business calling themselves a journalist: “Despite being convicted of serious hacking felonies, Poulsen was allowed by the U.S. Government to become a journalist covering the hacking world for Security Focus News.”
What on EARTH is that supposed to mean? Do journalists get approved by the Government now? Should they? Spitzer and Blodget, apparently SHOULD have passed this Government approval process for convicts to become journalists? Not only is it a massively lazy transitional sentence, it is so blatantly manipulative it is hard for me to take anything else he says seriously. It implies some sort of approval process exists, or moral outrage at the lack of one, both are patently preposterous. It’s simply there to cast aspersions, nothing else.
That Greenwald quote is actually a response to the Wired piece you posted. He lists inaccuracy after inaccuracy. You should read it, Wired has no excuse for the litany of lies.
I’ve read pretty much everything out there by both “sides” at this point, and I come down on the Wired side (if there are sides). And I say this as a Wikileaks supporter, albeit a moderate one.
The inaccuracies in Greenwald’s world are far more blatant, and the path to a conspiracy is far more direct for Greenwald than Wired. If we’re looking for an Occam’s Razor of conspiracy motivations, Greenwald wins, hands down, with bright neon signs explaining in very direct terms exactly where his motivations lie. After reading it all I’m still not sure exactly what the Wired conspiracy is even supposed to be. Some hackers knew each other in the old days? These secret transcript snippets contain massive evidence that Wired wouldn’t publish a scoop on if they had it… because… why again? Makes no sense.
Also, anyone who calls themselves a journalist and publishes a sentence like this really pretty much has no business calling themselves a journalist: “Despite being convicted of serious hacking felonies, Poulsen was allowed by the U.S. Government to become a journalist covering the hacking world for Security Focus News.”
What on EARTH is that supposed to mean? Do journalists get approved by the Government now? Should they? Spitzer and Blodget, apparently SHOULD have passed this Government approval process for convicts to become journalists? Not only is it a massively lazy transitional sentence, it is so blatantly manipulative it is hard for me to take anything else he says seriously. It implies some sort of approval process exists, or moral outrage at the lack of one, both are patently preposterous. It’s simply there to cast aspersions, nothing else.
“That’s what so much “journalism” now is: a means of shielding secrets from the public — usually to protect friends and the agendas of “sources” to ensure further access. Ironically, it is that very mentality — the Cult of Secrecy that American journalism has become — that gave rise to the need for WikiLeaks in the first place. We’re a society in which media and political elites keep secrets compulsively with one another — doing that is one of the hallmarks of membership in those circles — and there are thus plenty of people trained to believe that Good, Responsible People keep substantive secrets from the public. It’s the same mentality that has spawned the hostile reaction to WikiLeaks: people are happy — grateful even — when institutions keep substantive information from them. Hence: I want the Government to act in the dark and keep me ignorant about most of what it does; similarly: Wired is acting responsibly by refusing to tell us whether Adrian Lamo’s claims about Manning are true or false or to resolve the multiple contradictions he’s publicly affirmed.”
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Glenn Greenwald on Wired’s lies about Adrian Lamo. Read the archives before this article if you want the full context, which does not paint a flattering picture of Wired. (via jonathan-cunningham)
Probably best to read Wired’s rather cutting rebuttal as well.
“French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who had once called for the Louvre to be “burnt down,” came under suspicion; he was arrested and put in jail. Apollinaire tried to implicate his friend Pablo Picasso, who was also brought in for questioning, but both were later exonerated.[34]”
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Mona Lisa - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Apollinaire and Picasso were suspected of stealing the Mona Lisa in 1911. Weird.
