Interesting on NewsGator Online

"PRI Jackpot Justice March 27, 2007"

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 11:08:53 GMT

The New York City Profit Calculator

oldnewthing — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 14:00:01 GMT

New York Magazine has a fascinating feature in today's issue: The Profit Calculator. It covers a cross-section of New York City businesses and studies how they make their money. Chock full of interesting little details, such as

For a dollar store, it's all about turnover. One store can sell a trailer of cookies (162,000 cookies) in four days.
For a copy shop, walk-in customers are a negligible percentage of business.
For a diner, a large menu is a liability.
Each visitor to the Museum of Modern Art costs about $50. The $20 suggested donation doesn't even cover security and utilities.

This Explains Everything

Scott_Adams — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 14:03:29 GMT

I’ve often noted that all of the world’s problems are caused by people who apparently enjoy making other people miserable. I know it sounds like one of those cynical observations I often make for humorous purposes, but I mean it literally. There’s no other explanation for why people put so much effort into making others miserable.

Now there’s evidence to back my theory. According to recent research, people with high testosterone (let’s call them assholes) literally get pleasure from making other people look unhappy.

http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=3209

I am sooooo jealous. Making other people unhappy is as easy as, well, eating and farting.

Unfortunately for me, I’m wired the other way. I’m only happy if I can make other people happy. And that’s obviously impossible, because as soon as you give someone what he or she wants, he or she immediately want more. It’s one of those “can’t get there from here” situations.

But pissing people off? That’s simple.

I imagine myself stranded with an asshole on an otherwise deserted island. I’d be trying to increase my happiness by pleasing the asshole. I’ll be all, “Can I build you a thatch hut”? Meanwhile, the asshole would be getting all of his happiness by frequently pointing to the horizon and yelling, “Look, a ship! Nah, just kidding!”

A week later, when I’ve finished building a thatch hut for the asshole, he’d look at it and say, “Was this built by a monkey? Where’s the formal dining room? You can’t expect me to eat all of my meals at the breakfast nook. Speaking of breakfast, I ate all of your coconuts while you were working.”

My point is that I shouldn’t waste my time complaining about the war in Iraq. All I need to do is increase my levels of testosterone until I can enjoy the unhappiness of others.

Fairness

Scott_Adams — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 15:24:29 GMT

I often laugh when someone declares a thing to be fair. Fairness is a funny illusion. It’s one of our most useful illusions, but it’s an illusion nonetheless.

Imagine trying to “fairly” divide ten identical marbles between two kids. You could give five marbles to each kid, wave your arms and declare it fair. The kids would probably agree with this arrangement. The illusion of fairness works.

Is five marbles apiece actually fair?

Don’t you need to know how many marbles each kid already owns? What if one kid has a thousand and the other has none? The marginal utility of an extra marble is much higher for the marble-poor kid.

Doesn’t their different level of enthusiasm for marbles come into play? If you think about it, you’re trying to be fair with their happiness, not their marbles. What if one kid loves marbles five times more than the other? In that case, the fair thing to do is give most of the marbles to the kid who doesn’t enjoy them as much. He needs more marbles to obtain the same level of happiness as the marble lover gets with one. Of course that solution would cause one kid to melt down because it wouldn’t have the illusion of fairness.

Even the simplest example of fairness falls apart when you put it under scrutiny. Luckily, people are morons, so they imagine fairness where none exists. Otherwise nothing would ever get done.

I was thinking of fairness the other day when considering my next car purchase. I figure I need to do my part to conserve energy. I considered buying a fuel-efficient car that would give me no joy whatsoever. It’s the fair thing to do. We all need to pitch in.

Then I remembered I’ve never procreated. That’s a huge energy savings. When you create new humans, they start leaving the lights on, driving, eating, pooping, and doing all sorts of energy-inefficient things. By not creating any new humans, I’m saving a huge amount of energy!

I walk to work. That saves a lot of fuel too. If you consider my total energy drain on the planet, I could own a small fleet of gas-guzzlers and still be greener than 95% of the citizens of the United States. That seems fair to me.

If you were the judge in this decision, and considered all the facts, would you give me a Hummer?

Given a choice between two options, you influence the result by adding a third, inferior, alternative

oldnewthing — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 14:00:01 GMT

Shankar Vedantam wrote a Washington Post article and also appeared on NPR to discuss The Decoy Effect: Given a choice between two options, introducing a third, clearly inferior, option can influence your original decision. You won't pick the third option, but a clever choice of the bad third option can sway the decision toward either of the other two.

Rationally, an inferior third option should have no effect on your choice between the two other options, but psychologists (and marketing majors) have discovered that human beings are not rational decision makers. (Anyone who has interacted with a two-year-old child is already well aware of this.)

What's the row of numbers on the copyright page of books?

oldnewthing — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 14:00:01 GMT

On the copyright page of a book (typically the back of the title page), you'll find a row of numbers. Something like this:

Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

As Dave Taylor explains, the smallest number tells you which printing of the book you have. For example, if you see "10 9 8 7 6 5 4" then you have a fourth printing. Dave doesn't explain why printers use this convention, however.

I forget where I learned this; I think I read it in one of Don Knuth's books. It has to do with how books are historically made. Each page of a book is converted to a metal plate which is used to make impressions. If another printing run is necessary, you load the plates back onto the printing machine and off you go. But how do you indicate that this is a second printing? It would be expensive to burn a brand new plate just to change the word "first" to "second" on the copyright page. Instead, you pre-load all the printing numbers onto your master, and each time you start a new printing run, you scratch off the lowest number.

Even though a lot of book printing nowadays is done with computers rather than metal plates, the old method of indicating a printing is retained out of tradition.

Virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell poses as D.C. subway busker

log@waxy.org — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 15:43:21 GMT

Washington Post poses and records an experiment in art out of context [via]

"login"

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 11:26:32 GMT

The Perfect and the Good

malcolmgladwell — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 02:16:16 GMT

I wrote a piece for the The New Yorker a few weeks ago about a group of people who have created a neural network that predicts (or tries to predict) the box office of movies from their scripts. (It's not up on my site yet, but will be soon).

The piece drew all kinds of interesting responses, a handful of which pointed out obvious imperfections in the system. Those criticisms were entirely accurate. But they were also, I think, in some way beside the point, because no decision rule or algorithm or prediction system is ever perfect. The test of these kinds of decision aids is simply whether--in most cases for most people--they improve the quality of decision-making. They can't be perfect. But they can be good.

In "Blink," for instance, I wrote about the use of a decision tree at Cook County Hospital in Chicago to help diagnose chest pain. Lee Goldman, the physican who devised the chest pain decision rule, says very clearly that he thinks that there are individual doctors here and there who can make better decisions without it. But nonetheless Goldman's work has saved lots and lot of lives and millions and miillions of dollars because it improves the quality of the average decision.

Is the average movie executive better off with a neural network for analyzing scripts than without it? My guess is yes. That's why I wrote the piece. I think that one of the most important changes we're going to see in lots of professions over the next few years is the emergence of tools that close the gap between the middle and the top--that allow the decision-making who is merely competent to avoid his errors to be reach the level of good.

I think the same perspective should be applied to the basketball algorithms I've been writing about. It is easy to point out the ways in which either Hollinger's system or Berri's system fail to completely reflect the reality of what happens on the basketball court. But of course they are imperfect: neither Berri or Hollinger would ever claim that they are not. The issue is--are we better off using them to assist decision-making that we are making entirely judgements about basketball players using conventional metrics? Here I think the answer is a resounding yes. (Keep in mind that I live in New York City and have had to watch Mr. Thomas bungled his way toward disaster. I would think that.)

And the reason that lots of smart people, like Berri and Hollinger and others, spend so much time arguing back and forth about different variations on these algorithms, is that every little tweak raises the quality of decision-making in the middle part of the curve just a little bit higher. That's a pretty noble goal.

That said, here are the latest updates on the Hollinger-Berri back and forth. And remember. I don't think this is a question of one of them being wrong and the other right. They are both right. It's just that one of them may be a little more right than the other.

Here we go. First Hollinger's response, courtesy of truehoop.com, (an excellent site by the way.)

And then. Berri's response.

Airstrikes and tainted sources

lex — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 17:36:48 GMT

Greyhawk points us to a relatively long and detailed post by Patterico, which picks apart a 13 November article from the LA Times alledging that a US airstrike in the Anbar capital of Ramadi “pulverized” 15 houses and killed 30+ people:

BAGHDAD — A U.S. airstrike in the restive town of Ramadi killed at least 30 people, including women and children, witnesses said Tuesday…

A Times correspondent in Ramadi said at least 15 homes were pulverized by aerial bombardment and families could be seen digging through the ruins with shovels and bare hands. Other families attempted to leave Ramadi on foot or gathered at the city hospital, where a passionate crowd called out “Allahu akbar!” or God is great, in unison.

Hmm. Doesn’t sound like the local chapter of the Ramadi Secularists Union, but then again, that doesn’t in itself mean that the Times story is wrong. But read on: Patterico uses what resources are available to him to determine that it’s very likely that the “Times correspondent” quoted is in fact a stringer for the anti-democratic resistance, which means that the Times appears to be unblinkingly shilling propaganda for our enemies. Coalition sources agree that tank fires were used to stop an IED cell but deny using air power on 13 or 14 November, and Patterico’s extensive sources indicate that all of the 30+ killed in the action were military-aged males.

For the full story, read Patterico’s post and Greyhawk’s comments. From my own perspective, and as I pointed out over at Milblogs, an airstrike capable of “pulverizing” 15 houses would be a pretty large force package - it’d be hard to hide:

There’s no way to “pulverize” 15 structures with one conventional weapon, or even with one aircraft attacking, unless we’re doing urban CAS now with carpet bombing B-52’s or B-1’s, which I don’t believe to be true.

In that environment the bias is towards smaller weapons to reduce the collateral damage risks, and each target is scrutinized to ensure that the effects on surrounding non-targets are minimized.

“Pulverized” is a rather non-specific term, but I’ll take it to mean a target structure that is 80-100% destroyed since that’s the image it evokes. Assuming from a best case in terms of desired weapons effects that the target building was demolished and from the worst case that a nearby non-target was 50% reduced through CD, you’re still talking an airstrike of 21 weapons - 7 to 8 or so against principal targets and another 14 or so which somehow combined to “pulverize” the non-targets.

That’s at least a ten-plane strike for TACAIR - hard to plausibly deny from the military perspective.

The point is not that the Times is happily swallowing and uncritically regurgitating terrorist propaganda. It’s that, if they were doing so, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between that and what they wrote on 13 November. You’d think if a guy like Patterico, who after all has a full-time job which doesn’t involve source-checking important stories can tease out so many inconsistencies, then the paid reporters at the Times ought to be able to do so while on the clock.

You’d think.

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Common sense

lex — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 17:45:14 GMT

Over at Whittle’s place. Save it for lunch maybe, for the essay, she’s-a not so short - I’d hate to be responsible for the sudden dip in productivity as both of my readers disengage from their paid jobs for even a few moments.

Well worth the reading though: We are introduced to the handling characteristics of the F-102, various and sundry bumper stickers and other tropes (blood-for-oil, US imperialism) and last, but not least (and worth visiting even if you’ve only got a few moments) the Comprehensive Destruction of the Memory Hole. Which, thank Al Gore.

Oh. There’s also a Polaris submarine on offer. $6.98

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Sex and the single imam

lex — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 00:56:00 GMT

An occasional correspondent sends along this interesting bit on sex and the R.O.P. from the German magazine Spiegel. Worth reading all in its entirety, and not merely for the prurience that’s in it:

Rabat, Morocco. Every evening Amal the octopus vendor looks on as sin returns to his beach.

Which, you have to admit, is a novel way of opening a tale. I do not think it has been done before.

To continue:

It arrives in the form of handholding couples who hide behind the tall, castle-like quay walls in the city’s harbor district to steal a few clandestine kisses. Some perform balancing acts on slippery rocks and seaweed to secure a spot close to the Atlantic Ocean and cuddle in the dim evening light. The air tastes of salt and hashish. On some mornings, when Amal finds used condoms on the beach, he wishes that these depraved, shameless sinners — who aren’t even married, he says — would roast in hell.

Dreary work, octopus vending. Can put a man straight out of sorts with his fellow men.

There’s more of course:

The sexual frustration of many young Arabs has countless causes, most of them economic. Jobs are scarce and low-paying, and most young men are unable to afford and furnish their own apartments — a prerequisite to being able to marry in most Arab countries. At the same time, premarital sex is an absolute taboo in Islam. As a result, cities across the Arab world — Algiers, Alexandria, Sana’a and Damascus — are filled with “boy-men” between 18 and 35 who are forced to live with their parents for the foreseeable future.

That I suppose, or take the shortcut to the 72 ~~raisins~~ virgins. Semtex, anyone? Love what you’re wearing, darling. Does it come with ball bearings, or…?

And even “over there” sex sells:

Muslim novelist “Nedjma” (”Star”), the author of “The Almond,” a successful erotic novel, describes Moroccan society as divided and bigoted. Despite progressive family and marriage laws, she says, the country is still controlled by patriarchal traditions in which men continue to sleep around and treat women as subordinates. It is a society in which prudishness and sexual obsession, ignorance and desire, “sperm and prayer” coexist. “The more repressive a society is, the more desperately it seeks an outlet,” says Nedjma, who conceals her real name because she has already been vilified on the Internet as a “whore” and an “insult to Islam.”

And of course, there’s variety. It’s all a part of life’s rich pageant:

Google Trends, a new service offered by the search engine, provides a way to demonstrate how difficult it is to banish forbidden yearnings from the heads of Muslims. By entering the term “sex” into Google Trends, one obtains a ranked list of cities, countries and languages in which the term was entered most frequently. According to Google Trends, the Pakistanis search for “sex” most often, followed by the Egyptians. Iran and Morocco are in fourth and fifth, Indonesia is in seventh and Saudi Arabia in eighth place. The top city for “sex” searches is Cairo. When the terms “boy sex” or “man boy sex” are entered (many Internet filters catch the word “gay”), Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are the first four countries listed.

Which doesn’t necessarily make this easier to understand.

But it doesn’t make it harder, either.

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Counterpoint

lex — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 06:01:30 GMT

As a memo to those who couldn’t get behind Mr. Bush’s Middle Eastern Adventure because 1) they couldn’t grok this whole preventative war concept, or 2) or because that, notwithstanding all of those solid-gold toilets being installed atop the bones of tens of thousands of dead Iraqi children in Saddam’s “Palaces for Me” program, they thought it would be better to “give sanctions a chance” some more, or maybe because 3) Cowboy George was being all butch and unilateral and everything, there is this:

The consensus among weapons inspectors, intelligence analysts, academics and others I have interviewed—–which is backed up by the available open source material—-is that North Korea has developed anthrax, plague and botulism toxin as weapons and has extensively researched at least six other germs including smallpox and typhoid. It is also believed to have 5,000 tons or more of mustard gas, sarin nerve agent and phosgene (a choking gas). The Center for Nonproliferation Studies says North Korea ranks “amongst the largest possessors of chemical weaponry in the world.” South Korea’s military estimates half of North’s long-range missiles and 30 percent of its artillery are CBW capable.

This is an almost letter-perfect morality play in three parts: Faced now with a fait accompli in the elevation of a megalomaniacal tyrant into the world’s most exclusive club, we are left with very few palatable options indeed. Certainly, under the UNSC resolution recently engineered by Ambassador Bolton, et al we will have maritime police powers - the option to visit, board, search and seize WMDs and any their antecedents we might be so lucky to find at sea. Old fashioned cops and robbers this, as we try to prevent a cash-starved and amoral regime from continuing a long-established pattern of weapons proliferation to the world’s unfriendliest dictators and unfettered sociopaths. But if you’ve long been nostalgic for the idea of treating terror like a police problem – notwithstanding the fact that police are far better at punishing malefactors after the fact than preventing malefaction – well, happy days are here again! But these will be exciting times, given the fact that we’ve got to be good all the time, and Short Round only has to be lucky once. So let’s just keep those fingers crossed, mm-kay?

And since the North imports around 60% of their foodstuffs and energy supplies from the PRC, with a good sanctions regime in place we’ll have the opportunity to starve to death whatever North Korean peasants we can’t kill through exposure to the elements. Shouldn’t be hard to do, the wretched sods have next to nothing in terms of body fat, and look at the bright side: We’ll have forged a common bond with the Kim Chong Il regime, who up to now had to kill their own citizens with no help at all from anyone in the outside world, and after a while that gets to be a dreary chore. Still, and keeping things in perspective, the UN-sponsored ban on the import of luxury items has sent Pyongyang Leadership Cadres Exchange futures through the roof. That’ll hit old Short Round where it really hurts, unless the man is very much misunderstood. Getting China on board in support of this should be a trivial problem – fomenting a humanitarian crisis of biblical proportions on their border? What’s to hate?

And of course, we’ve been all multi-lateral and nuanced and everything, which should be most satisfactory to the pin-striped set. Six-party talks, memorandas for the record, Expressions of Concern: Most regular, everything in perfect order, just as it should be. Job well done.

The irony of all this is that the North Korean problem has pretty much been handled as best as it could have been: If you think that Iraq has been a mess, you would have been truly amazed at the carnage that would have come out of bombing North Korean nuclear weapons facilities, back when that was still an option. Those people up there don’t have much, and those who don’t have much don’t really have very much to lose.

Still, if you didn’t much like the way we got into Iraq, you owe it to yourself to be deeply satisfied at where we are with North Korea. It is in every way the apposite opposite.

Of course it’s also true that the world’s a much more dangerous place, and yes, it probably is time to polish up those “Who lost Los Angeles” talking points.

Just in case.

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Norks with nukes

lex — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 18:08:15 GMT

It’s my belief that the world is over-reacting to the North Korean declaration earlier this week that they would test a nuclear weapon. Short Round wants attention most of all, and so attention is what we should most of all deny him. Sabre rattling - even nuclear sabre rattling - gets tedious after a while, and having spent millions upon millions of whatever it is that passes for currency in the Hermit Kingdom, the Norks would doubtless find that it’s very much easier to build these weapons than it is to use them. Perhaps they will be able to threaten Seattle, but in return we would be able to obliterate Pyongyang, and what the regime is most concerned about is its own survival.

So focused is the Kim mafia on the continuation of its own rule that it is willing to starve thousands of its own people to death rather than loosen their feudal control over the economic levers of power. While hope is not a strategy, one could be forgiven for thinking that, should ever the temptation to unify the Korean peninsula by warring on their maddeningly more successful southern cousins prove impossible to resist, the regime’s desire for self-preservation will set boundaries on the scale of offenses they would be willing to commit by outlining the fatal amount of retaliatory damage they’d suffer in return. This all rests on the assumption that however useful the Kim regime finds their customary negotiating tactic of acting like lunatics, at heart they are “rational actors,” capable of making cool and realistic calculations of benefit and risk.

As contrasted to someone who, say, builds national strategy based on the anticipated return of an “occluded” imam. For example.

US national strategy for the last 50-odd years has been to keep the lid on military conflict on the peninsula, build up the South’s economic and military capability, and hope for the best, the worst being, in human terms, almost unbearable to contemplate. And that strategy has worked for the most part: the once-stricken South is now much more powerful, successful and secure than their cousins across the DMZ. The US troops who once formed an essential core of South Korea’s defense have for many years been little more than a deterrent trip-wire, guaranteeing a strong US response and the arrival of follow-on forces should ever the North actually draw those rattling sabres, and march on the south. It’s not entirely clear to me how testing a nuke will change that calculus.

It would have been a far easier thing to strike the weapons refinement infrastructure before sufficient weapons grade Uranium had been created, than to strike the warheads themselves once that fuel had been weaponized. But apparently no one thought it worth the hundreds of thousands of peninsular lives that would almost certainly have been lost when the Norks retaliated, as they would probably have had to do in order to save face, as Kim Chong Il would have to do in order to ensure his own survival as the head of both the armed forces and the communist party. The soft power exercise of multi-national diplomacy was all that we were left with, and much hope was placed in the so-called “six party” talks. More specifically, as the only country with any real political leverage on the North, much was expected from China. We have been much disappointed. We should not have been surprised.

So here we are: Having suffered a North Korean nuclear capability to be created - ostensibly for the sake of “deterring a US attack” - the world community more or less has to accept the fact that testing one is a “natural” evolutionary consequence. A rational regime cannot use the weapons without facing immediate annihilation, we are no more deterred now than we were before (albeit for a different reason) and thus the principal issue should be the very real concern of proliferation, especially since the North Koreans are such very active - and indiscriminate - proliferators.

Not everyone agrees:

The Bush administration delivered a secret message to North Korea yesterday warning it to back down from a promised nuclear test, and it said publicly that the United States would not live with a nuclear-armed Pyongyang government.

North Korea “can have a future or it can have these weapons. It cannot have both,” Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill said yesterday in remarks at Johns Hopkins University’s U.S.-Korea Institute. It was the toughest response yet from the Bush administration, coming two days after Pyongyang announced plans to conduct its first nuclear test.

Well, I hope that felt good to say, because if the Norks defy the world - one of their favorite sports, by the way - and test a warhead, we are now committed to one of two unpalatable alternatives: Fail to match rhetoric with action and provide a wary Pacific Rim with graphic evidence of our political fecklessness, or match rhetoric with action and spark a nasty conflict against a nuclear armed regime of cornered rats.

There are no good choices here, only bad and worse. A bad choice would be having to focus the resources of the intelligence community on discovering, deterring or destroying the transportation mechanisms with which North Korea might try to export their infernal devices. A worse choice is to threaten the regime’s survival, and have them believe that we are serious: With their backs to the wall and nothing left to lose, you can scratch the foundational assumption of Kim and his leadership cohort as rational actors.

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Introducing the Hidden Network

Alex Papadimoulis — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 14:27:42 GMT

In the two and half years that I've been sharing "WTF" stories with you, I've never used this space ("the article") to promote myself, the products I've developed, or even my own consulting company. So if you'll indulge me just this once (I promise, I won't make a habit of this), I want to tell you about my latest business venture, HiddenNetwork.com, and ask for your help in making it a success. I strongly believe that it will be something that will greatly benefit us all.

A Bit of History ...
Every now and them, I'd receive an email from a reader who wondered if there was a way that we could all work together to solve The Employment Dilemma. Sometimes it'd be from an employer, frustrated that all of their job applicants have evidently been featured on The Daily WTF already. Other times, it'd be an employee annoyed that his latest gig is nothing but a "Bait & Switch." It took a little while, but a picture of what we could all do finally started to emerge.

As you may have noticed in last month's reader survey, I included a question about jobs and job-seeking. From this I learned two things: first and foremost, seventy-eight percent of you are looking or would consider a new job opportunity. Secondly, I learned that several other publishers and bloggers have started their own mini job boards. I think their moves are a step in the right direction, but I believe that you and I, working together, can help solve the Employment Dilemma even more.

The HiddenNetwork.com Formula
The first part of the formula is blog readers. Have you ever noticed how, out of all the people you work with, the ones who read tech blogs are the strongest employees? It's not that reading blogs inherently makes you smarter, but in order to read tech blogs, you need to deeply care about technology and have a passion to improve yourself and learn more.

The second part of the formula is blog authors. You authors take time away from your busy lives to share your expertise and knowledge with the rest of the world for no reason other than because you enjoy helping and improving the on-line community.

The final part is employers. The good kind of employers. The ones that are just like you and me and simply need to find quality people to fill their quality jobs. The kind of jobs that don't offer The Customer Friendly System or The Tool, but instead provide a good work environment that strong employees can be productive in.

Bringing It All Together
The idea behind HiddenNetwork.com is to bring together employers, bloggers, and readers to share quality job opportunities. We will pay bloggers to run job advertisements that we've personally screened. We offer employers the opportunity to have their job advertisement syndicated through our network of blogs and be displayed to visitors located geographically near the job opportunity.

How You Can Be a Part - Employers
It's simple - just go on over to HiddenNetwork.com and create a job ad. Job listings are free for the duration of the Beta and your ad will be syndicated across our existing network in the next couple of days.

How You Can Be a Part - Bloggers
Head on over to HiddenNetwork.com and see what we have to offer. We pay each time the ad is displayed ($5.00 per thousand impressions) and every time you refer a new employer ($25.00). In other words, if your blog receives 100,000 monthly page views and four employers post a job through your site each week, your monthly blog revenue would be $900.00.

How You Can Be a Part - Readers
Talk with employers you know and encourage them to post a job. The more of you who do that, the more quality job opportunities there will be. Also, write to the authors on your blogroll and encourage them to join. Although the revenue isn't enough to quit one's day job, it offers your authors incentive to continue to write quality material.

Who's Already Signed Up
We have several job listings from various employers that are waiting to be syndicated. We also have several blogs -- including The Daily WTF (surprise, surprise), SqlTeam.com, Mike Gunderloy's Larkware, Phil Haack's you've been HAACKED, and Chris Sell's SellsBrothers blog. Expect to see the network in action over the next few days.

Final Notes
HiddenNetwork.com is officially in Beta. Unlike other company's "beta" periods, we anticipate launching by the end of next week. I've dedicated a lot of my consulting company's resources to ensuring that this product will be a success and look forward working together with you all to make it happen.

Your WTF Article
Don't worry, i'll post it later today. In fact, here's a sneak preview:

A few years ago Phil was working as a developer on wire transfer applications at a large bank. To make sure that nothing technical would prevent the bank from extracting maximum amounts of money from its operations, every part of their system had a redundancy with fast failovers and clustering. In fact, there was one sever (and a backup of that sever) whose only function was to monitor the other sever and send notifications if anything fell out of the operations norm.

Thanks for listening, I'll return with the rest of Phil's story in a few hours ...

Always worthwhile

lex — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 15:49:20 GMT

Fouad Ajami in the WSJ, writing on Iraq and Iran:

It is idle to debate whether Iraq is in a state of civil war. The semantics are tendentious, and in the end irrelevant. There is mayhem, to be sure, but Iraq has arrived at a rough balance of terror. The Sunni Arabs now know, as they had never before, that their tyranny is broken for good. And the most recent reports from Anbar province speak of a determination of the Sunni tribes to be done with the Arab jihadists.

Read it all.

Update: Link fixed!

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Taking him at his own word

lex — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 17:08:20 GMT

An inteview with al Qaida number two, Ayman al Zawahiri:

On established borders, international law and the writ of the UN:

But the important and serious matter is for Muslims in Lebanon to reject international resolutions, particularly the recent Security Council Resolution 1701. These resolutions which seek to surround the mujahidin and protect the Jews in Palestine. We must not accept these resolutions and not help entrench the presence of Israel and protect it with international resolutions. My dear brother: The biggest disaster in Resolution 1701 and other similar resolutions intended to humiliate Muslim is that it recognizes the existence of the Hebrew state, and calls for isolating the mujahidin in Palestine and separating them from the Muslims in Lebanon… It also underscores the criminalization of jihad against the Jewish state and its right to strike the mujahidin. Regretfully, everyone who approves of this resolution would be recognizing all these disasters…

My dear brother: The facts of international politics which they talk about stem from what they term as international legitimacy, the United Nations, and secular states which are the fruits of the malicious Sykes Picot Agreement. All these systems have been imposed on Muslims and the Muslim nation following the fall of the Caliphate state to force it to submit to systems and organizations that violate the Islamic law and to ensure the fragmentation of the Islamic nation. This will ultimately leave the Islamic nation subordinate, humiliated, and pillaged. The time has come for us to destroy these idols and false gods that they forced us to worship instead of Allah.

On the targeting of non-Islamic civilians

Regarding the targets that the mujahidin should strike, they should strike any target that would weaken the aggressive crusader-Zionist campaign on the land of Islam. Shari’ah does not recognize people as civilian or military, but classifies them into fighters and non-fighters, with fighters being all those who fight in person or assist the fighting with their money or opinion. Durayd Bin-al-Summah was killed on the day of the battle of Hunayn for advising the Hawazin [a tribe that was planning to attack Muslims] even though he was an old man.

The West’s crusader people are, in the eyes of Shari’ah, a fighting people who are at war with the Muslims because they chose their leaders and parliaments by their own free will, meaning they chose the executive authority that commits aggression against Islam and Muslims, and chose the legislative authority that monitors the executive authority, holds it accountable, and approves or rejects any of this authority’s policies as it pleases. These people also pay the taxes that fund the campaigns of aggression against the Muslims; it is they who provide the armies invading the lands of Islam with men, money, opinion, and expertise; and it is they who secure the manpower for the crusader security services that strive to conquer and subdue Muslims.

But what about those who oppose their government’s policies in the West? The anti-war crowd?

Even those among these people who oppose the policies of the crusader governments view these governments as legitimate governments that have the right to order them to participate in the fighting against us, and believe it is their duty to obey these governments.

On the territorial limits of the “New Caliphate,” and a two-state solution in Palestine:

Our fighting must not be dictated by respect for the United Nations Charter, its resolutions, or the territorial integrity of its members, one of whom is Israel. Nor should it seek to implement the armistice treaty and cease-fire agreement or observe the Sykes-Picot boundaries or international legitimacy — our fighting should be a jihad for the sake of Allah so that only He may be worshipped, a jihad that strives to liberate Palestine, all of Palestine, and any land that was ever a land of Islam, from Al-Andalus [Spain] to Iraq.

On the US motivation in liberating Iraq and the virtues of the democratically elected government there and by proxy, the will of the Iraqi people:

America, in a bid to pull the rug from under the jihadist-Islamic resistance against it in the Muslim world, tried to cooperate and coordinate with three parties. One of these parties is a group of people who trade in religion, spread fables and superstitions, and control their followers with claims of being guided by a connection with the Divine’s secrets. This group cooperated with the American occupier before, during, and after the invasion, and under the supervision and direction of the Americans, it formed the basic military formations that support the occupier and assault the mujahidin and Muslim masses in Iraq. This group and its fraudulent leaders pretended to forget the slogans ‘death to America,’ slogans that withered away and were replaced by the slogan ‘cooperation with the occupier to preserve security.” This group abandoned the rule of Shari’ah and tu rne d into the primary talon with which the crusader occupier claws at the body of the Muslim nation in Iraq. This is why this group of charlatans who trade in religion insists on the myth that the occupation will remain so long as there is a resistance.

On the murder of Iraqi civilians, Muslims who ordinarily ought to be protected under Shari’ah:

The instructions of Shaykh Usama, may God protect him, to the brothers in Iraq, chief amongst them Abu-Mus’ab, may God’s mercy be upon him, were that they focus their efforts on the Americans and neutralize the rest of the powers as best as they could. However, he gave them some freedom of movement, telling them that the witness sees what the absent does not see. He told them that for two reasons. The first was to give them freedom of movement in confronting any current which might ally itself with the Americans against the Muslims in Iraq, whatever its race or sect was. The second reason was to give them freedom of movement against any current causing strife and waging a war of annihilation against the Muslims in Iraq.

On the resilience of “the strongest power in the world,” currently backing the democratically elected government of Iraq:

There are two things which any intelligent person recognizes. The first is that the Americans have often fled and abandoned their allies. And the second is that the mujahidin, by God’s grace, have demolished the borders of Sykes-Picot. The intelligent is he who learns from others.

And a message for the peoples of the West:

I tell them your leaders are concealing from you the true size of disaster which will shock you. The days are pregnant and they will give birth to new events with God’s permission and guidance. I tell them: You have provided us with all the legal and rational reasons to fight you and punish you. You have committed ugly crimes, breached treaties that you used to impose on others to abide by. For our part, we have repeatedly warned you and repeatedly offered a truce with you. So, we now have legal and rational justifications to continue fighting you until your power is destroyed or you give in and surrender.

This is who we fight against in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are those who bombed our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. These are those who blew a hole in the side of the USS Cole, killing 19 sailors.

These are those who flew jet liners into the WTC and the Pentagon. Those whom we finally struck back against, first on Flight 93, then in Afghanistan, now in Iraq and elsewhere. There is no dialogue we can have with these people, no separate, honorable peace, no appeasement we can make, no apology that would not further embolden them. Theirs is the way of death and the sword, ours the way of peace and freedom and prosperity.

The battle is joined, the fight continues, there is nothing left to say.

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The value of a man

lex — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 23:30:43 GMT

Can often be inferred from a relatively simple measurement: The number and quality of those that love him. An even simpler measure may be taken from an opposing variable: The unnumerated quality of those that hate him.

The same, I think, may be said of countries:

I don’t think the Pope’s original comments have elicited nearly as much authentic rage as the images on TV would suggest. But I do think those driving these protests and whipping up anger know what they’re doing. The West wants to be loved. It can’t stand the idea that somebody — anybody — doesn’t like us. This is doubly so in Europe and perhaps triply so at the Vatican. So much of European — and American liberal — foreign policy is based on the idea that being disliked is an enormous indictment, a sign of serious moral failings on our part, rather than resentment, envy or scapegoating on the part of those fomenting anti-Americans.

The Pope is a man of serious responsibilities, and may feel that he has to apologize for speaking the truth of a historical fact. For my own part, I proudly wear the hatred of people who would murder nuns as a badge of honor.

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Last man standing

lex — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 21:39:04 GMT

Victor David Hanson gets depressed thinking on Oriana Fallaci, the Pope, and the times we live in:

So, yes, we know the asymmetrical rules: a state run-paper in Cairo or the West Bank, a lunatic Iranian mullah, a grand mufti from this or that mosque, can all rail about infidels, “pigs and apes”, in language reminiscent of the Third Reich—and meet with approval in the Middle East and silence in the West. But for a Westerner, a Tony Blair, George Bush, or Pope Benedict to even hint that something has gone terribly wrong with modern Islam, is to endure immediate furor and worse. In short, no modern ideology, no religious sect of the present age demands so much of others, so little of itself.

In matters of the present war, I have given up on most of the neoconservatives, many of whom, following the perceived pulse of the battlefield, have either renounced their decade-long, pre-September11 rants to remove Saddam (despite the 140,000 brave souls still on the field of battle who took them at their word), or turned on the President on grounds that he is not waging the perfect fight and thus is not pursuing the good war. The Paleo-right is as frightening as is the lunatic Left. My old Democratic party is long dead, their jackals trying to tear apart the solitary and stumbling noble stag Joe Liebermann, the old center taken over by the Kerry and Soros billionaires, and the guilt-ridden academic, celebrity and media cadres.

So we really are left with very little in these pivotal times—the will of George Bush, of course, the Old Breed unchanged since Okinawa and the Bulge that still anchors the US military, the courage and skill of a very few brave writers like a Hitchens, Krauthammer, and the tireless and brilliant Mark Steyn, but very, very few others. No, this is an age in which we in the West make smug snuff movies about killing an American President, while the Taliban and the Islamists boast of assassinating the Pope.

It’s trite but true that it’s always darkest before the dawn. Kofi Annan visited the Middle East and found their rulers - I do not say “leaders” - concerned that the Iraq war had been a “disaster” that had “destabilized” the region. Well, forgive me, but I am still working up to feeling sorry for the alarm of those who spent decades sowing dragon’s teeth abroad only to discover that some had fallen out of the basket and now take root at home.

The War on Terror was not real for the Saudi regime until al Qaeda struck at home, but now Bin Laden’s tendrils there are torn up root and branch. The government of Afghanistan, which once sponsored terrorists at home, hunts them down with NATO assistance. The democratically elected government of Iraq - read those words again and marvel at how quickly the unthinkable becomes commonplace - a government whose predecessor once sent $25,000 payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, fights for its own survival against our common foe, and their forces sacrifice still more in this fight than those who liberated them. Lebanon has kicked Syria to the door, and with their backs stiffened by augmented UN support may eventually get round to facing down Hezbollah. Libya has renounced its WMD programs, and paid compensation for previous crimes. The security services of Syria are apparently prepared to spend their lives in the defense of the US embassy against terror attacks. They may have done this out of duty or the goodness of their hearts, or it may have been because they want no more trouble than they already have.

Arab governments of Syria, Jordan and Egypt may well resent the fact that terror is no longer merely an export business, something that happens “over there,” but has a domestic component as well. Perhaps now they will do something about it, especially with the ancient Persian foe making noises in the East.

To acknowledge that things are not perfect should not prevent us from admitting that they could be very much worse. To every blow there is a reaction, for every attack a riposte. But for my own part, I am not quite ready to cry “Enough, no more!” and go back to the kind of stability we had before.

We know where that leads: We give you thanks, we will have none.

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What they wish he’d said

lex — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 17:39:09 GMT

In letters to the editors of the USA Today, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Seattle Times, Dorrance Smith, ASD for Public Affairs at DoD asked that when those press outlets file reports about Secretary Rumsfeld’s recent speech to the American Legion, they might, in their reporting, stick to the text of what he actually said, rather than what they’d wished he might have said, what would serve to confirm the journalists’ prejudices, or what, while clearly untrue, would make a more arresting headline.

If that’d be OK.

Largely the same response to nearly identical headlines like “Rumsfeld: Iraq Critics Morally Confused” (USA Today), “Rumsfeld: Bush Critics are Like Nazi Appeasers (Post-Gazette), and ”Rumsfeld: Bush Critics are Similar to Nazi Appeasers” (Seattle Times), Smith wrote the Times:

(Your headline and reporting) was misleading and prevented your readers from gaining an accurate summary of the secretary’s remarks.

For example, Los Angeles Times staff writer Julian E. Barnes wrote, “By likening today’s U.S. foreign policy to that during World War II and the Cold War, Rumsfeld sought to portray skeptics of the Bush administration as being on the wrong side of history.”

This may have been Mr. Barnes’ interpretation, but it is not anything the secretary actually said.

We invite your readers to read the full text of the secretary’s remarks at http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches

The secretary’s remarks were an effort to remind people of the similarities between past and current periods in U.S. history, so that a mentality of dismissing real and gathering threats does not undermine our nation’s ability to prevail in what will be a long and difficult struggle against violent extremists.

The San Francisco Chronicle didn’t escape attention either, after they’d claimed in an article that Rummy had: “link(ed) his critics to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policies of the late 1930s.” Bryan Whitman, Smith’s deputy wrote:

This may have been Epstein’s interpretation, but it is not anything the secretary said. Instead, the secretary’s remarks were an effort to remind people of the similarities between past and current periods in U.S. history, so that a mentality of dismissing real and gathering threats while focusing nearly exclusively on American imperfections — rather than the nature of the enemy — does not undermine our nation’s ability to prevail in what will be a long, difficult struggle against violent extremists.

Also up for subtle remonstrance was the report on a retirement interview given to the Norfolk Daily Press by BGEN Mark Scheid, Commander of Fort Eustis in Virginia (his letter behind a subscription wall):

I granted an interview based on my understanding it would be focused on my upcoming retirement - “Eustis chief: Iraq post-war plan muzzled,” Sept. 8. I was led to believe we would discuss training initiatives the post was taking to keep up with the latest tactics in the war on terrorism and transformation.

Instead, the reporter used my retirement as the context for comments I made on logistics planning, implying that retiring gives me the opportunity to speak out against Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as other retired general officers have done. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I said I believed the secretary of defense was worried about public opinion about a long war, and was concerned that any military action would not be publicly supported if it meant an extended war.

I also said that as soldiers we do not mix politics with orders. I do not fault the secretary of defense’s decision. How the reporter could take these comments and then write in the article that “Scheid doesn’t go so far as calling for Rumsfeld to resign” astounds me. This is simply manipulation of my words to stir controversy using a visible public official’s name to add credibility.

I am proud of the Transportation Corps and Fort Eustis and I am dismayed that the readers will not hear about those things because the Daily Press chose to ignore the original focus of this interview.

This falls into the “Army General does not deny wearing women’s panties” category of journalism. Because, you know: It’s technically true and all, so long as the reporter never actually asks the general about his underwear preferences.

I understand that the press has a critical watchdog role to perform against government, especially in its tendency to encroach into the private sphere - a risk never higher than when facing an exteral threat. While in the process of doing so however, it would certainly be helpful to their credibility if once in a while the “mischaracterizations” they make weren’t blatantly unfair to the people charged with trying to win the war we’re in. Not least because at it’s heart, our own center of gravity in this conflict is not military power, but above all a test of the public will - a sentiment shaped in large part by news reports.

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