If, though unjust, I acquire the reputation of justice, a heavenly life is promised to me. Since then, as philosophers prove, appearance tyrannizes over truth and is lord of happiness, to appearance I must devote myself. I will describe around me a picture and shadow of virtue to be the vestibule and exterior of my house; behind I will trail the subtle and crafty fox…
But I hear someone exclaiming that the concealment of wickedness is often difficult, to which I answer, nothing great is easy… With a view to concealment we will establish secret brotherhoods and political clubs. And there are professors of rethoric who teach the art of persuading courts and assemblies; and so, partly by persuasion and partly by force, I shall make unlawfull gains and not be punished.

– Plato, Rebublic

The Bush campaign site is apparently accurately predicting the outcome of the election. Just about all of the merchandise has just 20 stars on the flag.

If you look at the polls, that would be AL, AK, GA, MS, OK, TX, KS, WY, VA, TN, KY, UT, LA, NB, ND, SD, ID, SC, MT and NC, giving Kerry a 4% lead in the elections..

[Quote:]

The latest feature film from the creators of South Park is facing the box office kiss of death NC-17 rating because of a scene showing simulated oral sex between marionettes.

The makers of Team America: World Police have reportedly gone to great lengths, modifying the offending scene nine times for submission to the Motion Picture Association of America, the US film classification authority. They are keen to secure an R rating, which would allow under-18s to see the film when accompanied by an adult.

The makers, directors Matt Stone and Trey Parker and producer Scott Rudin, are contesting the MPAA classification, saying that the film doesn’t show anything that’s not been seen before in other R-rated movies. And besides, Rudin told the Hollywood Reporter, “our characters are made of wood and have no genitalia. If the puppets did to each other what we show them doing, all they’d get is splinters.”

The film eventually got an R rating

It’s been two years since President Bush declared that in Afghanistan, “Today, women are free.” But that’s news to the inmates.

[Quote:]

I believe in intellectual property. In my view, it’s the foundation of world economies, and certainly the foundation upon which Sun Microsystems was built. Copyright, trademark, patent – I believe in them all. I also believe in innovation and competition – and that these beliefs are not mutually exclusive.

If you look at Sun’s business, all we really are, like most of our peers in the technology industry (and the media and entertainment industries with which we’re converging), is an intellectual property fountain. Pour money in the top, some of the world’s most talented people go to work, intellectual property falls out the other end. We happen to turn our IP into storage and servers and software and services – but realistically, that’s what our manufacturing and service partners do for us. All Sun ultimately does is create ideas, design systems and engage communities. For the most part, we don’t operate large-scale factories or fabs.

Jonathan Schwartz, COO Sun Microsystems, on sept 30.

On October 3rd, Sun lost half it’s operating profits since 1997 in a lawsuit Kodak won, because Sun violated a patent. I wonder if Jonathan still feels the same about IP.

[Quote:]

I’ve looked and looked and I can’t find Iraq on the list of our coalition allies in the Eternal War Against Brown People. I see Micronesia, Palau, and the Marshal Islands, but no Iraq.

Obviously, the French are trying to make Deputy Leader Dick look like a liar when he claimed them as coalition members during the debate.

[Quote:]

“The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight.”

– Dick Cheney

and:

In this video still, you see Cheney on the far left of the screen, facing the new members he is swearing in. On the right, you see John Edwards, standing behind Elizabeth Dole, who is being sworn in.

Could somebody please inform these politicians about the existence of Google?

Akin to my last entry, I’ve run the transcript of the Vice Presidential Debate through a part of speech tagger and identified the most popular noun phrases for each speaker (listed below). I’ve also updated the Debate Spotter to handle both scripts. Simply change the debate field and the transcript and speakers will be changed accordingly.

>Have fun, and of course let us know if you identify any interesting phrases.

Edwards

john kerry (36), american people (28), tax cuts (16), saddam hussein (14), health care (14), united states (14), four years (11), al qaida (10), osama bin (10), mr. vice president (10), drug companies (9), thursday night (8), insurance companies (8), 75 percent of the world (7), cases out of the system (7), nuclear weapons (7), no-bid contract (6), department of homeland security (6), israeli people (6), 9/11 commission (6), ceo of halliburton (6), mess in iraq (6), spread of nuclear weapons (6), good judgment (5), prescription drugs (5)

Cheney

saddam hussein (11), fact of the matter (10), united states (10), al qaida (7), significant progress (7), wrong side of defense issues (7), vice president (7), united states senate (6), making significant progress (6), senator kerry (6), first time (6), weapons of mass destruction (6), families of suicide bombers (6), senator edwards (6), global war on terror (6), states that sponsor terror (6), u.n. security council (6), speaker of the house (6), several things (5), half years (5), tax cuts (5), wrong place (5), prescription drugs (5), states senate (5), small businesses (5)

[Quote:]

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer told resellers at the European Partner conference that anyone in danger of losing business to Star Office should email him and he would send in the cavalry.

In a question and answer session after his closing speech a delegate asked what he should do faced with public sector customers interested in Star Office, Sun’s budget rival to Microsoft Office. Ballmer replied: “Email me immediately and we’ll send in the cavalry. I’m joking…but I’m not. There is no reason to lose business to Star Office – it’s as good as what we were shipping seven years ago, it’s not compatible with Microsoft Office and it’s missing key applications like Outlook.�?

Ballmer said there was a perception that Microsoft was more expensive but they would happily take a Total Cost of Ownership test. He added that some governments talk about open source software being better – but that was something the company would debate.

Well, if you want a discount on your office software, you know what to do next time you meet your microsoft rep…

Just like AT&T is doing

[Quote:]

“I can’t get no respect.”

[Quote:]

A New Jersey middle school teacher who displayed a portrait of the president of the United States in her classroom side-by-side with pictures of other U.S. presidents and the Declaration of Independence was thrown out of her school on Friday for refusing to take the Bush photo down.

“I’m requiring that you take the picture down,” Shiba Pillai-Diaz says she was told by Mark Daniels, assistant principal at the Crossroads South Middle School in Monmouth Junction. The teacher refused and now faces dismissal for insubordination.

According to Pillai-Diaz, who recounted the incident to WABC Radio’s Steve Malzberg on Sunday, Daniels told her he had consulted with the school’s principal, Jim Warfel.

The consensus: “We decided that there was a very destructive atmosphere in your classroom and that you’re going around the school spreading your political views.”

[Quote:]

Rumors of reinstating the military draft, which have flourished for months in panicky e-mails, online chat rooms, college dorms and student newspapers, suddenly dominated the House floor yesterday in one of the strangest parliamentary maneuvers in memory. With even its sponsor voting against it, a bill to require young adults to perform military or civil service failed, 402 to 2.

The vote put an end to HR 163, but Democrats and Republicans signaled they will continue to accuse each other of contemplating a revival of conscription, at least through the presidential campaign’s final month, and probably as long as U.S. troops are in Iraq.

[Quote:]

If you read Lexar’s documentation, their JumpDrive Secure product is secure. “If lost or stolen, you can rest assured that what you’ve saved there remains there with 256-bit AES encryption.” Sounds good, but security professionals are an untrusting sort. @Stake decided to check. They found that “the password can be observed in memory or read directly from the device, without evidence of tampering.” Even worse: the password “is stored in an XOR encrypted form and can be read directly from the device without any authentication.”

The moral of the story: don’t trust magic security words like “256-bit AES.” The devil is in the details, and it’s easy to screw up security.

Although screwing it up this badly is impressive.

[Quote:]

This week’s How-To is a three part special complete with our first Engadget “Podcast�? MP3. The first part is how to get “Podcasts�? on your iPod. So what’s a Podcast? To put it simply, a Podcast is an audio file, a MP3, most likely, in talk show format, along with a way to subscribe to the show and have it automatically delivered to your iPod when you plug in to iTunes. The show isn’t live, so you can listen to it whenever you want.

[Quote:]

This is the world of scarcity. Now, with online distribution and retail, we are entering a world of abundance. And the differences are profound.

To see how, meet Robbie Vann-Adibé, the CEO of Ecast, a digital jukebox company whose barroom players offer more than 150,000 tracks – and some surprising usage statistics. He hints at them with a question that visitors invariably get wrong: “What percentage of the top 10,000 titles in any online media store (Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, or any other) will rent or sell at least once a month?”

Most people guess 20 percent, and for good reason: We’ve been trained to think that way. The 80-20 rule, also known as Pareto’s principle (after Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist who devised the concept in 1906), is all around us. Only 20 percent of major studio films will be hits. Same for TV shows, games, and mass-market books – 20 percent all. The odds are even worse for major-label CDs, where fewer than 10 percent are profitable, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

But the right answer, says Vann-Adibé, is 99 percent. There is demand for nearly every one of those top 10,000 tracks. He sees it in his own jukebox statistics; each month, thousands of people put in their dollars for songs that no traditional jukebox anywhere has ever carried.

People get Vann-Adibé’s question wrong because the answer is counterintuitive in two ways. The first is we forget that the 20 percent rule in the entertainment industry is about hits, not sales of any sort. We’re stuck in a hit-driven mindset – we think that if something isn’t a hit, it won’t make money and so won’t return the cost of its production. We assume, in other words, that only hits deserve to exist. But Vann-Adibé, like executives at iTunes, Amazon, and Netflix, has discovered that the “misses” usually make money, too. And because there are so many more of them, that money can add up quickly to a huge new market.

With no shelf space to pay for and, in the case of purely digital services like iTunes, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees, a miss sold is just another sale, with the same margins as a hit. A hit and a miss are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.

The second reason for the wrong answer is that the industry has a poor sense of what people want. Indeed, we have a poor sense of what we want. We assume, for instance, that there is little demand for the stuff that isn’t carried by Wal-Mart and other major retailers; if people wanted it, surely it would be sold. The rest, the bottom 80 percent, must be subcommercial at best.

But as egalitarian as Wal-Mart may seem, it is actually extraordinarily elitist. Wal-Mart must sell at least 100,000 copies of a CD to cover its retail overhead and make a sufficient profit; less than 1 percent of CDs do that kind of volume. What about the 60,000 people who would like to buy the latest Fountains of Wayne or Crystal Method album, or any other nonmainstream fare? They have to go somewhere else.