Russell Shaw's Brainstorm Central

Not With My Inbox, You Don't!

Spam is not protected speech. It is theft. Theft of RAM and hard drive space. I paid extra for the computer, for the RAM, and for that hard drive space. Spammers mess with the performance of devices and systems I paid a premium for. So calling spam a nuisance would skew toward euphemism.

I'll explain. As of this post, I, a not-atypical digital pack-rat, have 5,267 messages stored in my Inbox. Given the inevitable memory drain when utilities open and close, I often reach the point where a live file with 5,267 messages is too much for the RAM, and OE crashes. If I am away from my PC for three hours, and I come back, I sometimes find Outlook Express crashed. The culprit is an Inbox rendered even more corpulent by excessive, unrequested messages that have no right to be there. So to free up the memory necessary to open my Inbox, I have to reboot. I could take a day and purge my Inbox file, but I like having all my messages there, and searchable. That should be my choice.

Now, some Senators and Congresspeople are waking up. I think part of the problem is that, well, CAUCE (Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email) ain't a PAC. Also, in Congress, your interns, who you may barely know, are the ones opening up your e-mail. But more legislators are more tech-savvy these days, and have encountered spam personally.

Something will probably pass, but what does that do to thwart spam from tiny nations? Maybe we can block all messages from coming in from those countries that are spam-origination mills. We shut down Internet traffic from Iraq, so maybe from Vanatu and Tuvalu?

Hell. Link 'em to Al-Queda.

Ranking The Blogosphere

I will tell you the best way to rank the blogosphere. Crawl all the blogs on a continuous basis, like Google News does with their 4,500 news sources. Obviously you would be looking at hundreds of thousands of blogs, but GN could do it...heck, they already do it in almost real-time for almost as many Usenet Newsgroups. I know that my own Blog gets crawled once every 3-4 weeks, which, is the customary rotation time -- the interval between specific site crawls -- for the Google spiders. So more blogs need to be crawled, and in as near to real-time as possible. Then, you would have a more rankable, and more searchable, blogosphere.

iTuned Out

A big honkin' bah for Apple's iTunes. More formidable efforts with more alliances have tried, namely PressPlay and MusicNet. Plus, the price point is too high, and the technology too proprietary. If the iPod represents a closed system, well, then, just the other day I went to my clothier in downtown Portland, and when waiting for a suit to come back, I downloaded Kazaa on his PC, installed it, searched for and downloaded the Avril Lavigne song "Sk8ter Boy," via Kazaa,used RealOne's jukebox component to manage the media file, and then transfer it via flash card to his RioPort (which holds as many songs as iPod.). Free and open-source.

So what you have is iTunes charging for something that is widely available for free; like air. If you really want, you can go to an Oxygen bar and pay a price for a customized version of air. Or, you can use the "open source" version of air. Like, breathe, dude, ya know?

My Low-Brow Pop Culture Moment

I usually reject pop culture, but I have been watching "The Bachelor" faithfully. Which one will Andrew select?

If I was him, I would choose her. Here's why.

Andrew, she will do your family heritage proud. And if you are with her right now, I propose a toast.

Tax The Homes And Fund The Schools

I live in a state where the majority of those who care to vote hoard their money and their real-estate holdings. The result .. the shortest school year in the nation. Here's what needs to be done.

When Will They Learn?

Today I saw a bumper sticker: "Nader In 2004."

OK, Naderites, your votes pushed Bush over the top in 2000. Attempts to appoint very conservative judges, attempts to drill in the Arctic, imposition of restricted stem cell research, no WMD found yet ...haven't you had enough?

Shopped..And Now Dropped

I used to live in Atlanta. I have always loved downtown department stores. Atlanta's last such establishment, the Macy's on Peachtree, closed for good last Saturday.

I have lots of memories of that place. The festive Christmas toys on the mezzanine. Yummy, thick tuna sandwiches at The Mex restaurant. The talented and funny hairdresser from Utah in the second floor salon, whose handiwork was mocked by one stressed-out parental unit but met with my approval, as well as that of my then-girlfriend. Those empty Saturday afternoons, in the late 1980s, when I, mourning the recent passage of my girlfriend, went to Macy's basement for lemon and pound cake after a few hours poring over out of town newspapers in the library across the street. The tough times of 1980 and 1981, when I rode the new MARTA sunway to the store to float and cash checks so I would have enough to eat. The creaky escalators, the all-too-often sparse crowds.

And now, the end.

Fortunately, I now live in a city with three downtown department stores.

Of Coaches And King

In today's column, Salon.com's King Kaufman has trouble making the case that sports is "inherently conservative." Of course it is -- especially team sports. Both the military, team sports, and for that matter, much of conservative organized religion are built on obedience to hierarchical command structure and fealty to a higher authority -- generals, coaches, a male notion of God. If you are already pre-wired for deference, you will, on balance, be likely to have a conservative mindset. It will be easier for your thinking to be controlled. With that mind-set, you will gravitate toward pursuits where you will feel comfortable. That is why so many soldiers in this volunteer Army come from the ranks of fervent churchgoers and more than a few athletes regularly thank God for their touchdown or winning basket.

Doing The "Saddam Stomp"

Much of the media articulated the statue-dragging in that main Baghdad square as a mass event. Probably a more relevant mosaic on those events would have been that ..a small group of demonstrators, apparently unmoved by fear...I do think that some of the media tended to overplay the statute-tugging. Was great "tv," but in their descriptive hyperenthusiasm they made the event iseem like a popular uprising by the masses.

Perhaps more telling is what is happening today: thousands of looters in palaces and other regime offices; might symbolize that many feel they have been economically repressed while those in power got richer, and now, finally, this is their chance to get their share. Then, also, the murder of a pro-Saddam Shiite imam outside a mosque...

All this speaks to the distinct possibility of civil war, tribal war, permeated by all sorts of religious and ethnic rivalries, plus personal scores to settle. The fact that imperialist outsiders stitched together this nation out of dispirate parts has a lot to do with it.

April In Portland

We had a wonderful weather day yesterday. One thing I have noticed: Portlanders are more attuned to the joy of this particular season than are many others. Not untill April do Portland faces break out of common frowning winter doldrums, into more permanent electric face smiles.

Processing Moore's Law

My friend Dana Blankenhorn believes in Moore's Law so fervently that he wrote his own book about it. Prominent tech author-journalist Michael Malone does not share that fervor. He disparaged Moore's in a recent New York Times article.

I have my own opinions. Moore's Law is not a "religion," and no, it is not an "unhealthy fixation." It is not an unchallengeable uber-equation, but a template. If the market does not demand products improved by the results of Moore's Law in somewhat of a relevant time frame, the template it ascribes becomes more theoretical than definitive. Malone is right that "profit, product and market" ought to be thought about. But to me, he is wrong that he seems to equate a fixation on Moore's Law as a mind-set that would, on its own, blunt strategic thinking. It seems to me that Moore's Law is a technical phenomenon that informs and inspires r&d, and marketing is an executive management function. With the proper balance, the two can interact with productive results.

Is Lars Larson A Terrorist?

There's a Portland-based talk radio host named Lars Larson. I can't stand him. Here he is, yelling that some of the more demonstrative anti-war protestors are terrorists who should be locked up for decades. At the same time, Lars is partial to the role of law enforcement in fighting terrorism. Why, then, did he so loudly oppose Measure 28?

As an economically distressed state hit by the double-whammy of a sinking extraction-driven economy, a woeful tech economy, companies being snapped up by larger out of state rivals (due in large measure to "free market" non-regulation backed by Lars' conservative supporters) and high utility bills (due to energy deregulation and subsequent lack of rate controls, also backed by Lars' conservative supporters), our income tax collection is way down and our budget deficit is on the way up.

Let me explain my grievance. If passed, Measure 28 would have temporarily added $2 per week to the income tax levy of the average Oregonian. Two fucking dollars! That's a fraction of the cost of a pack of cigarettes, about a gallon of gas, one Slurpee drink, eight quarters dumped into the till at Spirit Mountain casino. Lars campaigned against it, and it failed. As a consequence, the state had to lay off more than 130 state troopers. These are the same state troopers that might have caught the next Mohammed Atta for a speeding violation. That actually happened in Florida ... Atta was stopped, but was let go because Florida did not have its traffic violation databases integrated with "known terrorist" databases at the time.

Not to mention the health care and education cuts put in play by the failure of Measure 28.

Lars Larson, your hyperbole and exaggerations hurt young people who want to learn, sick and older people who need care, and all of us, who need protection. Lars, you are more of a terrorist than the anarchistic slackers who jumped on I-5 in downtown Portland last month. They blocked traffic. You ruin lives. So do terrorists.

Just A Hunch

I don't think we got him. Not yet.

Get Ready For This Headline

The fog of war, the vagaries of spycraft and the spin of propaganda being what it is, you can count on reading this headline over the next several hours:

Iraq Denies Saddam, Others Killed In Bombing Raid

To A Fallen Word Warrior

Although his mostly conservative politics did not match up well with my own thinking, I will miss Michael Kelly. Kelly, who died today in a humvee accident in you know where, was a rare combination of courageous journalist, powerful author, and gifted editor. He brought The Atlantic out of its doldrums. Yet different from so many other Northeastern scriveners trained in the academy and used to the trappings of a materialistically fine life, he was not above volunteering to go to dangerous locales to find out the story, and write what he saw as the truth. While I only knew him through his words and deeds, I wish I had met him.

Starr Power

Given the war in Iraq, kind of ironic that we lost Edwin Starr this week. Starr wrote and forcefully sang the brilliant song, "War." As in" "war, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing." Don't know if he was a pacifist, or appropriated the theme to sound topically relevant when the song was released at the depths of the Vietnam War in 1970. But as we get deeper into another potential quagmire in a land we do not understand all that well, the melody and words are running through my mind right now.