yellow bits

I’m Walt Mossberg. Shut Up. - Take on Crunchpad/JooJoo

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 17:14:56 -0500

I’m Walt Mossberg. Shut Up. - Take on Crunchpad/JooJoo

randallb: ranajune: quikness:datavis: Problems Comparison...

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 10:53:47 -0500

randallb:

ranajune:

quikness:datavis:

Problems Comparison Chart: Tiger Woods Vs. Jay Z

I'm ranked #51 on the Silicon Alley Insider list for 2009!!

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:59:39 -0500

I'm ranked #51 on the Silicon Alley Insider list for 2009!!:

(via ranajune)

Congrats!

Avatar is Too Obvious

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 18:02:16 -0500

James Cameron’s new movie Avatar is suppose to be the big hit of the holiday season. Now, I’m sure it’s going to make a lot of money. It’s coming from the writer and director of The Abyss, Terminator, True Lies and Titanic. Whether it makes enough to break even or even be considered a success is a whole different question.

What bothers me so far besides the blue cat people kissing and the fake PS3-looking cut scenes is how freaking obvious the names are in the movie. Just a few examples:

Pandora - Name of the planet the humans are trying to invade. Or otherwise known as don’t go here, you’ll find a lot of trouble.

Na’vi - Natives. Let’s drop some letters.

Grace Augustine - So I’m going to guess she’s really graceful and really smart.

Unobtainium - UN-OBTAIN-NIUM. Blood Diamonds circa 2200 A.D.

I was half expecting the main character to be named John Everyman.

caro: The 50 Best Protest Signs Of 2009 - My favorite!

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 11:00:05 -0500

caro:

The 50 Best Protest Signs Of 2009 - My favorite!

Customer service

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:34:00 -0500

j: so what happened with the certificate [of authenticity]
d: we dont have any
d: it's fucking swarvoski crystals
d: not african blood diamonds

And this one.

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:46:51 -0500

And this one.

I love this pic for so many reasons.

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:45:19 -0500

I love this pic for so many reasons.

Deficit Commision, Not a bad idea

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:11:00 -0500

Deficit Commision, Not a bad idea:

I was reading the HuffPo yesterday, and I saw this story about how “crazy” it is to have a bipartisan commission to reduce deficit spending and whatnot. Most of it was a diatribe about how politicians are outsourcing their jobs and that this commission was just another bureaucracy. I disagree.

Why do we have deficit spending in the first place? Two real reason: 1) People don’t like to pay taxes (basis of Republican platform). 2) People, as much as they don’t like to admit it, like government services (basis of Democratic platform). We like our clean air, relative peace and security, our social safety nets, our subsidized education; we just don’t want to pay for it. Some politicians get elected for getting the government to help the people, and then other politicians get elected because we don’t like paying taxes for those services.

There’s just too many political pressures to have an equitable and balanced budget. The few times that we have had a balanced budget in the last century were either because the party in power made a really hard decision to either reduce government spending or increase taxes (and then lost power) or the economy outgrew government spending, which increased tax revenues.

A Congressman is not likely to cut a 50 million dollar government program that provides jobs in his district if it means that the budget gets reduced 0.03%. There aren’t enough moderates in either party, who will say I will take a 5% reduction in government spending for a 5% increase in tax revenues, that will cover a 10% hole in the budget. And neither party wants to take the heat for raising the retirement age for Social Security, even though people are living a lot longer than they used to. The 9/11 Commission seemed to work mostly, and maybe this one will. It won’t solve all our problems, but it’s better than the political system we have now. At the very least, it will give enough cover for politicians to go to their constituents and say, “It’s not a perfect plan, but it’s the best plan we could agree on.”

The IM conversations I have some times…

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:54:47 -0500

The IM conversations I have some times…

We switched slippers. She’s a size 7 in women. I’m a...

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:10:56 -0500

We switched slippers. She’s a size 7 in women. I’m a 12 in men.

Cute Fuzzy.

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:18:30 -0500

Cute Fuzzy.

The case for or against affirmative action?

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:42:46 -0500

The case for or against affirmative action?:

I’ve been a lot more blogging about political topics lately especially because of some ugly racial politics over the last couple of days. I came across this little tidbit of an article about admissions practices at elite schools. I’ve excerpted the most relevant part:

Translating the advantages into SAT scores, study author Thomas Espenshade, a Princeton sociologist, calculated that African-Americans who achieved 1150 scores on the two original SAT tests had the same chances of getting accepted to top private colleges in 1997 as whites who scored 1460s and Asians who scored perfect 1600s.

Granted my first emotion was to react in disgust, but setting my personal feelings aside and wondering about the greater good, I ask myself is this a good or a bad thing for society on the whole? Extrapolating the results of this study, it says that if we were end racial considerations today, our high-end, elite educational institutions would consist almost entirely of rich Asian and white students.

Of course we want the best of the best, but is homogeny really worth the price? On an individual level, I’m sure I would be furious if I were rejected for a less qualified candidate, but policy molds society. We do have some part in deciding what kind of society we want to live in. Schools most assuredly have a huge role in that process.

I have heard off hand before, “Oh, it’s because he’s Asian” or “You’re Asian; you must be good at math.” In some respects, I am proud. My mom instilled in me a great need to continually improve my education. Of course, this was usually under the threat of getting grounded or spanked if I brought home less than an “A”. At the same time, it has worked in my favor as well as against. Asian Americans are not well known (outside of classical music) of being heavily involved in the creative arts, and I’m sure somewhere along the way someone noticed my last name in undergraduate (BFA), at some job and perhaps others other facets of life.

I can testify that being around people from many cultures has improved my education in so many ways. It’s changed my world view and my approach to people and problem solving. The problem with diversity is that it is hard to quantify without resorting to quotas and percentages.

Wow... East Asians are conspiring to end white America

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:21:00 -0500

Wow... East Asians are conspiring to end white America:

So I was doing a little bit of research on Rep. Joseph Cao (R). He was the lone Republican to vote for health care reform in the U.S. House of Representatives. The second article I found in Google after querying “joseph cao conservative” had this:

I will be totally honest with you. I am seriously starting to distrust those of eastern decent. I mean, first we had John Yoo, who gave President George W. Bush some very horrible advice during the war on terror, then we had Obama’s Energy Secretary telling us, that we should pay China back. I mean, I hate to say it, we have Michelle Malkin; who honestly, at times, be-clowns the Conservative movement with her writings. How do we not know that it is some sort of a plot to take over America? I am not saying that I totally believe that, but there are times, when I do really wonder about it. I mean, some of us have not forgotten about what happened on December 7, 1941 and what Truman did to end the war. How do we know that this is not some sort of revenge thing by the eastern bloc to get back at us for what happened? Is it a moral crime to wonder about these things? If so, Why?

I’m going to be a tiny bit presumptuous and speak for most East Asians. If anybody was worried that we’ve been trying to get revenge for Hiroshima by getting American health care reform passed…

Yes, we are. We have meetings every third Tuesday of every month. Our plan is to become U.S. citizens, study hard, work in our parents’ Asian restaurants/laundry mats/beauty salons, get into positions of power, win a Nobel Prize, and then win special elections where the Democrat challengers have refrigerators full of money. Then cast the non-deciding vote. You caught us. The Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese and Koreans gave up three millennia of fighting with each to enact a century old plan to get universal health care passed. We thought the massive number of SAT prep books would have been the original clue.

UPDATE: I think the original writer deleted his blog post.

UPDATED AGAIN: Found the Google cached version.

Tao tao on bear mountain.

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 09:09:05 -0500

Tao tao on bear mountain.

Diana Cheng is the greatest ever! This is one of the best...

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:57:25 -0500

Diana Cheng is the greatest ever! This is one of the best birthday presents I’ve ever gotten!

Safe harbor for net neutrality

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:39:00 -0500

Lately, I’ve been having a number of conversations about net neutrality with libertarians and conservatives, who align themselves with total anti-regulation philosophy. Not to get to get into too much caricature, but most of the arguments seem to be that net neutrality is either the new “fairness doctrine” or just another attempt at more government intervention in our lives. They fear an Internet, where you’ll have to reveal your party registration in order to post a comment on a blog. Sadly, this is just a case of grossly misunderstanding what the debate about network neutrality is about.

Partly, this misunderstanding is because net neutrality itself isn’t well defined. Most of us pro-net neutrality supporters agree that ISPs should have “reasonable network management practices.” More on that later. In the meantime, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has outlined a number of principles, which I for one agree with preliminarily. For the next few months, the FCC will be taking public comments before they turn these principles into actual rules.

But back to the debate, this controversy for or against net neutrality is fundamentally about the role of government in our lives. Does the government have a role in regulating communications over pipes that ISPs built and manage themselves? Yes and no. I do not subscribe to a black and white view of the role of government. I believe there is plenty bad as well as plenty good that the government has, can and will do in our lives. Balance, the middle path and pragmatism is what I subscribe to.

Let’s be honest about this debate. Absolutely nobody is asking that the government censor and monitor all communications on the Internet. (I’m pretty sure they already do monitor the Internet to some extent, but again that’s something else.) Net neutrality is not about having a conservative counterpoint for every point a liberal makes. At the same time, the libertarian view that the free market should dictate all the rules that govern the Internet grossly simplifies a complex debate and ignores the realities of externalities, which will arise from a purely free market solution.

First, government doesn’t entirely screw things up. (It does screw up a lot of things but let’s give it some credit.) Let’s remember that the Internet is an off-shoot of DARPA, a government program that was initially started so that the defense network could still communicate in case a large portion of the network were destroyed in a nuclear war. TCP/IP were developed for the government for use on ARPANET. When the government declared that TCP/IP was the standard for military networking, it became the de facto standard for sending information over the Internet. In essence, it was the birth of the Internet’s plumbling and entirely government decreed. Today, ISPs enjoy plenty of unnatural, un-market-driven government intervention. I’ll get to that in a second.

Next, let’s remember that we’re talking about two entirely different aspects of the Internet: the content and the transmission. Net neutrality is not about content. Post whatever you want. It’s about the transmission. Most supporters of net neutrality would agree that we just want to be able to transmit whatever unharmful data we’d like. How much of that data is another but related debate.

The transmission of data is fundamentally and physically limited to the wires that run from your computer and through the walls. Most consumers only have only one or two options to access high-speed broadband Internet. The broadband market naturally doesn’t really exist for consumers. For example, I only have a SINGLE broadband provider in my apartment building. I cannot choose among a litany of ISPs, nor can I choose to leave my service. I’m stuck in this market failure.

So what to do?

I propose a compromise: ISPs who want to police and regulate their networks should lose DMCA safe harbor protection. Who-na-what-na?

The crux of the libertarian argument against network neutrality is that ISPs, which have built their own networks, poured money into their operations and manage their operations day-to-day, should have the final say on what crosses their transmission lines. ISPs after all are responsible for how their networks behave. That’s fine as long as they are responsible for how their networks misbehave. Currently, ISPs in the United States are indemnified against actions of their users. AT&T can’t be held responsible if one of its customers launches a DDoS attack against a Verizon customer. Comcast can’t be held responsible if one of its customers hosts child pornography on its network. Time Warner is not responsible if a terrorist uses its network to contact another terrorist. ISPs love their safe harbor protection. They want to police their networks and not have any responsibility.

Well, I propose that they can’t have their cake and eat it too. On the flip side, if ISPs agree to network neutrality (i.e. open access to all applications, reasonable network management practices, promise not to filter content on their networks or degrade web applications), then they get all the indemnification they want.

As far as reasonable network management is concerned, I’m not sure how to formulate that into enforceable law or regulation, but in general, I want a ISP to throttle BitTorrent traffic so that it doesn’t kill my connection to Hulu. Lord, have I cursed the residents in my building for pirating the latest Wolverine movie while I watched the latest episode of Family Guy. I want a ISP to filter out a DDoS attack against my favorite website. I do not want them to degrade access to Facebook because they struck a deal with MySpace or block access to Skype because they want me to buy their VoIP phone service.

This product is awesome.

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:41:29 -0500

This product is awesome.

Halloween fun.

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:09:35 -0500

Halloween fun.

Great Halloween party.

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:42:44 -0500

Great Halloween party.