So what is CDMA2000, anyway?

Steven Den Beste of USS Clueless has a piece on developments in the various 3G mobile phone standards - in particular how the American standard CDMA2000 seems to be winning over the European W-CDMA/UMTS. This is a follow up to this Economist article, and is an interest of mine as well. I wrote Steven a ludicrously long e-mail reply, which I think I might as well post here as well.

Steven,

It was interesting to read your piece on CDMA2000. In my former job as a telecommunications analyst at CSFB in Australia, I also listened to a lot self-righteous patronising crap from GSM proponents, and I am feeling a little schadenfreude myself. I wrote a whole lot of reports a couple of years ago stating that I didn't believe that W-CDMA would work any time soon, and that IS-95 networks could be easily upgraded, and that therefore these networks were potentially very valuable assets, but it nobody much paid any attention at the time.(Of course, I lost my job in a massive downsizing, so in a way it barely matters, but I do now feel somewhat better....).

In Australia, we have a mixture of GSM and CDMA (IS-95) networks. At this point the GSM networks have most of the customers, largely I think due to Nokia's marketing skills. At the height of the boom, even the companies that owned the CDMA networks announced the intention of buiding W-CDMA networks and purchased 2.1GHz spectrum (admittedly fairly cheaply) in order to do so. The success of GSM in Europe, Asia, and Africa was such that everyone paid attention to its proponents, and paid little attention to anyone else. (Everyone particularly paid attention to Nokia). The lesson they took seemed to be that because GSM was so successful the people behind it were omniscient. IS-95 might have been the better technology, but networks that had adopted it in the past had lost out to those that had adopted GSM because everyone else had adopted GSM, and that UMTS/W-CDMA was the 'upgrade path' from GSM. Clearly everyone was going to adopt W-CDMA, so therefore we should do this too, and you couldn't even get people to talk about CDMA2000. a colleague of mine spoke to the CEO of a company (Telstra) that owned a IS-95 netowork, and he knew little about CDMA2000 whereas he had swallowed all of the hype about UMTS. His company is now becoming quite enthusiastic about CDMA2000.

Now the perception has collapsed, and people are looking at the actual technology again. This is great, as it means the of the telco/tech boom has now gone.

The whole story of what happened in Australia is quite interesting, so here goes. I have also posted this on my blog. (http://michaeljennings.blogspot.com)

(Bear in mind that I am not an engineer, although I do have a Ph.D. in applied mathematics. I am something of an engineer wannabe, however.)

In the analogue days in Australia there was a single AMPS network on 800MHz that belonged to then government owned then monopoly Telecom Australia (now Telstra). In the early 1990s the government decided to upgrade to a digital technology. Three licences were sold for 900MHz GSM spectrum. Telstra was compelled by law to upgrade to GSM, and to phase out and switch off its AMPS network by 2000. This seems to have been because the government thought that it wouldn't get a good price for the second and third GSM licences if the new players had to take on an entrenched monopoly, and forcing Telstra to shut down its AMPS network weakened that monopoly. Telstra was not permitted to upgrade its network to IS-136, as it would have liked to have done. (This happened in New Zealand, where Telecom NZ upgraded from AMPS to IS-136 and eventually built an IS-95 network alongside its IS-136 network). Three companies: Telstra; Optus (then owned by C&W, now owned by Singapore Telecom); and Vodafone set up GSM networks. The government announced that the reason for the switch off was to make the 800MHz spectrum available for newer technology, and it would be auctioned when available.

When the GSM networks went into operation, it became clear that GSM is a lousy technology for places like Australia, because Australia is enormous, and very sparsely populated. GSM works fine in densely populated Europe where base stations are close together, but it works very badly in situations where large cells are called for. (My understanding is that it fails when the time it takes for a signal to go from the base-station to the handset becomes comparable with the length of a timeslot, so it's a TDMA thing in general I guess). The fact that the AMPS network, which worked well with large cells in rural areas, was being switched off and replaced with GSM (which didn't work) enraged voters in rural areas, who had become used to having mobile phones.

Like rural voters everywhere, rural voters in Australia are upset about a lot of things. (which largely come back to the fact that agriculture is not a way to get rich in the modern world, whereas it was a century ago, and the importance of rural Australia to the country has been in decline for at least that long, but I digress). Rural voters are a political problem for the conservative government that has been in power since 1996 in particular, because rural voters have recently been flirting with parties of the far right instead of the traditional rural conservative party. In any event, in this case rural people really did have a point. The government therefore felt it needed to do something quickly.

The auction of the 800MHz spectrum took place, Telstra gained a licence and was encouraged (and subsidised) to build a national IS-95 network as quickly as it could. (Hutchison Telecom also purchased 800MHz spectrum, and built a second IS-95 network in the large cities, and signed a roaming agreement for its customers to use Telstra's network out of the cities). This solved the rural voter problem quite effectively, as IS-95 works fine with large cells. (Has this issue come up in the US? Surely it must have). Therefore, what we ended up with in Australia was a situation where Australia had two solely GSM operators, one solely IS-95 operator, and one operator (Telstra) that owned networks of both kinds.

What then happened was that the three GSM operators gained something more than 90% market share between them. Although Telstra caters to customers in rural areas if it has to, its profitability lies in customers in the large cities, as this is where the majority of the population lives, and the urban population is much richer. City people might like to pretend that they leave the city to experience the great Australian outback regularly but in actual fact they don't. Therefore, it doesn't matter to most of them that GSM phones do not work outside the cities. For the best customers, international roaming is probably more important, and this does work extremely well for GSM, and it is an issue on which the CDMA world has never seemed to have got its act together. For whatever reason, CDMA lost out badly in Australia.

I think the biggest reason behind this is simply that, for some reason, mobile phones turned into fashion accessories. People are very conscious of their brand and appearance, and it is very important to have a 'cool' . (I think this is even more the case in Europe and Asia than in the US). Cell phones almost became like watches. A $1000 watch probably doesn't tell the time any better than a $20 watch, but people are willing to pay the difference in order to have the right watch. The $20 watch may well have more features than the $1000 watch, but this doesn't matter, as the only features on their watch that most people ever use are the time and date. Nokia were first to understand that phones were like this too. (The Nokia 8210 is easily the most successful phone in recent years in Europe and Australia, but in terms of functionality, it is quite backwards. It can be used for phone calls and SMS messages and that is about it). The features that Nokia added were lifestyle features such as changeable ringtones, games, and the ability to change the casing of the phone to change its colour. Plus they concentrated their advertising on these lifestyle features. What they did was create a situation where if you are a high school student, it is social death to have a mobile phone that is not a Nokia. If you are a single woman, then the tiny little phone that goes in your handbag has to be a Nokia. Nokia have never struck me as having great engineering - Ericsson and Motorola seem to get new (technical) features onto the market much faster - but Nokia are great at creating demand for their phones. Despite having seemingly excellent engineering, Ericsson have produced phones that are ugly, and that has cost them. Motorola's phones are packed with features - my own phone is a Motorola for this reason - but they are less attractive and are weaker on the lifestyle front than are Nokia's. (Motorola have improved their game a lot in the last couple of years, however).

And in markets such as Australia, Nokia does not sell CDMA phones. Yes, they produce them for the American market, but in markets such as Australia and New Zealand, they do not sell them. When asked about this, they say that they prefer to concentrate their efforts on the GSM market. If you want to buy a CDMA phone, it will generally be made by a South Korean company - Samsung or LG or Hyundai. And while these companies make decent products, they are deeply unfashionable: they are brandnames associated with cheap cars and cheap televisions. People do not want this for a mobile phone. So they have lost out. GSM has the high prestige brands associated with it, and it has gained the reputation for a quality product, even though it is technically worse. (It seems foolish to me for Nokia to decide which of its products its customers want for them rather than letting them do this, but that's its strategy).

In Australia, Telstra responded to this customer preference by seeing its CDMA network as part of its universal service obligation and only really promoting it in rural areas, devoting most of its marketing effort to GSM, and Hutchison has simply tried to compete on price. (Its calls are cheaper than anyone else's).

In New Zealand, Telecom NZ have sold IS-136 and later IS-95, and have lost out in a similar way, although not as badly. Their only competitor, Vodafone, uses GSM, and Vodafone have done a far better job of marketing their service, at least partly by selling GSM as the world leading technology.

In 2000, vast sums had been paid in Europe for the 2.1GHz UMTS spectrum, and a similar auction was held in Australia. (They auctioned the 2.1GHz UMTS spectrum bands, but did not specify a technology). However, there were about the same number of licences as applicants in Australia, so the licences went cheaply. Telstra, Optus, Vodafone, Hutchison and Qualcomm all purchased 3G licences. Optus (who have 'vendor financing' from Nokia) and Hutchison (who have a global parent that intends to roll out UMTS networks around Europe) announced they would build UMTS networks quickly. Telstra and Vodafone said they would build UMTS with less urgency, and Qualcomm announced that it would build a network using 2.1GHz CDMA2000 and resell the capacity. The extraordinary thing is how amazingly detached the rhetoric was from reality at the time: Nobody had any idea what 3G was or was supposed to do, but they had already decided that UMTS was going to be the winner. Plus they had no idea of the value of the assets that they already owned. At the time, Telstra was fully talking the UMTS line, but in the two years since, their tone has changed a lot. They seem to have woken up to the fact that their IS-95 network is an asset, and it seems to be clear they will launch a 1x service before long. (Telecom NZ has already done so).

(There were lots of theories as to what Qualcomm was doing - my theory was that they wanted to adapt and demonstate their CDMA2000 equipment for the 2.1GHz bands that were being auctioned throughout the world by regulatory authorities who thought that UMTS would prevail put didn't feel the regulatory need to specify a technology, probably with China in particular in mind. Qualcomm have been quiet on this lately, which may suggest that capital is too expensive these days for demonstrations like this. If they were thinking about China, it may be unnecessary anyway, as China Unicom has a (quite new, probably 1X capable out of the box) IS-95 network in pace already).

I suppose the lesson to be learned from this is the same one that you are making, which is that it's a bad idea to try to pick winners. Australia, NZ, and a lot of Asia has IS-95 networks in place, even if these networks do not have huge market shares at the moment. If camera phone type applications become a big deal, as they appear to have done in Japan and Korea, then it will be very easy for these networks to be upgraded to CDMA2000/3G, and you will see an amazingly quick shift in the fortunes of the two technologies, as the infrastructure is already sitting there in most of Asia to allow this to happen. (There was an IS-95 network in Singapore that was switched off because it didn't have many customers. I wonder if they can switch it on again. Actually I doubt it as it was operating on 1900MHz and I think the spectrum was reallocated to allow overlapping 1800MHz GSM). If some companies get a big advantage from this, there will be pressure for competitors to upgrade too. This may lead to widespread 2.1GHz CDMA2000, as this is where the free spectrum is.

Actually, I think the shift in perception as to which is the successful technology has just happened. I think CDMA2000 has just won, and this will be common wisdom within six months. This leaves Sprint and Verizon in the box seat in the US. Asia is in a good position to adopt the technology because there is enough IS-95 in place to allow a fairly easy transition, but Europe is completely screwed, as it has committed itself to a technology that doesn't work, and it cannot fix this until very slow moving bureacrats change the rules. Plus there is so much bad money already invested that they will no doubt continue throwing good money after it for a while.

Just as a matter of interest, there is one interesting regulatory loophole in Europe for people who want to build CDMA2000 networks. The EC/EU only got involved in the spectrum allocation business for GSM, and prior to that allocation of spectrum for analogue services was a matter for national jurisdiction. (The resulting mass of incompatible analogue systems was one reason other than protectionism that we got a single European standard and a single European set of spectrum allocations for GSM) A lot of European governments allocated 450MHz spectrum for analogue services, and in a lot of cases this is still allocated and still subject to national rather than European jurisdiction. (This spectrum is also available in Russia and one or two places in Asia). In most cases it is at least theoretically legal for the owners of such spectrum to build CDMA2000 networks in this allocation. I know that Qualcomm have been working on developing hardware to work at this frequency, and there is also a variant of GSM designed for it. I don't know if anyone has the guts to take a gamble on building such networks in Europe, or if bureacracy would get in the way. (I think it might). At least in theory, however, it is a possibility.

I have spent the last nine months writing a book on digital television, and the European proponents of the DVB digital television standard sound exactly like GSM people. (Actually they are in many instances the same people, so this is perhaps not surprising). We will see what happens with this technology, too.

Update I have added a few more comments on this, including observations on what my related stock recomendations might be. I have also written another piece discussing the reasons as to why Europe's mobile phone market is now as schlerotic as it is.

Further update I am presently looking for a job. If anyone reading this page things they might know someone who would be interested in employing me, look here .

Okay, fly the Jolly Roger

I see that pirates are now pressing CDs on ships in the Straits of Malacca.

Twelfth Night at Shakespeare's Globe

Recently, I puchased the special edition DVD of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. In the commentary Director Baz Luhrmann and Production Designer Catherine Martin talk about wanting to get away from what they describe as "the Victorian conception of Shakespeare". While their resultant movie of television, guns, rock music, and tatooed guys wearing Hawaiian shirts did indeed get away from the Victorian conception (and, while on that, most other conceptions as well), I do know what they meant. There is a certain idea that you should sit in an enclosed theatre, and feel the seats through your backside as you listen very carefully to the language being enunciated so clearly. While Of course, Shakespeare doesn't have to be like that, and in a good production often isn't, and probably wasn't even in Victorian times, but there is an earnestness that does become a bit much sometimes. I certainly have the memory of studying Hamlet at school, and going and seeing a very earnest production in which none of the audience (or really the cast) seemed to be enjoying themselves. I could appreciate the beauty of the language, certainly, although to some extent it was a matter of being in a thick fog, and occasionally a clear patch would open up and something extraordinarily beautiful would be visible through. I like Lurmann's Romeo and Juliet : the film's photography of Mexico City is dazzling, the film's use of music is sensational, and the film certainly respects the integrity of the story. While there is something to the criticism that the film doesn't properly respect the language, I think Mr Ebert is too harsh. The film works. The film has power. Sometimes its hard to describe why. Michael Almereyda attempted to do something similar with Hamlet in 2000, setting the play as a struggle for power in "Denmark Corporation" in New York, and while the film was technically competent and well acted, it fell completely flat. I do think, though, that the worst thing you can do with Shakespeare is make it dull. And I think when Catherine Martin is talking about getting away from the Victorian conception of Shakespeare, what she is actually saying is that we must avoid making it dull.

Which gets me to the production of Twelfth Night I saw on Friday night. This too got away from the Victorian conception of Shakespeare, but by going entirely in the opposite direction. I went to the reconstructed Globe Theatre on the south bank of the Thames. I had never been to the theatre before, and it so happened, largely by luck that I chose to go to the most authentic attempt at an Elizabethan production of a Shakespearean production that has been tried since the new Globe opened. It had Elizabethan costume, musicians playing Elizabethan musical instruments, an Elizabethan attitude to sets and props and, in particular, an all male cast. Certain things about Shakespeare in general suddenly make more sense when you see a play in something like the original theatre. For one thing, about half the audience at the Globe are groundlings , that is, people standing. Standing in one place for a while is tiring, and the breaks in the play, or at least in the action when there may be a scence of revelry or singing and dancing or similar, are at least partly there to allow the groundlings to move around a bit and prevent their legs from getting too stiff, and similar. There is much more interaction between the standing audience and the actors than is the case in a Victorian production, at times the audience is rowdy. But the play is designed for this.

But on to Twelfth Night in particular. This is one of Shakespeare's "cross dressing" plays, and was clearly deliberately chosen for an all male cast at least partly for this reason. The character of Viola spends much of the play impersonating a man, and quite a bit of the plot depends on the vact that she and her twin brother Sebastian are constantly mistaken for one another. In modern times, Viola is normally played by a woman and Sebastian by a man, and generally you can tell. Therefore a certain amount of suspension of disbelief is necessary in order that you accept that all the other characters in the play cannot tell them apart. However, if they are both played by men as in this production, they can quite genuinely be close to indistinguishable. A certain amount of suspension of disbelief is necessary to accept that Viola is a woman in the first place I suppose, but when all the female characters are played by men this is somehow easier. And in any event the audiences in 1602 were no doubt so used to the convention of female parts being played by men that they barely noticed it. The prevalence of cross-dressing in Shakespeare's plays suddenly means something different though. It works better with an all male cast. It really does.

The location, and the production, and the fact that we had permission to really get into the play and be a little rowdy rather than being required to sit back, be quiet, and absorb the earnestness of the production, did something to the audience. It gave us permission to have a really good time. A buzz was present, almost like you might find at a sporting event. Everyone was engrossed by the play, and were simply having a really good time. It was the best night out I have had in ages. They need to build one of these Globe Theatres in every city.

Isaac Asimov once wrote a short story called "The Immortal Bard". In this story, a scientist invents a time machine, and with it goes back to the early 17th century and brings Shakespeare to the present. He enrols Shakespeare in a college Shakespeare course, and the bard is overwhelmed by all the things now being said about the actual meaning of his plays, and flunks the course. Given what is now taught in many English departments, Asimov was if anything prophetic. However, imagine that it was possible to bring Shakespeare 400 years through time to modern London. Given that he lived before the great fire, there wouldn't be much he recognised.. Even St Paul's, more or less directly across the river from the Globe, was built since his time. Still, imagine that you could show Shakespeare the Globe theatre, and that and that he could see large crowds of people attending productions of his plays, more or less as they had been 400 years before, in more or less the same place beside the Thames. Most importantly, he would see audiences having a really good time. A finer tribute to him

There's a short interview with writer/director Cameron Crowe from Empire Magazine, in which he discusses puting together the DVD commentary track for Jerry Maguire. This particular commentary is with Crowe and the main actors for the film. When told in the interview that some actors (Schwarzenegger) now demand payment for commentaries, Crowe laughs.

Personally there are few things I have less desire to hear than what Arnold has to say about his movies. I have enjoyed a few of his movies, but what I am interested about is how the movie was made, not the motivation of the actors or the characters. I love commentary tracks, and I am always interested in what the film-makers think, but with a few exceptions I don't give a shit about the actors' thoughts. (One exception was another Cameron Crowe movie, Say Anything.... I would have been very upset if the commentary had not featured John Cusack in this case. Of course the distributors of this film in the PAL world released it without the commentary, but..). I think the best commentaries generally have two of the film-makers (in many instances the writer and the director) talking about the film. In some cases the director talking on his own works well, but generally interaction is good. However, not always. The Princess Bride has separate commentaries from director Rob Reiner and writer William Goldman. The reason they are separate is presumably because Reiner lives in Los Angeles and Goldman is a devoted New Yorker, but surely it could have been possible to get them together for a morning. ( Stephen Soderbergh has generally got it right with his films, as most of his films have a commentary track of him talking to the writer. He has described commentary tracks as "The best film school around" or somethink like that, and he fills them with little details. Plus they are pretty no holds barred. (In the commentary on The Limey, writer Lem Dobbs spends quite a considerable time explaining all the things Soderbergh did wrong. The comments are interesting because the criticisms are generally fair, and it's a terrific film anyway. Soderbergh also clearly doesn't like the solo commentary, because on DVD of the one major film he both wrote and directed (Sex, Lies, and Videotape) he spends the commentary track talking about the film with another director. (Neil Labute). This commentary is a trifle self-indulgent, actually. Soderbergh spends a portion of it cringing about things that he would have done differently if he was more experienced. Labute responts by complimenting Soderbergh on what a fine film he made anyway. (Labute is right. The film holds up to the passing of a few years extremely well).

And go read this profile of Lawence Lessig right now. It's good to know all about the number one knight on our side in the copyright wars (even if he did go to Trinity).

There's lots of good stuff in the November Wired . Besides a couple of pieces on the spread of 802.11 WiFi networks, which I will talk about when they are online, we have this great piece on an Australian plot to eliminate awful introduced carp that are infesting Australia's waterways. I actually am an Australian, and Australia is amazingly sensitive about its native wildlife. As you grow up, the distinction is constantly made to you about the difference between native and introduced wildlife. Native is generally good. Introduced is generally bad. This is the right attitude to have in Australia, because the continent was largely cut off from the rest of the world prior to 1788, and it is full of unique and fascinating species. Many of these are terribly susceptible to being overrun by foreign species, so great care must be taken. When you enter Australia, you are not permitted to carry any animal or plant matter that is alive, or that could conceivably be alive.

However, it was only when I came to live in England that I realised that it is the Australian position that is largely the atypical one. Europe, Asia, Africa and even the Americas have been mixing their wildlife with each other for millennia. New species will occasionally overrun old species, but that hard line between introduced and native simply doesn't exist in other parts of the world.

Anyway, back to the carp. What is striking to me is how clever this is, and how remarkably safe it seems. The point is that if you just throw a few modified fish in the water and stop doing it, the species will evolve the all male gene out fast enough. The point is that the process of extinction must move faster than the process of evolution, and you have to keep throwing the modified species in until the fish are all gone. If the all male gene jumps species to some other kind of fish, it doesn't matter because without being replenished the genes will just evolve out of the other species. This is so much better and safer than uncontrolled biological warfare in which you introduce a new animal to supposedly kill the old one, and you just have a plague of the new one. (Something that has happened a few times in Australia's history).

I see that Disney are proceeding with the film of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. There would be a certain irony if the project comes to the screen after Douglas Adams' death, given the amount of effort he put into getting the film made when he was alive. However, I don't want to see it. THHGTTG was so much one man's quirky invention, that I cannot really see a film being made true to the spirit of the original(s), without Adams' involvement. And sadly, we are not now going to get this.

From time to time I have been encountering the Chomskian America had it coming argument from Chomsky himself, from the British left wing newspapers, and from acquaintances in London. American foreign policy is devious and therefore S11 was America getting a taste of its own medicine blah blah blah. I have never had much sympathy for this point of view. (Actually I am outraged by it). This sort of argument usually gets back to conspiracy theories, and I think that conspiracy theories are for losers. (I have a recollection of Bruce Sterling making this observation in an article in Wired or F&SF or somewhere in about 1995, which I would link to but I cannot find the quote). American foreign policy can be really dumb at times (See War on Drugs, The) but is it especially devious and full of sinister reasons for fighting? The answer generally is no. America generally does things for the reasons it says it does. And when I think about this, what always seems to come into my mind is the American intervention in the former Yugoslavia. Here we had a nasty vicious war in Europe. The Europeans failed to do a thing about it. Eventually America came in and stopped the killing. Why did they do this? Because it was the right thing to do. There is really little more to it than that. Even then we only got sniping from a lot of quarters on the left. We got very little gratitude from countries in Europe right on the doorstep of the killing. Yes, America could have come in and stopped the killing earlier. And yes, there have been other human rights crises in other parts of the world where America could have taken action but didn't. (I rate the lack of action when genocide occurred in Rwanda to be the worst failure of the Clinton administration. This lack of action was to some extent a consequence of the reaction to the quagmire that American forces got themselves into in Somalia, so I sort of understand how it happened. However, the delay in appreciating that Rwanda was on another scale rather than just being another African war was a terrible failure. It was a case of an administration screwing up and failing to act, however. No conspiracy ). However, you must give credit where credit is due. The intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo was an example of America doing a very fine thing. America deserves a great deal of credit for this one. It can be observed, and it has been observed, that America was in this particular instance protecting Muslims against Christians. This is true, but it is not the point. America was simply stopping people from being killed. If there is a war between Muslims and Christians, then America was not taking sides in it. Europeans allowed the atrocities of Bosnia and Kosovo to take place in their own back yard. America stopped them. When I hear arguments about who is morally better than who, I cannot but see the events of this particular war as exhibit A.

In 2000, I was staying with a friend in New York. My friend lived in a residential tower belonging to Columbia University at the Hudson River end of 179th street. I wanted to visit a friend in Connecticut, so I rented a car and drove up to see my friend. I got back to Manhattan at about two o'clock in the morning, and could find nowhere to park anywhere near where my friend lived. Eventually, I gave up and drove over the George Washington Bridge to Fort Lee, NJ, parked in the car park of a strip mall, and then had to get back to Manhattan. There were no taxis to be seen, and there did not appear to be any buses back over the bridge. Therefore, I ended up walking across the George Washington Bridge at three o'clock in the morning. Interestingly, most private lighting in Manhattan had been turned off at that time, and most of the lightling visible was street lighting. This was not white, but yellow. The famous skyline was visible, but New York was therefore a yellowy-red colour rather than the white it would have been earlier in the evening. As always, the skyline was magnificent, with two clumps of buildings, at midtown dominated by the Empire State Building, and downtown dominated by the World Trade Center. Not everyone loved the WTC from an architectural point of view (I rather liked it), but it did something magnificent to the skyline. At three in the morning (as indeed at other times) the skyline was breathtaking. I haven't visited New York in the last year, but when I do, I will not be able to look at the (still magnificent) skyline without thinking about what is missing. In 50 years time, I will not be able to look at the skyline without thinking about what is missing.

This, I think is the fundamental reason why something immense and magnificent has to be built in place of the WTC. To hopefully slightly lessen the feelings of emptiness that I, and many others, will feel when looking at the skyline.

Often, when you watch competitive sport, you see young competitors winning. The best of them have an unbelievable amount of focus, they have little experience of anything but winning, and often don't seem to realise what a big deal it is. Pete Sampras was like that when he became the youngest person to win the US Open in 1990, and he was like that for most of his wins at Wimbledon. Sometimes, however, you see a great sportsman, who it appears the younger players have caught up with and, who it appears is past his best and the media has declared him 'finished', find something, somewhere inside him that reminds him that he still is a great player, and that he can win one last time. This is really nice when it happens, because competitors who do this know how hard it is and really appreciate the fact that the old man has done it one last time. I remember Jack Nicklaus winning the Masters in 1986. And of course Pete Sampras this week. The trouble is of course that in this case the 'old man' is younger than I am, and I don't feel old. From the point of view of Australian sports fans, another key instance of this is swimmer Kieran Perkins winning the 1500m freestyle at the Atlanta Olympics. I think we has about 22 at the time, so "old man" can mean some odd things in these circumstances.

I am a little ambivalent about all the media coverage of the anniversary of September 11. We all have our memories of what happened and our reactions to what happened, and to be honest a lot of us have been thinking of little else for the last year. What is not needed is lots of mawkish and puerile platitudes in the form of television specials. My compliments to the New York Times magazine's effort, however. (Free registration required, yada yada yada). Promotin a bold, interested proposal as to what should be rebuilt in lower Manhattan is a fine, positive way to mark the anniversary. (I wish the article was more detailed, however. Perhaps I am being unfair, as I haven't seen the print version).

I'm in the process of redesigning the site. Therefore, things will look different from time to time, and occasionally things will look funny when I screw up. However, I'm working on it.

The Cyberpunk movement, 15 years later

Last month, I caught to Eurostar train through the channel tunnel to Brussels and then had a couple of days in Brussels and a couple in Amsterdam. Besides drinking a fair bit of the world's best beer and seeing a large police presence outside a building called the World Trade Center, I had a wander around Brussels, a city of fine restaurants, expensive boutique hotels and unelectred bureacrats and lobbyists who really run the world (or, at least, Europe). I had an odd memory of reading William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy, the quintessential cyberpunk novels, about ten years ago. In Count Zero , the second of these novels, an art dealer named Marly Krushkova is summoned from Paris to Brussels to be interviewed for a job by an ultra rich corporate mogul named Joseph Virek. He is not actually there, but has some nasty disease and is thus living in a vat full of yeast in a bleak industrial park outside Stockholm, and the interview therefore takes place in a virtual reality version of Guel Park in Barcelona.

And yes, upon visiting Brussels did strike me as the sort of place where one goes to have virtual reality interviews with creepy businessmen like this. The country of Belgium has an impressive lack of any federal oversight of anything, and it seems to be the place for people who are upstanding in the sense that they will always obey actual laws and will be mortally offended if you suggest they wouldn't, but who none the less sometimes need laws with fewer scruples than are found in the United States of America. ( Singapore is a bit like this, too, although with an entirely different feel to Belgium). If you are instead making a show of being law abiding but you don't mean it and nobody believes you mean it, you go to Vienna. If you are not even making a show of it, you go to Cyprus, possibly Northern Cyprus.

Anyway, I think Gibson got Brussels about right. And after having this thought, an odd thing occurred to me. The Gibson novels are striking in that they are so global. The characters are in Tokyo. Then they run an errand in New York. Then there is another rush of airports and they are in Istanbul. There is a certain feeling of lightheadedness, of crampedness, and of prefabricated food that you get when you travel long distances by air, as if the actual time in transit isn't real. Suddenly you are in Istanbul. (Gibson of course extends this by adding the JAL shuttle to orbit to the experience).

I first read the Gibson novels about ten years ago, and at the time I had been to very few of the places where the books were set. In the ten years since, I have been to almost all the places in question. Not just Tokyo, but Chiba itself, a somewhat bleak, industrial place on the edge Tokyo bay out in the same direction from the city as (a) Disneyland and (b) Narita Airpot. (In this I was actually influenced by the Gibson novels - I was in Tokyo with a railpass a year or two after reading Neuromancer, a train line went to Chiba, and I thought what the heck, let's go). However, I have now been to Istanbul. I have now been to the Arizona desert. I have now been to Malibu, I have now been to various parts of the Sprawl (In the Books, there is a single giant city called the Boston Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, which may or may not have become an independent state). I have been to Paris, Barcelona, and of course London (where I am now).

Since going to Brussels last month, I have reread the three novels, and yes, my sense of the blur of all these places is very well captured by the books. Plus the global technological sense of the books is right. The mass of Cell phones, Blackberries, PDAs and laptops carried by people on planes and in hotels now wasn't right in the details, but it feels right in terms of the mood. (Of course, Gibson notoriously is something of a non-techie himself. He says he wrote the books about the enthusiam for technology he saw in other people rather than the technology itself, so details not right but the feel correct is perhaps what we should expect).

I have at times thought that Gibson is in some sense a disappointment in terms of his later career. He wrote a series of dazzlingly brilliant short stories in the early 1980s. (They are still in my opinion his best work - they are collected in Burning Chrome). Then he wrote Neuromancer, which was and is a great sf novel, but which was not as original as some would claim, because it basically reapeats what is in the short stories, then he wrote the two sequels, which really are just him repeating himself again, although they are full of wonderful new images and situations.

Then he wrote the Bridge trilogy, Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties, which while again full of wonderful images and situations, are less ambitious than the books that came before them. They are less global, about smaller scale characters, and less obviously concerned with the fate of humanity. (They actually are about the fate of humanity, but you only realise this somehow in passing at the end of the third book. I am not sure if this happening only in passing is clever or just cute).

It has been my impression that Gibson's sense of "with it" has been fading. He still writes excellent books, and I have been looking forward to his new novel Pattern Recognition eagerly. But, somehow, my feeling was that he was past it. But now I am not so sure. What I have been rereading recently still feels really vital. Neal Stephenson somehow now seems much more dated, although Cryptonomicon for instance was written much more recently. I now need to read the Bridge trilogy again and see how vital this feels.

Anyway, enough of this for now. I will talk about Neal Stepehenson and Bruce Sterling in future postings.

I so love The Onion . This photo

accompanies a story entitled US Fast-Food Chains Agree To Voluntary Cheese Limits and supposedly illustrates what burgers were like before the limits were imposed. I can just imagine them laughing themselves sick as they made the burger.

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This is a good one.

I have only been one place where electricity was not widespread: the Himalayan high country in Nepal near Mt. Everest. Here there were some villages that had electricity and some that did not. (There was lots of flowing water, so building small hydroelectric plants wasn't hard. Various foreign organisations (especially Austrians) wanted to build them, but the (Hindu dominated) government in Kathmandu put lots of bureacratic obstacles in their way). Due to a population explosion, there was a huge deforestation problem, with all the trees being chopped down for firewood. Any attempt to replant trees would just get almost immediately chopped down again. This was except for in and near towns with electricity, where the deforestation had stopped, and trees were successfully being replanted. Oddly enough, the presence of electricity was leading to major environmental benefits, not to mention the fact that the people were quite pleased that it freed them from lives of backbreaking labour of getting and carrying firewood. Pretty much anywhere there is no electricity, that is what life largely consists of: backbreaking labour.

Perhaps we could also fly in some McAfrika burgers from Norway.

I so love the Guardian

McDonald's has been accused of extreme insensitivity after releasing a new sandwich called the "McAfrika" in Norway, one of the world's richest countries, at a time when 12 million people are facing starvation in southern Africa.

The launch of the new hamburger has infuriated the Norwegian equivalent of Christian Aid and the Norwegian Red Cross and generated a storm of bad publicity for the American fast-food giant.

The concoction of beef, cheese, tomatoes and salad in a pitta-style sandwich is said to be based upon an authentic African recipe and is being sold to Norwegian consumers for about £2.80.

This is one of the most absurd and patronising things I have heard recently. Does this mean that I should be outraged at any attempt to combine "African" and "food"? What on earth is wrong with using the word "Africa" to describe food cooked using something based on an African recipe? The only thing McDonald's are doing here are suggesting that African food might be good. There is a place called the "Kilamanjaro African Restaurant" just up the road from where I used to live in Sydney. Should I be morally outraged by this?

Of course the United States on its foundation was essentially a compromise between the plantation States of the South and the evolved puritan society in the north, which eventually industrialised. Obviously these two cultures weren't entirely compatible and eventually went to war with one another. Then, after the Civil War, the United States went through a few decades of mass immigration, in which it received lots of people from non-English speaking Europe. Germans, Italians, Irish, eastern European jewry, etc. Eventually, around 1920 the US closed its borders to further mass immigration. The people of the immigrant wave melded into American society, and by the end of the second world war, they were the dominant American culture. The demographics of the country had changed, but it retained its core values. These are the people of The Brady Bunch and I Love Lucy. In the late 1960s, the gates opened again, and mass immigration started again. This time people came from different places: Latin America, India, China, but in fact a huge preponderance of places. We seem to be where the previous wave was in perhaps 1900. America's demographics are swirling around again, and eventually a new culture will come out. This is what the demographic trend of population growth is about. Inevitably a less European America is coming out of this. However, I don't see any reason why this new America will even lost the core values of the country. These withstood the last demographic change. As far as I can see., America will always have democracy and free speech.

There's a good piece in MIT Tech Review (great magazine by the way) on digital special effects in Hollywood. The point is that digital technology is taking over the complete postproduction process - editing, colour correcting etc - not just "special effects". This of course leads to the question as to whether any of the process should remain analogue. Certainly it is easier to film in digital, then edit and do your postproduction in digital at least. (The per cinema costs to project in digital for now are too high, but it is actually cheaper to do everything else in digital). However, the resolution isn't yet high enough. The 1920x1080 of the best film cameras isn't up to scratch compared to 35mm film (which is equivalent to a resolution of about 3500x2000). Until it is we are likely to still be using the hybrid digital/analogue techniques described in the article.

Interesting piece in the Economist, about how the United States is the word's demographic outlier. Conventional wisdom is that in rich countries birth rates are falling, populations stabilising and perhaps ultimately falling, and populations are aging. The truth though is that this is happening in Europe but not in America. America has more immigrants, who are more likely to have larger families than the native born, and this is part of the story, but as well as this the issue is that Americans are simply having more children than Europeans. America's population is ageing, but this is because people are living longer rather than having anything to do with the birth rate. We have had various predictions over the years that America's importance will decline compared to more populous parts of the world, but this seems to suggest that this will not necessarily be so. For one thing, it is going to become clear over the next 20 years that the Chinese have economically crippled themselves with their misguided one child policy. Japan is a demographic basket place. The future of India looks interesting. The future of places like Indonesia and the Philippines could also be interesting if they can run their countries in a coherent manner.

The great demographic timebomb is of course the Middle East, which is full of countries with rapidly increasing populations and little semblance of their people ever becoming educated enough to be economically productive. We should be really depressed about this. (Okay, a lot of us are really depressed about this).

David Brooks is going on again about trends in malls and suburbia and the like. The trouble is, Joel Garreu figured out that most of this was coming nearly fifteen years ago.

To be truthful, also particularly Joe Lieberman and Jesse Helms.

From Harry Knowles' review of xXx .

Imagine an Extreme Sports God that watched JACKASS and thought… I CAN BEAT THAT! Now, for my money, I want to see the XANDER ZONE show on TV for real. I want to see him punish Jack Valenti and the voting members of the MPAA. I want to see Xander unleashed on Joe Lieberman and Jesse Helms. I want to watch Xander bring down Televangelists and revisit their hypocrisy a thousand fold upon them. The aggressive guerilla terrorist against the corporate asses that brought us the disasters at ENRON and well…

Oh yes. Me too. Particularly the bit about Jack Valenti.

Bruce Sterling over at Infinite Matrix points out that the crazier the country, the lower its level of telephone traffic with the outside world. Yes, indeed. However, the tariff maps are even more interesting. These scale the world map so that distances represent how much it costs to call the respective country from the United Kingdom or New York. The interesting thing of course is how similar the UK and US maps look to each other. If it costs $x to call a country from the UK, costs around the same amount to call it from the US. Distance isn't (largely) the issue. Politics is the issue.

This effect has grown even more dramatic since 1998, which is the last date for these maps, unfortunately. Traditionally, international phone calls were governed by the "settlements" system, in which two countries did a bilateral deal by which a certain (usually outrageous) amount of money was payable per minute for international calls. At the end of an accounting period, the total amount of calls was calculated, a net settlement charge was calculated, and the country that had originated more calls paid that amount to the country that had originated fewer calls. The actual telcos in each country could then charge their customers whatever they liked: normally the settlement charge, plus their costs, plus a fat margin for themselves.

This worked okay (except for the fact that customers were screwed) in the days of monopolies and outrageous telecommunications pricing, but once deregulation and competition started occurring, there were problems. Essentially, in the United States, carriers competed amongst themselves for international traffic, and this massively reduced their costs and their margins. However, the settlement price placed a floor under what they could charge, and this floor came to constitute pretty much all of the price of calls. This money was then given to the foreign carrier in its entirety. This money did not reflect the foreign carrier's costs in any way.

Therefore, it you set up a phone service in a foreign country where the settlement costs were high, and could get people in rich countries to call you, then phone carriers in the US were obligated to pay you money. Therefore, lots of phone sex services and premium services set up in foreign countries. (Particularly the Carribean, which had the added advantage of having phone numbers that did not look like international numbers to US callers). The US and European telephone carriers were obliged to collect the money for these services, and US and European customers had little recourse to any legal remedy to anything resulting from the calls. (t home, the only relevant laws were those dealing with international phone calls, rather than premium services).

Eventually the US decided that it had had enough of this, and simply placed a cap on settlement charges paid by US carriers. Ultimately either the foreign countries agreed to heed this or they were unable to connect their phone systems to the US. Various other countries followed the US lead. The international sex lines business declined in size.

The second thing that happened was that more countries deregulated and abondoned the settlements system entirely. In a lot of instances, local telephone companies were compelled (either by law or by competition) to charge the same termination fees to international carriers as to domestic long distance carriers. This dramatically reduced the cost of international calls. (At least, it did for business customers and domestic customers who pay attention. Many telcos are still happy to pay the dramatically reduced termination charges, but still charge high rates to domestic customers who still believe that international calls should be 'expensive'. There are alternatives for customers who understand the situation, however).

Countries now can be divided into those that have deregulated and those that are clinging to the remnants of the settlements system. We now have a situation where international calls can be divided into two categories. If you are calling from a deregulated country to another deregulated country, the call should not cost much more than a domestic call. If, however, one or both of the counrties in question is not deregulated, calls are much more expensive, although not as expensive as they once were. Distance has little to do with it. On the map, the deregulated countries exist in a small ring near the centre. Everyone else is a lot further away. (This has become much more dramatic since 1998).

There is a hilarious article on Salon discussing all the extraordinary domain names that were registered during the dot com boom and which are now becoming available again. IHateAndrewSalkeldTheFatUglyGreasyStarTrekLovingWanker.com anyone?

When going through the channel tunnel the other day, I started thinking about infrastructure. Europe in the last few decades has gone on a binge of large scale infrastructure projects. In particular, lots of what engineers call 'fixed links', which is a fancy word for 'bridges and tunnels'. We have the channel tunnel, the bridge and tunnel project connecting Denmark and Sweden (The Ostend fixed link, I think it is called), a large number of projects for tunnels through the Alps, the proposed Messina bridge connecting Italy and Sicily. Plus we have various fast rail projects. While may of these will not make back the money invested in them in strict accounting terms, none of them seem especially extravagant projects. (Well, maybe the Messina Bridge). All of them are used or will be used by very large amounts of people. This compares with the United States, where there are no major projects of this type being built, and there haven't been for quite a while. Major infrastructure projects in the US these days seem to be about increasing the capacity of their urban infrastructure (eg the Big Dig in Boston). The conclusion is the fairly obvious one that the US basically built its infrastructure between 1880 and 1950, and there isn't much left to do. (That said, there are no bridges and tunnels in the US as big as the biggest ones in Europe. This may be simply that the US is much less densely populated and they haven't built cities near the trickiest bits of terrain, or perhaps they are just lucky. Once you have the Messina bridge and the Swiss tunnels, there are few obvious places left in Europe for big bridges or tunnels (except for the Straits of Gibraltar, but nobody would actually want that in the present world). There are still lots of places to build fast train lines in Europe, but we will wait and see how much gets done.
(Clearly Brussels - Antwerp - Rotterdam - Amsterdam is needed however, from what I saw on the weekend).

When a country rises economically, it seems that one thing it does is build key infrastructure links. These consist of transport systems in cities, and motorways, railways bridges and tunnels. There then comes a point where the key links are built, and you expand them in response to growth in towns and cities, but it largely becomes a maintenance exercise rather than a building
exercise. London had its rail system by about 1900, and New York had its by about 1920. Japan built its infrastructure largely in the 1960s and 1970s. Singapore and Hong Kong are presently in the position where there's is half built, but it will be more or less done within ten years in both places. China is undergoing a massive and frantic rush of building railways, roads, bridges and tunnels, and will undoubtedly be going for decades yet.

Japan seems disfunctional, as it has all the infrastructure it needs but is completely unable to stop. It has gone from building an adequate network, to building everything that could reasonably be needed and now on to building things that nobody could possibly need.

Today I saw the Belgian police conducting a road block in the business section of town. They looked serious: they were touting machine guns and had one of those spiked things you throw across the road when you want to puncture the tyres of passing cars. And they were doing this outside an office building called the World Trade Center.

The mystery deepens. I am now in Brussels. Here in Brussels, Kissing Jessica Stein is called Kissing Jessica Stein. What this says about the Belgians relative to the Dutch, I don't know. Actually whatever it says it probably actually says it about the French relative to the Dutch, as the movie industry divides the world up into "territories" for distribution and marketing purposes, and these don't necessarily correspond with actual countries. In movie distribution terms, "France" includes the French speaking parts of Belgium, and the French speaking part of Switzerland for that matter. Just as Britain includes Ireland, and Germany includes Austria. And for that matter the United States includes Canada.

I'm presently in Amsterdam. A fine place to be. (Although the PC in this internet cafe has a USB port, I forgot to bring my USB cable with me, so I am unable to attempt to upload any pictures from my digital camera). A weird thing that I saw. The film "Kissing Jessica Stein", which comes from the surprisingly large genre of "New York single young Jewish woman movies", (and which is an okay movie but a little soft in the middle) is being released in the Netherlands under the title "Kissing Jessica". The publicity material is entirely in English, and the poster is exactly the same as the American or British one except that the name "Stein" is missing. Movie distributors are the sorts of people who will do anything (including completely misrepresent what a film is about) if they think there is a chance of making more money, but the fact that they felt the need to downplay Jessica's Jewishness bothers me somewhat. Some of the hardliners in the blogosphere might see this as evidence of rising European antisemitism. I don't know. It is a little bothersome, however.

Here we have the back of the mansion at Bletchley Park. This is the original country house that the first of the codebreakers moved into. Station X was technically only the radio room under the water tank that MI6 used for its agents in the fields. Later in the war, this was moved elswhere due to fears that the Germans would detect the radio communications and attack Bletchley Park, and damage or destroy the codebreaking operations.



The world's first computer was built in this building. Look around, ye mighty, and despair.

This afternoon, I visited the museum at Bletchley Park, just outside Milton Keynes north of London. This is where Alan Turing and an assortment of mathematicians, crossword experts and linguists managed to break many of the German codes during the second world war, thus shortening the war possibly by years. I will get to what I saw in a while, but first I shall digress a little.

There is an article on Spiked (via Arts and Letters Daily about the British Museum's lack of resources, particularly for new acquisitions. I quote

In my view, the current financial restrictions are symptomatic of a broader problem: there is waning enthusiasm for the traditional functions of museums. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has plenty of money to give out, but collecting and interpreting the artefacts of human history is just not where it's at. The museums that get money today are those that play to the new government agenda of social inclusion: running projects to improve self-esteem or reduce prejudice, or using new technologies to increase community participation. There is little support for the idea that objects and knowledge have a value in and of themselves.

This does appear to be about right. The control of money to be spent on museums in recent years has tended to get under the control of publicists and public relations consultants and advertising agents and media studies graduates and management consultants and all sorts of awful people of this ilk. Many new museums seem to have lots of flashing lights and machines that make weird noises and works of art with meaningless symbolism aimed at superficial politically correct points, but there is nothing with any depth to them. You go there and you see lots of school children pushing buttons, but you don't learn anything.

As an example, the Science Museum in London is a wonderful museum. Here you can see a great many of Britain's extraordinary achievements in Science and Technology. Here is Stephenson's Rocket in the middle of the floor. There is a working reconstruction of Babbage's Difference Engine, so you can see how this curious 19th century wrong alley in the history of computing could have
played itself out. Here we learn about electromagnetism: there we learn about light. The museum is organised into sections depending on the general area of science you are dealing with, but it is cluttered enough that wandering around you can hit on something unexpected and wonderful. Good museums have this quality about them. The British Museum has this quality. Tate Britain has this quality.

However, at the back of the museum is the new (well, newish - it was built in the last five years) Wellcome Wing. This consists of lots of flashing lights, buttons to push which cause sentences like "In the future, we max choose the eye colours of our childrem" to flash on the wall, but there is an amazing lack of any substance at all. It's really dreadful. I don't know who was responsible, but they deserve to be have something awful done to them.

Now what is interesting about Bletchley Park is the fact that it has had almost complete neglect from everyone in authority with an agenda. Bletchley Park is a museum on the site of and commemorating events of immense importance. Here is where Alan Turing broke the codes that maybe won the second world war. If he didn't actually win the second world war, he certainly shortened it by years. Even more importantly than that, here is where the computer was invented. The most important invention of the twentieth century was invented here. And yet, somehow the geeks who did this have or had so little honour amongst the people in charge of their own country that the fact that they did it was not even made public until the 1970s. They have so little honour that a group of people trying to raise money for a statue of Turing a couple of years ago had great difficulty doing so. (And of course, the way Turing was treated after the war is a scandal of great magnitude). They have so little honour in fact that now that Bletchley Park, where all this occurred, is a museum, the museum itself receives no public money at all. The trust in charge of it a couple of years ago applied for some money from the profits of the British national lottery that are supposedly reserved for "good causes" but was refused. Organisations such as the National Trust and English Heritage have nothing to do with it either, because it is too far removed from the sorts of things they normally look after.

What we do have, however, is a museum that is run be volunteers, and was put together by people who really do care about it. There are rooms and rooms full of Enigma machines, descriptions of how German and Japanese codes worked in great detail, discussions of how you can reduce the difficulty of breaking cryptographic systems, descriptions of the battles which were won because of intercepted communications. You enter the place and you are greeted warmly and repeatedly by people manning the exhibits who want to talk to you about it for hours. You go on the guided tour and the guide explains to you how Turing was one of the great men of the 20th century and gives the impression that he takes it as a personal affront that not everyone feels that way. Although a lot of the equipment actually used to break codes (including Colossus, the world's first computer) were destroyed by the ultra-secretive British after the war, a lot of them have been reconstructed to working order. (Because of the momentousness of what was achieved at Bletchley Park, it is clearly possible to draw on some impressive expertise for some of this, even if the museum doesn't have any money). There are various interesting bits and pieces related to code making.

In the war, Bletchley Park started out as a country house, and huts were built around it to house more and more people as the scale of the operation grew. At its peak, there were 12000 people working there. Thus, if people or organisations with an enthusiasm for world war II related issues of any kind, or geeky pursuits of any kind wish to set up their own museums or exhibits, there is plenty of space to house them. Lots of geeky or technical people come through to look at the code breaking stuff, and by the way, here is all this other geeky stuff to look at too.

Thus we have exhibits of 1940s era toys, an exhibition of Churchill Memorabilia, a model railway exhibit, a museum on the history of computing - some minicomputer stuff - plus lots of 1970s vintage micros I hadn't seen for a while. A collection of WWII uniforms. A cinema full of lots of classic projectors and film sound systems. Lots of interesting stuff, but nothing really extraordinary. However, what is extraordinary is that the (largely amateur) people who have put together their "history of computers" exhibit can put it in a location where you can say that "By the way, the first computer in the world was built in the next room". This stuff is really good. The people who built it know about it and care about it. In aggregate, it is the sort of museum where you are constantly finding, weird, wonderful and hugely educational stuff as you walk through it.

It may not always remain like this. Until a couple of years ago, interest was such that Bletchley Park was only open to the public every second Sunday. Since then, it has increased to every Sunday, and then to every Saturday and Sunday, and it is now open on weekdays in the afternoons (for just one tour a day, and just for the codebreaking exhibits). Clearly this is a response to the wartime activities at Bletchley Park having been publicised in recent years, by Simon Singh, by Neal Stephenson, by Robert Harris, and by the movie of his book, but it is clear that slowly Britain has woken up to the importance of what happened there. Eventually the government will notice and the museum will find it has more funding and it will become a serious national museum, I suspect. Hopefully the trust that runs it will then be strong enough to prevent the place being trivialised, taken over by public relations consultants, and becoming uninteresting. They might, I think. There is a lot of enthusiasm there, and a lot of substance there, which won't go away easily.

American Prospect's blog and the Star Tribune via Instapundit discuss the fact that the US Senate has passed a law allowing Americans to buy prescription drugs imported from Canada, where they are cheaper. However, the Bush administration will not carry out this plan

because it would endanger public health.... Opponents argue that such drugs could be tampered with, thus posing serious health risks. Senators added a provision to the bill that requires the secretary of health and human services (HHS) to certify that drug re-importation poses "no additional risk to the public's health and safety" and will result in a "significant reduction" in cost U.S. consumers.

Arguing that imported products are of lower quality or do not satisfy local safety regulations or something like that and therefore should not be allowed is of course one of the oldest tricks in the "I'm not a protectionist but..." book of tricks. But what is curious is how similar these "Opponents of..." sound just like politicians who have been bought by the music industry in my native Australia. Several years ago the Australian government passed a law making parallel imports of CDs legal: it is fine for people to buy CDs legally in any foreign country, import them into Australia, and then resell them. Previously only importers authorised by the copyright holder could do this. The record companies just hate this, and their cosy monopoly profits have been eroded. Rather than attempt to defend their distribution monopoly directly, their principal tactic in opposing this has been to insist that it will lead to enormous numbers of pirate CDs being imported into the country.

As far as prescription drugs are concerned, I do not know why the drugs companies, who I really have very little against, want to copy the tactics of organisations as morally bankrupt as the record companies. There actually are serious issues at stake here. If you have countries with radically different intellectual property laws, then it may be justified in prohibiting parallel imports from them. In the case of drugs, countries in the third world are going to be declaring emergencies and manufacturing drugs cheaply under compulsory licenses. It isn't appropriate to allow parallel imports of these drugs into the developed world. However, there is no good justification at all for banning parallel imports from Canada, Japan or Germany. If the drug companies try to do this and so manage to weaken their moral position, they are going to find it much harder to walk the tightrope they need to with respect to Brazil, South Africa and India.

An odd thought. from time to time (such as this afternoon) I sit in Starbucks with my laptop and work on the book I am writing. Starbucks are good, as there are usually power 0utlets in their stores where I can plug in my laptop and recharge its battery while I am working. (I am not sure if it is company policy to provide these, but I suspect so). I buy a coffee, sit down, plug in my laptop and work for two or three hours. In this time, I do not normally get up and have another coffee. This is not because I am cheap - although I am - but is simply because I do not wish to leave my laptop unattended while I get up and buy a coffee. Picking up the laptop, walking to the counter, buying a coffee and then sitting it back down again is simply too much hassle, and if I do this I face the risk of losing the table next to the power outlet to someone else.

Every now and then, a staff member comes along and takes away the empty cups. What I would like is for this person to ask me if I want another coffee, take my money, and then bring me another coffee. Yes, I know that I am asking for waiter service, and Starbucks is a company that minimises staff costs by not providing waiter service. However, what is needed is a sort of limited waiter service which only applies to people having a second or third coffee, or even only applies to people using laptops. What we need is an arrangement where people walk in, buy their first coffee, sit down, and then are waited on from time to time after that. I think the additional staff costs of this would be fairly minimal, and they would certainly sell more coffee to people like me. They have already gone out of their way to be laptop friendly with the power outlets (and the 802.11 wireless networks in some places) and surely this is just a small way to take it further.

I suspect the problem would be that if you offer some table service, then customers would rapidly expect you to offer full table service to everyone and nobody would ever come to the counter. Still, it's a thought.

Why am I linking to the National Post of Canada so much lately.(Well, this is twice). But anyway, here is another "Buffy is such a wonderful television program" article. These are a bit passe at this point, but they are true. (Buffy is wonderful). Really perceptive people at least figured out that Buffy was something special by the time of the "Angel goes bad" story arc in season 2 in 1997. Really, really perceptive people figured it in season one. There weren't many of them, but at least I was watching the program.

We have John Underkoffler, formerly of the MIT Media Lab interviewed in Salon, about the vision of the future in Minority Report. In particular

Of all the technological advancements showcased in the film, how much of this stuff actually exists or is in the early stages of development?

Underkoffler: I would say a surprisingly large fraction. Almost an astoundingly large fraction. The mag-lev cars, for example. Although we don't have mag-lev technology that works on vertical surfaces, mag-lev technology has been around for many decades, spearheaded by professor Eric Laithwaite, who died not too long ago. And, of course, in Japan and Europe you have mag-lev trains. The nonlethal weapons are all variants or extrapolations of currently existing or under-development technology. It would be hard to identify anything that had no grounding in reality. I think that was very much by design.

I think by this he means that they took things that currently exist and then extrapolated them a little bit. There is nothing really out there, and this is why the film looks so pedestrian. That is what happens when you create a thinktank. The results are boring, even if it is a think tank of smart people like the Media Lab or GBN , both of which contain people I respect. To get something really out there, you need creative, obsessive, and somewhat antisocial people on their own. Like Philip K Dick. Or even Ridley Scott. I just don't think that Spielberg and the people around him have the sensibility of Dick, at all. Oddly, I think that Cruise's previous film Vanilla Sky had a much more Dickian sensibility than did Minority Report: besides the fact that Dick's favourite two questions (What is real? and What is human?) are central to that film, there's a scene in the middle of it which is lifted right out of A Scanner Darkly. Vanilla Sky is a remake of Alejandro Amenabar's Abre Les Ojos. Amenabar seems fond of stuff with a Dickian bent: I think it is there in The Others too, although that is in a genre somewhat removed from Dick. I wouldn't mind seeing Amenabar tackling something from Dick directly. That could be very interesting.

Paul Palubicki (pointed out by asparagirl ) thinks that our enemies in this war are a bunch of "half-retarded conspiracy theorists" and we need to mock them a lot more. Mark Steyn in the National post is doing quite a good job of it. (Well he starts off making fun of the media and the FBI, but really gets going by the end of the article).

Via slashdot : A BBC report on the OWL telescope that is conceivably going to be built, most likely in the Andes. The idea of a 100m mirror is simply awe inspiring, given that the largest telescopes in existence now are a little over 10m. This improves what we can see in the universe by a tremendous scale. (Potentially you can see things that are a hundredth of the brightness at the same distance than the best telescope today). This is what happens when you reach a critical point in materials science and computing (both to design and control the thing) at the same time. (Actually the materials science is also largely a spinoff of developments in computing. This is what happens. The computer is invented in the 1950s. It takes a few decades for the impact of this to filter through all sorts of things. And then, suddenly, near miraculous things become possible.

I am writing this sitting in a Starbucks in Wimbledon, in south-west London, on July 8, 2002. (I will log onto the net and post it later). This is quite a famous place of course. Yesterday, just down the road from where I sit, my countryman Lleyton Hewitt defeated David Nalbandian, of Argentina, in the men’s singles final of the All England Tennis championships, which was last won by an Englishman in 1936. The day before, Serena Williams of the United States defeated her sister Venus Williams, also of the United States, in the ladies singles final (won by an Englishwoman more recently than 1936, but still I don't know when). Before coming to this Starbucks I purchased a pair of trousers and a polo shirt from the Wimbledon branch of the Uni Qlo chain of clothes stores. Uni Qlo is an interesting case: this is the chain that supposedly revolutionised the way the Japanese dressed. Essentially, its like the Gap, only Japanese, and somewhat cheaper. It has stores in Japan, and in the United Kingdom. That is it. Just down the road, there is a branch of the Gap, too.

Starbucks too is in interesting case. The company has a reputation from the opponents of globalisation as being the arch enemy: the company that destroys local cultures and decimates all in its wake. And yet, what is curious about Starbucks is the relatively small number of countries it operates in. A few rich countries: a few peculiar countries in the Middle East, and not much else. There just don't seem to be many places that support the $3 cup of coffee in a nice friendly environment. (Starbucks are good at certain things, though, like providing power outlets for you to plug in your laptop).

The details of Starbucks entry to the British market is quite amusing. Prior to 1995, it was extraordinarily difficult to buy a decent cup of espresso based coffee in London. Scott and Ally Svenson, an American couple from Seattle, who were living in London, decided that this was terrible and something had to be done about it. They therefore founded a chain of coffee bars in London, selling the types of espresso based beverages that were becoming common in the US. In the US, this trend started in Seattle, and then spread all over the country. The company in the vanguard of this spread was of course Starbucks, and the Svensons’ British chain was essentially a clone of Starbucks. The same sized cups, the same names for the sizes (other than Venti, which Starbucks have a trademark claim on), the same filter coffee of the day, the same mix of hot and cold coffees, the same mixture of comfortable and more businesslike chairs in the stores. For probably the same reasons that Starbucks was a success in the US – it had previously been extremely difficult to get a decent cup of coffee – the Seattle Coffee Company, as this chain was known, was quite profitable. And then, a funny thing happened. Starbucks decided that it was time to spread into the United Kingdom, and, seeing that someone else had already set up the infrastructure for a chain of Starbucks stores in the UK, Starbucks bought the Seattle Coffee Company outright and rebranded all the stores as Starbucks. (Having a lot more capital than the Seattle Coffee Company, Starbucks then opened new stores much more rapidly than the Seattle Coffee Company ever could have, although they did have 64 shops at the point they sold out). What happened was kind of curious. Rather than barging into the UK market and crushing all in its way, what Starbucks actually did was enter the market after demand had already created its stores for it. Starbucks sort of built itself in London without the company's involvement. London is that sort of city.

And that was how I felt this afternoon after buying my clothes from a Japanese chain store, which incidentally has shops in Japan and the UK and nowhere else. London is I think one of the two most globalised cities in the world, the other being Tokyo. New York is perhaps close, but it is too parochially American (although it is the least parochially American of all America's cities). It's a fascinating place.

Instapundit and Photodude elucidate what I think is becoming pretty clear at this point: the reason we haven't seen an further terrorist attacks of significance from Al Qaeda is because the organisation simply lacks the resources to carry them out. Thus the most we are seeing from them is one or two feeble little attacks. The fact is, the attacks before September 11 (the USS Cole attack, the bombings of the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania) didn't really demonstrate tremendous resources either. September 11 itself demonstrated planning, but no physical resources at all, just the ability to find and exploit a weakness in the way in which our infrastructure works. I am not especially scared of Al Qaeda at this point, but I am scared.

For more than five years before September 11, I had been saying that I found the 1995 nerve gas attack on the Tokyo underground by the Aum Shinrikyo cult to be one of the scariest news stories I had ever heard. Here we had a deeply strange independent organisation that had managed to put together an impressive scientific infrastructure and had developed large scale military weapons capable of killing thousands of people, and who had only failed to do so through inadequate delivery of the weapon. I felt sure that where they had failed, some organisation would eventually succeed, be it with a chemical weapon like sarin, be it with something biological, be it with a nuclear device of some kind, and a terrorist attack on a major city killing thousands of people would occur.

The came September 11. A terrorist attack on a major city killing thousands of people did occur. Yet it didn't occur through an independent organisation developing a scientific infrastructure but by an independent organisation hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings. This type of attack could have occurred at any time since 1955, but it occurred just at the moment when chemical or nuclear terrorist attacks were becoming feasible. Therefore, we made the mistake of thinking that such attacks would follow from Al Qaeda, when in fact the nature of the September 11 attack probably indicated that Al Qaeda was not the organisation with the capabilities to make such attacks, for if they were that is what they would have used on September 11.

However, the possibility that someone else is out there collecting nuclear isotopes or producing weird nerve gases remains. This possibility continues to terrify me.

I finally saw Minority Report and I confess that I found the film fairly disappointing and didn't really care for it. It just had a fairly predictable, and very conventional thriller plot grafted on to Philip K. Dick's weirdness, and a bit too much Spielbergian sentimentality. I didn't find the future world presented to be as striking as I had hoped. It was more a matter of start with the present and then extrapolate just a little. We had flying vehicles, advertisements that greet you by name (this happens to me now when I go to Virginia Postrel's Weblog) but little that could be described as strange or unexpected. It was certainly no Blade Runner . The film was okay, but I don't really get the extent of some of the raves it has got.

Spoilers to follow. Stop reading if you haven't seen the movie but intend to.

As for the plot, what was the business with the eyes? Tom Cruise knows that he will be identified by retinal scanners if he attempts to go near his workplace, so he has a black market surgeon replace his eyes with somebody else's. He keeps his old eyes in plastic bags, so that when he gets to his workplace, he can take the disembodied eyes up near the retinal scanner and get into the building. Huh? (Also, he is recognised by several people who know what he looks like). Yes, the new eyes allowed for one or two cool scenes in the movie, plus he could later be greeted by "Hello, Mr Yamamoto" when he went to buy clothes in The Gap, but in terms of hiding his identity, they were a bit of a bust. And if the retinal scanners were so easy to fool with eye transplants and eyes detatched from bodies, is it really such a great idea to use them for security anyway? And why couldn't he be greeted in the Gap outlet with "Hello Mr Hillary, how was the Gore-Tex jacket", or "Hello Mr Hoover, how did the trench coat work out?", or something really fun.

To top it all off, we had one of the hoariest cliches in movie plotting.

"Do you know anything about the death of ?"
"No, I have never heard of her. But I will look into any cases of women who drowned in our records, and if I find anything...".
"I didn't say she drowned".

This is surely on a par with "And so Mr Bond, before I order all my henchmen to go somewhere else and I kill you in a peculiarly ingenious way, I am going to tell you my entire plan". Remind me to be this careful next time I am implementing my plans for world domination.

(Disclaimer: when seeing the movie, my mood was spoiled somewhat by a projectionist who forgot to put the anamorphic lens on the projector, requiring me to leave the film and complain before I was able to watch it properly).

Two images of July 4 in London.

An enormous American flag attached to the side of a building in the West End. Compare the flag with the cars, to see that is one big flag. The most obvious business in the building is "The Long Island Ice Tea company, which I think is a cafe/bar. (I should have gone in). Lots of pubs had American flags flying and were hosting July 4 celebrations. The ready availability of USA Today is clearly a reason why I should hate America.

The US embassy in Grosvenor Square, surrounded by a mesh wire barrier. No obvious celebratory activity of any kind. This photo only shows the shadow of the statue of Dwight Eisenhower. The figure you can see behind the barrier is a British policeman walking backwards and forward with a machine gun, although I perhaps need a better digital camera.

I was just sitting in a bookshop cafe yesterday, and I picked up this wretched book. (I think I wasn't thinking clearly, and thought I was picking up this issue of Granta, which is full of thoughtful pieces from foreign writers who have had experiences of going on American book tours, where they have found lots of sophisticated and intelligent people turn up to meet them in places like Boise, Idaho, and where they have received much genuine and kind hospitality). From the bits I read, An unending screed explaining why the people of the rest of the world are exploited because America uses a large portion of the worlds resources and is therefore rich when they are poor, how how the presence of McDonald's everywhere wrecks local cultures, and more yawn inducing stuff. (Actually, the publication date of the books is today. That's right - these scumbags feel the need to have it published on the fourth of July. Presumably they are going to feel the need to publish a second volume on September 11). Guys, the world has no shortage of resources, and America uses more of them than anyone else because it has more uses for them than anyone else. It has more uses for them because of everything that is good about America, which is Americans ingenuity, openness and good sense. McDonald's have stores throughout the world because people want to eat in McDonald's. Nobody makes anyone do so. (Actually, personally I have always found that the more American chain stores (and international chain stores that originate in other countries, too. These are not nearly as uncommon as you think) per square mile, the more culturally interesting and culturaly complicated the place. Go to Camden markets in London or Shibuya/Harajuku in Tokyo some time for an example).

In any event, what I mean by all this, is happy fourth of July, everyone. May all of America have a good party.

I went for a walk through the Park Lane / Mayfair / Belgravia area of London yesterday. Besides seeing why the point of Monopoly is to get a hotel on Park Lane or Mayfair, I saw a few showrooms for ludicrously expensive automobiles, and walked past a few embassies. The biggest of these is the American one on Grosvenor Square. (The square contains statues of Franklin D Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower - the Roosevelt statue is of him standing and discreetly holding a stick). The embassy is now protected by a metal barrier a couple of metres from the building. This was not there last time I visited the area in around 1996, but it does have a temporary look about it. It is probably something put up since last September. Standing on the steps was a man holding a nasty looking machine gun. (He was wearing dark blue or black trousers, a white shirt, and a hat with that checked pattern indicating that he was a British policeman of some sort). It rather pains me that such protection is necessary for the embassy of a great power and a friendly country, too. Yes, it's absolutely necessary, but as well as placing barriers between those who have power and those who want to kill them, it also places barriers between those who have power and people such as myself who have no desire whatsoever to kill them, but who would enjoy boiling Osama bin Laden in oil. And the machine gun is quite jarring in a city where the policemen don't normally carry guns at all. However, it is good to see that the people protecting the embassy are wearing civilian police uniforms rather than military fatigues. (You see policemen armed with machine guns at Heathrow airport, too, but at that point you have entered the weird internal and international ecosystem of the world's airports and airlines, so it is not quite as jarring).

Walking down the road a bit, I passed another embassy with another similarly attired policeman standing out front. This one was armed with a handgun. I wasn't sure which country's embassy he was protecting. I looked at a sign on the building a little further down the road and it said "Embassy of Trinidad and Tobago". It struck me as unlikely that they needed much protection, so I looked more carefully. The buildings in the street were large terraces and were connected, so it was a bit hard to tell where one stopped and the next started, and yes, this was a different embassy. I looked up, and saw a large Turkish flag flying from the building above the door being guarded. I am not sure whether the Turkish embassy was being guarded from Greek Cyproits, Kurdish separatists, French islamic fundamentalists or German football supporters, but I can see why they might want to guard that one.

Okay, so far we have guards outside embassies of friendly countries with enemies. The further question is how much protection is outside the embassies of nasty countries. I am not sure where the embassies of China, or Burma, or Iran, or Iraq, or the Kingdom of Saudia Arabia are. (Perhaps I can go and throw a hand grenade through the window of the last one myself. This post has now presumably been flagged by Echelon). Actually it's fairly likely the last couple are in Embassy Row in Kensington, opposite Kensington palace, ideal for when vile Saudis want to fraternise with minor members of the British royal family. (The embassies of the former dominions of the empire are either on or near Trafalgar Square in the West End. Canada and South Africa have nice buildings right on the square: Australia is a few blocks down the Strand next to Bush House of BBC World Service fame. A decade ago you would usually bump into a good few protestors outside the South African embassy when wandering through Trafalgar Square, but these are now thankfully gone. I will conclude this rambling by observing that there is at least one good thing that has happened in the world in the last decade.

(And I should have yesterday got out my digital camera (which was in my pocket) and taken some photos. Perhaps I was intimidated by the men with the guns).

Okay, in summary, I think one of the key points in all that was this. Music is a product where our consumption has in the past been seriously restricted by the way it was sold to us. Ideally we would all like a universal jukebox where we could listen to any music we want whenever we want, rather than the relatively small collection of songs in our CD collection. Napster gave us this, and someone else is going to give us this in the future. Our consumption (total number of songs we have the right to listen to) is going to go up dramatically. That means the unit price is going to have to go down dramatically. It doesn't mean the total amount of money we pay has to go down dramatically, but it does mean that the business model is going to have to change dramatically.

As far as movies and television are concerned, the total amount we watch isn't likely to change much. Most movies we watch once and once only, and those that we watch more than once we do so a relatively small number of times. We already have the opportunity to watch a large selection of movies on demand. (It's called going to the video store). Technology is going to mean that we have a much larger selection of programming to choose from. Obtaining it might be easier. It will be easier to watch television programming exactly when we want it rather than when the networks put it on. But the total number of programs we consume isn't going to change much. There may be some sligh changes to the business model. (Do you want to watch it once now or pay for the right to watch it as many times as possible? We already have both options with existing media but the balance may shift). But the consumption level will remain much the same and so the per unit pricing can remain much the same. Therefore I don't think Hollywood is especially threatened in the short term. It will find ways to make money out of new technology, as it always has. Unless the industry manages to make copyright law so restrictive and so punitive that it strangles itself. As it might.

The mighty Instapundit links to an article by Seth Godin in Fast Company, discussing the copyright war once again. It is in some sense the usual discussion, and it has the same old point. It is reasonable for the actual creators of artistic work to be protected by copyright and compensated for their work. However, there is no good reason why the companies that publish that work should have a monopoly on that work, unless what they are doing ensures that the artists are being compensated for that work, and that the artists wouldn't be compensated otherwise. However, there are elso economic benefits that stem from artistic works (and other intellectual property) being distributed as widely as possible, so even if the presence of the publishers does increase the income of the artists, then there still need to be limits on the extent to which the publishers are allowed to exploit the copyright. When technology advances, the publishers have no right whatsoever to demand that copyright law protect their existing business models.

This isn't a new argument, and I have written about it before at length. (My lengthiest comments are in Salon's comment system somewhere and I will try to track them down and find a link later). The actions of the copyright industry in extending copyriught law are all about protecting its monopoly from being broken down by new technology, but they argue (and in many cases appear to have convinced themselves) that it is about occupying the high moral ground and stopping theft. They do not care about the artists, and in some cases have in fact been screwing the artists for decades. And yet somehow they have managed to convince themselves that they have the high moral ground. The reason people flaunt the law so flagrantly here is simply that they know how morally weak is the position of the other side. Hilary Rosen, you are contemptible and I despise you. Jack Valenti, you are contemptible and I despise you.

If either of those people were to read this, they would just sneer at me and say that I was a thief and a criminal, and would no doubt take great offence at what I have said. (I don't despise the movie industry anywhere near as much as I despise the music industry, as I discuss below, but I do despise Valenti and the MPAA because they seem as determined to use copyright law to prevent the future from happening as does the music industry). The odd thing, however, is that I personally do not generally disobey copyright laws. I cannot say that I have never broken them, because they are in some cases so bizarre that there are few people in the world who have never broken them, but I generally buy music on CD. (These days I don't buy as many CDs as once, but that is because I have trouble dealing with the smell of the people I know are behind them). I don't think that the people who do download lots of songs are morally all that bad - certainly they are no worse than the people selling the music - but I have no great desire to break the law myself. Certainly I don't get any vicarious thrill out of doing something illegal.

In any event, I just got a bit too busy ranting to get to the point I was trying to make. The article discusses music and then goes on to discuss motion pictures. In the case of music, it is relatively simple for artists to create music and then put it on the net and for people to download it. The enormous 'music industry' apparatus is completely unnecessary, completely corrupt, and will go the way of the Dodo. The question is simply how long it takes. The music industry, with its star making apparatus, its controly of radio via the 'independent promoter' payola system and the like, is going to collapse under its own weight. It may well be the case that music artists need promoters and publicists, but there is no reason whatsoever why they should only be able to get these from one of five monopolistic corporations.

However, the deal with movies and television is different. Movies cost a lot of money to make. The people who make movies and television tend to get fairly (and sometimes obscenely) paid for their work. Movie making requires huge teams of people, many of who are very skilled in highly specific roles. Hollywood consists of a relatively small number of highly skilled (and highly unionised) artisans, who have to be brought together to make a film. There are relatively few studios not so much because they have a monopoly on distribution but because making the types of films they make is difficult. (If as an independent producer I am capable of raising $100m, hiring people capable of making a good action film and getting the film made, am I going to have any difficult getting the film into American cinemas. The perhaps surprising answer to that is "None at all". There are a few foreign companies that do this kind of thing. An example, "The Fifth Element", a film made by the French company Gaumont).

When you buy a cinema ticket or buy a DVD you are paying for part of a large, complicated production, and people know this. Although the number of CDs I buy has dropped, I now have a huge DVD buying habit, because I want the movies, and I want the special features, and I think the format is beautiful. In my travels, I frequently find people trying to sell me pirated DVDs or VCDs of recent movies, often for next to nothing. I do not buy them, and a major reason why I do not buy them is that they do not have the endorsement of the studio and film-maker, and I thus have no idea about their quality. I value the authenticity of genuine products, and I don't find the price especially unreasonable. I see lots of movies in the first weekend, not so much because I can't see them cheaper later on, but because I want to see the latest film in the best possible situation. Given that the percentage of filmgoers who go and see a film in the first weekend has been increasing dramatically for several years, I am not the only one.

What I am getting to is the one major point on which I disagree with Godins article. He says

But what about Arnold Schwarzenegger? you ask. How will he be able to make $100 million movies if they're pirated on DVD? Maybe he can't. Maybe a society filled with consumers who pirate doesn't deserve $100 million movies. Perhaps they go away, just as ornate Broadway musicals are a rarity or the June Taylor Dancers are no longer able to get work. Somehow, I think we'll all survive without Terminator 10.

While I agree with his basic point - some parts of the entertainment industry will suffer the changes in technology more than others, and just because some don't survive doesn't mean we are worse off in general, and while I think it is unlikely that we will ever see Terminator 10. (I think that without James Cameron Terminator 3 is likely to suck. Jonathon Mostow is self-important and rather irritating hackwho is unworthy of having Wolfgang Petersen piss on him), I don't think the big movie is going to go away. Lots of people want to see it. The studios are the only people with the resources to make it. As long as that fact remains so, their business models will survive. So far the digital revolution has only caused their revenue sources to multiply. I don't think this trend is going to be reversed.

What potentially is interesting is the possibility that it will not remain so. As I said, Hollywood consists of a small number of highly trained and well paid artisans. The vast majority of the cost of any Hollywood film is the costs of these people. Their working conditions and pay rates are quite high, and set by agreements with the various Hollywood guilds. If the spread of internet and the spread of these technologies means that there are suddenly many people in lots of places with the same skills, then suddenly it might be possible to produce similar movies for a lot less money. Or, on the other hand, it may be the case that nobody else can match Hollywood's ability to coordinate the whole process. I tend to think the latter argument may be right, but it shall be interesting to see where this goes.

There is a fascinating interview with Bruce Sterling in the German webzine Telepolis . Lots of good stuff on the Military-entertainment complex, why all the dubious deals are now going down in Dubai and the present state of the world. Just why does everything from 9-11 to the South African cricket team seem connected to the Bombay underworld?

Oh, that was such a long time ago... Last week I was in Italy hanging out with Linux freeware activists in a college event sponsored by a dance club that's run by some kind of anarchist dive... With Communists, and feminists, and hackers, and the media, and professors of Latin American literature, and radio personalities, and solemn guys with piercings who hate Berlusconi... And man, the food was great. We were all drinking heavily, and the local soccer club won and the population went nuts and ran into the streets.... I haven't had that good a time in ages. Since September 11, really. I just felt so happy, it was like the sun came out of the clouds for me. I love Italy.

To be truthful I don't personally love Italy. I love many of the things in Italy, but I wouldn't say I love Italy itself. It's a country where I find too many things to be a hassle. The public infrastructure doesn't work, and that annoys me. But yes, the food is certainly great.

Rob Walker has a piece in Slate discussing the various future advertisements for presently companies and products that exist in Spielberg's Minority Report

Other creative voices, from filmmaker Paul Verhoeven to writer George Saunders, have wickedly satirized advertising and where its voracious ambitions might lead. But here, in a weird way, the familiar product names may in fact be intended to serve almost as reassuring guideposts: Minority Report is set in a version of the future that is disturbing in some ways and entrancing in others, but it seems that whatever wild twists the future may hold, the one thing we can all be sure of is that it will turn out to be a brand-friendly place.

I haven't seen the film yet - it doesn't open in the UK for a couple of weeks - but what is interesting about this is that this isn't new. Another film that was famously set in a future world that contained enormous numbers of advertisements for mainly current day products was Ridley Scott's Blade Runner , the other famous movie to be based on the works of Philip K Dick. It is certainly true that in that movie too the advertisements featured as anchors of familiarity in a fairly alien and hostile environment. Of course, soon after that movie was released, companies that were featured in it started going bankrupt, to such an extent that a Blade Runner curse. has been much discussed since. As to whether this will now happen to The Gap I suppose we will wait and see.

Well, here in England everyone is ecstatic about the 3-0 win in the World Cup over Denmark. Personally, as an Australian, I don't have anyone to cheer for directly (Australia last qualified for the World Cup in 1974, and their once every four years humuliation in the qualifying tournament generally ends with them skulking out of a stadium containing 120000 wildly cheering Iranians, or similar). The great thing about the world cup in soccer, however, is that there are so many teams who are capable of being competitive. This year we have Senegal, an African team who have never qualified before, defeating defending champions and favourites France in their first game, and now making the last eight teams. They play either Turkey or Japan in the quarter finals. While both of these are good teams, neither are invincible, and so Senegal making the last four is a real possibility. This is great.

When Cameroon made the quarter finals (and took England to extra time in the quarter final) in 1990, quite a few people thought that African football had arrived. The Africans haven't really impressed since, until now, but maybe this is it. Certainly the final 16 teams have quite a bit of diversity this year. We have nine European teams, two South American teams, two North American teams, one African team and two Asian teams. It may be just home team advantage for Japan and South Korea, but the improvement in the South American teams is also impressive. The days of the World Cup just being Europe versus South America may be coming to an end.