Alan Jacobs

Basically, then, Europe doesn’t have the death penalty because its political systems are less democratic, or at least more insulated from populist impulses, than the U.S. government. And elites know it. Referring to France, a recent article in the UNESCO Courier noted that “action by courageous political leaders has been needed to overcome local public opinion that has remained mostly in favour of the death penalty.” When a 1997 poll showed that 49 percent of Swedes wanted the death penalty reinstated, the country’s justice minister told a reporter: “They don’t really want the death penalty; they are objecting to the increasing violence. I see this as a call to politicians and the justice system to do more.“

Perhaps the single most dramatic example of this phenomenon of software eating a traditional business is the suicide of Borders and corresponding rise of Amazon. In 2001, Borders agreed to hand over its online business to Amazon under the theory that online book sales were non-strategic and unimportant.

Oops.

Today, the world’s largest bookseller, Amazon, is a software company—its core capability is its amazing software engine for selling virtually everything online, no retail stores necessary. On top of that, while Borders was thrashing in the throes of impending bankruptcy, Amazon rearranged its web site to promote its Kindle digital books over physical books for the first time. Now even the books themselves are software.

Today’s largest video service by number of subscribers is a software company: Netflix. How Netflix eviscerated Blockbuster is an old story, but now other traditional entertainment providers are facing the same threat. Comcast, Time Warner and others are responding by transforming themselves into software companies with efforts such as TV Everywhere, which liberates content from the physical cable and connects it to smartphones and tablets.

Today’s dominant music companies are software companies, too: Apple’s iTunes, Spotify and Pandora. Traditional record labels increasingly exist only to provide those software companies with content. Industry revenue from digital channels totaled $4.6 billion in 2010, growing to 29% of total revenue from 2% in 2004.

He [Derek Parfit] decided to study philosophy. He attended a lecture by a Continental philosopher that addressed some important subject such as suicide or the meaning of life, but he couldn’t understand any of it. He went to hear an analytic philosopher who spoke on a trivial topic but was quite lucid. He wondered whether it was more likely that Continental philosophers would become more lucid or analytic philosophers less trivial. He decided that the second was more likely, and returned to Oxford.

Why did a figure such as Leibniz fail to use his own tools? Perhaps messiness was the source of his creativity. This is a fact of intellectual originality with which Google must still grapple—libraries, after all, allow for the type of manageable disorder which is often the spark of creativity. Or maybe Leibniz resisted the very order of things, over which his calculus gave him a unique mastery. If anything, the rejection of systematized information handling methods could be as common as their adoption.

Everyone but the Tea Partiers supports green technology — Republican, Democrat and independent alike. But Americans need to be leveled with. Green energy isn’t a jobs program or even an environmental policy. It’s insurance against fossil fuel price spikes and climate change. The president should remind people that stopping global warming isn’t about nature or “saving the planet.” Some set of plants and animals will survive. Human infrastructure is what’s in danger. We’ve built cities predicated on one climate and now those places have a new one. Climactic chaos is expensive.

Obama should have said: We support clean energy because we value the America we’ve built, and we’re going to fight to save and improve it through this country’s innovations. That could have been a generational challenge for an America lacking a sense of its own future — as sorely as it is lacking jobs.

For proof, he points to results from a survey prepared for CEOs for Cities, a Chicago-based U.S. network of urban leaders. The survey involved 1,000 college-educated people aged 25 to 34, and it found that two-thirds of respondents decided where they wanted to live first, then went to that city and found a job afterward.

“They operate on a theory that if it doesn’t work out, they’ll just go somewhere else,” Mr. Jones says. “With my generation, it was all about, ‘Where do I want to go work for 30 years?’ That’s not at all what we’re seeing with this generation.“

Among the books he packed for his European journey in 1933 was a volume of Horace. To pass the time while marching, he recited aloud “a great deal of Shakespeare, several Marlowe speeches, most of Keats’s Odes” as well as “the usual pieces of Tennyson, Browning and Coleridge”. This would be related with charming if showy modesty. The immense repertoire had a frivolous side. Throughout his adult life, Paddy was a great performer of party turns: songs in Cretan dialect; The Walrus and the Carpenter recited backwards; Falling in Love Again sung in the same direction – but in German. When I was at his house in the Peloponnese, in Greece, he restricted himself, after a lunch that lasted several hours, to It’s a Long Way to Tipperary in Hindustani.

In 2001 three young people from Moscow – Arkady Shlykov, student of Moscow theological seminary, Alexander Shumskih, IT manager of Ferrero company (Russia), and Mikhail Skuridin, an employee of Moscow icon-painting workshop, decided to build a new temple in Kolodozero, in the place of the one that burnt down. The archbishop blessed the construction that began in June 2002. In the course of construction the congregation started growing, too. Other people from Moscow and Saint Petersburg started joining it. (via NoGa-Art / Photostories / Kostantin Dyachkov / Regardless Of Circumstances and Common Sense…)

In short, Blackboard sucks. Blackboard supporters might claim that some, or even most, of the criticisms leveled above are false, or that they apply equally to other web software. Maybe. And I certainly don’t mean to downplay the difficulty of creating or assembling a suite of software that does well what Blackboard does poorly. But the argument against spending student money on something like Blackboard goes beyond a simple tally of weaknesses and strengths. As Jim Groom and others have argued for years, shelling out for Blackboard means sending money to a big company with no vested interest in the purposes of the institution, which in the case of CUNY is nothing less than the stewardship of New York City’s future, while the alternative is to divert money away from software licenses and into people who will actually support an environment of learning on our campuses. Frankly, even if Blackboard were a perfect piece of software, and even if its licensing and hosting fees were half of what it costs to hire full-time instructional technologists, programmers, and the like to support local instances of free software; even if these things were true, Blackboard would still be the wrong choice, because it perverts the goals of the university by putting tools and corporations before people. The fact that Blackboard is so expensive and so shitty just makes the case against it that much stronger.

David Leigh and Luke Harding’s history of WikiLeaks describes how journalists took Assange to Moro’s, a classy Spanish restaurant in central London. A reporter worried that Assange would risk killing Afghans who had co-operated with American forces if he put US secrets online without taking the basic precaution of removing their names. “Well, they’re informants,” Assange replied. “So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.” A silence fell on the table as the reporters realised that the man the gullible hailed as the pioneer of a new age of transparency was willing to hand death lists to psychopaths. They persuaded Assange to remove names before publishing the State Department Afghanistan cables. But Assange’s disillusioned associates suggest that the failure to expose “informants” niggled in his mind.