Frankly, I never felt comfortable with being held accountable, and not just because I am a cowardly slacker….

…More at Worthwhile Mag

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The Global PR Blog Week site says it’s:

an online event that will engage PR, marketing and business bloggers from around the globe in a discussion about blogging and communications. The event is scheduled for July 12 - 16, 2004.

Here’s the program. Jay Rosen and Dan Gillmor are both being interviewed as part of it.

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From the AP:

Washington — The Bush administration is offering a novel reason for denying a request seeking the Justice Department’s database on foreign lobbyists: Copying the information would bring down the computer system.

“Implementing such a request risks a crash that cannot be fixed and could result in a major loss of data, which would be devastating,” wrote Thomas J. McIntyre, chief in the Justice Department’s office for information requests.

So, does this mean that the Justice Department doesn’t have a backup of that database? Talk about the potential for a devastating loss of data!

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Doc came over for dinner a couple of nights ago. We came up with a killer plan for spam, found a way to enable file sharing while ensuring fair compensation for artists, and whiteboarded the single epithet that ensures the defeat of Bush in 2004.

Unfortunately, the dinner was off-blog, so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Doc on the verge of Solving All Problems

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I dreamt last night that I realized that “bric a brac” spelled backwards is “CARB A CRIB” (ok, so my dreams don’t go into reverse very smoothly) and then spent what felt like an hour of dream time trying to come up with situations where one could sensibly utter such a statement.

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I received a surprise email from Plaxo today, updating me on the status of my account. I’d forgotten I’d once joined, in the spirit of adventure.

So, I went to the Plaxo site where they’ve prominently posted reassuring information about their privacy policy. I found where I can opt out of receiving update requests, although it results in the following almost-funny error message:

The e-mail address you are trying to opt-out from (self@evident.com) has already been claimed by another user (possibly you). You will not be able to opt-out at this time.

(A search of their knowledge base turns up this page with information about quitting.)

Plaxo is taking the bad publicity about privacy concerns seriously. There’s a whole bunch of information about it on their site, most of it written in a straightforward and reassuring way. And, I have no reason to think that Plaxo is any less trustworthy than the other folks I give sensitive information to. Nevertheless, the table of how they compare on privacy to MSN, AOL, Yahoo, Amazon and eBay gives me pause. Only one company — Plaxo — gets a checkmark for “Provides opt-out mechanism for non-members.” Try to get your brain around that concept!

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I like Ron Reagan (the son) more than ever after reading this.

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Joi explains the “free for commercial use” license from Creative Commons and helpfully compares the licenses used by Wikipedia and Wikitravel. (Joho’s Creative Commons license, as noted at the bottom of this page, does not allow commercial use of its contents without permission. Like that ever happens.)

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Scott Rosenberg writes about the future of corporate blogging. Here’s an excerpt:

I’m sorry to be the pessimist at the party. But for large numbers of workers in America, particularly those at big companies, the dominant fact of life remains don’t piss off your boss. And, in an era of health-insurance lock-in and easy outsourcing and offshoring, many U.S. workers remain doubtful that they can simply waltz into a new job should their activities displease the current hierarchy to which they report. So the odds of them feeling at ease publishing honest Web sites about their work lives are extremely poor. The blogs you’re going to see from within most traditional companies will be either uninformative snoozes or desperate attempts at butt-covering and -kissing. Not because people don’t have great stories to tell — but because telling the truth has too high a cost.

I do agree that it’ll take a long time for corporate public blogging to spread beyond easy industries, such as high tech. But, I think it’ll happen faster than Scott does. First, internal blogging will happen relatively quickly because it’s a great way for employees to build their reputations, a motive as powerful as the urge not to piss off your boss. Those internal blogs will go onto the extranet and eventually some will make it onto the Internet.

Second, the first public blogs we’re likely to see outside of the sw industry will be more like the Dean blog than anything else: They’ll be always upbeat but still lively, full of voice, and worth reading by enthusiasts.

[Note: I have never been right with a single prediction.]

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A guy on a mailing list sent this around saying that it came from a friend of a friend of an n degree friend. It’s supposedly the clothing label from a small American company that sells its product in France.

Translation:

Wash with warm water.
Use mild soap.
Dry flat.
Do not use bleach.
Do not dry in the dryer.
Do not iron.
We are sorry that
Our President is an idiot.
We did not vote for him.

Categories: politics Date: June 27th, 2004

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Andrius Kulikauskas’ lab is initiating a new way of selling art that gets around the annoying fact that artists don’t get any cut of the profits speculators make when selling and re-selling their work. According to the new plan, the artist gives the artwork to someone who agrees to give her 50% of any future sale, and promises to sell only to someone who agrees to the same terms. More here.

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Enjoying the Freeway Blogger this morning…

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Shelley’s story, “The Mockingbird’s Wish” is now available in audio form, beautifully read by Nicholas Avenell (aka Aquarion). And Missouri Life is going to feature her stunning photographs of Missouri rivers, lakes and ponds.

Congratulations, Shelley!

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I read Book Alpha of Aristotle’s Metaphysics this afternoon (trans. Richard Hope). (A book is about 40 pages.) He reads like Bach sounds.

Book Alpha takes on a different cast when you read it looking for clues about the way in which things organize themselves into genuses and species. For example, the book begins, famoulsy, “All men naturally have an impulse to get knowledge.” This is not an unargued premise. Aristotle presents evidence for it: “A sign of this is the way we prize our senses.” We most highly value sight, even when “we have nothing practical in view.” Why? “The reason is that of all the senses it can best bring us knowledge and best discerns the many differences among things.”

So, now we know that knowledge has to do with seeing the differences among things. But, if you only see what makes something distinct, the world becomes populated by unique things, and knowledge is impossible: I need to distinguish Plato from Critias, yet see that both are men, and distinguish men from chickens yet see both are bipeds. So, knowledge requires the distinctions and groupings that a genus-species arrangement gives.

We see this in Aristotle’s critique of Plato. Most of Book Alpha is given over to showing how Aristotle’s predecessors got it wrong. Aristotle spends more time on Plato, his old teacher, than on anyone else. (Go have students!) Here’s one of his complaints about Plato’s notion of Ideas:

Also, there will be more than one pattern of the same thing, therefore more than one idea; of man, for example, animal and biped and at the same time also man-himself. [991a.25, p. 29]

Again, this is a problem that a nested, hierarchical view solves.

In Book Alpha the Less, Aristotle argues for a single “root,” a single first principle. But, of course, this first principle is not just an abstract category. It is also what gives traits to what follows from it:

To explain a thing it is necessary to know which among a number of things that have some trait in common gives that trait to others. So, fire, being hottestst, is the reason why other things are hot. So, too, what is most true is the reason why other things are derivatively true. Hence, the principles of eternal things are necessarily most truel for they are true always not not merely sometimes; and there is nothing which explains their being what they are, for it is they that explain the being of other things. Consequently, status in being governs status in truth.” [993b.20, p. 36]

So, we’re not looking merely at the order of knowledge but also at the order of being.

BTW, it’s hard for me to tell, but I think Aristotle is making a joke in this section:

Some require accuracy in everything; others are irritated by accuracy, either because they cannot follow a closely reasoned argument, or because they fear hair-splitting. There is something about accuracy that makes it seem unworthy to certain free spirits, either in business contracts or in rational exposition. [995a.10, p. 39]

Hoho! Good one, Ari! And, say, what’s a Grecian urn?

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I’m excited. I haven’t read Aristotle in 25 years, but I pulled down The Metaphysics and Randall’s “Aristotle” this morning, because for the book I’m pre-writing, I want to remember what he says about genera and species. In particular, I’m curious whether his nested view of categories explicitly reflects the way political entities are nested: animal contains human the way Greece contains Athens.

I thumbed through both books for about two minutes after blowing the dust off of them, and had a flash of why I used to love Aristotle. He believed that careful thought could understand the world, which implies that the world is orderly and beautiful, and that language, thought, action and world all could be aligned perfectly.

If only I can clear out enough spam to make room for beginning to read him again.

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David Reed is underwhelmed by Kerry’s tech proposals. Excerpt:

If Kerry’s team could understand that the issue should not be about allocating “spectrum” but instead about encouraging open wireless networking for scalable and interoperable systems (a wireless equivalent of the original goals of the Internet), he could really have an impact, and create a worthy challenge whereby America could lead the world.

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An article by Paul Jamieson, “$t0pp^ng $p@m!!“, in Legal Affairs, argues that the government needs to get out of the business of regulating spam:

…legal measures may be largely powerless to affect the spam problem because the architecture of e-mail is resistant to traditional methods of government regulation. While members of Congress and the Federal Trade Commission will be quick to claim credit in the event that the spam problem is reduced, the role they play is small

I of course like this point. I’m less certain about Paul’s prescriptions:

Consumers and businesses suffering from the torrent of spam must look for relief not from formal law developed on Capitol Hill or in a watchdog agency, but from the people who write the code that makes the Internet run, and then from the private businesses that put the code to work.

He points, seemingly approvingly, to Bill Gates’ Global Infrastructure Alliance for Internet Safety, efforts to charge postage for email, challenge-response systems, and systems that verify the sender’s email address. I know just enough about these to be nervous to varying degrees, but not enough to have actual opinions worth stating. But Paul’s conclusion worries me:

To solve the spam problem, the federal government should create incentives for the private sector to develop solutions. It could subsidize effective technological solutions to spam, much like what the government does to subsidize the availability of Internet access in the nation’s schools and libraries. Or it could require that a company license any truly effective solution to anyone who wants it. Government could also be more aggressive in supporting industry consortia, including the recognition of an industry standards-setting body that would develop practices to combat spam and share the best ones. If it turned out that the best anti-spam strategy required ISPs to employ a particular method of authentication, the government could mandate compliance with that standard.

If the government is going to pick favorites and enforce compliance, we might as well have it doing the regulating in the first place.

Here’s where I get confused: I like the end-to-end principle because it maximizes options. That principle is meant to apply low down on the stack. But I think it applies higher up, too, where the “center” isn’t defined by protocols for packets but by economic forces. If one company has an effective monopoly on, say, the browser or DRM software, then even though no packet headers are being changed, we have in effect lost the ability to innovate that the end-to-end principle is about. A government mandated authentication scheme feels to me like a violation of the end-to-end principle, just higher up the stack.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t know what to do about spam, I don’t know how to evaluate the ideas being presented, and I recognize that there are times when the end-to-end principle needs to be over-ridden by more pressing concerns. But, IMO, only only only when the case is so compelling and is so much in the interest of users and the long-term effects have been so carefully thought through and we are sure that not only are there no other options but no one is going to come up with one tomorrow…

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Being towards death

Hanan Cohen intertwines the mortality of blogs with our own mortality:

We think that we will live forever. We think that the files we have stored on machines powered by electricity will also live forever. Our files have no other purpose than to be online. We think that if our files are not available to the web, they are dead.

In a way, thinking about the death of our files is like thinking about our own death.

Meanwhile, over at Ereignis, the English-language Heidegger site, there’s a link to Christopher Ellis’ article that argues that Heidegger’s ideas about death are inadequate because they are oddly a-historic. Ellis touches on Heidegger’s failure to incorporate the ways in which we are animals in addition to being “ecstatic Dasein.” He recommends that Heidegger swallow a big dose of Hegel and re-think the historical particularities of, say, the Holocaust.

This article is aimed at the Heideggerian in-crowd, but I think its critique is trenchant. “No one can die my death for me,” wrote Heidegger. Ellis shows that this view of death-as-individuating is rooted in history, not in the inescapable basis of human existence. Besides, no one can take my shower for me either. Heidegger’s disinterest in us as embodied creatures has always seemed to me to be a weird and obvious flaw in his thinking. (And yet, Heidegger remains for me the person who got most of It right. And I mean the big big It.)

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John Kerry gave a speech today on the importance of innovation. Here are the main points. And I’ve posted a transcript.

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Fantastic speech by Gore today about the administration’s dangerous consolidation of executive power:

The seductive exercise of unilateral power has led this president to interpret his powers under the constitution in a way that would have been the worst nightmare of our framers…

…In the end, for this administration, it is all about power. This lie about the invented connection between al Qaeda and Iraq was and is the key to justifying the current ongoing Constitutional power grab by the President. So long as their big flamboyant lie remains an established fact in the public’s mind, President Bush will be seen as justified in taking for himself the power to make war on his whim. He will be seen as justified in acting to selectively suspend civil liberties – again on his personal discretion – and he will continue to intimidate the press and thereby distort the political reality experienced by the American people during his bid for re-election.

And here I thought The Daily Show was the only place capable of telling the plain truth. Wait … Gore cites The Daily Show:

Ironically, his [Cheney's] interview ended up being fodder for the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Stewart played Cheney’s outright denial that he had ever said that representatives of Al Qaeda and Iraqi intelligence met in Prague. Then Stewart froze Cheney’s image and played the exact video clip in which Cheney had indeed directly claimed linkage between the two, catching him on videotape in a lie. At that point Stewart said, addressing himself to Cheney’s frozen image on the television screen, “It’s my duty to inform you that your pants are on fire.”

Until I find where this is posted on line officially, I’ve unofficially posted it here.

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Ethan Zuckerman highlights a story in Tuesday’s Boston Globe that reports that we’ve hired a notorious British mercenary to coordinate security in Iraq. The $293M contract goes to Tom Spicer, “a retired British commando with a reputation for illicit arms deals in Africa and for commanding a murderous military unit in Northern Ireland…” The Globe goes on:

Spicer is known for his role in the 1998 Sandline Affair in which a company he founded violated a UN-imposed arms embargo by shipping 30 tons of arms to Sierra Leone. When the scandal erupted in the British media, Spicer told the press that the British government had encouraged the operation, touching off a storm that for weeks involved the office of Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Spicer also figured prominently in a 1997 military coup in Papua New Guinea. When that country’s army learned that he had received a $36 million contract from the government to brutally suppress a rebellion, the army toppled the sitting government and arrested Spicer, later releasing him.

In 1992, , two soldiers in the Scots Guard unit commanded by Spicer were convicted of murdering an 18-year-old Catholic named Peter McBride in North Belfast.

Ethan adds some details and writes:

I gotta ask - what were they thinking? Anyone who’s concerned about dirty dealings in the developing world knows who Spicer and Sandline are, and what they’re done in the past. With accusations that PMC [private military companies] s tortured people at Abu Ghraib, why would the Bush administration hire a PMC with such a questionable track record? Was this an accident, or just incredible arrogance and an assumption the press wouldn’t follow this story?

Or maybe having an appalling lack of judgment is as baked into this Administration as its commitment to tax cuts and its religious conviction that teaching birth control is immoral.

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As Co-Chair of the Massachusetts Republican Small Business Council (damn, I can’t get that name straight), I received a personal taped call just now from Rep. Tom Reynolds. …More here

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In case you were wondering why RageBoy was rejected by Google’s AdSense program, he explains it, in his usual, sweet, reasoned way.

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Mark in a comment sends us to Kiss This Guy, a site that aggregates misheard lyrics (kiss this guy = kiss the sky). Which reminds me of something I heard at the Seattle airport yesterday…

Two parents where shepherding their 8-yr-old daughter through the long “security” line. The parents took off their shoes and the girl started laboriously to unbuckle hers. “Does she have to take off hers?” the father asked the security guy. “Children are exempt,” he said with a slight Southern accent.

Still the girl insisted on taking off her shoes. After urging her not to a few times, the parents decided it would be faster just to let her finish.

After they had cleared the inspection, as the girl was putting her shoes back on, the mother said, “Why did you take off your shoes? We kept telling you not to.”

“Because,” she said, clearly upset by the stress, “the guard said that childred are exammed.”

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As Canada protects the patents on genes, Download Aborted wonders whether the genetic code should be considered Open Source. It’s slashdotted here.

And as atonement for saying something positive about the people at Microsoft — man, you folks are rough! — here’s some slashdottism about the anti-Open Source think tanks that Microsoft is funding. (But I still like the Microsofties I’ve met. So there.)

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I talked to two groups at Microsoft yesterday: the Web publishers across all of Microsoft’s departments, and Microsoft Research. With the publishers, I talked in a cluetrainy way about the rise of voice and conversation in world that’s been dominated by a broadcast model of marketing. To the Research group, I talked about how our insistence in thinking of everything as information (hint: DNA is not information) leads us to miss the importance of the unspoken. (Hmm. Both topics sound rather stupid when I put them like that, and possibly they were.)

During the Q&A at the publishing group session yesterday, someone asked me to expand on what I’d said about why DRM scares me. I had concluded my presentation by talking about the need to resist the Faustian bargain by which we agree to clamp down on voice in order to gain the illusion of control, and that doing so — given the temptation of treating the Web as a mass medium — would require a miracle from Microsoft. So, now I said something (very roughly…I don’t have much of a verbatim memory) like this:

When it comes to creative works, we are not “consumers,” and we are not users. Rather we appropriate creative works, that is, we make them our own. We apply them to our own context. We get them somewhat right or entirely wrong. They become part of us. That’s how how we learn and how culture changes. But that means that creators should lose control of their works as quickly as possible. Obviously, creators need to be be paid for their work, but not for every bit of value they create: You shouldn’t have to pay me if you re-read my book or lend it to a friend, even though you are getting more value from my book. Tough noogies on me. A pay-per-use system and allowing artists to control their works much past launching them into the world will kill culture. Further, since publishing creates the public [a point I'd made earlier], building an infrastructure designed to allow that type of control will damage the new public of the Web as well as cripple culture. It’s a really really really bad idea, so don’t do it.

[Cory made a stir at Microsoft a couple of weeks ago by saying something like this, and, best of all, in that Cory-ish way of his. Dan Gillmor has said something similar. And that Lessig fellow has also been known to touch upon this topic, I believe. Among many many others.]

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I’m in Seattle today to keynote an internal Microsoft conference on Web publishing. I’m going to make a plea for amateurism, which is really a plea for voice and ambiguity.

About twenty of us went out to dinner last night and had a great a time. I don’t think I’ve ever met a Microsofty that I’ve disliked. In my 15 years of experience with ‘em, I’ve generally found them to be hugely bright, passionate, and funny … although some of what they do when they’re put together into the mighty Microsoft Entity deeply disturbs me. Even so, the people I’ve met have been straightforward and non-huffy when talking about where we disagree. (Disclosure: Yes, Microsoft is paying me for speaking. No, I am not required to say nice things to or about them.)

I’m meeting with Microsoft Research in the afternoon and I think I’m going to go over the current outline of the book I’m pre-working on, which has something to do with how the info revolution is changing the principles by which we categorize and classify things, and how this is affecting how we understand ourselves and the world. Something like that.

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Dave Winer has sent an email to a mailing list I’m on, asking for help getting word out about a change in the redirection policy for former weblogs.com users:

If you know people who are affected by this, please let them know.

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Yesterday, during a conversation — telephonic! — with Jeneane, the question of what constitutes “authentic voice” arose.

I dislike the word “authenticity” although I use it because it gets at
something we all (?) sense is there: We know there are phonies, so we need
words to express non-phoniness. “Sincere” works when we’re talking about the
possible gap between feelings and expressions. “Integrity” applies to behavior that consistently matches principles. Authenticity refers to a
possible gap in our very being, whatever that means. (But it seems to mean something.)

While we need the word, applying it to voice gets straight at the difficulty. Authenticity implies that your visible behavior matches your innerness - or, more exactly, it implies a lack of distance between the two. But, our voices always contain some element of construction, decision, anticipation, drafting. That’s not a bad thing. It means that in speaking with you, I am aware of how I think you’ll hear me.

Conclusion: We need the term “authenticity” so we can talk about phonies, and simultaneously shouldn’t trust its implication that only “unfiltered” voice is “real.” But, then what marks an inauthentic voice from an authentic one?

(FWIW, I think the problem with the term “authenticity” is its presumption that we have inner and outer selves, and that the inner self is our real self. I personally find those ideas more misleading than helpful.)

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Brian Mooney writes a front-page story on the increasing demand that e-voting machines leave a voter-verifiable paper trail. In the course of providing Balanced & Professional Coverage, Brian writes:

”There are valid concerns on all sides,” said Dan Seligson, editor of electionline.org, a nonpartisan, nonadvocacy group that tracks election reform efforts. ”Whether democracy is truly threatened by paperless voting machines, I’m not sure that’s the case. Nor am I sure it’s the case that these are 100 percent reliable. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle.”

I wish the truth were in some middle ground, but in this case, we are going to have people who are psychologically and politically motivated to find fault with the system, so having technology that is not 100% trustworthy and verifiable is 100% guaranteed to erode our trust in the leaders who emerge from the process. Any unverifiable election that is at all close will be suspect. Any election that surprises us will be claimed to have been rigged. The frayed fabric of good will will rip. And we will lose the joy of upsets.

Scott Kirsner writes about Bose’s shock-absorbing system that is said to make cars ride as smooth as a hovercraft on fresh blacktop. “What on earth is a speaker company doing trying to reinvent the way auto suspension systems work?,” Scott asks. He answers by pointing to the fact that Bose is privately held and can support the diverse interests of its founder, Amar Bose.

But I believe (= am guessing) that there’s an additional point of connection. Could the Bose auto-suspension system use the same principles as its noise-cancelling headphones?

[Note: The Boston Globe's links only work for a few days. I.e., you can read the fresh and relevant news for free, but the stale, obsolete news will cost you.]

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Possibly because of the “Pray for Cynicism” banner adorning the bottom of my blog, Mark Dionne sends along a link to Pray for Reason, a site that wants us to win the war of prayers against those who are praying for Bush’s reelection. (More here…)

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Jon Udell speculates on what our OS would do if Google wrote it instead of
Microsoft:

On the Google PC, you wouldn’t need third-party add-ons to
index and search your local files, e-mail, and instant messages. It would
just happen. The voracious spider wouldn’t stop there, though. The next
piece of low-hanging fruit would be the Web pages you visit. These too would
be stored, indexed, and made searchable. More ambitiously, the spider would
record all your screen activity along with the underlying event streams.
…

Interesting idea! And couldn’t we implement enough of this to test its usefulness pretty quickly? After all, macro programs such as ActiveWords already watch our every click and stroke. I believe ActiveWords already keeps a history. Of course, that wouldn’t tell us the precise state of, say, the word processing document when we jumped over to our browser window and typed in an URL, but it might still be useful.

When I say “might,” I mean it. I’m not at all sure I’d actually use
such a system. It might feel invasive and it might have to operate at such a low
level that it introduces deep-seated instability. More worrisome, I tend to be so distracted in my work patterns
that the sequence of my small-motor movements may not be a good way of
searching for the threads of activity.

Behavior obviously contains clues
about the intent that stitches actions into meaningful streams, although the
clues can be awfully misleading: If you see that I move from a web page to a
word processing document, there’s a chance the first inspired me to write
something in the document, although it’s also possible that I got bored
reading the Web page and decided to get back to work. If I copy from the
Web page and paste into the document, you have a stronger clue.

A Semantic Behavior Index could be better at inferring third-party intent
from behavior than we humans are, although it’s hard to see it getting
better at interpreting my behavior than I am. But it doesn’t have to be that
good to be useful. The question is, would it be useful to have a searchable
table like the following:

Would something roughly like this be feasible? Worth indexing? Would it be useful without that fourth column, since that’ll take up a lot of HD space? Or would it all be nothing more than noise and an invitation to come invade our privacy?

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Here’s a feature I’d like in a mail client: Wait for Message (WFM).

Sometimes I’m expecting a message from someone that I want to make sure doesn’t get washed down the spam drain. So, I’d like to specify an address or keywords and have my mail client notify me when it arrives. After I acknowledge receipt of the message, by default it removes the search string from the WFM list. This is like a white list that plays favorites.

I tried building this in VBA for Outlook but succeeded only in creating a time-space loop that dims lights all across our neighborhood, although it actually shouldn’t be very hard to do. (It obviously gets more complex for those who use server-based spam filters.) Do any XP clients currently do this?

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Gary Lawrence Murphy has a thoughtful and funny response to my piece (comments here) on why I’m not a pacifist any more. An excerpt:

…Dr. Who, on detonating a bomb in an evil tyrant’s lair, was asked by his companions why he’d left his pacifism in this case. He replied, “Sometimes you just have to blow them up” — Krishna too tells Arajuna that some battles are justified, because yes, sometimes there is a complexity that goes beyond the way we wish the world was going.

The older I get, the more I am convinced that human beings respond primarily to connectionist values, that is, their behaviour is determined more by the history of reinforced patterns stored in the associative computing device in their biology than by those tricks of logic and sense we’ve painfully taught that biology to do. It is a testament to our ability as a creature that we have evolved any ethics or culture at all, so we can hardly expect perfection.

We should instead cheer if we see even the slightest moral reserve…

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From Bob Morris writes in response to my newsletter article on how VoIP works:

A Dedham MA provider, www.rnktel.com sells prepaid VoIP which is $.01/minute to most places in the world (Latin America being the major exception, where it is (a)poor connections and (b)$.06 and up). On their web site you give your credit card and get $5, $10, or $20 worth of billing. They send you a pin number by email.

In their case, you call an access number in the 781 area or one in RI. No one I know has reported finding $.01 service in other parts of the country though. The complete price list is on their web site.

On weekends it can be difficult to get to their access number. Clearly this is not an issue for modem-based services such as you described.

I program their access number in one button, my pin in another, and a few of my regular overseas callees in others. In fact, because I have a two-line phone, I have two pins running at any one time and can set up 3-way conference calls. (Tricky when my collaborator in Australia and I need to talk to our colleague in Germany. Somebody is up a wee bit late or a wee bit early….).

The setup time while your phone dials all those numbers is a bit of a nuisance compared to just dialing the long distance number, but we all need to slow down our telecomm lives anyway.

I also have the numbers in my fax memory buttons. So we are talking about sending faxes for about $.01-$.02/page anywhere in the world.

Plus, these pin numbers also help you control weight. Here’s how, in the actual words of my Taiwanese graduate student (who is so trim that I can’t imagine how she came to this): “Every time I go into MacDonalds and start to order fries, I think to myself: ‘Wow, if I don’t buy these fries I can talk to my parents for an hour and a half on the savings!’ ”

No need to thank me for the cost savings. All part of the JOHO service… (PS: Bob has no connection with the service he’s recommending.)

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Michael O’Connor Clarke is looking for advice on how to handle a racist hosting service. I don’t know what to tell him. If you do, please do so, and then let the rest of us know. Thanks.

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Sign a petition asking The Boss to play a concert on September 1 with proceeds going to defeat Bush. The organizer, Andrew Rasiej, has already put Giants Stadium on hold for that day.

Hell, let’s draft Bruce for VP…