Netflix abuses its customers

In December, I complained about Netflix streaming: not enough of what I want to watch is available for streaming. But some is, and getting one DVD at a time in addition to the streaming makes up for the lack, at least somewhat. In the end, then, we decided to keep the $10 Netflix subscription.

But Netflix has just announced that it’s increasing the cost of that plan by 60%. That’s a lot!

They’re actually doing it by separating the streaming and DVD plans, and charging $8 for each. Here’s what they say about it in their email message:

We are separating unlimited DVDs by mail and unlimited streaming into two separate plans to better reflect the costs of each. Now our members have a choice: a streaming only plan, a DVD only plan, or both.

Your current $9.99 a month membership for unlimited streaming and unlimited DVDs will be split into 2 distinct plans:

Plan 1: Unlimited Streaming (no DVDs) for $7.99 a month

Plan 2: Unlimited DVDs, 1 out at-a-time (no streaming) for $7.99 a month

Your price for getting both of these plans will be $15.98 a month ($7.99 + $7.99). You don’t need to do anything to continue your memberships for both unlimited streaming and unlimited DVDs.

These prices will start for charges on or after September 1, 2011.

The good part, I suppose, is that people who do only want one of the services can save $2 a month (let’s skip the penny here or there). But the assholes nice people at Netflix are doing a massive 60% rate hike for those who want the same package they’ve been using.

And one thing that’s particularly irritating about this is that if Cablevision, Time Warner Cable, Comcast, or Verizon wanted a 60% rise in rates, they’d have to get permission for it from regulatory agencies, and they wouldn’t be allowed to dump it all on us at once. Netflix has no such restriction, and can do what it wants... it’s up to us to say No! by not buying their service.

And so I’m really undecided about what to do. On the one hand, I’ve gotten used to the streaming, despite its limitations, and it’s nice to have stuff available and to watch things on the laptop when I’m travelling (in the U.S.). It’s tempting to just drop the DVD service and continue with $8/month for the streaming.

On the other hand, I very much want to give Netflix a clear message that they can go fuck themselves, and hope they lose 80% of their customers and go out of business.

A Trick of the Gmail?

When you’re looking at Gmail’s conversation list, it likes to show you just the first names of some of the people involved in the conversation — usually the first and last interlocutors, but sometimes others, depending upon repetitions and whatnot. It can be a bit odd sometimes. When I’m having a conversation that involves someone else called Barry, it can look like I’m talking to myself. And it’s often the case that there’s one particular Murray or Dave or Jim with whom I usually talk, but a message from a different person of the same name will throw me off.

But sometimes, the juxtapositions are just a bit amusing:

I guess it’s just that I’ve been a Genesis fan since way back.

Fourth of July, Miami Beach

Premier[e]

At Westchester County Airport (HPN), there are (among others) the following two ads:

Tranquility Spa
Westchester’s premiere day spa.

Dominican Sisters Family Health Service
New York’s premier visiting nurse service.

Never mind, for the moment, the pretentious use of premier — we’re talking about (mostly) affluent Westchester County, NY, after all. But note that the Dominican Sisters got it right, and the day-spa folks blew it:

Premier refers to the best of something, the leading example.

Premiere refers to the first, not the best. And even if premiere were what they meant, its use in this context would be odd. One might refer to a premiere offer for their opening day, but this just doesn’t work.

Someone obviously did not use the premier advertising agency.

New York Allows Same-Sex Marriage, Becoming Largest State to Pass Law

Yesterday, the New York State Senate approved the bill, 33 to 29.

ALBANY — Lawmakers voted late Friday to legalize same-sex marriage, making New York the largest state where gay and lesbian couples will be able to wed and giving the national gay-rights movement new momentum from the state where it was born.

It’s about time!

Misconceptions about DKIM

I chair the DKIM working group in the IETF. The working group is finishing up its work, about ready to publish an update to the DKIM protocol, which moves DomainKeys Identified Mail up the standards track to Draft Standard.

DKIM is a protocol that uses digital signatures to attach a confirmed domain name to an email message (see part 7, in particular). DKIM started from a simple place, with a simple problem statement and a simple goal:

• Email messages have many addresses associated with them, but none are authenticated, so none can be relied on.
• Bad actors — spammers and phishers — take advantage of that to pretend they are sending mail from a place (a domain name) the recipient might trust, in an attempt to fool the recipient.
• If we can provide an authenticated domain name, something that’s confirmed and that a sender can’t fake, then that information can be used as part of the delivery system, as part of deciding how to handle incoming mail.

It’s important to note that mail signed with DKIM isn’t necessarily good mail, nor even mail from a good place. All we know is that mail signed with DKIM was digitally signed by a specified domain. We can then use other information we have about that domain as part of the decision to deliver the message to the user’s inbox, to put it in junk mail, to subject it to further analysis or to skip that analysis, and so on.

Domain example.com signed this message, is just one of many pieces of information that might help decide what to do.

But some people — even some who have worked on the development of the DKIM protocol — miss the point, and put DKIM in a higher position than it should be. Or, perhaps more accurately, they give it a different place in the email delivery system than it should have.

Consider this severely flawed blog post from Trend Micro, a computer security company that should know better, but doesn’t:

In a recently concluded discussion by the [DKIM Working Group], some of those involved have decided to disregard phishing-related threats common in today’s effective social engineering attacks. Rather than validating DKIM’s input and not relying upon specialized handling of DKIM results, some members deemed it a protocol layer violation to examine elements that may result in highly deceptive messages when accepted on the basis of DKIM signatures.

The blog post describes an attack that takes a legitimately signed message, alters it in a way that does not invalidate the DKIM signature (taking advantage of some intentional flexibility in DKIM), and re-sends the message as spam or phishing. The attacker can add a second from address, and appear to the user to be from a trusted domain, though the DKIM signature is not.

The attack sounds bad, but it really isn’t, and the Trend Micro blog’s conclusion that failure to absolutely block this makes DKIM an EVIL protocol (their words) is not just overstated, but laughable and ridiculous. It completely undermines Trend Micro’s credibility.

Here’s why the attack is overstated:

1. It relies on the sender’s ability to get a DKIM signature on a phishing message, and assumes the message will be treated as credible by the delivery system.
2. It ignores the facts that delivery systems use other factors in deciding how to handle incoming messages and that they will downgrade the reputation score of a domain that’s seen to sign these sorts of things.
3. It ignores the fact that high-value domains, with strong reputations, will not allow the attackers to use them for signing.
4. The attack creates a message with two from lines, and such messages are not valid. It ignores the fact that delivery systems will take that into account as they score the message and make their decisions.

Apart from that, the blog insists that the right way to handle this attack would be to have DKIM go far beyond what it’s designed to do. Rather than just attaching a confirmed domain name to the message, DKIM would, Trend Micro says, now have to check the validity of messages during signature validation. Yes, that is a layer violation. Validity checking is an important part of the analysis of incoming email, but it is a separate function that’s not a part of DKIM. All messages, whether DKIM is in use or not, should be checked for being well-formed, and deviations from correct form should increase the spam score of a message. That has nothing to do with DKIM.

In fact, the updated DKIM specification does address this attack, and suggests things that delivery systems might do in light of it. But however good that advice might be, it’s not mandated by the DKIM protocol, because it belongs in a separate part of the analysis of the message.

---

Others have also posted rebuttals of the Trend Micro blog post. You can find one here, at CircleID, and look in the comments there for pointers to others.

Trusted identities

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) now has a way to do a change of address online, on their web site. Nicely, it’s even all using https (SSL/TLS), keeping it encrypted, which is good.

On the first page, you select whether it’s a permanent change or a temporary one, and specify the dates.

On the second page, you select whether the change is for an individual or a whole family.

On the third page, you give the old and new addresses.

On the fourth page, you get this:

For your security, please verify your identity using a credit card or debit card. We’ll need to charge your card $1.00.
[? Help]

To prevent Fraud, we need to verify your identity by charging your card a $1.00 fee. The card’s billing address must match your current address or the address you’re moving to.

If you click the ? Help link, here’s what it tells you:

Identity Verification — Credit/Debit Card

In order to verify your identity, we process a $1 fee to your credit/debit card. The card’s billing address must match either the old or new address entered on the address entry page. This is to prevent fraudulent Change of Address requests.

Please note that the Internet Change of Address Service uses a high level of security on a secure server.

I have a few problems with this:

1. They’re asking for credit card information in a transaction where no one expects it. They’re assuring you that it’s secure, but how does one know? This is a classic phishing tactic.
2. They’re assuming you have a credit card to give them. Lots of people don’t have credit cards. I know some.
3. They’re charging you a dollar to change your address online, a mechanism that’s surely cheaper for them than to have you walk into the post office to do it. That’s nuts.

To be sure, they do have to do something to make sure that people don’t change each other’s addresses as pranks, or worse. But do they really need to charge you a dollar for it? They could make a charge and then rescind it. They could give you an alternative to use a bank account, and verify it the way PayPal does, by making a withdrawal of a few cents and then depositing it back. That would also help for people who have no credit cards, but do have bank accounts — still not everyone, but it’s something.

Or you can just say, Eff this; I’m not giving the post office my credit-card information and paying them a dollar for what I can do for free, and then go into the office and waste a clerk’s time on it.

This is why there are proposals for secure identity verification. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has an initiative called National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) that covers this sort of thing. Whether or not NSTIC is the right answer, we need to get to where we have this kind of verification available, without having to hack the credit-card system for it.

What are people searching for?

I had a conversation with a friend the other day, a piece of which went like this:

Friend: Do you know who Contessa Brewer is?

Me: Is Contessa her name, or is she some kind of royalty?

Friend: She’s a news anchor on MSNBC.

Me: No, never heard of her.

I don’t watch MSNBC, you see. I don’t eschew it purposefully, but I just don’t happen to watch it. So later, when I had a chance, I did a Google image search to see what she looks like, and whether I might have seen her after all. I haven’t.

But here: Google image search shows me, at the top of the search results, some related searches to the one I made. I’d searched just for the name. Here were the related searches, which I presume are ordered by popularity:

contessa brewer legs
contessa brewer msnbc
contessa brewer cleavage
contessa brewer bikini
contessa brewer body

She’s a news anchor, but all most men want to do is see her legs and cleavage.

Men are such pigs. Damn, but it makes me embarrassed to be one.

70 Bob

Today is the birthday of, among others, Robert Zimmerman, who turns 70.

70.

Geez.

To everyone with a birthday today:

May God bless and keep you always
May your wishes all come true
May you always do for others
And let others do for you
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung
May you stay forever young

May you grow up to be righteous
May you grow up to be true
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you
May you always be courageous
Stand upright and be strong
May you stay forever young

May your hands always be busy
May your feet always be swift
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift
May your heart always be joyful
And may your song always be sung
May you stay forever young

— Bob Dylan, 1974

Creating jobs?

I’ve said before how much I like the radio show This American Life. This week’s episode, How To Create a Job, was an interesting one. I was especially interested near the end.

Throughout the show, they look at the difficulty of actually creating jobs — new jobs, where jobs didn’t exist before. In Act Three, we see that in many cases, it’s really just a matter of shifting the jobs around. They were always there, but we’re looking at a different there, moving jobs to Phoenix or Houston, from, say, California. That might make things look better in Phoenix or Houston, but overall, the U.S. economy hasn’t been improved by creating more jobs.

But then it was the intro to Act Four: Be Cool, Stay In School that really make me sit up. Here’s Ira Glass:

OK, here’s something I didn’t know before we started working on this week’s radio show. I knew that 9% of Americans are unemployed. But college graduates: their unemployment rate is half that, 4.5%. People with PhDs, it’s even better, 2% unemployment. High school grads are right near the national average, 9.7% unemployment. And people who did not graduate high school: their unemployment rate is almost 15%.

Which means, the unemployment problem in this country is mostly a problem for the uneducated, the unskilled.

And what’s strange is that those economic development people that Adam and Julie just talked to, they are mostly focused on attracting jobs for the highly educated, for people with at least college degrees.

To finish Act Four, Adam Davidson tells us this, after saying that America is still manufacturing a lot of stuff, in a lot of factories:

But pretty much everyone in those factories needs to have some basic math proficiency. They need to be trusted with expensive, precision equipment. You’re probably not getting a factory job if you don’t have at least a high school degree and some advanced technical training. The experts call it high school plus. If you don’t have a high school degree, plus some more training, some more specialized skill, you are, increasingly, locked out of the middle class.

And that’s a lot of people: 80 million Americans over 25. That’s 40% of the adult population, are in that group.

Having some training or education after high school used to be a great way, one of the most reliable ways, to make it into the middle class. But over the next few years, more and more, it’ll be the only way.

Now, most of my readers have lots of post-high-school training. Most of you have college degrees; some have PhDs. And I know that some of you have lost jobs and have had trouble finding work in this economy. We probably already have a sense that more education correlates with lower unemployment, though that’s little consolation when you, personally, fall into the bottom of the statistics.

It’s an interesting episode; give it a listen.

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[And, by the way: Act Four talks about a program called Pathways Out Of Poverty. I don’t know about you, but I — probably though my training at IBM — make acronyms out of everything. And, well, sometimes people might want to think about that a bit before they name their organizations.]

A photo, after a while of no posts

I’ve been too busy to post to these pages for the last couple of weeks, and I miss it. Too much going on with work; very busy with a couple of IETF working groups, along with other discussions and whatnot. And it turns out that Blogger has been having some problems, and some recent posts were removed in the process of fixing them, so it’s just as well, I guess.

So for now, here’s a photo from last week’s breeze through Amsterdam for a couple of days of meetings.

First of May

A favourite of mine, from way back:

When I was small and Christmas trees were tall
We used to love while others used to play
Don’t ask me why, but time has passed us by
Someone else moved in from far away

Now we are tall and Christmas trees are small
And you don’t ask the time of day
But you and I, our love will never die
But guess we’ll cry come first of May

The apple tree that grew for you and me
I watched the apples falling one by one
And I recall the moment of them all
The day I kissed your cheek and you were gone

Now we are tall and Christmas trees are small
And you don’t ask the time of day
But you and I, our love will never die
But guess we’ll cry come first of May

— B., R., & M. Gibb, 1968

Ephemeral clouds

I’ve talked about cloud computing a number of times in these  pages. It’s a model of networking that in some ways brings us back to the monolithic data center, but in other ways makes that data center distributed, rather than central. A data cloud, an application cloud, a services cloud. An everything cloud, and, indeed, when one reads about cloud computing one sees a load of [X]aaS acronyms, the aaS part meaning as a service: Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and so on.

I use email in the cloud. I keep my blog in the cloud. I post photos in the cloud. I have my own hosted domain, and I could have my email there, my blog, there, my photos there... but who would maintain the software? I could pay my hosting service extra for that, perhaps, but, well, the cloud works for me.

It works for many small to medium businesses, as well. Companies pay for cloud-based services, and, in return, the services promise things. There are service-level agreements, just as we’ve always had, and companies that use cloud-based services get reliability and availability guarantees, security guarantees, redundancy, backups in the cloud, and so on. Their data is out there, and their data is protected.

But what happens when they want to move? Suppose there’s a better deal from another cloud service. Suppose I, as a user, want to move my photos from Flickr to Picasa, or from one of those to a new service. Suppose a company has 2.5 terabytes of stuff out there, in a complex file-system-like hierarchy, all backed up and encrypted and safe and secure... and they want to move it to another provider.

In the worst case, suppose they have to, because their current service provider is going out of business.

Recently, Google Video announced that they would take their content down, after having shut the uploads down (in favour of YouTube) some time ago. This week, Friendster announced that they would revamp their service, removing most of their data in the process.

Of course, you understand that when I say their data, here, I really mean your data, yes? Because those Google Video things were uploaded by their users, and the Friendster stuff is... well, here’s what they say:

An e-mail sent Tuesday to registered users told them to expect a new and improved Friendster site in the coming weeks. It also warned them that their existing account profile, photos, messages, blog posts and more will be deleted on May 31. A basic profile and friends list will be preserved for each user.

Now, that sort of thing can happen: when you rely on a company for services, the company might, at some point, go away, terminate the service, or whatnot. But what’s the backup plan? Where’s the migration path? In short...

...how do you save your data?

Friendster has, it seems, provided a exporter app that will let people grab their stuff before it goes away. Google Video did no such thing, and there’s a crowd-sourced effort to save the content. But in the general case, this is an issue: if your provider goes away — or becomes abusive or hostile — how easy will it be for you to get hold of what you have stored there, and to move it somewhere else?

Be sure you consider that when you make your plans.

[Just for completeness: I have copies on my own local disks of everything I’ve put online... including archives of the content of these pages. If things should go away, it might be a nuisance, but I’ll have no data loss.]

Separation of church and Texas?

In a wonderful display of why we need to get religious nuttiness away from the halls of gummint, Governor of Rick Perry of Texas ranted thus yesterday in an executive proclamation that’s just in time for Earth Day:

WHEREAS, throughout our history, both as a state and as individuals, Texans have been strengthened, assured and lifted up through prayer; it seems right and fitting that the people of Texas should join together in prayer to humbly seek an end to this devastating drought and these dangerous wildfires;

NOW, THEREFORE, I, RICK PERRY, Governor of Texas, under the authority vested in me by the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Texas, do hereby proclaim the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas. I urge Texans of all faiths and traditions to offer prayers on that day for the healing of our land, the rebuilding of our communities and the restoration of our normal way of life.

Texas has as a state ... been strengthened, assured and lifted up through prayer?

Indeed.

This proclamation seems as clear a violation of the Establishment Clause in the First Amendment as I’ve seen in a while.

One might say that it does no harm. One might say that he makes it clear that it’s not just Rick Perry’s prayer, not just Christian prayer... that Governor Perry explicitly calls on all faiths and traditions.

The problem is that he still shoves some sort of faith in prayer into the faces of many, many people who consider prayer to be so much bullshit. This is totally inappropriate — just as inappropriate as if he’d said we should pray to Jesus, we should beseech Allah, or we should ask for the intercession of the spirit of Elvis.

It’s fine if Mr Perry thinks putting his hands together and muttering will do some good in relieving the drought. It’s fine if he wants to get his friends to join him in it. It’s even fine if he says so on statewide television when some talk-show host interviews him.

It’s not fine when it becomes an official proclamation. That’s crossing a line.

But here: I intend to draw an outline of Texas in the dirt in my garden today, and bury a ceremonial dried bluebonnet blossom in the approximate position of Austin therein. I will say Light-beam feelie! three times while holding my hand over the buried bluebonnet, and I am certain that within the month, it will have worked its magic and Texas will have had much-needed rain.

I know this to be the true answer, and far more effective than that prayer stuff. See if it isn’t!

Exercise while you work

I just got something new: a laptop desk that attaches to a treadmill. I tried it out yesterday, and it works great. It’s a little hard to type while I’m using it, but it works OK if I slow the treadmill down a bit. When I’m just reading, I can push it up to quite a brisk walking pace.

I gave it a go for an hour yesterday morning, and another hour yesterday afternoon, and I like it a lot. It’s a great way to avoid sitting in one place all day while I work. I may try some speech-recognition software as an alternative to typing, which, if it works well, might let me spend more time on it.

The treadmill might be a little noisy to use during conference calls, but those seem ideal times to get an extended period of walking in. I’ll have to try it, and see how that goes.

So far, with limited use, I can say that I really recommend it for anyone who works from home and sits at a desk all day!

Why is this night different?

Last night began the Jewish festival of Passover, one of several Jewish holidays (as was the recent Purim) whose stories can be summed up somewhat as, Someone tried to kill the Jews. The Jews survived. It’s time to eat. In this case, the someone involved the ancient Egyptians, or at least their Pharaoh and his advisors. Legend has it that the Jews were enslaved in Egypt, Moses led a revolt, with God’s assistance it succeeded, the Jews wandered in the desert for forty years, and wound up in Canaan. Somewhere along the way were a burning bush, plagues on the Egyptians, parting of the Red Sea, a pillar of fire, manna from heaven, and the handing down of the ten commandments. The story is told in the biblical book Exodus, in a 1956 movie with Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner, and every year at two seders — ceremonial dinners on the first and second evenings of Passover.

Tonight, for the second seder, I’ll be joining Murray Spiegel for a very different seder, indeed. That Times article is from 2002, but Murray’s been doing this for years, and continues to. Last year’s theme was the musical Oliver, with bits of the story set to tunes from the musical, clips of The Four Questions spoken in various languages, including Na’vi (from the movie Avatar), and a bizarre puzzle to solve to find the afikomen, the hidden piece of matzah that’s part of the ritual.

We don’t know what the theme will be — we never do, until we arrive — but we know there’ll be about 30 people there, and we’re told to expect a late night.

Why is this night different from all other nights?

On all other nights we eat either leavened bread or matzah; on this night, only matzah.

On all other nights we eat all kinds of herbs; on this night, only bitter herbs.

On all other night, we do not dip even once; on this night, we dip twice.

On all other nights, we eat either sitting up or reclining; on this night, we recline.

מה נשתנה הלילה הזה מכל הלילות
?

שבכל הלילות אנו אוכלין חמץ ומצה; הלילה הזה, כלו מצה

שבכל הלילות אנו אוכלין שאר ירקות; הלילה הזה, מרור

שבכל הלילות אין אנו מטבילין אפילו פעם אחת; הלילה הזה, שתי פעמים

שבכל הלילות אנו אוכלין בין יושבין ובין מסבין; הלילה הזה, כלנו מסבין

Equal-Pay Day

Today, 12 April 2011, is Equal-Pay Day in the U.S. If you took the median-salary American man and the median-salary woman, and started paying them both on the first of 2010, today is the day when the woman will have finally earned what the man took in through 31 December, about 14 weeks ago.

Of course, it’s not that simple. You can’t just take any man and any woman and make that comparison. The figure that’s used for this is the median income: take all the men’s annual salaries, list them in order of lowest to highest, then pick the one in the middle. Do the same for women’s salaries. Compare. The median of the women’s salaries is about 78% of the median of the men’s. We could use the average (mean) instead of the median, but for these sorts of economic comparisons it’s typically the median that’s used, because it doesn’t suffer from skewing by the extremes at the edges.

The problem is that the majority of the gap comes from the fact that men and women are not equally represented in all the different jobs... and the jobs that employ primarily men just so happen to pay more than the ones that employ primarily women. I can’t imagine how that happened, but, well, there it is. Nurses earn less than doctors. Beauticians earn less than plumbers. Teachers earn less than corporate executives. And so on.

And it doesn’t stop there: what about college-educated women? What about those with PhDs? Because another fact is that more women than men are finishing college, these days, and more women than men are completing PhD programs. Doesn’t that fix it?

No. For one thing, when we look at the fields that women are getting degrees in, we find the same thing: the fields that attract women more tend to be the less lucrative ones.

But also, when we break it down by field we still find differences. In April of 2007, the American Association of University Women released a study titled Behind the Pay Gap (PDF). The study showed that female biological scientists earn 75% of what their male colleagues do. In mathematics, the figure is 76%; in psychology, 86%. Women in engineering are almost there: they earn 95% of what the men do. But less than 20% of the engineering majors are women.

The other argument for why there’s a pay gap is that women and men make different decisions about their lives. Women choose motherhood, a bigger hit against career advancement and salary opportunities than fatherhood. More women work part time. And so on.

The AAUW study looked at that. They controlled for those decisions, and they compared men and women who really could be reasonably compared. They looked at people in the same fields, at the same schools, with the same grades. They considered those of the same race, the same socio-economic status, the same family situations. They didn’t just compare apples to apples; they compared, as economist Heather Boushey puts it, Granny Smith apples to Granny Smith apples.

And they found that even in that case, there’s an unexplained pay gap of 5% the year after college, which increases to 12% ten years later. From the study:

The pay gap between female and male college graduates cannot be fully accounted for by factors known to affect wages, such as experience (including work hours), training, education, and personal characteristics. Gender pay discrimination can be overt or it can be subtle. It is difficult to document because someone’s gender is usually easily identified by name, voice, or appearance. The only way to discover discrimination is to eliminate the other possible explanations. In this analysis the portion of the pay gap that remains unexplained after all other factors are taken into account is 5 percent one year after graduation and 12 percent 10 years after graduation. These unexplained gaps are evidence of discrimination, which remains a serious problem for women in the work force.

It has gotten better: if today the general pay gap is about 20%, 15 years ago it was 25%, and 30 years ago, 35%. The improvement is good news.

But the speed of the improvement is not. The disparity of pay between male-dominated fields and female-dominated ones is not. The gap in pay between highly trained men and women in the same field is not. And that unexplained 5-to-12 percent is certainly not.

Let’s keep pushing that date back, and look for the year when equal-pay day is December 31^st.

Is it art?

The item to the right (click it to enlarge) is on display at the Czech National Gallery at Veletržní Palác. As you can see, it comprises two white-painted wooden chairs that are tied together with rope.

There’s lots of other stuff at the (very extensive and interesting) gallery for which I don’t have to ask this question, but for this piece, here it is: Is it art?

What do you think?

We decline!

I’m back from Prague, and recovering from the trip. I talked about the Czech language after my 2007 visit, and mentioned the case endings. This trip’s given me something else to say about that.

After the IETF meeting, during the vacation part of my stay, I moved to a hotel called The Golden Tree. In Czech, golden tree is zlatý strom, and there were a few things around that said that. But that’s the nominative case. Hotel names are frequently (usually, it seems) rendered as U [something], where the word u is like the french chez, meaning at the place of. That throws it into the genitive case, so the proper name of the hotel is U Zlatého Stromu.

Czech has three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) and seven cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative, and instrumental), so the combinations of endings as nouns are declined and adjectives are changed to match can be dizzying.

Unlike German (but like other Slavic languages, such as Russian), Czech declines proper nouns, including people’s names. And they decline everyone’s names, not just Czech ones, or ones that look like they might be Czech.

This trip included a visit to the Czech Museum of Music, which had an exhibit called Beatlemánie, about the Beatles. I had to see that, of course.

It was amusing to see the names declined. The most interesting was Sir Paul’s. He was Paul McCartney when it was nominative, of course. But when a display talks about The Solo Career of Paul McCartney, it becomes Sólová dráha Paula McCarneyho.

Paula McCartneyho ?

Oy!

Clapton is God!

I’m at the IETF meeting in Prague this week, so there’s little blogging to be done. But I wanted to note that Eric Clapton turns 66 today, and to give you two of my favourites of his performances. Enjoy.

Happy Eltonmas

Today is Sir Elton John’s birthday; he’s 64. Here are two of my favourites of his songs. Enjoy the next eleven and a half minutes.

Snow, Donald Trump, and climate change

It’s snowing lightly in the New York area this morning, and it expected to continue through the night and into tomorrow. We might get some early closings of the schools, which would mean I don’t play volleyball tonight; that’s sad. And, of course, though it’s not (yet) sticking to the roads, it’s doing its part to mess up traffic, or so I hear on the radio. Still, I like snow. It makes the world look pretty. And it’s expected, here, at this time of year.

Donald Trump was on the local suburban radio station this morning, promoting his television show by having a chat with the morning-drive personalities (DJ being such an obsolete term). But during the greetings, he started things by pronouncing that global warming is hooey (not his word, but I forget the specific words he used). It’s ridiculous, of course, he said: look at this snow, and it’s spring. And warming, well, this was the coldest winter I can remember.

I guess Donald Trump has just fired all the scientists.

But, see, here are some of the things that are not true:

1. It is not true that it’s unusual to have a bit of snow in our area at the end of March, or even the beginning of April.
2. It is not true that this was the coldest winter on record, or even for many years, and if it’s the coldest he can remember, he has a short memory.
3. It’s not true that Donald Trump is a climate scientist, or any kind of scientist: he’s a businessman, and is apparently good at that. Others are good at other things, such as studying climate.

And here’s what is true:
As a businessman, Donald Trump has a strong interest in making people think there’s no problem. Regulations that address climate change at the expense of his business interests obviously won’t be making him happy.

I prefer the term global climate change, which gets us away from the idea that everything is monotonically warming, and that any time it’s unusually cold we should call the whole idea into question.

But what I really prefer is that we not pay attention to what businessmen such as Donald Trump — or clergymen such as Cardinal George Pell, or politicians such as Senator James Inhofe, or actors, or sports figures — have to say about science. Look to the scientists in reference to the scientists, and give preference to those who specialize in the field in question.

As with most topics, in the case of climate change you can certainly find disagreement among scientists as well. Unanimity is rare. But the vast majority of those qualified to weigh in will tell you that global climate change is a problem, and that we can and should work toward fixing it.

We don’t need to hear from someone who runs a business competition on television.

Send me an e-mail?

The New York Times has not just gone astray with its payment scheme; it’s gone completely off the deep end, gotten lost in the forest, fallen off the cliff and into a pit, and is knee-deep in any other mixed and fractured metaphor you can devise... linguistically.

See, they have recently updated their style guide, removing, according to editor Philip Corbett, some aging or outdated technical terms, such as CD-ROM, floppy disk, Dictaphone, Usenet, newsgroups, VHS, CAD-CAM and I.S.D.N. Yes, they used to use periods in ISDN, as they still do in I.B.M., I.P. address, C.P.U., and others. But I’m happy to see that they’re eliminating the dots in USB, URL, and PDF.

They also agree with me on capitalizing Web and Internet.

But here’s where they now err:

We no longer have to write about people sending an e-mail message — we can call it an e-mail. The term is also acceptable as a verb. (For now, at least, we are keeping the hyphen for this and similar coinages like e-commerce and e-reader.)

I’m apathetic, disinterested on the hyphenation issue. I, myself, omit the hyphen and prefer email, but I think it’s fine either way. But I insist that email, avec hyphen ou sans, be used in a parallel way to mail. It only makes sense, yes? And one would never say, I sent him a mail. Of course not.

A letter is parallel to an email message, and they should keep it that way. If one wants to be shorter, it’s easy: I sent him email, works fine, just as I sent him mail, does.

But the New York Times is giving in to sloppy, lazy usage, such as is unbecoming the Gray Lady.

Oh, Noes!

The ultimate Hamantash

Long-time readers are well aware of three things, at least, about me:

1. I’m flamingly atheist; I think religion is silly, at best, but
2. I grew up in a Jewish family; also,
3. I’m a math geek.

The combination of the first two can sometimes be a little odd. There are many ways in which the Jewish culture stuck, though the belief system never took hold at all. I love Passover seders, for instance, especially if I can be irreverent about them (more about that in a few weeks). I look forward to certain traditional foods (while at the same time relishing shellfish and anything related to pork). That sort of thing.

One favourite food has always been Hamantashen: triangular pastries associated with the Jewish festival of Purim, filled with poppy-seed paste or fruit filling (prune, cherry, apricot, or raspberry, usually). They’re little hand-held, individual fruit pies, and well-made ones are true delights.

It’s Purim now (well, this past weekend), and the Hamantashen are in the air. And Seattle food blogger Deborah Gardner has tied it all in with the math-geek bit to make the ultimate Hamantash (that’s the correct singular; Hamantashen is plural (I’m a language geek, too, remember)): the Sierpinski Hamantash, modeled on the Sierpinski triangle.

Doesn’t it look grand?       ! חג שמח

The New York Times paywall cometh

Yesterday, the NY Times sent this message by email to all registered users. An excerpt:

This week marks a significant transition for The New York Times as we introduce digital subscriptions. It’s an important step that we hope you will see as an investment in The Times, one that will strengthen our ability to provide high-quality journalism to readers around the world and on any platform. The change will primarily affect those who are heavy consumers of the content on our Web site and on mobile applications.

Here’s their FAQ list and the prices. As you can see, the minimum charge is $15 per month, which comes to $180 per year. That’s a lot, especially compared with free. Part of the charge is for use of smartphone or tablet apps, and they do not offer a subscription that’s web only.

Cory, at BoingBoing, doesn’t think it will work, and I agree with him. There’s bound to be confusion about how much you can see. For instance, while, according to the FAQ, you’ll always be able to read things that someone posts to a blog or that you get from a Google search, they will count against your 20 free articles a month. So if you’re not a subscriber, you can read 20 articles from the Times site, and then read 20 (or 40, or 80) more posted on someone’s blog... if you do it in that order. But if you read the articles from the 20 blog posts first and then want to snag an article directly off the Times site, you’ll have to pay. You gonna keep track of that?

Well, they say they’ll keep track of it for you, but, really, it seems a complicated mess.

Apart from that, I wonder about the links I’ve already posted. I presume that blog links will be identified in a way that the site can recognize, tagged with a token of some sort. It seems unlikely that using the referrer field that the browser sends would be reliable enough for them. But all those old Times links I’ve been posting for the last five years lack any sort of tag, so will those suddenly be blocked by the paywall? Probably, and that will be very irritating.

I also take exception to their characterization of the change as affecting primarily heavy consumers of the content on our Web site. 20 articles a month is nothing, and I would not call someone who reads one article a day a heavy consumer, in any sense. No, this will have a profound effect on the habits of a great many casual Times users, who check out a couple of items a day or so. If I want just 5 articles a month beyond the 20 free ones, I’ll have to pay $15 each month for that.

I likely won’t. I almost assuredly won’t.

So the result will be that the Times will no longer be my go-to news source for background on what I say in these pages. I’ll look to other sources instead. And I’ll do that with sadness and regret, because I think the New York Times is the best source around... and that’s the best reason I can think of for them to look for ways to fund their content other than by charging for it, article by article. They’re a business, yes, but they’re also a public service, and an important one.

Or perhaps it’s that they’re not a public service any longer. Sigh.

Republicans vs NPR

I sent the following message, last week, to my congressional representative, Nan Hayworth (R-NY 19):

The recent departure of executives from National Public Radio, and the events that triggered them, have fueled discussion in Congress about eliminating its federal funding. That would be a disastrous decision. Public radio and television provide and important service to the American public, with news, arts, and nature programming that is not connected to commercial interests. Their news agencies, in particular, benefit from their ability to remain impartial. Federal funding is entirely appropriate and necessary for these organizations, and Congress must not eliminate nor significantly reduce that funding. Ms Hayworth, please tell me your viewpoint on this matter, so that I may understand where you stand. And I urge you to stand on the side of the American public’s need for the high-quality news and arts programming that NPR and PBS provide.

I got no response. Or perhaps I did: today, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to eliminate federal funding for NPR:

The House voted on Thursday to cut off funding for National Public Radio, with Democrats and Republicans fiercely divided over both the content of the bill and the manner in which it was brought to the floor.

Under the measure, sponsored by Representative Doug Lamborn, a Republican from Colorado, stations could not buy programming from NPR or any other source using the $22 million the stations receive from the Treasury for that purpose. Local NPR stations would be able to use federal funds for operating expenses, but not content.

The time has come for us to claw back this money, said Representative Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee.

According to the voting, representative Hayworth voted against it. I’m not surprised, as she’s a newly seated Republican. But it’s very clear that she is not representing her district, which is very much in support of National Public Radio.

It matters little, really, because the measure will almost certainly not pass in the Senate, and so it will die. But what these idiot Republicans are doing is unfortunate, frightening, dangerous. And the partisanship that has settled in our legislatures since 2000 is the most dangerous part of all.

Happy Pi Day

[Thanks to commenter "D." for the image.]

Mathematics and advertising

I occasionally post here about abuse of mathematics (such as this post, and this one, and this one). I occasionally post about silly advertising (try here and here). And sometimes I get to combine them in an item about abuse of mathematics in advertising (this is a good example).

The other day, the excellent web comic XKCD covered the combo very nicely, and included some of the things I often whine get huffy kvetch whine and get huffy about:

Hold the mouse over the comic to see Randall Munroe’s extra text, present in most of his drawings. Click the comic to visit his web page. And while you’re at it, you might check out my other favourite XKCD comics: Sandwich (it’s a Unix joke), Snopes, Correlation, Can’t Sleep (warning: only extreme geeks will get this), and Spinal Tap Amps.

Illinois Governor Signs Capital Punishment Ban

Yesterday, Illinois joined the civilized world, including 15 other states, by abolishing the death penalty. Their reason? One of sense:

Since our experience has shown that there is no way to design a perfect death penalty system, free from the numerous flaws that can lead to wrongful convictions or discriminatory treatment, I have concluded that the proper course of action is to abolish it, Mr. Quinn [Illinois Governor Pat Quinn] said in a statement.

In 2000, at the same time that Texas Governor George W. Bush was crowing arrogantly that every one of the people executed in his state during his reign — well over 100 — was guilty and deserved to die, the governor of Illinois at that time, George Ryan, suspended the death penalty because DNA evidence proved that a disturbing number of the death-row inmates there were, in fact, innocent.

Before then, George Pataki won the election for governor in New York with the promise of reinstating the death penalty here. And our state’s top court subsequently declared the law unconstitutional. No one has been executed in New York since 1963. The Massachusetts law has also been declared unconstitutional by its state courts.

The thirteen other states that do not have death penalty statutes at all are Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

In contrast, Texas has killed 466 inmates since 1976. Virginia is a very distant second, at 108. In fact, Texas has executed more people than the next six states, combined (Virginia, Oklahoma (96), Florida (69), Missouri (68), Alabama (50), and Georgia (49)).

Illinois executed 12 prisoners between 1976 and Governor Ryan’s moratorium in 2000. Hooray for them for making it clear that they’ll kill no more.

“Hey, that’s my camera, Charlie!” “This is my farm, Clyde!”

Here: What do you do when people (such as animal-rights activists) take pictures of your farm in order to document abusive practices?

The answer, of course, should be obvious: you make it a felony to photograph farms.

Yes, the Florida state senate is considering a bill, SB 1246, that will do just that. From the Times:

Photographers — perhaps including some ghosts from Farm Security Administration days — are astir at news of a bill introduced by State Senator Jim Norman of Florida that would make it a felony to take a picture of a farm without the owner’s permission.

The bill is short, so let’s include the text, as introduced in the Florida Senate yesterday, here in its entirety. Paragraph (2) is the operative one.

A bill to be entitled

An act relating to farms; prohibiting a person from entering onto a farm or photographing or video recording a farm without the owner’s written consent; providing a definition; providing penalties; providing an effective date.

Be It Enacted by the Legislature of the State of Florida:

Section 1. (1) A person who enters onto a farm or other property where legitimate agriculture operations are being conducted without the written consent of the owner, or an authorized representative of the owner, commits a felony of the first degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084, Florida Statutes.

(2) A person who photographs, video records, or otherwise produces images or pictorial records, digital or otherwise, at or of a farm or other property where legitimate agriculture operations are being conducted without the written consent of the owner, or an authorized representative of the owner, commits a felony of the first degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084, Florida Statutes.

(3) As used in this section, the term farm includes any tract of land cultivated for the purpose of agricultural production, the raising and breeding of domestic animals, or the storage of a commodity.

Section 2. This act shall take effect July 1, 2011.

Get all your Florida farm picture-taking done by June, now.

[I’ll note in passing that this also seems to make it illegal for someone to snap pics of your back-yard marijuana crop. Just sayin’.]

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Update, 14:20 — Adding something I said in a comment elsewhere:

When I was in college (at University of Florida), I would see a great sunflower farm as we drove up I-75. When the sunflowers were blooming in row after row, it was really beautiful and striking.

The idea that if one’s passenger should snap a shot of that on the way by, without first stopping at the farmhouse for a written photo release, then one might be liable to prosecution for a felony... is pretty insane.

And the idea that they’re even considering this is equally insane. This is not the country I grew up in.