There Is No Non-Human Moral Authority

All moral laws are humanly produced. The question is which set of human-created laws we should follow and why.

Excellent essay. I wasn’t aware of Big Think until today. Making it part of my regular reading. That’s probably a great way to start the new year.

When the first plane hit we only noticed the lights flickering and the chirping of the power supplies attached to our computers. A few minutes later the phone calls started coming in from family. Something hit one of the trade center towers. I was on the phone with my wife listening to her telling me to leave the city and come home, when the second plane flew past our building and crashed into the second tower. This time we all heard the plane hit and we felt the blast. I went out into the street to see what was happening. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. Both towers on fire, paper and other debris was raining down from the damaged floors above. My first instinct was to run to the site. I had friends there in those buildings and I wanted to lend a hand. My heart was pumping and I felt numb. The only thought in my head was to help. Get to the towers and help. People I passed were in shock. Some were crying. Sirens were screaming everywhere. A woman fainted her friends caught her. I didn’t understand why, what did she see? When I got a block away from the south tower entrance I saw a police officer. He was directing traffic and people away from the area. I asked him where the people in the building who were evacuated being taken. He didn’t know. I asked him how I can help. He couldn’t say because he didn’t know. I looked up and for the first time I saw people falling from the buildings. It was like time stopped. I had never seen anyone die before now I was watching, helpless, as many people were losing their lives violently at their own hands or in the fire raging 80 stories over my head. At that instant I was enraged and impotent. I wasn’t ready for this. There was something horrible happening that was out of control and no matter what I did there was nothing I could do to make things better. Then I looked back at the police officer and he said the best thing I could do would be to go home to my family. I walked/ran back to my building. I went back upstairs to the 7th floor. I called my wife to tell her I was safe and that I was going to try to make it to the Staten Island Ferry and leave the city from the south. I started to get off the phone with her when I heard her say, “Something’s happening….”. I felt our building shaking. “I’m coming home. I’ll be OK. I’ll get in touch soon.”, I told her just as the phones went dead and the power went out. I walked out into the hall. I knew the elevators would be down so I made my way to the stairs. I opened the door to the stairway and it was pitch black. There were no emergency lights. Feeling my way down and trying to count the floors as I went, I started down from the seventh floor. As I got down to about what I had estimated to be the second floor, I met three other people who were making their way down. Thankfully they had flashlights. The doors weren’t marked but we got to the bottom of the stairway and opened the door out to what we hoped would be the lobby. We stepped out into the room and it was still dark. “Maybe we’re in the basement?”, one person said. I noticed the marble on the walls. “No.”, I said. “We’re in the lobby.” “Why is it so dark?, another person asked. Then I heard someone shouting, “Help us!”. I spun around. Where was that coming from? “Help us!”, I heard again. This time someone came around a corner. It was a black woman. Maybe a police officer. I couldn’t tell she was completely covered in dust. She was having difficulty breathing. It was in her eyes. “Water!”, someone called behind her.There were people streaming in from the street. They were also covered in dust. “What happened?”, I asked. Another police officer passed by and said, “The tower fell.” Just then a janitor came from behind us in the hall way. The second officer asked him where we could get water. He fumbled for his keys and opened up one of the ground floor offices. There was a small kitchen in there. The few of us who were not choking were helping people into the kitchen, getting their eyes and throats clear, and helping the people who were coming in from the street. A person in a wheelchair, a woman with a baby, a British film crew. When things stabilized I opened an office door that faced West Street. I looked out the window and saw the entire street, as far as I could see covered with grey dust. A few people were stumbling, half/running, down the street. I banged on the window trying to signal them to go to the front of our building. Someone walked in to the office with a handheld camera. He was looking at the video he shot only moments ago as the tower collapsed. I couldn’t believe my eyes. By then people were talking about this as an attack. Quick rumors were circulating about more planes in the air. Someone said the Pentagon had been hit and the White House. As I turned away from the video and walked back to the window a police officer burst into the office and shouted,“Everyone away from the windows! The second one is coming down!” We all ran out of the office and back into the hall. I felt a shudder, like a small earthquake. When it stopped I ran back to the office and looked out the window. I couldn’t see anything. Just brown/grey dust blocking out the sun. I decided as soon as this dust settled enough that I would try to make it to the ferry. I walked back to the office with the kitchen. I grabbed an empty water bottle, filled it from the tap, and put it into my bag. I found some coffee filters and wet them down. They would do as dust masks if the dust didn’t clear completely.I walked to the lobby entrance. The dust still choked the streets and I could almost make out the trees in Battery Park only a hundred feet away. Someone had a radio and was listening to the confused reporting in those first few hours. The Pentagon had been hit but not the White House. There were still planes unaccounted for but no other buildings have been hit. It was definitely a terrorist attack. Cell phones were useless. No one could make any calls. Someone walked outside to smoke a cigarette. They walked outside into that terrible cloud to smoke. A few minutes later the dust settled some more. I decided to leave. I walked outside. There were no sirens I could hear. It was strangely quiet. I walked down into Battery Park. A merciful wind was keeping the western side of the park closest to the the water free from smoke. People were congregating into this small oasis of clean air. A police officer announced that they were going to try to evacuate people from this area by boat. The injured would go first. So I decided to wait. As I was waiting my cell phone rang. It was a colleague. She asked if I was OK. I told her I was fine and if she could call my wife to let her know where I was and that I was safe. She said she would and we hung up. I tried to make an outbound call but I couldn’t get a signal. At least my wife would know I was safe. I waited a few more minutes and tried the phone again. This time I got though to my home. I told my wife my situation and bits and pieces of what happened. I told her how I was getting out. I told her I loved her. People from the crowd started asking me to use my phone. I was afraid if I hung up I wouldn’t get another signal so I asked people to give me their names and the phone numbers they wanted to call. I relayed them to my wife and we got messages to about a dozen families, including two NYC Firemen who had just escaped the tower’s collapse.Finally some tug boats pulled up to the seawall. One by one they loaded up people who were waiting in Battery Park and they took us over to Liberty State Park in New Jersey. During the short ride across the bay no one spoke. We all just looked back in horror and grief at the spot where the World Trade Center had been standing and was now burning ash.

Originally published on giolist.com

Mike Lofgren, Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult

An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not the case in the present economic crisis. After a riot of unbridled greed such as the world has not seen since the conquistadors’ looting expeditions and after an unprecedented broad and rapid transfer of wealth upward by Wall Street and its corporate satellites, where is the popular anger directed, at least as depicted in the media? At “Washington spending” - which has increased primarily to provide unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid to those economically damaged by the previous decade’s corporate saturnalia.

Probably the central political mystery of our time.

From the looks of the cascading Chrome logos being projected up front, today’s keynote is likely to be all about the Chrome browser, and my least favorite Google project, Chrome OS.

Vic Gundrota back up on stage today. 600k viewers getting access to the various live streams.

Today’s keynote will be about the platform none of us owns: the open web.

The stats: 160 million active Chrome browser users today.

Lot of work went into making chrome work well on Mac and Linux, they have also moved to a 6 week dev cycle. Lots of security and performance gains being made. The good news is that all modern browsers are aggressively implementing HTML 5.

Speech. Demoing adding speech API with one line of HTML 5. Great demo. Speech recognition for search worked flawlessly. Also demoed speech translation

JavaScript performance is good and potentially good enough for most applications. Wonder why this is downplayed.

2D canvas performance can leverage GPU support and it works well. Web GL also shows great performance gains for web graphics. HTML 5 apps are going to be getting better. Which makes me wonder why Google is propping up Flash.

Chrome Web Store in now going global. It’s being translated in 41 languages. In app payments will also be available. In app payments can be integrated with very little code. In app purchases will cost publishers 5%. That’s a lot lower than 30%.

Angry Birds publisher is showing off Angry Birds for the web. All HTML 5 Web GL and Canvas with hardware acceleration. It gets 60fps on most modern platforms and with browser client side storage you can play offline. They built some Chome specific levels. When in app purchases go live the Mighty Eagle will be available in Chrome. Previously only available only on iOS. The whole app is hosted on App Engine.

Arron Koblin showing off a new music project on the web. The demo and music are fantastic. It’s like being immersed in a 3d animation. Amazing. It has a mine craft like build environment so you can contribute to the project. Uses the 3.js library. Very nice demo of the state of web graphics.

Of course with all this capable on the web why do we need an OS? Enter Chrome OS and the Chrome Book. Sounds like the next generation of the cr-48. Lots of improvements: better hardware and firmware. Demoing file management using PDFs, music, video, and photos via the new Chrome OS file manager. Including importing photos from an SD card right into Picasa. Great integration which is available via an API to all Chrome OS developers.

Disconnected access will also be improved. GDocs, gmail, and calendar will use these features.

Chrome books will be built by many vendors. Samsung, Acer but man are they ugly. These devices will cost about 300-500 USD and will be available shortly from Amazon across the world. Available June 15th.

Of course this type of device plays well in the enterprise. As most apps become web based why do we need computers with full OS stacks. 50k companies applied to test the cr-48. Google surveyed these companies and they reported that 75% of there users could switch to a Chrome Book. Google has created a web console to manage Chrome Books in the enterprise. A fuul hardware and software system for 28USD per user per month. Wow. 20 USD for schools and government. Also available June 15th. This is pretty nice. It’s the future. Maybe I was wrong about Chrome OS?

Looks like everyone here is getting a free Chrome Book on June 15th.

Yesterday’s announcement of Google Music seemed pretty sedate. I think being sandwiched between Amazon’s Cloud Storage announcement last month and the impending Apple cloud announcement is bad for Google. Don’t get me wrong. This is a good first step for Google but Music is basically not that much different than most music locker services. It requires you to upload your catalog (that would tie me a while since I have about 16 gigs of music), you can stream it to any device, and you can cache tracks on your devices for those long plane rides. They did add a “genius” mix feature but that’s not very exciting. So overall I think this will be great for existing Android users but not a killer feature that entices people to choose Android over iOS. I believe Apples offering will likely be simpler to use (I believe you won’t have to upload anything to get tracks into the cloud) and it will have all iTunes features with maybe some interesting extras. We will have to wait for that shoe to drop. It should be more than a music locker. Simpler is better and I believe that in the consumer space simpler trumps open for most users. Things are improving in the Android space, but they have a long way to go.

Huge crowd, heard the attendance was 5.5k give or take. There was a veritable geek stampede getting into the room this morning. Not sure if there is any big news that hasn’t already been leaked. The Google music service launch, growth in Android market share, and possibly some more info on Honeycomb. It’s all going down in about 12 minutes.

Vic Gundrota upon stage. His review of past IO conferences ends with a shot at Apple. (You stay classy, Vic.)

Hugo Barra kicks off the Android keynote. Review of the Android numbers. Still focused on activations which is the wrong stat. 210 available devices (mostly phones) is still impressive and 200k app in the Android app store. A healthy market, no doubt.

Two new services being announced today. One must be the music locker.

3.1 Honeycomb being released today. Good stuff in the update: resizable widgets, better USB support, and more. 3.1 will also be available on Google TV.

Next release, Ice cream sandwich, in the 4th quarter. The top priority will be device choice but it looks like the OS will become more homogeneous. Like iOs. Unlike iOS some of it will be open source.

Cool head tracking demo using the device camera to adjust an Open GL scene.

Android market now adding movie rentals. Terms are similar to other online rental outlets like iTunes. You can stream and “pin” a movie to a device which downloads it for playing movies on planes. No tethering to a computer to pin the content. So music must be next.

Music beta. All in the cloud. Uses a client app to move files up to Google’s servers. So far it looks like Amazon’s Cloud Drive. Looks like they have a “Genius Mix” feature like iTunes. All demos are showing off both phone and tablets. Of course no tethering required. The service launches today in beta. It’s free while it’s in beta.

Barra announces an industry group that will govern how updates will happen to Android mobile devices. Should help speed the rate of Android updates.

Android Open Accessory is a new open standard and API for device interconnect. Demoing using an Android device with an exercise bike. Interesting idea. It’s a hardware and software solution based on Arduino. (wow) this looks like a great program for building Hardware that interfaces with Android devices.

Android at Home is an extension of this idea but they are short on details on the hardware and software that drives the simple X10-like lighting demos. Still pretty new. Not available.

Looks like Google and Samsung are giving us all Galaxy Tab 10.1! Thanks! Nice way to wrap up the keynote!

There was a lot of talk on the Interwebs about baked vs non-baked blogging platforms. To summarize, a “baked” blogging system renders all content to static HTML and moves that content to a plain old HTTP server. The alternative is to have a blogging system that renders a dynamic page for every request. The advantages of the former is that nothing serves up faster than static HTML files. It will keep you site from getting slashdotted (does that still happen?), fireballed, etc. if you happen to write something interesting that people want to read. My original blog, giolist.com was for the longest time a statically hosted site before Google eliminated publishing static HTML using sftp from Blogger. The closest I came to a meltdown was a while ago when I posted something that Dave Winer liked and linked to from scripting.com. Of course because it was all static HTML my site never went down even though it was hosted on a puny Linux box running Apache. This incarnation of my blog is hosted on Wordpress.com and I’m not sure it would handle the traffic if I were to come up with something profound. I find myself wanting to go back to a “baked” system partly because of the scalability factor but also because of the simplicity. Using static HTML doesn’t preclude interaction or other dynamic elements. You can still do interesting things with JavaScript includes like twitter badges, or photo streams in the margins of your site, and of course Disqus is more than happy to host your comments if you want them. I’ve been looking a lot at systems like Jekyll and Hyde but I’ve also been looking at rolling my own blogging system again. A short list of requirements would include:

• Markdown support
• no database, all posts are generated from files
• no server-side CGI required or exposed to the Internet
• plugin API
• functional but not overly complex templating system
• post on the go from an iOS device
• Dropbox integration (although if your file based I think you get this for free)

It’s an interesting project I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. It might just use one of the open source projects as a base, since it’s easier to add some of the features to an existing system than starting from scratch building everything. The templating engine could be a pain and there are lots of good ones out there in many languages. I wrote one ages ago in Perl. I’m not sure I want to do that again. The idea of writing my own system seems right. Now if I can only find the time. sigh

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch

“I don’t even care if they listen to what comes out. I’m concerned with getting it out. Just giving people the option of something other than the norm of American entertainment.” – Frank Zappa

I have been called a whore and a traitor by my friends, but I did it anyway. Last week I turned off my Motorola Droid, and activated an Apple iPhone 4 on Verizon. – Technology Viewer

This sounds a lot like how I felt when I switched from a Sony Viao 505 running Redhat Linux to my first G4 Macbook. Sometimes its just about getting stuff done.

...when normal people — not gadget bloggers and geeks like us — need to consider an alternative to the iPad, they’re not just thinking of Apple’s lack of “openness” (as Google so vaguely and poorly defines it in relation to Android) or the iPad’s lack of some individual hardware feature. Buying an alternative means giving up Apple’s entire ecosystem. That’s worth it to some buyers, but it’s incredibly impractical for many.

Interesting post from Marco Arment. He may be right. A tablet probably can’t be successful without the kind of support ecosystem and the seamless integration between hardware and software that Apple can provide. My favorite part of the article is how he divides the tablet community along the lines of those that know what RSS is and those who do not. Seems like a simple acid test.

About a week ago my family was gathered in the kitchen – all of us – a rare thing these days what with the kids growing up and all. We were talking about the coming new year and suddenly it dawned on me that when I was their age I thought that by now I’d be living in outer space. I explained that I thought I’d be shuttling back and forth between the Earth, Moon, and Mars, repairing computer systems, visiting friends and family, and generally cavorting in zero G. At first they all looked at me like I had suddenly sprouted another head. That was before they burst out into raucous laughter. I was puzzled by their reaction. They thought it was the most ridiculous thing they had ever heard. I didn’t probe as to where they thought they’d be in 10 or 20 years but I think their dreams are much more down to earth.
That makes me sad. Then again when I was a kid human space exploration was a big deal. The Apollo program, Skylab, Voyager, Viking were all big milestones for mankind. Today space exploration so mundane it hardly gets a mention on the news. It’s all but disappeared from the public consciousness, so much so that kids don’t dream of being astronauts. So today when we sit down to our New Year’s dinner I plan on asking the kids what they think their future holds. I’m curious what they will say. They are my time machine. They are going to see how this life, this movie, is going to turn out – at least the one I’m living in. I wonder how they think it’s going to end.