Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Having been Diet Coke-free all morning, on Sunday around 1 pm I set out to shop for food at a local farm. I stopped on the way at a convenience store and purchased three cans of Diet Coke. Unable to wait to sit down at lunch, I cracked one open, took a sip, and set it into the cup holder between the seats of my car. A few minutes later, I went into the farm shop, leaving Ollie the Collie imprisoned in his Japanese leather-upholstered kennel. In order to get a better view, Ollie likes to perch on top of the armrest between the front seats. When I returned to the car, I found that he had his front paws on the back of the armrest and was basically sitting on the front portion of the armrest, which includes the cupholders. I.e., he was sitting on my open can of Diet Coke.

Shortly after I started the car, Ollie relocated himself to the front passenger seat for greater stability in motion, thus revealing the soda from beneath his furry tail. I hesitated, looked at the can and didn’t see any dirt on it, then took another sip.

The first step in a Twelve Step Program is “We admitted we were powerless over Diet Coke—that our lives had become unmanageable.” I believe that I am there.

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Aside from wondering who will pay more than the cost of a Wall Street Journal subscription in order to subscribe to the New York Times, my biggest question right now is how the NY Times spent a reported $40-50 million writing the code (Bloomberg; other sources are consistent). Google was financed with $25 million. The New York Times already had a credit card processing system for selling home delivery. It already had a database management system for keeping track of Web site registrants. What did they spend the $40-50 million on? A monster database server to keep track of which readers downloaded how many articles? They should already have been tracking some of that for ad targeting. In any case, a rack of database servers shouldn’t cost $40 million.

What am I missing?

[I built a pay wall back in 1995 for the MIT Press, restricting access to some of their journals, e.g., Cell, to individual subscribers and people whose IP addresses indicated that they were at institutions with site-wide subscriptions. I can’t remember exactly what I charged the Press, but it was only a few days of work and I think the invoice worked out to approximately $40 million less than $40 million.]

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This nytimes article describes how GE, despite being America’s largest corporation, does not owe any corporate income tax. The company’s shareholders, of course, pay income tax on dividends, and the company collects sales tax, pays payroll taxes, pays real estate tax, etc., but through cleverness, trickery, and, mostly, lobbying, GE escapes the 35 percent corporate income tax.

The author of the article explains to some extent how GE’s purchase of a Congressman (New York’s Charles Rangel) enabled them to get the tax breaks they wanted, but mostly the author interviews people who believe that the system can somehow be “reformed” so that GE will pay more in the future.

Given that our politicians are more or less openly for sale, I don’t see how a company with more than $100 billion in annual revenue can be denied the laws that it wants, particularly if those laws are obscure and hard for the general public to understand. Is it reasonable to believe that somehow the laws will be adjusted so that small companies, without the resources to purchase Representatives and Senators, or even attend $5,000 per person dinners, pay less while GE pays more?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to scrap the corporate income tax (which a lot of economists have never liked) and replace it with something less susceptible to lobbying by the largest companies?

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A physicist friend sent me this nytimes article on Californians rejecting electric meters that transmit information back to the utility via radio: “the signals cause headaches, nausea and dizziness”. In other words, they hold their mobile phone or cordless phone right next to their brains to call up PG&E and complain that the radio transmitter on the side of their house is making them ill.

I pointed out that California led the way in anti-Microwave oven hysteria, forcing restaurants to post warning signs “microwave in use”. The same folks who couldn’t accept a 2.45 GHz signal confined inside a Faraday cage in their kitchen subsequently were happy to accept a 1.9 Ghz signal broadcast from next to their ear directly into their brain.

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If you have a home aquarium, and wish to assist the Japanese in recovering from the tsunami, purchase some Hikari fish food. This is regarded by many aquarists as the best flake and pellet food available and the prices are similar to American- and German-made food.

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According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libyan_Air_Force, the Libyans don’t have a very capable air force. Their planes are old and the maintenance capability is questionable. The Saudi Arabians, for example, have a much better air force (Wikipedia) and certainly the Europeans all have much more modern and better-maintained warplanes. Why then is the U.S. at war once again? Aren’t we already in enough wars? Couldn’t Libya’s neighbors handle this situation (if indeed it needs to be handled at all)?

Separately, since there was no urgency about this war (the Libyan uprising started on February 15), why couldn’t Nobel Peace Laureate Obama have gotten approval from Congress before showing the Libyans that sometimes the most lasting Peace comes in the form of a 1000 lb. bomb being dropped on their heads by a $1 million Tomahawk missile?

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My email today included a thoughtful offer from Lincoln, the luxury car maker: “Dear NYTimes.com reader, As a frequent reader of NYTimes.com … [you’re] just the kind of person we at Lincoln want to engage. … Though NYTimes.com will soon begin charging for unlimited access, Lincoln is offering you a free digital subscription for the remainder of 2011”.

Apparently the New York Times has identified its wealthier Web site registrants (my zip code puts me solidly in Millionaires for Obama territory, plus they may have merged their user database with additional demographic data) and sold them off to companies such as Lincoln who will now offer relief from the $180/year being charged to poor readers whose page views aren’t worth enough to justify the wear and tear on the servers.

So the newspaper whose editorial board complains that rich people don’t pay high enough taxes will be giving away its content for free to the wealthy while hitting the lower middle class for what might be 10 percent of their disposable income.

Now that I won’t have to pay for the New York Times, perhaps it is time to consider buying that $60,000 Lincoln Navigator that I’ve always wanted.

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I’ve always been a fan of HP laser printers because they were rugged, cheap per page, and the ink didn’t dry up if the machine was idle for a few weeks. Even though I don’t print that much, and arguably an ink jet would be more appropriate for the amount of printing that I do, I grew up with laser printers and like what I perceive as the bulletproof reliability.

Speaking of bulletproof reliability, my lightly used HP 2605dn ran out of color ink. So I spent $215 on genuine HP toner cartridges at Amazon.com and reloaded the 2605. Now it won’t print red. I called HP tech support and reached a very pleasant woman in Costa Rica. She said “do ‘calibrate color’ three times and then do ‘cleaning mode’ three times; four is better”. I did as she suggested and… the printer prints black, but no red, just as before. Putting the old cartridge back in doesn’t result in even a hint of red, so I don’t think that there is any problem with the new cartridge.

(The broken HP 2605dn was made in China; the made-in-Japan HP laserprinter that I bought in the late 1990s is still working in the home of a neighbor to whom I gave it. HP’s specifications claimed that the 2605dn could print up to 35,000 pages per month. If so, its life expectancy would be about two weeks, since mine died after printing 14,166 pages, a capital cost of 5 cents/page.)

Anyone have a straightforward idea for fixing the machine?

Failing an easy repair, anyone have a suggestion for a good home color laserprinter? It can’t be more than 20″ wide, 14″ deep, or 16″ tall. I want it to have an Ethernet interface (CAT 5). I’d rather buy something other than HP, now that I have a $700 doorstop (what I paid for the 2605dn) and about $300 in genuine(ly useless) HP toner cartridges.

[Perhaps this can be combined with tsunami relief if we can find a printer that is made in Japan.]

[Update: In the spirit of research, John Morgan and I (i.e., John Morgan), spent an evening carrying out the procedure described in http://www.reeves-hall.net/tech-gadgets/fixing-washed-out-colour-on-hp-color-laserjet-2605/ . After about two hours of clock time, we had the printer back together. The good news was that it printed in full color onto pages inserted into the one-sheet-at-a-time feeder. The bad news is that it would no longer grab pages from the paper tray, stopping with a perpetual “paper jam tray 2”. We put in another hour of monkeying with the connectors and then it more or less randomly started to work again. It turns out that the mechanical reassembly of the case can cause the machine to fail to feed paper from the tray. If we (i.e., John) had to do this again, it could probably be done in closer to one hour, but that’s pretty painful for a task that needs to be done every 10 days or so if printing at the rated duty cycle.]

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I helped a friend carry out a business trip today. One of the joys of using a light aircraft for business travel is that you get to fly in conditions that test a crew’s piloting skills. The winds were gusting around 30 knots upon our return to Hanscom Field, with horrific turbulence from 10,000′ down to the surface.

On the trip home, my friend mentioned that he’d met a pair of software developers who were distracted by their respective divorces. I responded “The real question isn’t ‘Why do women divorce computer programmers?’ but ‘Why do women marry computer programmers in the first place?'”

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Starting on March 28, the New York Times will start demanding between $195 and $455/year from Web readers (more than the Wall Street Journal, but I guess that makes sense since the WSJ serves so many low-income readers). As reading the newspaper is a waste of time for all but a handful of Americans, e.g., Congress, the President, and their respective staffs, I am predicting a large boost in American productivity. A workforce that has up-to-the-minute information about events on the other side of the globe is… a workforce that should probably have spent that time doing work. If you don’t own a fighter jet, what’s the value of learning about proposed no-fly zones in Libya? If you aren’t a member of Congress or one of their fatcat donors who can get a Senator on the phone, what’s the value of learning in real-time about a debate over a new law?

This is not an argument against learning about the world. I don’t think it is a waste of time to read New Yorker magazine, for example, or go to the library and get a book on the Collapse of 2008. But that’s different than breathlessly trying to keep up with the fragments of information as published by a newspaper. In fact, for many stories I prefer to check the Wikipedia page where the relevant facts have been accumulated.

A very productive friend who has written numerous books says “Don’t read the newspaper in the morning; the bits of disconnected information will scatter your brain and you won’t get any work done for the rest of the day.” So the New York Times is doing us all a huge favor by walling off their content. Let’s hope all of the other newspapers follow!

[Amusingly, the Times, which in the past has had difficulty with basic HTML navigation and hyperlinking, says that they are going to use Canadians as unpaid testers for their incompetently written code: “The 20-article limit begins immediately for readers accessing NYTimes.com from Canada, which allows the company time to work out any software issues before the system begins in the United States and the rest of the world.”]

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