Random searches on subways

When I first heard that New York City had responded to the London bombings with random searches on its subways, my first thought was: "Great. More unconstitutional government surveillance of dubious security value." The Times has a closer examination of the legal issues.

Slippery-slope arguments are, of course, rather suspicious in general. However, these subway searches continue an ongoing slide, over the past few decades, down a long slippery slope w.r.t. accepting government surveillance of its citizens, and I find this incredibly dangerous because the potential expansion of surveillance seems limitless.

The trend has accelerated in recent years, accompanied by an additional dash of terrorism-induced stupidity, in which invasive security "precautions" are embraced without any regard for their effectiveness. The TSA confiscates tweezers, police harass people for taking pictures of tourist attractions, Congress mandates a comprehensive national ID database with "files" on practically every adult American, and the vast majority of Americans just nod. It must be done, in the name of stopping terrorism!

Where do we draw the line? I think that as long as terrorist attacks continue (and they will continue), a majority of Americans will never draw a line. It seems entirely conceivable that at some point in the not-so-distant future, Congress will pass a law mandating random searches of people's houses; and a Federal judge will uphold it (because the ransacking occurs with a fixed frequency that is not up to the discretion of individual officers); and nearly all the members of Congress who voted for the bill will be re-elected.

Post-deadline bookmarks cleaning

• Nathan Newman's interesting (though, I think, much too hopeful) take on Supreme Court nominee Roberts.

• Nathan Newman again, on the unsound economics of protesting against more housing in Brooklyn. The exorbitant housing prices (and manifold absurdities that follow from them --- apartment brokers, etc.) are, of course, the biggest drawback by far of living in early 21st-century NYC. It seems obvious that the right thing to do, from a public policy perspective, is get lots more housing built. Protesting against a reasonable plan to build more housing is just perverse.

• Speaking of Brooklyn, here are some parrots.

• Why bicoastal liberals look down on conservatives in Red America: Sorry, but this kind of shit simply does not happen in Seattle or New York.

• How to generate "Pink Noise" (apparently, "pink noise" is a pleasant-sounding featureless noise useful for blocking out the sounds of the world).

• Alina Stefanescu points to some notes on first responders to terrorist attacks.

• Two Economist stories, on physical mobility and social mobility in America. Incidentally, this isn't entirely related, but I recall reading somewhere that some philosopher(s?) once theorized that meritocracy was a bad idea, because under a meritocracy all the smart/talented people would eventually gather in the centers of power and associate and interbreed only with themselves, producing a permanent ruling class; whereas under an aristocracy based on heredity or some other arbitrary notion, mediocrity and failure would be inevitable, thereby ensuring that the ruling class would fall periodically. My memory on this point's pretty vague, so I don't remember where or when I read it; possibly the idea dates back to antiquity.

• A handy Greencine list from markhl: The "New" Korean Cinema. I particularly recommend Save the Green Planet! and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, although the latter's only for the extremely patient.

• Joi Ito on Korean bloggers. What's most disappointing to me, here, is that the bloggers in Korea (one of the most wired nations on Earth) are embracing the most closed, proprietary blogging systems. This isn't surprising, though: Asian-Americans tend to use Xanga rather than Blogger or LJ for their personal blogs, and Koreans overwhelmingly to use MSN Messenger for IM, and the Korean localization of KDE is a joke. But I should stop complaining; if I really want things to change, I should learn more Korean and translate KDE.

• Speaking of closed systems, The Complete New Yorker will only run on Windows 2000/XP, and Mac OS 10.3+. Translation: "We think that you'll only want to read 80 years of New Yorker articles for the next 5 years, which is when WinXP will no longer be officially supported by Microsoft; also, nobody who uses Linux reads the New Yorker." Grrr.

  Q: Why can't they just give us PDFs? A: Piracy. Q2: Won't the protection on these things be cracked soon after release anyway? A2: Yes, but this way, you can ease the jitters of ignorant suits, give hackers something fun to do, and shaft legitimate users all at the same time --- what's not to love?

p.s. Regarding my previous post, it looks like Google has finally recomputed its indexes, so my reasons for moving no longer hold. I'll continue to use this blog, for now.

Preparing for my job search, and Google frustrations

I doubt very much that this prof's attitude prevails in most hiring committees.[0] However, my ongoing war to make Google forget my real name is not going well, as you can all verify [1], and to play it safe I've decided to take drastic measures. I'm taking down this blog later this month; hopefully, Google will manage to erase it from their cache and search results in the few months between July and the fall application season.

I am also going to be on total blogging hiatus until July 19th (the reason for this date should be pretty obvious to the programming language researchers out there). At that date or thereabouts, I will resume at my new personal blog, I Sub Rosa. Point bookmarks, aggregators, and whatnot, if you use such things, to that URL, since this one will stop working in a week or two.

Let's see if Google chases me there...

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[0] If I were less busy these days, I could dissect this essay in more detail, but I'll just have to exercise some self-control.

[1] Incidentally, as far as I can tell, I have succeeded in scrubbing the web of all direct links that use my real name in the link text. Interestingly, however, this doesn't actually take this blog off search results for my name, which leads me to believe that Google uses historical page data when computing the relevance matrix. This could be a design feature, or a bug that pops up due to persistence of stale page indexes.

Happiness and utilitarianism

A recent cross-blog thread about what happiness means:

1. Will Wilkinson: responding to some erroneous statements in Richard Layard's recent philosophy book Happiness.
2. Brad DeLong replies, defending the notion of happiness-maximization.
3. Will Wilkinson rejoins, dissecting the concept of "happiness" as it is normally understood.
4. Julian Sanchez weighs in, noting that certain abstract philosophical notions of happiness don't map very well onto actual human psychology.
5. Brad DeLong comments, without much explanation, that he finds the objections to happiness-maximization unconvincing.

Of course, longtime readers (all three of you) know that the theory of happiness is a longstanding concern on this blog, and I come down roughly on the side of Wilkinson and Sanchez --- one, two, three, four.

M. Schwimmer's post-Grokster law exam question

Best blog post today (via Copyfight): Martin Schwimmer's Trademark Blog has a law school exam question:

Client is computer and software vendor. It wishes to introduce its new computer featuring a CD-RW drive and MP3 management software with the advertising slogan: "Rip, Mix, Burn Your Own Custom Music CDs."

Client is a consumer electronics manufacturer. It invents a video recording device. It wishes to say in its advertising that its product allows the user to 'build a library' of his or her favorite shows.

Clients ask you if the advertising actively induces infringement.

IMO the very fact that these are hard questions reveals that the Supremes' ruling on Grokster wasn't nearly as favorable towards innovation as some people (e.g., Kevin Drum, simultaneously wrong and supercilious as usual) have been implying.

Related: SCOTUSblog sub-page for Grokster; previous post/link roundup on Grokster.