Category Archives: Uncategorized

I thank commenter Craig for discovering that my review of the 9/11 Commission’s report, to be published tomorrow in the New York Times Book Review section, is now online. The review was written before Senator Roberts’ proposal to break up the CIA, but offers several reasons for thinking that the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks, if it was indeed a culpable failure rather than an inevitable one, was primarily a managerial rather than a structural failure. Issues of government organization are baffling. Where you have a boundary, you have a turf war; and if you erase the boundary, you… Continue reading →

The following description of a recent conference on the world’s worst ills, featuring several economists who had been awarded the Nobel Prize in economics, enables me to sink global-warming skeptics and academic public intellectuals with only one salvo. “An international panel of economists brought together to rank the world’s worst ills ended a weeklong conference in Copenhagen Saturday by listing HIV/AIDS, hunger, trade barriers and malaria as the world’s most pressing problems while relegating global warming to the near-bottom of the list. The eight economists at the Copenhagen Consensus � among them Nobel laureates Robert Fogel, Douglass North and Vernon… Continue reading →

In an article in WIRED called Insanely Destructive Devices, Larry Lessig discusses one of the greatest of possible techno-disasters, a terrorist-engendered smallpox epidemic. What gives it a technological dimension is that experiments have shown that genetic alteration of the smallpox virus, utilizing biotechnological techniques and equipment that are inexpensive and widely available, including in Third World countries, could make the “juiced up” virus not only more lethal than “ordinary smallpox” (which kills a “mere” 30 percent of its victims) but also, and more important, impervious to smallpox vaccines (and there is no cure for smallpox). Smallpox is highly contagious and… Continue reading →

Interesting discussion of this question in Slate…. Continue reading →

Good comments, and mostly supportive though some skeptical along the lines of climate models are complex, climate science is uncertain, the experts may be wrong. All true; but reading the skeptical literature, I am reminded of the debates in the 1960s over the effects of cigarette smoking on human health. The evidence for serious ill effects was already very strong, but there were skeptics, some financed by the tobacco industry, who said such things as: the evidence is statistical, the mechanism by which nicotine and tars cause changes in lung tissue, etc. is not well understood, and in short we… Continue reading →

…the Justice Department is conducting criminal investigations of file-sharing networks. This development illustrates a point I made in a previous posting (a Lessig point) about the relationship of substitution between law and technology. The Grokster decision last week, if it holds up, will facilitate circumvention of copyright law by file sharing, by placing the sellers of the software for such sharing beyond reach of the copyright law. The liability of the sharers themselves is not affected; and already as we know hundreds of them have been sued by the recording industry. But copyright law also authorizes criminal sanctions. The Justice… Continue reading →

Good comments, e.g., by “yozhik” and by Prof. Castronova, the economist of the virtual world phenomenon; and for a rich discussion of the laws that govern or should govern virtual worlds, see Balkin. Also a paper by Lastowka and Hunter…. Continue reading →

…is the name of a 1998 novel by Dan Brown, the author of The Da Vinci Code. Digital Fortress is a cyberthriller about the National Security Agency (NSA), which monitors and intercepts electronic communications worldwide. In the book as in real life, the agency is concerned with encryption technologies that can prevent it from decoding the communications that it intercepts.(One of the triumphs of modern technology is the unbreakable code; it used to be that even the cleverest codes could, with enough time and effort, be decoded.) The agency would like all such technologies to contain a “backdoor” that would… Continue reading →

At last, high-level Administration acknowledgment that global warming is real, and that human activity (mainly the burning of fossil fuels, principally oil, natural gas, and coal, and deforestation in Third World countries) is a principal cause because such activity emits carbon dioxide. (See also Times article.) Greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere trap heat reflected from the earth and by doing so maintain a temperate climate. But since the Industrial Revolution and in particular since about 1970, economic and population growth has resulted in greatly increased emissions of carbon dioxide, resulting in greatly increased atmospheric concentrations of… Continue reading →

First example: how technology will bring us to the world of The Matrix. The matrix is a video online world that is so realistic that if one’s “avatar” (one’s electronic self, the player in the video world) is killed, one dies of shock. The current video online worlds, in which you create and manipulate your avatar by means of a computer screen and a mouse or joystick, are insufficiently realistic to cause many deaths; I know of only one, described in a great article by James Meek: ‘In October 2002 a 24-year-old man, Kim Kyung-jae, died of a DVT-like illness… Continue reading →