DanKohn.com

The man accused of being the 20th suicide bomber, Zacarias Moussaoui, was told by the judge that he is “so unsophisticated in the law that he came close today to inadvertently pleading guilty and ending his trial”. In his defense, I will admit to always finding the definition of Nolo Contendere confusing.

Martha Stewart seems humble:

Asked what effect the stock sale had had on her, Ms. Stewart said: “When I was a model– and I was all during high school and college — you always wanted to be on the cover of a magazine. That’s how your success was judged. The more cover, the better. Well, I am the C.E.O. of a New York Stock Exchange-listed company and I don’t want to be on any covers of any newspapers for a long, long time. That’s the story. Thank you very much.”

In related news, hell froze over today.

The prime minister of Malaysia is stepping down.

If Dr. Mahathir, 76, was leaving because he was at the top of his game, which was another theory heard here today, “wouldn’t he have coordinated it better and confided in his colleagues?” asked another diplomat. “Can you think of another semi-dictator who has said, `O.K., I’m through?’ ” the diplomat continued.

Now if Saddam Hussein would just follow suit.

Fortune magazine has a huge article on my former boss, Craig McCaw, and the companies I used to work with, XO, Nextel, Teledesic, and ICO.

Going Gas by Fred Kaplan in Slate explains that it’s not quite time yet to buy:

Has there ever been a more alluring gizmo than the plasma TV? The first time you see one, you really do gasp. The screen is so big and wide, the image is so bright, the set is so amazingly flat, just a few inches deep — you could hang it on the wall.

Besides, real aficinados currently prefer DLP and LCD projectors for equal brightness, better resolution, and no motion artifacts.

It’s been a nightmare trying to get a) high definition source material and b) a hi-def projection system capable of showing it off for Pixonics. I’m proud of the system we’ve hobbled together out of a Pentium 4 with a dual-DVI video card hooked up to 2 HP DLP projectors. The box can display a 32 Mbps MPEG2 stream across 2048×768, with complete pixel for pixel accuracy (i.e., no stretching). And, we assembled it for less than $10 K, as opposed to $100+ K for comparable demo systems.

William Saletan writes on the bathos of Bush’s Palestinian statehood non-proposal:

That’s what the offer of a “state” with no defined borders, powers, or timetable (and no right to be represented by its present leadership) is. It isn’t even a bone thrown to the Palestinians. It’s a picture of a bone. Bush’s father was notorious for confusing the photo op of a thing (”Message: I care”) with the thing itself. The son, too, seems to think that his words are equal to deeds.

Until you see 100,000 NATO troops occupy the occupied territories, don’t expect much to change.

In his NYT opinion column, Nicholas Kristof suggests a new banner for clothing: “Proudly Made in a Third World Sweatshop!” I would buy it. Seriously! This brings to mind two of Krugman’s best ever pieces, In Praise of Cheap Labor and Enemies of the WTO:

Critics take it as a given that anyone with a good word for [globalization] is naive or corrupt and, in either case, a de facto agent of global capital in its oppression of workers here and abroad. But matters are not that simple, and the moral lines are not that clear. In fact, let me make a counter-accusation: The lofty moral tone of the opponents of globalization is possible only because they have chosen not to think their position through. While fat-cat capitalists might benefit from globalization, the biggest beneficiaries are, yes, Third World workers.

The raw fact is that every successful example of economic development this past century — every case of a poor nation that worked its way up to a more or less decent, or at least dramatically better, standard of living — has taken place via globalization; that is, by producing for the world market rather than trying for self-sufficiency. Many of the workers who do that production for the global market are very badly paid by First World standards. But to claim that they have been impoverished by globalization, you have to carefully ignore comparisons across time and space — namely, you have to forget that those workers were even poorer before the new exporting jobs became available and ignore the fact that those who do not have access to the global market are far worse off than those who do.

If you seriously think that “fair wages” or the banning of sweatshops will help those in the third world, you owe it to yourself to read these two pieces.

The WSJ quotes a new Pew Internet life survey:

Roughly 24 million Americans, or 21% of all Web users, now have high-speed connections at home…. The dominant mode of high-speed access was still through cable TV modems at 71%, followed by DSL telephone lines at 27%, while 2% were using satellite or wireless broadband services.

There are 278 M Americans according to the CIA World Factbook.

Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics

Want to understand the problems of false positives in anti-spam filters? MacSlash lost its domain name because its renewal notices got filtered.