A personal introduction to Digial Rights Management (DRM)
Given the unorthodox style in which I’ve lived the last 4 years of my life–forsaking a lucrative and stable job stateside in favor of pursuing entrepreneurial and educational opportunities (with varying degrees of success) abroad, specifically in Latin America–I’ve felt a bit more freedom than I otherwise would have to spend most of my computing [...]
Kill Your Word Processor: Popularizing Lightweight Markup
As a part of my tentatively titled Kill Your Word Processor project, I’ve been trying to think of ways to expand the audience for it, particularly because I’ve more than once been frustrated by collaborators’ insistence on the use of clunky word processors and browser-based WYSIWYG editors which I’ve long since given up on.
I even [...]
Lightweight markup and Web 2.0
In a lengthy post earlier this month, I took a first stab at describing a word processor-less approach to document composition and formatting. A key component of that approach is the use of what has variously been referred to as "humane text," WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean), and "lightweight markup"–formatting [...]
Kill Your Word Processor
There once was a time when I regarded the word processor as a milestone in the evolution of publishing technology that began with Gutenberg’s printing press. I was astonished at the results that could be achieved when using Microsoft Word in conjunction with TrueType fonts and a low-cost HP inkjet printer. For a few [...]
New York Review of Books on pro-Bush media
One of the most pressing questions in contemporary international relations is how the world’s lone superpower, the United States of America, allowed its foreign policy (to say nothing of its record at home) to be hijacked by the ideological extremists of the Bush administration, and whether there’s any possibility of recovery from this situation in [...]
Some alternative economic and political visions
While filing away some readings from the first trimester of my graduate program in international studies–a period that included courses in international relations theory and international trade–I came across two items that concisely present powerful challenges to prevailing orthodoxies in economics and politics. They are, respectively, a summary of Norwegian economist Erik Reinert’s project [...]
The Cash Nexus
Niall Ferguson. The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World 1700-2000. New York: Basic Books, 2001.
In The Cash Nexus, published in early 2001, historian Niall Ferguson endeavors to undermine approaches to history based on economic determinism, replacing them with an interpretation that instead privileges "political events." This approach enables him to dispense [...]
Understanding economics
One of my motivations for enrolling in a course of study in international relations is the opportunity it gives me to fill in the (huge) gaps in my understanding of economics. Studying organizations like the WTO and phenomena like international finance is a good way to get started toward an understanding of how the [...]
The Pleasure of the (reStructured) Text
Every item that you read on this site was composed not by tediously applying HTML angle brackets to delineate the paragraphs appropriately or create hyperlinks, nor by selecting elements and clicking icons using a "WYSIWYG" editor that may or may not generate valid XHTML, but by using a plain old text editor (e.g., Notepad for [...]
“Raining blood”: Suicide bombings in Iraq
In the deadliest attack of its kind since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in April 2003, a suicide bomber killed 114 in Baghdad yesterday when he lured civilians to his vehicle with promises of work, then detonated a bomb.
A survivor said that in the midst of the chaos caused by the explosion, it was "raining [...]