This is the opening/trailer for Food, Inc.:

The film opens June 16 at the Kendall Square Cinema in Cambridge, for those of you local to Boston…

(h/t: Boston Locavores blog)

See if you can discern the principle at work in these two news reports below.

First, from yesterdays’ National Post:

The [Canadian] federal Department of Finance has flagged several prominent Crown corporations as “not self-sustaining,” including the CBC, VIA Rail and the National Arts Centre, and has identified them as entities that could be sold as part of the government’s asset review, newly released documents show.

Second, from today’s Globe and Mail:

The [Canadian] federal and Ontario governments are receiving 12 per cent of the common shares in the new GM in return for $10.6-billion (Canadian) in financial assistance. The governments also receive about $1.3-billion in debt and some preferred shares in the new company.

But Prime Minister Stephen Harper held out almost no hope Monday that the bulk of the money will be repaid.

“Clearly, taxpayers will get some money back when the day comes that we begin to sell our equity share, but to be frank, we are not counting on that,” Mr. Harper told reporters. “We are not factoring that into our budgetary plans.”

I’m certainly not a mind-reader, but if I had to guess, here’s what I’d propose as the operative principle: “We will give taxpayers’ money to wealthy industrialists, shareholders, and friends, with little promise of return. We will NOT give taxpayers’ money to any organization which fails to benefit those same wealthy industrialists, shareholders, and friends…even if that organization actually provides valuable public services.”

What’s your guess?

So, the New York Times isn’t willing to commit to using the word “torture.” The Times’s Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, wrote a column on April 25 to explain the paper’s editorial policy:

A linguistic shift took place in this newspaper as it reported the details of how the Central Intelligence Agency was allowed to strip Al Qaeda prisoners naked, bash them against walls, keep them awake for up to 11 straight days, sometimes with their arms chained to the ceiling, confine them in dark boxes and make them feel as if they were drowning.

Until this month, what the Bush administration called “enhanced” interrogation techniques were “harsh” techniques in the news pages of The Times. Increasingly, they are “brutal.”

So… the Times took a brave step forward, and moved from referring to these techniques as merely “harsh” to calling them “brutal!” Washington bureau editor Douglas Jehl explained:

I have resisted using torture without qualification or to describe all the techniques. Exactly what constitutes torture continues to be a matter of debate and hasn’t been resolved by a court. This president and this attorney general say waterboarding is torture, but the previous president and attorney general said it is not. On what basis should a newspaper render its own verdict, short of charges being filed or a legal judgment rendered?

Apparently, though, that editorial reluctance to use the word “torture” isn’t uniform. Today, the Times published an obituary for a U. S. pilot who was held captive by the Chinese military during the Korean War. Here’s the headline:

Harold E. Fischer Jr., an American Flier Tortured in a Chinese Prison, Dies at 83

But before we rush to judgment and condemn the New York Times for shameless promoting U. S. government propaganda, we should examine the behavior that merits the description “torture” in the Times’s news pages:

From April 1953 through May 1955, Colonel Fischer — then an Air Force captain — was held at a prison outside Mukden, Manchuria. For most of that time, he was kept in a dark, damp cell with no bed and no opening except a slot in the door through which a bowl of food could be pushed. Much of the time he was handcuffed. Hour after hour, a high-frequency whistle pierced the air.

So, let’s review: when “we” do it, it’s “harsh;” when “they” do it, it’s torture.

Can it be any clearer?

Finally, a note to all the 24 fantasists out there who insist that sometimes we have to torture, because, dammit, it works:

After a short mock trial in Beijing on May 24, 1955, Captain Fischer and the other pilots — Lt. Col. Edwin L. Heller, First Lt. Lyle W. Cameron and First Lt. Roland W. Parks — were found guilty of violating Chinese territory by flying across the border while on missions over North Korea. Under duress, Captain Fischer had falsely confessed to participating in germ warfare.

[…]

[Fischer’s interrogator, Chong] “wanted me to admit that I had been ordered to cross the Manchurian border,” Captain Fischer told Life magazine. “I was grilled day and night, over and over, week in and week out, and in the end, to get Chong and his gang off my back, I confessed to both charges. The charges, of course, were ridiculous. I never participated in germ warfare and neither did anyone else. I was never ordered to cross the Yalu. We had strict Air Force orders not to cross the border.”

“I will regret what I did in that cell the rest of my life,” the captain continued. “But let me say this: it was not really me — not Harold E. Fischer Jr. — who signed that paper. It was a mentality reduced to putty.”

That’s what torture produces: a “mentality reduced to putty” that will confess to absolutely anything, just to make the pain stop.

(h/t: Andrew Sullivan)

Guess which of these two papers (below) is owned by Rupert Murdoch!

As an added bonus, Agent B points us to a useful online resource that answers the question Do I Have Swine Flu? in a particularly Murdochian fashion.

Found on NYT, some nice Radiology Art. The movies are particularly satisfying.

[Update: I downsized and recompressed the movie, exported it as an FLV, and implemented an open-source video player on the blog to play it back! –Steve.]

Apple’s iPhone only supports third-party applications that have been created with Apple’s software development kit, and then reviewed, approved, and placed in the iTunes App Store by Apple’s own employees. I’ve long thought that this restrictive practice was counter-productive, chiefly because it serves to severely limit the number and breadth of developers who can contribute great software creations.

But I realized this evening that, by pursuing its strategy of fiercely controlling access to its App Store, Apple in some ways gets the best of both worlds. Inside the App Store, only vetted, well-fundedtested, certified programs can be downloaded (usually for a small fee). Outside the App Store – in the land of the “cracked” and the “jailbroken” – novel applications, developed by pirates, provide in-demand features and must-have functionality.

Inside the App Store, applications are bound to conform to Apple’s enforced limitations on hardware and software in the iPhone. For reasons both financial and technical, applications can’t access system settings that pertain to core Phone or iPod functions. This stifles innovation, because Apple’s own employees may not get around to implementing these features, especially if they bump up against the concerns from Marketing, Legal, and Major Accounts. For reasons that are purely financial, Apple requires U.S.-based iPhones to work exclusively with AT&T. This limits adoption of the device, as many potential users prefer (or need) to use a different service provider.

But, developers outside the App store are a different story. Anyone with the skill, interest, and time can create applications for the iPhone, and distribute them. Of course, only users who have deliberately and systematically altered their iPhones’ software can use these “rogue” programs.

While Apple argues in court that these users are breaking the law when they “jailbreak” their iPhones, their App Store managers are keeping a keen eye on the gray market of unauthorized iPhone applications.

Applications like TouchTerm (sssh) have already migrated from the “jailbroken” hacks to Official Applications, in a way that can offer significant financial rewards to the developers (and to Apple). They create functionality that’s desired by a number of users, and it doesn’t infringe on anyone’s “digital rights.” Other apps, like iPhone Video Recorder, are still renegade, but probably won’t be for long. Finally, the process of “unlocking” a “jailbroken” iPhone will probably never reach the App Store, because it threatens Apple’s and AT&T’s precious recurring revenue streams.

By keeping tight control over the Applications that appear in the App Store, Apple² is able to enforce standards for reliability and compliance – and they can also cover their asses, legally speaking. Meanwhile, unpaid and unrelated (even unlawful) developers are busy creating and testing brand-new applications which, if they work, end up in the App Store. Apple gets a lot of upside from this, with little apparent risk.

Of course, if enough users jailbreak and then unlock their iPhones, Apple and AT&T lose revenue, limiting Apple’s further hardware and software development of the platform. But most user’s don’t bother, because the App Store’s selections are good enough. And those who do – the self-described bleeding edge – make great beta testers.

---

Notes:
1. By the distributive property, the phrase

Apple's App Store Approach

can also be written

(App) * (le's + " Store" + roach)

2. Similarly,

(App) * ("lications that" + "ear in the" + " Store," + le)

Programmers can’t report to program managers, which means, among other things, that the development lead, or the CTO, or the CEO, can’t be the person who writes the specs.

The number one mistake most companies make is having the manager of the programmers writing the specs and designing the product. This is a mistake because the design does not get a fair trial, and is not born out of conflict and debate, so it’s not as good as it could be.

As usual, Joel on Software is spot-on.

Today’s Washington Post describes the Treasury Department’s latest plan:

The government is seeking to resuscitate the nation’s crippled financial system by forging an alliance with the very outfits that most benefited from the bonanza preceding the collapse of the credit markets: hedge funds and private-equity firms.

The initiative to revive the consumer lending business, outlined by officials this week, offers these wealthy investors a new chance to make sizable profits — but, thanks to the government, without the risk of massive losses.

That would be like the government guaranteeing the mortgages of all the homeowners who are “underwater,” but letting the homeowners keep all the profits if their homes rise in value and they’re able to sell at a profit. Something tells me that wouldn’t fly. As Atrios says,

They made bad bets when they at least theoretically thought they could incur losses. Now the cunning plan is to hope they make good bets even though…no chance of losses!

This is all going to end really badly.

A great Vanity Fair article explains Iceland’s economic crash:

Yet another hedge-fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: You have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that they are each worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners, but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets. “They created fake capital by trading assets amongst themselves at inflated values,” says a London hedge-fund manager. “This was how the banks and investment companies grew and grew. But they were lightweights in the international markets.”

I suppose it was only a matter of time before Apple argued that “jailbreaking” your iPhone is illegal (technically, a violation of everyone’s favorite Digital Millenium Copyright Act). Because the process of liberating your iPhone from Apple’s restrictions involves copying and reverse-engineering Apple’s boot-loader software, the company argues that users are violating the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions.

Fortunately, we’ve got some crack techies on the case over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They’ve filed paperwork with the U. S. Copyright Office arguing that iPhone users should be granted an exemption from the DMCA because Apple otherwise prevents them from using software from some third parties on the iPhone:

the courts have long recognized that copying software while reverse engineering is a fair use when done for purposes of fostering interoperability with independently created software, a body of law that Apple conveniently fails to mention.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. I’m just glad that the good folks at EFF are around to fight battles like this one. If you can swing it, maybe you’d like to kick ’em a few bucks.