Hi there. Have you been wondering where I am? No, probably not. But look, I was gone: to New Orleans, with the rest of the EchoDitto crew for our annual retreat, which this year happened to coincide with the beginning of Mardis Gras.

Prior to this trip all I knew about New Orleans came from Hard Target and that one Radiohead song with the clarinet. Both proved to be reliable guides, although anyone preparing for a similar trip would also do well to review the scene at a frat party — ideally one attended by several hundred thousand people.

I have lots of stories to tell (two!), and will get to them as soon as I can. At the moment I'm too busy grappling with the fact that I enjoy and am inspired by something affiliated with the Black Eyed Peas; also, pleasant exhaustion.

I won't pretend to be a devoted Clipse fan, but Spencer and Matt's excitement over We Got It For Cheap Vol. 3 has got me intrigued. But I didn't really want to keep my browser open for an hour while I listen to it.

So! Turn on the Live HTTP Headers plugin in Firefox. Reload the streaming page. Capture the conversation between my browser and their server and search for "mp3". What comes up?

http://www.mp3asset.com/xml/2008/02/02/7822210.xml?get=1202165719480

GET /xml/2008/02/02/7822210.xml?get=1202165719480 HTTP/1.1

Host: www.mp3asset.com

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11

Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
BAR: foo
Content-Type: application/octet-stream
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 286
Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2008 22:55:28 GMT
Server: Apache 2.4.0

What lives at that mysterious http://www.mp3asset.com/xml/2008/02/02/7822210.xml?get=1202165719480 URL? This does:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<playlist shuffle="0" autoplay="true" color1="231C24" color2="ED2311" color3="984537">
   <sound src="http://www.archive.org/download/Vol.3_734/01Track1_vbr.mp3" stream="true"><![CDATA[We Got It For Cheap Vol.3 Re-Up Gang Records EXCLUSIVE..]]></sound>
</playlist>

Sure looks like an XML playlist to me. Follow that archive.org URL and what do you get? The complete downloadable MP3.

Security through obscurity: its track record is at least consistent. Use one-time URLs if you want to keep something semi-private, kids.

At the start of the Superbowl I found myself defending Joe Buck from Charles' and Spencer's insults, and complaining that Troy Aikman is an idiot and a terrible color man. Well, I was right (not that anyone disagreed with me about Aikman).

Via Megan/Matt/everybody.

If you're making a post-apocalyptic science fiction epic and are having trouble budgeting for the outdoor shots, I have a suggestion.

So, as I mentioned, EchoDitto just got back from our annual retreat. This year we did something different and scheduled a service project for our first day together. The idea was to start things on a positive note, get everyone working as a team, and hopefully do some good. Being a company forged from the remains of a liberal presidential campaign, we naturally decided to accomplish this by destroying a church.

Of course, it was pretty well destroyed to begin with. The church in question was located in New Orleans' lower ninth ward, close enough to the water that you could see the levees from the front door. I don't know how high the water got there, exactly — twenty feet? twenty-five? — but it was high enough to engulf two floors of a church sanctuary. Three years later, much of the mud was still wet.

This was all set up for us by ACORN, an organization that not only lined up the opportunity but also provided the equipment necessary to keep us from dying (or getting sick, anyway). So we donned our allegedly-Tyvek suits, gloves, goggles and respirators and set to work.

First up: destroying pews. Ben came up with a pretty good system for demolition, and soon we had dragged them all out to the curb. That left us faced with the mud. Oh, the mud.

Although there was plenty of wet, shoe-grabbing muck conveniently located near the doors, most of it was like this: thick, caked, dry. The clumps were easily an inch thick, and hard to break. It was like enormous pieces of pottery had been shattered and precisely arranged into a plane. Shovels and wheelbarrows arrived just in time.

Under the mud there was a layer of carpet stubbornly clinging to life. The less said about the ensuing struggle the better. In the end we got it done — the place was stripped, ready for ACORN's lead and mold remediation measures and then, hopefully, for a congregation that's ready to rebuild.

Throughout the experience it was hard to know what I should be thinking and feeling. Would anyone come back to this building? To this neighborhood? There were no residents watching us work; no church members on hand to choose what to save. We might as well have been excavating an archaeological site. It was easy enough to imagine the despair the deacons felt upon first entering their ruined church, but whatever sorrow might have remained in the place had turned stale and seeped out of the hole in the wall. It was empty.

Plus, reality was being a bit over the top. I mean, c'mon: ladies' shoes? A destroyed organ? A waterlogged Bible? Mud encrusted children's toys?! It was all very maudlin and, frankly, unbelievable. That sort of lack of subtlety would never fly on HBO.

But once we had finished the ACORN folks gave us a tour of the lower ninth ward, and the enormity of the situation became apparent and more immediately striking.

These markings mean that the house was searched on 9/12 by a crew identified as "TFW". They found zero bodies, but the "NE" stands for "no entry" so that number's actually meaningless. Looks like they found a dog, too. Three years later, these spray paint markings are still on nearly every house.

This is the new levee. It's three years later, but this structure, allegedly temporary, is all that has been rebuilt. It's built to the same flawed design as the one it replaced, and built badly at that.

This used to be someone's front stoop. Three years later, the missing house is one of the few visible signs of deliberate progress, if you want to call it that. Whether the owner paid to have it torn down or whether the city did it for them because they were deemed not to be maintaining the property — who knows?

I don't mean to imply that the situation is hopeless. We met a gentleman named Mac who says that God told him to build a community center, so he did. It's an amazing thing. The ACORN volunteers were awfully inspiring, too. But there's still so much to do, so few people, so little attention paid. It's taken years just to accomplish what anyone could reasonably expect the world's richest country to accomplish in weeks. We should all be ashamed.

All photos belong to Jason or Michael

Ezra and Matt are talking about chain versus independent bookstores. Ezra says:

I keep trying to figure out a reason I believe bookstores will survive into the future, but it seems pretty clear that books will eventually be as mercilessly digitized as music, and most bookstores will close, just as most CD stores were shuttered long ago. Tell me why I'm wrong.

I agree with Ezra, so I don't really have anything to add except the suggestion that any answer to his question that includes the phrase "the way books smell" or variants thereof should be immediately disqualified.

(In descending order.)

1. White
2. Orange
3. Pink
4. Yellow*
5. Purple*
6. Green

Note that the odds of me eating myself sick when presented with candy hearts approaches unity for all colors.

* Ranked position is within margin of error.

I meant to talk about the new evidence that biofuels are a bad idea when Brian first wrote about it, but I forgot. Today Matt mentioned it, and I was reminded that virtually everyone is ignoring a key aspect of the biofuel land use debate. If I may quote the beginning of the cover story in the current issue of the excellent Mid-Atlantic Brewing News:

Blame drought in Australia and rain in Europe. Blame increased interest in ethanol as an energy source.

Even blame the growing popularity of beer in China.

Those—and more—are reasons to expect higher beer prices in 2008, and why some brewers will be unable to make some beers no matter how strong the consumer demand. Craft brewers face what more than one calls "a perfect storm" of higher costs and reduced availability for both the hops and malt used to make their beers.

"Prices are going to go up... there's just no doubt about it," predicts Jim Busch of Downingtown, Pa.'s Victory Brewing Co. "And some brands will disappear. Other brands will just totally change in their character."

"Brewer owners are going to have to raise their prices," agrees Russian River Brewing Co. founder and brewer Vinnie Cilurzo in Santa Rosa, Calif., "just to stay in business."

"I think this year will be, to use the Chinese curse phrase, 'interesting,'" comments Hugh Sisson, president of Baltimore's Clipper City Brewing Co.

The threat is real, people. You know Tupper's Hop Pocket, right? Well, not this year you won't — ingredient prices have made it not viable to produce.

So, to summarize: changing global climate; baseless biofuel enthusiasm; and the terrifying prospect of a nation's worth of people who look different from use dragging themselves out of poverty — all of these forces are conspiring to make your favorite brand of beer marginally more expensive and/or taste a little less like pine needles.

And what are our prospective presidential nominees doing about this looming crisis? Nothing. There was only one man prepared to stop global climate change, approach biofuels with appropriate skepticism, and exact merciless economic punishment upon the Chinese for drinking beer (instead of attending to human rights). That's right — it was Dennis Kucinich: the Beer Candidate.

Unfortunately for our nation's future, this truth has become apparent too late. Hell, I would've done my best to support a Department of Peace with a straight face if only he'd explicitly pledged to keep beer prices low. I used to think it was just the former that couldn't occur without the latter; now I see that it works both ways.

Last Wednesday's annual candy heart rumination aside, I haven't really written much here since getting back from New Orleans. It feels like I've gotten worse and worse at recording what I've been up to, which is of course unfair both to myself and to the historians of the future. So:

• I flew to San Francisco and went to some meetings about a social network for lesbians, where they can be free from the flagrantly heteronormative "poke" frame. Then there was some emergency pre-Valentine's chocolate acquisition and a business development meeting here with a prospective client. For those unfamiliar with the lingo, "business development" means talking about how great the internet is while the company buys you bourbon. It's easier than it probably sounds.
  
  Nicco piloted our top-down rental convertible toward SFO in characteristically terrifying fashion, and soon I was sitting in the airport bar, almost exactly 24 hours after I had landed. I chatted with a nice couple who were in town for some sort of trade show. They expressed amazement at my phone and irritation at having to press one to get English voicemail prompts. I opted to pick my battles and focused on getting the bartender's attention. This proved to be a bad idea.
  
  It didn't seem that way at first. I got on the plane and was pleasantly surprised to find that I had a whole row to myself. I zoned out, then spread out, then passed out. The stumble to the bathroom went okay, but the one coming out didn't turn out as well.
  
  My friend Scott is a medic in the Army. He's got as many mortifyingly hilarious stories as you might expect; some of my favorites are about his training. Mostly these are about doing unpleasant things to goats, but occasionally the trainees just do unpleasant things to each other. In one exercise partners take turns wearing inflatable pressure pants and dosing themselves with vasodilators, then abruptly pull the plug on the pants. If you do this — and I'm not suggesting that you do — all the blood will immediately drop out of the top half of your body and you'll go into shock (this is still a better gig than being an Army goat).
  
  That's pretty much what I felt like as I stumbled down the aisle, hung over, sleep deprived, blinded by the lavatory lights and generally out of it. I pawed at some unfortunate passengers' heads, desperately searching for any empty row that could plausibly be my own. It felt very, very good when I found one and collapsed into it. I woke up long enough to curse the Pittsburgh airport, then got home and slept through half the day.
• Also, I had super-birth-valentine's-day-stravaganza! I turned 28 on Friday, but was too busy being spoiled rotten by Emily to really notice. For Valentine's we went to Salt & Pepper, where they fed us well and plied us with port and grappa. We went to Southwark afterward and did some self-plying. The birthday-day was even better (probably because I had no part in planning it): we went to Dock Street and ate fancy pizza with some fine folks, saw Jumper, and grabbed a drink at Chick's. I can recommend all of these things highly (although I admit I may be confusing the actual movie Jumper with the abstract concept of teleportation).
  
  Then: DC! Dave & Buster's! Giant stuffed frogs! My thanks to everybody who dared venture into what is probably the most hostile environment not currently being considered for hosting an international peacekeeping force. I had a great time, but it turns out that friends are better for talking to than they are for enlistment into ad-hoc anti-zombie strike forces (no offense, guys). So this is perhaps not going to be the first installment of an annual tradition. On the other hand, I still have an awful lot of credits on my Power Card...

Whoops! We got a DMCA notice at work today from our ISP, and I'm to blame. It was an accident, honest! I had (allegedly!) been downloading episode five of The Wire's current season and neglected to shut off my Bittorrent app before leaving home. Apparently HBO took notice and didn't take kindly to it.

First: I'm currently an HBO subscriber, so I'm feeling pretty karmically okay about all of this.

Second: I may have been downloading a bunch of other season 6 eps at the same time (I had a plane ride ahead of me and catching up to do!) but HBO apparently only noticed the torrent for episode 5 — a lousy torrent made from an HBO screener DVD, incidentally, with horribly clipping audio throughout. It wasn't even the good stuff! It makes me wonder if they're particularly sensitive to leaked screeners.

Third: although I'm being flip, this is still an embarrassing and stupid mistake. The last thing I want to do was expose the company to liability so that I can timeshift my preferred crime dramas. The odds of dire consequences arising from this particular incident seem to be fairly nonexistent, but it's certainly something I want to avoid in the future. Having no faith in myself, I turn to technology.

OS X maintains an app called Kicker that does various things when network events occur — things like changing wifi access points. It also has an XML configuration file you can modify that'll allow you to run your own scripts. Scripts like this one:

#!/bin/sh

#get the ssid of the network
ssid=`ioreg -l -n AirPortDriver | grep APCurrentSSID | sed 's/^.*= "\(.*\)".*$/\1/; s/ /_/g'`

#fill in your own values for ssid and location below
if [ $ssid = "YourWirelessNetwork" -o $ssid = "YourOtherWirelessNetwork" ]
then
    `killall Transmission`
fi

exit 0

Transmission is the name of the app I use for Bittorrent. You'll want to change that and the wifi network placeholders (capitalization matters!). Then you'll want to save that file somewhere safe and `chmod +x whatever_you_called_it`. Then follow these directions for editing Kicker.xml so that it'll run your script. Voila! The script will run whenever you change networks. It'll check the name of the network and, if there's a match, terminate the Transmission application (potentially messily, I should add — this may be bad for your downloads in progress).

All in all, a pretty clever way to avoid my own stupidity. Hopefully someone else will find it useful, too.

UPDATE: Hmm. After installing this setup I began to experience some pretty weird system blocking errors — most noticeably Terminal.app freezing, but other weirdness, too. You may want to hold off on it for now. I'm giving it another go using a Ruby script that forks immediately in the hopes that this will prevent anything from sticking:

#!/usr/bin/ruby

pid = fork do
    
	#get the ssid of the network
	ssid = `ioreg -l -n AirPortDriver | grep APCurrentSSID | sed 's/^.*= "\(.*\)".*$/\1/; s/ /_/g'`
	
	#fill in your own values for ssid and location below
	if ((ssid =~ /YourWirelessNetwork/i) || (ssid =~ /YourOtherWirelessNetwork/i))
		`killall Transmission&`
	end
	
end

God dammit. I was feeling good about my prospects this year. Yes, I spent two and a half weeks sick. But so did everyone else! I was just trying to fit in! Besides, that length of time isn't that bad by my historical standards. Generally speaking I spend about every twelfth day of the year coughing or sneezing or otherwise being unpleasant to be around, and doing so in an extremely biological manner. I thought this year's stats would be an improvement.

But this morning I woke up with a 101 degree fever. My eyes stung. My lungs felt like burlap covered with cat hair, and my spine felt like a tube of pantyhose crammed full of pointy garbage. I took a sick day and lord was it ever a good idea.

The afternoon's been filled with cranberry juice and bad science fiction movies (when Henry Rollins and Dolph Lundgren are by far the best actors in a production you know you're looking at a quality piece of cinema). Tomorrow? Well, we'll see.

Yup, still sick, although not as deliriously so as I was over the last four days — this is some bad stuff. Mostly I've been confined to lying on the couch feeling sorry for myself. But Saturday's activities did also include an unexpected win at Scrabble and confirmation of Philadelphia's banh mi supremacy — Emily and I checked out Song Que and Nhu Lan, and though the latter has definitely got something to offer in terms of mayo & bread, both offered insultingly small portions of jalapeno and cilantro. It was still pretty delicious, though. And it's always good to be reminded of how stupid an idea bubble tea is.

I'm still producing much more snot than ideas, so for now I'll just ask: anybody want to go to Dorkbot tomorrow night? Alberto Gaitan is presenting the second half of his talk on Remembrancer. It should be pretty interesting. Also on the docket: MIDI goodness and a chat about NASA's newest Mercury probe by someone who helped write its software. Tomorrow, 7pm, GW, free.

From this page:

The Harlem Globetrotters are owned by Shamrock Capital Growth Fund.

Where are the forms to change my 401(k) allocation?!

Sure, harvesting the organs of executed criminals sounds like pleasant and morally unproblematic work. But Matt is ignoring the lessons of John Carpenter Presents Body Bags, Treehouse of Horror IX, and, in a somewhat broader sense, Nightmare on Elm Street, Idle Hands, Jessica Alba's upcoming movie The Eye and any number of other supernaturally-themed transplant films (some of them no doubt inspired by real events).

In general postmortem recidivism is a topic that's too often left unacknowledged by the prison reform movement.

UPDATE: The Nabob reminds me of Body Parts, an argument for my thesis that I had inexplicably ignored. If the Q. wasn't already E.D.-ed, surely it must now be considered so.

• New Hold Steady coming soon! I guess Pitchfork had the news on Friday, but I just came across this live track today. Man. That sounds pretty promising, right?
• That Once song from the oscars sure was purty, huh? Oscar version here; fuller HBO promo-music-style arrangement here.
• The guys in Hot Chip really seem like a bunch of wieners (increasingly in a bad way).

From Derek Lowe's blog:

The actual mechanism of the placebo effect is a field of great interest and potentially great importance.

That's right: someday soon scientists may be working to develop a pill that can mimic the placebo effect.

Personally, I find this immensely cheering. I think I love this universe the most when it's operating at maximum ridiculousness.

Charles just sent me this link which contains the following commercial, over which he and I have been scratching our heads for the past week or so:

After watching it a few more times, I'm convinced: that's Stephen fucking Merritt (dammit).

The fascinating thing about this ad is that it's almost exactly as good as any Magnetic Fields song. And I don't mean that as a compliment. Stephen Merritt gets a lot of disgustingly adulatory press. I think there are three reasons for this:

• He always sounds bored, which is widely regarded as a sign of sophistication.
• His love songs are about dudes, which is considered to be even more sophisticated.
• He spends a lot of time talking about how smart he is, which for a variety of reasons is not something that a given music press interviewer is in a position to challenge.

But I don't buy it. To me his songs have always seemed long on wit and short on genuine emotion, full of calculated revelations of self-loathing but devoid of actual vulnerability. They're beautiful, cold constructions. They're satirical poems from the Victorian Era, they're the chess column in the paper hummed aloud, they're New Yorker cartoons adapted for Broadway. They might as well be about gum.

It was very nice of Megan to link to me yesterday (even if the commenters that came along with it proved to be huge pains in the ass). So I hope I won't seem ungrateful if I take issue with this post about Blu-Ray's eventual triumph over HD-DVD.

Megan's right that I and a lot of my fellow nerds aren't very happy about this outcome, but she's wrong to say that "[e]very time there's a format war, the losers complain that the inferior product won through nefarious methods." I'm not sure that's a fair characterization. In this case I can admit that Blu-Ray is the technically superior standard. Many technologists didn't like it because it seemed a bit more DRM-laden, because it didn't seem worth the price premium, and because Sony has behaved very badly with respect to proprietary media formats in the past (Redbook/CD excepted, but of course that was a joint venture with Philips). I should say that I don't really have a dog in this fight — I don't own a drive from either camp, and tend to think that we'll only get halfway through this generation of tech before network delivery of video consigns Blu-Ray to a CD-like role (except less useful due to the aforementioned DRM). But that doesn't mean I'm happy with the way things turned out for HD-DVD.

It's not so much that I think there were dirty tricks involved (although there may have been). It's just that it's frustratingly obvious that the factors determining a technology's success frequently have little to do with its capabilities, price, performance or other innate attributes. Rather, they're the result of quirks of the business environment into which the technology is born.

The Reason article that Megan links to irks me much more than her own post, as it consistently fails to understand this. "MS-DOS wasn't an inferior technology that succeeded because of the market landscape and consumers' path dependence," it says (more or less). "It's just that the licensing environment surrounding IBM PC clones made them cheap, and once consumers started using DOS the costs involved in switching made doing so impractical. So you see, it was the superior technology after all."

The article does this again and again, most egregiously in the case of Dvorak vs. QWERTY*, where the author desperately tries to establish that actually in all cases the market selects for the optimum technology, always and in perpetuity throughout the universe. I know, I know — if you're a home-row typist you're probably laughing so hard right now that your pinky fell right off the semicolon key. But the argument proceeds anyway, tirelessly pointing out that geek-favored technologies have some downsides, maligned market winners have some upsides, and the way the path-dependent public ultimately chose is proof that the winning tech trumps the former on the merits.

Well, if you define "the merits" as "the sum of all factors facing the public" then yes, that's true. But this amounts to merely asserting that we live in an at least semi-rational universe, which isn't a very useful or original conclusion. The fact is that in many cases it would be better if those factors were weighted differently. As things stand, they're generally configured to serve the interests of the businessmen at the beginning of the process more than the consumers at the end of it, and that's a shame.

I suppose I shouldn't get too upset; this is just a variant on the Libertarian tendency to perpetually declare ours the best of all possible worlds (except for the parts they don't like). But it's still frustrating to read stuff like that Reason article. You just know that the author doesn't use a command line.

* Special bonus sophistry: pointing out methodological errors in pro-Dvorak studies, then buttressing the point with pro-QWERTY studies... full of methodological errors. Unless you really think it's fair to compare the marginal benefit of training to a group of experienced QWERTY typists and newly-trained Dvorak typists.

Ryan responds to my last post. I appreciate the thoughtful attention, but I can't say that I agree with much of his post.

I understand what Tom’s saying, but I think he’s missing some key points. He wants to judge a technology in a "pure" world, outside the presence of the market conditions in which it will be sold and used, but you can’t do that. The utility of a technology is inextricably connected to the market conditions in which it will be sold and used. A Beta videotape might clearly be superior on most quality variables, but if a VHS tape is long enough to hold a full-length movie and Beta isn’t, well that’s important. Saying that length shouldn’t be as important as other variables is pointless; the market didn’t just want "Quality," it wanted a certain quality.

I was careful not to mention Beta/VHS before because Ryan's exactly right: length vs. quality is reasonable decision to have to make, and one that the market is better positioned to make than I am.

But his larger point is wrong. Yes, the utility of a technology can only be judged in relation to the world at large — more precisely, the world as it currently exists. But a technology absolutely can be judged apart from that, in its own timeless, rarified world. Every engineering discipline develops principles and design patterns by which work can be judged. Technical elegance is a real thing, and it really matters. Something designed well will be reusable, will be extensible, will be, as we sometimes say, "futureproof".

And the difference between a good and a bad design does not always come with tradeoffs. The components in a DAT cassette deck and a high-end analog cassette deck are pretty similar. DAT has been much less commercially successful. But it is the superior technology. There's just no getting around that. In that case the cost of finding the better solution was time; in other cases it's as simple as giving a damn.

>The fact is that in many cases it would be better if those factors were weighted differently.

Emphasis mine. To this, economists will say, "Says who?" But the broader point is this. Tom believes that he can look at a technology and say it’s better or worse than another technology. Economists say he can’t, because Tom doesn’t actually know what the great mass of consumers wants.

I'll bite: why do I feel so confident saying it would be better if the weighting were different? Well, consider the reason why MS-DOS was successful: it was selected for inclusion on IBM's soon-to-be-blockbuster line of microcomputers. There were a number of similar technologies at the time, and it was up to IBM to choose one. Why MS-DOS? Well, depending on which version of the story you subscribe to, it was because Bill Gates' main competitor was late to a meeting, or his wife wouldn't sign an NDA, or, ironically, because the competing system was too successful in the marketplace and its owner — not realizing how valuable or market-changing the IBM deal would be — didn't want to sign over his business for what IBM was offering.

This all made perfect sense at the time. But now, decades later, what has the result been? It would be wrong to assign all of Microsoft's sins to MS-DOS, but the fact remains that the system was unequivocally technically inferior to other operating systems of the day, as judged by those aforementioned engineering principles. And those principles won out, as they almost always do: limitations of MS-DOS that may not have been immediately apparent became evident as technology advanced, and countless amounts of money and effort had to be expended to come up with workarounds, fixes and kludges. In a word: externalities!

How much did that all cost? I have no idea, but it clearly dwarfs the amounts that were being weighed and judged against one another during the IBM-CP/M-MSDOS deal. There's every reason to believe that, had a superficially similar but fundamentally superior technology to MS-DOS been selected, we would all be better off.

Now of course I can't say that definitively. Maybe the productivity gains of an all-Unix world would have been so great that we'd have accidentally opened an interdimensional portal to Dinosaur World by now and all been devoured. Or something. But I can say that the selection of an engineered product carries costs that may not be apparent for years — costs that non-experts are in no position to estimate until they occur. And even experts can generally only say "this was built well" or "this was built poorly". But in many cases that's enough, and it would save us all a lot of money if we listened to those pronouncements more carefully.

Oh, and one more thing: it's probably worth noting that one of the greatest technical (and economic) triumphs in recent memory — TCP/IP and the suite of other protocols and standards that powers the internet — was designed by having a bunch of really smart engineers get together, execute an RFC process and then issue an ISO standard more or less by fiat. This is not to say that markets can't help us arrive at good solutions — cable vs. DSL vs. FiOS is a good example of such a market working (or would be if the regulatory picture weren't so complicated). But it ought to be acknowledged that markets are not always an optimal tool for making technical decisions. In fact there are now pseudo-centralized organizations that take responsibility for many of the technical standards that power our world, and nearly all engineers agree that we're vastly better off for it.

UPDATE: Tim, who knows considerably more about this than I do, corrects my history and explains that TCP/IP did triumph through competition with other protocols. Fair enough! But I think the point stands: even when there is a "competition" stage in drafting a net technology spec — and this is an important function of the RFC process, so there ought to be — it's still true that the selection of the winning ideas/specs is largely isolated from the consumer economy, and with good reason. In cases where the consumer economy inserts itself in the process — e.g. when Microsoft uses its marketshare to undercut the W3C — most people agree that the end result is detrimental. Openness and the winnowing of ideas is important, but when the decisions involve infrastructure the process needs to be restricted to those with some expertise.