ADVICE FOR AMAZON, reflections on digital stardom, and more: Jeff Jarvis is on a roll today.

POLISH TROOPS are staying in Iraq.

UPDATE: Here’s a roundup of blog reactions from PJ Media. Most people feel we owe the Poles some gratitude here, and they’re right.

I’VE BEEN MEANING to order Battlestar Galactica ever since Virginia Postrel wrote that it “may very well be the best show on TV and is certainly the most philosophical.” I don’t know why I never did — I guess the memory of the earlier, Lorne Green-based series from the 1970s (which wouldn’t fit Virginia’s description at all) got in the way.

But now James Poniewozik, writing in Time, ranks it his number one show of the year, and observes: “Most of you probably think this entry has got to be a joke. The rest of you have actually watched the show.” Okay, okay, I give.

And, yes, I could watch it on TV when it airs, but that never seems to work for my schedule. I could also break down and buy a TiVo, I guess, but I haven’t.

UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg agrees on Battlestar Galactica.

RICH, FUTURISTIC GOODNESS: The Carnival of Tomorrow is up!

AUSTIN BAY is asking readers what were the big stories of 2005.

JUST BACK FROM IRAQ, Bill Roggio responds to a Washington Post article by Jonathan Finer and Doug Struck. Excerpt:

There are three problems with this article which require a response: the use of incorrect facts which could have been easily checked; the portrayal of my embed as an information operation; and equating U.S. military information operations with al-Qaeda propaganda efforts.

Read the whole thing. I hope the Post will run a response and correct the errors.

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt and Paul Mirengoff are unhappy with the Post.

Bill Quick, meanwhile, says the Post reporters are afraid of competition.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The Post is accused of engaging in a FUD campaign. “This is fascinating stuff because the production of FUD is a sign of an organization whose product is facing a competitive threat that it can’t beat head to head.”

Meanwhile, another freelancer who covered Iraq on his own initiative, J.D. Johannes, weighs in, too.

And Mark Tapscott writes that this will be a test for the Post in terms of handling major errors regarding the blogosphere. He also wonders how the mistakes that Roggio outlines made it past all those layers of editors and fact-checkers we hear about.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: The Belmont Club has more thoughts.

And Ed Morrissey writes: “I have to express some disappointment with the Post in this instance.”

MORE: Dymphna has further thoughts, though I don’t endorse her John-Lennon-inspired vision.

And Gateway Pundit notes that Egyptian bloggers are unhappy with the Post, too.

As Ed Morrissey notes, in general the WP has been much fairer than most American outlets. I’m a bit surprised by this, and I hope they’ll make it right.

A COUPLE OF INTERESTING ITEMS on military personnel matters, from StrategyPage. First overwork is a problem in retaining NCOs:

The U.S. Department of Defense has found that the current war in Iraq and Afghanistan is causing many troops to leave the service, but not for the reasons you would think. The biggest complaints involve the heavy work load, and the time spent away from families, and time to relax and recuperate. Danger and physical risk is not a major factor. As a practical matter, the losses from the heavy work load are not a major problem, because the reenlistment rate has gone up since the war began. But numbers are not everything, because it’s the experienced NCOs and officers getting out that do the damage.

Second, sexual harassment isn’t much of an issue:

Ever since American women were first recruited for regular military service 90 years ago, there were fears that sexual harassment would be a disruptive influence. Because the military is a very disciplined organization, this has proved not to be the case. There is sexual harassment, but much less than in civilian jobs. A recent Department of Defense survey of 76,000 members of the military reserves found that 53 percent of men and 33 percent of women believed there was less sexual harassment than in civilian jobs. In addition, 44 percent of the women saw no difference in the degree of sexual harassment at military and civilian workplaces. . . .

Because the troops are no longer allowed access to booze or prostitutes in the war zone, and about fifteen percent of the troops are female, there is a lot of sexual activity among the troops. This is largely against the regulations. But enforcing a ban on consensual sex is seen as counter-productive, and the hanky-panky is tolerated. For the moment.

That seems wise.

GRAND ROUNDS is up!

COOL AND CHEAP: I remember being impressed with a — hellishly expensive — 10MB HardCard, back in about 1984. Now I just “installed” one of these 60 GB shirt-pocket hard drives, powered by USB, and cheap enough that it was pretty much an impulse buy; I wanted something easily portable to back up laptops. (It really is as small as it looks in the photos, too — only a little bigger than a deck of cards or a pack of cigarettes.) I use the quotation marks around “installed” because all I had to do was plug it into the USB port and it was ready.

Six thousand times the storage, at (if I recall correctly) about one-third or one-fourth the price, in a much more convenient package. If only everything got better as fast as computers and electronics do.

UPDATE: Reader Kevin Murphy emails: “Moore’s Law states that performance/price doubles every 1.5 years. Given 21 years, that would be a factor of 2^^14 or 16,384. Which is pretty close to 6000 times performance at 1/3rd the price. Pretty good long-term validation of Moore’s Law if you ask me.”

Meanwhile, Jim Skrydlak emails:

Your post today about your new shirt-pocket disk drive and the steadily declining cost of technology was right on (as usualy for your posts). I thought that it might interest you to know that, in the mid-1970s, disk drives came two to a box. The box was approximately the size of a washing machine. Eight boxes were, in turn, attached to a controller, which attached the whole string to a channel (I’m talking IBM 360/370 here). An individual drive (Model 3330-1) held 100 MB (200 MB for a box). The cost, including a pro-rata share of a controller, wa in excess of $1 per MB. We used to refer to the disk storage for a computer room as the “disk farm”, and a farm would, in fact, cover an acre or more.

None of that is even to mention the electric power consumption both to run the disk drives and to dissipate the heat nor the frequency with which there would be a problem with a drive, a controller or a (removable) disk pack, which was a stack of ten (I think) platters, each 13″ (I think) in diameter.

That’s before my time, though my computer-science Explorer post in high school used a Univac 494 (already obsolete then) that employed drum storage, which I think was even more primitive. It was big, loud, and impressive, though, something that few computers really are now. My washing machine, however, probably has more computing power.

Meanwhile, Jeff MacMichael reflects on how he used to carry his PC, uphill, to school in five-foot-deep snow. Me too. And not just on the way to school — it was uphill both ways!

Finally, reader Michael Yancey emails:

Oh, man, that brings back memories.

I sold a motorcycle to get money to buy a 20meg Hardcard. I remember its logo and graphics being a minty green. I remember I got $400 for the bike and the drive was every bit of that plus maybe $25. But, boy, that was speed, in those days.

Yeah, I had a Kaypro 4 — a CP/M machine with not one, but two floppies – which were both double-sided and double-density. I couldn’t afford a hardcard, though I think you could get them for Kaypros. One of my friends had one on (I believe) a Northstar machine, then favored by programmer-types for some reason.

And, actually, the Kaypro, primitive as it was, was a very satisfactory machine to write on.

ED CONE: “Last night during the 7 o’clock Simpsons on UPN I saw Al Sharpton doing a LoanMax commercial. It made me ill.”

UPDATE: John Tabin is defending Al Sharpton.

RADLEY BALKO ON HOMELAND SECURITY: “the most bumbling, error-prone, embarassing government agency in town.”

Which is saying something, really. But, to their credit (er, or at least non-detriment), the story that they sent agents to harass a college student who requested Mao’s “Little Red Book” via interlibrary loan is a hoax.

Democrats should be making a big stink about problems with Homeland Security, but that would require criticizing big government bureaucracies. There’s also the problem that many of them supported creating the DHS, even though it seemed pretty obvious at the time that it was a lousy idea.

CHRISTMAS RETAIL SALES look to have been pretty good, according to this article (subscription-only) from the Wall Street Journal. Excerpt:

Holiday spending climbed 8.7% ahead of last year, according to SpendingPulse, a retail-sales data service from MasterCard International’s MasterCard Advisors unit. Demand for flat-panel television sets, MP3 players and digital cameras helped spur gains, as did sales of home furnishings. But sales of jewelry fell this season following years of solid gains.

I blame that last on Jonah Goldberg’s relentless criticism of lame jewelers’ ads. But here’s the bigger news:

Online spending continued to explode this year, as retailers offered Web-only discounts and shipped gifts later than ever. Holiday retail sales on the Internet are expected to top predictions of $19.6 billion in sales this year, a figure that is 24% ahead of the $15.8 billion consumers spent online last holiday season, according to comScore Networks Inc., a Reston, Va., market-research firm.

I seem to remember some talking heads pooh-poohing online sales last week. Sounds like they were wrong.

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt notes that this is an embarrassment for some.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Kevin Crosby sends this Reuters story, which is much more negative:

Online retailers’ shares fell in the first trading day after Christmas, as some said sales during the holiday shopping season were slower this year than in the past.

As Kevin notes, it would be nicer if we knew who the “some” were. The story also says that oil prices fell, dragging down the stock market. I’ve noticed that when oil goes up, it’s called bad for the market, and when oil goes down, it’s called bad for the market. Obviously, it should always stay exactly the same price. . . .

ROBERT BRUEGMANN’S Sprawl: A Compact History, gets a rather positive review in the Chicago Sun-Times. Excerpt:

Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman is equally enthusiastic.

“The intellectual perception of sprawl is a snobbish one that says it’s all crap, and Bob points out that it just ain’t that way,” Tigerman says.

“It’s not a black-and-white topic — in fact it’s terribly complex — and he goes through it all in a compelling argument that’s going to have a huge popular appeal. I’m not saying that Bob is a messiah and has all the answers, but it’s a really refreshing second look at what’s happening.”

Yes, it is. And, as NewsAlert notes, one nice thing about the suburban lifestyle is that “it beats having to rely on a transportation union to take you to work.”

BETTER ALL THE TIME: The Speculist’s roundup of under-noticed good news is up.

MICKEY KAUS: “Iraq the Model is telling me at least as much about what’s going on in Iraq as the New York Times these days.”

IN LIGHT OF THE “LITTLE RED BOOK” Homeland Security hoax, Jim Treacher is looking for a new synonym for “fake but accurate.”

THE INTERNET is increasingly affecting local politics according to this report. (Via Jeff Jarvis).

THE DIGITAL CAMERA CARNIVAL is up, over at Entropy Manor.

And if you’re in a Carnivalesque mood, also check out the Carnival of the Capitalists. Also the lawbloggers’ Blawg Review, where they’re passing out awards, the BritBlog Roundup, the Carnival of the Recipes, and, of course, the Carnival of the Cats.

And there are lots more carnivals here. Check ’em out!

UPDATE: Haveil Havalim is up, too!

MORE REPRESSION in Egypt.

JIM LINDGREN notes that although the story of the “Little Red Book” incident has turned out to be a hoax, there’s a massive government censorship program on university campuses that has gone almost unnoticed.

THE SOUNDS OF silence. “Hillary Clinton. Has she said anything about the current domestic surveillance controversy?”

UPDATE: Mickey Kaus:

One reason the warrantless eavesdropping controversy may help, rather than hurt, Bush in the polls has more to do with the character of his administration than popular support for eavesdropping. . . . if the Bushies have really had the energy to secretly do all sorts of illegal spying against terrorists, it’s almost reassuring. At least they’ve been on the case, doing their job as they see it. The more thorough and secret the eavesdropping, the more reassuring on this score.

Maybe Hillary has figured this out.

TV FODDER: I mentioned earlier that Ray Kurzweil will be on Book TV at 10:15 Eastern tonight. Now David Boaz emails that Milton Friedman will be on Charlie Rose tonight at 11.

AMAZON’S PRICE DROP POLICY: I didn’t know about this:

Did you know that if the price on something you buy drops, within 30 days of your purchase date, Amazon.com will credit you the difference if you ask for it? It’s a not-advertised price drop policy that most people don’t know about and it’s saved me tons of money over the last few years.

It’s news to me. Thanks to reader Paul Engel for the tip.

PROFESSOR KENNETH ANDERSON: “Shame on Robert Kuttner for cheapening our collective heritage.”

I think that Lincoln’s reputation is beyond the poor power of Kuttner’s words to add or detract. That said, the notion that Kuttner would be guilty of partisan unfairness strikes me as less than shocking, though Anderson’s discussion suggests that bringing up the Civil War may have been a mistake on Kuttner’s part. But as Anderson says, “Charitably, Kuttner is out of his intellectual depth.”

UPDATE: John Rosenberg is also unimpressed with Kuttner.

More here, too.

HERE’S MORE on Jeff Bezos’ new space venture, Blue Origins. “The company is designing a spacecraft that will take off vertically like the classic sci-fi rocket, land the same way and carry three passengers. Depending on FAA approval, the earliest test flights in Texas could occur late next year.”