Fixing California.

Huge budget problems -- ideological conservatives who refused to raise taxes vs. democrats scrambling to contain costs that they contributed to.  Big mess, all around. 

If there's one thing I know about California, it's that real estate prices are simply out of control. 

I think the state can fix its problems by upping the transfer stamp tax on property.  Just peel off about 10% of any gains, period.  I have no idea what the right number is, but that's a great place to start.  Most of this money is "found" money anyway -- people's properties just escalating in value like crazy.  Tap into it and try to solve a little bit of the budget crisis.

12:23:47 PM    comment []

Selective Enforcement.

On the sodomy laws: One thing I haven’t seen debated is exactly how these laws would be enforced. About the only way that you can do it is to put cameras in bedrooms. Yes, that is pretty darn crazy, and you can rest assured that John Q public doesn’t want a camera in his bedroom, being monitored by government forces. Since we’re not going to have cameras under any circumstances, what does this really mean? It means that there will be selective enforcement of the law. And how selective is that enforcement going to be? Will there be political motives behind said selective enforcement? You can bet that there will be. It’s an effort to apply enhanced scrutiny to the private lives of some of our citizens. A law like this is designed to erect a barrier. It’s designed, in the long run, to become a litmus test; screening out certain segments of the population and punishing them.

11:13:28 AM    comment []

We have our own Mullahs.

Dr. Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, referring to a constitutional amendment that would ban anything other than "traditional" marriages:

"I very much feel that marriage is a sacrament, and that sacrament should extend and can extend to that legal entity of a union between - what is traditionally in our Western values has been defined - as between a man and a woman. So I would support the amendment."

We rail on and on about how the religious nutcases in the Middle East are wrecking democracy, trying to institute somewhat crazy traditional beliefs.  And right here, right at home, we have the Senate majority leader demonstrating, casually, in public, that he cannot see any difference between a religious marriage and a civil one.  Once again, I say do what you want with your church.  Marry whomever you choose.  But the civil institution should be available to all, period, of any religion, race, or orientation.  The government, which is supposed to be separated from religion, should deal only with the civil institution.  As a matter of convenience, we may choose to recognize the religious marriage as a civil marriage as well. 

There are quite a series of parallels between the religious political forefront in this country and the mullahs overseas.  The most fundamental, though, is their automatic and complete assumption of a monopoly on truth.  Second is their presumption that they have a duty and/or right to enforce their views upon the silent majority.

Ultimately this is all about the tyranny of the majority.  If the powers that be can convince enough people to maintain them in power, they will begin to more aggressively enforce their religious beliefs on the population.

A one-party political system is not the only thing we need to fear.  A one-party religious system is far more dangerous.

10:56:22 AM    comment []

Silence of the Lambs.

"Quid Pro Quo, Mr. President.  Quid Pro Quo. Provide for me an enlarged tax cut, and you shall have your victory in the next election.  Provide me what I want, answer only these few questions, call forth these few favors, and you will be supplied with whatever means you require.  Spend my gifts wisely, Mr. President, for in the next cycle they may be accompanied by more stringent bindings.

Together we will nurse intolerance, prey on fear, and misdirect the masses.  This grand illusion has only just begun.  Do not look too closely into the heart of this affair.  I reside there.  When you look into me, I also look into you."

10:22:07 AM    comment []

The Word "Values".

Dear Washington:  Do the world a favor, and stop using the word values.  It's a useless word -- we've all realized it by now.  It conveys nothing.  What is a value?  What is a belief?  What is moral?  Where are the lines between these things and everything else?  In other words, I don't know what you mean any more.

Say what you mean. Stop hiding behind a generic term and tell us exactly what you believe goes into the word.  What specific issue do you take to be a values issues?  What side are you on?  Why?  What is the basis for your belief? 

We need a new kind of politician in this day and age -- we need politicians who are not scared of or embarrassed by their political platforms.  It's fine to be on the left, or on the right.  Just explain yourself, and stop hiding behind the easy words.  Stop deceiving others directly, or by leaving things unsaid.

5:15:07 PM    comment []

Comparing Media.

CalPundit notes the difference between British Media and American Media in their treatment of politicians.

One of the best things about the British system is question time, where the PM (Blair) has to get in front of the entire parliament and answer whatever questions the members feel like putting to him. I think it's great. Yes, there's plenty of grandstanding on both sides, but it's a great opportunity to directly connect the executive with the legislative bodies. Some real questions get asked, and some real answers are delivered. The PM cannot hide behind his "team" and act as the invisible hand.

Politicians here are so used to giving nuanced and noncommital answers to even the simplest of questions that interviews with them are generally pointless. Condoleezza Rice is to all accounts an extremely competent person in here role, but interviews with her are as dull as drain water. Why? Rather than impart any of her insight, she simply parrots party line on any topic she is asked a question about. Which means that there's really no point in interviewing her. She isn't going to say anything interesting, or attempt to explain anything.

12:39:49 PM    comment []

IE isn't Usable.

You know it and I know it.  Internet Explorer is no longer usable as a web browser -- I've switched entirely to Mozilla...the reason being popup control.  Yes, there are some popup solutions for IE, but none works anywhere near as well as Mozilla's simple denial of unrequested popups.  So many sites on the internet are popping things up all over the place now, and it's just beyond frustration to have to close all that crap.  Mozilla means I don't have to, and everything pretty much just looks the way it should.

I particularly enjoy reading the Washington Post without annoying popups.  Here's the thing -- I really don't mind inline ads.  They're fine with me.  I even click on them sometimes.  Just like in a normal print publication, the ads can be there without overwhelming the read, or being jarring.  I read Aero News, and they've got a set of display ads lined up on the right hand side of their site.  Some of the ads are pretty interesting -- they rotate them on a regular basis and, shock of shockers, they're relevant to the viewing audience.  The viewing audience will therefore click on them some times.

Idiot spenders pretending to be marketers seem to think that there's no point in ads being directed at a specific audience, when on the web. 

I will never buy anything presented in a popup.  Stick with inline ads.

And stop using IE -- it's poison, because of the popup issue, plain and simple.

11:12:32 AM    comment []

It's the Books, Stupid.

Noted: The Supreme Court's Librarian has resigned.  Fantastic!  This is an unparalleled opportunity for Bush to appoint a right-wing librarian and get busy with some serious book burnin'!  Books that humanize gays -- Gone!  Books that describe the destruction of the environment -- Gone!  Books that describe what has happened in other countries when money has bought the political structure -- foosh!  Away with them.

Welcome to the monoculture.

Keep in mind that we have Supreme Court Justices who cannot tell the difference between morality and religion.  Or they choose not to.

10:58:34 AM    comment []

The "You Have Got To Be Kidding Me" Department.

Our supreme court demonstrates once again how utterly ideological they are.

Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer agreed with Kennedy in full. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor agreed with the outcome of the case but not all of Kennedy's rationale.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented.

"The court has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda," Scalia wrote for the three. He took the unusual step of reading his dissent from the bench.

"The court has taken sides in the culture war," Scalia said, adding that he has "nothing against homosexuals."

First, anyone who adds that they have "nothing against homosexuals" sure as hell does.  Second, the only people who believe there is a culture war are the conservatives trying to throw gays in prisons.  Let's be clear here -- the gay people just want to be left alone.  How fucking hard is that to understand?  Don't pry into their lives.  Don't set up surveillance to "catch them in the act".  Just get the fuck out and leave them alone. 

There is NO clearer place for the separation of Church and State.  Anyone against gay sex takes that position because they believe it is a sin, pure and simple.  Sin is a religious judgement.  You want to chuck a gay guy out of your church because he's having sex with another guy, I say go right ahead.  Whatever.  It's your belief and your intolerant church, and you'll be judged for it (in every sense).

You want to throw the same guy in jail?  That's where secularism has to step in.  That's where reason has to step in.

A Supreme Court Justice who can't figure out something this basic, or is so blinded by his religious paranoia that he can't see around it, is a dangerous and unstable force in our society.

The very first thing I thought when I read the headline was, am I going to finally get some reassurance that the Supreme Court is what it purports to be?  I am bitterly disappointed, once again.

11:48:21 AM    comment []

Dog Mind Reader.

I will make a million $ by making a small video camera (CCD) that attaches to a dog.  The dog runs around for a while, then the owner amuses herself by reviewing what's there and seeing what her dog sees.  Yay!  I make a million $$. 

1:20:26 AM    comment []

Paul Graham's Hundred Year Language.

I like LISP. I like the Scheme variant best, because I think it just comes up a lot cleaner. You can absolutely work any sort of computation model into it, which people can and have done. The distance between the language and the machine is short, and there's a ton of power there. All is good so far.

So why is LISP so hard to read? It's absolutely inscrutable at times. Yes, you get better at it with experience, as we all do. Even with that experience, it's hard to pick out what's going on. I think there are a few reasons for this:

• A general paucity of commenting. This is often because it's hard to figure out where to put them.
• Poor naming conventions. This is one of the things I like about Scheme...vastly superior naming strategy relative to CL.
• The "you can do anything factor". Macros are super cool, and super-tangly. Forcing someone to understand your private language before they can understand your code is pretty cruel. And see the note about comments above.

The thing that's missing from most LISP code are the conceptual signposts that help us "get" things. When you're looking at C code, you look for curly braces to tell you where code blocks are. You look for parentheses to see function definitions and calls. You look for brackets to see operations on arrays. When you take in a wash of code quickly, your brain can pick out these signposts and construct a mental map of an area fairly quickly.

LISP just uses parentheses for all of this. Yes, it's very powerful, but it's also confusing to look at. At a minimum it might make sense to be able to use the other forms, when wanted...just to provide that visual clue.

The terseness of LISP really works against it when it comes to comprehension. On the other hand, sometimes things seem a little inscrutable because something complicated really is going on; something that wouldn't have bee possible in another language.

I like the language. I just wish there were more signposts.

8:42:09 PM    comment []

Games are about Shooting.

Because it's so darn easy to program them. Player pushes button, little missile flies through space, does/does not hit target. Easy math, dammit. Scoring a more complex interaction, like a social one, requires actual thinking by a developer. You've got to balance a complex model. That's a pain in the ass.

And that's why we still have so many shooter arcade games coming out. Bleep! Faaazooot! Bawooom!

8:41:40 PM    comment []

SpamBayes is Badass.

I usually have about 3 months of spam at any one time...just waiting for the day that I needed a training set.  I was using Cloudmark and was somewhat happy with it, but there was just too much stuff sneaking through.  Other guys at work have started using SpamBayes, and recommended I give it a try.  I read Paul Graham's articles a while back, and I like the way it individualizes itself.  Good mathematics there.

In any case, this thing just positive rocks.  It's classified virtually everything correctly..only had one false positive, and a few maybes.  I'm sufficiently impressed that I unsubcribed from Cloudmark.  Sorry guys, but your distributed collection just doesn't beat a good statistical method.  And SpamBayes is faster.

8:41:00 PM    comment []

Affirmative Action.

Here's a few bits I commented on CalPundit (great site...good thought provoking discussions).

Richard Aubrey:

Ross, you don't understand. Even a valedictorian at an inner-city school might not come close to qualifying for UM.
The qualifiers and near-qualifiers are, by definition, not educationally disadvantaged. They come from good schools where the determination you describe does not apply. It might apply regarding other issues, but, unfortunately for your point, those other issues are not race-specific. Broken home? Check. Death of a sibling? Check. Chronic ill health? Check. Frequent moves? Check. HOw about a white kid in an impoverished rural school? Crime? They aren't all Mayberries out there. School facilities? Some are okay, some not. Kalkaska district Michigan's northern lower peninsula stopped school in the spring several years ago because they ran out of money. You want maybe to apply your determination qualifier here? Didn't think so.

And I don't have a problem with a rigidly academic set of requirements for admission. Schools are quite clearly in different tiers, academically speaking, and the value of a top-tier education depends on its being actually top tier.

When the less-qualified are admitted, getting them to graduate in numbers which would protect the U from a suit about graduation figures is a problem which might dilute the academic rigor. The solution is race-specific tutoring plans, which, as it happens, have been recently been ruled illegal. If you don't have race-specific plans, then everybody gets the same tutoring boost and those who are less capable graduate in the expected numbers rather than the required numbers. That's why the race-specific tutoring programs were installed in the first place. It was to provide an extra, race-specific, boost. Now don't be telling me that I think all minority students are unqualified. The race-specific admissions criteria were not my idea. I think the universities had that idea first.
The problem is that race is much higher in admissions value than something like income level or location. And we have a constitution and a body of related law which address the issue of race, not residence in the Upper Peninsula.

Be that as it may, the Supremes said the the U's undergrad program doesn't cut it. The first one they had--which they attempted to keep secret--was so bad that a judge in a lower court observed, in passing, that while he thought the current program acceptable, the earlier one was not.

I recall the president of Rutgers, discussing the possibility of making permanent the then-temporary lower requirements for blacks, said something to the effect of "what about those who don't have the genetics....?" He spent a good deal of time abasing himself for having let on what was in his good little liberal heart.

As if there's any surprise here except that somebody was unguarded enough to 'fess up.
With friends like that....

Richard, somewhere around 12% of the population of this country is black. Without race (or equivalents) as a tool in University admissions, various universities have indicated that black admissions would drop to around 1% or so.

According to your pure merit ideas, this is just the way it is, and only around 10% of blacks are capable of "keeping up" with everybody else, on this level playing field. So they're somewhere around 10% as smart, according to that metric.

That seems pretty ludicrous to me, and it probably seems ludicrous to you as well. After all, we're all human. So how do we try to explain that 10x difference in rates? We look to systemic factors -- it's the only thing that makes sense.

A race-based adjustment is a single coarse mechanism for applying a delta to accomodate a series of historical/cultural/systemic problems that have led to the 10% situation.

Or do you think that the 1% admission rate for blacks is about right?

I really want to apologize for putting words in your mouth, and I don't want to polarize the debate too much. I do NOT accuse you of any hidden subtext here -- I am just trying to put it in starkly mathematic terms.

I think we can argue extensively about the degree to which affirmative action should be applied. I must confess that I was startled the first time I saw the scoring system placing race far beyond the SAT score, for example. Scoring is just arguing about how far the dial should be turned, not whether the dial should be turned at all.

This administration displays a distressing love of convenience when selecting its firmest moral positions."

8:25:33 PM    comment []

A Great Mind!

Goodness...Zulfikar must be one.  :)  I am pleased to be able to read his blog!

Rethinking the tag line or the blog title might demonstrate a little humility. 

All in good fun, my friend.  Good luck with the blog.

9:17:07 PM    comment []

Squelch.

Fearful Symmetry tells us that everybody thought Iraq had WMD:

"Yglesias skips over the parallels that must be drawn, he is engaging in an all-too-common revisionist tactic among Bush's critics, which is to ignore the intersubjective and institutional reality of Iraq's WMD programs. Before the war, no one, save for perhaps the Iraqi Information Minister, was out there saying that Saddam had no WMD, and in fact one of the chief anti-war arguments was that Saddam would use his WMD on US soldiers and inflict massive casualties, or that he would launch a strike on Israel and provoke regional Armageddon. Similarly, while the terms "weapons of mass destruction" and "WMD programs" were used interchangeably by three US presidents to illustrate the danger posed by Saddam's regime, critics now deny that finding WMD development programs -- which we have discovered in Iraq -- are as important as finding huge caches of WMD. "

Yeah, well, maybe everybody that the Right was listening to said that Iraq had WMD.  I seem to recall the small matter of worldwide demonstrations from people who simply didn't believe, based on their common sense, that Iraq was in imminent threat to the civilized world.  These demonstrators have been proven correct.  The Right has a powerful squelch control on their thought radio.  It is capable of retroactively tuning in only communications they agree with!

Iraq was in no way, shape or form the imminent threat that the Bush Administration painted it to be.  Yes, they were bad people.  There's a significant chance they're going to be much worse off, in the end, because of the famed Bush Foreign Policy Attention Deficit Disorder.

Remember Afghanistan?  So few people do, these days.  We blasted the crap out of that country; now it's gone from being run by the Taliban to being run by a bunch of warlords.  America?  Hardly anywhere to be seen. 

11:08:40 AM    comment []

Someday You Too Can Be An American.

It struck me just now that the Right in this country is attempting to seize the definition of American.  They define an American as a capitalist, a moralist, and little else.  Anyone who disagrees "hates America" -- and the implication is that they are not American. 

There is a Special Society, made up of people who've "made it", to pinnacles of wealth and power.  They are the only true citizens in Bush's America, and the only ones whose opinions matter.  Membership in this SS is for sale.  Your money is your proof that you belong. 

The group's mandate is to perpetuate itself.  This is achieved by creating law that succeeds in tipping the balance in society even further.  While this is taking place, the SS must be extremely careful to ensure that the illusion of equal opportunity is preserved.

Recently they have become so emboldened with their success that they no longer feel the need to preserve the illusion.  Come November 2004, $200 million of relentless media barrages will cement in the minds of the population that in order to raise all boats, the boats of their masters must first be raised; it is only through their leadership that the population will gain.

Join the Leadership Class! Be a part of tomorrow!  Step right up with your $2500 for a hot dog, and we'll let you in on the secret.  We're going to win.  And we know who our friends are.

The Right has decided that society as a whole is a loss; since that's true, they might as well make a few people very, very happy. 

And by the way, how are we doing with the massive job gains we were supposed to get from the last tax cut? 

10:47:25 AM    comment []

John Edwards Sums It Up.

Here's the full text of a speech he gave recently.  The real question is, why does Bush do what he does?  Does he truly believe in what he's doing?  If so, why?  What is the rational evidence beneath his policies?  Is there any?

This is where Buckethead and compadres need to chime in. 

10:36:12 AM    comment []

Bought and Paid For.

Common Sense. Phil Greenspun has a funny (as in sad) story about the market rising because the public domain is being transferred to corporations. As Phil writes.........
[Lessig Blog]

Never thought about airspace in that context, but it makes a lot of sense...it has belong to all/the public or there can be no air travel...but if Disney gets to own the airspace above Disneyland, why can't the rest of us then also own the airspace above our property? [Ottmar Liebert]

Let's have a brief think on two things that Disney has recently bought and paid for.  First, the airspace issue.  There is exactly one reason why this stupid TFR (temporary flight restriction) exists -- Disney doesn't want banner towers over its parks.  There are these guys who make a few bucks by flying airplanes in the public's airspace and displaying messages.  Disney doesn't like this -- they want absolute control over the audiosensory experience in their parks, I guess.  They are hanging it on the hook of "security", but that's a lie, plain and simple.  Let's start calling it a lie.  It's a LIE.  Just like in Chicago, where Mayor Daley cited "security" as the reason for digging up Meigs Field, one of the nation's most historic and relevant airports.  He LIED to people.  A few weeks later he even admitted that he lied, and indicated his real reasoning (to build a park and develop more waterfront, probably named after himself).

How do we know the TFR's official reasoning is a lie?  Simple.  Where are the waivers for the banner towing pilots?  They should be able to pass through a simple security vetting process and have their flying rights back.  But there isn't one, and that's how we know that Disney isn't telling the truth.  That the FAA is complicit in this is stunning.  The FAA is normally pretty jealous in guarding its perogatives for airspace, as it should be.  What really happened is that Disney's campaign contributions (there's that ugly word again) clearly influenced a Senator from somewhere, and that Senator made a call to the FAA, and told them to give Disney the TFR they wanted.  And now it's done.

Like I said -- Bought and Paid For.

Second, Disney has managed to damage the intellectual capital of this country in a very significant way, with the introduction of even more ridiculous copyright extensions.  This is a pretty big issue to get into, but the bottom line is that as the copyright term limits have approached some of its key properties, Disney has bought and paid for term limit extensions from its favorite politicians.  These are usually passed under the banner of "helping artists", but that's just bullshit.  It's a LIE.  The real reason is protecting Disney's IP so Joe Average isn't allowed to take a 75 year old image and make his own version of it.

9:37:20 AM    comment []

Tax Cuts == Wealth Transfer.

Preview of tax back-and-forth. Bush Cites the Cost Of Tax-Cut Repeal - An easy counter to "a repeal will raise your taxes" is to point out that state and local governments across the country either raised their taxes (sales, property, income) and/or cut services. Is this simplistic argument too nuanced for most people? [cwinters.com]

It's plain and simple wealth transfer.  How so?  Well, we're giving massive tax cuts to the top 1% of the population.  The Bush government completely lacks the balls to make any cuts to offset the reduction in revenue.  So the services still need to be delivered, and paid for.  That's being done by axing transfer payments to the states and by a massive runup in the deficit. 

When the states see less revenue, they need to compensate.  Unless you're California with its crazy property tax laws, as the State you raise the property taxes to compensate.  Who pays the property taxes?  The middle class, mostly.  So what Bush has done is simply move the tax burden from the wealthy to the middle class.

"You Raised My Taxes" should be the battle cry of the middle class in the next election.  Unless the population of this country tires of having its political phrasing dictated to it by the media, that simply won't happen.

9:28:32 AM    comment []

Rehumanizing the System.

Yeah, I don't think it's a word either.  But I needed one that would say, "hey, there was (I think) a time once, where people cared about fairness, ethics, and their fellow man, and I would like that again".  So rehumanize it is.

What do we need to rehumanize?  Everything.  But let's start with a short list:

• Corporate Governance
• Tax Codes
• Network Security
• The Legal System

You'll note that the things on the list are all complex systems.  So here is my thesis: Complex systems cannot be secured or regulated.  Business goons in the late 90s and onward specialized in contorting the system to produce apparent results that had nothing to do with reality.  From a regulatory standpoint, they had often done nothing wrong (if you think the Enrons of the world are the extent of the problem, keep in mind that 90% of the iceberg is under water), but from an ethical standpoint, it's another story.  Just because something isn't illegal doesn't make it right.

That's schoolyard basic ethics, and it's something that we, as a society, are just letting go of. 

Tax codes are incredibly complex -- the result?  Sufficiently rich members of society don't pay a thing in tax (or pay minimally), and the little guy gets screwed.  The IRS comes down hard on those who aren't able to defend themselves.

Network security is tasked thanklessly with the protection of systems of ever more complexity and ever more questionable reliability.  Clever hackers know that complexity is their friend -- the more crap that's installed on a system, the higher the probability that system can be broken into. 

Finally, the legal system is just absolutely out of control.  Let's focus down on one thing -- tort law (everybody's favorite).  I see the linkage that exists between corporate malfeasance (if it's not explicitly illegal then it's ok) and the ridiculous state of liability (if you didn't specifically warn me about something, my personal responsibility ends). 

So there's a coupling between all of this -- that the systems that make up our everyday lives are too complex, and need to be pulled back in somehow.  They need to be better designed.  It needs to be possible for a human to understand them again, and fair enough that humans don't mind participating.  In short, they need to be rehumanized.

11:18:19 PM    comment []

Piccolo Rocks.

Had a great time tonight building some cool stuff with Piccolo.  Yes, this is my substitute for a social life, at least for tonight.  Once you get your head around how Piccolo works, you start sketching...a lot.  Then you try to make those things real.  The cool thing is, you lay out the general shape of what you want, and then with about two calls, you can do basic animation and transparency effects. 

There's a whole new world of UI out there, away from the crapperies of Swing and Windows...I never liked that stuff.  It's ugly, too hard to lay out, provides very little in the way of focus+context, and is just generally a huge pain in the ass.  Plus the tools suck.

Tonight my UI design tool was a sketchpad.  All I did was couple Piccolo with a little high school geometry, and I have a clock setter that I truly like.  The clock setter has these behaviors:

• Clicking a time node smoothly expands into a clock face, with twelve hour circles and am/pm boxes.  It is animated on the expand, and through transparency.
• Hovering over any hour circle or am/pm lights that up.
• Clicking on an hour sets the time to that hour, and also produces four more circles -- :00, :15, :30, :45.  Clicking on one of those produces 15 circles down to the minute.
• Clicking off the structure folds the whole thing away.

After futzing around with umpteen stupid clock setting spin boxes and being driven nuts by them for a decade, it's amazing to see what a single night's worth of engineering on Piccolo can do.

Next I plan to play with transparency on a global scale -- damping down my entire UI while "modal" stuff, like my clock setter, is active. 

1:36:41 AM    comment []

Space Tethers.

You use'em to slingshot things into orbit, or maybe out of orbit too.  The problem is that the cable has to be really strong, and there's a lot of crap floating around up there that will sever a cable.  One solution to the breakage problem is to make a cable into a kind of mesh, so breaks don't matter as much.

Making the tether out of a mesh is a pretty cool idea, but all you've done is extend the lifetime by some factor. What you really want to do is find a way to repair the damage relatively easily.

Picture two mesh tethers between the endpoints. Each tether is made of a series of lines. The lines come out of the tether and are _unwoven_ from the mesh weave. They are then looped back around and _reweaved_ into the tether going back in the other direction. Each line within a tether is actually participating in a complete loop, there are back again. Each line is an unbroken circle.

The tether is then _moved_ through the continuous loop, unweaving and weaving at each end. In this way the tether acts like a belt.

If a break occurs, then movement of the belt/tether will eventually bring the break to one of the terminals, where it can be repaired. The weave localizes the damage and ensures that the line will not simply fly off into space. The repaired line is then rewoven into the loop.

A belt-like tether like this can last indefinitely.

1:51:58 AM    comment []

General Computing.

What pisses me off about the music piracy/blow up the computer thing is this -- the REAL goal of the RIAA is to create a permanent "tax" on media. What they want is for Joe Consumer to pay a few dollars every time he buys blank media. Then, when the media isn't as popular any more (due to high speed interconnects and dropping non-volatile storage) they'll go for a tax on the devices themselves. They're the milkmen of our age -- they once had a role but technology has largely made the record companies irrelevent. Any competent band can record in a home studio for a few thousand bucks, now. You can do the whole thing on just about any PC. Record companies don''t serve artists -- they screw artists.

For this society is supposed to pay them a tax, in perpetuity, as they grow progressively more irrelevent?

The RIAA is hiding all this under the guise of copyright and IP. It's BS. They're advocating a huge attack on general computation to attain their ends.

For the non-technical, consider this: The RIAA does NOT want you to have the ability to do any computation that you please on your general purposes computation device. In fact, they do not want you to have a general purpose computation device. In the past (and currently) you can take your computer and program it to do anything that you want. It is capable of performing any transformation of information from one form to another. The RIAA wants to disable this capability. They want to make it extraordinarily difficult to perform certain transformations. Naturally, most real techies can get around it, but for the average person it will be impossible.

It's funny, but there are parallels between gun laws and the information that ricochets inside a computer. The constitution says that I have a right to speak, I have a right to carry a gun. Do I have a constitutional right to TRANSFORM information as I please? To conduct any analysis I please? To use any method I please?

RIAA and IP grabbers WILL try to push DRM (digital rights management) into the hardware. They're already trying. Keep in mind that the phase that follows this, if they succeed, is that your computer will MONITOR your use of this material and report it back to...well, whoever. Creepy.

Yes, it's somewhat obscure and technical. But you should be scared.

11:16:26 PM    comment []

Gauging Medical Treatments

11:14:48 PM    comment []

Twisting the Truth.

Why am I not suprised?  From the NY Times:

Drafts of the report have been circulating for months, but a heavy round of rewriting and cutting by White House officials in late April raised protest among E.P.A. officials working on the report.

An April 29 memorandum circulated among staff members said that after the changes by White House officials, the section on climate "no longer accurately represents scientific consensus on climate change."

Weapons of mass destruction, tax cuts, and now the environment.  The truth, according to the current administration, is something that is to be bent to suit policy, to suit whim.  They are determined to create the world they believe exists.

11:11:35 PM    comment []

Point of View.

I read Israeli news when I can.  Haaretz is a near-daily stop for me.  I know that it's considered to be a left-wing paper...but those kinds of redefinitions are a classic form of misdirection.  I don't believe that Haaretz is left-wing.  I think it's quite centrist in its approach.  Why?  It advocates a two-state solution.  It believes that negotiation is the right tact.  It acknowledges that you cannot negotiate with an entity while you actively attack and assasinate its members.

Amira Hass' article hits the nail on the head.  I've been reading Israeli coverage for years, and there's a theme that runs through all of it.  Every Israeli death is caused by "terrorists".  Every death caused by the IDF is "accidental".  It is quite stark.  Is there any form of physical or violent resistance that is permissible by the Palestinians?  After all, the Israelis keep them cooped up like animals, preventing freedom of movement, halting their economy, and more recently, not even bothering to apologize when they kill 3 year old little girls.

The reality is that both sides have lost any sense of human life.  There are civilian deaths on both sides.  Israelis are engaged in legitimate military operations against terrorists, but those Palestinians who choose to fight by directly engaging the military occupation are not terrorists.  Infiltrating a settlement and killing civilians is terror.  Infiltrating a military base and killing a soldier armed resistance.  Israel does not seem capable of discerning the difference.

I think the reason for this is the pervasiveness of IDF service.  Because Israel has a draft, Israeli families feel the loss of each soldier very directly -- they have their own sons and daughters.  They do not view these family members as part of a professional combat force, with the risks and responsibilities that entails.  They view the IDF soldiers as civilians in military clothing.  In many senses of the word, this is true.  They are young Israelis, forced into service by their government, just trying to get through the situation alive.

There must be some legitimate outlet for Palestinian hopes and dreams.  When all the military power is on one side, and that side's conservative wing wants to set up an apartheid state, I believe there are moral grounds for resistance.  Three young men slipping into a military base to their almost certain deaths is not terrorism.  It's the price Israel pays to appease their conservatives.

4:48:20 PM    comment []

The Goose and the Gander.

Imagine the outrage an American would feel if one of their own were caught somewhere overseas in, say, France, and had OVERSTAYED THEIR TOURIST VISA. As a result, the French Authorities toss him in jail, houses him with lights on 24 hours a day, calls him a global-dominating capital pig military-complex terrorist, and doesn''t bother letting him see a lawyer or talk to his family. In fact, he can just damn well sit there until the French authorities have determined that he's not some sort of terrorist or malcontent.  Which may take a few months, if you're lucky. 

What we're really talking about here is how Joe America would like to be treated in other countries. What we're talking about the are the basic courtesies that citizens of one country should exhibit to those of another country.  It's a measure of how insular America has become that its citizens have no concern for how they will be treated in other countries, and how little the opinions of others in the world mean to them.

There was no world-wide crackdown and round-up of American students and tourists abroad. Perhaps there should have been.

We didn't round up white people when we attacked Kosovo.

Being legal doesn't make it right.

4:36:14 PM    comment []

Being Branded.

Michael Taht writes on trying to remove brands from his day.  Can't say that I blame him.  Do we have any sort of right to live our lives in that way?  I suppose we can all make our own spaces brand-free, marketing-free to an extent.  Does this right extend to public places?  I guess not.  The only thing that will have any effect on marketers as a breed is for public revulsion to have some kind of effect on them.  The problem is that they specialize in the creation of inoffensive noise that probes at the boundaries of your psyche without truly annoying it.  It's really the accretion of all that crap that's problematic.

4:27:55 PM    comment []

Double Standard.

It looks like there's actually going to be a recall vote on California Governor Gray Davis.  That is amazing.  If the Republicans had only fielded Richard Riordan, the popular and centerist ex-mayor of Los Angeles, instead of Bill Simon, the unknown and conservative magazine publisher's son, this would not be necessary.  But since they didn't, it is.  If you want to know why, check out California's $38.2B deficit.  Amid stories everywhere about state budget shortfalls, California wins the prize for biggest deficit and worst management.  Our kids are the ones who suffer, among others...

[Critical Section]

Or is it?  CS usually writes well to the right...and here we have a conservative criticizing the California budget deficit.  Good Lord, what do you think Bush is doing at the Federal Level?  The federal budget is growing massive beyond all reason. 

At least California has an excuse...it's got a weirdo property tax-avoidance scheme that'll never change, a high tech industry in the dumper, and the amusing destruction of finances caused by the energy companies (who didn't do anything wrong in right-wing-collusive-business America).

CA's budget deficit is bad and needs to be dealt with at the systemic level.  I suspect that property tax reform would do the trick.  Deficits are a cheap-ass way of avoiding the wrath of the public, until you can't get money any more. 

It's just another iteration in the loan shark war. 

12:24:43 AM    comment []

How to win if you're a democrat.

It does seem like the dems are in something of a pickle at the moment...but after watching Meet the Press this morning, it's pretty obvious.  The winning ticket is John Kerry/Wesley Clarke.  Kerry is a pretty smart guy, has excellent executive experience, and just seems like a great centrist.  Clarke is centrist as well, has impeccable military credentials, is a Rhodes scholar, and just plain comes across as completely honest.

And honesty is simply the best tactic to take in the next presidential election. This president and his staff clearly think they know what's best for the American public, and just as clearly, they do not feel any particular need to apologize for any spin they put on the facts that swirl through the issues.

Did the president lie about Iraq?  No.  Did he twist what he was presented, to fit his hypothesis?  Yes. 

In the next election people can decide whether they like having their facts twisted and their truth spoon-fed to them.

11:10:07 PM    comment []

XBRL and Democracy.

Seems like one of the wishes on my list has come true, thanks to the fine efforts of others.  I have long wished for an open accounting format, one that the government requires companies to use.  XBRL is an effort that's being developed by around 30 large companies.  I think it's something of a silver bullet for a lot of the problems that face the markets (and society) today.  Here's why.

• Easy access to raw information.  It's imperative that we bring more analytical viewpoints to bear on the market.  The best way to do this is to widely disseminate the information.  The problem is that the glossies available from companies don't tell you anything about that company's real finances...you need to get into the nitty-gritty to understand it. The reason you need to get into that kind of depth is that accountants lie.  It's as simple as that.  They're given a mission, told to accomplish it, and they'll bend or break whatever rule they have to, to make it happen.  Sad but true. The raw information needs to be available.
• Distributed Analysis.  We should require companies to disclose this information at a published web address.  If they do not have one of their own, the SEC will publish this information for them.  In fact, have the SEC keep the "signed" version of all this data.  Once it's available on the web, we enable thousands of armchair analysts to keep track of what's going on.
• Unification == Tools.  By unifying and simplifying the data format, we enable analysis tool writers to pull in much larger swaths of data.  This will lead directly to more clarity.  Trends and problems will be easier for investors to spot, and public analysis will become much more sophisticated.
• Bidirectional Verification. Once companies on both sides of a transaction are required to file XBRL, we can run automated verification of their statements, with relative ease.  Financial "cycles", where dishonest CFOs try to create hard-to-follow financing loops that hide losses or inflate profits, can much more easily be detected.  There's a lot of hard science out there in graph theory-land that can lend itself to this kind of processing.

Beyond what it can do for private companies, the same standards can, I believe, work wonders for our public accounting as well.  All governments, at all levels, should be required by federal law (if not constitutional law) to provide complete and accurate information in an XBRL-style format.  All the same benefits of transparency are then applied to the public sector.

The composite flow graph between the public and private sector can be analyzed to provide leading indicator information for the Fed.  It can also be analyzed to detect fraud.  Government finances will be the subject of substantially more discourse, as the real (signed) information will truly, finally be available.

"He said, she said" is the real financial problem our private and public institutions are facing.  The unfortunate abdication of ethics by the top of the accounting profession has lead directly to this.  We have no choice but to route around them; they are a failure.

We should pass laws for this kind of transparency and semantically complete accounting information.  It is NOT enough to simply publish english reports on the web.  The correct structuring of this information is key to achieving the benefits I've outlined above.

6:41:26 PM    comment []

You divide, I'll choose.

Once of the problems with our current legislative system is that we have folks like Roy Blunt inserting last minute stuff into things like Homeland security, where those insertions have nothing to do with what the bill purports to be about.

Presidents have been arguing for a line-item veto for a long time. I was under the impression that the President following Clinton would have such a veto. Does Bush have a line-item veto? Has he ever used it?

I was thinking about a more general mechanism -- the problem is that legislation wanted by a large majority of people gets hung up on "stealth" stuff inserted into the bill.

What if every member of congress or senator had the ability to trigger a vote of "bill splitting"? The idea here is that a single congressman or senator could, at suitable points, propose that any legislation be divided into two or more parts. Each part would then be subject to the normal process. As an assemblyman you''d have to get at least a certain percentage of the chamber, say 20%, to agree, before the split would take place.

What this would ensure is that objectionable items could easily be separated out of bills, early in the process. Each part of a bill would have to be able to live or die on its own merits.
You would need to have some order in the process, to prevent legislation from being hacked to death, into atoms, but the general idea seems pretty cool.

Opinions?

11:08:47 PM    comment []

What kind of country do we want?

We can argue about the wording of the constitution until we're blue in the face.  At what point do we have the courage to ask ourselves if we can do better?  There are a series of constitutional documents that have been created over the past 50 years or so.  Are any of them better than the good ole US of A constitution?

Keep in mind that the "official" constitution has been amended quite a few times.  It's evolved, and for good reasons.

If we could make constitutional changes now, what changes would we make?  Starting with flag burning is probably not going to be my first choice.

12:16:33 AM    comment []

Three Years Old.

The only thing that surprises me about the Israeli Defense Force's murder of 3 civilians today is that they did not attempt to describe the 3 year old girl they killed as a "gunman".

8:55:03 PM    comment []

I Beg To Differ.

Ole Eichorn thinks single moms usually have children to get tax credits!  Giving a tax credit to someone who "pays no income tax" is spending.  And...a young girl is better off having a child, than working for minimum wage.  He calls this the mutilated beggar effect, a reference to the horrible practice of mutilating children to multiply their begging capability.

First of all, there's this popular right-wing myth that the poor pay no taxes.  BS.  There are sales taxes.  There are payroll taxes.  There are property taxes (which get factored into rents).  So this notion that the poor pay nothing is just plain wrong.  Payroll taxes are around 15.8%, if you include the portion that employers pay on your behalf, which you should.

The real problem is the minimum wage.  Why is a young single mom better off with a welfare check than a job?  The minimum wage should be pushed up by a dollar or two, so this simply won't be true any more.  Conservatives will cry that this will surely cause job losses. Yes, it will cause a few.  The very vast majority of jobs being done for minimal wage are things that pretty much have to be done.  Employers can absorb another dollar there.

Under the total tax structure in Alabama, I recently read that someone making aroun $14,000 a year pays about 13.5% of his income in tax.  Someone making $200,000 a year pays about 4.5%.

Nobody likes paying taxes.  If the child tax credit situation is so great, why doesn't Ole dump his job, take his wife and start making babies?  Because it would suck, that's why.  It sucks to be on welfare.  The lifestyle is really poor.

I have been in favor of welfare reform, as a whole.  I think that there were a lot of able-bodied people who just plain went out and got a job.  Pushing them off welfare has done a lot of good.  But we're talking about kids, here.  Cutting the child tax credit is just going to mean that there are going to be starving kids.  We're not exactly talking about the most responsible parents in the world.  Who is going to help these kids?  What will become of them?

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

And quoting Tom Delay?  Tom Delay is perhaps the evil politician in America today.  He has no discernible principals other than naked power.  He is violently, abusively partisan.

2:06:51 PM    comment []

Revisionism?

Condi Rice:

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice described as "revisionist history" recent criticism that senior Bush officials starting with the president may have overstated what was known about Iraq's chemical and biological weapons leading up to the war in March.

"The truth of the matter," Rice said on NBC's "Meet the Press," "is that repeated directors of central intelligence, repeated reports by intelligence agencies around the world, repeated reports by United Nations inspectors asking hard questions of Saddam Hussein, and tremendous efforts by this regime to conceal and hide what it was doing, clearly give a picture of a regime that had weapons of mass destruction and was determined to conceal them."

It would be revisionism if we'd all agreed back then that there were WMD, and then later on a bunch of us decided that there weren't.  It seems to me that a pretty good chunk of the world (say, like 90% of the population of the planet) just wasn't seeing the evidence.  UN inspectors were in there, and weren't finding anything. 

What Rice is saying is that, hey, the administration isn't at fault, because they were just acting on what they were told by the intelligence chiefs.  The intelligence chiefs, meanwhile, are saying that they didn't say that there were WMD.  They used words like probable, possible, and so forth.

Which leads me to the conclusion that a FUNCTIONAL VOCABULARY is a necessary attribute for a President.  If Bush had a better command of the English language, he would have understood that when the CIA said probable, it meant that there might or might not be WMD in Iraq. 

Somebody hand Bush a dictionary before he starts another war.

1:29:17 PM    comment []

The WMD Scoreboard.

Meme Cauldron's scoreboard is making me laugh.  Good point!

Here's the thing: Republican reaction to Clinton's lies about a blowjob: Impeachment.  Republican reaction to Bush's lies about WMD: Cheering!  Maybe "lies" is too strong a word -- so far.  The jury is definitely out.

For the sake of declining American credibility in the world, I hope Bush is right, and something, somewhere, gets found.  I hope it's locked up in nice, safe containers.  Of course, given that Saddam Hussein didn't use WMD as his reign was being destroyed may be a fairly good indicator that it was never "45 minutes away" from being used, as the Brits claimed.

We see grumblings from intelligence analysts that their "possibles" and "probables" were turned into "definites" by the administration.  We all know what happened.  The Bush adminstration performed the same spin on intelligence data as they do on just about every other piece of information that passes through them.  This is par for the course for standard political, domestic issues.  We all expect it and would be surprised if it didn't happen.

The difference is that the spinning here was used to start a war.  The resolutions Congress passed were to defend against a WMD threat, not to have a regime change for regime-change's sake. 

Right now it all looks like a lie.  What else can you call telling the Congress something that you know will get you the resolution you want, but also knowing that it basically isn't true?  The executive branch is supposed to be finding a way to justify war, however possible.

This is a disturbing trend.

Ashcroft's Department of Justice makes no apology for using all available remedies in its pursuit of terror and suspects.  The human cost of trampling on so many individuals, for no reason, doesn't even register with him.

Similarly, Bush's administration makes no apology for twisting available facts to suit its policies, to bend the middle east to its will. 

Bush has said that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.  I guess it depends on what the meaning of the word "are", is.  Doesn't it?

2:18:03 PM    comment []

Defeating DDOS.

It's time for IRC to go, or to be modified.  The very vast majority of DDOS attacks are coordinated through the IRC networks; bots insert themselves in and wait for commands.  The anonymity afforded by IRC is something that we really can't afford to let continue.  Yes, it's nice that IRC is out there, blah blah blah.  And I'm sure that there's a lot of work that gets done through IRC channels.  There's also a lot of harm that gets done.

Unless some way can be found to implement some form of accountability within the IRC space, I think that ISPs should simply start filtering out all IRC traffic.  DDOS IRC bots running on someone's home machine can't respond to commands that never reach it.  This will force the bots to use some other technique.

Of course, the networks that are set up by P2P systems like Kazaa are also a perfect mechanism for finding and discovering trojan peers running on other systems.

Basically you set yourself up as a trojan, then hook yourself into Kazaa's network just enough to get lists of other machines.  You then probe those machines directly, trying to find trojans running on them.  When you discover one running, the two trojans exchange lists of compromised machines.  You can even insert yourself into the Kazaa sharing directory, etc. etc.

These information-sharing trojans are the real nemesis we'll have to face in the future.  They'll be capable of hiding themselves, be polymorphic, implement their own P2P communications mechanisms, and generally be a huge pain in the ass for anyone who gets one.

Strong Anti-Virus is the only thing that will help us.

That, and ring-based security in our operating systems.  Since we're probably not going to see that in my lifetime, I should stop whining about it.

11:57:33 AM    comment []

Naked Objects.

Stuart Halloway, and a lot of other people, think they're pretty interesting.  So do I!  My feeling is that the future will be something like Naked Objects...it's a strong step in the right direction.  I have been thinking for a long time about fluid user interfaces.  Basically you want the interface to adapt itself automatically to the data.  Swing's various data models are a step in the right direction -- you have many different kinds of controls that can attach themselves to common data models.

XUL goes further -- it says that there is a common data format (RDF), and all the controls know how to assemble themselves from that.

I am not sure that RDF is the idea model for this kind of thing.  Having done some work with tuple spaces and CLIPS-style fact systems, I'd have to say that the facts are definitely the way to go.  They're just more flexible, but the big win is clearly being able to run rules against all that stuff, in a very rigorous way.  The rule systems can analyze the kinds of information present and actually synthesize user interface code on the fly.

The thing to remember about synthesized user interfaces is that the exceptions must be handled.  You need to provide an extension mechanism that allows a developer to get in the special sauce.  The future will be made of partial automated interfaces, together with custom stuff.  This is just like the component model of today -- you use the components where you can, and then you extend as necessary to get the precise behavior you want.

10:54:28 AM    comment []

Flag Burnin'

I guess Congress figures (again) that it should be illegal to burn the flag.  That got me wondering.  What else should we be allowed/not allowed to do with a flag?

• Have underwear made of a flag?
• Is it still a crime to burn the flag if that flag you have has a different number of stars?  Is it still a flag?
• If you throw out a bunch of cloths and stuff, including a flag by accident, and burn it all, did you break the law?
• If a foreign country invades and the only thing you can do is soak a flag with gasoline and throw it at them, should that be a crime?
• If there's a wrestler named Captain America wearing an American Flag uniform, and the other wrestler rips it up, should he go to jail?
• After 9/11 a lot of people drove their cars around with American flags displayed.  These flags quickly became quite tattered, and some were nothing but ribbons.  This is physical desecration of the flag.  Should it have been a crime?

3:07:09 PM    comment []

What's on YOUR computer?

You and I are both computer pros, right?  We have a pretty good idea of what's running on our machines...both in terms of services, and resident programs, and so forth.  The thing is, 90% of the people out there don't.  Maybe we should try and do something about that.

Figuring out what's running on your own machine is a complicated task, especially under Windows.  The various Unixen make the ubiquitous ps displays available, where you can find out a good deal of information.  To have any hope of identifying what's going on there, though, you have to be an expert.  There just isn't any way around that.

Things are worse under Windows.  Processes can hide themselves from the task manager, so they're not visible there.  Many kinds of services can be started and running in your system.  They won't show up in the task manager as anything other than svchost.exe, which doesn't do anybody much good.  You have to play "point and click" in the services manager to try and figure out what they are.

There's no way to monitor what internet resources are being used by which programs on a Windows box, unless you install something like the "ActivePorts" tool.  And even if you install that, you really can't tell what a lot of process are actually doing with your internet connection.  And, of course, you'll have N processes whose only identification is svchost.exe. 

I don't like this whole thing.  Reputable software vendors like Real are increasingly putting crap onto people's systems as a part of their normal installations -- crap like New.NET, or whatever.  It appears that whatever ethical boundaries used to be in place against screwing with a user's machine simply aren't there any more.  Software installer can and will alter basic system functionality without giving you anything more than a footnote in a click-wrap agreement.

I find that unacceptable.

Since we're not going to be able to persuade the world to act in an ethical manner any time soon, we need OS-level defenses against this kind of thing.

I've advocated the "ring" approach before...there needs to be a kind of "virgin" system that sits underneath every OS installation, something that cannot be touched.  We can then maintain layers on top of that, creating and snapping off new branches of software, new "rings", new areas of work.  We can then see, in detail, every piece of software that's running in a given branch.

There shouldn't be any more "RunOnce"-style registry entries in Windows.  All those holes should be utterly plugged.  The only way that the system should permit some program to be run at startup is if it passes a set of checks for identity and signing (if they want it to be automated), or if the user agrees and permits the program to run.  If the user makes that choice, it should be reconfirmed at a later time.

All these mechanisms must be protected at the OS-level from having their "clients" (those rogue programs) corrupt what they do.

What it all points to is this -- you cannot trust your own computer any more.

Do you know that there is nothing running on your machine that engages in behavior you do not approve of?

I believe that it is no longer absolute (and hasn't been for some time) to say that a user controls the data on our own computers.  I think we need to take some of that back, if for no other reason than we need a little self-defense.

1:38:42 PM    comment []

No Veil, or No License.

I guess the ACLU figures that people have a right to identification cards where their identities are obscured.  I think that religious freedom has to stop somewhere.  You can't have a picture identification card that doesn't have a picture on it.  If you don't want your picture taken, fine.  Just don't expect that you'll be given the same set of privileges that others get.

What this goes to is the concept of anonymity.  I don't think that we really should have as much anonymity as we've had before.  I believe strenuously in freedoms, but believe that liberty needs to be practiced in the open.

There are Islamic countries where she won't need a driver's license, because she won't be allowed to drive.  If she wishes to more fully execute her personal beliefs about Islam, perhaps that is the place to do it.  There are plenty of Muslim women in this country who don't have a problem with picture identification.

6:14:46 PM    comment []

Other People's Freedom.

It's my experience that Americans are totally willing to give up someone else's rights/liberty/property in a heartbeat. They just don't like giving up their own.

"Well," they say, "terrorism is a very bad thing. And sometimes we need to lock up good people because of the bad thing".

Sure. This line of reasoning says that because we are/were/might be at war with Arabs, our threshold for locking them up can be arbitrarily low. The sad part is it inescapably boils down to racism, pure and simple.

When we were at war in Yugoslavia, we didn't go around locking up white people.

The thing that absolutely stuns me is how little this Administration cares about the constitutional rights of individuals. That constitution thing is there for a reason. It's because we've all learned something from history. You CANNOT trust a government. The Bush-Ashcroft-Wolfowitz just can't understand why we don't trust them. After all, they''d never lock up anyone who didn''t need locking up, right?

Wrong. Ashcroft won't even TAKE QUESTIONS on his own department's rather scathing report, delineating the treatment of the "detainees".

Lack of respect for individuals coupled with some serious cover-your-ass, and we have the situation we're in.

Even better, Ashcroft thinks that Zacarias Moussaiui (apologies if I've misspelled) shouldn't be able to call witnesses in his own defense. What the hell kind of trial is that? You want to talk about a dangerous precedent -- there it is. The government gets to choose who testifies in a trial? What on earth are they thinking?

There is an adversarial system, and there is lunacy. As officers of the court they're supposed to be interested in, and ethically bound to find, the truth.

Mossaoui will probably turn out to be the screwup he claims to be. He probably did want to be in on the hijackings, but was turfed out for being an idiot. He should go to jail if that's true. Our government should CEASE its pursuit of frictionless justice.

Like I said, if you ask the average American, they're all for giving away someone else's liberty. Just not their own.

7:41:02 PM    comment []

Piccolo.

If you haven't checked out Piccolo yet, what are you waiting for?  It's a very cool library for doing 2.5d user interfaces.  That's an interface that can zoom in and out, and do all kinds of Flash-like things.  I'd love to see what can be put together with it. I've been cooking an idea for a node-based user interface that uses Piccolo in part.

Piccolo does more than just do zooming; it provides a framework for animation-based user interfaces in general.  By animation I don't mean UIs that have dancing monkeys; I mean a UI that shifts and moves and adapts, with context, to what the user needs.

It's all about focus+context, and Piccolo is the means by which most Java programmers should be exploring this.

If I never see another JTree, I'll be a happy man. 

11:15:42 PM    comment []

Performance-based Patent Examination.

If I have to read one more idiotic patent I'm going to scream.  Maybe I'll go ahead and scream anyway.  The problem, as I see it, is that these idiot examiners don't know what the word obvious means.  They also see to pretty much not feel like looking for any prior art.  And the people trying to get the patent certainly aren't going to point out any prior art that they know of -- not any more.  That would require something we call ethics, which used to exist, but no longer does.

There are two things we can do to fix this.  First, tie the compensation system for patent examiners to accuracy.  If a patent they grant is ever overturned on prior art, their rating is reduced.  They get bonuses based on their ratings.  Second, allow prior art to be introduced at any time during the filing process.  The initial filing of the patent sets a mark in time for the invention.  It is then made public.  The public is then free to add any knowledge they may have of prior art.  This public comment period is a necessity to allow the vast, distributed processing power and knowledge of the internet to come into play.

Why do we rely on one harried, stressed-out person to "examine" patents?  We all know there is no examination process.  Patents are simply checked to ensure that they have the right words in the right places, that they follow the correct forms.  Once you've got that, you're in.

The process needs to be opened to the public.

6:30:36 PM    comment []

WMD and You.

If you were a crazed dictator, sitting on top of 30 years of torture and oil revenue, pushing plastic army men and plastic canisters of VX across your little laminated maps, and the big bad Americans were coming to take it all away from you, wouldn't you consider using your WMD?

This is the thing.  If Saddam Hussein had big stockpiles of the stuff and sees the 5th Division heading right for him, wouldn't that be the time to uncork the bottle and let the wind do its dirty work?

WMD was never used against American forces.  I think there are a couple of possible explanations:

1. There weren't any to use.  American intel got it wrong, Bush ignored the evidence, it's a war for oil, you know the litany of consequence this produces.
2. Battlefield conditions made it impractical.  There are WMD, they're hidden, they were never used because it is actually pretty damn hard to deploy this stuff without hurting your own troops.  The lethality of gas agents is pretty minimal, and all you'd end up doing, really, is killing a few US troops and really pissing off the rest of them.
3. The WMD were hidden in a place that made them strategically inaccessible.  This means they're still out there, being inaccessible at the governmental level, but accessible at the informal (read: terrorist) level.  This is a very bad scenario.
4. WMD were never used because Saddam Hussein believed his commanders, who told him that he could win this one for Uday; those same commanders were, of course, so terrified of losing their heads that they probably said whatever they could to save their own asses.  The speed of the American advance confounded any attempt to use WMD.
5. Saddam Hussein had a set of conditions that would trigger the use of WMD.  These conditions were never met because he was prematurely killed, or because he prematurely went to his bat cave to hide out.  The guys left behind decided their asses were worth more than Hussein's orders.

The thing is, Hussein had a lot of notice.  He could have positioned WMD and made them usable in the war, if he had them.  He chose not to.  One possible scenario there is that my drawing out a conventional war and turning world opinion against Bush, he could lose the battles but win the endgame.  The endgame would remain winnable only if WMD were never used.  Using them would play into Bush's hands.

My gut feel is that there are minimal or no WMD in Iraq. 

If you were a crazy dictator, when would you have used your weapons of mass destruction?

Stay tuned for part two of this story - the North Korean version.  Let's have another roll of the dice there, and see what the next crazy dictator will do!  Thank God For Television.

Phillip Greenspun has been writing on this.

4:29:12 PM    comment []

Comments Now Available.

Go ahead, make my day (punk).

10:51:21 AM    comment []

Mandatory Testing.

It's tough for kids in schools these days.  Your whole high school career can boil down to a single test that, if you don't pass it, means you don't graduate.  Fail that, no matter what you've done before, and you're permanently marked for life as something of a failure.  At best, you can be the kid who "recovered", possibly from straight-As, and "made something of himself" after that.

Obviously I think that having kids fail a grade for failing a state test isn't a good idea.  I do think it's a good idea to have the tests; I just think it's crazy to actually change a kid's life because of the results.  Aren't the grades the school is assigning to the kid supposed to be a good indicator? 

The politicians who like mandatory testing should be subject to the same thing.  There ought to be state and federal knowledge tests for politicians.  After all, a basic knowledge of civics, national issues, and international affairs ought to be required.  I suspect that we'd weed out not a few politicians with a few simple tests! 

So let's see that mandatory testing bill for congress.  Let's see them apply the same standard to themselves.  Of course the state and federal governments have been quite busy exempting themselves from the laws they impose on private industry; what's good for the goose is not always good for the gander.  When it comes to their own qualifications, why should they vary the formula?

10:50:21 AM    comment []

Guns and Butter.

So why don't we have vending machines for guns, B? Right there on the street corner, next to the bar, conveniently available after fisticuffs with other patrons? I forgot -- guns don't kill people, people kill people, etc etc etc.

Surely you can admit that it's all about access to firearms. Plus, it's about the kinds of firearms you have access to.

Canada has nice low crime rates, overall. Very low gun death statistics. But, surprisingly high gun ownership rates. The difference -- handguns are strictly illegal. There isn''t any such thing as concealed carrying and nonsense like that.

The reason there's a million handguns on the streets of this country is that there's an industry that's finding a way to keep pushing them.

What percentage of gun usage is legitimate self-defense? Maybe one gangsta defending himself against another is legitimate self-defense, in your book.

And Buckethead's reply:

Current estimates indicate that defensive gun use instances (including brandishing, but not firing, a weapon) number in the millions per year. FBI statistics show that when civilians use guns in self defense, they shoot someone in error less than three percent of the time. Our well trained police officers'' error rate is four times higher. Criminals shoot the wrong person 100% of the time. Who do you want to have guns?

Where concealed carry laws are enacted, violent crime drops. (And if the trend was already downward, it drops faster.)

The reason there are millions of handguns in this country is also that there are millions of people like me who wish to own them.

Crowing about low crime rates in Canada? How many people are up there, anyway? 10, 20? of course they have a lower crime rate.

12:44:14 AM    comment []

MicroProjector

As cell phones and other small computation devices become more and more popular, some way of displaying this information is necessary. A cell phone today can reach out and access a very wide variety of information, but is limited with the tiny display it has to displaying a small subset.

A MicroProjector has a folding, compacted screen. This screen unfolds with a support structure. The screen is only about a foot wide, 8 inches tall, and has the thickness of paper. A small wire or plastic frame maintains the structure of the screen; the wire frame is also collapsible.

A project unit is attached to the wire frame such that the projector sits about a foot or two in front of the screen. The angle of the projection unit is low -- keystone correction is used. The user's PDA can be placed on top of projector and connected. The user then looks down at the display...small display/projector technology (using LED flash tech) then projects a video signal onto the screen. Conventional desktop resolution can then be achieved with a personal, lightweight, portable device.

7:55:43 PM    comment []

Executive Compensation.

To Buckethead: Every conservative loves to think that the "liberals" (whatever they are) want everybody to have the same income. Horse poop. I make more than the average bear, and you do too, in all likelihood. What we''re annoyed about is the divergence, beyond all reason, between the rich and the poor.

You have Joe Paycheck making 40k a year, doing task X in a corporation. Then you have the guy at the top making $25 million, while the shareholders are taking a bath. Market forces, you say. Bullshit, I say.

You and I and the SEC and everybody else knows that there is an extremely cosy relationship that has evolved between Board Members and Corporate Officers. This is a "scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" affair, and the shareholders (the frickin' OWNERS) are left out of it! Why? Total lack of ethics on the part of most boards.

So what do we do about it?

Simple...we need a law. Not a law that says that everybody needs to make the same thing. That's silly. What we do need is a simple law that says, you can't be compensated at ridiculous levels, to the detriment of your shareholders. Let's call it the Ebbers Compensation Law.

I think a formula is appropriate.

CC(max) = 5 * EC(average) + FACTOR*Dividend + FACTOR*Max(Market Cap Change, 0)

where

CC is CEO Compensation, or any other executive spot.

EC is employee compensation.

FACTOR is some numerical factor; I have no idea what this should be. Smart people could figure out a nice number.

Here's the thing -- you make a FEDERAL LAW of this Formula. It applies universally in America. Good CEOs who raise the value of their companies, helping shareholders, increasing pay to their employees, can CLEAN UP under this Formula, as well they should!

Bad CEOS won't find a "special home" with the "pet companies" of their frat buddy board members, where they can idle away their days destroying other people's lives, and saying "oh well" when it becomes obvious.

7:54:55 PM    comment []

And Now the Fish?

Turns out that runoff from agriculture is wrecking the oceans, creating such unnatural wonders of the world like the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico. I have just about had it with the farmers of this country.

First of all, there is massive redistribution going to these folks. Hundreds of billions of dollars have gone to them. Second, they've pretty much managed to ruin a good deal of the land environment. Rerouting of rivers to supply irrigation to farmers has destroyed our rivers and our lakes all across the continent. That same rerouting has also destroyed many coastal fisheries, which depended on the fish being able to spawn (Salmon). So we traded away fishing jobs for agricultural jobs.

Now we find out that huge chunks of the ocean are being killed by fertilizer runoff. When are we going to decide to stop subsidizing the food system? We don't need to compete in this area. Overproduction is the only problem. Consumer food prices have stayed high in spite of overproduction because of the oligopolies that are in effect in the food industry.

Let's just stop the insanity of farm subsidies, and recognize that the "american farmer" we've been trying to save just isn't there any more. What price will we put on this? We're going to have to change how we fish the oceans; how many fishermen are going to lose their jobs?

Imagine how many teachers we could pay; how many job retraining programs we could run, how much we could do for health care...if we had several hundred billion dollars back. And the sad part is...the vast majority of this money has gone straight into the pockets of the giant "middleman" corporations that control most means of food production in this country. It's plain old corporate welfare, disguised as "helping the farmer".

It doesn't help them, and it doesn't help us.

7:54:13 PM    comment []

It's All Downhill From Here.

Ted Turner commented recently that under conditions such as those just created by the FCC this morning, CNN would not have existed, and could not have been created.

The so-called "competition" amongst the pay television channels that the stations are so afeared-of will, in the end, be owned by ClearTimeWarnerNews, if it isn''t already. Say, who really owns the Discovery Channel and all of those other pitiful excuses for cable TV?

Are they scared of Bravo? Oxygen?

Bottom line -- we deregulated radio, and now it''s a wasteland of payola and single-purpose opinion. America marches to a single drumbeat, and the drummers will seek to maintain their position.

To Buckethead -- I''d say that's rather UnAmerican. Play your cards right and you''ll have nobody left to preach to. At least, you''ll have nobody who isn't addicted to Bill O'Reilly and "embedded" reportage. And as we all know, the best thing in the world is to be preaching to a crowd that completely agrees with you! Feels quite heroic!

From an evolutionary standpoint, this is all quite dark. As we unify media, unify responses, unify and codify "correct" opinion in this country (and that has NOTHING to do with "political correctness") the ideological flexibility that has permitted this country to survive and prosper is slowly being squandered.

Clever manoeuvering by the right has resulted in any disagreement with their position being labelled "UnAmerican". This is rust in the gears, and it will result in, well, badness.

Did we learn nothing in the last few years? What goes up must come down. Deficits, unexploded ordinance, and that brief, glorious renaissance in America, where you could actually say what you want, without being pointed-at and patriotism-questioned.

7:32:04 PM    comment []

Unions

As if "securing better wages" for teachers is an unassailable goal. The point of government is to improve the lives of those governed. The point of the federal workers' jobs is to do the same; otherwise they shouldn't be there.

We have set up a poor system of equations in this country, where the members of the big government unions (in particular the federal unions) simply don't feel any of the pain that the governed are going through.

Salaries in the real world may have dropped by 10%, and employment risen to 10%, and those in the federal payroll are still pushing for more money, and more benefits, to be paid for by those who have less and less (their fellow taxpayers).

When will there be a responsible federal union that simply says, "well, the rest of the economy is screwed right now, so how about we hold off on those raises for a , until it recovers?"

The best reason a union can give for pay raises is often that some OTHER union makes more than they do.

7:28:53 PM    comment []

Short Term Memory.

El Busho is over in Europe at the moment, being feted by Putin et al.  This does a nice job of covering for the fact that there really isn't a whole lot to talk about.  The fact that the conservative wing of this country just can't seem to understand why Europe is still upset about the Iraq thing tells us a good deal of what we need to know.  According to the Adminstration, the war was over, like, 25 minutes ago already?  Why are we still talking about the subject?  What's wrong with these Europeans, anyway?  Can't they just forgive and forget?

I don't think they're going to, and I don't think that they should.  Wolfowitz has already admitted that the WMD claim, prior to the war, was a smokescreen.  We could also go ahead and just call it a lie -- a lie that was played out on the world stage.  That lie has now been revealed, and we are faced with a simple situation: Either the American intelligence services are unreliable, or the Administration just plain lied to the people.

I seem to remember an incident not too long ago where a President lied about sex.  Nobody died, but people were pretty upset about it.  Here we have a freakin' war that's happened.  Somebody lied.  Either the intelligence people lied because they were pressured to "find" evidence of WMD, or the administration lied about the importance of WMD, and did not accurately characterize what the intelligence services were telling them.

What's curious to me right now is the systemic effect of everything that's going on.  We have the war.  We have a pretty dramatic freeze in investment right now.  We have a giant tax cut that is going to the wealthy, ostensibly to "create jobs" because they'll invest in America.

Of course, the fact that practically all of the capital in this country is just sitting on the sidelines right now seems to be lost on those in power.  Providing tiny additional incentives to individuals to invest seems pretty dumb.  After all, if the corporations don't pay the dividends to individuals, those corporations are just going to go ahead and invest the money anyway.

Are we creating an overall situation here where the country and the economy will drop into some kind of death spiral?  How exactly is the country ever supposed to recover from these kinds of deficits?  How many years of sustained growth will it take to do it? 

What worries me is that I feel like the country is being run by loan sharks.  Next time I'll illuminate that.

6:58:43 PM    comment []