Wednesday, July 30, 2003

Leave No Child Free Of Debt. For all his talk of compassionate conservatism and his educational goals, El Busho falls squarely in the camp of those who are arranging the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in history.  He is creating huge new entitlement programs, and shifting the burden of paying for them from the current generations to future generations.  Be warned, Boomers: Some day people like me will be in charge. When that happens, all this cushy shit that you have voted for yourself is going to be gone.  Get used to the fucking idea.  You expect a social security benefit?  It'll be gone, unless you really, truly cannot pay for things yourself.  All this prescription crap?  That'll just be gone.  Someday we'll realize that when we're faced with being able to pay for drugs for ourselves, and our children, or pay for drugs for old folks who just didn't feel like paying for them, we'll pick our kids.  I hope that our generation has the strength that the Boomers haven't exhibited.  I hope we can make the choice that our younger generation is going to get a better deal.  Be ashamed. 5:40:29 PM    comment []

Sorry!  Wrong Target! From the don't-let-it-near-me department: The new F-22 is being demoed, according to this article. As a technical boy, what caught my eye was this discussion: But what really sets the F/A-22 apart is its ability to process data on air and ground targets using its own onboard radars and sensors, as well as those on other aircraft. The airplane is, essentially, an extremely advanced carriage loaded with computers running 2 million lines of software code. This explains why Pearson and two Air Force brigadier generals, Mark A. Welsh III and Richard B.H. "Rick" Lewis, spent the better part of an hour explaining dramatic progress made in the area of "avionics stability," which has plagued the Raptor program and produced cost overruns and scheduling delays. To the layman, avionics stability means computers that don't crash during flight. As recently as February, test pilots were spending an average of 14 minutes per flight rebooting mission critical computer systems, such as those processing data from onboard radar. Now, reboot time is down to an average of just 36 seconds per flight. "What we're in the process of doing right now is integrating the last 7 percent of that software," said Welsh, the director of global power programs for the assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisitions. "Now, admittedly, it's critical software. This is the 'let's go kill people' software. It's the mission essential portion of the airplane. It's the sensor fusion, the integration of data from on board sensors and external sources, it's the stuff that's going to allow you to be successful in combat." Holy crap.  There's 2 million lines of code in this thing, and as recently as February, it was rebooting itself for 14 minutes every flight.  Now they're down to a mere 36 seconds of rebooting per flight?  And as if that wasn't bad enough...the problems are in the last 7% of the software; the "let's go kill people" part.  Isn't that what this beast is all about?  I've got news for you, buddy...that last 7% is where all of the fun is going to be.  Let's hope to god that those 2 million lines are across a large number of discrete systems within the plane.  Let's hope that there are very small communications paths between them, with minimal intercoupling.  What's more is, I wonder how much of this was really necessary.  The basic physical capabilities of the airplane probably didn't need all this horsepower.  Integrating together a data net composed of local and remote sources is probably where a lot of the complexity comes from.  I am also forced to wonder exactly who this fighter is intended to go after?  There really aren't any serious air forces out there in the world that we would need such a thing to fight.  But since I really don't know all that much about air combat, I'll stay quiet on that point. It's been said that the military dropped dramatically under Clinton in terms of manpower.  Has it grown in cost, though?  Are we taking the money we used to spend on soldiers and spending it on high-tech equipment instead?  We dropped thousands of bombs pointlessly on Iraq.  It seems now that a lot of that money would have been better spent on manpower. 5:30:34 PM    comment []

Other People Don't Exist. Kevin complains that, despite paying lipservice to the complexity of the problems, hawks often backslide into these kinds of kill-em-all policy proposals. Having grown up in Ireland, I can sympathise with the “Scorch the Earth and Salt the Fields” reaction. It’s a natural expression of justifiable anger and frustration. But the hawks never seem to pause to think how they might react if they and their kin were the targets of the kind of policy Totten advocates. [Crooked Timber] When it comes to freedom, war and the justice system, for a lot of people other people just don't really seem to exist. It's perfectly OK to hold Jose Padilla, an American citizen (remember him?  if you don't you should be ashamed of yourself) in jail indefinitely, on the very loose say-so of one intelligence analyst.  It's perfectly OK by most Americans because they're not the person being held. It's a kind of reverse lottery mentality: Yeah, shitty things can happen, but there's so many people out there, it probably won't happen to me!  And because I am such a brave American, I will go ahead and say that it's just the price we have to pay to live in freedom and all that. The same people were clamoring for us to bomb the shit out of Iraq in the war, as if real people weren't on the receiving end of those bombs.  And as far as Israel goes, there seem to be two types of Israelis: Those who cannot understand and cannot comprehend that Israel has done anything wrong, and those who have some faint inkling that perhaps the Israeli people are in danger of turning into everything they should hate. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.  On the collective level, this is what we have seen in Israel.  Individual Israelies have been killed, as have far more numerous Palestinians.  Collectively Israel's power is absolute. We are ever so eager to give up other people's freedoms. 1:26:31 AM    comment []

Google and the Semantic Web. Mark Watson made me think a bit about this.  He describes writing a spider that goes looking for RDF, and was disappointed that there's so little out there.  The thing is, manually generating all that stuff is just pretty much not going to happen. On the other hand, we have the GoogleGod out there, with the web's biggest pile of data.  That data has already been sliced up by word count, which is...you guessed it...exactly one half of a Bayesian classification system.  Yup, the same kind used to fight spam.  What if we applied the same technique to the entire web, via Google's tech?  Pretty cool, I think.  You be able to construct any number of classifications of information.  Each of those classifications can be described with RDF.  It can even be automated.  Pass a web page through some kind of google-based application, and what spits out is tagged with RDF, ready for the semantic web.  Companies could even be formed around providing this service. Ah, late nights.  1:18:26 AM    comment []