unraveling
31.July 2002
Hackers v. Hollywood,
part 2:
RIAA Web site hit with a DOS attack after endorsing legislation to allow
copyright holders to disrupt peer-to-peer networks. (Or, the
funny
papers version.) Can't we all just get along?
Reruns tend to be OK if you like the show but missed an episode. But
The West Wing
is such great TV that seeing the same episode over again is still
a thrill. (A thrill? you say, what, has he lost his mind? No,
I mean it.) This week they reran the season finale from the
season before last, "Two Cathedrals." It's the episode with Mrs.
Laningham's funeral, and the flashbacks in which we learn of Jed's and
her relationship, and of Jed's abusive father, before the hurricane and
lightning accompany the motorcade to the press briefing where we learn
that Jed will announce he's running for re-election. He doesn't
actually make the announcement, mind you, and everyone in the
audience and on his staff is waiting to hear what he'll say. But we
know, thanks to the dead Mrs. Laningham's ability to read the man. Leo
says "Watch this!" and it's the last line of dialog for what seems an
eternity, and we go to the credits on black.
I'd assumed the current plague of Mormon crickets (Anabrus
simplex) (discussed
and seen here earlier this month)
was a local thing, but the
USDA
reports that "recent outbreaks have occurred in Washington, Oregon,
Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, and Wyoming" and
tompaine.com
suggests it's a wake-up call to reform our ways of ecosystem
mismanagement.
I'm thinking it's a bad sign when you hire a
law
firm to check your accounting. A hundred million here, a hundred
million there, it's just "on the fringe of materiality," and errors
"made honestly" at the Mirant Corp.
Are they earnings, or
is it
art? The Supreme Court rules.
Found
WebElements
when I had an elemental question today. A periodic table that you can
drill into, very cool. I liked the "Strange Matter" cartoon under
Fluorine, among other things.
30.July 2002
Got Gas?
We've set up our natural gas utility billing for autopayment from our
checking account. It beats writing a check and mailing it off every
month. When they offered online statements, that seemed like a good
thing, too. I was thinking along the lines of an email message with
the half dozen numbers that matter to me, but instead, the email message
had a URL, which pointed to
their website, from which I go to
"View bill," login, and finally get what I'm after.
Except this month, I didn't get past the login, until I switched from
Opera v6 to MSIEv5.5. I sent them a little note, before I'd figured out
the workaround, thinking their site was broken. After the first couple
messages, I tried IE and got my bill, and sent a reasonably polite
response to the inquiry "can we do anything else for you?" asking them
to please consider a simpler delivery method, or at least fixing their
site so it works with Opera.
Today I got another message, "I will have your billing sent to you in
the mail." Oh well, guess that's easier for them.
I guess all that's a pretty minor annoyance compared to
spending a third of your income on clean water.
When you're Shaquille O'Neal and you go house shopping, you don't get
just a house, you get a
"portfolio of affordable-housing communities."
29.July 2002
"Senior administration and Defense Department officials" are blabbing to
the NY Times about the various
plans
for war against Iraq, while the official stance is not to comment at
this time. We do understand that "regime change is American policy,"
but some of us, at least are wondering just what the hell is going
on.
Since civil liberties are apparently passé, I suppose world
domination would be next on the agenda? It's OK, because Iraq's regime
are evildoers, I suppose. Aside from the thousands or tens of thousands
(or more) who will have to die as such a policy is carried out, this
seems like a very slippery slope, with precious little evidence of
significant opposition in Washington.
Iraqi buildup
near border puts Kuwait on heightened alert. They're not really
that stupid, are they?
Caught part of
Le Show
this Sunday, including the part about the
buried lead
(rhymes with screed, not with shed) in the
story about Microsoft's .NET plans:
"Microsoft also warned today that the era of 'open computing,' the free
exchange of digital information that has defined the personal computer
industry, is ending."
I confess I read that story, and was somewhat alarmed by that paragraph,
but given that it was almost at the end of a story which was supposed to
be about .NET (according to the headline), it didn't register quite the
way it should have. The free exchange of information is ending?!
Yeah, maybe that should be a headline.
The NY Times continued: "The company is trying to influence an industry
consortium called the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, which has
been trying to create a new standard that will build a cryptographic key
system into future personal computers."
The
Register:
"The Internet Radio Fairness Act would exempt webcasters with less
than $6 million in annual revenues from the additional RIAA royalty and
from future royalty requirements."
Corporate bureauspeak
revealed.
You need to pay to see the full variety, but many can be sampled
gratis. I see that "today is a difficult day" for Worldcom employees,
both on July 23rd and 24th. That was
bankruptcy day.
Meathead vs. Terminator: The next governor's race in California
promises to be more interesting than this one, according to
Maureen
Dowd.
$1.5 billion of
boo-boos in Qwest's accounting. Oopsadaisy.
Hollywood
hackers comin' atcha. But don't YOU try
hacking with
your gear, oh noooo.
Hawaii lava flow draws thousands of spectators. Yeah, I can
understand that.
Oh, and
Iran,
too?!
Sorry to see you go,
Rob, but... the show must go on.
Now somebody else at the White House should be arrested: whoever
gave the order not to accept the
papers to be served on Dick. They used to let 'em do it when Bill
lived there.
ClassactionAmerica.com,
just a click and a service mark away from justice, has a fairly bizarre
advertising scheme: their site pops up an ad for...
their site. That should draw the aggrieved in even faster.
Later, you get a pop-under ad, too. "Please don't go" they seem to be
saying.
While you're visiting, take their survey, asking "Would you use a legal
service that operates via a 1-900, pay- by-the-minute, phone number,
that allowed instant access to an attorney?" They're looking for "yes"
or "no." I said "no," which gives a Javascript alert telling me
I had to answer the 2nd question, which is how much I would pay for this
service per minute. $1.99? $2.99? $3.99? $4.99? $5.99? None of the
above is not offered. After choosing the most expensive option (what
the hell?), I see that 86.67% of the responses were "no," while 92.28%
were willing to pay $1.99 for the service. 2.81% liked $2.99 and 2.81%
liked $5.99.
They could do a follow-up survey, "How many minutes do you think you
could talk to a lawyer on our 1-900 line before you'd used up the most
you could expect to get out of a class action settlement? I'd pick 10,
if they go with the majority on the per-minute rate.
28.July 2002
The concept of the
Burning Man
always seemed attractive in a sort of abstract way, but it seems to be
ever more institutionalized. They have their own
DMV now, although the "M" is for mutant. I guess I shouldn't knock
it 'till I've tried a visit to the "thoroughly flat, prehistoric
lakebed, composed of hardpan alkali, ringed by majestic mountains."
At any rate, the website is awesome, check it out. You don't have to
buy a ticket for $200 or drive through Reno to appreciate the
Art Cars,
the dust storms, the other-wordliness of it all.
If you've got an itch to go, but aren't quite sure, read this
personal essay, answering the question "What is Burning Man?"
27.July 2002
With Congress set to approve new bankruptcy regulations, the
expected
rush to file got me to thinking about human behavior and tax
incentives. It doesn't take much of an incentive to change marginal
behavior, and with hundreds of millions of people involved, it's a mob
scene. Will there be a rush to die when inheritance taxes are
reinstated after the 10 year tax boon created by the Bush
administration? Or a rush to assist death? Perhaps that will be the
argument to make the changes permanent.
Just in case you hadn't figured out that the game is rigged,
here's Dennis Kozlowski, ex-chairman of Tyco,
dodging
the taxes on the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stock
options he got. Of course that name sounds familiar - he's the same guy
who was indicted for dodging sales tax on his art purchases. The IRS is
looking into it.
Look on the bright side:
"The
truth may empty your pockets, but it will also set you free."
 |
| One of our friendly Mormon crickets, not
the sort that "sing" in our backyard |
Tidied up the computer today, finally got around to sorting through all
those files in the "tmp" directory that have been around up to a year
or two, filing or deleting them, before backing things up to CD. Just
before I started burning, I closed all the apps I'd been using to
inspect files for the keep/dispose decisions, and Word didn't shut down
right away. When I got back to it, there was a dialog I've never seen
before: "This is taking longer than expected, do you want to continue
waiting?" Ah, NO. That made it go away, as desired.
The name of this artist --
Dox Thrash -- was enough to pique my interest, but the description
of his materials -- Carborundum (a brand name for silica crystals,
I learned) and copper plates -- persuaded me to check it out. Nice
Flash-based presentation of the art, with supporting information and
text. Too bad he died in 1965; he's got a great name for the internet
age. (Thanks to the
Scout Project for the link.)
Also found the
Chinese
dinosaurs at the Australian Museum in their latest report. Very
cool stuff.
And ZoneZero, an interesting site
about analog and digital photography. I'm just starting the tour, with
a story about Pedro Meyer's spinal injury in Ecuador, looking at the
remarkable pictures he took while being sent to L.A. for surgery, on a
stretcher...
26.July 2002
The opportunity of
The Commons:
"Thought experiment: Compare diversity of expression on television or
radio with that of the Internet."
You would have thought that submarine warfare technology went out of
style with the Soviet Union, but no. The administration just gave the
go-ahead
to the Navy for the potentially ear-splitting submarine detection
sonar. They claim "224 submarines operated by non-allied nations"
which seems rather incredible. (It would be even more incredible
if they argued that many or most of these were undetectable by less
risky methods.)
Apart from the very real possibility that bodily harm will be done to
marine mammals and other creatures, imagine what it would be like to
have a parade of kids with 1600W stereos in their cars, cruising your
neighborhood for 3 out of every 4 days, with the volume up full for 4
hours a day. Where the hell is the environmental impact statement
on that?
Congress read the writing on the wall and
passed the corporate reform bill almost unanimously. "(Senator
Phil) Gramm, the sole dissenter among the conferees who worked out the
bill, said, 'In the environment that we're in, virtually anything could
have passed the Congress.'" That's right, Phil, and contrary to what
you apparently thought, it's your job to see that things don't get so
bad we come to such a state.
Just in case you needed any, here are reasons to
eat locally.
I don't remember where I found the link to this site, or what it was
about, or what the site is
about, but it's kind of interesting with a lot of different voices and
sketchy and cartoony things:
Killoggs. Lots of discussion
going on, too, but I didn't drill down into that.
Why I Quit Bush's EPA, by Eric Schaeffer in the Washington
Monthly. "Behind the scenes, in complicated ways that attract less
media attention (and therefore may be politically safer), the
administration and its allies in Congress are crippling the EPA's
ability to enforce laws and regulations already on the books."
He spells out the process in great detail: shrinking the enforcement
division (and leaving it without a leader); pushing back on the
bureaucracy to divide and conquer; packing the courts (as usual);
enlisting members of Congress to protect polluters in their districts;
dumping enforcement off on the states; and "innovating" ever more
gridlock into the process of environmental protection.
Can we learn from history? First we have to understand cause and
effect, for questions such as how we ended the cold war.
"The dominant view of the right and center is that military intimidation
was the root of victory, a dangerous axiom then and just as foolish
today and tomorrow."
The
Nation comments, from 1999.
Dear
Mrs. Banning:
Being an atheist isn't so bad. It's no worse than having a child out of
wedlock these days.
We'll be waiting for Senator Lott to be castigating yet another act of
party-switching disloyalty, but we will not be holding our
breath.
25.July 2002
Bob Cringely writes the recipe to
end the
recession: sign up for eBay, sell all your old junk.
Now this is chutzpah: Harvey Pitt wants a
promotion
and a raise. The guy should be a comedian.
Seems like the crew should have plenty of time to blog while
waiting to get out of the
Antarctic ice
the ship is trapped in. But maybe their 'net connection is not so good.
Or the minus 50C temps have their minds otherwise occupied.
(Lake effect sent me down south
there. That also sent me off to
Le Monde diplomatique,
happily translated, as my francais is nicht so gut these
days.)
One of the arguments against nuclear power is the risk of the
proliferation of nuclear weapons. That risk is looking more substantial
all the time, what with news of
stolen radioactive materials in Chechnya. That Pandora's Box
thing. The US spokesman seems particulary adept at understatement:
"Chechen groups have relationships with countries we do not find
exceptionally desirable."
24.July 2002
Warren Buffett
calls
bullshit on all the corporate bigwigs who say they can't account for
options.
"Or do you really think that placing a value on the option is just too
difficult to do, one of your other excuses for not expensing them? If
these are the opinions you honestly hold, call me collect. We can do
business."
John Rennie in Scientific American: 15 Answers to Creationist
Nonsense.
Printed text can be dry and uninteresting, and we don't normally expect
to see any "body language" in it. This
whitepaper from Microsoft has some, though. After plodding through
the "user experience" and procedures for "updating and downloading
technologies" of Windows Update, Media Player, MSN Explorer, Messenger,
Help and Support, certificates and their revocation, ActiveX and
Internet time service, we come to Digital Rights Management.
This is not plodding. DRM "opens up some very exciting new business
models for the electronic distribution of digital content." "When
consumers choose to acquire secure content, they enter into a good-faith
agreement with the content providers. Hackers essentially disrupt this
agreement and curb the availability of quality content by stealing the
content." If only the could hiss here! "By accepting the security
updates, consumers agree to limit the damage that hackers can incur to
content providers..."
Deep in the license details, we read the Windows Media Player is set by
default in "silent mode" to "acquire and install" licenses as needed,
with no user intervention (or approval). This should help folks do the
Right Thing, eh?
Finally, the recommendation for "How to manage updates in an IT
environment": "DRM systems may not be deployed effectively if they
allow users or corporations to disable key features of the DRM
technoloyg such as applicaiton revocation. As a result, the system
administrator's best bet for managing the technology is ot understand
how it works and what types of content may come protected by DRM."
And just say yes, yes, yes to everything we tell you to do.
This is an exciting business model, eh?
Michael Dolny
bursts our myth of the liberal media:
"Both print and broadcast media have practiced in recent years an
uncritical, if not reflexive, cheerleading of CEOs, mergers and
acquisitions, the latest earnings, and deregulation. That hardly amounts
to a liberal bias."
Building a net presence for yourself is a two-edged sword.
Jennifer 8. Lee (interesting middle name) writes about
eluding the grasp of Google. Have you done a "self-Google" lately?
I gave it a whirl, and one of the more interesting things I found was a
Russian
translation of my Spinout
FAQ. At least I think it's Russian - that Cyrillic stuff all looks
like Greek to me.
23.July 2002
Is Marketocracy searching for
and finding the best stock pickers, or is it simply providing a lesson
in statistics? With 50,000 people trying, the top ten (or hundred, or
even 1,000) are likely going to look good, maybe even better than most
professional money managers. But the same market forces that make the
pros' stars rise and fall will act in this galaxy. Past performance is
no guarantee of future results as the torrent of red ink on Wall Street
tells us day by day.
The top 10 of my
Top 100 have slipped below $2T, the top 100 has a
whole is off 16% in just the last two months. Consider that: weak
companies that drop in market cap will fall off the list, but even
the variable list of 100 largest lost a sixth of its value. I don't
know about you, but I'm ready for the plunge to be over.
(Mary Voll says we'll
look
back at this and laugh. I hope so. The stat that the Nasdaq is
now 75 percent below its peak is not reassuring.)
With news like this --
Citigroup facilitating Enron's fraud, and
El
Paso's pipeline of inscrutable accounting -- the feeling that the
game is rigged and we ought to all run for the hills is hard to
shake.
22.July 2002
What Texas and the Bush dynasty look like from across the pond:
Dark heart of the American dream, by Ed Vulliamy.
"Texas counts the worst pollution record in the US, top in the belching
of toxic chemicals and carcinogens into the air, top in chemical spills,
top in ozone pollution, top in carbon-dioxide emissions, top for mercury
emission, top in clean-water violations, top in the production of
hazardous waste."
The face of globalization:
outsourcing
data processing to Ghana. "Asked what she would say if she ever met
a New York City police officer, Ms. Okine said without hesitating, 'I
would tell him to improve on his handwriting.'"
More fun with TIPS:
One Week in the Life of a TIPSter, from the Democratic
Underground.com.
Bush speaks up about the markets again,
and the plunge continues. He says
we'll see them go up again. Thank goodness for that MBA training,
eh? Could someone tell him to just SHUT UP about the economy,
please?
Jakob
tells us what makes him so great at his job: sheer
brainpower!
Sadly, he does not tell us how we can be smart like him, but he does
give us a
short bibliography
on the subject.
The survey about intranet site that I took today was an example of what
can go wrong with insufficient brainpower applied. They had a page with
a list of links to various resources, and gave me hypotheticals about
wanting one or another of them, and asked me where I'd go. "Say you
want some badges..." and one of the links was labeled "badges." How
easy was that to find? they wanted to know. Maybe they were
pre-screening for the next round of layoffs.
24 cubic miles of ice going away. Each year. Just from Alaska.
We just got a whopping electric bill covering some of this hot weather,
over 400 kWh, at the new, new rate of almost $.07 ea.
21.July 2002
One month of summer gone by, or winter if you're down under.
Temperatures have returned to civility in Boise, a pleasant 90F in late
afternoon, with plenty of 60s cooling at night. The floor was cool on
my bare feet this morning. Ah.
Oh, and the crickets started up last night. July 19th, no crickets.
July 20th, crickets. How do they do that? I love the sound
of crickets coming in through the open windows at night, much better
than barking dogs and yowling tomcats.
What would
you do with a webserver on a $1 chip? It's the connectivity that
gets you, of course...
Our day started with a sizeable
bang about 7:30; a transformer explosion, and from the sound of
it, something bigger than your average can-on-a-pole. I called Idaho
Power straightaway, but expected the power to be out for a while.
They got it fixed in 20 minutes, though, amazingly fast work.
This
transformer explosion at ConEd, well, that's going to take a bit
longer to fix.
Q&A with a political science prof from ISU nicely summarizes the
flapdoodle over
under God
and the Pledge, without rendering an opinion about it. It's interesting
to read that Eisenhower "emphasized the need for spiritual weapons to
combat materialistic communism." He had some insight about
materialistic capitalism, too, warning about the hegemony of the
military-industrial complex. (But did he actually do anything
about the risks he perceived?) "Our government makes no sense unless it
is founded on a deeply held religious belief -- and I don't care what it
is," Eisenhower said. Of course, it is possible that our government
makes no sense.
I'm more inclined to argue that it makes more sense if it's
founded on a deeply held religious belief, but that's just me. This
seems not so far from what Adler tells us Justice William Brennan's view
was, that the "ceremonial deism" of the Pledge, motto, legislative
prayers and the like are Constitutional because because "they have lost
through rote repetition any significant religious content."
Moses showed up
for Larry Craig's 57th birthday part. Now that's political
clout. The electorate will not perceive this as out-of-state
special interest involvement, of course, because the vast majority
of Idahoans think Moses is A-OK.
Übergeek
skewers the Apple "switch" campaign, but good. Requires Flash.
Operation TIPS-TIPS: "Mark the informant." (Love the domain name,
btw.) Also provides a link to get your
Ellison National
ID.
20.July 2002
Is there any chance of changing the rules of stock options?
Leslie
Wayne explains why the answer is "almost none." The Stock Option
Coalition can afford more politicians than the other side.
Michael Ryan
notes that George W. "get tough on terrorism" Bush personally signed off
on the plea bargain deal for John Walker Lindh, maybe because he saw
himself in the misguided kid from the suburbs.
But Zacarias Moussaoui, the Al Qaeda fall guy who
wants
to plead guilty is told he has to think it over. If we give him the
dealth penalty, we want to do it fair and square, I guess.
Operation TIPS
envisions "a national system for reporting suspicious, and potentially
terrorist-related activity, (involving) the millions of American workers
who, in the daily course of their work, are in a unique position to see
potentially unusual or suspicious activity in public places."
Or not-so-public places, such as where your utility meters are.
Jennifer
Bauduy at TomPaine.com: "The Spy Who Reads Your Meter."
Astoundingly, House Majority Leader Richard Armey
just said no
to that idea, along with the national ID card. Armey's
Mark spells out
his objections in clear terms: A national ID card is
"not consistent with a free society." "Citizens will not become
informants."
The US Postal Service said no, thank
you to the idea of having postal carriers adding espionage to their
duties as well.
18.July 2002
Microsoft is shocked, shocked that anyone might infer
nefarious intent on the part of their Media Player EULA.
They admit it doesn't "clearly explain" what they intended,
and they're going to
rewrite it to make it more "clear."
(Also?) On the positive side,
Cringely notes that the good news is that Palladium probably won't
work. At least not on the first or second try? But then there's always
the collateral damage to worry about, and the forgone technology that
their early announcements scares people away from developing.
Harvey Pitt's not ready to resign as head of the SEC, it's
"the only job (he) really wanted since (he) got steeped in securities
law." I can understand that, it's a prestigious job that presumably
pays pretty well. But what kind of man says something like this
for
attribution: "It would be unthinkable to deprive people of my
expertise." That's excerpted from a larger quote in the NY Times
article, but it doesn't sound like it was delivered with
self-deprecating tongue-in-cheek.
Note to Harvey: No one is indispensible.
Oh yeah:
"We don't want to 'restore confidence in the stock market,' as both
parties' leaders keep intoning. That's like restoring confidence in the
casino after the little guys discover that the house and the big bettors
always win. We need to restore the real economy, not the
hyper-speculative stock market."
From Publicus, on
tompaine.com,
which is of course the sort of site Tom Paine would have had if the 'net
had been going back in the late 1700s.
He (?) also referred us to Robert Borosage's
July 9th column in the Washington Post, whose URL I found with
Google's help. I did try searching the Post's site, but got shunted
into a cookie monster that wanted me to register and send money.
Yet another Google disintermediation victory. Not that I really want to
shout to content providers that they need to hide their content if they
want to sell it.
Anyway, Borosage rejects the explanation that "the bubble did it,"
and explains that "Markets need rules."
"A centerpiece of Gingrich's Contract With America was 'securities
reform.' Passed in 1995 over President Clinton's veto, the bill shielded
outside accountants and law firms from liability for false corporate
reporting, and made it more difficult for shareholders to bring suit
against fraudulent reporting."
Continuing, "Clinton's SEC chairman, Arthur Levitt, waged a long and
bitter campaign to ban this basic conflict of interest. The accountants'
lobby -- led by one Harvey Pitt -- blocked the reforms..."
(I was a little snide a few days back about the SEC
getting a "bonus" in budget increases, but reading about how it's been
starved, and how Bush's "first SEC budget proposed eliminating 57 staff
positions, including 13 in the office of full disclosure and 12 in the
office charged with preventing fraud" puts that and the proposal to hire
100 more investigators in a new light.)
Will Lance Armstrong make it
four in a row? He won the 11th stage, and took over first place in
the Tour de France.
Also on TomPaine.com:
Jamin B. Raskin's
response to the recent court decision, "One (Constitutionally
Illiterate) Nation Under God; The Constitution Can't Protect Our Rights
If We Don't Understand Them."
"We need a national movement for constitutional literacy, and not just
so Americans will be prepared to absorb the shock of judicial decisions
that enforce the Establishment Clause. We need constitutional literacy
as a basic tool of intellectual self-defense."
17.July 2002
John's Stuff
has a bloggish report on a hybrid road rally around Minnesota.
(The site's framed up, so he wants you to follow the links:
"hybrid road rally" on the front page today, dated July 16th.)
Greenspan: "It is not that humans have become any more greedy than in
generations past. It is that the avenues to express greed had grown so
enormously." Recounted by
Floyd
Norris, who drily notes that "Just for the record, all the major
averages are still higher than they were when the phrase 'irrational
exuberance' entered the lexicon."
Bush predicts that the SEC
will clear Cheney. No doubt. More than two-thirds of the populace
still views the president as honest and trustworthy, just in case
you didn't realize we're living in an age of miracles.
Of course, if you don't like that poll, you can try
a
different one that says 2/3rds of the country thinks "the
administration (is) more interested in protecting the interests of large
companies than those of ordinary Americans."
Chevron's been in Nigeria for 30 years, and the natives don't have much
to show for it. They're
restless, to be sure: unarmed village women have stormed and
occupied four ChevronTexaco pipeline stations.
Bob
Herbert: "After 29 futile and tragic years, it is time to bring the
curtain down on the institutionalized cruelty of the Rockefeller drug
laws." Just in case you hadn't figured out that drug enforcement is
racist, consider this fact from his column: "94 percent of the people
doing time for drug offenses in the state of New York are black or
Hispanic."
16.July 2002
Had an experience to connect to the clichéd phrase "a shot in
the arm" today: a cortisone shot in the shoulder, for what the doc tells
me is adhesive
capsulitis. He's sending a note to the physical therapist to
stop being nice, too, with a prescription to me for something to keep me
from complaining when she starts yanking on my arm.
I'm not much for needles, and I studiously avoided looking at what he
was up to while his assistant distracted me, held my arm and suggested I
"relax, relax, relax" then wham, a bigger ache than any of the
recent "episodes" chipping away at my mobility. The pain didn't
persist, but the traumatic wake-up call was with me all day. Is it like
that for everyone, I wonder, or am I just a weenie?
The Wall Street Journal experiments with demand elasticity, with
33% price hikes for its online content. I suppose once you've given
in to paying $60 (or have it on the corporate expense account), it might
as well be $80. Me, I enjoyed it when it was free.
Would you
loan $2B to Worldcom? Me neither. Elsewhere, the NY Times
chronicles
Fraud
101 at the company.
Misery wants company: Hussein says all Arabs are Iraqis when the US
comes knocking, or something like that.
Hope lives: peace in Northern Ireland, and the
IRA issues an apology. "Astonishing."
I searched the Washington Post site for a link, but couldn't find one
that matched the NY Times story about the Washington Post company
joining Coca-Cola in
accounting for options as operating expenses. That's two.
A useful
guide
to online photo albums. Thanks to PC World's Digital Focus
newsletter
for the link.
15.July 2002
Thomas Friedman's columns about the Arab world have been
insightful and educational. His July 3rd column,
Arabs at
the Crossroads, for example:
For too many years we've treated the Arab world as just a big dumb
gas station, and as long as the top leader kept the oil flowing,
or was nice to Israel, we didn't really care what was happening to
the women and children out back -- where bad governance, rising
unemployment and a stifled intellectual life were killing the Arab
future.
The scale of the problem is made clear by this parenthetical statistic:
"The G.D.P. of Spain is greater than that of all 22 Arab states combined."
These are states whose total population is about the same as the US',
headed for more than 400 million in a couple decades.
Even well-intentioned men in charge can overlook the obvious, thinking
that they're doing the right thing. For the National Institute of
Health, it finally became obvious the women's health concerns were
different than men's, and that action was needed, under the
directorship of Dr. Bernadine Healy.
This op-ed piece in the NY Times,
Anne M. Dranginis tells us
why the
hormone study finally Happened.
"...Dr. Healy's stubborn insistence that the N.I.H. concern itself
with women's health was not broadly supported at the time. In some
quarters the study of women's health was somehow seen as the
intrusion of 'special-interest politics' into the business of science.
In 1991, when Dr. Healy was appointed head of the N.I.H., women were
usually excluded from clinical trials, a practice that she
ended...."
After a week of extreme ugliness in the stock markets,
this cheery piece for Monday morning:
"The market has come down quite a bit from the unprecedented levels
it reached a couple of years ago," Mr. Arnott says. "It has now
reached the same valuation level as at the market top in 1929."
It's easy to forget that
"irrational exuberance" came out in late 1996, more than 3
years before the markets topped out. One of the radio reports over the
weekend said something about 1997 levels, as I recall, so go figure.
The
firemap
for July 15th looks like the west has the measles.
Those are just the big (and named) ones, of course. The
"manageable"
fires, like the 6 on BLM land, 10 in the Boise National Forest and 7
on Idaho Dept. of Lands acreage that started from yesterday's
thunderstorms aren't shown.
We finally got a break in the heat, and some time in the 60s
last night. (It's a little cooler at our house than the airport, thanks
to more plants and less concrete.)
The digital rights management (DRM) battle is escalating. Not content
with killing off internet radio, the RIAA is now looking to
electronic
countermeasures to stymie freeloaders. The DMCA amounts to forced,
unilateral disarmament, so the prospective customers should be an easy
target. Sorta like 007's license to kill,
Berman's legislation would give publishers a license to break in.
(Thanks to
Jeff Harrow's Technology Report for the links.)
Coca-Cola
breaks
rank on the issue of accounting for options! The price of
righteousness for them would have been $202 million last year.
14.July 2002
It was still hot at dark last night, the concrete and bricks practically
glowing with the heat of the day. Cumulonimbus had filled the sky and
there was hopeful lightning, but by morning just dusty traces of a few
raindrops and no significant break in the heat.
Our thermometer got down to 70, briefly, but the little fan couldn't do
much between when we crawled out of the basement and when it was time to
close up again.
And smoke. The lightning
lit some new
fires in the area, with not much of a spark needed after everything
has been kiln-dried by 4 consecutive days over 105F.
After a middle-of-the-night foray, Jeanette came back to bed and
reported that no water was coming out of the tap. Rumor has it that our
water company's well is going dry, and they're frantically digging a new
one. I tossed uneasily, thinking about landscaping that wouldn't
survive, how long our 5 gallon reserve would last, how many times we'd
get to flush the toilet. But by morning, it was flowing again.
For now.
The heat has me hiding out, missed a bunch of events this weekend,
like Pridefest, and various demonstrations surrounding the
National Governors Association
meeting that runs through Tuesday. The one thing that sticks in my mind
about the NGA is hearing that they'll be driving (driven?) around in
unlicensed SUVs... with DOT permission obtained through some "emergency"
override our executive gets. And how it costs us some million+
dollars to host this thing, and how they draw on a huge bank of
volunteers to put it on. It just seems weird.
Ironically, given the venue,
Marc Ambinder's news story on ABC suggests that the NGA is shunned
by some (such as big Jeb) because it's too liberal. Hard to say; it's
meetings aren't public.
The Statesman has been reporting on the events, of course,
noting that they could all agree that the Feds should
send more money
to the states.
Dan Popkey's
column gives a little insight into power politics: Democrat
fundraisers, no way, Kempthorne fundraisers, A-OK!
Nicholas Kristof tries out RV "camping" and finds it "convenient,"
if not quite the same as prior experience. Somehow, sleeping in a
variety of parking lots doesn't sound that inviting. Back in the 70s,
when I was hitchhiking and imbued with the spirit of Earth Day, the very
term "RV" was derogatory. Now there are 7+ million out there, and the
promise of many, many more as the baby boomers pass 55.
Our compromise is a minivan with rear seats that fold flat. It remains
to be seen how long that will satisfy us, but I still have a hard time
imagining being an RV pilot.
Felt a little poke in a toe while walking through the house, and thought
maybe I'd picked up a sliver. I sat down and absent-mindedly started
feeling around on one bare foot with the other, then OW! What's that?
I got a tweezers and a mirror, and had no trouble finding the fuzzy and
prickly offender, just 2 or 3mm, but definitely an attention-getter.
What kind of nasty fruit is this?! ("Photo" from an HP 6200C
scanner.)
13.July 2002
It's a rare spell of hot weather in Boise that leaves us without
night-time cooling. Our low humidity usually gives us cool nights that
provide 8+ hours of air conditioning, for the cost of running a small
fan. At the end of a hot spell, it's not unusual to have a thunderstorm
swell up and keep things hot until it breaks, but that's usually a
one-night deal at the most.
This week, it's just been getting hotter each day,
and each night. The natural A/C reservoir was close to empty
the night before last, and gone last night. The good news is that it
looks like some cumulonimbus are stacking up this morning...
Of course, it's always the heat wave when the heating and cooling guys
are the busiest. Something tells me there's some overtime being put in
this weekend. Yesterday, we blew one of the 2 30A fuses to our
compressor; just too hot for it? And then yesterday evening, an
unexpected dripping sound led me to find that our plenum was dripping
all over the furnace and floor. Yikes! With no easy way into the sheet
metal box (and Freon plumbing in the path of the hard way), I decided to
have a look at the condensate drain pipe, and found the problem in a
clogged elbow that was easy to get to.
Sleeping uneasily in the basement last night, I was not looking forward
to our 4th (or is it 5th?) triple-digit day, this time without any "hard"
A/C to fall back on, but this morning's repair looks like it'll keep
our 30? year-old cooling system going for one more day. Whew.
The depth of ideological difference between the Islamic world and the
rest of us seems clear in this snippet from a
NY Times article by Neil MacFarquhaar, in Saudia Arabia:
"Well, of course I hate you because you are Christian, but that doesn't
mean I want to kill you," a professor of Islamic law in Riyadh explains
to a visiting reporter.
William
Cadette:
"Corporate America appears to be overstating its earnings by at least 20
percent. About half of the exaggeration reflects the lack of any
recorded expense for options; the other half, manipulated operating
earnings." The retired V.P. at JP Morgan gives his prescription for
reform: "There can be no real reform without honest accounting for stock
options."
12.July 2002
Exploring the history of climate in powers of 10: the
Climate Timeline
Tool.
We don't need Pandora's Box anymore, we've got all the
recipes we need, and can whip the contents up
from scratch.
Gretchen
Morgenson, writing in the NY Times, details the problems with stock
options, as she observes that the President didn't quite get around to
addressing that issue.
"(O)ptions have risen from 5 percent of shares outstanding at major
companies to 15 percent."
"At Enron, for example, deductions for stock options helped eliminate
more than $625 million in taxes that the company owed to the government
from 1996 to 2000."
At WorldCom, where the three top execs were awarded 18.5% of the
company's grants in the last 4 years, "half the company's free cash flow
in 1999 -- $886 million -- came from workers exercising options."
Meanwhile, the Times notes that
the Dow
is down 5% in the 3 days since Bush spoke. The Senate approved
tougher penalties than he asked for on a 97-0 vote.
10.July 2002
On the way home from work, the radio told me it was a hundred and four
outside, and 9% humidity. Sorta like a free sauna. I left the A/C off
for the 4 mile drive, and our house is still cruising on last night's
cool. We may not be doing quite so well after another couple days of
this...
But the onset of stable hot weather finally produced some summer
morning wind,
gratifying local windsurfers. Wish I'd been there.
6 years ago today, HP announced that it would close down its
Disk Memory Division. Happy anniversary to a couple thousand of us.
Things could be worse: I could be working for
Qwest, whose
stock is flirting with $0, and whose employees
were asked to take unpaid leave last month.
Or, we could've stayed in the business, like IBM, who
reported a pretax loss of $423 million last year. Ouch.
The Army is giving away
war games,
and they have several hundred thousand takers.
The NY Post's teaser headline talks about vegans and
oppressed
bees, but the real gem in the story is the quote from South Dakota
cattle rancher Jody Brown. I won't spoil it for you.
Judicial Watch's slogan is
"Because no one is above the law." Their
suit
against VP Dick Cheney (et al.) helps make the point,
too.
I've been admiring the latest permutations of the spam scam which is
apparently known as the Nigerian Scam (among other things).
PCWorld tells us that "the con has pulled in more than $5 billion
and is one of the largest industries in Nigeria."
9.July 2002
I forgot to mention about yesterday...
the crack of dawn was onomatopoetic on Monday. After rumbling
and flashes woke me up, I counted after a couple of lightning flashes:
12 and 18 seconds, 2 or 3 miles. That could be directly overhead, up in
the thunderhead, or somewhere down the road. The next one was
right in the neighborhood, no need to count between the flash
and the bang. Good morning!
Employees are finding their bosses contemptible in some cases, and
hoping Congress does
too. Ebbers sez "I'm innocent, but my lawyer tells me I shouldn't
say anything."
Wired wonders if that's your tooth ringing: "A wireless receiver can
be implanted into your tooth with the aid basic dental surgery. The
implant can allow a person to receive digital signals from radios and
mobile phones, from the privacy of their own head." I did that once,
but without going through any dental work...
Is this "post-human evolution" or just mad science? What's the
boundary between prosthetics and evolution?
Thanks to the
Harrow Technology
Report for the link.
Where to check when something in that movie you're watching
just doesn't add up:
The Math in the
Movies Page. And, there's a site for
insultingly stupid movie
physics as well. Thanks to
Science Magazine's Netwatch column for those; but you need to
register to get to that (and they'll tease you with parts of the
magazine you have to pay for).
The word "Movies" just looked weird to me. As if we called
photographs "Stillies," or automobiles "Rollies."
I read this week's NY Times Magazine
feature
piece this morning, "What If It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?"
I'm not anything like obese, but I've been gaining weight, and could
stand to lose some. I've also believed in the "fat bad, carbs good"
concept for as long as I can remember. I stopped buttering bread some
while ago, because it was easier and felt somewhat righteous. Tonight,
I happily put some on (can't quite bring myself to "slather" yet), and
you know what? Bread's better that way! :-) Bring on that fat!
Satiation is a good thing.
An acquaintance,
Lee Mercer,
went for a hike into the Jarbidge Wilderness with friends on the
4th of July. At age 44, he dropped dead on the trail.
Life is too precious to waste a single moment.
Bush did not top John McCain's op-ed piece from yesterday. The
prescription in
his speech is for "strict enforcement" of the existing rules,
and "higher ethical standards." The SEC gets to keep its boss, and
$100 million bonus to hire 100 more enforcers. The maximum penalty
for corporate fraud would get boosted from 5 to 10 years. Is that up to
where minimum penalties for some petty drug crimes are yet? I
don't think so. He's proposing a task force and a
"10-point Accountability Plan." Yeah, that should get the job done.
8.July 2002
Helen
Thomas summarizes where we are in the Bush imperial presidency, with
the experience of many, many years watching the Executive branch. It's
not a pretty picture, but apparently the silent majority are rolling
over for it.
Speaking of imperiums, Janis Ian's alternate view of the
internet
music debacle is worth reading, too. It's a long and sordid
tale.
The next blue chip to fall?
Merck booked $12.4 billion in uncollected revenue. Oopsiedaisy.
No effect on profit, though, and it's all done according to the glorious
Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. Maybe it's A-OK.
John
McCain: Harvey Pitt should be sacked. Separate auditing and
consulting. Count options as expenses. Cough up those ill-gotten
gains. Send liars to jail.
Top that, George.
7.July 2002
Fred Phelps and his trio of supporters were punctual with their message
of hate, and the counter-demonstrators were comfortably in place well
before they showed up. The good news is that love outnumbered hate by
about 20 to 1. (The Boise police outnumbered hate by 2 to 1 as well.)
The troup of angels surrounded St. Michael's on the two sides facing
State and 8th Streets and other supporters filled up the shady sidewalk
around the church. Phelps' gang stood across the street, on the
Statehouse square, coincidentally, their fluorescent signs well designed
to grab the attention of passing motorists.
Our side was variegated, convivial, friendly, singing together in a
gentle congregational alto, "We Shall Overcome," "We Are One in the
Spirit," "America the Beautiful." Their side had the two gals with
trained voices, piercing the choral murmur, but never seeming to find a
clear expression. I thought about how vocal training can make you
heard, but that the message it carries must come from within to be
moving. One of the more remarkable messages on the anti-side was "I
suffer not a woman to preach," a quotation from Paul's Biblical
misogyny. One our side, others had come up with the same ideas for a
message as we had: "God is Love," and Jeanette's "Love One Another."
 |
What I remember most vividly is the face of the parishoners coming and
going from the church, and their minister as they greeted us and thanked
us for being there this morning. Our pleasure! The fact that there was
no particular hostility directed to the four demonstrators was also
gratifying; they were so much more pitiful than they were
threatening.
Krugman
previews the Tuesday night speech:
"He will sternly lecture Wall Street executives about ethics and will
doubtless portray himself as a believer in old-fashioned business
probity. Yet this pose is surreal, given the way top officials like
Secretary of the Army Thomas White, Dick Cheney and Mr. Bush himself
acquired their wealth...."
Doc Searls
writes on the trepidation of shopping: "...since I almost never leave
Costco without spending a bunch of money on stuff I never thought I'd
need before I got there..."
Costco-ness divides the world into two kinds of people: members
and non-members. The former have a behavior pattern that is
rather charming to the latter: they enthusiastically aver that
everything they buy there is a fabulous bargain.
From the
Arab News:
"Bin Laden no longer exists: Here is why"
Eric Raymond's
final essay of the series is a more powerful call to arms than
anything the US government has offered up, even though they seem to be
working from the same mindset. Today's discussion at church (which I
missed, unfortunately) was Pacifism v. Militarism, from two members.
The latter made the point more generically: "Human nature, being what it
is, and the politics of nations being what they are, seeking to achieve
ultimate good through Pacifism in the face of great evil is a fool's
mission."
Peggy Noonan
waxes
poetic on what's right with our great country. Her list includes
blogging, which will no doubt get her piece blogged up one side and down the
other. "The 24-7 opinion sites that offer free speech at its
straightest, truest, wildest, most uncensored, most thoughtful, most
strange. Thousands of independent information entrepreneurs are
informing, arguing, adding information."
6.July 2002
As we pick up the stray spent firework in our yard, we celebrate another
holiday season in which no moron has succeeded in setting our house on
fire. One old guy in a nearby neighborhood
was not so
lucky. As if a bottle rocket is not random enough, one budding
genius decided to tie one onto a toy airplane...
5.July 2002
Yesterday's entry was exploded with the tons of ordnance lit off
in bursts of patriotic fervor last night. Discussion question:
which is more patriotic, flying the flag from your automobile, or
lighting off 4th of July fireworks? I'm also wondering if there was a
bigger melée than usual where you live this year. It certainly
seemed like the density, frequency, and intensity of private
"celebration" (or is that "private" celebration?) in Boise was beyond
all previous attempts. I do hope you've all shot your wad at this
point.
The evolution of the "African Minister" email finance scam is rather
entertaining. Spam in general seems to be multiplying faster than
pond scum, but most of it is not interesting. The different ways of
suckering people who think they can skim off a large financial
transaction, however, are. I suppose it's an outgrowth of the
multiplicity of "legitimate" skimming that people see happening around
them; if Morgan Stanley can get rich through brokering mergers and
acquisitions, why can't I?
Today's offering comes from "smart joe" at the Auditing and Account
Unit, Foriegn Remittance Dept., Credit Commerce du France, Lome-Togo.
He starts his message with:
I am Mr.SMART JOE.
There is the
usual stew of facts, lies, indirection and storytelling. What, you
don't believe there are any facts? Try this: "I will not fail to inform
you that this transaction is 100% risk free."
The closer always makes me want to respond...
"I suggest you get back to me as soon as possiblstating your wish in
this deal." My wish is that Mr. Smart Joe should just SEND ME THE MONEY
and cut out the middlemen.
We've moved beyond commentary to
meta-commentary about
Wolfram's book. Jordan Ellenberg's piece in Slate is enjoyable, and
includes a number of links for further exploration, including a
lecture
on "Popper and disconfirmation" from the Bolton Institute, and
Brian Hayes' "full review" in American Scientist.
I thought a list of
authors'
reading lists sounded interesting, maybe there'd be some ideas I
could use for my own. Even before getting
to any of the lists, though, I found this interesting: I didn't
recognize any of the authors listed. Maybe they're fiction
writers? The first five were...
What do El Paso Corp., Microsoft, Philip Morris, the American Petroleum
Institute, and Ernst & Young have in common? They were among the
quarter million dollar club at a May GOP fundraiser, buying what
The Daily Enron terms "Executive Branch prepaid legal services."
(Not to be confused with the company called
Prepaid Legal Services!)
Also from TDE,
Where are Burton and DeLay on Halliburton? Asking in more specific
detail what can be compressed into a
bumper sticker, which is worse,
screwing an intern, or screwing the country?
Something to ask yourself the next time you accept one of those
"I agree" end-user license agreements, as described by
Robert
X. Cringely:
"Did you just give Microsoft the right to go inside your computer and
change pretty much anything they like even if it disables applications
from other vendors -- applications you paid good money for? And if they
do mess with the inside of your computer they don't have to ask
permission or do anything except post an explanation on some web site
somewhere?"
The answer will be "yes," sooner or later. You don't have much of a
choice. That's why the call it a "monopoly."
If I were "confined to a wheelchair," as they say, I think I would
find a way to afford an
iBot, even if it cost
as much as a car.
3.July 2002
On the eve of Independence Day, it might be a good time to think about
the
repeal of the Fairness Doctrine and how the stated goals of
increasing diversity of expression in broadcast media has not been met.
Some questions for further discussion: Does the current balance of
opinion in talk radio reflect market demand, or something else? Is it
pulled by the audience, or pushed by the broadcasters? Are attempts to
reduce funding for the Corporate for Public Broadcasting being pushed by
the same forces?
Edward Monks provides the history lesson, for the Eugene, Oregon
Registar-Guard.
After about 20 years in the area, we finally got over to the
upper
South Fork of the Boise River for a low-key, overnight camp. Hiked
to a little hot spring, and partway up a trail used by
motorcycles. I can understand the attraction to zip through the forest
without doing much work, but walking seems a lot more recreational.
We admired the thimbleberry flowers that are a
week or two away from production, and the variety of campers well
spread-out through the official and unofficial spots on the rivers and
creeks. We were next door to a fifth-wheel outfit that looked set for a
week, with gramma, grampa, and 2 grandkids. They were in bed well
before dark. Oh, and no fireworks.
Our business executive-in-chief has a bit of a wobbly platform for
demanding holier-than-thou adherence to security laws. It wasn't a
lot of money, but the
AP
reports he didn't get around to filing all those disclosure forms on time.
It's OK, though, just "like doing a 60 in a 55" speed-limit zone.
1.July 2002
There weren't any news stories about the potential destruction from
tens of thousands of visitors this year, but cycling through Ann Morrison
Park this morning, the damage was evident. City workers were having to
clean up the scattered garbage, there were broken wine and beer bottles
scattered about. I didn't look too closely in the bushes and trees
along the river, but one can imagine...
The governer didn't
declare a disaster emergency, and something tells me that I won't be
seeing any stories about all the cleanup that was required, either,
because it wasn't the Rainbow People this year, it was the
Boise River Festival.
Here's one of the ways we're (not) spending out tax cut:
stopping
cleanup at EPA Superfund sites.
Is our Veep one of those chief executives "who have mismanaged their
company in some fraudulent way (and) will have to pay"? Harvey Pitt
says his
SEC will find out. That could be interesting.
Holiday outing up Shafer Butte today, and a hike around More's Mountain.
At 7000', it was an incomparable day, temperature in the 70s, cloudless
sky, wild flowers in their glory, still flush with the water from
snowmelt. The 4 mile hike through Douglas Fir forest with views of the
ski area, Boise, Horseshoe Bend, the Sawtooths and the White
Clouds was a wonderful tonic.
 |
We took the Prius, and driving Bogus Basin Road without snow,
ice, and (especially) traffic was delightful. On the way
down, the game was maximizing fuel efficiency, enjoying the late
afternoon light, and dodging the Mormon crickets. I managed to rack up
a full display of 100+ mpg bars, with 7 diamonds (1 diamond = 50 Wh
regenerated). The histogram shows average miles per gallon in 5 minute
increments for the last 30 minutes, typically varying around the 50mpg
middle line. With a stop at a drive-in on the way home, we eventually
had a dozen bars, and more than half a kWh regenerated. We started at
49.0 mpg three-fourths of the way through a tank of gas, dropped to 47.4
at the top, and then shot up to 49.7 by the time we got home, all in 40
miles or so. Nothin' but tire noise most of the way down, we call it
"Stealth mode."
Checking my logs, I saw >5000 hits one week last month, with 3000 of
them from one site. Seems to be some blog-bot software gone awry
(and then fixed, since it didn't keep happening), but
Rajesh Jain's "Emergic" has a lot
of interesting things going on. I like the idea of categories, for
example, but with 477 days worth of postings, I'm not prepared to go
back through them all and add metadata. At least not today.
At some point, I might have to quit using my home-grown perl script and
get in the mainstream, too...
Neighbor kids are lighting off a bigger-than-ever collection of illegal
fireworks. The 4th of July on a Thursday has to be the worst possible
timing for those of us who can get by on a half a dozen or ten pops a
year. It started last Friday, and will run more than a week.
raveling
Tom von Alten
tva_∂t_fortboise_⋅_org
ISSN 1534-0007
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Thursday, 01-Aug-2002 22:19:08 MDT
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