February 2006 Archives

Lest there be any doubt as to why I have the utmost contempt for the left and its thought process, I present to you, fair reader, a good example of why I so vehemently despise the American left and all it stands for:

The justice makes the U.S. Constitution sound like a real estate lease or a last will and testament. Even some of those may be subject to different interpretations over the years.

Isn't it the genius of the Constitution that its principles are broad enough to meet the demands of changing times? Isn't that the great virtue of any basic law -- that it is broad enough to grow in response to different conditions? Isn't that why a country's constitution is sometimes called its organic law?

That would be the genius behind the United States Constitution. The wording is clear, crisp and relevant. There are no stipulations, limitations, exceptions, simply put, the document is utterly devoid of legalese. The average person, regardless of whether they agree with it or not, can actually read and understand it. The only people who find it to be so incredibly difficult to grok are those that really, really want to go against the Constitution without appearing to have absolutely no respect for it. Such people would include Paul Greenberg and a random sampling of the people who work in the Bush Administration.

Let's take the first amendment for example:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The only exception to the freedom of speech part is treasonous activity, and that's only because treason is included in the Constitution. The rest of the first amendment can be read as though it were its own context. Congress shall not do a damn thing to regulate any of the following except where they apply to people under the employment of the federal government. Now how hard is that text to understand? The founders did not leave a large number of exceptions, clauses, etc. They just simply wrote "the Congress shall not do X." A child could grasp the basic meaning of that, which says a lot about the people who find cryptic meanings in the Bill of Rights. They are in fact either incredibly subversive and dishonest or abysmally stupid. Take your pick, but anyone who gets fuzzy-headed over the meaning of the Bill of Rights is either not a good person or is incredibly mentally challenged because the text is so straight to the point without any equivocation.

As with a living organism, if law does not adapt, it dies. It becomes a dead letter -- instead of a living thing. The logical opposite of a living Constitution is a dead one.

The very reason that the Constitution has become a dead letter is because of the fact that idiots like Paul Greenberg cannot bring themselves to restrict the government to it. They have no desire to limit the federal government to the powers it gets from the U.S. Constitution. The Bill of Rights should be relevant today, but ideologues like Greenberg won't allow it to be because it interferes with their post-modernist agenda. The English language has not fundamentally changed in the past two hundred years; texts written in 1776 are quite easy for any modestly educated person to read.

It is invariably a sign that someone is dishonest when they twist such simple words around and say that just because they were written in one period, does not make them appropriate today. This is why socialism is still a powerful force around the world. It has been tried to the best of human ability, but the end result has always been carnage, but every generation insists that it is not inhibited by the primal defects that made the previous attempt fail. There is nothing intellectual about this approach to the Constitution, rather it is hubris that is thinly veiled in a layer of appeals to emotion and temporary fancy.

If the Constitution does not mean the same thing today that it meant two hundred years ago, then there is no point in even bothering with it anymore. Freedom of speech at the federal level may not have been as far in scope in the late eighteenth century, but it certainly was interpretted far more seriously than today. We have judges who cannot for the life of them imagine how placing spending limits on political advertising, or outright silencing all political speech for a period before an election, is a restriction on freedom of speech. What we have here is evolution, but devolution, from a very simple, but elegant design to a system so complex, ugly and dysfunctional that any engineer would wish violence upon the committee whose ad hoc idiocy spawned it.

"Idiot" indeed is the appropriate appellation for the people who think of the Constitution as a living document. Of what value is the first amendment if "Congress shall pass no law abridging freedom of speech" changes in meaning from generation to generation? None, and same for all of the amendments. Those who believe it is a living document cannot be bothered to govern even by the principles of the tenth amendment which delegates the vast majority of powers to the states and the people. They rape the meaning of the interstate commerce clause until it is so stretched apart that it includes any action which has even the vaguest impact on interstate commerce. By saying it means whatever a new generation "needs," what they're really saying is that the words themselves have no inherent meaning, which in turn means that there are no inherent rights secured, nor is there any inherent limit on the power of the state.

The battle over the Constitution and its meaning is not about the Constitution itself, but about truth versus post-modern nihilism. There are few, if any, words in the Constitution that can be considered genuinely archaic. A few of them may be funny, but none of them are what one would call archaic, which is to say from a vernacular used before the time of modern English. Those who cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the simple words and phrases of the U.S. Constitution are not decent people worthy of civility and respect for their ideas. Rather, they are hell-bent on tearing down the things that made this country great, including its culture of freedom. So, it's for that reason that I applaud Scalia for having the guts to openly call them idiots. Their actions and beliefs deserve words that are a lot worse than that.

I have changed my mind about the Dubai Port deal. Why? It's a very good reason, actually. I was very suspicious of them until I read in a commentary about them that they managed a port in Hong Kong and, as I recall, three in China. If the Communists in China trust DP to manage their ports, then maybe they aren't that much of a security risk. I must be high as a kite, you're thinking. No, actually, I think that if one of the most paranoid regimes on Earth sees no harm in letting them operate on their ports, there probably is little cause for concern. We do still need to scrutinize the UAE government and DP, but if everything checks out, I think it's worth allowing to go through.

The cold, hard truth is that China takes its security deadly seriously compared to how we treat our security. If their screenings show no major cause for concern, then I think this is probably a pretty safe way to go.

The mainstream media is feverishly predicting the Demise Of Blogging As We Know It^tm:

You're forgiven if you cling to the conventional wisdom that blogging, like half-pipe snowboarding, enjoys an unrelievedly rich future. Forgiven, but maybe behind the curve. A new report from Gallup pollsters, "Blog Readership Bogged Down," cautions that "the growth in the number of U.S. blog readers was somewhere between nil and negative in the past year."

Color me unconcerned about this particular aspect of the future. The reason why blogging became so popular in the first place is that it represents an easy way to get published online. In some form, it has been around as long as there have been people using the Worldwide Web as a way to publish their ideas and commentary. All that the new stuff does is make it much easier to create a technically-sound, semi-attractive website for hosting one's writings, videos or audio commentary.

If blogging is falling apart today, which I don't believe, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt, there's a very simple and logical explanation for that that should immediately jump out. It's hard to write anything that others want to read. The majority of blogs are about people, not ideas, new things, art, etc. They have no redeeming value of any kind to anyone except the owner and the people in their lives. I'm not one to judge the value of such blogs, but realistically these have no future and if they dominate the blogosphere, then clearly that is going to skew the statistics dramatically.

As much as both sides hate to admit it, both the bloggers and the mainstream media need one another. Despite their best efforts to deny it, no one save for ideological leftists genuinely believes that the mainstream media is objective, or often even highly professional these days. The mainstream media is increasingly struggling with problems such as reporters who just blatantly make up "facts," make up quotes and then attribute them to those they interview and even outright disregard the input from technical advisors whose input would eliminate juicy, ad revenue-generating controversy from a particular subject.

Bloggers are putting increasing pressure on the media to differentiate itself through professionalism, indepth coverage and, well, everything that it was supposed to be doing all along. That doesn't mean that most journalists are actually doing this as of right now, but the blogosphere puts valuable pressure there where it needs to be, and is the only thing that mightcause a revitalization of the mainstream media. I'm not counting on it, but that doesn't mean that the media doesn't desperately need the raking-over-the-coals it gets from bloggers. Bloggers, in turn, get a significant amount of the information that we comment on through the mainstream media. Without the mainstream media, the blogosphere would be rather... bland and asinine for the most part.

The mainstream media should not welcome the death of the blogosphere anymore than Microsoft should welcome the death of Apple. It takes the underdog gnawing on the ankles of the big dog with a ferocious temper sometimes to get the big dog to stay young and relevent. Granted, as I said, in the case of the mainstream media it might be so apathetic and lethargic at this point that the underdog will nip the femoral artery and put the old bitch out of her misery once and for all.

For more check out this post by Ed Driscoll.

The pro-market forces in the network neutrality debate seem to be missing a single, very important point, on one of the key aspects of network neutrality. Why should Google, Amazon, my blog and others pay for bandwidth at every network that our traffic flows through? More importantly, why should the "market decide" who wins on something this fundamental? Take this quote from CEO of Deutsch Telekom:

Ricke said it would only be fair if content providers like search engine Yahoo--which offers e-mail, online games and music videos--would pay for access to networks that would allow them to deliver their products at higher speeds.

"It is not fair that only the customer, via the monthly subscription fee (for using the Internet), pays for this great new world," Ricke said.

Just where is the fairness aspect coming in? Let's say that Google has its bandwidth provided by some fictional corporation known as XYZ Telecom (I don't know who leases them their lines right now). Google pays, probably conservatively, in at least the tens of millions every month for its bandwidth. More realistically, probably well over one hundred million dollars. Google also happens to be just one of many, many companies that line the pockets of their bandwidth providers quite handsomely. Only a patently dishonest individual could claim that Google is screwing anyone over because they pay for their lines like every other telecom customer and even have invested incredible sums of money into buying their own dark fibre. Yet, somehow Google is screwing them over because the profit margin isn't quite what the telecoms would like it to be.

An even better example is Apple. The telecoms' CEOs love to make soundbites about the cost of bandwidth to provide streaming video and reliable audio online. Apple's iTunes Music Store probably goes through almost as much, if not more, bandwidth every month than Google does, and that will be even more the case when they start making full movie sales part of their service. They will, in turn, negotiate new deals with their bandwidth providers to greatly increase the amount of bandwidth available at their data centers which process the vast volumes of transactions that go through the iTunes Music Store. Who is going to make big wads of cash off of this increased demand for video products from the iTunes Music Store? Not just Apple, but their service provider(s)! After all, I don't see bandwidth giveaways for corporate America nor do I see armed mercenaries under Apple's employment coercing the telecoms into providing them free or far below fair market priced bandwidth.

So why do I think it should be illegal for Verizon or SBC to limit Google's service through XYZ corp? Practicality and principle. There reaches a point of absurdity with principle that principle must yield to reality, and this is definitely one of them. The telecoms' customers pay for access to each other, and they pay for it on the basis that they don't get severely limited. Only in the perverted minds of the telecoms is it justified to sell a 1.5Mpbs DSL service, and then throttle it down to effectively around 300kbsp because the service that the user is requesting hasn't paid for "premium service." The fact that Verizon and others are not getting any kickbacks from the enormous sums of money that Google pays XYZ Corp, and the fact that they didn't properly price their DSL/Cable plans, does not justify them changing the nature of the service midstream. It's not Google's problem, it's not my problem, it's Verizon's for being unwilling to allow full internet service, even though that's what they're claiming to sell.

The problem here as I see it, is not a matter of whether Verizon should be allowed to devote 80% of its network to providing high-quality IPTV services, but how they should be able to limit their customers' access. If they are selling 1.5Mbps of downstream bandwidth to their customers, they should have a legal obligation to do everything they can to provide that service at any given time. If that means sacrificing part of that 80% they want to reserve, then tough luck. You sell a service, you have an obligation to provide it. That means that they have no right to throttle access to the iTunes Music Store down to 300kbps because Apple did not pay up. If they artificially limit my 1.5Mpbs connection, then they have actually refused to provide the service that I am paying for.

Let's not get distracted by focusing on the issue of whether they should be able to provide premium delivery to services that pay them. It'd actually be a good thing for Verizon, SBC, Deutsch Telekom and others to charge a nominal monthly fee to provide an even higher quality of service for certain technologies such as IPTV. The issue is that this not what they're talking about. They're talking about making companies like Google pay again for bandwidth they've already bought and making their broadband customers pay for services that they have no intention of providing. After all, why else would they be raising a stink about fairness here? Routing others traffic is part of cost of doing business when you're in the networking business. Google's ISP should respond by throttling all traffic from Verzion's network down to nothing. Or, even better, Google should buy the infrastructure in between major points in the global network and shutdown Verizon, SBC and others entirely until they agree to end this nonsense once and for all.

There's one thing that I have never liked about horror movies. It's one of those few things that makes me almost attavistic with a desire to reach through the screen and slap the hell out of the actor or (usually) actress that is committing this cardinal sin of congenital idiocy. It's the old "ineptly try to insert the car keys in while the monster is coming" schtick. The individual in question tries frantically to get the keys into the ignition so that they can get the hell out of there before the Super Bad Thingy gets them, but all they can do is poke at the ignition with the keys as though they were a chimpanzee with a stick poking a dead animal. I can't stand it, and almost immediately find myself rooting for whatever is trying to get them.

Yeah, yeah it's supposed to be panic, but that's just the thing. You have two choices. Either you can act like a deer caught in the headlights of a redneck's huntin truck or you can focus on the one pathetically easy task that you must perform perfectly in order to get the hell away from the Super Bad Thing. I am just sick of this rehashed panicy character thing. It's really old. The next time it happens, I really want to see the Super Bad Thingy tear the character limb from limb because they couldn't swallow their panic just long enough to stick the key in the ignition. I just can't root for a character that is that much of a weakling anymore than I can root for a deer that just stands there as a hunter is about to shoot it.

How you can tell that America is not a theocracy:

He was interrupted by Steve Drain, who bellowed that God hates gays and their enablers and "so, therefore, God hates the U.S. military."

According to an account reported by the Minneapolis-based Star Tribune, about a half-hour before the service, Deirdre Ostlund, Kemple's mother, approached the six Kansans and told them in a cold fury: "I'm Andrew's mother and I want you to know you are truly hateful people."

As Ostlund turned away to enter Zion Lutheran Church, Shirley Phelps-Roper taunted her: "Adulterer! You can't admit you sent your own child to hell! If she does not heed this warning, she will look up from hell with him."

If America were a theocracy, the Phelps would have been tried for blasphemy and would either have been excommunicated (which is a spiritually dangerous, almost deadly punishment in its own right) or put to death. Why? Because scripture is clear that God does not hate homosexuals, but rather hates their sin. The sin of homosexuality is a severe one because all sexual sins are against one's own body as well as God, but that does not in any way make them sufficiently egregious as to make them unforgivable. There is, however, one sin that the Bible says quite clearly is unforgivable, and that is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.

Phelps is not a Christian anymore than Osama Bin Laden is. His approach speaks directly against basic Christian teachings and regardless of the label that he wears, it is not fitting for him to be referred to as a Christian. He is a sick and evil little man who is doing his very best to stifle any genuine call for repentance for those he encounters and is an enemy of God, not a devoted follower of God.

So, what would he be doing here if he were a Christian preacher instead of a lying charlatan? He'd be praying on behalf of the fallen and would be urging others to strengthen their relationship with God so as to earn God's favor for our country. Instead, he turns people off to the Gospel message. Some preacher. I'm sure Satan will give him a merit badge or two someday.

Rather than change the law, we will just take the easy way out:

If a rape victim becomes pregnant and bears a child, the rapist could have the same parental rights as the mother, said Krista Heeren-Graber, executive director of the South Dakota Network Against Family Violence and Sexual Assault.

"The idea the rapist could be in the child's life ... makes the woman very, very fearful. Sometimes they need to have choice," Heeren-Graber said."

Well I guess since we can't be mean to those big bad rapists we have to show tough love to the children by killing them. Afterall, we can't simply pass a law saying that if you rape a woman, you irrevocably lose all parental rights over that child. There is one thing that should be added to this, though, and that's that instead of demanding child support, the state will provide either a tax deduction equal to the child support or a small benefit if the rapist is convicted. The reason I think that this is necessary is that rapists, being bad people, might take violent and deadly offense to having to pay child support. That is the best way to support the child, while not dangers to the mother and child.

There's a major logical inconsistency here. If you oppose abortion in general, there is no good reason to support it in the case of rape or incest. There is no moral difference between a child created under these circumstances and a child that was created by two consenting, non-related adults.

One of the lessons that I got out of my readings of 1984 (I love it and have read it a few times) is that in the face of tyranny, people will sometimes choose to rebel in ways that offend the sensibilities of more conservative individuals. Yes, I know the book is fiction, but it is in morals and spirit a very realistic critique of life under Stalin in the Soviet Union. Some people choose to rebel through sexuality, crass language and conduct and violent behavior in the face of cold, inhuman bureaucracy. And why shouldn't they choose this path, since it is one of the last ways for them to exert their humanity and individuality in the face of a militantly conformist system that impinges on increasing numbers of areas where it has no business getting involved?

Life in America is increasingly becoming rigidly regimented by the forces of political correctness. A significant amount of the fundamental freedoms that were enjoyed at the turn of the twentieth century flat out do not exist today, and in the past several years, the attacks on individual freedom and choice have grown steadily. If people identify with incendiary writers with a flamboyant shock jock tendency, writers and public figures like Ann Coulter, it is a sign of the culture itself being cut off. Today, the only people who get their voices heard in the face of political correctness are those who care so little about the consequences or the feelings of others that they will not be silenced by the bureaucratic fascists in academia, government and corporate America.

Civil debate on many issues is dead. There is an official orthodoxy and the only ones who survive it are those are willing to go for the throat in defense of their ideas. When Joe Carter of Evangelical Outpost attacked Ann Coulter for her willingness to be radical, over-the-top and flamingly-outspoken, it didn't surprise me. The sad reality is that while George Will is a better intellectual than Coulter, he and most "civil" conservatives don't take the battle to the left. We libertarians rarely tend to be the types that back down in the face of the typical left-wing, politically correct attakcs.

In my opinion, it's actually good to have a conservative who is willing to come out and mutilate the sacred cows of the left like a drive by UFO raid. Many less-intellectual people associate an unease with defending one's views with a weakness in the ideas themselves. Since conservatism is the leading force on the right at the present time, if a general right wing push in America is to be achieved, it is necessary for the conservative ranks to have members who are willing to fight fire with fire. Everytime a conservative backs down and says with a mealy-mouthed tone of voice, "I'm not (insert prejudice here" and genuflects before the alter of tolerance and accepted liberal values, the right (and this includes libertarians to a fairly significant degree) is discredited in a small way.

You don't have to like writers like Ann Coulter to realize that they serve a good purpose. She is a pitbull for the right and is not willing to sit around while the robbers are walking out with the loot. Most conservatives of all stripes, however, while good people, are unable to muster the intestinal fortitude to get down in the trenches and fight their opponents. Regardless of whether many more "civil" conservatives like it, you can only afford to use morally superior methods to win a war when you have the ability to safely do so. Unfortunately, conservatism is by and large about as prepared to fight this war as the British Army of 1776 would be to suppress the IED-equipped insurgents of modern Iraq. Many conservatives do not realize that the culture has not swung in a conservative direction post-9/11. It's imperative that they understand the difference between a fear of foreign attackers, triggering a vote for a stronger national security program, and a general push toward a limited government, right-wing system. In many areas, such as academia, we have gained almost nothing and are still losing ground.

When student newspapers are being censored for allowing students to see what a violent controversy is about, it should be obvious that civil discourse is being attacked. Those who insist on totally civil rules of debate, in the face of what is a blatant attempt to stifle all intellectual opposition to a hard left, post-modernist institutional ideology are not being morally superior. They are just lambs walking right into a slaughter. You can abide by certain limits to establish a moral superiority, but refusing to using incendiary rhetoric, some of which might be very offensive, is self-limiting. It's regrettable that cool heads debating rationally is nowhere near the norm today, but that is the way things work.

Lee Harris has one of the best commentaries I have seen so far on the "portgate" issue. Check it out at TCSDaily.com. In my opinion, he's consistently the best contributor that TCSDaily has, and for him to come out so strongly on this issue, in this way, is a good sign for me that this is not just about paranoia versus pragmatism.

Nothing to do with terrorism, they said. The UAE are our buddies, they said. So why is it that they were known to go galavanting around Afghanistan in areas where Bin Laden operated openly?

The report states U.S. intelligence believed that bin Laden was visiting an area in the Afghan desert in February 1999 near a hunting camp used by UAE officials, and that the U.S. military planned a missile strike.

Intelligence from local tribal sources indicated ``bin Laden regularly went from his adjacent camp to the larger camp where he visited the Emiratis,'' the report said.

Notice how things are starting to change among bloggers and the press, since we're being "assured that there is no security threat?" There is still evidence to show that the UAE government is not as anti-terrorism as it is made out to be. It's just one of the many reasons why I have said that Bush supporters are like Clinton supporters. A few words of good news comes out and all of a sudden, it was just a "communication problem."

I think this boils down to a very severe problem with the way that many Americans think about war and foreign affairs. A lot of Americans, probably most, think in terms of dichotomies. If you are anti-Bush, you must be at least sympathetic to Kerry. If you help us in part of our "War on Terror," you must be anti-terrorism. It's a fundamental weakness that is perhaps the greatest one that many Americans have in terms of understanding issues like this.

Just because the UAE is helping us fight our enemies, does not make them our ally. Islamists in governments in the Middle East have spent decades funneling cash and weapons to terrorist elements around the world in order to build up their movement. They do not appear to be Islamist on the surface to the casual onlooker, but their goals are the same. The House of Saud always seemed like a quaint, albeit corrupt, government to many Americans, but in fact they have spent quite some time funding the expansion of Wahabi Islam around the world to create an ideological base for their religious expansion by the sword. The Saudis let us work closely with them and seemed to be our ally in the Cold War and the Gulf War, even as they were (and still are) funding the rise of Wahabi Islam and its corresponding bloodshed around the world.

One can easily imagine scenarios where Islamists gain employment with DWI and end up bringing weapons into the United States through this deal. All it would take would be for someone with the corporate headquarters with a suitcase nuke to make an official visit to a port site, drive off for lunch into the middle of New York City and that's all she wrote. The very reason why we have to worry about this company is that if there are Islamists who have access to its shipping channels and corporate transportation, they will not be the raving lunatics of Gaza and the West Bank, but rather cold, dedicated and professional in the delivery of their attack.

It seemed ironic to me earlier today when Joe Carter dismissed this story as pure paranoia, considering his defense of the "wisdom of repugnance." It is repugnant to me, and many others, that we are allowing a foreign corporation with very intimate ties to its government, to own the port operations at some of our most important ports. Yes, I know about the Chinese COSCO corporation, and I don't support that either. The one does not justify the other.

I don't think that there is some organized conspiracy among right wing bloggers here, but it takes me aback that so many of them dismiss outright the legitimate criticisms of this deal. My question to the people defending this transaction comes down to this: what if you're wrong and they deliver a nuclear bomb into NYC? If we keep them from taking over, we can at least say that we tried. And enough of the sophistic comments about fear of this corporation's roots in an Islamic country. Considering the undeniable fact that Islamic terrorism is the most pervasive and widespread terrorism in the history of mankind, and arguably would be the most genocidal if suitably equipped, I have no sympathy for Islamic countries. It's not up to us to give them them the benefit of the doubt that Islam is a religion of peace and that they are dominated by a peaceful majority that encompasses almost the entire society. The Danish cartoon fiasco proves quite clearly that we have every right to be skeptical because the jihad is not some fantasy shared by a tiny minority.

The whole port fiasco has been grating on me all day to one extent or another, and it is getting to be rather disturbing to see the number of people on the right who so quickly dismiss the security implications of this. Once again, a lot of people seem to be suffering from a severe lack of imagination when it comes to the myriad number of ways that our enemies could strike us. Take this from Instapundit, for example:

As I noted earlier, we have a perfect storm brought about by the loss of confidence in the Administration's backbone after their inadequate Cartoon Wars response, continuing fears of terrorism (at least now the Democrats won't be able to say that it's a case of Bush fanning the flames of fear) and lousy White House PR management. As Rich Galen says: "This port deal is not a national security issue. It is an issue of this administration having a continuing problem with understanding how these things will play in the public's mind and not taking steps to set the stage so these things don't come as a shock and are presented in their worst possible light."

As I say, I don't think there's any real security issue here, but I think the Bush Administration needs to launch a full-bore effort to explain what's actually going on, something that they still haven't really mounted.

Glenn makes a good point in noting that the border security issue is one that has blown the Bush Administration's credentials sky high for many of us on the right. The problem with the Bush Administration in terms of the trust factor alone is that they have run our national security policy with a schitzophrenic back and forth between "we're at war" and business-as-usual tactics. We have wartime surveillance and detention powers, but a disturbing lack of interest in (and outright vocal opposition to) border security. The ports, especially the major ones, form a strategic part of our border security. It still seems like a no brainer to me and many others that letting a corporation based out of a country that has a terrorism problem, especially of the Islamic kind, is dangerous for our security.

There are a number of ways in which terrorists could exploit the DWI ownership of these port operations. Just having them in the work force alone would pose a security risk. A lone terrorist could get a job with them, come over on official business with a suitcase nuke and take out a chunk of New York City. You could have terrorist infiltration into the management of the company at positions that are high enough to be effective, but low enough to keep outside of the government's scrutiny. Then there is the possibility that they might just let a few weapons go through unchecked. The possibilities exist, and even if improbable, so is the successful hijacking of a few airplanes with box cutters and then using those same airplanes as missiles against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

I have to say that you know something is fishy when Michelle Malkin goes pitbull on Bush over one of his administration's actions. Supposedly, the whole background check of the business and transaction took between twenty and twenty five days. That's nowhere near long enough to do a thorough background check of the company. If the CIA had done a background check for six months to a year from top to bottom, I might have no problem with this, but this is too rushed for comfort. There is definitely at a minimum a disturbing lack of concern among the Bush Administration for the security implications here.

James Joyner of Outside the Beltway seems to echo the typical sentiment here for many of the Bush Administration's supporters:

My only point in any of this is that people like Rep. Sue Myrick seem to think that we have somehow sold our ports or even security control of our ports to the Arabs. That's not the case. Whether the government owned Dubai company in question can be trusted to carry out the functions previously assigned to a private U.K. firm is not something about which I have any particular insight. I merely note that the fact that there are Arabs involved is not does not constitute a prima facie case that we should deny the contract.

Now, James, would you feel the same way about a corporation owned and run by the Chinese government? This Middle Eastern company is said to be owned by their government, and it's a government in a country that is in a region which is known as a popular hotbed of terrorism against American interests. How would you feel if it were a front corporation for the People's Liberation Army instead of the UAE government?

Oh and this from Right-Thinking from the Left Coast is a perfect example of why we cannot trust the UAE. No national security issue, my ass!

But if he aspires to live in a world of reciprocity, then it makes no sense to limit the possibilities of the exchange to code, excluding money, hardware, or services. Because people value different things, money and markets are the way in which societies achieve reciprocity. The ranters claims of the moral superiority of a gift economy or a barter society are puzzling.

I'm somewhat amazed that James DeLong hasn't figured out what Torvalds really meant by now. Tim Lee wrote at Tech Liberation Front about this and covered it fairly well in an area where I would have thought that DeLong would have seen a sufficient explanation to pull a small mea culpa. Guess not. Since I'm in a rehashing mood, let's continue with another rebuttal.

It's a geek thing, and something that DeLong will probably not be able to understand given the difference in perspectives at play here. People like Torvalds, and I include myself and many of my friends in this category, do software development as much for fun as any other motivation. This is why the relationship between open source software and corporate America is so wierd. The software is written because someone decided that they didn't like Product $X and tried to do a better job themselves. Other people jump in and contribute code, art, documentation, etc.

DeLong's definition of reciprocity is different than Torvalds. The latter is more specific than the former. Money does not make a kernel work better, and since Torvald has been hired for a while to work on the kernel by various companies, it makes little sense for him to care about money if he's happy with his job. Torvalds did not start developing his kernel as a business, but as a hobby. If he decides that code is more useful to him, then that's his business. It would seem that IBM, Compaq, Apple, Intel and others that have at some point worked on Linux agree with him that code is a more valuable contribution since he won't license them the right to fork off derivative products from what kernel code he owns.

There is nothing stopping a business from dividing up a pie of a few million dollars between the kernel team's full time members in exchange for the value that they have gotten from it. What DeLong seems to want is the rights to the code in exchange for money, which means ultimately the right to fork the code. Torvalds is not giving that up and I don't blame him.

There is dishonesty afoot in the fair lands of ABC News. Some n'eredoweller has seen fit to blatantly and unabashedly lie about the accuracy of a story in order to whip up anti-video game hysteria. Good heavens, this couldn't be perpetrated by the intrepid truth-seekers from the fourth estate have been caught with their pants down in a shamless effort to create news where none existed! Hark! Doth mine ears hear the sounds of yon barristers from Nintendo on approach?

Hah! All I can say is that this story has made my day! It's about time that someone finally caught the mainstream media in an outright slander/libel case against video game makers and gamers. For years they have been selling their news about how video games are going to destroy the youth of America, and finally they have been exposed. It used to be that video games were going to cause a wave of violence (some still try to sell that one), and now it's apparently a playground for pedophiles.

Couldn't have happened to a better company. Stuff like this proves why bloggers are getting credit where they may not even deserve it. With this much unprofessionalism in the most important media outlets, who can you trust these days? Parents, remember this incident the next time the media shouts "oh no! Video games will make demons out of your children!"

OK, here is the VMWare Player image of HaikuOS that was built on Feburary 19^th by Sikosis. To use it, download and extract the zip file, install the VMWare Player download and double click on the file HaikuOS.vmx to load the virtual machine inside of the VMWare Player.

I just got done testing out a disk image of HaikuOS that was built yesterday morning. In case anyone needs a link to where I got it, I downloaded the disk image here. Ok, so a very fair question that I'm sure some of the semi-/non-geeks in the audience will have, why should y'all care? The answer is really simple. HaikuOS is an open source reimplementation of BeOS, an operating system that was far, far ahead of the competition. It was to MacOS what MacOS was to Windows if that gives you any indication of how amazing cool it was. Imagine an operating system that was futuristic, light-weight, had a great GUI, could run as fast on a PII 450 as Windows does on a P4 and that had the "it just works" goodness of MacOS.

And it ran on PC hardware. I kid you not, fair readers, as I have personally witnessed all of the above from my times using BeOS R4, R4.5 and R5 before Be went bankrupt and sold its IP to Palm, who ended up wasting it. I would probably never have a good reason to buy another Mac if and when HaikuOS reaches a full, stable release and can run natively on my hardware.

So, what can you do with this disk image? Not much, as far as desktops go right now. Remember, this is a development build that is not supposed to be used by casual users. However, I am in the process of packaging up a VMWare download for anyone who wants to use VMWare Player to test it out. And of course, why should you care about it, as far as your computer goes? Really simple, actually. Linux is too bulky and complex for most users, and MacOS X requires special hardware. If you want choice, and the chance to have an OS that really works, support HaikuOS. The majority of the basic infrastructure is now in place, and progress has really been picking up over the last six months. In another six months to a year, it is very likely that they will have a usable beta out for testing. So, go to their website and make a $5-$10 donation every so often to help them get the funds needed to keep things chugging along. (I have already given them about $15 and plan to send them another $15 at the end of the month or so)

***Update***
For a good review of HaikuOS, check this out.

On Tech Liberation Front and IPCentral, there seems to be some disagreement as to what kind of control DRM really is. In my opinion, DRM is a new breed of control. It is not a legitimately comparable to a lock because it is significantly more powerful and nuanced. Calling it a mere lock is like calling an Acura TL analogous to a new type of carriage. The closest definition is that it is a "self-enforcing, policy mechanism." It is more comparable to having a lawyer watching over your use of your car to ensure that you are using it in a manner that is deemed acceptable by the manufacturer. Is that mod to the body acceptable? How about that new paint job? Did you check to make sure that you had the right to install a custom-made MP3 player? This is what DRM can subject us to, and it has only been Apple's rabid zeal to keep their brand in tact that hasn't allowed DRM to become a share-cropper system. Make no mistake about it, the content producers do not like Apple, but what can they do? As long as Apple controls the iPod, there is no alternative because no system out there works on the same level as what Apple has control of.

Fortunately, we can rest safely in the knowledge that DRM getting cracked does not cause a wave of copyright infringement. Ironically, most of the illegal rips that have appeared on file sharing networks were leaked by those affiliated with the studios. Perhaps the one flaw that was most widely exposed was not the fundamental weakness of the CSS system, but rather that many DVD manufacturers did not fully implement the DVD restriction specs. My Daewoo DVD player, for example, is not particular about encryption or region codes being present. DRM does little good if parts of the specs are just tossed out by the implementer, and that is a global problem that no amount of federal regulation can solve. It is for this reason alone that a major argument can be made that DRM needs to be a one-vendor monopoly so as to control the entire system. Perhaps you have to be a software developer to see openness as a gaping hole here, but it seems like a technical pipedream to have an "open standard DRM." Interoperability and security are invariably at odds with one another when it comes to DRM.

The only way to allow buyers to preserve the value of their data at that point is to let them break DRM systems for what can be reasonably called fair use reasons. Why James DeLong and others are so squeemish about using law enforcement for real, not for profit infringement is beyond me. It would seem to be the best balance between protecting copyright holders and their customers since the final determinations would be made by humans, through legal standards. If non-fair use copyright infringement is theft, then clearly there is a good reason to make use of the government's law enforcement capabilities. In practice, the best protection of copyrights will end up being the threat of loss of life, liberty and property, not reasonably easy to hack content restriction systems.

On a side note, what I would like to know from the IPCentral guys is, at at what point do we just give up on DRM ever working? At what point do we say, "the market will not accept this." All of the DRM schemes that have been proposed by vendors with the ability to get them out to the public in force, except for Apple's FairPlay, smack of a vaguely Orwellian tone for the average buyer. While the features would be beneficial for businesses, they wouldn't be for me or any other average buyer. Please, spare me the idealistic "the market will find away" rhetoric. I am more of a cynic than a libertarian and what I see promises a future dominated by certain DRM schemes that are not... shall we say... liberal in their treatment of the buyer's use. So, at what point do you admit that you were wrong if the market fails to create any real DRM schemes that provide a variety of choice rather than a share-cropper relationship between copyright holder and copyright good buyer?

I have never tried to suggest that I am an optimistic for I am a cynical realist when it comes to humanity. I have for a while rejected any concept of the "innate goodness of man" in light of the obvious fact that humanity has been a brutal race as often, or even more so than it has generally conducted itself in an enlightened manner. It is with this preface that I would like to make a small stand on the MySpace controversy.

My heart does not bleed for the teens who expose themselves in such a blatantly stupid manner on MySpace. Kids, if you provide a roadmap to your home, all of your contact information and semi-sexually explicit pictures of yourselves, you're throwing meat to starving wolves. This is not neverland, well, in the Peter Pan sense. This is the real world where evil men and women get off to that sort of thing. You have two choices: be dorky and safe, or be cool and risk getting involved in a sexual relationship with a Very Bad Person. It's your call, and quite frankly, I really don't care which you choose.

So now, why don't I care? Why am I so heartless toward these pure, wholesome children? It's because they're not children, not pure and not wholesome. A fourteen year old is four years away from being a legal adult. She's damn well old enough to understand the dangers of rape and to know what puts her at risk. The exposure of so much personal information from an eight year old is one thing; an eight year old is unequivocably just a child. A teen, however, is not a child, but a young adult had damn well better start behaving like one in public, especially when it comes to personal safety.

If you can't keep your miserable little brat safe, then keep them off my Internet. There, I said it. I don't pitty the girls who post sexually explicit pictures of themselves, and I'm not going to waste emotional energy assuming that they have deep scars because daddy didn't love them. I sure as hell do not want their competitive attempts to one up their female peers to get in the way of my enjoyment of the Internet by bringing out all of the soccer moms and Al Gore to regulate it until its safe for toddlers and useful only for the same.

Back when I was their age, ironically when few parents had ever used the Internet in 1995-1997, no parent allowed their kids to publish any of this information. They sure as hell would have revoked their kid's access if they posted any sexually explicit pictures of themselves. Fast forward to today. We've had eleven years for the Internet to be integrated into mainstream society and people in general are more naive than ever about it. So, I guess they'll blame it all on Apple and Microsoft for making it appear friendly with their flashy new interfaces. That's the way these people work.

**UPDATE** 12/4/2007: Y'all have finally done it. Comments are closed, and if you have a hard time understanding why, just check out the last few comments. If you have more than a handful of brain cells, the reason will be self-explanatory.

Our elected government, in its "in"finite anti-terrorism wisdom, is seriously set on course to allow a state-owned corporation based out of the United Arab Emirates to operate some of our most strategically important ports. In related news, the Roman Government, it has been recently discovered, outsourced the management of its city defenses to the Huns citing budgetary problems...

And what was the most outrage that the Senate could muster over this outrageous move that borders on outright treason? It's "politically tone-deaf." Thank you, Senator Graham, for your scathing rebuttal to the Bush Administration whose last election was won on anti-terrorism grounds.

So, I'm wondering. What happens when the security switches over to a bunch of jihadis at these ports and they start bringing weapons over to our country? Oh, I'm sure that the Bush supporters will find every reason to say that Kerry would have been worse. Excuse me, but bullshit. Like Hell Kerry would have been any worse at this point. But hey, if you want to stick to your fantasy world where Bush has done everything he reasonably can to keep us safe, that's your right. One of the freedoms in the penumbra of the ninth amendment is the freedom to maintain dual citizenship in lala land.

And now, for some final words on this subject, the Islamic world is once again host to rioting. If the Jewish people responded with violence to the cartoons that are routinely published about them in Islamic news outlets, there would be several entire Islamic countries nuked off the face of the Earth. The stuff that gets published there is at least one solid order of magnitude far more vitriolic in its denigration of Judaism than anything that was published in that Danish rag.

So let's see, to sum it all up. We are in the midst of an explosion of Islamic violence around the world that could fuel several 9-11 or higher levels of attacks, but we are allowing a Middle Eastern company, owned by an Islamic country's government, to operate our port security. This at a time when Muslims in most of the Islamic world are rioting with a fury that we have not see in a long time. The rioting has gone just about global, but hey... it's business as usual. No good reason to increase those terrorism threat levels, shut down the border, end the visas for six months to a year and nationalize control of the ports!

1. Lebanon
2. Iran
3. Phillipines
4. Pakistan
5. Libya
6. Somalia
7. Bengladesh
8. Syria
9. Indonesia

Just some of the few countries where rioting has taken place. There could be even more, but I am too lazy to really look up all of the possible places. This is not an isolated thing. This is increasingly becoming a global problem and if Bush won't change course and admit that he's dead damn wrong here, then he needs to be impeached, followed by a serious look by Congress whether the entire administration shouldn't be purged by impeachment and new elections called. The stakes are too high for politics and failure to do right. For them to not be taking this seriously is a fundamental failure on their part and one that they should lose their jobs for.

Former President Clinton has finally come out with his true feelings about freedom of speech:

He said the people's religious convictions should be respected at all costs and that media should not be permitted to criticize other faiths. He said the media could criticize any issue including governments and people, but nobody had the right to play with the sentiments of other faiths.

So how do you separate someone's religious beliefs from them? Their religion is part of how they derive their identity. The obvious reaction would be that any criticism of a Muslim would end up becoming a criticism of their religion because most people are thin-skinned and look for ways to shut up their critics.

Well this week hasn't been pretty for Gore or Clinton. They've shown their true colors when it comes to both national security and basic civil rights. The fact that some European countries can prosecute the publishers does not translate out into an obligation to do so, nor does it make it right. The Islamic media publishes some stuff that is so patently offensive and religiously hateful that by Clinton's standards, it should be shut down entirely.

If you don't believe in the right to say offensive things, you don't believe in freedom of speech. Stop making excuses, stop calling it incitement to violence. Civilized people don't riot over cartoons, no matter how offensive. Those who do, deserve to be rounded up and unceremoniously sent to prison. Civilized people don't tolerate people turning mere offense into license to go on a rampage. I'm sick of the wishy-washy leftists who are all about the freedom to denigrate peaceful religions like Judaism and Christianity, but practically piss their pants when it turns to Islam.

Who would have thought that Al Qaida actually has everything from salaried positions, to vacation policies and company healthcare? Apparently, Al Qaida actually has an internal structure that is more like a modern, multi-national corporation than the organized terrorist groups of yesteryear. Isn't globalization great? Even the jihadis are learning how to participate in the global economy!

The most intriguing aspect of this discovery is that it proves that the best way to take down Al Qaida is not the restriction of fundamental liberties in the United States (I could have told ya that one!), but rather a global financial war. They can be undermined by making it simply not economically worthwhile for their people to continue to work for them. Money is a powerful motivator and will probably be what undoes them.

The reason why it is so important to destroy them financially is that it would isolate many of the married men from their base of supporters. Married men have wives and children to support, and they would face tremendous pressure to support their wives and kids rather than fight the infidels. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to imagine some of the wives' fathers killing them for abandoning their wives and kids to starvation. Unmarried men might be more likely to be willing to commit a suicide bombing, but they have less attachment to this world than married men, which might make Al Qaida harder to organize and maintain as a fighting force.

All of this is speculation, but a younger, more hot-headed Al Qaida would be less of a threat than an Al Qaida composed of older, more cool-headed married men.

One of the things that you have to deal with when you're a conservative Christian in America is the incessant nattering of the secularists and their persecution complex. America is on the verge of theocracy! Gays will be herded into concentration camps with cells lined with leather and perfumed gas chambers! Or... rather... maybe not. It seems that Russian Muslims are getting a little bit agitated about the whole open homosexuality thing in Russia these days, and their "solution" to it is a lot less civilized than Pat Robertson at his most tourettes-afflicted.

Clearly, flogging the hell out of gay pride marchers is as bad as debating whether homosexuals should have legal access to the marriage system in America. Come to think of it, knowing the BDSM fetish among many gay men, this threat from the Muslims might actually cause some to seriously consider a gay pride rally in Russia. At any rate, it's object lesson in the proportionality that many leftists and secularists of all stripes have, that so many of them compare American religious conservatives with these violent wingnuts as though they are all cut from the same cloth.

Now, I wonder, if different political ideologies encourage their followers down different paths of practical application, then how can anyone seriously argue that all religions end up producing the same types of followers? At what point in time have Buddhists waged holy wars? When has it been widely accepted that Christian scripture gave average Christians, or even the institutional church, the obligation and right to convert at the point of sword and exterminate entire communities that did not convert? There is overlap in terms of peace and violence, and evil has been done in the name of scripture of all types, but longterm trends of different belief systems have been markedly different.

On that note, I should remind everyone that Christian scripture has been repeatedly violated by religious and political institutions that have tried to exploit it in order to consolidate their power. One need only examine the historical differences between missionaries operating according to Christian scripture and Islamic scripture to see what I mean.

Two uniformed men strolled into the main room of the Little Falls library in Bethesda one day last week and demanded the attention of all patrons using the computers. Then they made their announcement: The viewing of Internet pornography was forbidden.

The men looked stern and wore baseball caps emblazoned with the words "Homeland Security." The bizarre scene unfolded Feb. 9, leaving some residents confused and forcing county officials to explain how employees assigned to protect county buildings against terrorists came to see it as their job to police the viewing of pornography.

I suppose that's one use for former Vice Squad agents. Still, what a waste of money. The funny part of this story is when the police arrive to deal with the uppity? library patron and librarian. The cop didn't pull the law-abiding patron and librarian out of the library, but rather pulled the ?homeland security agents? outside and gave them a friendly bit of instruction on how to properly not harass law-abiding citizens.

This is not mission creep, but rather part of a sophisticated attempt to capture terrorists since it's a well-known fact that terrorists like strip clubs. A library is clearly the next best thing because you can view porn there and porn is the next best thing to a real, live woman stripping. Just ask any man that has had to substitute pornography for a real woman. He'll tell you that it sure does beat having to use one's imagination to conjure up images of women who might be sexually interested in men like them.

Who says that Macs are significantly more expensive than their PC counterparts? Compare the high-end MacBook Pro which has almost the exact same specs as these Dell XPS laptops. Granted, the Macs have video chipsets that aren't quite as powerful, and slightly slower hard drives, but they cost a few hundred dollars less and have dual core intel processors. I'd definitely rather have a dual core processor over a faster video chipset in my laptop. Bringing the high-end MacBook Pro up to a 7200RPM hard drive adds one hundred dollars to the price tag for a total cost of two thousand, five hundred ninety nine dollars. That's around two hundred fifty dollars less than the Dell system that approachs it in cost.

And this would be why I was excited about the transition to x86 processors. Better performance, better price and better energy use. My PowerBook G4 didn't get half the batter life that my Dell Inspiron gets with its Pentium M processor. Now that they are using the same processor architecture, they can compete more evenly on merits rather than "religion." I can't wait for the Mac Minis to make the transition, I'll definitely be grabbing one of those babies for a web development machine.

"I know a lot of people are concerned about Big Brother, but my response to that is if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?" Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt told reporters Wednesday at a regular briefing.

Houston is facing a severe police shortage because of too many retirements and too few recruits, and the city has absorbed 150,000 hurricane refugees who are filling apartment complexes in crime-ridden neighborhoods. City Council is considering a public safety tax to pay for more officers.

Hurtt said he believes building permits should require malls and large apartment complexes to install surveillance cameras. And Hurtt said if a homeowner requires repeated police response, he thinks it is reasonable to require camera surveillance of that property.

The moment they bring out that old lie, "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear," is the moment that you know that something is going terribly wrong or going to go terribly wrong. Surveillance cameras inside peoples homes is the epitome of a dehumanizing, totalitarian suggestion. Has America really gone so far down the path of tyranny that local officials are literally allowed to use 1984 as a play book? Just remember, the House Police are your friends, and would never violate your rights and their chief of police wants you to be aware of how concerned he is for the security of the residents of his fair city:

"If they are putting a burden on the criminal justice system and cheating the other residents of Houston, yes," he said. "I think people are upset when people are robbed and killed on the streets of Houston."

James DeLong is having a hard time understanding Linus Torvalds' point about the GPL and reciprocity:

I don't write code. So, in Torwalds' view, we cannot trade. But a broader view is that we can trade because reciprocity includes me giving him money, which he can then use to buy something that he cannot make himself.
The market is a giant reciprocity machine. Why is this a hard point?

As Time Lee has pointed out in posts on Tech Liberation, DeLong has a hard time understanding a view of copyright that doesn't involve money or dichotomies between anarchy and total control. Torvalds is not thinking like a businessman here, but rather like a software engineer. He is not interested in simple financial contributions from a variety of sources, but rather technical contributions. I'm sure that he'd be pleased as punch for people to contribute money to a fund to pay core contributors who are not gainfully employed in a way that advances Linux development, but, again, that's not what he was referring to here. What he is interested in was the little matter of getting something for giving something.

I agree with Torvalds that if the GPL is going in the direction of restricting developers, it is not a good license. What DeLong clearly missed was that Torvalds chose the GPL v2 because it best fit his primary goal, which was to force people to give back code if they use his code. The matter of getting paid was less important than making sure than people could not take his code, modified or not, and make money off of it without giving back to his codebase. Clearly, reciprocity between code and money is not what he was referring to at the time. It was reciprocity between developers, not developers and businessmen.

To put it another way, would you want a developer to talk about reciprocating in code when your primary interest is money? For most people, in fact for pretty much everyone, the answer is clearly no.

Feb. 14, 2006 - We have an important warning for parents. Today marks the three-month anniversary of the launch of the Nintendo DS Wireless Connection. But Action News has learned this popular gaming system could put kids in harm's way. Parents buy the system so their children can play video games. But we have made an alarming discovery. Strangers can use this toy to lure unsuspecting children to dangerous places.

Nintendo's hot new creation markets primarily to children. It even comes complete with playmates. The handheld gaming system is like a mini computer. It has built-in wireless capability. That allows kids to battle fellow Nintendo DS players across the room or across the world.

And the conclusion that they come to is that anonymous gaming is bad, bad, bad!! We must worry parents that every child is now liable to become the victim of sexual molestation because Nintendo has not placed incredibly draconian restriction in its DS portables' wireless capabilities. How else can you intepret what amounts to a page long hit piece on Nintendo that plays the usual pedophile card against a company or technology? Afterall, it never occurred to them that with a little bit of parental oversight, this might not be such an issue.

Nintendo confirms what happened to Emily is possible but the company claims that person must also be using another DS system and be within 65 feet. Like our expert, Nintendo also warns parents to educate their children not to talk to strangers even on their gaming system. Also, beware, there are other wireless gaming systems made by different manufacturers and they may have similar issues.

Now how is that for avoiding any responsibility in the matter? Nintendo just said that to be able to do that sort of thing, the perp has to have a Nintendo DS system that is within 65 feet of your kid's DS system. It wouldn't seem to be that hard in many public places to find the middle age guy who happens to have a Nintendo DS and is trying to get into your eleven year old daughter's pants. Oh wait, maybe if parents were responsible, they would learn something about the products that they buy for their kids, but that would require them to actually give up some of their precious time For The Children^tm.

Every so often, you need a reminder for why you don't give into barbarians. With cartoons like these, it is hard for me to feel anything but contempt for the Muslims who are outraged about these cartoons. Apparently, it's ok to disparage the Jewish Israelis in a way that is reminiscent of the Nazis, but it's so offensive that they feel that it is their right to burn down embassies and riot like savages over cartoons that barely even scratch the surface of what could be said about Mohammed and Islam.

There are times when the federal judiciary makes such mind-numbingly stupid rulings about technology-related cases that it's amazing that the Congress hasn't fired them and replaced them with a pack of monkeys fresh from the jungles of Africa. They couldn't possibly make more idiotic rulings than this one:

A federal court has thrown out a lawsuit that accused a student-loan provider of negligence in failing to encrypt a customer database that was subsequently stolen.

Stacy Lawton Guin, a customer of Brazos Higher Education Service, sued the corporation on the grounds that encryption should be used as a routine security precaution.

But U.S. District Judge Richard Kyle in Minnesota dismissed the case last week, saying Brazos had a written security policy and other "proper safeguards" for customers' information and that it acted "with reasonable care" even without encrypting the database.

I actually have to admit that I am surprised by how bad this ruling is. This is an extreme example of the judiciary simply disregarding basic, established best practices for security and doing whatever the hell they want at the time. Hopefully some court will have the good sense to slap down this ruling and let the lawsuit continue on appeal.

This court might have well just said that people who handle money at financial institutions have no responsibility to the banks' clients.

Last night on Battlestar Galactica, there was a sub-plot regarding the issue of abortion. For those of you who may have not seen Battlestar Galactica before, it often delves into political sub-plots alongside the action in order to add a certain realism to the post-apocalypse society. A geminese girl was trying to have an abortion and the geminese were furious about this because they are the religious conservatives of their society. So, the President of the Colonies, Laura Rosalind, is forced to make a very hard choice. Either she can give up her cherished belief that abortion is a woman's right to choose and save the fleet both in terms of political unity and demographics, or she can continue to ignore the fact that few babies are being born.

Admiral Adama, not exactly known for his religiosity, ends up being the one that convinces her to start thinking about outlawing abortion. The fleet is aging and dying off slowly. Without new babies being born and replacing them, it would be only a matter of two decades before, as Vice President Gaius Baltar observes, the human race is extinct. The conclusion that the political leadership comes to is that regardless of whether it is a good ideal that a woman should be able to control her reproductive system from beginning to end, that reality did not afford them such faux freedom. Only two paths could be followed at this point: the path of laissez faire treatment of reproduction or the survival of the human race.

This is why I have come to regard Battlestar Galactica as my favorite non-comedy TV series of all time now. The series strips away the illusory protection of peace-time civilization and pits human ideals and desires with cold, brutal reality. It works to provide a reminder that our world hangs by a thread that can be cut when we least expect it; the colonies of Kobol never expected their Cylon enemies to be able to effortlessly shutdown their planetary defenses and launch a genocidal nuclear strike against their worlds. In the blink of an eye, the world that everyone knew was gone and they were forced to re-examine their luxuries and some of the more vice-like freedoms that they enjoyed with a critical eye. It takes away the peace and almost servile tranquility of civil life and pits humanity against the great, cold unknown. The best and worst of humanity shows itself in Battlestar Galactica.

People who are opposed to abortion would have loved this episode. In this episode, a young woman wanted to have an abortion, and was allowed to have one before the President signed an executive order outlawing abortion. The fundamental struggle here was between those who could not accept reality and those who could. Children are difficult and inconvenient, especially during pregnancy and the first few years of their lives. Sometimes individual desires must be subordinated to the greater good, and there is a fundamental difference between subordinating freedom of speech, property rights and the right of self-defense and subordinating control of reproduction. If there is to be a future for a civilization, it must be through its children, and allowing people to have abortions gives them too much control over the future of the whole civilization.

You could almost track a sine wave using my ability to work on my fiction posts right now. However, I have a little announcement to make. The next fiction post is actually about 75% done now, as far as I can tell. So far, it weighs in at 9,329 words for about 17 pages. It is going to be one hell of a big post as anyone who reads this can tell. After that, I'll try to make time to really start working on the first real book of some kind.

The fundamental premise behind the Feminine Mystique, that women waste their time being housewives, has always been very ironic to me. If you look at the majority of professions that women go into to "find themselves" and not "be stifled," it is amazing that being a housewife could be considered a bad thing by comparison. Human Resources? Secretary? A whole plethora of other jobs that don't really push the individual to really flex their mental or physical muscles. How on Earth could these provide fulfillment? That's a question that I will never understand.

I say that from the perspective of a recent graduate of a good Computer Science program and as someone who is now working full time as a software developer. I can't even imagine the kind of hole inside of a woman and her relationship with the father of her children that she would rather work at most positions in corporate America rather than be free to raise her children as she sees fit. Anyone who finds fulfillment processing paperwork all day really scares me, but then that's just me. Don't call me lucky, I worked for my degree and the opportunities that it provides me to be creative.

Being a good part of a corporate machine is not going to make America or the world better, but being a good parent who is close to his or her children will leave a lasting, positive impact on both one's country and the world. The thing that Betty Friedan did that she cannot be forgiven for is her denigration of the housewife, the woman who gives up her fulfillment for the betterment of her family. To quote her true opinion of these selfless women:

"Housewives are mindless and thing-hungry. Housework is peculiarly suited to the capabilities of feeble-minded girls; it can hardly use the abilities of a woman of average or normal human intelligence."

If there was ever a textbook example of "projection," that would be it. No one faults working women who are in the workforce because they have to be in order to help their husbands support their family. While many working women are not mindless, a great many of them are indeed quite "thing-hungry." The average low-end white collar job is no more out of the league of a feeble-minded girl than is housework.

Friedan's legacy was not to liberate women from shackles, but to take them out of one pre-defined role and force them into another. What else can be said of a woman who so viciously denigrates the choices of millions of women in the name of "liberating them?" How is that any better than the men who try to force women out of the workforce? The answer to principled people is that it is not right to denigrate either choices.

Weren't we down this path with Clinton?

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff accompanied a Native American tribal chief he was trying to sign as a client to a White House meeting attended by President Bush, a newly published picture shows and a Bush spokesman confirmed Sunday.

Abramoff's presence at the meeting came to light after Time magazine and the New York Times published a picture of the president with Kickapoo Tribal Chairman Raul Garza. Bush chief political strategist Karl Rove is in the foreground, and the lobbyist is dimly visible in the background.

Abramoff pleaded guilty to corruption charges January 3. He agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors in an investigation that knowledgeable sources say could lead to charges against a half-dozen people.

2006 is definitely not shaping up to be a good year for the Republicans. Abramoff is not going down without a fight, that much has been made clear already. The Bush Administration has categorically denied any connection between them and Abramoff, but now there is at least some evidence that goes beyond he-said, she-said assertions. So who wants to start taking bets on how long it will be before this thing gets blown wide open and the "i word" starts getting thrown around in a serious way on capitol hill?

The Democratic Party really does know how to pick leaders who are adept at creating damned if you do, damned if you don't scenarios. Al Gore is perhaps the best example of this talent that they have had in recent years. If you thought that the Dixie Chicks were out of line with their statements abroad (I didn't really care either way with them), they've got nothing on Gore.

It's incredibly ironic that anyone would think that we really need Saudi Arabia more than they need us. As painful to our economy as it might be, we could go elsewhere for oil. Mexico, Russia and Venezuela and others could fill in that void after a few years. Saudi Arabia, however, needs our government's continued support in its fight against the very radicals that it armed and funded. The chickens are coming home to roost and now they're starting to realize that maybe they can't play so many games with us.

So you oppose our involvement in Iraq and even oppose limits or outright bans on visas for Saudi citizens. Just what is, your plan, Mr. Gore? This is the thing about left-liberals that sends me through the roof as an engineer. They can always whine, bitch and moan about solutions, but in those rare chances that they propose solutions of their own, they almost never work. The cheapest anti-terrorism plan that involves no foreign wars or loss of civil liberties for American citizens is for the government to secure our borders and deport all Saudi, Iranian, Egyptian, Syrian, Yemense, Sudanese and Pakistani citizens from America.

Oh, what is that you say? That'd be discriminatory? Well how many Chinese do you see suicide bombing our buildings? I counted not a single one among the 9-11 hijackers who were, dun dun dun... all Saudis! Yes, Virginia, Saudi citizens are the ones most likely to come here with intentions of raping, pillaging and murdering our citizens and legal immigrants. If you don't want to violate the rights of those statistically unlikely to be terrorists, then you have to profile the groups that are definite "at risk" groups. Since Saudi Arabia is the country that most of Al Qaeda comes from, it stands to reason that if you want to subject as few legal immigrants and citizens to any loss of liberty as possible, you'd discriminate against the one group most likely to do them harm.

Now, cue someone fresh from a hooka smoke at their drum circle to accuse me of racism for this. Please, it's a matter of citizenship. You don't profile Chinese or Mexicans for terrorism because chances are they have no involvement because recent history has shown them to have no appreciable involvement in organized terrorist cells. Saudis were to a man the perps behind 9-11, and are disproportionately represented in global terrorism. Logically, if you let a Saudi citizen into your country you have a much higher chance that they are going to be a terrorist. Since we cannot read their minds, and no one wants to restrict the rights of anyone we have no reason to restrict, there is only one solution. Tell the Saudi government to shove their quota restrictions up their collective, royal asses.

We can buy elsewhere, but at this point there isn't enough money in the world to buy support for the Saudis where it counts if they lose us. Europe isn't sympathetic, Russia has its own oil, Israel would just shrug as yet another band of thugs rose to power and the East Asian powers could quite frankly give a rat's ass less whether they buy from royal Islamists or populist, pseudo-republican Islamists. Which reminds me of one little flaw in the arguments for defending the House of Saud. Whether they fall or not, Saudi Arabia will be ruled by Islamists. The House of Saud is hardline Islamist, albeit with a taste for the good life. They are not our friends. They never have been, and never will be. They are only working with us because the monster they created in the 1970s and 1980s is coming back to get them.

I had an argument with a relative last night about the Danish cartoons that, in my mind, represents a sharp distinction between libertarianism and liberalism. Libertarians expect humans to behave as rational, sentient beings and to control their baser animal instincts, liberals, however, do not. No one in their right mind would argue that incitement of some kind was not in fact a primary motivation of the Danish cartoonists, but that point is irrelevant in the face of the reaction by tens of thousands of Muslims worldwide.

At any given moment, a person is free to choose what to be offended about. In the course of any given day, especially in larger areas of any country, occasion to take offense will be presented at least a few times a day. What we do with that offense, is what ultimately matters. Taking offense at something is an action that we choose, and there is nothing more degrading and derogatory that can be said about the Islamic world than to suggest that they were simply incapable of shrugging it off or making light-hearted jest in return. They are adults and should know better, but instead behave like toddlers with temper tantrums.

As the largest religion on Earth, Christianity has been subjected to far more ridicule than Islam by simple fact of its size making it a convenient target. It simply cannot assume the embattled minority status in many countries, though in many others it can. When it is brutally lampooned, as was the case with Piss Christ and the Last Temptation, there were no mass riots, even among third world Christians. A few wingnuts made death threats, but that is par for the course. I should think that the "artists" responsible for these masterpieces would have been disappointed if they did not receive death threats for that would have been a sign that no one found their work edgy and controversial and their intended victims found their work trite and much ado about nothing.

If you have ever seen the cartoons, you know that they are not particularly offensive. The Family Guy's take on Mel Gibson and the Passion of the Christ was outright persecution by comparison to these cartoons, and it went virtually unnoticed by Christians. Call it a minor theological point, but Christianity is irreconcilably different from Islam in terms of the value that both place on peace. The people who rioted did so because they consider their religion beyond reproach and their concept of apologetics begins with shouting down their opponents and ends abruptly with a sword to their throat. If this is not sufficient ground to question whether they have the temperment required for a pluralistic, free society, then I don't know what is. One can only imagine that our fearless, elected leaders will not second guess their worthiness for a student visa.

Being a Christian, I don't particularly care when people disrespect my religion. Christ warned us that this would be par for the course. It's simply part of the price that you pay for being a Christian, and quite frankly, there are a lot of things that are far worse than being called an idiot because you question the probability of evolution. You could be raped and tortured like many are for their faith abroad. Unfortunately, this is not a sentiment shared by the Islamic religion, even if a strong minority of Muslims make it a matter of personal honor to be civilized in the face of attacks on their religion. Good for them, but that's not a value that their religion holds to very much and you can know that by looking at the true believers.

The true believers are the ultimate test of a religion. You judge a religion by its zealots, not its sadducees. I will take Osama Bin Laden at his word that he is a good Muslim because my readings of the Islamic scripture surrounding the violent passages I have found show no signs that the passages could possibly have been taken out of context. At the same time, I will also regard Eric Rudolph as an apostate from Christianity because his actions are explicitly banned by the Bible as unconditionally immoral and evil. Be rational, judge a religion by what its dedicated followers do, not what its cultural adherents do. Many Americans call themselves Christians, but couldn't even begin to tell a foreigner what Christianity is about beyond the teaching that he is the Son of God. Many people claim to adhere to religion not out of personal conviction, but rather cultural ties to it.

The fact that the cartoon was in bad taste does not, in any way, excuse for what happened in response to them. There is a reason that people are usually charged with assault, even when they are "victims of fighting words" and that is that we expect them to restrain themselves from wildly disproportionate violence. To even bring up the matter of bad taste as though it is somehow relevant to the response is to give license to everyone who is so thin-skinned that they cannot stomach criticism to silence disagreement and important aspects of free speech. And there is something dishonest about treating the Islamic world as though it is a land of milk, honey and fluffy kittens under assault by evil, radical Christians and secular Westerners, when on a daily basis the Jewish religion and Israel are subjected to more abuse in one hour of publication by Islamic news media than the Islamic world is subject to in a year of Danish publication. When rioting Iranians and Lebanese burn down their government buildings and their Saudi embassies for such flagrant insults against the Jewish people, rational people will consider them principled, but violently misguided, rather than violently hypocritical.

When the Egyptian press finally stops distributing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, I'll gain a modicum of respect for them. When the Saudis stop teaching their children vicious lies such as Jews and Christians are pigs, dogs, apes and generally subhuman, I'll consider that a sign of progress. Until then, no plees about respecting their prophet should be given the time of day. If Islam is so impotent as a force for moral rectitude that what we see today is the best that it can offer in the modern world, then that is a really scary thought for the future of these countries. Perhaps that's its fundamental problem. A religion that has a concept of holy war in its scriptures, even "holy war against one's personal demons," is not going to be prone to introspection. I'm sure the irony that the "peoples of the book," Jews and Christians, have almost always been treated with the same vitriolic disrespect that was reserved for all other classes of non-Muslims escapes the rioting masses. They are too busy attacking the unbeliever to see that the fruit they bear is so poisonous that it has left their societies convulsing in agony. That is why I predict that should the day that the Islamic world looks back, rather than forward at the modestly jeering infidel, come, it will see such a hypocritical past filled with wasted hope and dominated by sweet deceiptful nothins staring back at it that it collapses in on itself with the same violence that gave birth to it.

There are times where I just don't understand how people can have decent technical skills and yet be so stupid. This, definitely happens to be one of them:

One day last year, things started going haywire at Northwest Hospital and Medical Center. Key cards would no longer open the operating-room doors; computers in the intensive-care unit shut down; doctors' pagers wouldn't work. This might have been just another computer-virus attack, a common and malicious scheme that sometimes is done for little more than bragging rights. But federal officials say it was something far more insidious. It turns out the Seattle hospital's computers - along with up to 50,000 others across the country - had been turned into an army of robots controlled by 20-year-old Christopher Maxwell of Vacaville, Calif., according to a federal indictment issued Thursday. And Maxwell, along with two juveniles, earned about $100,000 in the process, court documents state.

So, did anyone actually think that the FBI would not go after them tooth and nail, especially since their little fraud spree happened to take down a hospital. In this day and age of paranoia about terrorism, it's a wonder that the FBI didn't make them wish that they had never been born because this exposed how weak the hospital's IT infrastructure was. Not that that would be right, per se, but it would be what I'd personally expect. The best part about this case? The twenty year old ring leader of the operation was working at Wal-Mart, yes, Wal-Mart. Presumably not while he was working on his Computer Science or Information Systems degree (or any certifications either). What kind of loser works at Wal-Mart when they could be pursuing at least a basic networking gig?

In a globalized economy, the environmentalists want us to worry about First World capitalism imposing its ways on bucolic, pastoral, primitive Third World backwaters. Yet, insofar as "globalization" is a threat, the real danger is precisely the opposite--that the peculiarities of the backwaters can leap instantly to the First World. Pigs are valued assets and sleep in the living room in rural China--and next thing you know an unknown respiratory disease is killing people in Toronto, just because someone got on a plane. That's the way to look at Islamism: We fret about McDonald's and Disney, but the big globalization success story is the way the Saudis have taken what was 80 years ago a severe but obscure and unimportant strain of Islam practiced by Bedouins of no fixed abode and successfully exported it to the heart of Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Manchester, Buffalo

There is a terrifying truth to this that cannot be ignored by any sane, freedom-loving person. The fact of the matter is that the West has been caught up for too long in pseudo-rational optimism about human nature and that has lead us to the point where everything we value will be on the line within a few decades. We try to tell ourselves that we ought to look at the best aspects of the cultures that produce the vermine who seek our annihilation, but the reality is that we we can ill afford to be so childishly naive for our enemies are coldly rational about this. The great irony of modern materialists and rationalists is that they cannot comprehend evil when it is staring them down, and always try to find some justification for why it is not what stands plainly before them.

Since some will now accuse me of saying that all Muslims are evil, I will preempt them by saying that such thinking is absurd, but only a modern, self-described secular rationalist could come to the conclusion that a violent religion does not in fact make people violent. Islam is violent, it thus has, as history demonstrates, a violent warping on the minds of millions of its followers. Some are this way by nature and Islam only gives them a sense of divine sanction, others are peaceful by nature and thus their practice of Islam will be generally peaceful. Some may even be so sincerely peaceful by nature that they adapt Islam itself to their peaceful nature as the Sufis have done a decent job at doing. Yet, peace is subjective and there is no material difference between a person who will cut your head off and a person who thinks that doing so for your lack of belief is morally neutral, holy or just a tad wrong.

In the absence of action, words become meaningless and in the absence of words we can only assume acquiescence. That is rational, assuming that the vast majority is terrorized by an insignificant minority into silence is the height of irrationality.

Does anyone honestly think that black southerners would have feared the night riders of the KKK so much if they were not given moral and material aid by the bulk of the southern white population? In a few years time, the black community could have easily banded together and ridded themselves of this menace like the trash that they were, but knowing that the night riders enjoyed the moral and material support of many in power and a large percentage of the mainstream white population put a whole new perspective on things. What civilization has ever feared a small number of madmen, who had no popular and/or governmental support, so thoroughly that the society was crippled and its culture fundamentally warped so as to appease a few lunatics?

It may be as pleasant of a wakeup call to realize that there is no "silent, moderate majority" as it would be to have a bucket of McDonald's coffee splashed on one's face early in the morning, but reason dictates that we ask ourselves why the Islamic world is so far behind. Why is it that no stable, prosperous liberal regimes have emerged in these countries, but they have in countries whose dominant religions are Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Shintoism? Perhaps the reason is that there is a common thread among these successful religions: they value peace above conflict. Judaism and has no scriptural concept of holy armed conflict, save for a few instances where God gave his blessing to their efforts, Christian New Testament scripture explicitly rejects all notions of violence to advance society and the Kingdom of God. From my limited readings of the principles of the other three religions, I would assume that they hold to similar values. Islam, well, does not and there are a number of websites out there that document the scriptures in question. Take this one, one of the first search results from Google with a query of "Islam is violent."

There is one thing that we can be certain of here, and that this is decidely not a racial conflict, so to all of the professional and lay "anti-racism" activists, I say it is time for you to pipe down and shut up. There are Christian and atheist Arabs, in fact Lebanon has quite a few of them. Arab civilization was Christian and pagan long before it became Islamic, and today there are still Persians who are Zoroastrian as there are Pakistanis who are Christians and Hindus. I don't even know whether to call this a conflict of civilization as the issue at stake is, for lack of a better way of describing it, Islam versus everything else. That is what this is all about. It's not about "America versus the Arabs," but rather about our culture versus the Islamic vision of the future, two world views that cannot be harmonized except if by harmony one means peace and we include "the peace of the grave" as a legitimate definition of peace for the sake of this argument.

I for one will not come down on America for all of our mistakes. We have done many bad things, many regrettable and quite a few nasty things have been done by our government in our name. Yet, I won't ever let myself regret being American because every civilization does things which are nasty, vile and utterly regrettable. One might as well regret being human and apologize for having been born. It's time for Westerners to grow up and not be apologetic about who we are, regardless of race and to tell those who want to replace us in the name of their religion to go back to the seventh century wastelands that they came from. If we are honest enough about history, we might even conclude that we have as many grievances with them as they do with us. We fought the crusades, but they invaded Spain and Eastern Europe. The Indian Hindus may be brutal toward Muslims in Kashmir and elsewhere, but it was the Muslim armies that invaded ancient India and fractured it along religious lines.

We gain no moral superiority out of our politically correct, pseudo-tolerant self-flagellation. It is no more righteous and noble than threatening to slit your wrists when you've wronged someone who wronged you a long time ago. If those who would make us feel guilty for the "horrible sins" of the West were at all honest, they would concede that we are not helping our enemies. If we want moral superiority, then it's time to put our past mistakes behind us, commit ourselves to not making them again and rid ourselves of the guilty that paralyzes us. Doing so would, unfortunately, require us to be principled, proud and work hard because we'd find ourselves taking principled stances against many of our trade partners, not the least of which is OPEC. It's easier on the wallet to beat oneself up than to actually change one's behavior.

That's just a little something that I found on rentacoder.com. It just goes to show that sometimes these guys are so brazen that they will actually post a work order in a very public place that doesn't even beat around the bush about what they want. Fortunately, the bid is marked as cancelled, so one can only assume that rentacoder.com shut this guy down before yet another scumbag spammer could be added to the legions that are already swarming like locusts on blogs everywhere.

Sometimes it amazes me that the PFF gets the time of day from Congress:

Since people like to take shopping carts, the local supermarket used to have barriers to keep you from wheeling them beyond a small territory outside the store's door. To get your groceries, you drove around to a usually-congested loading zone.

The barrier is now gone and shopping carts can be wheeled out to the trunk of your car in the parking lot. Much more convenient. The cart bears a notice: "Take this beyond the parking lot and the wheels will lock."

Clearly, this is some kind of wireless ditigal technology -- DRM, in fact.

So I began thinking. Don't shopping carts want to be free? Shouldn't it be fair use to wheel the cart to my home? After all, there are lots of them, so I would not really be depriving another shopper of the use of a cart.

Yes, let's ignore the obvious differences like the store cannot let someone take a cart home without losing their property. When a hobo takes their shopping cart, they lose their personal copy of the shopping cart, and that's what it is, a copy. There is not a single, exclusive instance of a shopping cart, but millions of them made by the manufacturer, and the store paid for their copies of the shopping cart. When someone takes it, no more shopping cart. Now, what if the hobo could walk up to their shopping cart, hold up a small device, click a button and make a functional copy using the metal from a pile of aluminum cans? Sure, it'd be aluminum, not steel, but it would be a copy that would in no way infringe on the store's property rights. It would just mean that the hobo now had a copy of the shopping cart without having to buy a copy from the manufacturer.

These are the absolutely ridiculous games that are the norm of the defenders of broad-reaching, strong copyright law and policy. You would have to genuinely believe that duplication is a form of theft, to see any parallel between these two types of property, and that's the problem. Under the current copyright law, my ownership of the music on my computer exists in conflict with the ownership rights of the band, sorry, their record label, that owns them legally. I cannot own my copy of the song in the same sense that I can own the computer hardware itself. If I can assert a genuine property right over it, that means that the copyright holder can no longer force me to use DRM, which is a problem because at that point, since I never signed a contract with them, only the law can bind my usage of my property. Fortunately for the copyright holders, I do not have any property rights in the music, movies and books that I own. I am a sharecropper at best, a serf in practice.

What is so hard to recognize the fact that our own founding fathers did not recognize the "copyright is property" concept that is advanced by a lot of academic capitalists? The section of the United States Constitution which authorizes intellectual property law recognizes an explicitly utilitarian role for and premise behind all intellectual property law. And that is how it should be. I have no problem putting several thousand FBI agents behind copyright law enforcement, it's only those fair weather libertarians that are selectively skiddish about the government that would rather rely on half-assed technology than good old fashioned law enforcement. It's a utilitarian arrangement where the government gives them a monopoly to let the make money. Fine by me, but these arguments that attempt to wrap it all up in big talks of freedom, property, choice, etc. are dishonest.

The simple fact of the matter is that copyrighted goods do not exist with the same natural restrictions that other products do, and logic, not cobbled together theory, dictates that that which is different, be treated differently. The government ought to protect them vigorously, but with arrests and lawsuits, not sweeping laws which restrict other aspects of property ownership. I would have no problem with the FBI taking on the role of national IP police, arresting and prosecuting people who trade thousands of files on P2P networks in the United States. Something tells me that in response, James DeLong would chide me on being "pro big government" like many fair weather capitalists do on this subject. Fine, but what then is the point of having any government presence at all? If copyright infringement is theft, it's a criminal matter and criminal law is rightfully enforced by the government, not private parties.

Since President Bush will not agree to add at least ten thousand new border patrol agents to the agency right now, why not merge the BATF and DEA with the Border Patrol and retrain the former BATF and DEA agents as border patrol agents? It'd be one way to transfer several hundred to a few thousand experience federal agents to an agency that desperately needs more enforcement power in its jurisdiction.

I still think that the ultimate solution is the creation of a fifth branch of the military that would defend our border is the best longterm solution. It could be called the Border Security Force and would be about as large as two or three army divisions and would have a relationship with the Army similar to the relationship that the Marine Corps has with the Navy.

With the explosion of identity theft as a major economic crime that is disrupting the fabric of the economy for many Americans, it's nice to see the FBI doing its job on the domestic front in a way that gets some real benefit for the average citizen:

A data security breach that has spurred at least two large banks to cancel thousands of customer debit cards appears to be connected to an older ongoing investigation in Sacramento, the FBI said Friday.

Scores of Bank of America and Washington Mutual customers have received notifications from the banks that their debit cards were cancelled because of a breach at a "third-party" establishment. In interviews with CNET News.com, neither bank would disclose the name of the unidentified company.

The problem will ultimately have to be solved using a variety of technical changes to the way that money is processed in this country. The fundamental lack of security in the system has been a boon to lazy people everywhere, but it has been the biggest ally of the identity thieves to date. The credit card system is set up in such a way that as long as the banks can minimalize the amount of damage done by an instance of identity theft, it's just a small cost of doing business in a very lucrative environment. They don't require biometric information, notarization, etc. to open a new credit card account because to do so would require them to absorb much higher costs of doing business and would subject them to greater scrutiny. For them, identity theft is like having a fire in your backyard. As long as you can control it and keep it small, it is just a nuissance rather than a real problem.

I am willing to give up the majority of my convenience and a big chunk of my financial privacy to my bank in order to get the security we need. One of the easiest steps that could be taken to put a major dampener on identity theft would be to require that all credit and bank accounts be opened either at the bank branch office or by mail via a notarized notice. Attach a twenty five thousand dollar fine to any business that lets you open an account without a notarized, signed agreement. This step alone would render one of the biggest holes in the system almost one hundred percent obsolete, but would be a major hassle for the major banks who would obviously fight it tooth and nail.

You've gotta hand it to the Republicans for picking an appropriate mascot, the elephant. I'll bet right now they wish that they had chosen the goldfish, which apparently has a memory that is so dysfunctional that it forgets each swim around its fish bowl upon completion, in light of this. It would seem that the Republicans would do well to get better at choosing lobbyists because Abramoff is not going down without taking down a few people with him. Were I so inclined as to be a scumbag-I mean professional lobbyist for commercial or labor interests-I'd do the same thing myself.

More power to you, Mr. Abramoff. Maybe if a few of these guys like Abramoff spill the beans and take down enough Congresscritters and even a President or two, our elected "leaders" will stop dealing with them. Now, as far as Bush getting accused of lying, I'm shocked I tell you, absolutely shocked! You'd think that a man who has been all but called the second coming of Jesus by many of his supporters would have a cleaner, more transparent image brimming with honesty. Well, you know what they say about men, trees and fruit...

So much for principled stances against insulting others' sacred icons and idols:

An organisation which calls itself "The Glorious Brigades in Northern Europe" is circulating pictures on the internet which show bombs exploding over pictures of the newspaper and blood flowing over the national flag of Denmark.

Meanwhile in Brussels a young Muslim immigrant published a poster depicting the Virgin Mary with naked breasts. The picture has drawn some protest from Catholics though not from Western embassies, nor from the bishops.

Now that's real maturity right there! Why, we'll go around insulting the other religions because a few people did the same thing to us, even they probably don't even practice the religion we just insulted! Notice how the Roman Catholic Church just shrugs at such denigration of one of its holiest idols? Do you see Catholics out in the street burning down the embassy of the country that this guy moved from? No! Anyone with a brain can look at this and clearly see that despite its major problems, the Roman Catholic Church is, like most religions, not a religion of violence and war like Islam.

Clearly, these are tolerant people with a great respect for diversity.

Lest We the People^tm start to think that Congress doens't take the issue of phone record fraud seriously:

Anyone who "fraudulently" acquires and resells records of calls made by a telephone subscriber could face fines of up to $500,000 and prison sentences of up to 20 years, under a bill proposed Wednesday in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Five Republicans and four Democrats from the House Judiciary Committee introduced the measure, which they dubbed the "Law Enforcement and Phone Privacy Protection Act of 2006," on the same day that a Senate subcommittee convened a hearing on the topic.

The fine is certainly reasonable, but twenty years in prison? That'd have to be one hell of a large fraud operation to justify putting someone in prison for almost one third of their natural life. I actually cannot entirely support this draft because the penalty doesn't match the severity of a single act of fraud along these lines, but I would definitely have no problem with a mandatory one year in federal prison per count up to twenty years. I understand that identity theft and similar crimes can have a devastating impact on someone's credit for a while, but twenty years for a single offense just strikes me as a knee-jerk reaction, and there really is no benefit to the victims in this. If Congress really wanted to do something, it'd give half of the money from the fines to the victims.

This problem seems to be resolving itself without much government involvement. The phone companies are starting to get very serious about what amounts to a direct attack on their relationships with their customers. Congress should just wait and see how these lawsuits play out. As often happens, this is probably going to just end up being another example of not sufficiently using pre-existing powers to handle a problem.

Maybe the solution is a bit of vindictiveness. In response, every employee of these businesses is required by law to have their phone records posted online for public consumption for the rest of their lives. How about that, instead of losing twenty years of their lives, they get to have no privacy for the rest of their lives for such egregious offenses? Surely that might have a little more impact since chances are they won't be able to pay such fines anyway, and the victims right now under this proposed law wouldn't even get restitution. And don't even get me started on the travesty that is "justice" which crushes the offender, rather than mete out restitution to the victim, out of the mistaken belief that all of society was victimized, rather than one or a handful of individuals.

CNet's Mike Yamamato seems to be extremely cynical today about the network neutrality issue and how far broadband will really go in the United States, but not without good reason. The telecoms and their backers have been using the argument that if the government gets involved, that we will end up with a future with little investment into new infrastructure. Looking at my apartment in Northern Virginia, I can't help but think that this is the status quo. I live in one of the most densely-populated areas in Virginia, in the wealthiest region of the state, but no one serves real broadband to my apartment complex. Instead, a single minority provider gives up service that is often so terrible that it makes dialup preferable by comparison.

Just where is this investment, right now, in the fairly unregulated market? It's been several years since broadband started becoming mainstream, and yet we are still stuck using cable and DSL services that are barely any faster than the original service specs. News flash to those who think the problem isn't real: 3mpbs cable is not enough to provide streaming HiDef video services. To be able to do that reliably we'd probably need a network that could do at least 10mbps, and it ain't coming around anytime soon for the average American, whereas it's a reality abroad.

If the telecoms were investing so much already in broadband deployment, then why is it that densely-populated areas in the United States are still so far behind France, Japan and South Korea? I can easily understand small towns of fifty thousand or less not having more than 768kbps-1.5mpbs DSL, but why aren't the big cities in America seeing an explosion of broadband service on par with the rest of the world? Here's one simple guess: they have no intention of providing that much value to the average person on anyone's time frame except theirs. It's kind of asinine to worry about future investment, when hitherto the telecoms have not invested enough already to make our big cities even close to on par with the leading countries like South Korea.

Those of us who are starting to grow sympathetic to the idea of more telecom oversight would have far less reason to support this cynical position if we actually saw broadband services in our major cities meeting the challenged posed by other countries. If the future of commerce involves the Internet and the telecoms are not working with other industries and the government to advance our Internet infrastructure, then it stands to reason we must look elsewhere for solutions.

Just imagine our economy if we had this attitude toward electricity. While the comparison between bandwidth and electricity only goes half-way, it should provide enough of a cautionary hypothetical to remind any straggler out there why this issue is of dire importance for our future. Bandwidth and neutrality are not rights, but they are a practical infrastructure issue that are every bit as important as neutral access to electricity and transportation infrastructure. Call me a pragmatist lacking principle if you want, academic libertarians, but sometimes principle must give way to reality otherwise we are just as stupid as the socialists on the other side of the fence, and just as utopian.

Now Google is getting called a free rider by Verizon, in the latest shift in the "Net Neutrality" debate. Quite frankly, I don't see what the issue is here because of the fact that Google pays for its bandwidth already. Only in the twisted logic of the executive officers of the telecommunications companies can a company that has paid so much money for their services be called a free rider.

But wait, Verizon thinks that they should have to be paid because Google isn't in Verizon's area, but does pay large sums of money to the providers in its area. That's despite the fact that Google's users in Verizon's areas already pay them quite well for the pittance of bandwidth that is provided to them. From the sounds of the griping, you'd think that Verizon is getting forced to finance and unfunded mandate! Perhaps they can't afford to provide $15/month DSL to their customers anymore in a futile effort to one-up the cable companies, fine, we'll pay them $40-$50 for the bandwidth every month. However, their commentary can be better paraphrased as, "waaaaah waaaah we're not getting what we want, when we want, without providing anything in return!"

You pay every month for bandwidth when you buy DSL or cable access. That's how the system is supposed to work. In reality, the major bandwidth providers think that since other companies' traffic passes through their networks, they should get paid well for it. Why shouldn't Google, Microsoft and others turn around and rape the telecoms in retaliation by making the telecoms pay for access to their services? If Verizon doesn't refuse to stop criticizing these companies, Microsoft shuts off all automatic updates to Verizon customers, Google doesn't let them access their services, Yahoo, everyone jumps in and says, "here's your bandwidth back, now try to find something to do with it."

I'm actually beginning to get sympathetic to the idea of municipal broadband services, just like some areas have municipal electricity. The system has, quite frankly, failed to provide the innovation that academic capitalists had been predicting. We are no closer now to a totallly unified network for television, telephone, web pages, email, etc. than we were a few years ago. Broadband is still unavailible in many areas and we are starting to steadily fall behind other countries like Japan. There is simply no way we can compete against them if we let politics get in the way, and ironically, that's what the telecoms want. They want to be able to rake in a huge profit without providing innovative services and they are dead set against allowing competition.

There is no property rights argument here, it's ultimately about fraud. Verizon's traffic flows through SBC's network, whose traffic in turn flows through other networks. This is how the Internet works. It's based on cooperation, and if the telecoms can't accept that in order to provide bandwidth to their customers, they have to route traffic from other networks, then they should be forced to cooperate by law for the good of the network. This is not some small issue, but rather a debate over the framework of the Internet in America. Are we going to let some lofty, academic notions get in the way so that we can feel good about protecting the "rights" of a few big companies, while destroying the future of our country? God help us if we do that, we'll end up like Argentina within a few generations.

The Internet is the national highway system of the future. Just as our economy couldn't progress without a comprehensive highway system, we can't without a robust, neutral and competitive Internet infrastructure. Unfortunately, the telecoms don't see it that way. They think that it's "their networks," not the networks that innumerable subsidies, benefits, eminent domain grabs and other perks made possible. There would have been no AT&T without those state benefits. This is something that a rational libertarian can accept. A privately owned and controlled infrastructure is the ideal scenario, but the attitudes of these companies are increasingly jeopardizing access to technologies that could literally make the difference whether America leads the world or not technologically. If they insist on reneging on their promises to their customers, both content provider and content consumer, then it is time for the government to step in and enforce those agreements. At that point, if they insist on tying up the system entirely for their benefit, for the sake of our economy, regulatory options must be considered. Just as we wouldn't allow a single hope to stop the construction of the highway system, we ought to not let their interests prevent us from developing a better infrastructure.

The telecommunications industry is currently seeking to gain support for what they call a "tiered internet." This is an internet where, despite having sold services at a fixed price and performance level, would be restricted based on what websites can afford to pay them to keep performance levels up. For example, if Google doesn't pay them enough money, SBC would reduce the speed at which their subscribers could access Google. The telecoms would no longer be "common carriers," but rather would be actively regulating what content flows through them.

This is unacceptable for two reasons:

1) We, the average customers, already pay a monthly rate for access, and they are asking for permission to violate their contractual agreement to attempt to provide service at a certain level. We buy it at cable speeds, they provide certain services at dialup speeds.

2) Web hosting services and online companies already pay a great deal of money for their bandwidth. To allow the telecoms to do this is akin to fraud because it makes them pay for a service that provides large amounts of bandwidth, but in practice, the telecoms would actively undermine these speeds and impose limits that would reduce the actual service provided considerably.

Please support any measure which would prevent the telecommunications companies from enacting such policies. What they are proposing is immoral and should be illegal. No one should have to pay them twice for the same service. That is, in the reasonable estimation of many, fraud, not a legitimate business arrangement.

Sincerely,

From Reuters:

"Denmark must apologize for disgracing the Prophet," yelled the protesters.

Denmark is a nation of almost five and a half million citizens, and there are probably not more than a hundred employees of the newspaper that started this conflict in the first place. The "moderates" like CAIR and others given the spotlight are always telling us to not judge the whole Islamic world by the "few radicals." Isn't it just touching to know that collective judgment is still a deeply-held value among the common folk in the Islamic world?

So far no one has able to disprove my theory that when violent protests like this one are commonplace in an area, that it is not logical to presume that the majority are on some level completely opposed to them. Rather it's like the old Maoist idea that the revolutionary is like a fish and the peasantry is like the water. Without the peasantry, the revolutionary always fails. I believe the same rule applies equally well to popular terrorists and the sentiments that support them. These "radicals" would not be so well-tolerated if there wasn't popular support for what they represent because the government would have stopped them a long time ago. The Islamic world is famous for silencing dissent and crushing minority viewpoints. If these were not at least sympathized with, they'd have been crushed without mercy already.

Because if they want to lease you a T1, then effectively reduce it to a 56k modem, that's their right:

With Net Neutrality, the advocates support the comandeering of privately-constructed, privately financed broadband networks -- and the proscription of any business arrangements except those they favor. Not only does this damage the investment incentives in networks, it amounts to a wholesale weakening of property rights -- with the normal rights of ownership being lost. Like Kelo, the political economy, or rentseeking, aspects of this diminution in property rights loom large.

I have a few problems with this. First of all, the American telecommunications sector has failed to deliver the innovations that are commonplace in Europe and Asia, despite having a "competitive market." Second, they are resorting to something more along the lines of a policy of extortion than good business practice here with their talk of a "tiered internet." Finally, consider this: their proposal would have a devastating impact on the future of Internet development. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that it would be akin to the destruction of the American section of the Internet.

Given the fact that the telecommunications infrastructure is vital to the modern American economy, it doesn't make any sense for the government to not take an active role in restraining certain aspects of how telecommunications companies run their businesses. It's one thing to let them determine prices, but to let them corrupt the functioning of the network itself is fundamentally wrong, and that's part of what most of these lawyer types don't understand. They don't understand just what this "Interwebthingamajig" is.

My Internet service provider leases a percentage of the local infrastructure at an established rate that connects its network to a global "network of networks." This "network of networks" is what we call the Internet. To allow SBC to establish tiers goes against not only the design of the Internet, but also attacks SBC's customers. They have leased access at a specific performance level from SBC. When you rent out a T1, T3, etc., you get it with the expectation that it really will perform at about the level advertized, but that's not what SBC wants! They want to be able to tell their customers that they can't really access certain websites or services at the speeds that they want, even though they've bought the bandwidth. Imagine being told that yes, you bought a 1.5mpbs leased line, but you can only access Slashdot.org at 100kbps because they refused to pay the "bandwidth tax" imposed by SBC. That, to me, is fraud against SBC's customers. They were sold a line with the understanding that they had 1.5mpbs of downstream bandwidth, but SBC is surreptitiously denying them the other 1.4mpbs because the website refused to pay the price.

The problem is that the network is not conducive to competition, not really anyway. No one wants to pay per-minute rates for their service, and tiered Internet access is nothing less than an attempt to make the Internet only work for the big guys, at which rate all of the benefits are lost. It becomes useless to the small businessman who cannot afford to pay the extortion taxes imposed by the telecoms. The small blogger suddenly finds his or her blog on the lowest priority setting possible because, after all, who'd want to see that garbage, right?

Normally I have deep-seated libertarian tendencies, but not on this. I can find no grounds to let my heart bleed for corporations that are more likely to benefit, rather than be cursed, by Kelo v. New London. That's the crux of the matter for me, and many others. Can anyone in their right mind really imagine Verizon being the victim, rather than the victimizer in an eminent domain case that in some way impacts telecommunication infrastructure? Let's not forget the fact that Pfizer was the driving force behind the Kelo v. New London case! The poor multinational corporations... were and still are, the biggest recipients of the spoils of these cases.

(Btw, just for clarity's sake, I have no problem with Verizon reserving 80% of their bandwidth for their services, provided that this plan does not adversely affect their paying customers.)

From The Technology Liberation Front:

I'd be curious to know what DMCA supporters think he should do in this kind of case. Should he write a letter to each of the labels that publish these songs and ask for permission to use the exceprts? Should iTunes have a feature where you're allowed to purchase small song clips for a nickel a piece? Or is it just possible that the most sensible way to deal with this sort of thing is to legalize DRM circumvention in circumstances where the use would otherwise be legal.

I've been saying for quite some time that the whole issue of DRM is ultimately a moot point as the enforcement of the DRM system itself is legal, not technical, short of writing code that is so vicious toward the user that it holds their computer hostage. The problem with DRM is ultimately that it makes fair use extremely complicated, and without fair use, the whole system of copyright is invariably undermined as far as the average customer is concerned. You don't need to be able to rip clips for personal use to find the system unusable, unfair and, for lack of a better description, just plain wrong. The great beauty of the MP3 and CD technologies is how ubiquitous they are. They are everywhere and supported by practically every device that does something with music. They are the unprotected, real world version of the DRM-enabled future that IPCentral and others salivate to create, and they aren't going anywhere anytime soon for the same reason that HTTP will not be replaced anytime soon, except by a superior incarnation.

I'll go the next step and suggest that fair use is of far greater importance than people like those behind IPCentral have given it credit for. It is nothing less than the safety valve that causes the public to forget about the artificial nature of copyright and embrace it as a necessary sacrifice. If a customer can transfer the contents of their CD to their iPod without restriction, there is much greater reason to forget that technically it is illegal to make multiple copies of one's songs or movies, even for personal use. Take that away, make the customer conscious of every petty restriction imposed by the law and the copyright holders, and a backlash is a very real possibility.

People generally hate being nickeled and dimed to death, and that is precisely how it would be seen to require a new "license" everytime a customer wants to move their songs from their computer to their iPod, burn a copy of a CD for a car and other such personal uses. Yet, these are precisely the personal uses that are nonchalantly dismissed by the advocates of universal DRM. People are not restrained from illegally copying the songs they buy from iTunes by technical limitations, but rather by the convenience and the liberal policies that Apple has imposed. The DRM policies that Apple uses emulate the real-world usage patterns of most buyers and allow the free flow of information between devices that many already routinely do. Want a copy of the songs for your car? Apple will let you burn up to six copies, and they will be real CD audio data, not some proprietary crap. Take that away, and the future of copyright will be revolutioned more along the lines of France than America.

Human rights do not arise out of equality. True equality, biochemical equality combined with an exact replica of life experiences, has never occurred in the history of the human race. There are no two people who are true equals, thus human rights cannot arise out of sameness. It is instead out of our inequality that human rights arise. No one is equal to another, thus we are all an individual story with an individual worth and out of that individuality comes every good reason for dignifying human life and liberty. Each individual is unique, indeed, just like everyone else, regardless of how derivative one person's existence may seem there is no meaningful equality there. Chimpanzees are ninety eight percent genetically similar to humans, but no one would ever look at the overwhelming amount of genetic similarity and proclaim that we are equal to them in every fundamental way.

In our lust for "democracy" and equality, the idea that liberty is of the greatest importance for the state to protect, has been effectively lost for the many. It will be a dark future indeed when we are all equal, all "just as good as the next guy." Such will be a bland world, a tasteless world without color and vitality. No overt viciousness, but neither will there be even simple virtue lest we become pompous and elitist.

These thoughts brought to you by a realization after reading Tech Liberation, Vox Popoli and IPCentral, that while many musicians have been paid well by strong copyright law, no Mozart, Beethoven or other ground-breaking genius has come out of the DRM-protected, smoldering ashes of the "Vienna model" of payment. A million Eminems, not a single Mozart. Scary, isn't it?

I have briefly seen some criticism of Representatives Smith (NJ) and Lantos over their attempts to take Google, Microsoft, Cisco and others to task for following the Chinese censorship laws. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that these guys are just grandstanding, but a look at this reveals that believe it or not, these guys actually have a small history of voting to restrain trade with China.

Not surprisingly, Tom DeLay's name shows up on the list of people who voted in favor of keeping "Most Favored Nation" status going with China. I'm also not surprised that my former "representative," Bob Goodlatte, was on the list of people who voted to continue our "trade" relationship with China on the level that it was going.

Listen up people, you have two choices. Either we stop trading with China altogether and accept the economic upheaval that comes with that, or we just shut up about companies like Microsoft and Google following their laws and policies. That's the price that comes with the cheap trinkets and trash that floods Wal-Mart and other stores.

Scott Adams is trying to start a new genital mutilation trend:

WCM stands for Who Cares Most. If you want your relationship to have a chance, defer all decisions and interpretations of fact to the person who cares the most.

In practice, this will mean that women will make 98% of all the decisions and be �right? 98% of the time. Compared to men, women care more passionately about just about everything. Men mostly scratch what itches and call it good.

Well you might as well go around telling men, "look just because you care about something doesn't mean you have a right to actually insist that your ideas get equal consideration." Why anyone woman would respect a man who caves into her every little whim, rolls over at the first sign of disagreement and practically lives to acquiesce to her demands is beyond me. What kind of relationship is that?

Not to be overly cynical, but no one of either gender really likes very weak people. In the vast majority of people, there is a subtle Nietzschean streak that, while it pitties weak people, has little respect for them. Females of most mammal species in the wild are not keen on mating with males that refuse to be males and assert themselves, so why would it be logical to assume that similar rules don't apply to us?

The Secret Service is investigating a seventh-grader who wrote a school essay that authorities say advocated violence against President Bush, talk show host Oprah Winfrey and others.

The boy's homework assignment for English class was to write what he would do on a perfect day. In addition to the president and Winfrey, the boy wrote that violence should be directed at executives of Coca- Cola and Wal-Mart, police and school officials said.

Normally you'd expect to hear about the school officials throwing the book at a kid like this, but oddly enough they have exercised restraint and, *drum roll* compassion toward this student. The kid was obviously stupid for doing this sort of thing, and who knows, it may have been a heart-felt political statement, but given the variety of people that he wanted to see dead, well, it sounds like a typical instance of proto-teen angst.

And I have to agree with you on this, Difster, it was incredibly stupid of the Secret Service to not break with protocol and refuse to investigate this. Yeah, sure the kid could have theoretically been so serious about it that he'd take a pot shot at the President, but realistically this kid is about as much of a threat to the President as a wayward seagull accidentally flying into his head at full speed and taking him out that way.

Hmmm, I wonder. Wouldn't it be much more efficient to just lock the President in some sort of high tech version of one of those plastic containment balls you see in the movies for the germophobes? What a great idea. Not only would that keep the President safe from harm, but it'd prevent him from signing any of the crap that Congress sends his way. What a great way to not only make the Secret Service more efficient, but prevent more bad government.

If Google really does perform at least the conservative statistic of one hundred fifty million searches per day, and each search products a log file or database entry of only one kilobyte, they would have only 146.5GB of storage requirements everyday for their log files. Let's say that realistically, it's 400GB, for their daily storage requirements for just their search service, that'd put them at at a cost of $500 for a 400GB SCSI hard drive each day of the week. That's only $182,500 every year to record all of those search entries, at least in terms of the hardware cost. For a company as profitable as Google, that's chump change to record everything that you do with their search engine.

The best proposal I've seen to remedy their logging habits, is this one which proposes to make them delete their records unless someone states that they'd prefer otherwise. The issue here isn't so much marketing profiles, but rather a comprehensive list of previous activities. Many people may search for things out of curiosity that they'd never have a serious interest in and these records could really come back to haunt people if missused. It cannot be said enough that the personalization features of the search engines pose privacy problems for their users and must be used accordingly.

And if you think that Google couldn't possibly have the infrastructure to easily house all of that history data, think again. According to Wikipedia, realistic estimations put their network size at at least 100,000 Linux-based computers. If they have the resources to manage a network that large, then do not think for a second that they couldn't maintain the infrastructure needed to track their users' transactions for at least a few years, if not for over a decade or more. Considering the size of its parent company, MSN is no better and Yahoo probably has its own, similar capabilities.

Don't you just love the "benefits" brought to us by the extremely cheap storage technologies available today?

WASHINGTON - Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is raising the possibility that records sought in the CIA leak investigation could be missing because of an e-mail archiving problem at the White House.

The prosecutor in the criminal case against Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff said in a Jan. 23 letter that not all e-mail was archived in 2003, the year the Bush administration exposed the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame.

Lawyers for defendant I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby this week accused prosecutors of withholding evidence the Libby camp says it needs to mount a defense.

In case you ever wondered, the only thing that was cut from the federal budget in 2003 were new cartridges for the tape backup drives. In the interest of cutting costs on federal IT expenses, it was decided that for 2003, a legion of underfed monkeys would be assigned to transcribe all official emails for the FSY2003 period on typewriters for one banana a day.

The Republicans prove once again that they are just as much the party of emotion-over-reason, hyperbole and wild-eyed assertions as the Democrats:

For their part, Republicans forcefully defended the program. Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., zinged off some excellent one-liners about the need for secrecy regarding the program.

"I can tell you how many people have been saved by this program," he said, when Gen. Hayden of the Department of National Intelligence declined to say how many people were saved from death at the hands of terrorists by the program. "It's everybody who was on the Brooklyn Bridge when it would have been blown up."

You have to feel sorry for the intelligence agencies throughout all of this because they are the ones who are being mishandled and will ultimately take the brunt of the attack for the Republicans' actions. People say that things have changed since 9-11, well you wouldn't know it from the political games that both sides are still playing. Things have not changed one bit, the paranoia of certain segments of the American population notwithstanding.

The principles of proper, ethical security are, in my reasonably educated opinion, better laid out in information security circles than in the legal realm these days. Consider the principles of information security summarized in this article from Wired. IT, like the legal profession, is a significant component of the business and security processes today, but unlike IT, it has been all but divorced from practical, logical considerations on the practicality, ethics and efficacy of security policy. When information security is over-bearing, it has a demonistrable negative impact on performance, quality of service (QoS) and the efficiency of the IT usage of an individual, organization or community. In the legal world, this is not necessarily the case because the law is murkier than the hard-edged realities of most information security (infosec) policies.

The guiding principles of infosec policy are: no more permission than is needed shall be granted, and all users must be openly accountable to the system. Ideally, even the administrators follow the same information security policy, and there is a axiom in administration circles that any task that can be done with normal privileges mustalways been done as such. It's a "presumption of non-necessity" that must be proven false, in clear and open channels. The legal world analogy is that the police should be given the presumption that they do not need any permission to circumvent civil liberties protections unless they can prove a clear and present need to do so, that any reasonable person could accept as being sufficiently extraordinary as to make a case for a one time policy exemption. This is the only way to ensure that the legal system continues to work. If participants in it cannot be bothered to follow the policy and justify their occasional need to work outside of it, then the existance of the laws and constitutional amendments that protect our rights is just a farce.

The part that worries many people, and rightfully so, with Bush's NSA spying operation, is that it was done outside of the purview of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The FIS Act already provided an incredible array of options for the administration to operate under, in a clandestine, but overseen manner, but the FIS Court was not even consulted. Bush thus ordered the NSA to become a law unto itself and to ignore the proper protocol, something that ought to be troubling regardless of why it was ordered. The FIS Court is a secret court; its discussions with our executive branch agents are behind closed doors where no one without a need-to-know reason for being there can get access.

And just to throw a little chum in the water, consider this, fans of the Bush Administration and Three Monkey Republicans everywhere: how can we know that the fight to protect our national security is succeeding or failing if there is no oversight and accountability? Surely no one in their right mind wants to risk an Enron-like fraud, but this time played out with our national security apparatus instead of offshore accounts. I'm not saying that Bush would be the one to do it either, but doesn't it scare you people that it could happen and that there very approach you advocate makes it a realistic possibility that some administration might fail to follow proper procedures, expose our country to terrible danger, and you'd never know about it and thus not know that it's vital to fire the incumbent in the next election or, if sufficiently drastic, to impeach him or her?

You can't make this stuff up:

Organizers of a vintage car rally have hired karate experts to protect vehicles from marauding native parrots, a media report said Friday.

Wouldn't it just be easier to get a few guys to stand around with pellet guns and shoot at the parrots when they get too close? I can just see it now, "parrot killed by 'flying crane kick technique'."

Quoth James DeLong of IPcentral:

One possible explanation derives from a conversation I had with Don Boudreaux, Chair of the George Mason econ department. He commented that many Libertarians seem focused on the concreteness of physical objects, placing great emphasis on one's ability to possess them in one's own two hands. They distrust the idea of owning an abstraction.

I think that James needs to try to see this from our perspective. The major copyright holders time and again reject their customers' claim to property rights. They appeal to illusory contracts the likes of which we have neither seen in print, nor seen statute of law verifying their existence, as a way to claim that by buying their products we agreed to hand over all claim to ownership. Most record executives would have no problem arguing that while you own the physical media of a CD itself, your every use of the actual content on it is bound by whatever terms they want, even though you did not sign a formal contract with them. Many of us see this as one of the ultimate tyrannies imaginable. You own your car, but you now have to go GM or Honda in order to get permission to change out your seats or stereo system. We don't see it from the lofty, theoretical view point that many capitalist theorists do, but rather we see it for what reality has born out: copyright holders not only jealously guard all of their power over their customers, but actively seek absolute control over their product's every use.

Let me give you an example in terms of intellectual property that you can understand from a software development perspective. Most of the serious core development in Java today is being driven not by Sun, not by IBM, but by the Apache group and other open source vendors. I am not an open source cheerleader, but I will be the first to give my utmost respect to these projects for the sheer volume of innovation they have made possible. Hibernate, Spring, Struts, Taglibs and many other projects that are the true next generation of J2EE development are in fact all open source. There is no object-relational mapper out there that can seriously match the price/quality/performance ratio that Hibernate provides, and it's open source. While open source software has failed to win over converts in the desktop application market outside of Firefox and a few other small projects, it has succeeded phenominally well in terms of infrastructure software. For most companies, there is no reason to use Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle or IBM DB2 for small or medium projects because PostgreSQL or even MySQL perform quite well for those tasks. The biggest reason why these infrastructure pieces have succeeded so well is that they emulate physical property so much better than their proprietary counterparts. Hibernate doesn't require that you go out and buy a license and then be, pardon my French, caught with your nuts in another company's vice.

Another thing that James and others forget is that many young libertarians are not legal professionals, but rather are technically, artistically or business-oriented. Those of us from the sciences, in my case, Computer Science, tend to wave occam's razor at any economic argument that comes our way. It makes no sense to argue that the DMCA does not infringe on private property rights because it infringes on my ability to hack my hardware and software to suite my purposes. That is the simple, logical outlook. If I cannot legally hack my Linux box to play my lawfully-acquired DVD, then my private property rights have been violated by the DMCA in favor of the monopoly grant given to the copyright holders. There, I said it. The "gee, well, it's nuanced" litany that comes out of the strong IP defenders is, in our estimation, pure sophistry because it relies on complex theoretical models that ignore the simple reality of the real world. News flash: the music and movie studios are barely worth about 3-4% of the American IT industry, but they have lobbied more aggressively than their IT rivals to create a near creative police state in which basic state property rights laws are nullified.

IP law often in practice with software development works in a contradictory fashion. On the one hand, as a writer I have a right to protect my creative works of fiction, but under patent law I do not have a right to develop software that allows me to freely transfer my creative work from one proprietary file format to another. Yes, it is my data, but for some reason I do not have a legal right to move it from one format to another because I do not own my particular representation of that data. Once I copy and paste it from Microsoft Office into OpenOffice and save it in OpenDoc or whatever it's called, I can breath a sigh of relief, but until then, my right to control my data is limited by Microsoft's willingness to let me transfer my content to a different format that they do not own. I can copy and paste my stories, but God help me if I write a program that automates this boring work without buying a license for Microsoft's file formats.

The whole framework is contradictory and the arguments that IP is bonafide property every bit as much as physical goods, has no historical support in American tradition as our own founders did not recognize this concept when they drafted the foundation of our IP regime. Should we throw out the whole system? Of course not, but let's be realistic on this. A future in which buyers have no legal control over the copyrighted goods they buy is a bleak one for property rights. The iTunes Music Store has been an abberation in the movie and music studios' long quest to have total control over every stage of their goods. Even now they are undermining it by demanding more money per file sold, even though the current prices are the only ones that the market will bear out, and under the current system, they have too much power. If IP is true property, then it must be conformed to not just the legal norms, but the social norms of physical property. Part of that is that once a song is sold online, the record label loses the right to dictate the use except where the law has something to say about it. Just as it is a social norm that cars do not come with "end driver license agreements," neither should software except when sold with the advanced understanding. If the law is going to be structured to make IP seem like real property, then it must be forced to conform to the expectations of the buyer, not the wishes of the seller. Otherwise the whole system will be a scheme to enrich a few at the expense of the basic property rights of the many.

I know that I promised a fiction post over a month ago, and no I have not lied about that. As some may know, this has been a long transition for me and things are just now starting to wind down for me enough that I can resume regular blogging. Naturally, I have spent the past few days really working on the fiction post that I promised, and it is at almost eleven full pages now. It's got probably another three to four pages to go before I consider it ready to be published. Hopefully it will be up before Battlestar Galactica on Friday.

After this post, I will start reading, researching and writing for my first full book. There are a few books I consider important for this:

• Lord of the Rings trilogy
• Starship Troopers
• The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
• The Chronicles of Narna

The reason that I want to read these before I get started is not because of a lack of imagination, but rather to get ideas on how to properly develop characters, describe scenes, etc. It's like having a song in your head, but learning how to play the instrument and tab it out well enough to accurately represent the tune.

Google comes out swinging:

"In addition to common action by Internet companies, there is an important role for the United States government to address, in the context of its bilateral government-to-government relationships, the larger issues of free expression and open communication. For example, as a U.S.-based company that deals primarily in information, we have urged the United States government to treat censorship as a barrier to trade," Google's senior policy counsel Andrew McLaughlin wrote in a statement posted on the Google Blog.

Google has really done an outstanding job lately of telling our government to kiss its corporate ass. You gotta love how blunt they are about this subject. "What the hell do you expect us to do? You could easily restrict trade with them, but instead you have left this fight in the hands of corporate America."

The federal government has been in love with trade with China for quite some time now, and one relatively small internet company is not going to be able to make any difference in the long run. Even if Google, AOL, MSN and Yahoo had a gentleman's agreement to not help the PRC, without an official foreign policy of not aiding China, it'd easily fail. Our government must get involved by imposing trade barriers on Chinese goods, increasing incentives for domestic production and establishing a diplomatic policy of "containing China" as far as trade goes.

The main reason why we will probably never see restrictions on China that would help companies like Google and Microsoft take ethical stands is that companies like Wal-Mart would furiously lobby against them. Many retailers depend on cheap Chinese goods in order to keep costs low, and any significant trade barriers on Chinese goods would cause a lot of heartache for retailers and their lower class customers who would find themselves with less buying power.

Web sites like Google and its specialized Google News service automatically pull in headlines, photos and short excerpts of articles from thousands of news sources, linking back to the publishers' own site. Google News does not currently carry advertising.

"They're building a new medium on the backs of our industry, without paying for any of the content," Ali Rahnema, managing director of the association, told Reuters in an interview.

"The news aggregators are taking headlines, photos, sometimes the first three lines of an article -- it's for the courts to decide whether that's a copyright violation or not."

"It's not intended to shoot one over the bow, it's to take a group of people to look at the issue, and look at what options are open to our members," Rahnema added. "The purpose of this isn't to attack Google, but to say that as an industry we don't feel OK with you taking the content and seeing what happens."

What is it with everybody and their brother doing everything they can to make a quick dollar online at the expense of their entire working relationship with the handful of companies that can make or break their business online? Rude wakeup call, few people actually read any newspaper's website on a regular basis unless it has the status and brand-recognition of something like the New York Times! If you don't want them to index your website, create a robots.txt filter for your entire site and they'll happily delist your website from their indices. Actually, what the search engines should do is get together and tell these publishers that if they want to be listed, they have two choices: either they stop this litigation nonsense or they pay a $25-$50/page fee to be indexed. Yahoo, AOL, MSN and Google should get together and refuse to let them be searchable without paying a new bankrupting fee if they're going to try to straddle the fence by simultaneously whining about how they don't get any respect for their copyrights while pursuing litigation, but not wanting to alienate the search engines.

The part that cracks me up about this is that if you do a Google or Yahoo search for "New York Times," the first results you get, including advertisements, take you to pages where you can buy a subscription to the dead tree edition. If no one is getting into the advertisements that these papers use online, that's not the fault of the search engines. They cannot index newspaper entries in a way that won't "infringe" on some aspect of the story if they are going to present search results in a way that will get users interested in reading the story. Search technology is by no means perfect today and the last thing that would make most users consider going to a newspaper's website these days is a search result that says, "Google thinks this article is what you want, but due to the respect of the copyright holder, we're not going to actually show you a preview so you can decide for yourself without clicking on it."

For most of us, there's also a little system in place. If you don't want it to be indexed in Google, and I don't know about it already, chances are I don't need to nor would I want to know about it.

While I agree with James DeLong in so far as many mechanisms for making decisions are best outside of the purview of the democratic process, I think that he has come to a very erroneous comparison between proper republican decision making diversity and the state of affairs in China:

Democracy in the U.S. was founded on a sophisticated interlayering of different types of governance in different situations, with the types appropriate to the decisions and interests involved. It is an irony of successful democracy that the whole must be subject to democratic control, but within this framework there must be many undemocratic decision processes, ranging from representative assemblies to market-driven businesses to law-bound adjudication.

There is a fundamental difference between the command-control nature of the Chinese economy and our quasi-free market system. This particular argument borders on a strawman because the primary objection that has time and again been aired about China's role online in China is that they are working with a regime that is violently anti-individual rights. The democratic process itself is not of particular importance if the government operates in an enlightened manner that is respectful of individual rights and works toward a positive greater good. Most people who are criticizing Google would no doubt be just as critical if China had a multi-party democratic process, but remained the police state that it is.

It's just disappointing to see companies actively help out a police state and build up its economy. Surely the criticism is a good sign that many Americans still recoil at the thought that a government abuses its people the way that the Chinese government does. If they didn't recoil, but rather nonchalantly accepted the treatment, that would be a very bad sign for the direction of the United States because it would mean that the majority of Americans had given up on the idea that individual rights are universal, not a cultural construct.

What is interesting about this case is that Google doesn't seem to be really playing ball with the Chinese government in the way that their competition does. The fact that misspelling words can defeat their search filters, is a very interesting turn of events. It raises the possibility that Google is only paying lip service to the wishes of the Communist Party. If that's what Google is doing, then more power to them for playing both sides off against the middle.

Ok, it's time for me to admit that I jumped the gun a little bit when it comes to Web 2.0. One of my biggest gripes, the primitive nature of the user interface development process, is in part due to my "advanced novice, novice intermediate" knowledge of JavaScript. I got to thinking about the problem of using the Model-View-Controller design pattern with web pages and am now doing a sort of about face on this aspect of web design. Though this is more of a Model/View-Controller implementation, I have written a sample to show a much more programmer friendly way of tying the user interface together with the controller in a way that doesn't taint the markup with embedded JavaScript calls.

<html>
<head>
<script type="text/javascript" xsrc="js-mvc.js" mce_src="js-mvc.js"      /> </head>
<body onload="init()">
<form>
<input type="button" id="myBtn" name="myBtn"/>
<p id="label">0 clicks</p>      </form>
</body>
</html></blockquote>
<blockquote>var myBtn = null;var label = null;

function init()
{
    myBtn = document.getElementById("myBtn");
    label = document.getElementById("label");
    myBtn.onclick = myBtnOnClick;
}

function myBtnOnClick()
{
    var labelContents = parseInt(label.innerHTML);
    labelContents++;
    label.innerHTML = labelContents + " clicks";
}

This isn't exactly some profound insight into JavaScript, but it's something that can be easily overlooked by people who have little or no experience with website development. I think what makes this little trick interesting is that it can serve as a good reminder that the tools to make website development more rigorously adhere to software engineering principles have been around for a while, it's just that they have been under-utilized. People usually put the onclick and related event delegates into the HTML themselves, but with proper design, the web page can be almost completely JavaScript-free, allowing it to become little more than a "view."

I have hitherto restrained myself from commenting on the Palestinian election, but I can do so no longer as it exposes a flaw in the argument that democracy is the great liberator and that it is A Truly Wonderful Thing. Well the ugly side of the democratic process reared its head in the Palestinian elections in the form of a sweeping victory for the unabashedly terrorist group Hamas. What's next, the crips sweep the Democrats out of power in Los Angeles? To all of those people who said that the Arab world would welcome us with flowers, parades, song and dance as our troops invaded, I say congratulations. You have managed to be so wildly inaccurate that you have paved the way for legitimizing every terrorist group in the region.

Democracy is nothing more than a method of choosing leaders. It is not a statement about the quality of those leaders, their sanity, policies or anything else for that matter and the Palestinian elections proved the point that people can and will make astoundingly brain-dead choices for who should lead the civil body politic. They elected a criminal organization that has waged a guerrilla war against Israel for years, and this was made possible by the idealism of the neoconservatives. If you thought that Arafat and Saddam were bad, just wait until they're replaced by Islamists who are quite willing to die fighting us out of religious zeal. We facilitated the replacement of kleptocratic dictatorsips with Islamist governments who consider it a matter of faith that they blow up women and children different from them.

So now that we have a bonafide terrorist group replacing a quasi-terrorist group (Hamas and Fatah respectively), let's ask ourselves why we even bothered with the War on Terror to begin with. We funded the Palestinian Authority, and in doing so we funded the groups that were supported by it. Now that Hamas is calling the shots, the Washington establishment has finally been forced to face up to the fact that the Palestinian Authority has always been nothing more than a federation of thugs. What are we going to do now? Are we going to say that maybe democracy is not always the right way to go and support whoever wants to eliminated Hamas? Or do we stick to our principle and let them elected leaders who are blatant terrorists?

Not being prone to love democracy (I love freedom, not the opinions of the public at large), I see no reason to respect this election. Cut their funding and tell them that the Israelis can reenter the West Bank with impunity as far as we're concerned. If the rest of the Arab world gets angry, tell them to go f$%^ themselves with irradiated glass shards because we don't have to respect an election where a terrorist organization won the bulk of the seats in Parliament. The one thing that this should show us about the Middle East is that we have basically "lost the hearts and minds" of the mainstream there. Don't kind yourselves anymore, you who bought into the great democratic crusade. The democratic process will only serve to usher in people even more vitriolically hateful of America.

The problem with moderation policies is that they end up becoming one of the defining qualities of a forum. How people are allowed to convey their ideas sets the tone for the entire debate, and in that respect most Internet forums are incredibly lacking. While it is a given that there needs to be a mechanism to restrain unruly users, there needs to be protection to ensure that one particular mindset does not achieve dictatorial power over the forum and proceed to silence dissent. Even in the narrowest of forums, this is very undesirable as it cheapens the dialog and insulates people from points of view which they are uncomfortable with which has a myriad number of problems associated with it.

There are two extremes that I have seen which by and large do not work, those of FreeRepublic.com and those of Slashdot.org. In the case of the latter, the moderation system is managed by one or a few powerful individuals who can summarily revoke posting privileges, remove all traces that a user participated and other draconian measures. While these are necessary powers for an administrator to have, in the case of FreeRepublic.com they are often badly abused to silence libertarians, conservatives who don't support Bush and others whose views are invariably considered "trollish" by the moderators and those who usually call on them. In the case of Slashdot.org, moderation is done by the users themselves and this allows one user to come in and correct the censorship of another. If someone negatively moderates a post of mine for ideological reasons, another user can come along and undo this moderation.

Invariably, pretty much all ideological forums suffer from censorship problems online. Left-wing sites like DemocraticUnderground are no better than their right-wing counterparts when it comes to trying to achieve a stranglehold on the debate and ensuring ideological purity in the discussion. It may not immediately come in the form of moderation controls, but it does come in vocal and vitriolic attacks on those who disagree with the status quo on the forum. In defense of this, some people say that if you want to "discuss" a different view point, go elsewhere and that's fine, but if that is how things be on that forum, isn't it more accurately descriptive to call it a mutual masturbation get-together instead? If people are going to congregate in search of ideological safety and refuse to engage one another, then the great "democratic debate" is a dead horse that has been stuffed and put into a closely guarded barn so as to lend the illusion that the old nag is still with us. Long live balkanization.

There are some good arguments out there that anonymity itself is not the problem, and I am inclined to agree with those sentiments. The real problem is the accountability factor, and that is something that has to be factored in heavily with the moderators. In most forums, the moderators are for all intents and purposes unaccountable to the users and that is the case with both FreeRepublic.com and Slashdot.org. The "Admin Moderator" is not accountable at all in the former, and in the latter you never know who is moderating your posts. The moderators need to be publically-known individuals, and they themselves should be subject oversight by both the forum administrator and the users. If a moderator is attacking people for their beliefs, there needs to be a process by which the users affected can get access back and be protected.

Since providing accountability is hard to do in a simple way, the best way to do it is to make it at least partially resemble a real forum's accountability structure. In a real forum, part of the legitimacy of the forum itself derives from the trust-worthiness of the host and the moderator; no one would watch political debates where the moderator routinely let one side break the rules and/or get treated with kid gloves while asking other participants, "can you justify your cruelty to children?" The forum's administrators should be responsive in dealing with user complaints, and it would be a good idea to keep mere moderators from being able to disable a user's account permanently. Only the owner of the forum should actually be able to permanently remove a problematic user, and the system should be set up to force the moderators to leave a publically-visible trail of justification for seeking the permanent removal of a user. Moderators decisions should be subject to one another, and a group of moderators should be able to override the decision of one moderator in a way that benefits a user, rather than hurting the user so as to make it harder for a group of moderators to gang up on one moderator who is being fair and balanced.

One control that I think would go a long way toward simulating real life would be to create a system of "credibility" rating, which would minimize users with wingnut tendencies without silencing them. Their comments would still be visible and a full part of the system, but might be excerpted rather than displayed in full. One user could reduce the credibility rating on another user for their personal viewing preferences of the forum, and this would at least in theory provide a safety valve that would let users partially ignore those they disagree with, without balkanizing the forum to such an extent that people would only see the comments that are from users who have a predisposition to agreeing with their point of view. If enough users reduce the credibility rank of a user, then that reduction could become global for every user, except in a situation where a user disagrees and wants to set their own credibility rank. This idea would also apply to increasing credibility rank. Slashdot.org successfully proves that this can work for the most part with its karma system and the positive karma boost that it assigns to users who have been consistently moderated up. A more individualized version of this would probably work even better.

I know that the bulk of this is hypothetical, and that it is at best a bandaid over a greater problem. There is something to be said for creating an institutional set of rules that are designed to preserve civil debate and to limit the ability of users to shelter themselves from opinions they dislike. Remember, we are not talking about blogs or private message boards, but public forums here. To those who say that if you disagree with some aspect of the forum you should go elsewhere, I say that you are part of the problem and a contributor to the decline in civil discourse that is undermining our republican form of government. Your contribution is small, but an unwillingness to engage in a simple internet forum is invariably indicative of a larger, more close-minded mentality that shuts out any dissent. It is for that reason that I find the concept of creating a more perfect moderation system to be interesting and important. If users who disagree can be forced to address each other and grow from that, that's great. If they can be made so exasperated by the idea that others might disagree with them that they stop participating altogether (especially in politics), well, that's perhaps even better in the long run as that'd be the surest way to heal the democratic process.