Bruce Hayden

Obama as Saruman

2008-09-07T15:31:00.000-06:00

Obama as Saruman (LOR):

“…Those who listened unwarily to that voice could seldom report the words that they heard: and if they did, they wondered, for little power remained in them. Mostly they remembered only that it was a delight to hear the voice speaking, all that it said seemed wise and reasonable, and desire awoke within them by swift agreement to seem wise themselves…”

Obama and Palin riding their bikes

2008-09-06T18:45:00.003-06:00

An example why Obama is in trouble.

U.S. hands back a quieter Anbar Province - International Herald Tribune

2008-09-02T00:15:00.001-06:00

U.S. hands back a quieter Anbar Province - International Herald Tribune:

RAMADI, Iraq: Two years ago, Anbar Province was the most lethal place for American forces in Iraq. A U.S. marine or soldier died in the province nearly every day, and the provincial capital, Ramadi, was a moonscape of rubble and ruins. Islamic extremists controlled large pieces of territory, with some so ferocious in their views that they did not even allow the baking of bread.

On Monday, U.S. commanders formally returned responsibility for keeping order in Anbar Province, once the heartland of the Sunni insurgency, to the Iraqi Army and police. The ceremony, including a parade on a freshly paved street, capped one of the most significant turnabouts in the country since the war began five and a half years ago.

This was the province that two years ago was considered lost, but thanks to the Surge and the Sunni Awakening, it has been pacified.

Vista searching - using my Mac to find stuff on my Vista laptop

2008-07-17T12:12:00.003-06:00

Last night I lost my toolbars in Visio 2003 on my laptop. I figured, no problem, I have saved the local configuration files, etc. for the various Office products. So, I figured that one of the files I needed to replace was Visio11.pip. That shouldn't be hard to find, should it? It probably would have taken maybe 5 minutes to scan my 40 gb hard drive under Windows XP or 2K. But Vista? Couldn't find it. Period. Couldn't even find the old version on the desktop.

So, what did I do to find it? I mounted my hard drive on my desktop Mac, and then used the Mac Finder Find command. It took about 5 minutes across the network for my Mac to find the files that Vista couldn't find on the system running Vista.

Status in Iraq

2008-07-16T19:21:00.010-06:00

Current status in Iraq, thanks to MNF-Iraq:

Saturday bomb scare closes 395 in Minden

2008-07-15T19:40:00.006-06:00

Saturday bomb scare closes 395 in Minden: Highway 395 at the north end of Minden was closed for two hours Saturday while bomb squad officials checked out a suspicious vehicle parked at Stewart Title after the driver was arrested on traffic charges.

Here is a picture of the car:

And a picture of the wacko driving it:

What is the relevance of this?

I took a job about nine months ago in Minden as a patent attorney with Sierra Patent Group, which was merged into Lewis and Roca LLP in April. And our offices are upstairs from Stewart Title.

I worked Saturday, but didn't see the commotion in the parking lot. It may have happened before I got in, or while I was upstairs. If the later, if I had known, I would have had a ringside seat for all the excitement.

Update: It turns out that I was at work at the time, but the general consensus was that if I had looked out the office window, I probably would have been cleared out of the building, since it was adjacent to what was believed at the time to be a potential bomb.

Here is one of his business cards, picked up today from the parking lot:

Microsoft Profit Drops; Forecast May Miss Estimates

2008-04-24T21:40:00.001-06:00

Microsoft Profit Drops; Forecast May Miss Estimates:

Microsoft Corp. declined 5 percent in extended trading after it reported an 11 percent drop in third-quarter profit and forecast earnings that may miss analysts' estimates as Windows software sales fell.

Net income dropped to $4.39 billion, or 47 cents a share, from $4.93 billion, or 50 cents, a year ago. Revenue was little changed at $14.5 billion, matching analysts' estimates and disappointing investors looking for more after industry reports showed better-than-expected demand for personal computers.

The world's biggest software maker said sales of Windows for PCs sank 24 percent and revenue from its online advertising unit came in at the low end of its projections. Microsoft's report contrasted with positive comments from chipmaker Intel Corp. and computer company International Business Machines Corp.

Could it be that Windows Vista sucks and as a result, a lot of people are not upgrading?

Quake shakes downtown Reno; no damage immediately apparent

2008-04-24T21:34:00.000-06:00

Quake shakes downtown Reno. I flew into Reno about 6 hours earlier, and was about 50 miles south of the quake and didn't know it had occurred until four hours later - which is probably a good thing.

Professor Lessig Is In

2008-03-09T19:01:00.001-06:00

Mark Hemingway (National Review Online): Professor Lessig Is In: Not running for Congress, but having an impact. Lessig views himself as a liberal Democrat, but is now concerned with the inherent corruption of money in politics, and the quid pro quod we now see between political contributions and legislation, etc.

What is hard to fathom from someone who seems to understand that the bigger the government, the more corrupt it is, how he can be a liberal Democrat, where the governing tenet seems to be that more government is better, and that government can be called upon to solve all of society's ills. And, if government failures are pointed out, the answer is invariably that those in government are corrupt, and that if smarter people were running things, government would work just fine.

If Lessig continues along this route, he is likely to end up in the group most hated by the left, a neo-conservative, sometimes defined as a progressive mugged by reality.

Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling

2008-02-26T18:45:00.002-07:00

DailyTech: - Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling:

Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snow cover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.

No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age

2008-02-25T19:23:00.001-07:00

Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age:

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

Thank goodness that the consensus has won, and we all now know that Global Warming is going to end the world as we know it.

Warming temps should end worst cold snap since 2000

2008-02-11T16:29:00.000-07:00

Warming temps should end worst cold snap since 2000:

While it was 48 degrees below zero at Fairbanks International Airport on Sunday, the coldest temperature recorded so far in Fairbanks’ worst cold snap in eight years, forecasters were calling for a significant warming trend beginning today.

What ever happened to Global Warming?

Sun's low magnetic activity may portend an ice age

2008-01-31T11:56:00.000-07:00

Brits at their Best: Sun's low magnetic activity may portend an ice age

The Canadian Space Agency’s radio telescope has been reporting Flux Density Values so low they will mean a mini ice age if they continue.

Uh oh. Has anyone told Al Gore about this yet?

The Lewinsky Decade

2008-01-17T23:59:00.000-07:00

Best of the Web Today: The Lewinsky Decade starts out: "Ten years ago today came the most interesting Drudge missive:"

BLOCKBUSTER REPORT: 23-YEAR OLD, FORMER WHITE HOUSE INTERN, SEX RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESIDENT

**World Exclusive**

**Must Credit the DRUDGE REPORT**

At the last minute, at 6 p.m. on Saturday evening, NEWSWEEK magazine killed a story that was destined to shake official Washington to its foundation: A White House intern carried on a sexual affair with the President of the United States!

The DRUDGE REPORT has learned that reporter Michael Isikoff developed the story of his career, only to have it spiked by top NEWSWEEK suits hours before publication. A young woman, 23, sexually involved with the love of her life, the President of the United States, since she was a 21-year-old intern at the White House. She was a frequent visitor to a small study just off the Oval Office where she claims to have indulged the president's sexual preference. Reports of the relationship spread in White House quarters and she was moved to a job at the Pentagon, where she worked until last month.

The rest is history. Bill Clinton was impeached, but not convicted. Monica's name became synonymous with oral sex. Hillary is running for president. The Republicans are in trouble. And Drudge is still one of the most reviled names on the left of the blogosphere, while Republican candidate Mitt Romney admitted checking it out a couple of times a day.

The Economics of Marriage

2008-01-17T08:47:00.000-07:00

Interesting article by the Undercover Economist, Tim Harford: The Economics of Marriage. This should be read in concert with the previous article by Megan McArdle: No Country for Young Men. Together, the two articles make a lot of sense out of marriage, divorce, sex, college, and the pill.

One of the interesting points here is the viewing of marriage through the lens of comparative advantage, and going all the way back to Adam Smith's pin makers. He posits that one of the reasons that we had stay-at-home moms for so long was that women had a comparative advantage in child raising, and that the combined wealth of both in a marriage was (often significantly) higher when the two specialized, just as Smith's pin makers did. When I was born, men would average 50 hours a week working outside the house, and women would average a similar number of hours in the home. But one thing that happened is that the 50 hours expended in the home has dropped significantly through automation. What he didn't mention, is that it also dropped considerably through smaller average family sizes (and, thus, fewer kids around the house, for a shorter period of time). Thus, the eon long bargain between men and women has broken down, resulting in significantly increased divorces, etc. Megan would point out that this caused the value of a college degree and profession to increase significantly for women.

No Country for Young Men

2008-01-17T08:35:00.000-07:00

Megan McArdle has a great article out on marriage and retirement of the Baby Boomers: No Country for Young Men. This should be read in connection with the next article: The Economics of Marriage by the Undercover Economist.

Microsoft seeks patent for office 'spy' software

2008-01-15T20:56:00.000-07:00

Microsoft seeks patent for office 'spy' software . Initially, I thought that this was a patent claiming computer operation by, for example, brain waves. But instead, it just hooks up the user of a computer to leads so that his employer can monitor heart rate, perspiration, etc. Much less cutting edge, and, more worrisome because of its ability to be misused. It shouldn't have any patentability problems whatsoever, indeed fewer than the typical software patents filed by MSFT.

Mike Nifong Bankrupt

2008-01-15T20:48:00.000-07:00

Mike Nifong Bankrupt. Couldn't have happened to a more deserving person. I did find interesting the $180,009,081.71 figure for total non-priority unsecured debt. Nothing like pulling a figure out of thin air, and then putting it through calculations to give such an exact sounding total.

Insanity at the USPTO

2007-11-01T08:10:00.000-06:00

Few outside the patent bar realize what has been going on over the last month or so in the realm of patents. It has been insane, and was supposed to have culminated last night, midnight EDT.

Some time last winter or spring, the USPTO published some new rules for comment. The rules would have drastically changed patent practice, esp. in the realm of patent prosecution and claiming. By far, the biggest change in my 17 years of patent practice. Continuations, Continuations-in-Part (CIP), and Requests for Continuing Examinations (RCE) were to be limited to one or so per application. Claims were to be effectively limited to 25 total and 5 independent claims, with insanely onerous consequences for crossing those limits, making any patents crossing that line very expensive likely unenforcable. And to make matters worse, claims from applications filed about the same time with the same inventors would be combined for this purpose, leaving it up to the applicants and their attorneys to show that they shouldn't be combined by the USPTO. Oh, and the rules would be mostly retroactive.

No surprise then that almost all the comments were extremely negative. So, with all the negative comments, the agency published the rules in August in the Federal Register, to become fully effective today.

The rush was on. Continuations, CIPs, RCEs, and divisionals that could be filed before the deadline were filed. Of all those, only the pure continuations were easy. The RCEs required amendments to respond to prior office actions. Claim sets of pending applications were cut down to the 5/25 limit.

Meanwhile, the USPTO was fumbling around. All cases exceeding the 5/25 claim rule were pulled from examiner's dockets, but then some were restored based on the hue and cry of practitioners, since the rule would only apply to applications that had not received their first Office Action by the 11/01/07 deadline.

Because of the nature of the new rules and their effect on pending applications, at least three law suits were filed, the major one being by SmithKline Beecham, one of the biggest drug companies, filed in the ED of VA. The drug companies were especially concerned because they were likely to get hit the worst, though big companies in other industries were panicked too. The USPTO responded and was able to set the hearing for yesterday, Halloween, the day before the rules were to go into effect. And with this delay, a number of groups, including several former commissioners of the USPTO, filed amici briefs, universally condemning the new rules.

So, that was where we were sitting early this week, as the patent bar was filing applications, etc. as fast as they could. No one could take the chance that that Court would let the rules go into effect today.

In the end, sometime in the afternoon, the Court issued a preliminary injunction against the rules going into effect, at least until the Court could conduct a hearing on the merits. So, technically, I could have called it a day at that point, and gone out to celebrate. But I didn't, wrapping up what I was planning on finishing, and taking my leisure today.

I would say that the big problem here was the staffing of the top of the USPTO by people who were not patent attorneys. Clinton's USPTO commissioner, Bruce Lehman, was a copyright attorney instead, but at least he did put patent attorneys in right below him. There seems to be a vacuum in the understanding of patent prosecution at the top of the agency right now, and that resulted in this attempt to implement rules that would have had de minimis effect on the patent prosecution backlog, but dramatic effect on the cost and enforceability of patents ultimately issued under the new rules.

Yon: Iraqi Islamic Party says, “Al Qaeda is Defeated.”

2007-11-01T08:09:00.000-06:00

More good news in Iraq by Michael Yon: Iraqi Islamic Party says, “Al Qaeda is Defeated.” I love the end of this:

“Al Qaeda in Iraq is defeated,” according to Sheik Omar Jabouri, spokesman for the Iraqi Islamic Party and a member of the widespread and influential Jabouri Tribe. Speaking through an interpreter at a 31 October meeting at the Iraqi Islamic Party headquarters in downtown Baghdad, Sheik Omar said that al Qaeda had been “defeated mentally, and therefore is defeated physically,” referring to how clear it has become that the terrorist group’s tactics have backfired. Operatives who could once disappear back into the crowd after committing an increasingly atrocious attack no longer find safe haven among the Iraqis who live in the southern part of Baghdad. They are being hunted down and killed. Or, if they are lucky, captured by Americans

Man Sues Casino over $1.6 Million 'Jackpot'

2007-10-25T16:33:00.000-06:00

ABC News: Man Sues Casino over $1.6 Million 'Jackpot' is an interesting situation. A man appears to win a jackpot at an Indian reservation slot machine. But then, the casino refuses to pay, claiming that it was a slot machine malfunction. If this were Nevada or Atlantic City gaming, he could probably sue the casino, but this is an Indian reservation with its own court system.

But the article misses the ball here. The slot machine was made by, and likely owned by, International Gaming Technologies (IGT), which is by far the biggest slot machine company in at least the U.S. A couple of years ago, it was estimated that the company was making several times the winnings here a month on its Wheel of Fortune game, so it has the money.

So, the logical answer to the guy's problem would be to sue IGT in U.S. District Ct. in N.M., and essentially ignore the casino, on the theory that IGT is the real party at interest, and under tort theories of negligence, fraud, etc., since: 1) they likely own the slot machine, and 2) it was apparently their software that screwed up.

Snow (#2)

2007-09-18T09:24:00.000-06:00

Today, the clouds are gone and we have our normal blue sky. Some of the snow seems to have melted, with most of the snow appearing to be above 12,000 feet.

This is a picture from our balcony in Dillon looking south-west towards Breckenridge. The mountains shown are in the Ten Mile range and these peaks are the top of the Breckenridge ski area.

Snow!

2007-09-17T11:18:00.001-06:00

Looks like the first snow of the season here in Summit County, Colorado. The photo was taken just now at about 9,000 feet, so my guess is that the snow line is about 10,000 feet or so, which is about the base elevation of most of the ski areas in the county.

You know when you are nearing ski season when you start having ski swaps. This last weekend, there was one in Breckenridge to benefit Team Summit ski and board team. Team Summit is a successor of the various ski area ski teams, including the Keystone ski team, which in turn is a successor to the A-Basin ski team that I raced for in high school, almost 40 years ago.

I managed to survive the ski swap with only buying a new helmet and gloves. Last year at the Vail ski swap, I ended up buying two pair of skis, two pair of poles (identical, for when I break one), and a pair of boots (not for me). I did try on some boots and looked at skis, but already have one almost new pair of AT skis and should have new AT books on order - and the boots have both AT and Alpine soles that can be interchanged.

So, ski season is just around the corner. I expect to be on skis by the end of October, maybe six weeks from now, and my brother will be even sooner for race training.

Althouse, Blogger, Firefox, and Vista

2007-09-15T09:33:00.000-06:00

Ann Althouse's blog does not seem to work well with Firefox. It seems to freeze Firefox under Windows Vista, and possibly just eats up resources under XP and Server 2003. It is a weird problem since other Blogger blogs don't seem to have this problem.

As a result, I run IE 7 under Vista just for her blog. But, that means that I also use it for articles launched from the Althouse blog, and some of them do the nasty stuff that caused me to move to Firefox in the first place (such as pop-ups, and installation of questionable software).

Ultimately, I expect to dig through her blog and figure out the problem, if, and when I have the time...

Why haven't I been updated?

2007-09-15T09:32:00.000-06:00

ZDNet: Why haven't I been updated? exposes that Microsoft is apparently updating its Windows Update software without informing its customers that it is doing so - even when they have selected knowing about updates.

One of the first things that I do with a new Windows system, whether on a new computer or after I install it, is to totally turn off automatic updates. But most MSFT customers don't know that you can do this, or how to accomplish it, if they did want to. And most of them are not as paranoid as I about having stuff put on my computers that I don't know about. MSFT EULAs would seem to give them the legal right to read anything on a computer running their Windows OS, and that is frankly scary to me, in my belief that sometimes my interests and those of Redmond sometimes diverge.

That said, it does appear that at least as late as Windows XP, Windows Update wouldn't be updated without permission if no updating is selected, since I have occasionally had to update this feature before I can update the rest of Windows.

Resistance "is a normal thing, and a right for everyone"

2007-09-12T08:20:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, I suggested that if you really wanted to know what was going on in Iraq, the best way was to read Michaels Yon and Totten. I had forgotten Bill Ardolino. His Resistance "is a normal thing, and a right for everyone" is a great man-on-the-street view of Fallujah.

Perhaps more than any other element, contextual local perspective is missing from analysis about Iraq as a whole and Fallujah in particular. Western media, media consumers, and the political class offer strategic assessments about the conflict that confine the opinion and motivations of Iraqis to the general abstraction of religious sects and cherrypicked polls. It is a glaring oversight.

Lieberman and McCain on Iraq

2007-09-11T10:16:00.000-06:00

WSJ: Listening to Petraeus: The president had the courage to change course on Iraq. Does Congress? by Sens. McCain and Lieberman makes a number of points about the testimony of Gen. David Petraeus before Congress. Of particular interest:

The Bush administration clung for too long to a flawed strategy in this war, despite growing evidence of its failure. Now advocates of withdrawal risk making the exact same mistake, by refusing to re-examine their own conviction that Gen. Petraeus's strategy cannot succeed and that the war is "lost," despite rising evidence to the contrary.

The Bush administration finally had the courage to change course in Iraq earlier this year. After hearing from Gen. Petraeus today, we hope congressional opponents of the war will do the same.

A Quick Guide to Key Petraeus Points

2007-09-11T10:11:00.000-06:00

NRO: A Quick Guide to Key Petraeus Points (Excerpts)

As a bottom line up front, the military objectives of the surge are, in large measure, being met. In recent months, in the face of tough enemies and the brutal summer heat of Iraq, Coalition and Iraqi Security Forces have achieved progress in the security arena. Though the improvements have been uneven across Iraq, the overall number of security incidents in Iraq has declined in 8 of the past 12 weeks, with the numbers of incidents in the last two weeks at the lowest levels seen since June 2006.

Coalition and Iraqi operations have helped reduce ethno-sectarian violence, as well, bringing down the number of ethno-sectarian deaths substantially in Baghdad and across Iraq since the height of the sectarian violence last December. The number of overall civilian deaths has also declined during this period, although the numbers in each area are still at troubling levels.

Additionally, in what may be the most significant development of the past 8 months, the tribal rejection of Al Qaeda that started in Anbar Province and helped produce such significant change there has now spread to a number of other locations as well.

And despite the constant refrain about Iraqi deaths:

Two US intelligence agencies recently reviewed our methodology, and they concluded that the data we produce is the most accurate and authoritative in Iraq.

As I mentioned up front, and as the chart before you reflects, the level of security incidents has decreased significantly since the start of the surge of offensive operations in mid-June, declining in 8 of the past 12 weeks, with the level of incidents in the past two weeks the lowest since June 2006 and with the number of attacks this past week the lowest since April 2006.

Civilian deaths of all categories, less natural causes, have also declined considerably, by over 45% Iraq-wide since the height of the sectarian violence in December. This is shown by the top line on this chart, and the decline by some 70% in Baghdad is shown by the bottom line. Periodic mass casualty attacks by Al Qaeda have tragically added to the numbers outside Baghdad, in particular. Even without the sensational attacks, however, the level of civilian deaths is clearly still too high and continues to be of serious concern.

Interesting reading. It puts the lie to much of the misinformation being spouted right now by the anti-War crowd, and points to the inanity of Sen. Schemer's comments this last weekend. The whole article is an interesting read.

Totten: Anbar Awakens Part I: The Battle of Ramadi

2007-09-11T10:04:00.000-06:00

Michael J. Totten: Anbar Awakens Part I: The Battle of Ramadi tells the reality of the Anbar Awakening. Ramadi a year ago was extrodinarily dangerous for everyone, and in particular, the American military. Today, as with much of Anbar, Ramadi is more quit than many parts of Baghdad, and the Sunni Arab tribes there are working closely with Coallition and Iraqi security personel to keep it so. But that hasn't come without cost - as the city looks as bad as some of the German cities at the end of WWII. Life is improving though, with the restoration of some electricity and water, as compared to a total absence when the city was run by al Qaeda.

I will submit that for those of us who haven't been there, the best sources for what is really going on in Iraq come from the embeds like Michael Totten and Michael Yon. Far better than the perky Katie Couric spending a week in the country.

House OKs revamp of patent system

2007-09-11T06:54:00.000-06:00

CNET News.com: House OKs revamp of patent system. There is a lot to complain about in the bill passed by the House. The big beneficiaries are the big software companies that have small patent portfolios. And the big losers are the independent inventors and the biotech/drug companies.

Probably the part of it that is going to take the most to get used to would be the "first to file". The U.S. has been a "first to invent" country for several hundred years, and that doesn't seem to have hampered our innovation. But Europe in particular, with its much lower rate of innovation has had a "first to file" system for a long time. Coincidence?

The problem with the drug companies versus the software companies with small patent portfolios is that the former use blocking patents to restrict entry into a field. This means that the company that gets the patent (typically because they actually discovered the drug) can recoup its R&D costs by keeping competitors out until the patent expires. Software and semiconductor companies, on the other hand, typically develop products that infringe patents from numerous parties, and the bill would significantly reduce their patent infringement exposure. That would be nice - except that the same law effectively reduces the bar to infringing drug patents, allowing generic manufacturers to potentially compete before the expiration of the patents protecting a drug.

Gulfstream Gore

2007-09-07T16:05:00.000-06:00

Drudge: Gulfstream Gore:

'GREEN' GORE GOES GULFSTREAM: VIDEO CATCHES ECO-WARRIOR ON LUXURY PRIVATE JET
Fri Sep 07 2007 07:48:23 ET

As former Vice President Al Gore waits to hear if he has won this year's Nobel Peace Prize for his tireless effort on climate change, a new video will air this weekend capturing Gore on a fuel-guzzling private jet!

FOXNEWS host Sean Hannity is set to unleash the damning video this Sunday night, network sources reveal.

Hit & Run > Two More Isolated Incidents

2007-09-03T08:38:00.000-06:00

Reason Magazine: Hit & Run > Two More Isolated Incidents where the cops hit the wrong houses in no-knock raids. Again, the question arises, how did we got to this place, and what can we do about it? The police have become paramilitarized, and have every incentive these days to use overwhelming force to serve search warrants, esp. in the "War on Drugs". But, being government organizations, these SWAT teams become self-perpetuating, increasing their mandates to justify their increase in spending. Besides, a lot of cops would love to dress up in black, play with cool toys, break down doors, and generally terrorize the population.

The solution is to remove sovereign immunity from over zealous cops and their enablers. If they break down a door, and there are no drugs found, then they should have to pay to fix things up. And if they terrorize innocents for a mistake of theirs, they should be treated like anyone else who puts a gun to someone's head to terrorize them. And maybe a couple of outrageous conduct verdicts bankrupting some cities because of their SWAT teams will put an end to this.

Property tax bills soar as services fall

2007-09-03T08:22:00.000-06:00

Mass. Property tax bills soar as services fall. Not surprising that this seems to be hitting Mass. harder than most. Apparently, what is really bothersome is that property taxes are peaking due to assessments based on the real estate bubble, but services are being cut.

Short run, I expect pressure on Mass. and other similarly situated states to pick up more of the bill for the local governments that are so exposed here. But the long run solution has to be getting personnel costs down. Government pensions were cranked up in many places as a result of a revenue bubble a couple of years ago, and now the governments are having to pay the price. Right now, government workers tend to have much better pensions than those paying them. But add to this that many government workers really don't have to work all that hard (we got into this discussion last week at volokh.com), and I suspect that you will ultimately see a lot of pressure placed on local government to fix its personnel problems.

Thins are likely not as bad in places like this. Better than a decade ago, the voters here in Colorado put a straight jacket on government spending and taxes at all levels. So, the state doesn't have the money to bail out the cities and counties, no matter how much they would like to. And that is how it should be - it is the taxpayers' money, and governments without a lot of checks on them will spend as much of it as they can.

Another Sony rootkit worms its way to the surface

2007-09-03T08:07:00.000-06:00

Another Sony rootkit worms its way to the surface

Sony can't catch a break after its infamous rootkit scandal back in 2005. In fact, we know from talking to security researchers and black hats alike that Sony is under the careful eye of many as a result of that major screwup. Now, a new story has come out involving Sony's biometric Micro Vault USM-F thumb drive, which apparently contains a rootkit that could potentially allow hackers to compromise users' PCs.

"The apparent intent was to cloak sensitive files related to the fingerprint verification feature included on the USB drives," Kapoor and Purdy wrote. "However, in this case (*cough* AGAIN! *cough*) the authors apparently did not keep the security implications in mind."

Last time, it was arrogance. This time it appears more ineptitude, in trying to secure its fingerprint verification software, it opened up a similar security hole as it did two years ago.

New pfish: IRS

2007-09-01T11:33:00.000-06:00

I just got this email:

After the last annual calculations of your fiscal activity we have determined that
you are eligible to receive a tax refund of $109.30
Please submit the tax refund request and allow us 2-3 days in order to
process it.

To access the form for your tax refund, please click here

Regards,
Internal Revenue Service

It even came with a nice IRS background. The "click here" address was to: http://www.bertorotta.it/site/uuw.php, but I don't think that we were supposed to know that.

Anatomy of a Tribal Revolt (SWJ Blog)

2007-08-30T08:55:00.000-06:00

An excellent review of what is happening right now in Iraq: Anatomy of a Tribal Revolt (SWJ Blog). It looks at why the situation throughout much of, in particular, Sunni Arab Iraq has swapped so markedly over the last six months, with most of the tribes switching from helping al Qaeda to essentially declaring blood feud against them, and joining us against them.

One big point is that the insurgency ratio can be changed much more rapidly and markedly by swapping insurgents to our side than by surging troops.

But there are a lot risks remaining, as the article points out.

Hillary: Sending Katie Couric to Iraq ‘Too Little, Too Late’

2007-08-29T17:42:00.000-06:00

ScrappleFace: Hillary: Sending Katie Couric to Iraq ‘Too Little, Too Late’:

Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, today said that the decision by CBS to send Evening News anchor Katie Couric to Baghdad, Iraq, was a “desperate move” that she called “too little, too late.”

“When what you’re doing isn’t working, you need to cut your losses and pull out,” said Sen. Clinton, noting that, “Almost a year into the Couric anchorage, CBS News has failed to unite any substantial group of viewers and the evening news landscape remains a hopeless quagmire of sectarian fighting.”

CBS producer Rick Kaplan, however, said that sending a widowed, single mother of two young children into a war zone would “demonstrate that we mean business.”

Mr. Kaplan called on Sen. Clinton to “allow the Couric surge plan time to work, rather than advocating a defeatist strategy of cut-and-run.”

The big question though is whether the perky Katy Couric gets out of the "Green" zone and actually has a chance to see what is going on in Iraq. Al Qaeda knows that the MSM stays in the "safe" part of Baghdad, and bombs accordingly..

Edwards: Americans should sacrifice their SUVs

2007-08-29T09:23:00.000-06:00

Above photo shows Edwards' house and the SUVs parked around it. Edwards: Americans should sacrifice their SUVs:

LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. (AP) -- Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards told a labor group he would ask Americans to make a big sacrifice: their sport utility vehicles.

The former North Carolina senator told a forum by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, yesterday he thinks Americans are willing to sacrifice.

Edwards says Americans should be asked to drive more fuel efficient vehicles. He says he would ask them to give up SUVs.

Mr. Two Americas thinks that Americans are willing to give up their SUVs so that he can continue to fly in private jets and live in a 20,000+ squate foot house.

By Refusing To Count Our Votes, Democrats Are Writing Off Florida

2007-08-28T10:39:00.000-06:00

Tampa Tribune: By Refusing To Count Our Votes, Democrats Are Writing Off Florida points out the absurdity of the DNC refusing Florida's Democrats a vote at the DNC convention next year because of the moving of the Florida primary.

The Democratic National Committee, which accused Florida of failing to count every vote during the 2000 presidential election, says it won't count the votes of Florida Democrats in the 2008 presidential primary.

That's right. The party that castigated Florida for disenfranchising voters now plans to disenfranchise every Democratic voter who participates in Florida's primary.

What hypocrisy.

The DNC treads dangerous ground by snubbing Florida voters at a time when Republicans are running hard.

Why Apple Can't Stop iPhone Hackers

2007-08-28T10:36:00.000-06:00

Business Week: Why Apple Can't Stop iPhone Hackers points out the legal problems that Apple and AT&T are facing trying to enforce the software lock between the iPhone and AT&T's cellular network.

They are trying to utilize the DMCA to prevent people from unlocking iPhones. But there is an exemption in the law for unlocking phones and the purpose of the DMCA was to protect copyrights, and cellular networks are not protected by copyright.

The reality is that they are trying to tie the two together. While that may seem like good business, it is questionable legally. I might suggest a Sherman antitrust attack on the tying, esp. given the lack of DMCA support for it.

Personally, I find the iPhone ridiculous. I may be going overboard from my bad experiences with a phone running Windows, but I just can't believe that I could easily make or answer calls on the ski slopes wearing gloves.

NYT: The Spy Chief Speaks

2007-08-26T10:41:00.000-06:00

NYT: The Spy Chief Speaks provides the same sort of comic relief as the paper has for the last decade or so, as it lives in its own BDS reality. It starts off with:

After more than a year and a half of administration stonewalling on President Bush’s illegal domestic wiretapping, it was nice to see Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, finally unburden himself in a newspaper interview.

Of course, there was never a finding by a court of illegality... and the President's Article II powers haven't even been litigated here.

Take, for example, his disclosure that the government has eavesdropped without warrants on thousands of telephone calls in which one party was outside the United States. He said the government got warrants to continue spying on the person in the United States only “100 or less” times.

This is what was actually said:

And If a foreign bad guy is calling into the United States, if there's a need to have a warrant, for the person in the United States, you just get a warrant. And so if a terrorist calls in and it's another terrorist, I think the American public would want us to do surveillance of that U.S. person in this case. So we would just get a warrant and do that. It's a manageable thing. On the U.S. persons side it's 100 or less. And then the foreign side, it's in the thousands. Now there's a sense that we're doing massive data mining. In fact, what we're doing is surgical. A telephone number is surgical. So, if you know what number, you can select it out. So that's, we've got a lot of territory to make up with people believing that we're doing things we're not doing.

I read that to mean that when a U.S. person is involved, a warrant is, and always has been, acquired.

After Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Bush ordered the National Security Agency to intercept communications between people in the United States and people abroad without a warrant. That is a violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA.

Maybe, and maybe not. Besides, most of what was being intercepted was purely foreign.

Now we know the law was broken thousands of times. In 100 or so cases, the unlawfully intercepted calls led agents to believe that the person in the United States was a bad actor (Mr. McConnell implied, sort of, that they were terrorists), and the government’s lawyers obtained a warrant. We are still looking for that loophole in the Fourth Amendment.

Obviously, from the quote of McConnell, this conclusion was invented with little regard to reality. And as for the 4th Amdt? That is just silly. It only prevents unreasonable searches, and the U.S. has intercepted international communications during every war since electronic communications became commonplace. No court of final and competent jurisdiction has ever said that international calls with declared enemies of this country have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Besides, even if they did (and they don't), the NSA TSP surveillance of such would still not be unreasonable, given the reality of the threat, and that the interceptions are not being used in criminal prosecutions.

The remainder of the article is more of the same, mischaracterizations of the law and what McConnell said, all pandering to a BDS unreality that bears little if any relationship to what is actually happening.

Transcript: Debate on the foreign intelligence surveillance act

2007-08-26T09:33:00.000-06:00

Transcript of a question and answer session with National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell about FISA, the TSP, etc.

Reading the transcript shows the disconnect between those panicked about civil liberties and the reality of what the NSA is doing to combat terrorism. Some of the stuff that I noted here:

- The idea that the NSA coule reverse target Americans and stay within the recent amendment that used the word "directed" instead of "targeted" seems far fetched. That isn't how the NSA operates here. Rather, they target telephone numbers and record stuff coming and going from them. If the targeted number is here in the U.S., a warrant is required.

- The long term problem that precipitated this was that back when FISA was passed into law, most international communications were through the air, interception of such was not deeded to be w/i the U.S., and thus, the more lenient 50 U.S.C. 1801(f)(1) applied. But now most communications are via fiber optics that need to be intercepted at the switches on U.S. soil, and thus, interception moved to 1801(f)(2). Under (f)(1), FISA didn't apply if the target was foreign or the person here was here illegally. Both of those disappear in (f)(2).

- The other thing that changed was that when a second FISC judge looked at the program, it appears that he determined that when there was a mere possibility that one end of a conversation might be in the U.S., and it was tapped at one of those fiber switches in the U.S., FISA was triggered. The problem is that sometimes they don't know the location of both ends of a conversation - notably with satellite calls.

- Finally, as the AG has repeatedly stated, the problem is the paperwork involved - 200 hours per warrant. That is fine for situations where one party is known to be in the U.S. But that is a fraction of the relevant calls, and that FISC judge's ruling was causing a 10x increase in the warrants required - all at the 200 hours per warrant cost.

DNC Strips Florida Of 2008 Delegates

2007-08-26T09:19:00.000-06:00

Not a good move. WaPo: DNC Strips Florida Of 2008 Delegates. The DNC has stripped the state that gave Bush the presidency in 2000 of its delegates to the 2008 convention. They probably did have a chance there, since their governor no longer has a brother running for president. Until this...

More FISA Fear-Mongering by Andrew McCarthy

2007-08-21T09:01:00.000-06:00

Andrew C. McCarthy talks sense on FISA reform in: More FISA Fear-Mongering (the New York Times strikes again). The NYT breathlessly reported that the recently enacted FISA amendment would allow all sorts of implausible incursions into our civil liberties, most of which had nothing to do with international and foreign electronic communications (generically, and not as defined by FISA), the subject of FISA and its recent amendment.

I have gotten a bit tired of hearing about how the "directed" language in the new law can be theoretically, maybe, by Darth Bush (McCarthy's term), perverted to allow indiscriminent tapping of American phones. Never mind that the intelligence community has repeatedly pointed out that they see the language as being essentially equivalent to the "targeted" language of the original FISA. But somehow, it is supposedly possible for a rogue Administration to target Americans by targeting al Qaeda operatives.

Yes, the language may be a tiny bit more lenient than was in effect for interceptions made outside the U.S. (and most of those making these arguments admit that most international communications could be and were tapped "outside" the U.S. when FISA was enacted). But the amendment addressed some real problems with where FISA had gone.

First, the technology had changed significantly since then, to the point where interception outside the U.S. is now technologically infeasible (we are now tapping fiber optics at the switches as the cables come onshore, instead of out of the ether, as was previously done).

Secondly, much purely foreign traffic is intercepted at those same fiber optic switches, as AT&T had kindly routed it through this country, partially at the behest of the NSA (and partially because they are an American company with their infrastructure here). That was fine, since foreign traffic is exempt from FISA - until a FISC judge determined that FISA applies if there is a chance that one end ended up here in the U.S. That might not have been an issue, except that the NSA doesn't always know where both ends are (for example, with satellite phones).

So, if OBL were sitting in his cave on the Afgan/Pakistan border, and used a sattelite phone to call someone, a FISA warrant would now be required, because the NSA couldn't guarantee that the phone call wasn't made from this country.

Those are two big things to keep in mind when talking about the amendment to FISA. First, the big thing it did was change the standard from absolute knowledge to reasonable belief. If they detect OBL, they don't have to worry about whether he sneaked into this country somehow. And that the "directed" language is being interpreted as equivalent to the "targeted" language in 50 U.S.C. 1801(f) (and note that this part of the amendment specifically refers to 1801(f)). The person of interest must be reasonably believed to be outside the U.S. for this provision in the amendment to apply. The idea that someone here can be targeted but the surveillance be "directed" at someone outside the U.S. is just ludicrous. Since "targeted" is really narrower than "directed", this just doesn't work.

Finally, it is only temporary - six months.

Vista #10

2007-08-20T13:10:00.001-06:00

Typical weird Microsoft Vista problem. Right now, I am using my Vista laptop to post this. The connection is via a cross-over cable to my Windows 2003 Server, and thence out another Ethernet port to the Internet. The two Ethernet adaptors on the server are bridged, and DHCP on the server assigned the Vista machine its IP address.
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So, can either system see each other? Of course not. Not only can Windows on each system not see the other system, but I can't ping the other system either. You would think that that indicated a lack of connectivity. Of course not. The Vista machine can ping the modem and the print server through the Server, and, indeed, can access the Internet through the Server. It can't find DNS on the Server, but can find external DNS's.

Ping Tian Resorts

2007-08-05T14:27:00.000-06:00

A long time friend and family acquaintance, Chuck Tolton, is the VP of Resort Operations for Ping Tian Resorts, which is scheduled to be the largest ski resort in Asia. It will be 20 sq. miles, with a 3,600 foot vertical drop. And that is big. Very big.

Hopefully, I can visit and ski there in a year or two when more of it is in place.

Undercover Reporter Outed, Flees DefCon Conference

2007-08-05T09:29:00.000-06:00

PC WorldUndercover Reporter Outed, Flees DefCon Conference.

DefCon organizer Jeff Moss called out Michelle Madigan, an Associate Producer for NBC-Universal, from stage during the "Tactical Exploitation" session.

He said:

"It came to our attention that a reporter might be here with a hidden pinhole camera," Moss told the crowd, which he said left two options. One was to let her corner some 13-year-old kid and get him to admit to hacking. The other was to escort her away.

As Glen Reynolds points out at Instapundit.com:

YOU DON'T TUG ON SUPERMAN'S CAPE, and you don't spy on hackers unless you're, you know, actually good at it

I find the whole thing quite humorous. This lady was obviously out of her league, and got called for it.

Hugh Hewitt intervies Gen. Petraeus

2007-07-19T09:24:00.000-06:00

Hugh Hewitt interviewed General David Petraeus on the conditions on the ground in Iraq. Instapundit thinks this is a must read for all of Congress. Of course, they won't, because doing so would likely interfere with their claim that the "Surge" has failed. It hasn't, and the one man who would know, the man at the helm in Iraq, and the designer of it, explains why it is working, in places even better than expected.

Eating beef ' is less green than driving'

2007-07-19T09:17:00.000-06:00

This is bad news for the environmentally sensitive: Eating beef ' is less green than driving'. Apparently, according to Japanese experts, 2.2 lbs of beef is worse for the environment than driving 150 miles. The problem with eating beef is first that cows generate a lot of methane, and second, a lot of energy is expended bring them food. Bad news for feedlots like we have in such plenty in Greeley, but better for range fed beef. Of course, the Japanese don't have the room for range fed, and they coddle their cows even more than we do - so eating beef here may only be as bad as driving 125 miles from an energy point of view.

This will be quite interesting to see how this plays out. Not surprisingly, I first saw this from PETA ("People Eating Tasty Animals" or something like that). Cows do compete for the same corn that is now in demand for ethanol right now. But the bigger question is whether people will have to give up their meat to be seen as environmentally sensitive.

Luckily, I don't have that problem.

Dillon in the morning in summer

2007-07-19T08:50:00.000-06:00

Dillon Colorado in the morning. Pictures taken yesterday from the back porch.

It actually looks about the same this morning. Maybe a couple more clouds, but mostly blue sky. The lake is calm. Temperature is balmy 53 degrees, but should get up to 80 or so today.

What I have never been able to figure out is that in the summer, the weather is fairly consistent, mornings like this, clouding over in the mid afternoon, a little rain, and then clear again by dusk. Well, ok, yesterday it started out perfect, as usual, but was raining by 4, and did so until about 7. So, I ended up driving to the grocery store.

I have found that walking to the grocery store is a nice walk in the summer, maybe 20 minutes each way. So, I have taken to doing that in the evening, instead of walking along the dam. So, hopefully, instead, I will skate along it in an hour or two.

Quindlen: Hillary Should Make Barack Her Running Mate

2007-07-17T08:42:00.000-06:00

Anna Quindlen: Hillary Should Make Barack Her Running Mate makes a good point, that the best thing that Hillary could do to win the general election would be to take Barack Obama as her running mate. And, I think that she is right. That would be a very, very strong ticket. Obama's biggest problem seem to me to be his inexperience. And, despite the reality to the contrary, Hillary doesn't have that problem in the view of many Americans. Obama appears cleaner than Hillary, and he appeals to the younger crowd better than probably any other major candidate. Oh, and he is Black, or at least partially so. But White enough not to scare the voters.

I am not sure who the Republicans could run to compete with this ticket. Maybe one their losing Black candidates in the last election as VP. Or Dr. Rice. Possibly a charismatic Hispanic? In any case, it would significantly increase the Democrats chance at winning, with Obama cancelling out many of Hillary's weaknesses.

Strategypage on Iraq

2007-07-17T08:21:00.000-06:00

I do think that strategypage.com on Iraq is a good source for what is going on there. It doesn't always get down into the details that Yon, Totten, et al. do, but its weekly posts do a decent job at keeping me up to date at a slightly higher level.

Some of its recent observations were that the Iraqi insurgency has always been a Sunni Arab insurgency. For a long time, it primarily involved Baathists paying for a lot of the attacks, and working with foreign terrorists as an expediency. But the recent surge has targetted them, and they and their money are being seized at an increasing rate.

The other thing is that the Sunni Arabs in Iraq have turned on the terrorists because of the wanton bloodshed, mostly of innocent Iraqis. Strict Wahhabi Sharia law doesn't help either. I was surprised that this turning really started three years ago, and not in the last six months. Rather, we are now just seeing the results of that long term process, with most of the Sunni tribes swapping sides and aiding us in ridding their communities of the terrorists, who in the end terrorized the Sunni Arabs hosting them almost as much as they did the Shi'a .

If I have a complaint with strategypage's coverage of the war in Iraq, it is that it is too rah-rah, and some of our problems in the past were glossed over. But still, it is far better coverage than you normally get with the MSM here in the U.S.

Who Is Responsible for the Mess in Mesopotamia?

2007-07-14T13:19:00.000-06:00

TCS Daily: Who Is Responsible for the Mess in Mesopotamia? asks how the MSM can be so clueless about what is going on right now in Iraq. Esp. interesting is their abject refusal to put a name and nationality to the major terrorists in Iraq right now - they are Wahhabi Sunnis, primarily from the Gulf states, notably Saudi Arabia. As evidenced by the Anbar tribes switching sides this spring, the Iraqis mostly dislike the Wahhabi strictness, including their imposition of a very strict Sharia law.

As noted, all this is missed, when liberals, the MSM, etc. try to convince everyone that the war in Iraq is lost.

What do you call John Edwards at the bottom of Lake Michigan?

2007-07-14T06:33:00.001-06:00

Answer: A good start.

Thanks to poster: Dubya resonding to Feeling "Betrayed," Kucinich Calls Edwards Bluff where Rep. Kucinich indicated a feeling of betrayal with former Sen. Edwards attempting to cut him out of future Democratic presidential debates.

Bush and the Fairness Doctrine

2007-07-14T06:30:00.000-06:00

The Corner@NROBush and the Fairness Doctrine had this statement from the Administration:

As you probably know, some Members of Congress have recently indicated their desire to seek legislation to regulate what is said on the radio by reinstating the so-called Fairness Doctrine, which was abolished in 1987 after the FCC concluded that "a multiplicity of voices in the marketplace assured diversity of opinion" on our airwaves. Since then, the multiplicity of voices has significantly increased — and the case for the Fairness Doctrine is weaker than ever. Reinstating the Fairness Doctrine would muzzle political debate and free speech. I therefore want you to know that the President would veto any legislation reinstating the Fairness Doctrine.

This is, of course, not unexpected. Talk radio benefits the right, since that is where the dominent talk radio shows are located. And so, the Democrats in Congress, newly in a majority, would like nothing better than to hobble their enemies with a reinstitution of the "Fairness Doctrine".

But what is interesting to me about this is the Constitutional side of this. The Fairness Doctrine had been justified by Red Lion, where the Supreme Court approved it based on there being a limited number of channels of communications available. Of course, this started in the 1920s, when there actually was a shortage. Eighty years later, there of course isn't.

Note that the Administration talks straight at this, pointing out that twenty years ago, the FCC found that the doctrine could no longer be justified on that basis. So what has changed to justify it now? Nothing.

But if Congress were to pass such a bill, and if it were signed (presumably by a later president), or they were able to overcome the president's veto, would it be enforcable? I would suggest not. Normally, the Supreme Court defers to Congress in its finding of facts supporting bills. But in this case, first there was a conflicting finding of fact by an administrative agency. And again, the Court would often ignore this in favor of Congress. But in this case, the standard of review is not the usual Rational Basis, but rather Strict Scrutiny. And because of that, I would suggest that the 1987 FCC findings would be fatal to its Constitutionality.

Michael Yon reports from Baquba, Iraq that the surge appears to be working.

2007-07-13T07:04:00.000-06:00

Hugh Hewitt show: Michael Yon reports from Baquba, Iraq that the surge appears to be working.Some of the interview:

HH: I’m joined now by satellite phone from Baghdad by intrepid reporter Michael Yon. He’s actually in Baquba. Michael, welcome back to the Hugh Hewitt Show, always a pleasure to speak with you. How goes the fighting on the ground?

MY: Well, it’s really slowed down here in Baquba, Hugh. I was just in the TOC or the headquarters about fifteen minutes ago before I came on the show, and they were like the Maytag repairmen here. I mean, Baquba has just…you know, it was a very serious fight when it started, Operation Arrowhead Ripper on the 19th of June, I came in with them, but it quickly abated. The people have just turned against al Qaeda here. And so Baquba is really, the big fight now is to get the food distribution working again, which it already is. You know, they’ve got that going. And now, they’re working on fuel, because the fuel relates to electricity and water pumping. So really, they’re working on more civic things now. There’s still some combat to do, but not a lot, actually, because like I said, you know, the people just turned against al Qaeda.

HH: Now Michael Yon, a lot of people don’t know the significance of Baquba. And so can you explain what peace in Baquba means for the larger war effort?

MY: Well, it’s huge, because al Qaeda had claimed Baquba as their capitol, their worldwide capitol. And you might recall one of the things that kind of upsets people about my reporting is I said Iraq was in a civil war, and I said that way back in February of 2005, and I continue to do so. But when I first wrote that, I was in Baquba, in 2005, and I spent two or three months here. And it was just total…you could see it, and you could see al Qaeda was trying to foment that civil war, because that’s their underlying strategy, is to do that. And so getting, fracturing al Qaeda here, and al Qaeda alienating so many Iraqis, it’s helping us to put a damper on the civil war.

HH: Now yesterday, Harry Reid said on the floor of the Senate that the surge has failed. Do you think there’s any factual basis for making that assertion, Michael Yon, from what you’ve seen in Iraq over the last many months?

MY: He’s wrong, he’s wrong. It has absolutely not failed, and in fact, I’m finally willing to say it in public. I feel like it’s starting to succeed. And you know, I’m kind of stretching a little bit, because we haven’t gone too far into it, but I can see it from my travels around, for instance, in Anbar and out here in Diyala Province as well. Baghdad’s still very problematic. But there’s other areas where you can clearly see that there is a positive effect. And the first and foremost thing we have to do is knock down al Qaeda. And with them alienating so many Iraqis, I mean, they’re almost doing it for us. I mean, yeah, it takes military might to finally like wipe them out of Baquba, but it’s working. I mean, I sense that the surge is working. Reid is just wrong.

Yon goes on to say that Baghdad is still problematic, but that al Qaeda is rapidly running out of places to operate from. It can't operate in the south because there aren't any Sunni there, and the Kurds in the north are even less receptive.

The big thing is that a lot of the Sunni Arabs have switched sides. Not so much because of the surge, though that is probably helping, but because of two primary things. First, al Qaeda has overstayed their welcome. Most of the Sunni Arabs that used to work with al Qaeda are not in favor of the strict Sharia law imposed by al Qaeda, esp. when imposed through brutality. And, secondly, they are beginning to realize that we are their best chance at surviving in Iraq, esp. given the ethnic cleansing that had been going on last fall and maybe winter, with them the target.

Michael Yon : Feasting on the Moveable Beast

2007-07-12T20:42:00.000-06:00

Michael Yon in: Al-Qaeda on the Run: Feasting on the Moveable Beast again brings us the reality of our war in Iraq. Here, he describes a meeting with a leader of the 1920s Revolution Brigades (1920s) who goes by the name Abu Ali. Six months ago, his group was fairly effectively fighting our troops, as well as those of Iraqi government. But then, in April, he came to us and asked for help in fighting al Qaeda. We were more than willing to accept his change of allegance and do some of the heavy lifting. As a result, Burhiz is being rapidly cleaned out of al Qaeda. Some of Yon's blog:

Before the tape was running, I asked Abu Ali why he and the 1920s turned against al Qaeda in Buhriz. Speaking through LT David Wallach, a native Arabic speaker, Abu Ali said that “al Qaeda is an abomination of Islam: cutting off heads, stealing people’s money, kidnapping . . . every type of torture they have done.”

The recent stories of baked children came to mind. I asked if Abu Ali had heard about children being baked. Ali said no, he had not heard such a story, but he would not be surprised if it were true because al Qaeda had done so many crimes, such as cutting off a man’s head, putting it up on a stick and parading it around town.

Ali said people had been afraid in their own homes because of al Qaeda. I asked if he had fought Americans and Ali laughed and said through Wallach, “What kind of question is that?” I chuckled. Unfortunately, we had to go to other meetings, so the time for taping was short. In closing, I asked Abu Ali if there was something he would like to say to Americans. The markets that had been closed under al Qaeda were bustling around us.

Ali thought for a moment as some local people tried to interrupt him with greetings, and he said, “I ask one thing,” and now I paraphrase Ali’s words: “After the Iraqi Army and Police take hold and the security forces are ready, we want a schedule for the leaving of the American forces.”

I have no doubt that the Administration agrees completely with this later sentiment, as do I.

Ladies’ Nights, RIP

2007-07-12T20:32:00.000-06:00

This Westword article: Ladies’ Nights, RIP tells of the possible demise in Colorado of Ladies' night at nightclubs based on the fact that they discriminate on the basis of sex in the provision of public accomodations.

On the one hand, I have always felt somewhat discriminated against when I have visited bars on Ladies' nights. But on the other, I have gone there for just that reason - that the cheap or free drinks, cover charges, etc. bring out more women, which has typically been my reason for visiting bars in the first place.

So, in the end, I think that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission did the wrong thing here, regardless of the law.

The New York Times Surrenders

2007-07-12T20:26:00.000-06:00

Victor Davis Hanson does his usual superb job of destroying the credibility of the New York Times in: The New York Times Surrenders responding to their article titled "The Road Home". What is really scary is how idiotic the NYT article is. It seems to almost intentionally ignore the reality of the logistics, short term, and long term effects of an immediate pullout. As Hanson points out, the Gray Lady seems to be saying that any resulting genocide or ethnic cleansing is just fine, since it would be George Bush's fault for going into Iraq in the first place.

Google faces landmark lawsuit over sponsored links

2007-07-12T20:21:00.000-06:00

Google faces landmark lawsuit over sponsored links:

A consumer watchdog is taking legal action against Google over the way it sells and displays its sponsored links, in a case that could "send shudders down the industry".

The case stems from 2005 when Trading Post, an Australian classified ads magazine, took out sponsored links in the name of two car dealerships from Newcastle, New South Wales. People clicking on the names of the dealerships found themselves on Trading Post’s website.

Interesting case, even if it is in Australia. Trading Post apparently used Google sponsored ads to misdirect people looking for the car dealerships to its, presumably competing, web site. Web sites have been trying to do this for a long time via regular search results by including the name of the product or service they want to steal from somehow on their web pages - and the search engines go out of their way to try to police that. But in this case, Google was taking money for it, and is therefore presumably somewhat culpable.

U.S. leg of Live Earth hits key notes - Newsday.com

2007-07-09T23:31:00.000-06:00

Newsday.com: U.S. leg of Live Earth hits key notes brings into question whether newsday.com is a legitimate news site or a shill of the environmental wacko fringe. The artists can be forgiven, but the others? For example,

Etheridge aside, it was nonmusicians at this concert who made the most passionate pleas about demanding action for the environment. "Get rid of all these rotten politicians that we have in Washington, who are nothing more than corporate toadies," said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the environmentalist author, president of Waterkeeper Alliance and Robert F. Kennedy's son, who grew hoarse from shouting. "This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors."

RFKJR is evidence here of growing panic on the Global Warming fringe, by suggesting that anyone who doesn't fully, completely, and absoutely believe his his type of hocus-pocus is a traitor. Of course, the reality is that the science is not settled, and "consensus" is not a word that applies to science, but rather, to politics. Oh, wait, he is a politician, whose father and grandfather tried for the presidency (the later having lost his chance by backing the wrong side in WW II). Of course, this guy's uncle is the one leading the opposition to windmills ofshore in Mass., and he likely still makes use of the family compounds in Hyannis Port and Miami.

And then there is this:

Primatologist Jane Goodall offered a greeting in chimpanzee language, before saying, "Up in the North the ice is melting, what will it take to melt the ice in the human heart?"

Yes Jane, it is that time of year, and so the artic ice is melting now. And in a couple of months, it will be forming again. It happens every year, and is called by the technical term of "Summer". My guess is that after all those years in the jungle, Ms. Goodall has forgotten that most of the world goes through this sort of annual heating and cooling cycle.

Bless the Beasts and Children

2007-07-05T20:28:00.000-06:00

I wasn't sure of the title of this: Michael Yon: Bless the Beasts and Children until I reached the comments. Yon did Pulitzer level work here, documenting an al Qaeda atrocity where they butchered the donkeys and the people of a village they were abandoning as Iraqi and American forces advanced. The dead animals were left on the road, but the people buried, in parts, in a common grave. Kids were beheaded, but it wasn't clear whether their parents had seen the kids killed first, or the kids had to watch their parents being killed, before they themselves were butchered.

In Yon's follow-up article: Update on “Bless the Beasts and Children”, the latest body count is somewhere between ten and fourteen.

The unanswered question in all the comments is why this atrocity hasn't seen the light of day in the various mainstream media news outlets.

Justice Thomas marches to his own tune

2007-06-28T23:50:00.000-06:00

Interesting take in LAT: Thomas marches to his own tune, given the biases of that paper. It suggests that Justice Thomas serves an important purpose on the Supreme Court, that of pointing out when the emperor isn't wearing any clothes. It is almost as if being hated already because he is a black conservative on that Court, he has nothing more to lose by telling it like it is.

I think it likely though that this article was written before today's decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District, where Thomas hammered the obvious, that this case wasn't about desegregation because the Seattle school district had never been segregated, and the segregation in the Louisville one had been official desegregated. Instead, the case was about racial balancing, which typically falls prey to strict scrutiny, as it did here.

It is inevitably in areas of race that Justice Thomas most angers those on the left, because he seems to always burst their pretenses.

Democrats Denounce Desegregation Ruling

2007-06-28T22:21:00.000-06:00

Notice the framing here in the title of this article: My Way News (AP): Democrats Denounce Desegregation Ruling. The Supreme Court explicitly stated that the case did not involve desegregation, but rather racial balancing. Yet, the AP uses the word "Desegregation" in the title. And then, in the lead-in paragraph:

An historically diverse field of Democratic presidential candidates - a woman, a black, an Hispanic and five whites - denounced an hours-old Supreme Court desegregation ruling Thursday night and said the nation's slow march to racial unity is far from over. "We have made enormous progress, but the progress we have made is not good enough," said Sen. Barack Obama, the son of a man from Kenya and a woman from Kansas.

Of course, the last line there, pointing out that Obama isn't a real Black, and never suffered racial discrimination due to slavery was interesting.

What the Supreme Court did say was that the case was not about desegregation, despite the posturing here by the Democratic presidential candidates to the contrary. The Seattle school district had never had a history of government mandated segregation and the Louisville court ordered desegregation had been ruled complete several years before. Rather, this was a case of attempted racial balancing through explicitly making race the deciding factor in deciding which kids got to go to which schools.

What is really scary is that a number of these candidates are lawyers, and indeed, two of them, Clinton and Obama, graduated from the top two law schools in the country. Either they can't understand fairly straight forward case law, or they are intentionally misleading the American public. Neither speaks very highly of them.

Unrest grows amid gas rationing in Iran

2007-06-28T22:06:00.000-06:00

Unrest grows amid gas rationing in Iran points out that things are not going well right now for the Iranian government:

TEHRAN: Unrest spread in Tehran on Thursday, the second day of gasoline rationing in oil-rich Iran, with drivers lining up for miles, gas stations being set on fire and state-run banks and business centers coming under attack.

And this is primarily a result of trying to ignore basic economics:

The Iranian government had planned for a year to ration gasoline but had postponed the move, fearing unrest. Iran offers the highest subsidies for gasoline in the region, buying foreign gasoline for slightly more than $2 a gallon, according to official figures, and offering it for 34 cents a gallon.
..
The price of subsidized gasoline was raised by 25 percent last month. The new regulation allows private cars 26 gallons of gasoline a month for 34 cents a gallon. Taxis are allowed 211 gallons a month.

This would not be a problem if mass transit were available, but that, along with refinery capacity, were never properly funded. So, Tehran at least has about half the buses it needs, and the people don't have the gas to get to work. But the gas they do get is cheap.

4 for $11 or 2 for $5.50? Revisited

2007-06-27T22:36:00.000-06:00

I posted earlier about how packaging pricing does seem to work in: 4 for $11 or 2 for $5.50? where I compared different prices for Coke, based on packaging. And, surprisingly, there was no correlation between cost and value. Here are some pictures I tried to take tonight.

Here we have 8 8oz cans of coke for $3.49:

Now we have 6 12 oz plastic bottles for $3.49:

Here, 12 12oz cans for $2.75, or 4 for $11:

Here are 6 12oz glass bottles for $4.29:

And two liter bottles for $1 (10 for $10):

I should note that the Kroger's brand was even cheaper: their cola, etc., cost $.50 for a two liter bottle (20 for $10).

Ahmadinejad's Inflammable Blunder

2007-06-27T22:11:00.000-06:00

Pajamas Media: Ahmadinejad's Inflammable Blunder by Meir Javedanfar points out that the Iraqi government, and in particular, their president, have screwed up royally when it comes to gasoline. It is heavily subsidized, costing a fraction of what it should cost. That was because Ahmadinejad used low gas prices to bribe the less wealthy to vote him into the Iranian presidency. But, the problem with an artificially low price is that consumers respond by greatly increasing demand for the product. But Iran, one of the richest countries in the world in terms of oil reserves, imports some 40% of its gasoline, due to a shortage of refineries. Instead of building refineries, which would have helped to reduce this, the government committed to spending money on any number of less urgent, but more politically advantageous products. So, with demand exceeding supply, which is inevitable with subsidized pricing, the government imposed severe rationing. To make matters worse, the purchase of more buses was also left mostly undone, again because infrastructure money was spent elsewhere. The result is not surprising - there are a lot of very angry Iranians right now. Not the rich, because they easily find ways around the gas rationing, but rather, the lower and lower middle classes.

None of this should be a surprise. This is economics 101. But it did point out the failings of the socialist philosophies off the Iranian leaders to understand how economics really works. Of course, if they did understand economics, they probably wouldn't be socialists.

RIAA's Turn to Be a Defendant

2007-06-27T21:59:00.000-06:00

In RIAA's Turn to Be a Defendant, the tables seem to be turning against the recording companies. Unfortunately, the current Administration doesn't seem willing to pursue antitrust allegations against anyone, and, in this case, against the coordinated efforts by the recording companies to shut down on piracy.

But it appears that some people victimized by RIAA are starting to strike back. Notably,

Former RIAA defendant Tanya Andersen is now suing the major record labels and the RIAA for negligent and illegal investigation and prosecution. In a thirteen count civil suit filed in Oregon District Court, she alleges that record labels didn’t use properly licensed investigators and violated her privacy.

As an IP attorney, I have some sympathy for the recording interests. But I seriously fault their tactics, and thus lose much of the sympathy I would give most others in their position.

Understanding General Petraeus's Strategy

2007-06-27T21:53:00.000-06:00

Weekly Standard: Understanding General Petraeus's Strategy by Frederick W. Kagan in Testimony to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs makes a lot of important points about our new tactics in Iraq. For one thing, the troops are just now in place, and aren't fully supported yet. And, thus, much of the work being done now is preparatory, with Iraqi and American forces being prepositioned for later clear and hold actions. Some of the prepositioning is aimed at developing better intelligence. Also, many of the forces are being moved into blocking positions, so that the terrorists can't as easily just flee from one location and reemerge from another.

Of particular note, to those who say that we have failed already:

To say that the current plan has failed is simply incorrect. It might fail, of course, as any military/political plan might fail. Indications on the military side strongly suggest that success--in the form of dramatically reduced violence by the end of this year--is quite likely. Indications on the political side are more mixed, but are also less meaningful at this early stage before security has been established.

Edwards camp again turns to cash cow Coulter

2007-06-27T21:43:00.000-06:00

This is pathetic: Edwards camp again turns to cash cow Coulter:

With the second quarter drawing to a close, the presidential campaign of former North Carolina senator John Edwards (D) on Wednesday again turned to one of its most reliable “fundraisers,” Ann Coulter.

Apparently, the reason to support John Edwards is that he is the brunt of some of Ann Coulter's humor. That is not the best reason I have heard of to support someone for president.

Making the big time - quoted by Instapundit

2007-06-27T19:02:00.000-06:00

I may have finally made the big time with this comment of mine quoted from volokh.com by Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.com concerning the pending immigration bill:

The problem as I see it, is that most of us don't really understand the bill all that well. And Congress is really to blame for that - my impression is that it was not drafted out in the open, it is quite large, and amendments are not welcome. Plus, it seems like it is being rushed, possibly because the more that the people know what's in it, the more they are likely to complain.

Well, I am not going to hold my breath for the next time, but still, it is kinda nice.

The real Club Gitmo

2007-06-26T23:22:00.000-06:00

Col. Morris Davis, the chief prosecutor at Gitmo, in NYT: The Guantanamo I Know tells the reality of what is going on there. While ABC News is still using footage of Camp X-Ray from five years ago to illustrate Gitmo, X-Ray was replaced by ultra-modern facilities five years ago, and the real Camp X-Ray is now covered by weeds. The reality is that the detainees are treated significantly better than prisoners at our federal prisons. Plus, they get three (large) culturally appropriate meals a day, a chance to pray five times a day (apparently with arrows pointing towards Meccca, JIC), a Koran, etc.

Col. Davis also points out the reality of the legal system that is in place there. The detainees are getting more due process, etc. than is required by their status under the Geneva Convention, with the biggest difference between their rights and those in the U.S. are somewhat relaxed rules of evidence, to take into account the reality that most of the detainees being caught on the battle field.

Understanding Current Operations in Iraq

2007-06-26T23:12:00.000-06:00

Dave Kilcullen in Understanding Current Operations in Iraq (SWJ Blog) goes in a fair amount of depth about the changes that have been implemented in Iraq. The added troop levels in the "Surge" were only enabling. The big thing is the major change in tactics.

The tactics being implemented are similar to, and no doubt derived from, the French experience in Algeria, as described by Arthur Herman in How to Win in Iraq—and How to Lose. To some extent, we have an easier time in Iraq than the French did in Algeria, since the major players on the other side are foreigners in our case, either Wahhabi Sunnis, primarily from the Gulf states, or recently, Iranian Shia agents. On the other hand though, both the French and the U.S. have similar troop levels to work with, but Iraq has several times the population that Algeria had in the late 1950s.

But that is what is critical, separating the terrorists from the population in which they hide. And to do this, the population has to be made secure enough that enough of them are willing to finger the terrorists hiding in their midsts. The way that this was done in Algeria, and is now being done in Iraq, is that areas where the terrorists hide, or may try to hide in the future, are cleared, and then protected. This later is the big difference between the present tactics and those we used in the past. Then, we would clear an area, and then have to come back later and do it again. Instead, after areas are cleared, fortified compounds are installed in each such area, staffed by local police and military, and with U.S. (or in the case of Algeria, French) troops, all working together. Then, the local police and military personal take the lead in working with the people in that area, maintaining peace, and going after any terrorists who are there, or try later to come in there.

One reason that I suspect that this is going to go more easily than the French experience in Algeria, is that Public Enemy Number 1 in Iraq is al Qaeda and its associated groups of foreign terrorists. They have, in short, worn out their welcome in Iraq, primarily by trying to implement strict Sharia law, over a people who prefer a somewhat more liberal view of Islam. Also though, it appears that the foreign terrorists trampled on tribal sensibilities in the tribal areas of, for example, Anbar, by insisting on marrying the women there, in a culture that still practices arranged marriages. So, women were stolen and/or raped. Their male relatives who resisted were killed. And as a result, many of the Anbar tribes apparently have declared blood feud againstjavascript:void(0)
Publish al Qaeda. And because of these terrorists have worn out their welcome, all the Iraqis need to turn them in is the security that the terrorists are unlikely to be able to retaliate if fingered. And that is what the new tactics provide.

So, it really isn't that important that all the terrorist leaders are caught in these operations, since what is important is that they are prevented from hiding within the population in more and more of Iraq.

Of course, the biggest problem in Iraq continues to be the anti-war movement in the U.S., and in particular, in Congress. It almost seems like the better we do on the ground there, the more politicians jump on the "War in Iraq is Lost" bandwagon.

Hillary v. ???

2007-06-26T09:32:00.000-06:00

Right now, I don't see how any Democrat can overtake Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for president in 2008. Obama is too inexperienced and is making novice level mistakes. Edwards is a blatant hypocrite, and an experienced lightweight as well. Richards is the most qualified, but can't get traction and isn't photogenic.

Sure, some of these impressions may be false, but where do they come from? The fact that the Clinton team (with the help of the MSM) has managed to infect the electorate with these impressions is significant in itself. That they are that vulnerable indicates that Hillary and the rest of the Democrats are competing on different playing fields.

Which means that it is likely that Hillary will be Democratic nominee. The question then is how well can any of the Republicans stand up against the onslot that the other Democratic candidates are withering before. I don't see McCain being able to maintain his temper long enough, and being likely to lose it when pressed. While I like Romney, I see him as fairly brittle. Maybe not, but we shall see. Guliani maybe. But he bailed instead of running against her in 2000 for the NY Senate seat. Right now, my money would be on Fred Thompson. But he really hasn't taken that much flack yet, from either side.

But then, picking a nominee that could beat Hillary would possibly be making the same mistake that the Democrats made in 2004 - somehow John Kerry convinced a lot of people that he was the only one who could beat President Bush. Who knows how he did that, but he did. So, he got the nomination, despite the fact that a number of serious Democratic contenders didn't have his Vietnam ere baggage.

Vista #10 - Searching

2007-06-26T08:22:00.000-06:00

If I had to prioritize my gripes with Microsoft's new Vista operating system, I would put its search capabilities near the top.

Vista has a brand new search facility that seems aimed at competing with Google Desktop for control of searching users' computers. And it is fast. It gets its blinding speed through indexing files beforehand. Think of it as using a humongous relational database with all the nifty file information stored therein. Which is fine when the relevant files are indexed, but many aren't. So, you do your first search, and don't find what you want. Then, you notice that it didn't search unindexed files, and you try again, and voila, you get the answer. I am not quite sure yet why some files are indexed and others aren't. I didn't have this problem with earlier versions of Windows, where I was able to control this fairly well (and it was much less important).

Then there is the problem that it no longer makes my most common types of searches easy. Up through XP, if I wanted to search for a file folder with "Canon" in its name, as I did the other day, it is simple to do, using "Advanced Options", and selecting "Folder" as a file type. No longer. You can search for all files, including folders, with that name. But not just for folders. Similarly, for other file types. There though, if you know the extension of the file type you want, you can, maybe use that.

Overall, in the name of providing a broader use tool, I see the search facility in Vista being significantly less useful that its predecessors. This sort of thing is not uncommon with Microsoft, where they throw away useful features to generalize a tool to make it more powerful - but less easily used.

Scientist Calls Mars a Terraforming Target for the 21st Century

2007-06-26T08:20:00.000-06:00

SPACE.com: Scientist Calls Mars a Terraforming Target for the 21st Century points out that we probably now have the technology to terraform Mars, and to do it within a reasonable period of time.

As with a lot of things that we can do, the question ultimately is, whether we should. I somehow find it unlikely that the same people who panic over nuclear power, nanotechnology, and the like, will lie down for this affront to, if not Mother Earth, then Father War. Yet, isn't it worth the risk? I think so, esp. given that the population on this planet is nearing capacity (maybe).

The Real Deal

2007-06-26T04:44:00.000-06:00

Amity Shlaes in AEI: The Real Deal takes to task historians, and probably economists, for refusing to look at the reality of the New Deal. The evidence continues to mount that Hoover screwed up by walking away from his free enterprise roots, but then FDR came in and totally demolished the economy, greatly lengthening and deepening what should have only been a couple years of hardship into the Great Depression. Little of what FDR did helped the economy, most hurt it, and some was devastating. And one of the oft missed problems was that FDR never could hold the course very long, whatever course he chose to chart for the country.

One interesting point that Ms. Shlaes points out is that much of the socialism of the New Deal is forgiven as necessary to prevent a socialist takeover of this country. But this ignores the reality that FDR's Brain Trust had spent time with the Communists in Russia and the Fascists in Italy before coming to power in this country. They were, in essence, fellow travelers with the socialists taking power then in Europe, whether they be Communists in Russia, Fascists in Italy, or Nazis in Germany.

What she doesn't address is the why for this failure to investigate one of the more momentous epochs in our history. My belief is that it is almost entirely a result of the extreme liberalism we now find in academia, and notably in the social sciences. This questioning of the demi-god FDR and his legacy would be political suicide in many universities right now, the height of political correctness, worse than challenging affirmative action, white male oppression, etc.

Back Talk: The Democrats are Lying about the War in Iraq

2007-06-26T04:30:00.000-06:00

Back Talk: The Democrats are Lying about the War in Iraq points out that the Democrats and the MSM are either lying or very naive. Everything is viewed in the context of the sectarian civil war. Whenever there is a mass atrocity, it is most often blamed on "insurgents" or maybe a bit more accurately, "Sunni insurgents". But if you were to just stop there, where the MSM and the major Democratic politicians do, most of us would think that meant Iraqi Sunni insurgents. It doesn't. It mostly means foreign born Sunni terrorists belonging to, or allied with, al Qaeda, who are using indiscriminate mass violence against mostly civilians in order to try to incite that civil war that everyone keeps talking about. That means that most of those suicide and vehicle bombs that kill so many civilians are not a result of the civil war, but rather a cause of it.

Everyone on the left and in the anti-war movement is so heavily invested in the idea that the War in Iraq is mistaken, lost, etc., and that we should be concentrating on al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and maybe in our putative ally, Pakistan. And so, the reality that al Qaeda is killing a lot more people in Iraq right now than it is anywhere else in the world doesn't fit the story.

Drudge and Firefox

2007-06-23T06:31:00.000-06:00

I used to follow the Drudge Report fairly religiously. After all, we can thank him for breaking the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and many other stories since then. Yes, he gets some things wrong, but also a lot of things right, esp. in cases where the MSM seems willing to ignore news that is politically inconvenient to its liberal biases.

I have a list of sites that I typically have loaded in tabs in my browser. A couple of years ago, I removed the Drudge Report because it automatically reloaded at fairly short intervals and spawned a lot of pop-up windows.

Recently though, Firefox has gotten good enough at suppressing reloading and pop-ups that I thought to give it another try. And it seems to be working just fine. Now, if Matt would just implement RSS feeds, I would be even happier, since I tend to have to read the whole report to see if anything has changed.

Ticket to Ride

2007-06-23T06:29:00.000-06:00

John J. Miller at The Corner at NRO: Ticket to Ride:

Pulled over for driving 78 mph on a 55 mph road? In Virginia, it will soon cost more than $1,000. This isn't because Virginians are especially reckless drivers who require draconian disincentives in the name of public safety—it's a Richmond money grab. The state legislature wants to increase revenue but doesn't want to be accused of raising taxes. It's being called a "civil remedial fee." And thus our state troopers will become glorified tax collectors. Brilliant.

What he is possibly ignoring is the corrupting effect of traffic tickets on law enforcement. If the police see any of the money resulting from this, they are going to become even more zealous about enforcing speeding tickets. We see this time and time again, where the primary goal of a police force becomes revenue generation through the use of police power. So, instead of cracking down on petty crimes and low grade felonies, they spend their time cracking down on speeders, letting the more important stuff slide.

It gets even better:

John, It seems the legislator who introduced the higher fines, which the article you cite says will lead to an influx of business to law firms specializing in traffic cases is, you guessed it, co-founder and partner in a firm specializing in traffic/criminal law cases. His government position is part time, so the rest of his time, he can work on the cases his legislation generates. Gotta love Virginia politics.

Fred Thompson talks about a Federalist solution to malpractice abuse in Texas

2007-06-22T22:25:00.000-06:00

I am betting that one subject that John Edwards would not want to debate: Fred Thompson talks about a Federalist solution to malpractice abuse in Texas. In short, Texas was losing doctors fast. In response, they passed an initiative that capped non-economic damages in malpractice suits. And, voila, the legislature has had to allocate more money to process all the doctors trying to open up shop in Texas.

Edwards, of course, got rich (today, I saw that his net worth was around $30 million) by exactly this - winning pain and suffering verdicts against doctors, using what turned out to be junk science. What was worse, was that his primary target were the ob/gyns who performed vaginal deliveries. And, no surprise, the biggest backers of Edwards are the plaintiffs' contingency fee tort lawyers, including those who litigate medical malpractice cases.

Of course, we can all dream about an Edwards/ Thompson debate, where Edwards tries to talk about his "two Americas", and Thompson about malpractice reform.

Fred File: the link between tax cuts and our children's well-being

2007-06-22T22:16:00.000-06:00

Fred Thompson writes about the link between tax cuts and our children's well-being:

Since 1993, according to Justice Department statistics, the juvenile homicide rate was cut in half. For kids between the ages of 14 and 17, the reduction was even greater. The National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System shows child abuse declined by 43 percent and childhood sexual abuse by almost half. Sexual assaults against adolescents dropped by more than two thirds and aggravated assaults by almost 75 percent.

This is dramatically good news, especially for children and their parents. And the reasons behind these improvements in the lives of American children are linked to economic growth. With increased revenues on a state and local level, more police were hired. Financially healthy families took their children to doctors more often, who were more likely to prescribe medications and other treatments. The study even pointed out that increased financial health reduces family tensions and produces happier children -- less prone to problem behaviors.

The irony is that we got these improvements in our children’s lives from a strong economy driven by tax cuts. Now we're being told that tax cuts have to end, so that the government can tax us and spend the money on programs to accomplish what Americans already did for themselves. And they did it far better than any bureaucracy ever could.

Sen. Thompson has a decent chance at the Republican nomination because he is saying what should be said to combat the Democrats running Congress right now. Most of their ideas are brain-dead, and they likely know it. But they throw them out, believing that the American people can either be bought off, or are dumb enough to believe them. Thus, despite all the evidence to the contrary, they insist that we need to raise taxes in order to balance the budget. But as always, they use "static analysis", which has been repeatedly discredited. They use it because their goal is to raise taxes, in order to fund more government programs, and have no real interest in helping the American public.

Vista #9

2007-06-21T12:56:00.000-06:00

Well, I solved by parallel port driver, but I will get to that in a minute.

When I woke up this morning, my Vista computer was dead. It wouldn't boot. Rather, I would get the Compaq flash screen, and then nothing. A totally blank screen, except for a character cursor in the top left corner. I tried different ways of booting, etc., all to no avail.

So, I called up Compaq, and got a technician in India, whose English proficiency wasn't quite there yet. It was rather humorous.
HP: Is the computer acting any differently?
Me: Yes, it isn't running.
HP: What did you change?
Me: A lot.
HP: What services are running?
Me: None. The computer is dead.
HP: What applications are running?
Me: None. The computer is dead.
HP: Did you install any software?
Me: Yes, that is what computers are for, running software.
HP: Let's check the event log.
Me: Sorry, the computer is dead.
HP: What is the last thing you did?
Me: I went to bed.

Ultimately, it turns out that the problem was that I had set the system to go to sleep after two hours of inactivity. Initially, that wasn't an issue, since it would wake up with activity on the network, and my server (H) would broadcast WINS status checks every twenty minutes or so. But then, a day or so ago, I disabled having the Ethernet interface wake the system up.

I had also manually put the system to sleep, both by the external switch and the internal button. Of course, programming the external switch to put the computer to sleep meant that it was nearly useless when I wanted to reset or reboot the computer. Of course, the solution to that was to unplug the computer and then plug it back in. Then, the external impulse switch works as a boot switch, at least for a moment or so.

It took rebooting a couple of times, trying to get into the setup menu, and finally, moving the cursor around a lot and hitting the space bar a couple dozen times (under the supervision of the helpful HP technician) to finally get the system back up.

Then, I was referred to another HP technician who seemed to know a lot more. I first asked him about my parallel printer port problem. Whenever I would boot the system, I would get an error message that the parallel port driver couldn't start, and the most likely reason was that I didn't have a parallel port - which for the first time ever, I don't.

The solution was to go into the registry (and how many HP customers would know how to do that?). Under current settings, etc., there is a key for "parpor" or something like that. Guessing, I clicked on it, and, sure enough, the description said "Parallel Port Driver". The startup parameter was set to a 3. The technician had me set it to a 4. I then rebooted, and no error message.

Looking back, it is obvious that I should have looked up parpor under CurrentVersion under Windows under Microsoft under SOFTWARE under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE in the registry and changed the Start value from a 3 to a 4. I am just embarrassed that I had to have that HP technician tell me to do so.

Actually, of course, most people who use Windows don't know what the Registry is, don't know how to access it, how it is organized, etc. And worse, Microsoft suggests very strongly that you run in Vista (and XP) as a User, and not as an Administrator. Of course, the Registry is likely inaccessible in User mode (I haven't verified this, because I almost always run as an Administrator).

I am used to mucking around in the Registry, and have shortcuts already set up for the two programs that Microsoft supplies to view and modify it. One nice thing that Windows does provide is an environmental tag for the current Windows directory. This has been true at least since Win 2K. So, you can code shortcuts utilizing this environmental tag, and move them from system to system. So, I did this once, and now have shortcuts on all my Windows systems (2K, 2KSE, XP HE, XP Pro, 2K3SE, and now Vista HP) for all sorts of Windows utilities.

Still, despite all the above, I am curious whether this whole thing was an HP programming problem, when they customized Vista for this computer (and they didn't verify the customization by checking the Event log), or whether I actually inadvertently activated the Parallel Port driver. I won't likely know until have to reinstall Vista.

Computer Failure Stalls United Airlines Flights

2007-06-20T10:54:00.000-06:00

cbs2chicago.com: Computer Failure Stalls United Airlines Flights. First, the computer system crashes that determines flight weights, etc. And then, in order to maintain its on-time takeoff record, the United planes push back and then sit on the ground for a couple of hours. OK for the company, but not so great for its customers.

Father of the Iranian revolution

2007-06-20T10:45:00.000-06:00

I like this by the Jerusalem Post: Jimmy Carter - Father of the Iranian revolution.

We just don't get it. The Left in America is screaming to high heaven that the mess we are in in Iraq and the war on terrorism has been caused by the right-wing and that George W. Bush, the so-called "dim-witted cowboy," has created the entire mess.

The truth is the entire nightmare can be traced back to the liberal democratic policies of the leftist Jimmy Carter, who created a firestorm that destabilized our greatest ally in the Muslim world, the shah of Iran, in favor of a religious fanatic, the ayatollah Khomeini.

Carter viewed Khomeini as more of a religious holy man in a grassroots revolution than a founding father of modern terrorism...

Vista #8 - disappearing control panels

2007-06-20T10:00:00.000-06:00

It seemed like all of a sudden, and my control panels disappeared out of Windows Vista. After a lot of investigation, I found that I could execute them directly from the Windows\System32 directory. But, I couldn't get them to run from the start menu.

I went through a system restore to a point a couple of days ago, to no avail. Then, I started playing a bit more with Services, and found the culprit: "Software Licensing". Apparently, in my attempts to turn off some of the nagging, irritating, Vista stuff, I had turned that service off. Reading it carefully, it indicated that the service:

Enables the download, installation and enforcement of digital licenses for Windows and Windows applications. If the service is disabled, the operating system and licensed applications may run in a reduced function mode.

Apparently, MSFT's definition of "reduced function mode" means no Control Panels. But I still can't figure out the logical connection between "Software Licensing" and the Control Panel.

Now all I have to do is figure out why the parallel port driver is being started, since I don't have a parallel port and it therefore error terminates after each boot.

Realtors and antitrust

2007-06-20T06:52:00.001-06:00

Probably some 20+ years from when I first acquired a real estate license, I formally was sworn in as a "Realtor" yesterday, after a day long training session. This meant that I formally joined the National, Colorado, and local Board of Realtors. While in some states, joining is mandatory, in Colorado it is not, and only about 2/3 of the brokers are members.

Much of that training was in ethics, and in particular, the ethics standards of the National Board of Realtors (NAR). For the most part, nothing that unexpected. Interestingly, the NAR standards are not that different from the Colorado state standards for RE brokers, except that in several places Colorado has gone further, and indeed, overrides the NAR standards. So, there are apparently several places in the NAR standards that apply to 49 states (plus presumably D.C.), but not here. These mostly have to do with Realtor relationships with each other.

As noted, there was little surprising throughout most of the presentation. But the end of it involved a section on antitrust and price fixing. This was brought home by an example of two single mothers who got a little drunk, compared commission rates charged customers, and were ultimately sentenced to prison when their kids are old enough - in apparently another three years. And, esp. troubling to me, the attorney who accidentally overheard them and didn't turn them in, was suspended from the practice of law for six months.

Colorado has been somewhere in the front as far as negotiable commission schedules. I talk to people in other states who are surprised that our state RE commission doesn't set commissions. It doesn't, and those utilizing the services of RE professionals benefit. Indeed, this is becoming the Wild West here, with some brokers charging separately for different services, most often on a flat fee basis.

Maybe we, as RE brokers here in CO, might be safer if we were back with state mandated commission rates. But that is the point here - the customers wouldn't be better off. Fixed fees benefit the members of the guild. Negotiable fees benefit the customers.

World's biggest airliner to serve as private jet

2007-06-20T06:52:00.000-06:00

World's biggest airliner to serve as private jet:

Attention hip hop stars and billionaires: the world's biggest airliner, the 73-metre-long (239-feet) Airbus A380 superjumbo, has been ordered by a mysterious buyer for use as a private jet.

The order sets new heights in the private plane sector, leaving the Learjet, which used to be the ultimate symbol of ostentatious air travel, in second class.

The doubledecker A380, which enters service later this year, is capable of carrying 840 passengers, has 900 square metres (10,000 square feet) of cabin space and towers over its biggest rival, the Boeing 747.

I probably wouldn't have commented on this, except for its ending:

"Aviation is now so out of control, we're not only seeing unnecessary binge-flying, it seems we're starting to see 'bling-flying' too," said Joss Garman, from the British anti-pollution group Plane Stupid.

"Buying a superjumbo like this to use as a private jet is like buying a filthy coal-fired power station just to use to charge up your mobile phone."

Vista #7 (IE 7)

2007-06-18T17:07:00.000-06:00

Finally, something good about Vista. It comes with Internet Explorer 7. While IE 7 lost some of its buttons, etc., it made up for that by being able to properly render this blog.

As with a lot of things, Microsoft has been reluctant to conform to standards, in this case, HTML standards. My default presentation mode is "chopped" in this blog, and IE level 6 and earlier did not properly render that mode, which uses the following CSS to implement:

.Post-Chop .post-item-body{
max-height: 3in;
overflow: hidden;
}

Apparently, IE 6 and below don't support the max-height attribute nor the overflow: hidden.

Vista #6a

2007-06-18T15:55:00.000-06:00

This is in response to a commenter who was quite upset about not being able to use the built-in FAX that has been a part of Windows for at least a decade now.

Here is an official comparison of the different versions of Vista.

You can, of course, upgrade to Vista to the Ultimate version that has everything. Here is a Vista upgrade calculator. For me, it would cost $159 to go from Home Premium to Ultimate.

Right now, I don't need the FAX functionality. I primarily use send2fax.com to send and receive FAXs electronically. But I also have several computers running with older versions of Windows that have FAX software and have two multifunction printers that can also FAX (though I only really use them for scanning and copying).

Rather, if I do end up upgrading to Vista Ultimate, it will be to have more control over the security settings, be able to back stuff up en mass, be able to host remote desktops, and synchronize files on different systems.

I should note that some of these differences are only visible when you start digging into the documentation. For example, I found out about the remote desktop stuff and synchronization when trying to set them up. I am currently using Synchronize It! to synchronize files among my different computer systems. The problem is that it is becoming laborious to make sure that they are all up to date. The Vista synchronization facility looks like it might be useful for me - if it were available. It isn't in the version of Vista I have (Home Premium).

Vista #6

2007-06-17T18:55:00.000-06:00

One thing that I do like about Vista is that it provides a quick and easy way to put the computer to sleep or to hibernate. It actually seemed to try to eliminate hibernation, but that is still available via the sidebar. But there is a sleep button on the Windows Start menu, and the power button can be programmed to sleep also. It is easy enough that I am actually starting to use that feature if I will be gone for a day or two.

I did set the system to sleep if inactive for four or more hours. It hasn't availed itself of that yet. I suspect that it is because the Ethernet adapter was set to wake it up, and the server periodically makes sure that its WINS entries are up to date, and so queries all the computers it can every ten minutes or so, and this probably kept the system up. I have disabled that, and hopefully the system will go to sleep on its own. We shall see.

Vista #5 (and other stuff)

2007-06-17T18:18:00.000-06:00

Not really a Vista problem this time. I have had any number of problems with Vista and one of them was that PDFcreator doesn't run yet under Vista. Every time I run it, it generates some sort of error message that is tied to the print queue. The message is "Interactive Services dialog detection", and if you click on it, it takes you into some weird mode to display the message.

Currently, I have taken PDFCreator offline and marked the print file for deletion, all to no effect. I need to reboot to get rid of the silly error message, which I plan to do once I have posted this.

Which brings me to another weird problem today.

I was desperately trying desperately to file a provisional patent application electronically today with the USPTO. The USPTO EFS system requires limits submission to .pdf files (and some of them are required to be updated only by Acrobat reader 7.0.9 - not 7.0.8 or 8.0, which is what you get when you have a government monopoly). I needed to submit them from my server (H) which is running Server 2003. Unfortunately, both PDFCreater and CutePDF were not working correctly there. And the Vista computer (I) couldn't run PDFCreator since it doesn't run under Vista. That left my laptop (E) running XP. But because of the weird Home Edition stuff of both Vista and XP, I couldn't go directly from the server (H) to the XP (E) computers. Rather, I had to move everything via the Vista (I) computer. At first, I was moving stuff from server (H) to Vista (I) to laptop (E) and back. But then I found I could just skip the middle step, and have a window for the server's desktop and one for the laptop's desktop open, and move the files back and forth between the two desktops - from the Vista machine. Weird. And what is even weirder is that the laptop (E) is connected to one Ethernet port on the server (H) via a crossover cable. Meanwhile the server (H) is connected to the same Ethernet hub as the Vista system (I) (and hence to the Internet). And then all the server connections are bridged together. Thus, in order to transfer a file from the server (H) to the laptop (E) via the Vista machine (I), it actually travels from the server to the Vista machine back to the server and thence to the laptop. And then, of course, the reverse is also true on the flip side.

A final note on Home Editions, etc. Last night I brought up a DHCP server on the server (H) primarily to make assignment of an IP address easier, etc. for the laptop (E). This way it can always automatically acquire its IP address, regardless of whether it is connected to my office network or another network. DHCP assigns the same IP address to the laptop based on its MAC address. It also provides it with the latest DNS settings, etc. And that worked great the first time. For once. So, now the laptop can operate on my network with a static IP address, and all the systems have that IP address loaded statically.

But while I was working on that, I also tweaked my WINS server there. I noted that most of the WINS entries were static (via lmhosts) - except for two critical ones. The Vista computer (I) invariably ended up as the network browser. And the Laptop (E) invariably ended up owning the workgroup. The first seems a bit harmless. But the later may be the reason that I often have problems with the XP laptop connecting to the other systems. Initially, it can't access the workgroup. I suspect that is because at that time it is owned by one of the other computers. But once the laptop gets ownership of the workgroup, it works just fine.

I should note that part of the problem here is that both Vista and XP systems are running Home Editions. That means that they have stripped down security systems. I don't have this problem with either XP or 2K Professional, or 2K or 2003 Server, where I have full security control.

Which brings to one final point - I should be bringing back up another desktop computer (D) in a couple days that runs Win 2K Professional. In the past, it has worked great with 2003 Server. It shall be interesting to see how it works with Vista HE. Probably as poorly as the server does.

Vista #4

2007-06-16T20:55:00.000-06:00

I mentioned in a previous post that Vista can find other computers in the local network significantly faster than can previous versions of Windows. Well, now I need to qualify that - if Vista finds another computer, it does so faster than do the older versions of Windows. But currently, I have a situation where an XP computer (E) is routed through a Server 2003 system (H). The new Vista computer (I) cannot find the XP system (E) and there is no way to look for it in Vista.

I should note that the problem is likely due to Microsoft intentionally maiming its home editions. I am running XP Home Edition on my laptop (E), which is why I can't just hook it up to the Ethernet hub like everything else. No, I have to hook it directly to my server (H) via a cross-over cable, and then bridging it in the server (H) to the hub and modem. But I can't search for computers on my network with my other "Home" edition, this time, Vista (I). The brand new fancy Vista search engine didn't bother to include the ability to search the local network for specific computers. I am sure things work find in the professional version of Vista - for a $150 upgrade.

Looters raid Arafat's home, steal his Nobel Peace Prize |

2007-06-16T17:36:00.000-06:00

Jerusalem Post: Looters raid Arafat's home, steal his Nobel Peace Prize:

Enraged Fatah leaders on Saturday accused Hamas militiamen of looting the home of former Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat in Gaza City.

"They stole almost everything inside the house, including Arafat's Nobel Peace Prize medal," said Ramallah-based Fatah spokesman Ahmed Abdel Rahman. "Hamas militiamen and gangsters blew up the main entrance to the house before storming it. They stole many of Arafat's documents and files, gifts he had received from world leaders and even his military outfits."

I am sure glad that the Palestinians aren't involved in a civil war right now. It is bloody enough already, without one.

Nifong to be disbarred

2007-06-16T17:30:00.000-06:00

Nifong is found to have violated a number of ethics rules and the state bar has decided that he needs to be disbarred. And some 400 posts to Durham-in-Wonderland within the first two hours.

Vista #3

2007-06-16T13:47:00.000-06:00

I am still getting used to Windows Vista. One of the nice new features is the Side Bar. It allows you to load up one side of your screen with "gadgets". Currently, I have three clocks, showing Mountain, Pacific, and Eastern time, followed by two weather gadgets showing the weather in Dillon and Golden. Then, I have tasks and calender items from Outlooks, followed by RSS feeds from a bunch of web sites. Finally, I have some performance gadgets on the bottom. I have their opacity set to the minimum so that they don't distract me, but when I put the cursor over them, they fully appear. Pretty slick.

One big problem with gadgets is that most of them that reference Office, reference Office 2007 only, and I am not about to pay for that as long as Office 2003 works just fine. Besides, it appears that Microsoft has reorganized their look and feel even more than it did Windows with Vista. I have spent a decade or so getting a good system working with the various Office programs, with menus and button bars that expedite my work. I am not about to throw that away until I have to.

Final problem though is that the bizarre security system in Vista can't figure out that shortcuts to its own products should be treated the same as the underlying products. So, if I create a shortcut to a Microsoft product and then click on it, Vista makes me verify that it is legitimate before executing it. Come on guys, if you can't trust your own software, you shouldn't be selling it.

Acobat 8 versus Visio 2003

2007-06-16T13:33:00.000-06:00

I was recently testing out Acrobat 8, and for the most part, it worked quite well. I created three .pdf files from Visio 2003 files, and then one .pdf from those three, sorting the pages as I needed to. Some of the Visio files were landscape and some portrait. Nevertheless, I could rotate just the landscape files, resulting in a .pdf containing only portrait pages. Then, I applied a dozen different backgrounds to the generated .pdf to generate a dozen or so unique files of Visio drawings, which were then successfully submitted as parts of patent applications to the USPTO.

However, Acrobat 8 (professional) has a very nasty habit when coupled with Visio 2003 - it constantly overrides the Visio button and menu bars in order to make sure that its own button bar and menu items are persistent. So, I will set up the button bars and menus like I want in Visio. It will run just fine, until I exit. Then, when I restart Visio, Acrobat has reset the Visio button bars and menus to their initial state and added buttons and menu items for itself.

I wasn't absolutely positive that it was an Acrobat problem until today. But my 30 day Acrobat 8 test license is expired and I managed to uninstall it (not without having to reboot both before and afterwards). And guess what? Visio is running great - remembering button bars and menus across program executions.

What is interesting here is that Acrobat 8 tries to do the same thing with the rest of Office 2003, but doesn't screw the rest of the programs up this way. The button bar and menu customization, etc. look the same across all these Microsoft products, but apparently isn't, since Acrobat only screws up Visio.

Nevertheless, I am hesitant to purchase and install Acrobat 8 for just this reason.

Weird computer problems

2007-06-16T12:05:00.000-06:00

I mentioned in an earlier blog that I have a new computer. Ignoring that it comes with Windows Vista, otherwise it works great - except that I was loading a page in a Firefox and an advertisement was flashing so fast that it was almost uncomfortable to watch.

My guess at the problem is that the new computer has two 3 ghz processors. That is a lot of horsepower, and when misused as was done with that advertisement, the results are not always pleasant. My guess is that the designers of the ad just assumed that it would run slow enough that they didn't have to worry about inserting delays. They were wrong.

Vista #2

2007-06-13T13:24:00.000-06:00

I am still underwhelmed with Windows Vista, esp. as I find more and more places where Vista Home Premium has been intentionally crippled to entice us to upgrade.

I downloaded some free software from the HP web site to my desktop. Well, I thought that it was to my desktop, but it didn't show up there. But I was able to see it if I opened the desktop as a folder. I refreshed the desktop. Not dice. What was going on? Apparently, the install file is downloaded with a "do not index" attribute set, and because of that, it wasn't showing on the desktop.
Vista comes with folder menu bar disabled. It took two days to figure out how to turn it back on. I still can't set up a folder icon bar.
Folder shortcuts have mostly disappeared. These are like regular shortcuts, except that when you put them in the start menu, you can traverse them as pull-down menus. This can be quite convenient.

Google Complains About Microsoft's Vista

2007-06-12T11:50:00.000-06:00

Google Complains About Microsoft's Vista points out a different problem than the one I expected after bringing up a Vista computer last night. I was struck by the fact that IE has a similar search window to Firefox, but that it defaults to Yahoo. This was again one of those places where MSFT seemed to be using its strength here to push out Google. I was ultimately able to set up Google as my default search engine on the Internet, but not without some pain.

But apparently MSFT is going a bit further in trying to thwart Google. It appears that MSFT is crippling the operation of Google Desktop, while embedding its own competing product in Vista.

I should note that this is just another place where I think Vista went in the wrong direction. Searching for the sort of stuff that I typically search for (i.e. files on my computer) has just gotten notably harder. Vista generalized the search interface, with the result that the types of searches that I do are significantly more cumbersome.

Maybe the difference is that I pretty much know where I store stuff. I tend to look for something very specific, such as a file with a certain extension created w/i the last week.

I did find it interesting that CA AG Jerry Brown is looking into Vista. This is governor moonbeam of a previous era, and then mayor of Oakland. I actually agree with him for once on something.