Yearly Archives: 2004

Remember Yaser Hamdi?

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He was one of the American citizens detained indefinitely, without counsel or charge, on the grounds that he was an “enemy combatant” and therefore not subject to the rights of the accused as we enshrine them here. See, he was SO DANGEROUS that they had to hold him in secret and not allow him to address the evidence against him.

Right. He’s being released in a deal wherein he must (a) renounce his US Citizenship and (b) leave the US for Saudi Arabia.

I’m sorry, but What. The. Fuck?

The agreement to free Yaser Esam Hamdi represents a stunning reversal for the Bush administration, which argued for more than two years that the former Taliban fighter was potentially so dangerous that he had to be detained indefinitely in solitary confinement with no access to counsel and no right to trial.

It will be interesting to hear how Hamdi characterizes his ordeal once he’s free to talk. Terrorist or not, I’m not happy with the DOJ’s actions here, and this deal seems custom-tailored to save face in the wake of several rulings putting them in their place. As it happens, the Constitution is, you know, LAW and all.

In which we tease the afflicted

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We expect Mr Coyote to become slightly less strident in the near future, because we have it on good authority that he’s (a) about half drunk because (b) he got a pretty sweet job offer today. So there’s that.

Two from Fred

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Slacktivist has two fine posts this morning:

  • No DD-214, no job. A DD-214 documents the circumstances under which an individual left the military. Fred notes “I am not interested in the typographical capabilities of the IBM Executive Model D typewriter . . . I want to see the man’s DD-214.”
  • Careless committees. Here Mr. Clark notes the sad state of environmental legislation in general — and the Endangered Species Act in particular — under this administration, but also includes this gem: “The British scientist J.B.S. Haldane, the story goes, was asked by a clergyman what we might learn about God from studying the creation. Haldane replied that, ‘He has an inordinate fondness for beetles.'” Gotta love that.

Something you likely won’t see much of in the mainstream media

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But CNN covered it, albeit briefly and without substantial comment. Over at Tom Tomorrow’s site, Bob Harris writes about seeing the coverage of a US attack killing a working journalist on camera, supposedly because the reporter was too close to a disabled American vehicle. There’s a bit more coverage through Tom’s post, or directly here; there’s a CNN transcript here.

Bob goes on to note precisely what behavior like this is likely to produce. Hint: it ain’t stable democracies in the middle east.

Curiously, they don’t even bother to mention fuel economy

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The excellent HowStuffWorks.com folks have a bit up about the Bugatti Veyron, a million-dollar supercar to end all supercars. A few fun facts:

  • It boasts a W-16 engine that produces 1,001 horsepower.
  • It’s good for 250MPH.
  • 0 to 60? THREE seconds.
  • 14 seconds is a pretty good quarter mile time; in 14 seconds, this car is going 180MPH, and has left the quarter quite a ways back.

It’s good to know that these things exist. The article doesn’t mention a curious fact I know to be true of other Bugattis: they run on aviation fuel, not regular gas. The folks who used to clean my car had one on the lot a couple years ago, and the owner gave us the tour; it was essentially a track toy, but the aviation gas wrinkle meant that when he took it to Dallas, for example, he had to either trailer it or caravan with a truck full of fuel.

That’s the sort of thing that makes my air-cooled German pile of foolishness look practical, I tell you. It may burn oil and require absurd maintenance, but at least I don’t have to go to airports for gas.

Why Sun Still Doesn’t Get It

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In this article, Sun Chief Technology Evangelist Simon Phipps states that the subscription model is a “necessary trend for Open Source Deployers.” I disagree, at least where the JDS is concerned.

Phipp’s key analogy is that of a newspaper:

The model Sun is developing for giving customers the benefits they need using open source is illustrated well by Sun’s Java Desktop System (JDS). JDS comprises many software elements drawn from a wide range of open source communities. To understand what’s happening, let’s consider the newspaper industry. Newspapers haven’t been killed off by the Internet (at least, not yet!). The reason for this is that when we buy a newspaper, we’re not buying the news. These days the news is free (gratis) – we can go online and read news feeds from organizations like Reuters or the Associated Press, or original reporting from an organization like the BBC. When I buy a newspaper like ‘USA Today’ or ‘The Independent’, I am actually buying an editorial style. The editor-in-chief for the newspaper sets the outlook, and then the editors and other staff select the news stories, phrase the reports, position them in the publication and perform the lay-out in support of that editorial outlook. If I go online to get the news, I have to do the work of selecting and filtering the news, and I may not always be aware of the biases of the source I am using. To get an aggregation of the news I want delivered in a style that helps me and with biases I understand, I subscribe to a newspaper. JDS is just like this. Almost all the elements that comprise it – the Mozilla browser, the Evolution mail and calendar client, the StarOffice document productivity suite, the underlying GNU/Linux operating system they depend on, the Gnome desktop environment they use and much more – come from open source communities. You could go get all those parts yourself – they are all available gratis. But then you’d have to integrate them yourself, support them yourself, and accept joint liability for their use of ideas yourself. Instead, Sun acts like the editor-in-chief of the JDS ‘publication’. Staff select the software components to include and exclude, work to integrate them, contribute to each of the open source communities to improve their compatibility and completeness. Sun packages and delivers the final publication, offers support and updates, fixes security exposures, offers indemnity and generally joins the communities so you don’t have to. You don’t buy the software from Sun – instead you subscribe to the editorial outlook. Sun’s editorial view is to deliver high function, ease of use, data format and networking compatibility, low migration cost, re-use of existing hardware, escape from Windows viruses and security risks and minimal retraining. If that’s an editorial outlook that fits your corporate needs, you’d do well to subscribe.

The problem with this notion is that the newspaper itself — with its editorial outlook intact — exists online for free as well; online news seekers aren’t limited to raw feeds with unknown biases. If I want, I can read the Washington Post in its entirety — or the Washington Times, if I prefer my news with a Moonie bent. In fact, most papers are available free online, though many require registration. What we buy with a newspaper is portability, which isn’t that germane to the subject Phipps really wants to discuss.

The notion of JDS as a known aggregator is sort of buyable, but there are distinct drawbacks to working with someone else’s idea of how these pieces should work together. Unhooking them to change the configuration will require nontrivial work, so the time you spend using someone else’s aggregate may be false economy. PAYING Sun in the long run for this desktop may be a way to get into FOSS quickly, but ultimately you’ll want more control, and you’ll go to a homegrown solution. And because you can’t really escape having SOME IT at your enterprise grows, eventually it’ll make more sense to develop your own build in house and stop paying Sun every month.

This is analagous to the hosting situation of a new firm, for example. Right now, say newcompany.com lives at Hostcentric on a server they provisioned and built to their spec. It has most of what we wqnt on it, but in a configuration that isn’t optimum for adaptation or tool migration — if, say, we wanted to change our mail system to authenticate to LDAP, for example. When we start wanting to do fancy things, we’ll need to build our own server so we can (a) pick the tools we want to use instead of the ones Hostcentric likes (b) control the way these tools interoperate.

Sun has a big challenge ahead: it needs to define why it still exists. High bus usage applications where their tightly coupled hardware/software solution shines are a tiny portion of the market they formerly dominated; there’s no longer a need for most applications to go to such high-end, proprietary hardware. For example, last year I led a team building a music marketing site that now supports 150,000 registered users and 3MM hits a day. In runs on two Intel boxes (one runs Apache; the other runs Postgres). They’re beefy boxes with RAID and lots of RAM, but they cost a fraction of what it used to take to support that kind of application, and that means most of Sun’s market has gone the way of all flesh.

What does Sun have? They have Java, but monetizing that would be difficult at best. They have Solaris, which may be the last man standing in the proprietary Unix world, but Linux is closing fast, and being the last survivor of a dying breed still makes you a dying breed. The JDS is an interesting idea, but isn’t that compelling, I don’t think, if you look more carefully at the way it purports to work. We get a Linux machine with free tools installed, and we pay Sun to manage it for us? Um, why? How much? First, Linux boxen require dramatically less “management” once running than do Windows machines. Second, why would we want to entrust any outside entity with the stability of our machines? In a small organization without any IT support, I can see a degree of appeal here (again, like the Hostcentric situation), but any sort of ongoing and growing enterprise will likely be better served by assembling a “drive image” internally and distributing it in much the same way Windows is managed now. Sun is adding a financial “load” here without clear value-add, at least from this geek’s point of view, and adds an external point of failure besides.

So how do you make money in open source? There are lots of ways, but chief among them are probably service model businesses (somebody’s always got to know how to make things work together no matter who made the software) and open-source-based projects like Apple’s OS X (built on FreeBSD), Tivo (which runs Linux), and a thousand other tools built with free or open source cores. Trouble is, I’m not sure how Sun can make that jump. JDS is an attempt, I suppose, to product-ize a service (that is, managing your Linux desktops). The problem with this is that I have a hard time imagining they’ll be able to charge enough, or be able to get enough customers, to make it play for them. They need a LOT of revenue to avoid being a niche player, and I don’t think this is the source. I’m not counting them out yet, but I wouldn’t buy the stock, and I sure wouldn’t trust my company’s desktops to a firm whose business model seems on the way out the door.

We’re pretty sure he’s gonna have a lawsuit over this

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An Alabama woman has been fired for refusing to remove a Kerry/Edwards sticker from her car. The boss in question has apparently also been stuffing employee mailboxes with pro-Bush fliers, which, while not illegal, is certainly creepy. Especially in light of his actions where this woman is concerned. (Original story here.)

Any members of the Alabama Bar want to contact this woman about a wrongful termination case?

Save Betamax

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A Betamax. No biggie. No, not the obsolete Sony also-ran, but the Supreme Court decision that made owning a Betamax legal. The MPAA whined and whined — and sued — over the whole notion of time-shifting and home taping, insisting (famously) that the Betamax was some sort of technological equivalent of the Boston Strangler (thanks, Valenti), and that home taping in and of itself was infringment on their copyright (and never mind Fair Use), and further wanted Sony held liable for contributory infringement for making the VTR available in the first place. The Supremes saw it differently, and thereby allowed the market for home video to explode — which, of course, is now part of the bread and butter revenue stream for that very same MPAA that sought to ban the Betamax and its ilk in the first place.

Now we have something called the INDUCE Act before Congress; this law would essentially undo the Betamax ruling, conceivably making Apple liable for the infringment of iPod owners, for example. (Read it, or some analysis, yourself; it’s not pretty.)

In response, some concerned folks have created SaveBetamax.org, and online grassroots organization whose first task is a coordinated day of phone calls to targetted Congresspeople. Go sign up and make a call if you like the idea of deciding when to watch the Sopranos, or on what format you wish to listen to your newest CD. It’s that kind of fair use that the RIAA and MPAA would dearly love to eliminate, and that’s what the INDUCE Act is about. It won’t take much time — hell, some of you spend more time than this will take on this site alone, if the access logs are to be believed. (Heh.)

Garrison Keillor on the GOP

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We don’t really listen to Keillor’s show much, but after reading a piece like this, we may need to reconsider:

The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil ArmstrongÕs moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, NewtÕs evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks weÕre deaf, dumb and dangerous. Rich ironies abound! Lies pop up like toadstools in the forest! Wild swine crowd round the public trough! Outrageous gerrymandering! Pocket lining on a massive scale! Paid lobbyists sit in committee rooms and write legislation to alleviate the suffering of billionaires! Hypocrisies shine like cat turds in the moonlight! O Mark Twain, where art thou at this hour? Arise and behold the Gilded Age reincarnated gaudier than ever, upholding great wealth as the sure sign of Divine Grace. Here in 2004, George W. Bush is running for reelection on a platform of tragedyÑthe single greatest failure of national defense in our history, the attacks of 9/11 in which 19 men with box cutters put this nation into a tailspin, a failure the details of which the White House fought to keep secret even as it ran the country into hock up to the hubcaps, thanks to generous tax cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead us into a box canyon of debt that will render government impotent, even as we engage in a war against a small country that was undertaken for the presidentÕs personal satisfaction but sold to the American public on the basis of brazen misinformation, a war whose purpose is to distract us from an enormous transfer of wealth taking place in this country, flowing upward, and the deception is working beautifully.

When “Lorem Ipsom” won’t cut it

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Top Cat! The most effectual Top Cat! Who’s intellectual close friends get to call him T.C., providing it’s with dignity. Top Cat! The indisputable leader of the gang. He’s the boss, he’s a pip, he’s the championship. He’s the most tip top, Top Cat.

Hey there where ya goin’, not exactly knowin’, who says you have to call just one place home. He’s goin’ everywhere, B.J. McKay and his best friend Bear. He just keeps on movin’, ladies keep improvin’, every day is better than the last. New dreams and better scenes, and best of all I don’t pay property tax. Rollin’ down to Dallas, who’s providin’ my palace, off to New Orleans or who knows where. Places new and ladies, too, I’m B.J. McKay and this is my best friend Bear.

I never spend much time in school but I taught ladies plenty. It’s true I hire my body out for pay, hey hey. I’ve gotten burned over Cheryl Tiegs, blown up for Raquel Welch. But when I end up in the hay it’s only hay, hey hey. I might jump an open drawbridge, or Tarzan from a vine. ‘Cause I’m the unknown stuntman that makes Eastwood look so fine.

(Here.)

Or, if you prefer:

Samt vilket datum dessa Šndringar gjordes b) Du tillser att alla verk som. Ett sŒdant meddelande som nŠmns ovan) , Programvaran licensieras i sin helhet utan. FšrŠndrade versioner av Programvaran eller verk enligt villkoren. Startas skall det skriva ut. Programvaran eller verk enligt villkoren i paragraf 1 ovan fšrutsatt att du ocksŒ uppfyller fšljande, innehŒller eller Šr hŠrlett frŒn Programvaran eller en del av Programvaran. Och distribuera sŒdana fšrŠndrade versioner av Programvaran eller verk enligt villkoren i paragraf. De fšrŠndrade filerna har ett tydligt meddelande som berŠttar att Du Šndrat; att de fšrŠndrade filerna har ett tydligt meddelande som berŠttar att Du Šndrat filerna! Kan utfšra interaktiv kommandon nŠr det; kostnad till tredje man enligt dessa licensvillkor c) Om den fšrŠndrade Programvaran i sitt?

(Here.)

Bill Maher fucking NAILS it

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As quoted by Atrios:

And finally, New Rule: You can’t run on a mistake. Franklin Roosevelt didn’t run for re-election claiming Pearl Harbor was his finest hour. Abe Lincoln was a great president, but the high point of his second term wasn’t theater security. 9/11 wasn’t a triumph of the human spirit. It was a fuck-up by a guy on vacation. Now, don’t get me wrong, Mr. President. I’m not blaming you for 9/11. We have blue-ribbon commissions to do that. And I’m not saying there was anything improper about your immediate response to the attacks. Someone had to stay in that classroom and protect those kids from Chechen rebels. But by the looks of your convention, you’d think that the worst thing that ever happened to us was the best thing that ever happened to you. You just can’t keep celebrating the deadliest attack ever as if it’s your personal rendezvous with greatness. You don’t see old men who were shot down during World War II jumping out of a plane every year. I mean, other than your dad. … So I say, if you absolutely must win an election on the backs of dead people, do it like they do in Chicago, and have them actually vote for you. Cite

At some point, it should matter that there are no complimentary insider accounts

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Senator Bob Graham has some disturbing things to say in his new book. More coverage at the Miami Herald.

The gist is this: a web of politically motivated secret classifications has prevented a genuine inquiry into the relationship between the Saudis and the 9/11 hijackers, and this stonewalling continues to this day. What is known is that at least two of the hijackers were financially supported by Saudi agents prior to 9/11, which is more than a little disturbing.

Dept. of Retro Onion

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This Onion story just isn’t anywhere nearly as funny was it was four years ago:

“We as a people must stand united, banding together to tear this nation in two,” Bush said. “Much work lies ahead of us: The gap between the rich and the poor may be wide, be there’s much more widening left to do. We must squander our nation’s hard-won budget surplus on tax breaks for the wealthiest 15 percent. And, on the foreign front, we must find an enemy and defeat it.”

Sigh.

In which we point out other clever people

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Missouri Loves Company has this to say about Hero:

“Hero,” by the way, is an outstanding movie, even if the fight scene between the two chicks did remind me of a Bjork video. Think Rashamon meets Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. With an athletic, sword-wielding Bjork.

We recommend you go read the whole post, especially the part about people demanding their money back because they didn’t understand what “subtitled” meant on the poster.

In case you missed it, we live in a police state

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At least, you know, if there’s a convention in town. Check it out; the NYPD basically arrested everyone they could find — more than at any other political convention in the US — and held them far as long as they wanted (i.e., until the convention was over) with no regard for whether or not the people arrested were breaking laws, or were really even protesters.

Dollars to donuts says there will be no real repercussions against the cops who did this, and even less against those who ordered it, and that makes it much easier for NYPD or LAPD or anyone to do exactly the same thing again, any time they decide they want to quash legal dissent.

Who is it that hates freedom again? I forget.

If you think secret laws are bad, how about secret arguments supporting them?

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John Gilmore has sued the US Government in order to force it to disclose the laws requiring ID checks when we fly; the government’s response has been that the laws themselves must remain secret for “national security reasons,” which precisely no one with half a brain believes.

It gets better, though: now the Feds are insisting that their own arguments in the case must be kept secret as well. What about oversight?

“We’re dealing with the government’s review of a secret law that now they want a secret judicial review for,” one of Gilmore’s attorneys, James Harrison, said in a phone interview Sunday. “This administration’s use of a secret law is more dangerous to the security of the nation than any external threat.”

Damn right. I fear what an unchecked Executive may do far more than I fear Al Queda. We will always have enemies beyond our borders, either because we backed friendly dictators or committed some other foreign policy cockup, or because sometimes people just hate for no good reason; that’s a given. But we shouldn’t have to deal with these kinds of enemies of freedom, liberty, and transparent government within our own republic. Christ.