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There are certain genetic diseases associated with the X chromosome, which are therefore far more common in boys than in girls, most notably hemophilia. When genetic diseases of that kind are known to run in families, sometimes they will do genetic tests during pregnancies and abort any males, so as to select female offspring who would have a far lower chance of inheriting the diseases. In the case of hemophilia, if the father is not a victim then a daughter cannot be because she's guaranteed to get a clean X chromosome from him, but will have a 50% chance of being a carrier because she may get the bad one from her mother. Even if she is a carrier, though, she will not have the disease. On the other hand, a son will get his father's Y chromosome, and will have a 50% chance of being a victim because there's a 1:2 chance that his one and only X chromosome, from his mother, will be the one with the bad gene. In the case of in vitro fertilization, if the same genetic risk exists in a family I have no problem with screening for gender before implantation. Ethically speaking, I see it as being no different from having an abortion in that case. But making what amounts to a cosmetic choice of offspring is not the same. This isn't a choice based on avoiding a crippling and horrible disease (unless you consider being a "girl" such), it's the first step on the road to designer children, where the parents are not merely using this procedure to get kids, but are using it to get kids that fit their requirements or desires. We should not design our kids. (discussion in progress)
That is preposterous. It wasn't the UN that got attacked, it was America. Why would we want to trust the UN to fight our war for us, and for that matter what right have we to ask the UN to do such a thing? Certain nations which have mutual defense pacts with the US may be asked for military assistance, but surely we neither want nor need or have a right to ask for Chinese troops to fight against our enemies, let alone Cuban troops or troops from Algeria. Yes, I'm aware that thousands of people from around the world died in the Trade Centers. Those nations also have a grievance against the attackers and are free to prosecute their own wars or do whatever else they desire to because of their losses. But that does not give them moral authority to override the acts of the US in this. The reason Castro wants the US to subordinate itself to the UN, and the reason I oppose doing so, is precisely because this would remove the ability of the US to unilaterally respond. (discuss)
"Thou shalt not kill." Well, usually. There was a case about a year ago of a couple of crazies in LA who tried to rob a bank and botched it. One of them started stalking down the middle of a street shooting at anything that moved. Ultimately he was shot and killed by the police. What he was doing was unquestionably wrong, but was it wrong for the police to kill him? I don't think so. Had they not done so he would almost certainly have killed several people himself. "Shoot to wound" only happens in movies and on television. In real life with modern weapons you don't generally have that choice. The LA police were presented with the stark choice of one death versus many, and correctly chose to kill one man to save the lives of many. Is it wrong to execute someone convicted of a heinous crime? Some people claim that it is always wrong to do so. But suppose that we Is torture wrong? Well, usually. Until two weeks ago the following scenario might have seemed like paranoid ravings, but I think people will now accept it as a real possibility: what if, at some point in the future, Al Qaeda smuggles the components of a fission weapon into the US with the intent to assemble it and destroy a US city. If one member of the group with knowledge of the details of the attack had been captured, then what do we do with him? He has the answers, and if those answers can be gotten out of him then a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions might be prevented. Forget about truth serums; that only happens in the movies. (Lots of ethically easy answers only happen in movies.) You've got 12 hours to make him talk or Philadelphia (or Miami, or Houston, or Denver) will be destroyed. What are you going to do? You torture him. There is no other answer. It's bad but all the other choices are worse, and torture works. If by torturing one man you can potentially save hundreds of thousands of lives, I consider it to be an ethical obligation to do so. I'd even take my turn, if I had any talent for it. (And then I'd hate myself for the rest of my life.) Is it wrong to use poison gas in war? I'm torn on that one, but a lot of people think so. The main practical argument against it is the possibility of a radical escalation. Many people point to the fact that not even Hitler used poison gas in WWII, but the reason why surely had nothing to do with the Geneva Convention or any ethics on his part. Rather, he knew that the Allies were prepared to counter with their own poison gas, and that if he started it then his own troops would reap what he had sowed. It was deterrence which prevented it, not any ethics. On a moral basis, is it necessarily any worse to kill an enemy with gas than it is to shred his body with cluster bombs, or to cook him with napalm, or to blow him to bits with a fuel air explosive? Let alone simply shooting him? Death is death, and a lot of weapons maim when they don't kill. Still, there is that worry about escalation and it's very real. Let's suppose that somehow gas is truly ethically worse. What if we're facing an enemy who has a position that can't reasonably be taken out any other way than with poison gas? As a battlefield weapon there are numerous reasons to dislike gas, but as a weapon for Is it wrong to use a nuke on an enemy city? This is a horrendous evil and should be resisted if at all possible -- but I still can conceive of circumstances in which it would be morally required. If a ruthless enemy is known to have a supply of nukes and uses one on one of our own cities, then what is to prevent him from doing so again and killing even more Americans? For fifty years, what has prevented nuclear exchange was the threat of massive retaliation, but that threat only works if it is credible. If someone doesn't believe you have the will to respond, then even if you have weapons you have no deterrent. It was the absolute determination to use the weapons which prevented the need to do so. So what if someone actually calls our bluff? If we don't respond, won't they be encouraged to take out several more cities? If by destroying one enemy city to prove our resolve we can prevent the destruction of five more US cities, should we not do so? Setting off a nuke in an uninhabited place doesn't prove anything; that only works in movies. I think we'd have to seriously consider whether the inhabitants of Baghdad are more important than the inhabitants of New York plus Atlanta plus Los Angeles plus London plus Rotterdam plus Frankfurt plus Marseille plus Salerno. Are we willing to sacrifice all those Americans and allies to avoid killing the people of Baghdad? I was raised as a fervant Christian, and I mean fervant. One of my great grandfathers was a minister and his daughter (my grandmother) wouldn't even let playing cards into her home when I was a kid. We were more liberal than that, but my parents didn't curse and didn't drink (and didn't dance). When I was in high school, I began to have doubts about what I had been taught; the ethical principles seemed simplistic and I kept running into cases where a literal application of them would result in acts which were prima facie wrong. It just seemed as if the ethical rules needed to be more complex, if only because the world is complex. When I was in college, despite being a science major I took a lot of philosophy courses. I took a course in ethics, and emerged from that recognizing that of all the classic ethical systems, the only one which wasn't deeply flawed was rule utilitarianism. It was formulated as a variation on pure utilitarianism as a way of dealing with, among other things, the But many mainstream religions have accepted this and do change their ethical teachings as new problems arise. Of course, given that it is presumed that God hasn't visited us lately and handed us a new set of stone tablets, the it means that the ethical teachings of those churches come from humans, not from God. Some try to pretend that they got the changes from God via prayer, but that doesn't generally wash and most of them have abandoned the pretense. This removes much of the moral authority behind them. It seems that a church can be right or strong, but not both. In the mean time, we have to accept that in war it is necessary sometimes to do evil things, sometimes grossly evil things, for no reason other than because all the alternatives are even worse. By far the best summation of this came from a Los Angeles police officer: "The standard isn't perfection; the standard is the alternative." If what we do results in a situation that is less bad than what would happen if we were inactive, then it was the right thing to do even if it is absolutely bad. That, ultimately, is why pacifism is wrong at this time; it will lead to worse results than if we actively do bad things. It is not always given to us to make an choice which is absolutely good. Sometimes we have to select the least among evils. (discuss)
Update 20010930: Israel has given the Palestinians 48 hours to stop the violence. Apparently it is Arafat's fault that Israeli troops have shot and killed 16 Palestinians since the beginning of the "cease fire". What's he supposed to do, disarm the Israeli army?
It's been 18 days since the bombing and the US hasn't done anything yet. How restrained to they want us to be? (discuss) Update: Of course, they do have a right to protest. The Constitution protects our right to be foolish. (And wouldn't it be ironic if this "peace" protest turned into a riot, like so many of the other anti-Globalization demonstrations in recent memory?)
The Japanese had fortified the island extensively with concrete pillboxes for machine guns and mortars and artillery pieces, and also with an extremely elaborate tunnel system. These tunnels would permit Japanese units to pop up behind the Marines and attack them from rear. Ultimately, one way of dealing with this turned out to be to deal with tunnel entrances whenever they were found by pouring flamethrower fire into their mouths, followed by the use of satchel charges to collapse and seal them. The flamethrowers would ruin the air inside, and sealing the mouth would then trap any survivors or at least make that exit useless. If it turns out to be necessary for the US to send in a substantial ground force to Afghanistan, we're probably going to have to do the same thing with the tunnels there, only maybe even more so. While there is not (cannot be!) anything like the kind of density of tunnels as there were on Iwo, the ones they do have will be a substantial problem. One possible tactic on finding any tunnel mouth will be to toss in gas grenades, and then to seal the mouth. Tunnels have many virtues but ventilation is not among them; and if there is a substantial release of gas at a sealed entrance, it will eventually pervade the entire tunnel complex and force abandonment for a considerable period of time. That, of course, then leads to the question of lethal versus non-lethal gas. How ruthless do you feel? We could use tear gas (CS), for instance, but the complex would become useful again in a few days at most. On the other hand, such a tunnel could be rendered permanently useless with mustard gas, which settles on surfaces, is a contact poison (gas masks are not a sufficient defense against it; you need full body coverage), and doesn't degrade if it isn't exposed to weather, which it wouldn't be underground. Upon discovery of any tunnel entrance, a hundred pound canister of mustard gas with a time-delay mechanism on it could be moved 20 yards inside, and then the mouth sealed with explosives. Then a couple of minutes later the cannister would release many thousands of cubic feet of gas over a period of a couple of minutes. That would be enough to render an extremely large tunnel system (one extending several miles) useless pretty much indefinitely. Mustard gas is 85 year old technology; I have no doubt whatever that we have more modern poison gases capable of even better effect. But this would also violate the Geneva Convention and could potentially lose us our position of moral superiority in the war. (It's arguable also that it is cruel, but is it really any more cruel than any other kind of killing in a war?) On the other hand, I really don't know of any other way to deal with extensive tunnels; we can't afford to pay the kind of price we paid at Iwo per square mile of Afghani territory cleared, and to eliminate a tunnel complex without gas you have to find and destroy every single entrance. For big ones that's not practical. The advantage of using gas is that you can eliminate a complex by finding only one entrance; you no longer care where the others are. Once you've driven your enemy to the surface, then he is much easier to defeat. The "humane" way is to used non-lethal colored smoke. Then you use air recon to try to find other entrances as the smoke emerges from them, calling in either bombing missions or moving ground forces in to seal those. That's not very effective, though; too much chance of missing a few. An alternative, which would so far as I know be completely legal under the Geneva Convention, would be to release explosive gas instead of poison gas, and then detonate it. This would turn the entire tunnel complex into one big fuel-air bomb, and a confined one at that. 500 pounds of propane could ruin a very big place, but it wouldn't deny that area to the enemy for further use unless it caused widespread collapses in the tunnel system, which would depend entirely on how well they'd built. Vaporized kerosene would cause a bigger explosion but wouldn't dissipate as far before the blast. Yes, these are horrible thoughts. War is not a nice experience. But this is the kind of thing that military planners have to consider. The tunnels are a problem; how do we deal with them if we have to invade? There are people in our military now who are debating these and many other alternatives. I hope we don't have to deal with them at all, but if we do then I hope our planning people find a way which minimizes casualties among our own soldiers. What we don't want to have to do is go down in and root them out. (discuss) Update: Having done more research I can now say that mustard gas would be a poor choice. It isn't really a gas but rather is a liquid; when it was used as a weapon in WWI it was placed in artillery shells which aerosolized it. The canister releasing it could do the same, but aerosols don't spread well. A better choice would be a true poison gas like phosgene, which is reasonably stable, highly lethal, and which is heavier than air. As a result, it would tend to spontaneously travel to the lower parts of the cave complex. It, too, would be a violation of the Geneva Convention. And I do know that there are persistent nerve gases which equally could serve as area denial weapons in caves and tunnels -- but that would unquestionably lose us any claim to moral superiority. As I think about this, I'm coming to think more and more that propane or something like it is a better answer. The big problem with it would be premature detonation caused by a flame source in the cave, reducing the effect of the blast. On the other hand, if word spreads that we're doing something like that, it might cause our enemies to think twice about continuing to use its caves, which would be all to the good.
Execute him? A lot of people in the US oppose capital punishment, but how else to remove the threat of kidnapping from Americans operating around the world? Actually, the best answer would be for our forces to have "kill, not capture" orders; best to take him out as early and as cleanly as possible and avoid the whole issue. (Given that this is
A large number of the CD drives sold now for computers permit access in raw mode, which is a straight block-addressed read that completely bypasses the operating system's directory services. The data which a CD player reads can be retrieved from one of these new CDs in raw mode, ignoring the protected versions entirely. If the data has Macromedia-style errors incorporated, it will be possible to make a pass through the data to remove it. Any error correction that standard CD players can do to remove the crap can be emulated digitally in a computer; it doesn't have to be real-time since you're only doing it once. Then the data could be compressed and redistributed as an MP3 file. It only takes one group to write the necessary software and distribute it, and then the whole world will have the capability. It only takes one person who owns such a hybrid CD to create the MP3 files, and then they can be distributed widely thereafter with file sharing programs. This genie won't fit back in the bottle. As long as a copy protected CD can be played on a standard CD player, and as long a there exist CD drives for computers capable of raw reads, then it will be possible to defeat the copy protection on those CDs. (discuss)
Someone who hates America will see closed-minded uneducated bigots who think that a marvelously written series of kids books should be censored because of narrow-minded religious sensibilities. On the other hand, someone who loves America will note that the list itself was publicized by Americans to show that such censorship attempts exist so as to try to make sure they don't succeed, and will also note that the Harry Potter books have sold extremely well in the US. All of those things are true. The US is difficult to categorize -- indeed, that is the whole point of the US. What this story really demonstrates is that the US is a nation which tolerates and even encourages an extremely wide variety of opinions -- and a wide variety of nearly everything else. Trying to put America into a small category becomes an exercise in "Blind men and the elephant". Are Americans educated or uneducated? Open minded or bigoted? Intelligent or stupid? Vicious or kind? Creative or hide-bound? Reckless or cautious? Free spending or miserly? Forgiving or vindictive? Generous or stingy? Yes. Which can make the US come off as a loose cannon sometimes, which may be why even our friends fear us a bit. With so many voices speaking and saying so many different things, it can be hard for outsiders to determine which voices will prevail. (discuss)
You have to learn the difference between people with titles and people with power. You do not hassle the clerk at the airline check-in, because if you do your bags will get sent to Anchorage while you're going to Bermuda. If you hassle a clerk at a hotel, you'll get the room which looks out over the freeway instead of the one that looks out over the swimming pool. You can hassle your boss but you do not hassle the group secretary. She doesn't have a title but she can make your life miserable. And I can't see any point in hassling dentists when I'm laying in their chair. (discussion in progress)
That is, in fact, a testimonial to how well designed the towers actually were. No steel frame building is capable of standing indefinitely in the face of severe fire, and the original designers of the towers had a goal of avoiding catastrophic collapse for at least 60 minutes after an overwhelming fire started -- and they achieved that. One tower stood 62 minutes, the other 103. And because of that, most of the people were able to evacuate, and 24,000 people were saved. Engineers always study their failures in detail, to learn as much as they possibly can from them. Everyone who took high school physics has seen the film of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge when high winds destroyed it; that failure was extensively studied and all bridges built since then are resistant to those kinds of failures, and there has been no comparable bridge collapse anywhere in the world since then. Generally speaking, civil engineering is extremely good. We take it for granted, but shouldn't. Consider how little actual damage was done in San Francisco by its major earthquake a few years ago: a few buildings on landfill in NE SF collapsed when the ground they were built on liquified; one segment of one deck of the Oakland Bay Bridge went down, and a stretch of elevated freeway in East Bay collapsed. That was pretty much the extent of it. It could have been far, far worse; none of the large buildings there were even slightly damaged, for instance, and the Golden Gate Bridge came through with nary a scratch. And even the damage to the Bay Bridge was slight considering how large it is. They were able to repair it and put it back into service. That overall reliability of a huge number of structures in the Bay area (well over 99% survival rate) was due to analysis of prior failures; the buildings in SF survived because of studies done of all the buildings which had collapsed in the big one in 1905. The WTC towers used a relatively innovative design where the outer wall of the building was load bearing. As a result it didn't have internal columns and this gave it more useful room inside as well as large open spaces on each floor. It also had a different effect: when the collapse finally came, it went straight down. Given the amount of damage and the ferocity of the fire, a collapse was unavoidable. But if the frame had been designed differently, the building might have leaned to the side and set off a far greater catastrophe: a domino-like sequence of buildings falling into each other and going over. Had that happened, the death toll might have reached a hundred thousand. In retrospect, these buildings did nearly everything you could have hoped that they'd do in the face of intolerable damage, up to dying in a way that didn't destroy their neighbors. It isn't possible to build a large building that cannot be destroyed. But these buildings actually survived the initial insult extremely well, especially considering how much of the external load-bearing structure was destroyed in the initial impact. The remainder took up the load; had the insult been confined to the impact, the buildings would not have come down. It was the fire which did them in; the remainder of the load-bearing steel weakened in the heat, and the impulse from the top part of the structures falling then accordioned the rest of the structure. What lessons will engineers learn from this and what will they do in future? It is, of course, too early to tell. It will take years for the analysis to be completed. Some things stand out already: For buildings the size of these, a 60-minute survival rate in major fire for the steel is not adequate. It needs to be twice or three times that. It probably isn't practical to extend it much further, though. And there probably should be more and better emergency staircases. The ones in the Petronas towers are particularly well built and are maintained at an atmospheric overpressure to keep smoke out, and if it is not already, then that will become standard design practice. The steel structure will probably be beefed up and a bit more redundancy added, so that it can sustain more damage without immediate catastrophic failure. I think that, on analysis, this will not repudiate the basic tube structure used; indeed, the fact that the buildings collapsed straight down instead of falling laterally into neighboring buildings will come to be seen as a plus. (It's been commented on that they came down nearly as cleanly as if they had been deliberately imploded.) On a different note, though, the "Mine is longer than yours" race will probably come to an end soon. Even if someone is willing to build another huge tower, there will be more reluctance by people to rent space in it, and no single company can fully utilize a building that size. Even in Manhattan there is not the actual need to utilize ground space that efficiently; too many large buildings in too small a space not only represent a tempting target but also bring with them problems of traffic and congestion. This may well be the beginning of the last stage of the distribution of business away from urban concentrations. With modern telecommunications there actually is little benefit for a company to be in close proximity to many other companies; if the other company is three blocks away you talk to them by phone anyway, so what difference does it make if they're five miles (or five thousand miles) away? Business is already global, so why pack it into a few concentrations? Large buildings represent a diminishing return anyway. One of the biggest problems with them has always been that as buildings grow taller, the amount of space inside the building dedicated to elevators grows even faster. Each additional floor you add gains you less and less actual useful space. At a certain point, most of the insides of the building would be elevator shafts. The WTC towers had an innovative solution to that: certain floors served as elevator stations. To get to one of the top floors, you had to "change trains" a couple of times. This permitted multiple elevator cars to operate in the same vertical shafts, increasing capacity. But that only delays the inevitable: A 200 floor building would have no useful space in it. It's kind of a shame; there's something romantic about the constant race to build something even bigger than the last. Everyone knew it would come to an end eventually, but I don't think anyone thought it would happen this soon. If new structures are built on the site where the WTC towers once stood, I don't think they'll be anything like as tall. (discussion in progress)
In a sense, they're on the side of the angels here. I would like it if there was a way to get through this without anyone else getting killed, myself. But I don't believe that's possible. It's no longer a question of whether people will die, it's now only an issue of who they will be. If by killing some of our enemies we can keep some of our own people safe, then that is what I think we should do. If we do not do that then we sacrifice our own, and I think that is wrong. Our enemies have set the ground rules; we can only play by them. (discuss)
A couple of years later I was hanging out in his room laying on his bed reading the latest issue of Scientific American, while he was working on something at his workbench, and I read an article about eidetic (photographic) memories. And I said, "Hey, this is cool! There are people who can take pictures with their minds and hold them and look at them even after the picture is gone!" And he looked at me, astonished, and said, "I thought everyone could do that." I said, "No, it's extremely rare." And it is, but it turns out my brother is one of them. We did an experiment; the article had a picture in it of Alice looking up at the Cheshire cat sitting in a tree, and my brother looked at it for about 20 seconds, and then I took it away and concealed it from him and asked him questions like "How many rings on the cat's tail? How many flowers are there at the base of the tree and how many petals does each have?" And he answered all the questions correctly. Even among people with eidetic memories, my brother is rare. Most of them can do it with photographs, but my brother can also do it with abstract drawings, like schematics. Turns out that when he wanted to wire a circuit, he'd capture the drawing in his head. He could close the magazine because he didn't need it anymore. Whenever he needed to consult the schematic, he'd get kind of a blank look and peer off into space for a moment, and then get back to his wiring. That was what he'd been trying to make me do -- but since I don't have an eidetic memory, I couldn't. The linked article talks about the latest release of Mac OSX. Henry Norr is a Mac fan from way back, but even he mentions that he still finds the dock to be somewhat less useful than it might be because of its exclusive use of graphics icons, as opposed to the mix of icons and text which is used on the Windows taskbar (which Norr says is more useful). And it suddenly occurred to me: Could it be that Jobs, who has always emphasized the graphic over the text, is an "image" thinker instead of a "word" thinker? It's long been known that the subjective experience of thought for most people is of a "voice" inside the head. But for some people, the subjective experience is a series of images. Such people are not necessarily any less intelligent nor are they necessarily less articulate in expressing themselves verbally, but it is a difference nonetheless. It is not actually something you can detect from external behavior; picture thinkers can be great writers and word-thinkers can be great artists -- though I suspect it's more common to be the other way around. Research has shown that "verbal" thought occurs mainly in the left frontal lobe and that "visual" thought mainly in the right lobe, and that for most people the left lobe dominates; picture thinkers make up a few percent of the population. I happen to use both kinds; I switch between them freely and use whichever is appropriate for the kind of problem I'm trying to solve, and sometimes I use them both at once. I find that word-thinking is better for detailed problem solving and for when I'm writing, but that image-thinking is better for things like analyzing entire systems and doing timing analyses, which I can do in my head while other people have to do them on paper. Of course, these things vary quite a lot from person to person, and most word-thinkers use images some of the time and vice versa. But you do get people who go to extremes, and it just occurred to me that Jobs might be exclusively a picture-thinker. Work with me here. If that's true, then for 25 years he's been attempting to design the perfect computer for picture thinkers like him, because he thinks "everyone can do that", the way my brother thought everyone had a photographic memory. So the Mac interface has always tried to use spatial and graphics and icons for things that were often controlled with text on other GUIs. And the Mac has collected a core group of believers while the majority scoff at its GUI concepts. It is perhaps no accident that the greatest stronghold of commercial Mac users is commercial artists, who would be expected to be predominately picture thinkers. The Mac true believers are absolutely convinced that the Mac GUI is well in advance of the alternatives because it matches the way they think more closely, and don't understand why the rest of us are not overwhelmed by its conceptual beauty. To them it seems obvious that this is how it should be done -- which might make sense for picture thinkers who don't understand word thinking. The Windows interface, which is the overwhelming commercial success, is more generalized: it uses both text and image cues for most things. What that means is that it is usable by both word-thinkers and by picture-thinkers, and that both of them find it cluttered. The word-thinkers wonder what all those stupid graphics cues are there for, and the picture-thinkers criticize all the damned text -- and everyone thinks it is mediocre. But because it is generalized and uses redundant cues, it is more readily accessible to a broader set of people than any interface customized for one style of thinking. Is there a competing extreme group on the other end? You bet: Linux users. Until recently, Linux was nearly exclusively text, and even today its GUIs are non-standard (three competing ones which are incompatible) and are not as broadly used as are the GUIs on Windows and the Mac. A Linux user will, generally speaking, opt for a text interface when he can, using graphics only when he must. A Mac user will (as a general rule) use graphics when possible and text only when forced to do so. The preferred Linux tool is a shell prompt; the preferred Mac tool is the mouse and things like the Finder. My conjecture is that Linux and the Mac attract people whose thinking modes are extreme, respectively towards word thinking and picture thinking (not exclusively, of course) with the majority, who are not extreme toward either type, landing in the middle and using Windows. The frustration of these two extreme groups comes from not understanding that their thinking modes are not, actually, the mode. They proselytize, "Of COURSE you can do everything with [words/pictures]; I do and I never need [pictures/words] at all -- and neither do you." And their words land on deaf ears and they get angry because others can't see the basic beauty of their extreme interface, which is actually tailored for the thinking processes of a minority of the population. (discussion in progress)
No, it's a group of companies led by Sun Microsystems who are going to create a system to compete with Microsoft's Passport. The "liberty" to which they refer is liberty from the real Evil Empire, the one whose capitol is in Redmond. Scott McNealy needs to get a grip. (discuss)
This is not insoluble, but it is a difficult problem. It seems to present us with a dilemma: how do we defeat the Taliban (if indeed we decide to attempt that) without in turn handing a victory to the Taliban's opponents who also hate our ally Pakistan? One possibility would be to use the former king of Afghanistan to unite all the forces and to create a new government in Afghanistan, which possibly might not be antagonistic to Pakistan and thus might be palatable to Islamabad. Another possibility is to take advantage of the fact that the countries which seem to be on our side in this are not too closely allied -- in particular, Russia. The Russians have been feeding material support to the Northern Alliance for years, and apparently intends to increase their support now. They've hinted that they'd like us to help, but doing that would anger the Pakistanis. However, some of our people might have an informal chat with some of the Russians and say "Hey, about them Northern Alliance guys; we can't help you support them or even publicly applaud you doing so, but just between the two of us here in private, we think it's a fine thing and we hope you'll do more of it, and by the way, next time you talk to them could you ask them about these five locations in Afghanistan and tell us what they say?" (discuss) Update 20010928: Pakistan has made its attitude about the Northern Alliance public. I sure hope the ex-King of Afghanistan doesn't die in the next year or so; we're going to need him.
Let's be clear about something: Jackson is a private citizen. He has no more or less diplomatic power than I do. He is not part of the government and he doesn't represent the US. He has no right to make promises or to negotiate on our behalf. And in a circumstance like this, when a thousand delicate diplomatic points with fifty nations are hanging in the balance, the last thing that Secretary of State Colin Powell needs now is for Jackson to start meddling in the affair. If Jackson really wants to serve his country, the best thing he can do right now is to stay home and keep the hell out of it. Let the Taliban deal with Colin Powell; it's his job -- and unlike Jackson, Powell has a mandate from the citizens of the United States. Powell was approved for his job in a Senate hearing; Jackson's only qualification is that our enemy has asked for him -- and we do not generally let our enemies choose our diplomatic representatives. (discuss) Update 20010927: It seems that the Taliban didn't actually initiate this: Jackson himself suggested it. Now I'm sure that we don't need him involved, anymore than we needed him involved
Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban, is watching with growing concern as his nation disintegrates. The rule of law, such as it was, is nearly gone and crime is rampant; the morale of his army is at an all-time low and it is suffering massive desertions, and there is wholesale abandonment of the major cities of Afghanistan by their residents due to the non-trivial fear of US bombing; they're fleeing en masse to the borders with Pakistan and Iran. In order to strengthen the morale of his people, Omar issues a call for people to return to the cities, saying that the threat of American bombardment is receding. But he himself left the city of Kandahar and went into hiding a long time ago and he issues this "call" from an unnamed location. If he does indeed truly feel that there is no more threat of US bombardment, what better way to prove it than to return himself to Kandahar and to operate there openly? (Why do I have this feeling he's not going to do that?) (discuss) Update: Of course, if Mullah Omar was truly concerned about the plight of his people, there is an extremely easy way to make sure that the US doesn't bomb: give up bin Laden and close all his training facilities. Judge a man by his actions, not by his words or his clothes. Mullah Omar is no saint; he's a petty tyrant just like so many who have come before him.
On the other hand, I'm less than sympathetic with extreme conservative voices. But nearly anyone on the political spectrum can identify people to the left of them and to the right who they do not respect. I guess the only real answer is that politically I'm an engineer: I tend to be pragmatic rather than ideological. I believe in doing things because they work, not because they satisfy some ideal goal, and I diss things which I think won't work for that reason alone. If I have any ideology at all, it's a general belief that people ought to be left alone to think and talk about and do more or less what they want as long as they don't hurt anyone else (which is why I'm a big fan of the Bill of Rights). Thing is, lots of both liberals and conservatives believe that, so it's no help. I used to think of myself as "progressive", but that term has been coopted by the lunatic fringe, and I don't consider myself to be a political lunatic, either. And "libertarian" is even worse. (Of course everyone, even on the lunatic fringe, think they're reasonable.) I'm in favor of Gay Marriage and against religion in government-financed schools, which I guess makes me liberal, but I oppose political correctness and sensitivity training in the schools, which I guess makes me conservative. I dunno. Anyone care to help me in starting the Engineering Party in the US? Our twin mottos will be "Whatever works" and "Leave me alone." (discussion in progress)
Update: It turns out this is exactly what we're going to do.
Almost no-one in the UK in their right mind actually counseled pacifism at this time. This was after the fall of Poland, the fall of France, the Dunkirk evacuation and more than a month of heavy fighting in the skies over the UK. The people there knew that they were fighting for the life of their nation. Not everyone in the US is yet convinced of the seriousness of this war; I hope it doesn't take having an American city nuked to make them realize how important this is. (discuss)
During boom times, when there seemed to be no limit to "up", NASDAQ's rule about delisting stocks whose price dropped below $1 seemed reasonable. After all, only companies which are really losers have that happen. But now it turns out that 15% of the stocks listed on NASDAQ have a price near or outright below $1, what with the dot-com bomb and the general drop in stock prices of the last year. When one stock falls below $1, the company has a problem. When a 669 stocks fall below $1, NASDAQ has a problem -- and they're suspending their rule for delisting such companies, at least until the end of the year. It's a sign of the times, folks. (VA Linux
You know where I think a lot of this comes from? Political polls. People have gotten in the habit of having their opinions felt in Washington just by thinking them. If enough people think like me, the pollsters will pick up on it and communicate for me to Washington, even if they don't call me specifically. I can effect political change just by sitting on the couch watching TV and thinking to myself; I don't have to write letters or call my congressman; I don't have to get involved in demonstrations. Just by being, I am doing. Nothing more is required of me. I really wish people would get over that. Big change costs big effort and big money; really big change costs physical pain. World-class change costs lives. It's always been that way and it always will be. Ants do not move mountains by each one carrying only one grain of sand away and then calling it a day -- and they sure as hell don't do it by standing in a circle touching antennas together and wishing really hard that the mountain would vanish. I went out driving yesterday and saw American flags and patriotic banners hung on bridges over roads and highways all over the place. While I have nothing against the flag, I can't see what good that does. We're not going to win this war by waving flags. No-one has ever won a war by waving flags. (discussion in progress)
Update: There ain't any 300,000 even with this conscription. The Taliban's military power is a shadow of what it once was, and even then it wasn't all that formidable. Morale is going like cracking ice.
No, it's not another name for a shovel; it's an obsolescent term once used by American whites for people of African origin. You know, those people. A modern translation of it, carrying the cultural meaning it once had, would be: "Let's call a nigger, a nigger." It comes from the slight similarity between their skin color and the ink used to print black playing cards.. Nearly everyone who now uses the phrase would, ironically, never consider actually calling an African American "a spade" (or "a nigger" either). In fact, I wonder how many American blacks use the phrase without even knowing what it really means, or althernatively who use it fully understanding the irony of it? (discussion in progress) Update 20010926: John writes to tell me that the phrase appears in the play "The Importance of Being Earnest". This unquestionably predates the racial meaning of the word "spade" in the US, and in any case Oscar Wilde wasn't American. I stand corrected.
War is any attempt to use any kind of force to accomplish a political goal after diplomacy fails. Isn't that what we're about to do? We're calling it a war because it is a war. The fact that Ms. Erbe doesn't like the idea of our nation being at war doesn't change that fact. She can't escape it by word games. (discuss)
Up to this point, their science is sound, albeit a bit unexciting. But then they make a great leap into the void: this would devastate the soft drink industry. Since about a quarter of the fluid consumed in the UK is soft drinks, this would cause a proportional decline in consumption, an amount they quantize as 13 million can-equivalents per year. Would it, though? Would people instead drink the same amount of soft drink (or even more) but consume less water? Or would soft drink consumption decline but not by as much? Their calculation is based on the assumption that the decline in fluid consumption would manifest proportionally on all kinds of consumable fluid, but how do they justify that assumption? (discussion in progress)
By the way, it's been more than a hundred years since any artillery piece "stained the dirt black from the powder". Everyone in the world switched to smokeless powder (nitrocellulose), which doesn't do that. Anyway, even earlier pieces didn't do that unless they were malfunctioning, in which case they'd probably also kill their crew. (An artillery piece which is leaking gas from the detonation is about one step from catastrophically failing.) So what else did the reporter get wrong in this moving story? How much of it is completely made up? (discussion in progress)
My first reaction to this was that there isn't any way that the value-space for the checksums can be larger than the value space for the clear packets, but that's not correct. Upon thinking about it further, I realized that you do the checksum backwards. To create a 20-bit checksum for a single bit, you create a checksum algorithm which converts that 20-bit value into a single bit (obviously parity would work but something better would be needed). Then when the clear bit is "1", you start selecting random 20 bit values and calculating their checksums until you get one which calculates a "1" and that's what you use. On the next bit if you again need a checksum for "1" you pick a new 20-bit value and again keep doing so until you find one which calculates a "1". For chaff bit of "1" you'd check random 20-bit values until you found one which calculated to '0" (i.e. to the wrong value). What you end up with, then is a big list of ordered pairs, one member of which gives the right answer and one which gives the wrong answer. Could this then be used as a means of searching an algorithm-space, since any algorithm which generates the same answer for both members of any pair in the entire message is obviously wrong? I fear that entirely too much information about the cipher itself is included in the message mixed in with the clear and chaff bits. On the other hand, if the clear sequences are longer this adds a double problem. First, if for example the clear sequences are 10 bits long then it means that randomly checking longer checksums backwards lowers the chance of a hit. On average you'd need to check 512 potential checksums to find one that worked, if the checksums are longer than the clear sequences. If the checksums are equal or shorter, then either you need to use long clear sequences or you face a substantial risk of false positives on the decipher. Once the clear sequences become substantial in length, it may be possible to use statistical analysis of their entropy to differentiate meaningful ones from meaningless ones. May I propose a different form? It would remain a symmetric cipher, which means that a key would have to be communicated between the parties. Both parties agree ahead of time to a random number generation algorithm (which is not secret) which uses an N-bit seed. They then agree ahead of time to N-M bits for the seed, with M being a number on the order of 24 (i.e. the seed is 256 bits and 232 are agreed to ahead of time as the secret key; 24 bits are reserved). If one party wishes to send a message to the other, he selects a rising sequence number of M bits in length and plugs it along with the agreed upon key into the random number generator. Half the number space of "M" would be reserved for one guy and half for the other. (Probably one guy always sets the high bit to 0 and the other guy sets it to 1. It's critically important that no value is ever reused.) This is then used to generate a bit mask, which would presumably be approximately half 1's and half 0's and would be about twice as long as the clear to be sent. Then he plugs in a bit of clear for every "1" in the mask and a random bit for every "0". (So the generated mask length would need to be long enough so that its population of 1's was as long as the clear message to be sent.) The message begins with the selected number (of M bits, which need not be secret) followed by the resulting spread bit sequence. The receiver plugs that number in along with the secret key, regenerates the mask, extracts out and concatanates the critical bits (correlating to 1's in the mask) and discards the others. The communication overhead is just slightly over 50%, which is far more efficient than the algorithm proposed by Rivest, whose overhead is anywhere from 3:1 to 100:1, and this algorithm is computationally efficient, scaling linearly with the length of the clear. If the random number generator is chosen well, then the only attack is brute force to try to guess the secret bits of the seed. If even one of those bits is guessed wrongly, then the resulting bit mask will be about 50% wrong, yielding about 50% true bits and 50% trash bits at random -- which makes it useless. There won't be any near misses. Since the spreading is bit-wise, there's no way to do a statistical analysis of entropy. So the attack would have to be exhaustive search, and since the seed for the random number generator can be arbitrarily large the cipher could be made arbitrarily strong. This cipher has two advantages over the one Rivest proposes; Rivest's cipher is either horribly inefficient in communication overhead or it is inefficient in calculation. My cipher is reasonably efficient at both simultaneously while being no less secure. But there's really no point in doing either of them. They are inefficient the way steganography is at transmission time, but without the advantage of being surreptitious, and they are at best no more secure than existing ciphers while being less efficient in communications bandwidth. They combine the worst features of both. The only possible advantage either of these might have would be to evade a law, and they wouldn't, because technically they really are both encryption and would be banned like all the others. (discuss)
Of course, one reason I like watching Women's billiards is that I'm madly in love with Jeanette Lee. I'm a sucker for oriental women anyway, and she's fashion-model gorgeous, as well as being one of the top ranked players in the game. And she always wears slinky black outfits, often made of leather. (My kind of woman!) Alas, she's happily married, and whenever she wins a tournament, she always talks to the camera and tells her husband George that she loves him. But there are other players I enjoy watching. Another is Vivian Villarreal, who is one of those tiny women who seems to have a nuclear reactor inside providing her with boundless energy. She is more emotional when she plays than you can believe; she tends to use a lot of body english. She's a kick. But there has been an interesting invasion in recent years. The top two players in the world now are both from the UK. Allison Fisher has been the top-ranked women's player or so long that it's almost become a dynasty. The surprise is another Brit named Karen Corr. She used to be the top-ranked women's snooker player in the world, but moved into American billiards, possibly because the money is better. Anyway, like Fisher her experience with snooker has served her well, and she's the second ranked player in the world now. The difference between an experienced player and a champion is the safe shot. There is nothing more artistic in the game than a great safe shot, and no-one does it better than Corr. Of course, part of the pleasure of a beautiful safe shot is admiration for the skill of setting it up, but part is seeing the schadenfreude of seeing the other player walk up to the table and start thinking about it. Sometimes a player like Corr may only let her opponent get up to the table three times in twenty minutes -- and every time the position is going to suck! The game achieves its peak when someone in that position makes a safe shot of her own; they may trade horrible positions back and forth three or four times. Like watching "Junkyard Wars" and trying to figure out what they're going to do, watching billiards is an active experience, trying to predict how they'll set themselves up. Unfortunately, I usually don't do very well; I'm just not in their league. (I never will be, either. That's part of why they're fun to watch.) (discussion in progress)
Of course, there's the third flaw: customer backlash. People like to be able to make copies of their discs, and there's already reason to believe that discs which are copyprotected will be subject to boycott. (discuss)
Update 20010925: "We will return!"
Law enforcement is reactive; it happens when someone transgresses against citizens of a state, and it has the purposes of punishment, deterrence, and prevention of future crimes. Someone who commits a crime once is more likely to commit another, so if we lock them up they cannot do so. That may make someone else think twice before committing a crime. There's also a general consensus that someone who commits a crime should pay for doing so. The ultimate aim of law enforcement is to try to create conditions within a state where its people feel safe and can go about their busness without being threatened by others within the state. The critical point here is that crime does not directly threaten the state itself, only the citizens within it. That means that the process of law enforcement has to be balanced against other issues within the state, since law enforcement which is out of control can be worse than the crime it purports to prevent. So, for instance, law enforcement authorities place the safety of innocent civilians above all other things, and when innocents are in danger will take the risk of a micreant getting away rather than take the risk of killing or hurting innocents who get caught up in the situation. In war, it is the nation itself which is at risk, and thus by extension every citizen within it. It isn't just the citizens who happen to be near where the crime was committed, but all of the citizens everywhere. A really horrendous crime (such as the Oklahoma City bombing) may kill a few hundred of us; a war threatens all 270 million of us. With stakes that large, the rules change. In war, the civil rights of citizens are routinely violated. For example, it is routine for young able-bodied men to be ordered to abandon their lives and to involuntarily report for service wth the military (the "draft"). While this violates their rights, it serves the greater good of preserving the nation as a whole, and it does not violate the Constitution. No right is absolute; these things are all balancing acts. When the fate of the nation itself is in peril, individual rights give way to some extent. (Of course, that argument can be used to routinely violate all our rights all the time, so it has to be watched carefully.) Soldiers are not entitled to the same rights as civilians; a soldier who is tried is not entitled to a jury, for example. Legal proceedings in a Court Martial are not the same as in a civilian court. All this is necessary because an army must be efficient in order to be able to fight for its nation; the soldiers in that army must cede some of their rights for the greater good of preserving the nation. Policemen involved in law enforcement in our nation should never even consider summarily executing a prisoner; but this is actually permissible under the Geneva Convention for enemy soldiers captured in a war, under certain circumstances. For example, if they're found to be operating in the wrong uniforms or in no uniform at all, technically they're "spies" and can be shot on sight without trial. Equally, enemy soldiers captured in the normal course of battle who are in the proper uniforms can still be shot if trying to take them captive would risk the survival of the capturing unit. This isn't common, but it is more common than most people realize. Tho protection of innocent civilians is probably the top priority for law enforcement authorities, it is not and cannot be for soldiers. If the only way to win a war is to kill civilians, then they must die. It is better for a few thousand civilians to die than for the nation itself to be destroyed, risking the lives and safety of all 270 million of its residents. No-one wants to kill civilians, and certainly our army shouldn't seek them out to deliberately slaughter them, but their safety cannot be the paramount concern in planning of military operations. If the mere presence of civilians in a given area makes it off limits to military action by our side, our enemy will pick up on this very rapidly and put all their most valuable assets in those kinds of locations -- and we'll lose the war. In fact, the Iraqis tried to do something exactly like this during the Gulf War; there was a military command bunker they knew we were going to try to bomb, and they herded several hundred civilians on top of it, who then died in the bomb blast. It was unfortunate, but it was also necessary. Iraq didn't try that again, but if we had avoided that bunker, pretty soon there would be civilians forcibly detained and placed on top of every Iraqi military target. The biggest difference between law enforcement and war is that war is not necessarily reactive. While we would consider it completely unacceptable to arrest and try someone because they might commit a crime, it is completely justifiable to fight a war against someone because they might be considering an attack against us. It's known as a spoiling attack and one of the classic examples of it was Israel's attack in 1967 against Syria, Jordan and Egypt. Law enforcement is about preserving the safety and prosperity of individual citizens of the nation. War is about preserving the safety and prosperity of the entire nation. Wars are fought when the goals of two groups are in direct opposition and they cannot come into agreement through diplomacy. Then you fight and whoever wins the conflict gets his way. And it is the threat of war which makes diplomacy work. When diplomats talk, the other side is more likely to make concessions to our side if they know that we're ready, willing, and able to attack them if they're not accomodating. Thus the willingness to attack, ironically, helps prevent war by making diplomacy more successful. The motivation for war is not retaliation or punishment, and we can legitimately fight a war against someone who has not done anything directly against us yet. In this case, we are at war with Al Qaeda not because there exists proof that they were directly behind the destruction of the WTC towers, but because they are dangerous, have attacked us in the past, and show every sign of being willing to attack us in future. Their continued existence represents a threat to the survival of the US and that is a sufficient reason to fight them, even absent anything resembling a legal case against them for involvement in the WTC attack. We're not trying to prove them guilty, we're trying to kill them so that they can't attack us in future. Trying to judge war by the standards of law enforcement will only lead to confusion and demoralization -- and failure, which is the greatest crime in war. (discussion in progress)
Let's be clear that bin Laden was already wanted by the US for complicity in the first WTC bombing, the bombing of our embassy in Nairobi and the bombing of USS Cole. The Clinton administration had been applying "measured diplomatic pressure" on the Taliban for years to try to get them to turn bin Laden over to us for trial (amounting to the diplomatic equivalent of "Pretty please with sugar on top?") and the Bush administration began taking a harder line. But even if the US did directly threaten to bomb Afghanistan, does this excuse or explain the WTC bombing? No, it does neither. First, the hijackers began to infiltrate the US long before this threat; in fact many were here last year before the election. Some of them were taking pilot lessons in Florida last winter. So it is evident that the details of this attack had been put into place long before Bush was even sworn into office, let alone before his administration might have made that threat, which means that at worst, only the timing of the attack was changed by it; it would have happened whether the Bush administration had issued a threat of that kind or not. As to the claim of oil and gas interests being behind it, that's sheer moonshine. But then, if you look at the front page, the "editorial slant" of Global Free Press becomes blatantly clear. (What do you expect from a site based on Slashcode?) (discussion in progress)
He points out peripherally that the US has a reputation in Europe for being uneducated. That's more than strange, because anyone's top-ten list of universities in the world will consist primarily of American ones. Nine of mine would be Harvard, CMU, MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Berkeley, Oxford, Cambridge and the Sorbonne. I could make a good case that the tenth should be Johns Hopkins, and I can list off lots of other American universities which are world class: USC, UCLA, UCSD, Yale, RPI, Princeton, the list goes on. Any one of those would be a gemstone, a source of local pride, for any other nation in the world. Boston and the Bay area and LA each have more world-class universities in their metro areas than most nations. And when you think "High tech companies", which nation's companies are on the top of your list? Is there any British company you'd place in the top ten? (I can't think of a single British company I'd think of as being world-class high tech except ARM, and that's tiny. I'd put the Dutch company Philips in there; that's the only European company I can think of I'd put in the company of IBM, 3M, Dupont, Intel, Agilent, Applied Materials, Tektronix, Eaton and Texas Instruments. We have the best medicine in the world, unexcelled science and engineering and the world's best university system. Why is it that we're viewed as "uneducated"? Hmmph. He talks a bit about American anti-Americanism (especially mentioning Falwell) but seems to miss the point that it is a strength of the US that it not only tolerates but encourages such dissent and is strengthened by it. It is precisely because Falwell can make an ass of himself on TV without any legal fallout at all that I know that I have freedom of expression. Still, his fundamental point is critically important: When it really comes down to it, whose side are you really on? (discussion in progress)
One of the most amazing natural substances is spider's silk. It is enormously strong and has many other marvelous properties, and now it is being synthesized in goat's milk. Given what kinds of things we've done with plastics over the last fifty years (it is no exaggeration to say that they've completely changed our lives) the possibilities inherent in using some of the superb natural substances like spider's silk are boundless, not just in medicine but in many other places. The miracles are there, waiting for us. And they're languishing because of superstition and paranoia. (discuss)
Forget, for the moment, the idea that this makes the most restrictive police state imaginable easy to implement. Forget all those niggling details like the Bill of Rights. That stuff doesn't matter. This system is waaaay over the top technologically speaking. First, computer-recognition of thumb-prints is sophisticated but hardly error free; what happens to someone when the ID system issues a false negative? What happens if they have a cut on their thumb? Or ink marks? What about amputees? When a system gets used millions of times per day, a false negative rate of .001% is too high, and there's no way it's going to be even that low. What happens when some happy hacker breaks into the ID system and starts playing with the records? His high school teacher flunked him out of English, so our friend breaks into the system and hax0rs the teacher's record so that his thumbprint no longer matches. What do we do in case of a telecommunications breakdown? How many redundant database systems will there be and where will they be located? How will they be connected to the phone system? What means will all those independent terminals use to reach the database, and will they be secure? If anything in the last two years has been demonstrated by the internet, it's that nearly any system ultimately has holes in it, and the only truly secure computer is one which isn't connected to anything else. But by its nature, this system has to be broadly connected; is it even possible for such a system to be as secure as this would need to be? Oh, and then there's the issue of software bugs. Do we really trust Oracle to implement this mother? Ellison also offers to give this software to the US for free, but will maintenance be free? And what happens if Oracle goes OOB? (discuss)
Update: The US government is skeptical about the Taliban's claims, to.
Ammonia and tincture of iodine are a lot of fun. Mix them together and pour the resulting fluid on something and let it dry; part of what remains is nitrogen tri-iodide, which is a contact explosive. High school students have been having fun with this one for decades, but the stuff is too sensitive to use for anything big time. Acetylene is also fun; take a solution of copper sulfate and bubble acetylene through it, and a blue powder will precipitate. Filter it out, and as long as it's wet, you're safe. Once it dries, you've got contact-sensitive high explosive in the form of copper acetylide (CU2C2 -- Kids, don't try this at home! You'll blow your arm off!). A tank of propane is Of course, not everyone who buys fertilizer is planning on making a bomb out of it. So it would be nice to know just what they did find that they are calling potential bomb ingredients. For example, if they had fifty pounds of potassium perchlorate, I'd be convinced. (Not too many other uses I can think of for that in those kinds of quantities.) But if all they found was ammonia, someone's trying to trump up a case. (discuss)
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