Terraforming - Polynesian style

The New York Times > Science > Tasty, and a Great Source of DNA

There is much evidence that the Lapita people took R. exulans along for food. Unlike European rats, Dr. Matisoo-Smith said, exulans do not swim and dislike wet conditions. So it is unlikely that they accidentally reached the islands through infested ships.

As a food source, the rats do not require much effort. The Lapita would have just had to release them on the islands they settled, and rats being rats, there would soon be plenty for eating.

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Quite a few science fiction writers have based their "space faring cultures" on the Polynesian peoples. Using a bioform to prepare a habitat (thereby wiping out many local species) for colonization is a classic terraforming move.

Remembering Reagan - as he was

Salon.com | The Reagan legacy

As the eulogies come down the pike, don't let conservatives, once again, win the ideological struggle to determine mainstream discourse. Remember Reagan; respect him. But don't let them make you revere him. He was a divider, not a uniter.

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A good article. Reagan was nastier than I'd remembered.

Apple - AirPort Express - Yes.

Apple - AirPort Express

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Yes. As soon as the first set of disastrous bugs are fixed. I wish there were a firewire port too, but I think iPod firewire is passe. I'm betting the next generation will be all USB 2.0. I wonder if the USB connector on this device will allow one to eventually broadcast off an iPod ...

No kidding, GWB may really qualify as a war criminal

INTEL DUMP - Archives 2004-06-08 - 2004-06-14

Jess Bravin reports in Monday's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) about a classified legal memorandum prepared by the Pentagon's Office of General Counsel that appears designed to find every legal workaround possible to justify coercive interrogation and torture at Guantanamo Bay. This report comes in the wake of disclosures about other memoranda — one written in early 2002 by UC Berkeley law professor John Yoo while with the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and a second written by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales — justifying the White House's overall Guantanamo Bay plan. This latest memo, signed in April 2003, goes much further than those though — it specifically authorizes the use of torture tactics, up to and including those which may result in the death of a detainee...

...The president, despite domestic and international laws constraining the use of torture, has the authority as commander in chief to approve almost any physical or psychological actions during interrogation, up to and including torture, the report argued. Civilian or military personnel accused of torture or other war crimes have several potential defenses, including the "necessity" of using such methods to extract information to head off an attack, or "superior orders," sometimes known as the Nuremberg defense: namely that the accused was acting pursuant to an order and, as the Nuremberg tribunal put it, no "moral choice was in fact possible."

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If you want to be a Nazi, this DOJ document suggests how to get away with it. I rather doubt Bush is going to sign any international war crimes treaty -- he'd be convicting himself.

The term "war criminal" is used so carelessly that it's lost most of its meaning. The bombing of Cambodia may have been a war crime, and Kissinger might thus qualify as a war criminal, but I can't think of many other clearcut post-1980 examples (though I'm no historian). Except for this one. Even I'm a bit stunned.

Ashcroft should go now. Bush should not be reelected. If he is, no American with half a brain can claim they "didn't know".

On redistribution

The Atlantic | January/February 2004 | Are We Still a Middle-Class Nation? | Lind

...
The disparity between rapid productivity growth in mechanized sectors and slow productivity growth in human-service jobs produces Baumol's disease—named after the economist William J. Baumol. According to Baumol, in a technological economy falling prices for manufactured goods and automated services eventually increase the relative cost of labor-intensive services such as nursing and teaching. Baumol has predicted that the share of gross domestic product spent on health care will rise from 11.6 percent in 1990 to 35 percent in 2040, while the share spent on education will rise from 6.7 percent to 29 percent.

The shifting of relative costs need not in itself be a problem. If Americans in 2050 or 2100 pay far more (as a percentage of their spending) for health care and education than they did in 1900, they may still be better off—if they pay correspondingly less for other goods and services. The problem is that as the relative cost of services like education and health care rises, more and more Americans will find themselves in service-sector jobs that, unlike the professions, have historically been low-wage...

... In the absence of some system of private or public redistribution, then, there is no guarantee that rising national productivity will spontaneously and inevitably produce rising incomes and wealth for most Americans, rather than just windfalls for the fortunate few.

Since the 1970s inequality of both income and wealth in the United States has increased dramatically. As Paul Krugman has observed in The New York Times, a Congressional Budget Office report shows that from 1979 to 1997 the after-tax income of the top one percent of families climbed 157 percent, while middle-income Americans gained only 10 percent, and many of the poor actually lost ground. The share of after-tax income that goes to the top one percent of Americans has doubled in the past three decades; at 14 percent, it roughly equals the share of after-tax income that goes to the bottom 40 percent. The concentration of wealth at the upper levels of the population has been even more extreme....

... It is doubtful that in any society with universal suffrage the majority is going to sit on the sidelines and watch, generation after generation, while a handful of investors and corporate managers reap almost all the benefits of technological and economic progress.

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Argentina.

This is a good complement to Reich's Book, except Reich backs away from redistribution. A bit of intellectual cowardice, as his text makes the case even more strongly than this article.

The Law of Preservation of Quality: The Atlantic and The Economist

The Atlantic Online | Back Issues

Ok, there's no such law. But is it entirely coincidental that as The Economist has gone into decline, The Atlantic has emerged from abyss?

UN Security Council Resolution on Iraq: Yes France, you were right

The New York Times > International > Middle East > United Nations: U.S. and Iraq Submit Plan to Security Council Session

Mr. Powell said the American military would still have the right to imprison Iraqis, though he said internment would be resorted to only 'where this is necessary for imperative reasons of security.' He pledged that members of the multinational force would always act 'consistently with their obligations under the law of armed conflict, including the Geneva Conventions.'

From what I can tell, the resolution is basically America's way of saying "Yeah, France, you were right. We screwed up. Now we will do it the way we should have done it from the beginning."

Bush will never admit to the screw-up or the reversal, but this is a good thing.

Bill Joy: A man after my own heart

The New York Times > Magazine > Encounter: Proceed With Caution

The other Bill Joy, however, would very much like to prevent the inevitable from happening. Four years ago in an article he wrote for Wired magazine, Joy declared that the headlong race in biotechnology and nanotechnology might prove catastrophic. In the time since, he has continued to explore and advance this concern. Joy says he thinks the probability of a ''civilization-changing event'' is most likely in the double digits, perhaps as high as 50 percent.

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I'm not as smart as Joy (ok, very few people are), so it's nice to have someone like him with my cheerful perspective on life.

So what happened to journalism in the 90s?

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? : Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal

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Time to ask why the media has fallen so far. Theories?

Here are mine:

1. The government developed a set of techniques and discipline for managing the media. The need for sources was always the achilles heal of the media -- it just took a while for government to discover how to use this lever.

2. Economics. Print media is stressed by net advertising and the decline in classifieds revenue. Broadcast is stressed by cable. Financial weakness means more advertising levers to pull, and less ability to defend.

3. Corruption. Journalists saw too many stupid people getting rich ripping the system off. No-one seemed to care. Finally they gave up and decided to get their piece.

Are there historical analogies?

Corrupt absolutely ...

The New York Times > Magazine > The Maestro Slips Out of Tune (Krugman)

... The less generous interpretation is that Greenspan simply abused his position to help his friends. Kenneth Thomas, a finance professor at the Wharton School, has calculated that Greenspan visits the White House about once a week, as The Christian Science Monitor reported last month, and that is almost four times as often as he did when Clinton was president.

Part of the genius of George Bush's political operatives is their ability to persuade people (Colin Powell, Tony Blair) to betray their principles, to say and do things they will later regret, in support of a presumed shared cause. Paul O'Neill, Bush's first treasury secretary, falls into the same category: he was a moderate Republican who for a time played good soldier, defending the Bush tax cuts despite private qualms, to help the new president -- a man he thought shared his values -- by giving him an early political victory. And guess what: O'Neill was a close friend of Greenspan's.

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What is the secret of Bush's capacity to corrupt those around him? Is it the combination of great power together with a cult of absolute loyalty and ruthless punishment?

Sherron (Enron) Watkins on Bush

The New York Times > Magazine > Questions for Sherron Watkins: Life After Whistle-Blowing

Are you a Democrat or a Republican?

I am not a registered anything. I vote both parties. I did vote for Bush. My husband did, too. Now we're A.B.B. -- Anyone but Bush. We have lost the moral high ground in this country.

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Sherron is the world's most famous whistle blower. Like most who expose crimes, she pays an economic price for integrity. I hope the respect of a few of us counts for something.

One of the great ironies about Bush is that he speaks of integrity more than any president since Carter, while spreading abuse and corruption through his actions and policies. It's an astounding gap between speech and action, between image and reality. As to what Bush really believes, I don't know. It may well be that he believes what he says.

Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men - a lost article from The American Magazine, 1924

The New York Times > Business > Your Money > Digital Domain: What's Google's Secret Weapon? An Army of Ph.D.'s

Until recently, when computer science students completed their long Ph.D. training and stepped into daylight, they were treated warily by industry employers. American business has had to overcome its longtime suspicion of intellect. 'Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men,' an article published in the 1920's in the American magazine, is a typical specimen of an earlier era. In modern times, computer scientists are hired, but a doctorate can still be viewed as the sign of a character defect, its holder best isolated in an aerie.

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The aversion of industry to the "over-educated" is a real phenomena. I can't comment on whether it's a wise prejudice, I've no data. (I'm an MD & MS, not a PhD. Hard to say which is a tougher slog -- the PhD depends very much on field and on advisor. An MD does not require any creativity, indeed creativity can be a disadvantage. Most PhD's need to have quite a bit of the creative inclination.)

I'd love to read that article however: "Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men", (The?) American Magazine, 1924?. Oddly enough, it's not on the net! In fact, the only reference to it comes from a "Joel on Software" discussion. I'll have to start looking into news repositories.

NetGear access point is wide open ...

SecurityFocus HOME Mailing List: BugTraq

The Netgear WG602 Accesspoint contains an undocumented administrative account...

...Any user logging in with the username "super" and the password "5777364" is in complete control of the device.

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NetGear has a patch out. This appears to have been put in by their Taiwanese OEM. This OEM makes other devices, I'd suggest reading the article and trying this on one's own router.

I have two routers in serial from two vendors. One can be controlled only via hardwired serial cable. I always thought I was being a bit overly cautious ...

This is worse than the usual Microsoft incompetence. The responsible OEM should be bankrupted. NetGear's web site doesn't say anything yet. That's probably the worse way to handle this. I don't think I'll be buying much from them in the future.

Incompetence at the FBI, CIA and ?

The New York Times > National > Spain and U.S. at Odds on Mistaken Terror Arrest

In pursuing what proved to be a flawed case against Mr. Mayfield, the F.B.I. was also beset by internal dissension between officials in Portland and Washington, a language barrier with the Spanish, and a fingerprint examination that the bureau now concedes was flawed from the start...

...t after conducting their own tests, Spanish law enforcement officials said they reported back to the F.B.I. in an April 13 memo that the match was "conclusively negative." Yet for for five weeks, F.B.I. officials insisted their analysis was correct.

In Portland, meanwhile, investigators were quickly building their case against Mr. Mayfield, 37, a Muslim convert, and arrested him on May 6 on a material witness warrant, a technique that civil liberties advocates charge that the Bush administration has abused in an effort to fight terrorism. Despite never being charged with an actual crime, court transcripts and interviews with Mr. Mayfield show he was told that he was being investigated in connection with crimes punishable by death and jailed for 14 days. On May 24, after the Spaniards had linked that same print from the plastic bag to the Algerian national, Mr. Mayfield's case was thrown out. The F.B.I. issued him a highly unusual official apology, and his ordeal became a stunning embarrassment to the United States government.

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The FBI has a lot of problems. The CIA has a lot of problems.

So, what's going on? What's wrong with the way we build our security networks and we incent people and run them?

Maybe we do need an entirely new infrastructure, run by very different people. I'd recommend a balance of nerds, geeks and intellectuals with military and business sorts. I suspect the problems in the CIA and FBI have to do with the temperaments of the people who run them and, in turn, they people they like to hire. The fingerprint problems appear to be due to a lack understanding of basic science. Like all other tests, fingerprint matches have varying methodologies and intrinsic false positive and false negative rates. Matches are probabilistic. The FBI appears to be in denial about this. They need smarter people.

On the nature of warriors and the responsibility of protection

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Beating Specialist Baker

If the U.S. military treats one of its own soldiers this way — allowing him to be battered, and lying to cover it up — then imagine what happens to Afghans and Iraqis.

President Bush attributed the problems uncovered at Abu Ghraib to "a few American troops who dishonored our country." Mr. Bush, the problems go deeper than a few bad apples.

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An ironic title for this article -- remember "Finding Private Ryan"?

Kristoff never mentions ethnicity, but a white soldier would have made an unconvincing terrorist in this exercise. I wonder about the ethnicity of the other soldiers in this training exercise.

This was an accident in training. There are a few lessons, none suprising. Our soldiers are young, strong, and as violent as most young, strong, males. The people who set up this training exercise showed poor judgment. The army covers up its mistakes. The survivors of mistakes get "blamed" for the mistake.

In such a world it is not surprising that Iraqi prisoners will be abused at least as badly as American prisoners in the worst US jails. The only protection is law, lawyers, an observant press and the power of shame.

American politicians have removed much of the protection of law from US prisons. The Bush regime has removed it from US POWs. Since this is the only protection from abuse that will otherwise occur, it is Bush and his leadership that bear full responsibility for these abuses -- not a handful of soldiers.