View 372 July 25 - 31, 2005 (original) (raw)
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
It's more than likely that the reports on Microsoft'ssuicide pact (suicide by data mining) are exaggerated, confounding the error analysis which does require some information on drivers and information flow within the computer, and the verification procedure for determining the authenticity of the OS on the computer. There's a full discussion in mail. Be sure to read it all, particularly today's section. See also below
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Two Important Articles about the War in the Middle East
I am not a great fan of neo-Jacobinism and the oxymoronic "Big Government Conservatism", and I remain convinced that we should never have gone into Iraq (even Buckley now says that if he had known then what we know now he'd have opposed the invasion; of course Bill Buckley is a bit older than me, and perhaps didn't keep up as well as I did, and besides, he may have been advised by the egregious Frum).
Having said all that, there are two articles in the July 25 issue of The Weekly Standard that are very much worth your attention. One, Jihad Made In Europe by Reuel Marc Gerecht, http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/836esgwz.asp is nearly required reading. Gerecht has done several cool-headed analyses of the war and its consequences. Two weeks ago http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/view370.html#Gitmo I recommended his article on Guantanamo Bay and the progress of the war. If you missed that, go read it.
This week I can definitely recommend his Jihad Made In Europe http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/836esgwz.asp . He argues his case well.
Another article in the July 25 issue of the Weekly Standard, Nervous in Baghdad by Austin Bay, http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/838lfyxk.asp is also worth your time. It presents a pretty good argument for the success of our efforts in Afghanistan. Yes, that regime is going back to opium farming, something the Taliban stopped. Interestingly, there wasn't much of a change in the world price of heroin as a result of the interruption then restoration of the Afghan supply, leading one to ask other questions about the success of the opium wars; but that is surely another issue. In any event, Bay presents his views well and writes from the location. Agree or disagree with what is happening in Afghanistan, it's an article worth your attention.
The real question now is not whether we ought to have gone into Afghanistan and Iraq in the first place (I'd say yes on Afghanistan, no on Iraq), but what we do now that we are there; and while some of my friends long for great public humiliation of Bush and his advisors as a salutary lesson to all imperialists in the US, I am not sure that we can afford the cost of such a lesson.
The opposite view is presented in The American Conservative, in an article entitled "Failure is an Option" by Christopher Layne. Unfortunately is it not on line. I was not impressed with Layne's historical views, and his analogy of Iraq with Viet Nam is dead wrong. The US was not faced with an insurgency in Viet Nam, and we did not lose the war; in 1972 the Army of the Republic of Viet Nam, with US materiel supplies and air support, beat back a large invasion from the North with about 300 American causalities for the year, in a land battle all but forgotten in the history books, but which demonstrated precisely how US supported allies could defeat any attack: something we put to good use in Afghanistan. Yes, we left Viet Nam in 1975, but not as a result of defeat. The Democrat controlled US Congress pulled us out, betraying our allies and throwing away the 1973 victory along with all the blood and treasure we had put into Viet Nam. There's plenty to be ashamed of about the US withdrawal from Viet Nam, but calling it a defeat and using it as an analogy to the Gulf Wars is dead wrong.
(Note: originally the above read 1973, which is incorrect; the forgotten victory was in 1972, see below.)
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To Reduce the Cost of Teenage Temptation, Why Not Just Raise the Price of Sin?
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/25/business/25consuming.html
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I am often impressed by Thomas Sowell, enough so that I suppose it fair to call me one of his fans, but then:
Dr. Clyde N. Wilson: The Rednecks Did It! Monday, May 16, 2005
Alas! it is delusion all;
The future cheats us from afar,
Nor can we be what we recall,
Nor dare we think on what we are.
--Lord Byron
The neocon celebrity economist Thomas Sowell has attracted a good deal of attention with his "redneck thesis," expounded in his most recent book and in a Wall Street Journal piece. The thesis is one more in the endless chain of fanciful explanations for the well-known pathologies statistically prominent in the lives of African Americans. According to Sowell, the disdain for employment and education and proneness to violence evident in of much of the black non-community is behavior that black people unfortunately picked up from Southern "rednecks."
This idea is so ludicrously false in a hundred different ways that it could never have been put forth except in a society that was pre-conditioned not only to believe the worst about us rednecks, but actually to blame us for everything that goes wrong in America. I am reminded of the pundit who ascribed the crimes of Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber to "the evil Southern gun culture," though neither was Southern or used guns.
This is an old, old trick in American life, going back to 17th-century Massachusetts. It involves a falsification of history and an evasion of responsibility and honest analysis by projecting guilt onto the eternal American "Other"--Southerners. It shows something seriously defective, even dangerously delusional, in what passes for the mainstream American public mind.
The able www.vdare.com columnist Steve Sailer exposes some of the many defects of Sowell's thesis, but his treatment exhibits the same tendency to dismiss us rednecks as the "Other." As Sailer recounts, he mentioned to his wife that the thesis was false. She replied that such was OK as long as it worked (to improve attitudes among African Americans). Translation: It is perfectly alright to bear false witness against us rednecks and libel us on the outside chance that it might help a misbehaving but more favored group to behave better.
"Redneck" is, of course, an elastic term but seems to describe a category of Americans, centered in the South, who have done and continue to do more than their fair share of the working and fighting (and, yes, the thinking) that has created and sustained the American commonwealth and its freedom. (Never mind that the understanding of these Americans has been lately befuddled by a lot of careless theorizing about "Celtic" race and culture.)
If the thesis is true, we are left to the mystery of why African Americans picked such a bad example to follow when they had the spectacle of industrious, public-spirited, clean-living Northerners before them. One dare not raise the question in polite company, but might it be because those Northerners, in general, kept themselves and their example as far away from black Americans as they could?
Having grown up in Tennessee, I suppose I feel a residual obligation to defend the South from unfair attacks. You will note, though, that I no longer live there. When I was a young man I was thought both mad and a hopeless radical because I thought (and said) that the law ought to be color blind. Of course today I am thought a hopeless Redneck Conservative for holding precisely the same views...
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New Study Shows We Can Afford Border Control!
$41 Billion Cost Projected To Remove Illegal Entrants
By Darryl Fears Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 26, 2005; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/25/AR2005072501605.html
A new study by a liberal Washington think tank puts the cost of forcibly removing most of the nation's estimated 10 million illegal immigrants at $41 billion a year, a sum that exceeds the annual budget of the Department of Homeland Security.
The study, "Deporting the Undocumented: A Cost Assessment," scheduled for release today by the Center for American Progress, is billed by its authors as the first-ever estimate of costs associated with arresting, detaining, prosecuting and removing immigrants who have entered the United States illegally or overstayed their visas. The total cost would be 206billionto206 billion to 206billionto230 billion over five years, depending on how many of the immigrants leave voluntarily, according to the study.
"There are some people who suggest that mass deportation is an option," said Rajeev K. Goyle, senior domestic policy analyst for the center and a co-author of the study. "To understand deportation policy response, we had to have a number."
As many have pointed out, that's less than the cost of the Iraqi War; which would you rather see the money spent on? Of course I doubt the 41Billion/yeartobeginwith.InLosAngelesagreatdealofthecostwouldbebornebylocalpoliceoncetheywerefreedoftherestrictionsoncheckingcitizenshipandresidencystatus−−andinSouthernCaliforniaatleast41 Billion/year to begin with. In Los Angeles a great deal of the cost would be borne by local police once they were freed of the restrictions on checking citizenship and residency status -- and in Southern California at least 41Billion/yeartobeginwith.InLosAngelesagreatdealofthecostwouldbebornebylocalpoliceoncetheywerefreedoftherestrictionsoncheckingcitizenshipandresidencystatus−−andinSouthernCaliforniaatleast2 billion a year would be saved instantly by relief of public institutions such as hospital emergency rooms from the burden of providing services for illegal immigrants. Other such savings come to mind.
And of course some of the job could be farmed out to bounty hunters. At ten million illegal immigrants, what could we afford to pay bounty hunters per individual delivered at a Border Patrol station or INS Detention Center? At 1000aheaditwouldcost1000 a head it would cost 1000aheaditwouldcost10 billion to round up all of them, leaving another 20billionforactualcostofdetentionanddeportation,andstillsaving20 billion for actual cost of detention and deportation, and still saving 20billionforactualcostofdetentionanddeportation,andstillsaving11 billion for the first year. Spend that 11billiononbordercontrol,andthenextyeartherewouldbe,say,only5million,sothecostisnow11 billion on border control, and the next year there would be, say, only 5 million, so the cost is now 11billiononbordercontrol,andthenextyeartherewouldbe,say,only5million,sothecostisnow15 billion for the second year plus the 11billionforbordercontrol.Surelywewouldbedowntoamillioninfiveyears,soourcostwouldbe11 billion for border control. Surely we would be down to a million in five years, so our cost would be 11billionforbordercontrol.Surelywewouldbedowntoamillioninfiveyears,soourcostwouldbe3 billion for bounty hunters and deportation, plus the 11billionforbordercontrol.Wecouldthenlookatstreamliningthebordercontroloperations,havingspent11 billion for border control. We could then look at streamlining the border control operations, having spent 11billionforbordercontrol.Wecouldthenlookatstreamliningthebordercontroloperations,havingspent55 billion on it; one supposes that cost could be got down to half? We are now at $10 billion a year, possibly forever.
But if they are right, and it will cost $40 billion/year forever, it will still be affordable. We can afford the Iraq war, can't we?(and see mail)
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Court Ruling Forces Austria to Revise Foreign-Student Policy The Chronicle of Higher Education, 5.7.29 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v51/i47/47a04102.htm
By AISHA LABI
The European Court of Justice has invalidated an Austrian law requiring students from other European Union countries to prove that they have been admitted to universities in their home nations in order to gain admission to Austrian universities. The ruling sparked fears among Austrian academics that unqualified students from other countries, chiefly Germany, would flood their campuses.
The court, which sits in Strasbourg, France, said the Austrian law was discriminatory because it required foreign students to meet admissions requirements set not only by Austria, but also by their home country. The Austrian government responded swiftly to the ruling by changing admissions procedures for the country's 21 public universities, which have some 200,000 students.
Austria had been the only European Union country to allow unrestricted university access to qualified citizens. All Austrian students who had passed the matura, an examination completed at the end of secondary school by about 35 percent of 18-year-olds, could enroll in a university. Foreign students, however, were required to demonstrate not only that they had completed a qualification equivalent to the matura, but also that they had fulfilled their own country's requirements for pursuing the course of study they wished to undertake in Austria.
In countries such as Germany, qualifications such as minimum grades and examination scores have helped keep enrollment down in oversubscribed programs like medicine.
The widely expected court ruling, issued this month, raised the specter that German students who had failed to qualify for courses of study in their home country would inundate Austria's universities. "
Ain't it grand? I am sure the US Supreme Court will find this an interesting precedent.
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I had to turn off Microsoft Outlook Junk Email filtering. Even at the lowest level the stupid thing was taking out all mail that had the word "spam" or "spammer" in the subject.
It also removed:
Subject: Windows Authentication Process
Dr. Pournelle:
All the info that I have found indicates that the "Windows Genuine Advantage" (WGA) program is not as intrusive as indicated by the report from the Globe and Mail link in today's mail. As an example, this quote from The Register:
"To register for the WGA, users just need to visit the Microsoft Download Centre, Windows Update or Microsoft Update. There they will be prompted to download an ActiveX control that checks the authenticity of their Windows software and, if Windows is validated, stores a download key on the PC for future verification."
Although I haven't captured packets during an authentication, the above statement is similar to what I have read at other sites (Infoworld, etc).
Microsoft's WGA site says (in their faq):
" The genuine validation process will collect information about your system, such as Windows product key, PC manufacturer, and operating system version, to determine if Windows is genuine. This process does not collect or send any information that can be used to identify you or contact you. The complete list of information collected in the validation process is shown below:
OEM product key PC Manufacturer OS version PID/SID BIOS info (make, version, date) BIOS MD5 Checksum User Locale (language setting for displaying Windows) System Local (language version of the operating system)"
(link to site is http://www.microsoft.com/genuine )
All my research (so far) indicates that this process is pretty benign, with no personalized information gathered.
Regards, Rick Hellewell
which came yesterday, but I didn't see until I went to look at the Outlook Junk Email filter. Why Microsoft Outlook wouldn't want me to see that is not known to me.
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From Jim Woosley:
Subject: SHUTTLE GROUNDED PRIORITY 1
NASA officials said Wednesday they would ground future space shuttle flights because foam debris that brought down Columbia is still a risk.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050727/ap_on_sc/
space_shuttle;_ylt=Ag9d04Xgb.VGnH43pZFFRqOGOrg
F;_ylu=X3oDMTA3b2NibDltBHNlYwM3MTY-
Couragio! And see mail.