Current View (original) (raw)
Thursday, May 25, 2006
Last day of WinHEC. Presentation this morning on Ultralite or UltraMobilePC. At the moment they are too expensive, but that should change. Iron is still more expensive than silicon --- and Windows OS is geared to metal hard drives, not solid state drives. So the presenter said but the session was more marketoid than technoid and I did not get any explanation of that remark. Perhaps one of you will know? It seems interesting. Some day the drives will all be solid state, particularly in paperback-book sized PC's. Or so I believe.
Lisabetta the TabletPC continues to serve me well as the only machine in use. I have a second one in the roll-on but it has not been turned on since I got here. Lisabetta's keyboard is a bit small but I am used to it. One annoyance: there is significant "bounce" in the keyboard, two letters appearing when I meant only one. I am a sloppy typist, but I don't get this effect except with the TabletPC keyboard, mostly on the l and k keys but sometiimes on others -- see the last use of the word sometimes in that sentence as example that I did not correct. If there is a fix for this I do not know about it. It's not a crippling annoyance, merely an annoyance.
But I can turn out lots of words with this machine. I'm writing this in the press room at a table, so it's easy enough, but I can do pretty well at any table. Not on my lap. The convertible keyboard form factor just doesn't work well for use on a lap. But so long as there is a table I can turn out words at about 90% of my usual speed, which is pretty fast. And of course with the PEN I can write, albeit slowly, almost anywhere. A good TabletPC and OneNote will change your life.
This evening I take an airplane to San Jose where I am GOH with Niven at BAYCON in the old Red lion now a Doubletree Hotel.
==============
Thanks to Tracy Walters for this one:
Subject: Japanese boffins build breakthrough brain-machine interface
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/05/24/honda_brain_machine_interface/
======
Found a Turkish correspondent in the press room. Apparently my column is extensively translated and read in Turkey. I am glad to have that confirmation.
===========
And the constitutional crisis continues.
Pelosi and the Speaker ought to sponsor a JOINT RESOLUTION OF IMPEACHMENT if the President does not order the return of all papers and an apology from the FBI. The principle of separation of powers is too important to allow this or any administration to compromise it. If a Member is a criminal that is the business of each House separately, and its sergeants at arms; not of the executive.
I am glad to see that Pelosi and the Speaker stand together on this. Impeachment should follow if nothing else is done. This is beyond the power of the President. And see below
================
I have half an hour in SeaTac airport, but it is hard to write an essay with a pen, and it is not convenient to set up the keyboard. One limit of a TabletPC. But I can do some mail and have. That is an advantage of the Pen Computer.
Alas, This Starbuck does not have T-Mobile and I will not pay $ 7.00 to get access for an hour to what it does have. Peter has Cingular that works everywhere and I am Convinced to change to that.
Separation of Powers
Just as each House is the judge of the qualification of its members, each House is responsible for enforcement of ethics and criminal actions of members. The Houses have sufficient authority to do as they will in those cases.
When you bring the executive power into direct enforcement against sitting Members of either house of Congress, you end the separation of powers. It is easy for the executive to fake 'evidence' if it chooses. Once the executive power can intimidate sitting Members of Congress, you have an entirely different kind of government.
Now it is required that the Houses inquire into the criminal actions of Members. But that is done by their own agents, or at the request of the Speaker or President pro tem; not by the executive authority.
Is anyone mad enough to suppose that in 200 and more years there have been no crooked Members of Congress? Or that none were ever known to have been crooked? Yet in the 200 years no executive has dared search the Capitol offices of a sitting Member. No previous President has thought he had that power. Just as the House Ushers or Sergeants at Arms have no authority to go search the White House. This was all learned during the English Civil Wars, and understood by the Framers. And of the three branches of government, until this week, it was clearly understood that the "most sovereign" of the three was the Congress. Not the Court, not the President, but the Congress.
One reader asks what if a Member kept child pornography and heroin in his office, as if that were the worst thing imaginable. Would he be immune? Well -- to the executive, yes. Not to the Sergeants at Arms of his house. The Speaker has ample authority to deal with such matters. Nor are the quarters off the Capitol places of immunity: no one complained when the Member's home was searched and a lot of cold cash was found in his freezer. But the proper remedy in all these cases is specified in the Constitution and by long standing precedent; and turning the agents of the executive --- the Army, if you will -- loose on a sitting Member is not the proper remedy. It has never been done in these United States, nor should it be.
There are worse ills in a Republic than corrupt members of the Legislature.
================
Note, incidentally, that while Members of Congress and Senators enjoy many of the immunities of the old Roman Tribunes of the People, they cannot at the same time be part of the Executive. There are arrangements by which Members can hold commissions in the Armed Forces and still sit as Members, but they don't in fact hold both offices at the same time; their commissions are on hold, so to speak. Goldwater was a USAF general, but he did not wear the uniform or take the pay as a reserve general while he was a Senator; there was a dispensation, so to speak, to allow him to fulfill some of the reserve requirements, but if he had joined the armed forces as a serving officer he would have had to leave the Senate.
This was deliberate. Old Rome mixed executive and legislative, and in England you must have a seat in Parliament to hold a Ministry; bribing Members of Parliament with offices and pensions was a fine art in England during the 1700's and this did not escape the Framers. Nor did it escape them that the King, before the Civil Wars, had intimidated the legislature, imprisoning them in the Tower for voting against his wishes, and even sending the soldiers into the legislative chamber to disperse them. Cromwell did much the same thing.
Better to have legislative immunity than to allow the executive to intimidate the Members. We can tolerate crooked members of Congress. If the entire Congress is corrupt and can neither be prosecuted nor voted out of office, we are in a Constitutional crisis anyway, and on the verge of Civil War. And yes, some Members have abused their privileges and immunities, some in notorious ways. That's the nature of power. It gets abused. But better a few corrupt Members than their intimidation by the Executive which has all the power it needs to find ways to charge the Members with criminal actions.
=============