View 426 August 7 - 13, 2006 (original) (raw)
Thursday, August 10, 2006
It is 0930. Sometime between 10 and 2 in theory someone will show up to repair the telephone. In theory. If not, then reporting that is going to take forever, since no one is quite sure who is responsible for fixing things. Thank you, Judge Green.
We now have an unregulated monopoly utility to provide telephone service, instead of old Ma Bell which was at least regulated. Ma Bell may have been inefficient, and bloated, and may have charged too much, but we had dial tone.
Now we have an enormous monopoly, and less bandwidth in the US than in the Philippines. I can't go on line to do any research on this. If I get a chance, I may be able to get to a T-Mobile hot spot only I can't go on line to see where the T-Mobile hot spots may be around here. And I can't leave here because the phone guy may show up. I sure wish I were home.
It's hot in here because they are doing something to the sand down on the parking area on the causeway into the Bay, and that is blowing up sand and dust and the windows and doors all have to be closed.
1430: The telephone company says they will be here before 9 PM. That's all they know but I do have to say that this was a far more pleasant experience than yesterday. The ticket is open. They had the wrong cell phone number for reasons not known to me, but that has been changed. So I wait. The TV keeps telling me things.
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The TV is filled with stories about the end of the airline world as we know it. Can't bring toothpaste or baby formula on an airplane. Can't bring books or magazines if you are flying from England. God knows what they think of traveling with a cane. No laptops.
But, of course, we much continue to be nice to everyone, and do no profiling. We are all in this together, including the 40% of the minority population in England that says it is all right to carry out suicide bombing operations against Jews. We need to digest that information. But Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for Western Civilization as it commits suicide; it was Liberalism that invited all those of alien cultures to live in every western nation, and said that it is OK for Muslim countries to have laws excluding Jews and Christians, but we cannot exclude anyone for any reason, even if they are here illegally. Interesting. But isn't that fair? Don't we feel better about ourselves for having been so fair and open? It's the land of the free and we will welcome those who want to end that.
I hope it is consolation for all those who are trying to go about their business and standing in 9 hour lines to get on airplanes without a water bottle or a book or a magazine. We should all feel good about how generous we are. The consolation is about all we will get for doing all this.
But we have diversity, and that's really neat, and we all ought to be proud.
I may be in an overly curmudgeonly mode today, what with my sinus/muscle spasm whatever it is headache that is getting progressively worse, and being tied here waiting for the telephone repair man before I can even get on line. Spending an afternoon and following day without any on line access turns out to be difficult; odd, because for most of my life there was no Internet access, and being somewhere without a telephone seemed like a very good thing to do once in a while. Refreshing. New habits die hard, I guess.
I do have cell phones, and I am more and more tempted by those comprehensive plans that have wireless data service by cell phone. I will look into them when the smoke clears.
Niven is in Canada. I presume he got there before they shut down the airlines; at least he is not home, so I suppose he's there. God knows how he will get home.
Tomorrow I will go to the medicos. Saturday they are supposed to install Cable Modem here, and along with it for not a lot more a telephone service. I'm not sure how that works, or why you would want that as opposed to just using Skype, but we'll find out. It doesn't cost enough more to make it worth worrying about, and I presume we can still use Skype even if we have that.
In a bit I am going to go find an Internet Cafe and see if I can connect up, get email, and send this off. I hope that works. Obviously if you see this you will know it did. The Starbucks at the Ralph's on Mission Blvd says it's a T Mobile Hot Spot so that ought to do.
Last night I took the opportunity to enroll a LOT of new subscribers. Each one will get a message, so it will take a while to send all those and clear my outbox, and of course there will be a ton of incoming mail. I may as well plan on a long time in Starbucks...
15:13 An AT&T tech in an SBC truck arrived. Highly competent. Replaced a couple of corroded jacks, and we have dial tone. I am rather foolishly doing this by dialup to save the trip to Starbucks which is a couple of miles away, although I probably could walk there, do the mail uploads and downloads, and walk back before this will be done...
And now I have two days worth of mail to process. Sigh. But at least I can do it. I could have got DSL too, now that the phone is fixed, but we're arranged for Cable Modem at least for a while. DSL looks a lot cheaper though. And the AT&T/SBC technician was highly competent. Of course it helped that he had read some of my books...
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I am caught up, and there is some important mail posted.
All is well. Tomorrow I am off to the doctors, to find out just what in the heck is wrong with my neck.
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Subject: From today's Wall Street Journal
An Army of Immigrants; The Dual-Citizen Debate By JENNIFER JOHNSON August 9, 2006
Border Lines is a regular look at the best writing on the immigration debate from around the Web. (Some links may require registration or subscription.) * * *
ALL YOU CAN BE: In 2005, the U.S. Army fell short of its recruiting goals by 7,000 soldiers. That same year, the government rejected 1.5 million requests for temporary visas, solely because applicants couldn't prove they intended to return home. "Do you think we could have convinced half of 1% among that 1.5 million people to come to our country and serve in our armed forces in exchange for the privilege to stay longer than temporarily?" Retired Brig. Gen. Kevin Ryan wagers we could have. In a Christian Science Monitor commentary, Gen. Ryan makes a case for the U.S. to expand military recruiting beyond its borders1. "If the U.S. Army placed one recruiting station in the capital of India, an English-speaking democracy of more than a billion people, we would have available a pool of enlistment-age adults equivalent to the entire population of the United States," he writes.
The Army sends teams around the globe to obtain new technologies, why shouldn't it apply the same principle to its personnel requirements, he argues. "We only accept the highest-grade technologies, and we would only recruit the highest-caliber people," says Gen. Ryan, who is also a senior fellow with the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "America could put recruiting shortages in its past, and the country would gain educated, legal, patriotic, new immigrants who, like immigrants before them, would do the work that many Americans won't -- serve their country in its defense."
Machiavelli had much to say about soldiers and a republic.
But we could certainly recruit our overseas occupation constabulary from around the world, offering citizenship after twenty years of service....
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And I close tonight with:
Subject: Microsoft Updates
Dr. Pournelle:
The Microsoft "Patch Tuesday" (monthly updates) have been released. Many are critical, and should be installed on workstations and servers. There are some active exploits out there for these vulnerabilities.
Users (non-corporate/business) are best served by ensuring installation via "Microsoft Updates", not just "Windows Updates". ("Microsoft Updates" include MS-Office updates as part of the automatic package; "Windows Updates" only update operating system components.) You have "Microsoft Updates" installed on your system if you see that choice on your Start, Programs menu (you may see both; use the 'Microsoft Updates" choice if you are manually installing the updates. If you don't see "Microsoft Updates", then use the "Windows Updates" site to upgrade.
Network administrators should ensure prompt updates of workstations and servers in their environment. At my office, we deploy workstations updates automatically (without user intervention) when we release them via the "Windows Software Update Server" (WSUS), a free program from MS that allows you to centrally manage update installation. For servers, we use a "download and manual install" process; this helps us minimize compatibility problems, and schedule the updates during a time of minimal user access to the servers. WSUS is a great program to help manage OS and Office updates.
There are other ways to get the updates in a corporate/business environment; MS has a deployment guidance page here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923752 . Again, we use WSUS to manage the updates in our corporate environment.
End users (non-business/corporate) should ensure automatic updates installation; these patches are quite important (see this "SANS" page for upgrade guidance https://isc.sans.org/diary.php?storyid=1573 https://isc.sans.org/diary.php?storyid=1573 ; includes links to the various updates). Users in a business/corporate environment should coordinate with their computer support guys (who should be pushing out the updates...if not, then your business has -- or will have -- a larger problem).
Regards, Rick Hellewell