| Friday, July
14, 2000
And, lo, it came to pass that the trader by the name
of Abraham Com did take unto himself a young wife by the name of Dot. And
Dot Com was a comely woman, broad of shoulder and long of leg. Indeed, she
had been called Amazon Dot Com. And she said unto Abraham, her husband,
"Why doth thou travel far from town to town with thy goods, when thou
can trade without ever leaving thy tent?"
And Abraham did look at her as though she were
several saddle bags short of a camel load, but simply said, "How,
dear?" And Dot replied, "I will place drums in all the towns and
drums in between to send messages saying what you have for sale and they
will reply telling you which hath the best price. And the sale can be made
on the drums and delivery by Uriah's Pony Stable (UPS)."
Abraham thought long and decided he would let Dot
have her way with the drums. And Dot said, "There will be a lot of
banging in the land."
And Abraham replied, "It is my most fervent
wish that this be so." And the drums rang out and were an immediate
success. Abraham sold all the goods he had, at the top price, without ever
moving from his tent.
But his success did arouse envy. A man named
Maccabia did secrete himself inside Abraham's drum and was accused of
insider trading.
And the young did take to Dot Com's trading as doth
the greedy horsefly to camel dung. They were called Nomadic Ecclesiastical
Rich Dominican Siderites, or NERDS for short.
And, lo, the land was so feverish with joy at the
new riches and the deafening sound of drums, that no one noticed that the
real riches were going to the drum maker, one Brother William of Gates,
who bought up every drum company in the land. And indeed did insist on
making drums that would only work if you bought Brother William's
drumsticks.
And Dot did say, "Oh, Abraham, what we have
started is being taken over by others." And as Abraham looked out
over the Bay of Ezekiel, or as it came to be known, "eBay," he
said, "We need a name of a service that reflects what we are."
And Dot replied, "Young Ambitious Hebrew Owner Operators."
"Whoopee!" said Abraham.
"No, YAHOO!" said Dot Com.
Jonathan Sturm (not the author)
Hi! I sucessfully use winoncd 3.7 Power Edition with
my HP cd/rw on a win2000 server system and it works flawlessly.
Best Regards
Pedro Bernardo
My experience is that you can use CD Creator or a
CD-RW program with Windows 2000 and either will work, but installing both
and going from one to the other invites resets. I am sure they'll
get the bugs out one day. Thanks.
LINUX KILLED MY LOUDSPEAKERS
Every so often, I install yet another distribution
of Linux, just to see how things are progressing in Linuxland. Today it
was the turn of Caldera OpenLinux eDesktop 2.4. Much to my amazement, one
of the earliest phases of what was otherwise a surprisingly troublefree
Windows type install included a blast of music at full volume. My
loudspeakers do not have an electronic volume control; just a virtual one.
While a chance to control the volume came later in the install, it was too
late for my loudspeakers. They had expired. Presumably from the eDesktop.
I assume the e before desktop means explode. I feared for my monitor also,
as the intensity of the sound affected the internal circuitry sufficiently
to severely distort the image on the screen. I don't think Linux is quite
ready for the normal user yet. Somehow this reminded me of MegaDeath, the
heavy metal rock band in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Perhaps there
ought to be an entry in the Guide: beware Linux unless you enjoy the stink
of vapourised heavy metal!
Jonathan Sturm
Ouch!
Jerry-
I also downloaded and installed GetRiget 4.2c today.
I did this because I had been using it happily on NT4 and the site said
the new version would run on W2K, which I am now using. I got around your
URL problem by doing a custom install (because I'm suspicious) - but, that
may be the least of the problems. I've been using ZoneAlarm and I soon
started getting msgs about letting msipcsv contact the internet. I said no
and went looking, yep, there was Attune's little advertising program. I
uninstalled it, but not everything was deleted (it did notify me of that).
I was now getting msgs to the effect that msipcsv.exe was generating
errors and would have to be restarted.
Did I mention that the computers on my network
couldn't see each other anymore, there are only two of them. By then I saw
your msg (thanks for posting your adventures) and simply uninstalled
GetRight. The network came back. Then I couldn't get my computer
registered with my isp, sure glad I installed the trial version of
Executive's Undelete a couple of days ago, recommended. Restored the files
GetRight's uninstall took out and Bob's (my) uncle. GetRight is gone - if
they deceide to take the junk out and restore it to being a well behaved
good program I'd be willing to pay for it, but until then....
Thanks for being there, and continue to write well.
Paul rphampson@earthlink.net
I am in contact with the authors of GetRight, who
seem to be good guys, and I am conveying our concerns. My advice is stay
with GetRight 3.34 and PAY for that. It works, it is worth it, and it's
good stuff. Since it is shareware there ought to be sources for
it.
Stay AWAY from any later versions.
Trent Telenko says:
The usual suspects want the U.N. to hire mercs for
peacekeeping rather than use national military forces.
See:
http://www.foxnews.com/world/062300/un_broder.sml#top
I'm afraid the usual suspects just don't understand
the drawbacks involved with using mercs on a continuing basis (see the URL
below). And the fact that U.N. peacekeeping is a payola deal for third
world bureaucrats, some uniformed and some in suits. So any U.N. mercenary
operation would necessarily be corrupted by the U.N.'s bureaucracy.
http://www.hearstnp.com/san_antonio/bea/news/stories/san/storypage.cfm?xla=saen&;xlb=790&;xlc=38836
Absolutely correct, of course. Macciavelli told
of the problems with using hired soldiers. Mercenaries can sometimes be
extremely useful, but it depends on the circumstances, and republics
reduced to hired armies to defend their homelands are usually doomed.
History shows some exceptions. Hawkwood, for example. And the French have
had good service from the Foreign Legion.
There is also a terminology problem. Pure
mercenary soldiers would change sides for more money; most of the people I
know who call themselves mercenaries or soldiers of fortune chose their
side for reasons other than just money.
David Drake's "Bonding authority" for
mercenary units, right out of Hammer's Slammers," seems to be taking
shape.
See:
http://www.sandline.com/hotlinks/article2.html
Selected quotes:
"In terms of regulation, the best approach
discussed thus far was laid out in a point paper sent to the United
Nations in 1998 by Michael Grunberg, the founder and owner of Plaza 107, a
British multinational holding company, who has worked closely with both EO
and Sandline. He calls for a general set of rules, governed by an
international body such as the UN or the International Court in The Hague,
covering the conditions under which PMCs (Private Military Corporations)
can operate. They would subject themselves to an audit process whereby the
registration body conducts an evaluation of the company's compliance with
a predetermined set of internationally defined and accepted operating
practices, such as technical competence, adherence to the law of armed
conflict, and respect for human rights.
Once registered, PMCs would be kept on a list of
approved companies maintained by the regulating authority. It would have
the right to remove, suspend, or fine a particular PMC if there was
evidence to prove that the company had breached its operating obligations
and governing code. Prior to a PMC accepting an operational assignment, it
would have to apply to the regulating authority for permission, setting
out basic project details, a justification for its involvement, and a
statement of parameters within which it would work. If permission is
granted, a certificate would be issued by the regulating entity. In this
sense, the process is similar to that of an arms contractor seeking an
end-user certificate prior to selling its weapons abroad.
Finally, a PMC would deploy to the field with an
observer team. This force would monitor the PMC to ensure it was not
unnecessarily prolonging participation for financial gain, using
indiscriminate military methods in violation of humanitarian law, or using
its presence to exploit natural resources.
Of course, such an approach leaves many questions
unanswered. Who sponsors the observer teams? How do they factor into
operational security? If abuses are discovered, what recourse would the
teams have? Who would be penalized? What are the consequences of the
misconduct? Would the UN Security Council be responsible or some other
international tribune - say the International Criminal Court?"
Insane how people dream of controlling warriors
with words.
And now for one of the more
interesting letters.
Background: I am in a discussion group that
includes Greg Cochran. You may have seen his work on evolution and
disease: if the theory of evolution is true, then many
"hereditary" diseases including schizophrenia must in fact be
caused by infectious agents: the evolutionary burden of those disabilities
is so large they would be bred out of the race in no time.
Studies have shown that one of the most important
variables in education is the intelligence of the teacher: the smarter the
teachers, the better the results. This is perhaps unsurprising, but it has
serious consequences.
I think there is no serious (other than
politically correct) disagreement among informed experts that IQ has a
strong hereditary component. Murray and Herrnstein put it at 60%; that's
actually considered low.
In our discussion this came up. Published with
permission:
Once upon a time, the United States had to deal with
enemies who talked about supermen - either Nordics, or the New Soviet Man.
But that's all they did about it - talk. That may change in the 21st
century.
Today the bell curve limits what any country can do
. High IQ increases performance in almost every job, but there are only so
many people with high IQs. Two or three percent of European populations
have an IQ above 132, maybe 1/10th of one percent have IQs above 148. We
have reason to believe that children would get a better education from
teachers with higher scores, but there just aren't enough people with such
scores, and most of them are already doing something else more lucrative.
And we needs lots of teachers - if we found that teachers with IQs three
standard deviations above average (> 148) were considerably more
effective than typical teachers today, we could not ever take advantage of
that fact for most students, because there are only a quarter of a million
people in the US who score that high, while there are at least ten times
that many teachers in the US.
We could use smarter engineers, smarter doctors,
smarter plumbers, smarter soldiers - but right now it can't be done. The
best we could do would be to reallocate some smart people currently
playing socially destructive roles. Like lawyers.
In fact, with the current demographic trends, we can
expect that the fraction of kids with extremely high IQs will be
considerably smaller in the next generation. That's called diversity.
We're cloning animals, and we could probably clone humans - tomorrow, not
generations from now. There is no physical reason why someone, somewhere,
could not do this on a large scale. And if they did, you could have a
country where 20%, or for that matter 100% of kids had IQs over 150.
If any medium sized country (like France) ever
decided to adopt such a policy, it would in one generation have more very
smart people than the entire rest of the world. I think this would greatly
increase that country's competitive abilities in many fields. it would
also make all our current concerns about ethnic differences in cognitive abilities
seem pretty unimportant. Not only would this hypothetical country be full
of talented people, the powers that be would _know_ who was talented, and
could skip much of the expensive and time-consuming sorting processes we
use to identify them - when we even care. A reasonable biology professor
should be willing to hire a 20-year-old clone of Bill Hamilton without
having read his thesis..
I'm sure that lots of people would dismiss this
possibility, on the grounds that genetic influences are not all that
important in determining IQ, or that IQ itself is not that important.
They're wrong, of course, but in fact those choosing who should be Xeroxed
are by no means limited to sorting by IQ. Health, emotional stability,
even having ideas could all be part of the selection criteria. None of
this requires the sequencing of the human genome, or deep understanding of
that sequence - Xerox machines don't have to know how to read.
The real question is whether this is any chance that
such a radical step will ever be taken - or,, I should say, taken anywhere
in the near future. I'd say that it's fairly unlikely, but possible.
Certainly there have been individuals within living memory that had enough
personal power for enough years to make such a program feasible. I'm
thinking of Stalin, but there may be other examples. Anyone with iron
control of a country for a generation or so could probably pull it off. It
would be hard to do this in any country in Europe, since none of them are
really dictatorial right now and it's hard enough to get women to have any
kids, let alone someone else's...
But you never know.... It is possible that someone
would try this in the service of some familiar goal, such as preservation
or aggrandizement of some culture or religion, national resurgence or
revanche: Ideally, this would result in a country whose superabundance of
talent was organized in incredibly inefficient ways - I say ideally,
because this would give us sluggish democratic societies more of a chance
and make for interesting history. If these guys were immensely smarter
_and_ well organized, they'd just win and that would be the end of
it.
We might try to nip this in the bud - although it's
hard to say exactly what reason we would give, since our official ideology
says that this could never work. We would be far less likely to interfere
with anyone trying this who happened to have nuclear weapons. Simple
obscurity might also allow success - if the Ethiopians were doing this
right now, would we ever hear about it? Foreign-affairs coverage has about
vanished from most of the big newspapers and never really existed on
network news...
This is not the last, or the most important of the
biological innovations that promise to make history more interesting than
Frances Fukuyama's worst nightmare. It is just the next one.
Gregory Cochran
We do live in interesting times. And John
McCarthy points out that this sort of thing need not be done by a nation.
An organization or religion might even try it.
The Boys From Brazil only more so and for real?
It would make for a good science fiction novel, but in fact it may not be
fiction at all. And as Greg points out, our official ideology says it
won't work, so there's no way we could justify interfering, even if we
wanted to. China, anyone?
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