| Friday,
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
It may be a bit early, but apparently Asimov's "I
Robot" will arrive this summer as a movie. See
http://www.irobotnow.com/index.php
The website is alone worth the price of admission. --
Cheers,
Art Russell
mailto:artrussell@
mindspring.com
http://education.gsu.edu/spehar
"Behavioral Science is not for sissies." - Steven
Pinker
Neat! I didn't find credits, is it Harlan's
script?
Subject: info about the movie "I, Robot" buffy willow
About the credits and production of "I, Robot," see:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0343818/fullcredits#writers
David C. Plunkett
Aha. I thought not. No Ellison credit. Harlan wrote
a beautiful movie but no one I knew thought it could actually be filmed.
==================
Global dimming
Hi, Jerry!
When I spied the global dimming story at the Guardian
(via SlashDot), I was reminded of this story from Wired:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,52512,00.html
This describes how some climatologists took advantage
of the grounding of flights over the US following 9/11/01 and discovered
that contrails seemed to have dampened the temperatures over the US by about
1.2 degrees Celsius (that is, without the contrails the temperature range
between noon and midnight might have been 1.2 degrees greater during the
9/11-13/01 period).
In trying to track down the above story, I came across
this site:
http://www.contrails.nl/
Perhaps the creator of this site is on to something?
Now it may be only coincidental that the period of
dimming is roughly the same as the age of jet flight (especially commercial
flight), and it lacks an explanation for the equilibrium in dimming that we
have had over the past decade (though 2 possibilities come to mind: we may
have reached a maximum contrail saturation level along the major flight
corridors, or we may not have had a significant increase in number of
flights over this period), but I think this might be worthwhile as a
direction of inquiry.
Arthur Maruyama
I think it has been going on longer than that, but
contrails may have an effect. Just how much I'd have to calculate.
Particulates from coal fired furnaces would affect the albedo more I would
think.
And see below
==================
Dr. Pournelle,
First, to set the record straight, Al Qaeda had
committed acts against the US and its citizens prior to 9/11; the 1993 Trade
Tower bombing and the attack on the UISS Cole. Having said that, it is still
a miscarriage of justice (at least as I understand it) to effectively outlaw
joining any organization by jailing members who have committed no overt act.
When I was in Navy basic (Great Lakes, 1971), there
was a member of my platoon who was a college grad. He had a major in Russian
and a minor in German, and was expected to be assigned to some embassy duty
somewhere. Then his background check came back. He had been a member of the
Students for a Democratic Society while in college. This was the same
organization some of whose members were instrumental in the protests (riots)
during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Some of the acts they
committed would be recognized today as terrorism. He was lucky to be allowed
to stay in the navy but any type security clearance was out of the question.
He was not however jailed. He himself, had done nothing unlawful.
I have a problem with the way this country is run.
There are no candidates that espouse the causes I support and it is
financially impossible for the average citizen to run for any office higher
than local level. The politicians in office do not listen to the common
people as a general rule and when they are forced to, they reward those who
protested for their efforts. (The first shuttle was named Enterprise after a
massive grassroots effort lead by trekies. The budget cut following that
naming resulted in the first shuttle being hung in the Smithsonian rather
than launched into space. Thus was the first shuttle lost).
The USA Patriot Act and its relatives are
ill-conceived legislation, but protesting it will result in negative
publicity, and possible arrest, but not in a repeal. The powerful are safe
enough, but those of us who have to financially support this country and its
adventures are left without protection except that which we can provide for
ourselves, and they want to take away our weapons. I have understood for a
long time that there is no security except that which you provide for
yourself and your loved ones. In the end, we will all die. I have a problem
with someone who takes money that I could use for my security so that he can
provide it for himself or someone else I have no concern for.
I have been accused of being isolationist. I prefer to
think of it as minding my own business. I like your idea of Monuments. I
also like the idea of destroying any government that supports terrorists.
Destruction is inherently easier than building (especially nation building),
and can be done from a safe distance that reduces the risk to those at the
sharp end. The society that is destroyed will be unsupportive of terrorists
as a result of the ensuing chaos. If the terrorists take charge, they now
become targets for the next round. Maybe I am too simplistic?
Patrick A. Hoage
If you post this, edit it as you see fit.
I generally don't edit other than using the spell
checker, but I will always cut out irrelevant rambles. In your case I just
used the spell checker.
You're right on the record, and I can't think what
kind of lapse caused me to imply otherwise. Al Qaeda has been after us a
long time.
In another place I'll comment on the Court of
Appeals decision today regarding internees. I completely agree with the
court. Charge them or release them in the case of citizens, and if they are
POW's then which is the war?
The Shuttle Enterprise was a boiler plate never
intended to go to space -- too heavy. It did fly in air drops to measure
stability and flight characteristics, and showed as expected that it had all
the gliding capability of a brick with painted stripes. The Trekkies didn't
realize this, and used a lot of their clout to get the name changed. They
should have waited for Columbia...
My sentiments remain unchanged. We are the friends
of liberty everywhere but the guardians only of our own. Guarding our own
may well include regime change for places that harbor, aid, or abet our
enemies.
================
Subject: Saddam's Arrest Brings Humiliation Debate
Hi Jerry,
I saw this article and thought it interesting.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-3525555,00.html
While I am first to admit that there is an awfully lot
I don't understand about Islam and Islamic culture, I cannot conceive why
there is a debate on whether Saddam was a dictator.
Merry Christmas and best Holiday wishes,
Terry Goodrich
===================================== Terry Goodrich
CSMG Design "Machine Design & Parametric Modeling"
web:
www.csmgdesign.com email: terry@ csmgdesign.com
Nor I. Merry Christmas indeed.
===========================
Dr Pournelle,
How’s this for a conspiracy theory?
http://www.gopusa.com/news/
2003/december/1218_albright_bin_laden.shtml
And from a former Secretary of State at that.
Jim Mangles
You are astonished that the dimmest bulb we have
ever had at State would believe anything? She did while in office, too.
Subj: Marine Corps Small Wars Manual
Your readers might find this interesting:
http://www.smallwars.quantico.usmc.mil/sw_manual.asp
Rod Montgomery==monty@sprintmail.com
And me too. Thanks!
====================
Dear Dr. Pournelle:
Have you read "For Us, the Living" yet? I imagine many
of your readers are interested in your reaction. I'm especially interested
your take on social credit theory.
Also, a while back when you mentioned that a
believed-to-be-destroyed first novel of Heinlein's was scheduled to be put
out, you noted that you had a couple of letters by him that you asked for
permission to publish. Mr. Heinlein granted permission to do so upon his
death, and Mrs. Heinlein requested that you hold off until her death.
I conclude that you thought those letters were
important, or you would never have asked for that permission. Do you intend
now to release them? Will you give us some hint as to what they are about?
--William S. Cornell
I have not read it, in part because I know that
Ginny would have ordered it destroyed if she had known a copy had been
"found", and that leaves me with mixed emotions. Apparently Robert and L.
Ron Hubbard at one time had planned to collaborate on this work, which
complicates it even more.
Not long before it was written Robert had run for
California State Assemblyman on the Upton Sinclair "Ham and Eggs" platform.
He lost in the Democratic Primary to Sam Yorty, later Mayor of Los Angeles.
I managed Sam's successful bid for a third term as Mayor and served as his
deputy for a period. Robert found that amusing.
I will read the book when I get a bit more time. As
to Social Credit, that takes a lot longer reply than I have time for.
==============
And Joanne Dow says on global
dimming
Recent studies of Sun spots and overall insolation of
the planet seem to be saying that the planet is receiving more energy in the
last 50 to 100 years than in the preceding 1000 to 1500 years. If less is
reaching the surface that means more is staying in the upper atmosphere.
This gets rather interesting.
Of course, setting out a pan of water to watch it
evaporate and noting it takes longer today than it did some time in the past
does not sound like a very scientific technique to me even if you can find
standardized pans with standard reflectivity, thickness, materials, and
neatly standardized distilled water. Is it standing out over a snow drift or
over a black tarmac parking lot? Is the ambient humidity higher or lower
today? (That latter is a BIG effect here in Rancho Cucamonga. With all the
people irrigating lawns around us the humidity here is getting higher every
year. Pans of water left out in the Sun will take longer to evaporate. I
also note there is more smog in the air here than 50 years ago. That means
less Sun light gets to any photocell detectors that might be used to measure
insolation.
That report, as far as I can see, is meaningless
alarmist palaver more suited to one of Art Bell's guests than your site.
{^_^}
But I have been one of Art Bell's guests, as you
well know!
It is certainly the case that we seem to be getting
more not less energy from the Sun -- and note that the Lowell's records on
the brightness of Venus fit in here. I don't pretend to know what's going
on. I do continue to say we should be spending money on facts, not on
"remedies", until we have better understanding of what is going on,
including effects of contrails, CO2, particulates, and all the rest.
===============================
On John McCarthy and the west
Subject: re: McCarthy vrs Schaeffer on the West
What John McCarthy fails to note is that the
technological and organizational advantages of the West didn't come up out
of the ground. They came from those very ideas that Francis Schaeffer wrote
about in his books.
Those ideas made modern science and technology
possible. Those ideas made freedom possible - that there is one logical
transcendent God who created the universe and acts in it is the necessary
foundation for science and more than accidental technology. Politically,
that this God is *where all final authority rests* - and thus not in the
State or the person of the king, and thus we have freedom. Where you have
freedom, you don't need an extensive State apparatus - indeed such an
apparatus can be seen as blasphemous - and you don't need to take that
apparatus with you on a voyage of discovery.
So yes, Christendom had superior technology and a more
effective organization for voyages of discovery and colonization. But those
came from the ideas of Christianity (and which Christianity shares with the
other manifestations of Second Temple Judaism). They don't come from blood
or soil.
Steve Schaper -- Steve <sschaper@qwest.net>
===========================
On the problems with Mac Mail
Feel free to use the following as long as you leave in
the disclaimer that this is guesswork. I'd really rather not have a lawyer
tell me that I'm wrong.
This is an odd problem that you've experienced. It's
one that I doubt the Apple engineers expected, but it's also one that I'm
sure they are trying to work around now.
I haven't examined the service or software offerings
from Apple with any rigor, so I need to make it very clear that all of the
following is guesswork.
The symptoms you've described were probably _not_
signs that the "mailserver" itself is down. They were more likely a symptom
that the connection between the front end mailserver and the database (be it
LDAP or whatever Apple uses to store user information) was broken.
This is clearly the worst of all possible worlds.
First of all, that mailserver will stay up, accepting
connections but unable to authenticate its users. Your client software, when
the password is rejected due to some transient failure on the other end,
will fall back to its "my user is a dyslexic nincompoop" mode and ask you
for the password. I suspect that this happens because the server returns a
"450 Authentication Failed" response.
This is, unfortunately, one of the side effects of
dealing with SMTP (which doesn't have quite the riches of syntax that you
will find in the Microsoft mail protocols).
Now, if ugly little problem had reared its head across
a swath of Apple's inbound servers, I can assure you that any reasonably
awake sysadmin would have noticed it -- sysadmins do tend to take an
interest in these things when their pretty little graphs start flatlining.
It's more than likely, then, that it cropped up on only a very few servers.
BUT, Apple clearly does load balancing on their
inbound smtp systems. It's also likely that they maintain some
client->server affinity for a given period of time. It's also likely that
they direct connections to the servers that are completing their sessions
quickly. That would mean that, over the course of (say) thirty to sixty
minutes, more and more traffic would be routed to the malfunctioning
servers.
... And the pretty graph approaches a flat line ...
... And the sysadmins swear prettily and unplug the
bad server ...
... Or Apple runs an unusually competent operation,
the software notices the unusual activity and takes the odd server out of
the load balanced pool ...
... Or the problem magically went away ...
In short, this is actually not likely to be a client
problem. This is either an operational problem or a protocol problem because
the status code that server sends you is "450 Authentication Failed". That's
the same error you would get if you actually were a dyslexic nincompoop.
Yes, it's a transient failure that is not marked as
such. Yes, it's their fault and they should do better. But.
Apple's behavior here seems to exactly the same that
other software display. I just looked and it's present in the source code
for Postfix in the area of code where the smtp server deals with the sasl
authentication framework.
The good news is that it looks like it can be fixed.
The bad news is that it might take a while. The fix would require that the
MTA return different error codes for a bad password than it would for a
failure of the authentication mechanism. The MUA (Mail.app) would then need
to handle those two codes differently.
Unfortunately, the problem does not seem to be limited
to Apple clients and Apple's own servers. I can duplicate the symptoms
locally with Eudora and Mozilla when connecting to Postfix on FreeBSD by
inducing failure in the LDAP back-end.
Again, however, this is just guesswork.
Malachi Kenney
Interesting guesses. MY problem at my end is that
the error messages were wrong; but Outlook used to do that too. Fortunately
Outlook 2003 fixed that particular problem.
===========================
From the blog,
"Jessica's Well"
Nigerian e-mail con-spam: It's America's Fault!
"The image of capitalism now being spread about the world is cowboy
stuff: little gleaned from America extols the virtue of regulation,
restraint and control. We reap from the third world what we sow: if some
Nigerians learned lessons in capitalism from global oil companies that
helped corrupt and despoil that land, it is hardly surpising they
absorbed some of the Texan oil values that now rule the White House."
How stupid does one have to be to write this?
This stupid:
"With embarrassment, feeling a fool, I [the author] admit I was a
victim of a Nigerian fraud."
................................Karl
Lembke
Hmm. Thanks.
======================
Subject: Christianity as seen by
modern scholars
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
Public television had a series fo shows about Jesus
and Christianity that is written up in a series of essays and articles at
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/ . There is
a lot of material explaining the modern viewpoint and includes modern
archeological discoveries. It will have to serve as its own comment.
regards,
William L. Jones wljones(at)dallas.net
There is indeed a lot there. I haven't done much of
the "new scholarship" and I suppose my views come as much from C. S. Lewis,
"The Apostle to the Skeptics", as from anywhere else. That and Paul's rather
stark statement:
12: Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say
some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead?
13: But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not
risen:
14: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your
faith is also vain.
But I am not a writer of apologetics. I can leave
that to others more gifted than I.
On Arbitrary Power
Sir:
You may find this of interest (assuming that you
haven't read it already)...
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/mccarthy200312190923.asp
In a nutshell, Congress *has* given the President the
power to "use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations,
organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or
aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored
such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of
international terrorism against the United States by such nations,
organizations or persons."
You may wish to argue that Congress overstepped what
was prudent in passing such a joint resolution, but that's a different
matter.
On an unrelated note, you had stated...
But I see no reason to sink $80 billion into Iraq as a
gift to Mesopotamia. I would rather put that money into 40 1,000 MegaWatt
fission power plants, a small fleet of heavy lift re-usable (single or two
stage to orbit) spacecraft capable of restoring our military space assets in
the event of an Argus-like event as well as of beginning solar power
satellites, and research into the best use of electricity as a substitute
for gasoline in transportation systems.
...and would pretty much agree when you replace the
$80 billion with the cost of the Medicade bill that was oh-so recently
signed.[1] In other words, I don't think that if we *really* wanted to do
those things that the price tag would stop us.
It certainly hasn't stopped us from doing stupid
expensive things in the past. What you are proposing are at least
*investments* that will eventually repay us with something useful.
Good day to you, sir. Have a great Holiday season!
Footnotes: [1] Well, I'm 44 years old and am not
holding my breath for Social Security or Medicare to exist when I retire.
-- Mark A. Flacy Any opinions expressed above are my
own. Any facts expressed above that you could detect means my weasel wording
needs work. "He exhibited difficulty operating complicated modern devices
such as doorknobs." -- Robert Frezza, "McLendon's Syndrome"
Yes, their argument is that the Congress has
already passed The Ultimate Decree authorizing the President to save the
state by any means necessary. When the Senate of Rome did that, they put
time limits on such power; and they worried a lot about such arbitrary
power. Cicero put to death without trial some of the Cataline Conspirators
-- "They have lived" -- and that was considered a blemish and a shame for
the rest of his career; indeed was the reason Mark Anthony put Cicero on the
proscription list. Arbitrary power begets more arbitrary power.
I do not believe the Congress was foolish enough to
have meant this act as The Ultimate Decree, nor do I think Congress has that
power even if that is what it meant.
I don't know how much more money we can borrow.
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