| Thursday,
July 17, 2003
Happy Anniversary,
Roberta
We were married in Seattle in 1959. It was an odd wedding party and a
rather odd wedding, and most of her relatives disapproved of me. Ah well.
Adelphia Cable Modem is still not reliable. It won't even work well
enough to let me download their reporting software. So I'll have to use
Megapaths to get the Adelphia trouble shooter and then use it.
Over in Mail I got
a letter concerning my views on Empire and Republic. It seemed to
misunderstand me so I wrote an answer that perhaps belongs in the main
thread so I will put it here as well.
Consequences
of Empire
I am not particularly pessimistic in the ways you
think. We are not in any trouble when it comes to holding Iraq, and it's
not that hard to make the soldiers happy again, although you do have to do
that. It is the long term effects on us, and particularly the loss of
cheap self government, that concerns me. But those are probably gone, not
because the world changed but because we have, and in doing that we caused
world changes that make it very hard to get back to being a Republic.
Empire is, in my judgment, rule of people who do
not consent to that rule. "Deriving their just powers from the
consent of the governed" is the description of a republic. Neither
Afghanistan, nor Iraq, nor especially Bosnia, have consented to our rule,
and indeed most of the populace in those places would cheerfully vote us
out if given the chance. (Of course in the US the population would
overwhelmingly vote to stop immigration and stop exporting jobs, but
they'll never get the chance to vote on those matters either.)
It is very easy to get used to government by the
consent of the governing class rather than the governed. It is very hard
to break that habit once you get into it, since the people with the power
have little motivation to change it, and will cheerfully hand perks to the
opposition so long as the opposition isn't interested in changing the
system.
Our overseas experiments accelerate that trend.
At the moment we're a not very competent empire,
and at the moment the Army is not as important as government employee
unions, teachers unions, and the trial lawyers associations in American
politics. You and I will both live to see that change, so that the
military will be as important as any of those in political matters. That
was hastened by the contemptuous way the military ballots were dismissed
in Florida in the year 2000 election. If the American public didn't notice
that high handed imbecility, you may be sure the soldiers did.
So our formula seems to be sensitivity training
for the officers, and extended tours of duty for the troops. It doesn't
take a lot of imagination to project the results of such actions, and
apparently someone in the Pentagon has noticed, so that we are now
negotiating with the UN, with India, with anyone, to get some help in
Iraq. We'll manage that. There's a lot of oil over there and we can pay
well for the help. Of course what we want is an occupation force we can
send home when we need to: bringing in Turks or Russians doesn't meet that
need. Denmark is too small, and France has too may past associations in
the region. Germans would be a mistake, and certainly we don't want
Former-USSR Moslem nations involved on the ground. Or do we?
Perhaps we can hire Ghurkas. And
see mail.
Security alerts coming in an hour or so.
 Subject:
Today's critical Microsoft remote-exploit vuln/fix ( priority one)
http://www.microsoft.com/security/security_bulletins/ms03-026.asp
---------------- Roland Dobbins
----
Microsoft has issued yet another
have-your-way-with-me critical vulnerability warning. This warning applies
to all current versions of Windows except Windows Me. Windows 98SE and
earlier versions of Windows 9X were not tested and may or may not be
vulnerable. You can read the details at:
<http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/?url=
/technet/security/bulletin/MS03-026.asp>
-- Robert Bruce Thompson thompson@ttgnet.com http://www.ttgnet.com/thisweek.html
http://forums.ttgnet.com/ikonboard.cgi
See ALSO
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/707/cisco-sa-20030717-blocked.shtml
Well Adelphia thinks it is the Hawking Router, and that may be the
case. When the Adelphia line is plugged directly into a Windows XP PC and
I set the TCP/IP to do everything automatically, it seems to work; through
the Hawking Router it fails intermittently.
But I hate running bare to the Internet so I closed that connection. I
then tried to address a D-LINK DI-604 router to 192.168.1.1 from its
setting of 192.168.0.1 and disable DHCP services, but when I do that I
don't seem to be able to communicate with it any more and the setting
doesn't stick: next time I do connect to it the router seems to be back to
192.168.0.1 which is not what I want. There are no instructions for using
advanced features, at least none in the manuals I have.
It seems to want to be connected to the machine that changes its
address and if it can't report the address change then it can't make the
address change; but of course the 192.168.0.x system that got its DHCP
from the router now can't see it if it's 192.168.1.1 so the router can't
report to it and, apparently, after a while says to heck with it and
reverts to the original address setting. This isn't so good. Maybe I need
to have two computers connected to the D-Link, one addressed in the 0.x
range and the other in the 1.x range? Or is there some other
way? This is driving me nuts but I am going to go work on my book
now.
I am on through the Hawking with iDSL connected to WAN2 and the
Adelphia cable modem connected to the cable but with its Ethernet port
unconnected. I'll probably figure this out sometime this evening or
tomorrow. Now to work on fiction.
Windows XP clearly has a critical need detector. Now the Zip Drive
opens but Windows goes mad trying to autoplay when all I want to do is
save the blasted files onto the Zip so I can go to the monk's cell.
I can't even close down the window. XP is too clever by half.
I think I am going mad.
Well, I fixed that, and I have done about 1200 words of Burning Tower
so I feel like a writer again. Of course my brain is now mush, and I still
have to figure out how to make the Adelphia cable modem behave, which
involves readdressing the router, but that's for later.
Well now the cable modem doesn't work with or without a router. Now it
won't work connected directly to a PC. I did manage to get the router
addressed properly and the DHCP turned off. I am connected through iDSL
again. Adelphia Cable Modem isn't working although their status page shows
no local area problems.
I don't have a lot more time to waste on this.
Midnight: it is not working at all, connected direct or through a
router. Adelphia Cable modem is dead.
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