| 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.
=============
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