Category Archives: View

View 758 Monday, January 14, 2013

I have this from Colonel Couvillon

I pick this up from the middle of the article:

http://strategicstudyindia.blogspot.com/2013/01/americas-strategic-stupidity.html

" Simply put, the troops proved unable to win, a shortcoming painfully evident in both Iraq and Afghanistan."

Bacevich, a former US Army Colonel and West Point grad, makes the same damn mistake that US apologists always make. They forget that to WIN a war one has to DEFEAT the enemy AND his supporters… That means to subjugate the enemy populace and make them bow to your demands and power. When the enemy populace becomes your ally and turns on their government/leaders; or at least rejects our enemy – and yes, that means oftentimes innocent people die in the meantime, then you WIN. The US does not do this, to our great failing. All the talk of rebuilding, making democracy, support, help, assistance, etc. can happen after that point.

The troops didn’t prove unable to win… they were withheld from doing what is necessary to achieve total victory.

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Avoider of Yard Work

In The Revolt of the Masses, Ortega y Gasset tells the story that Napoleon was reviewing his troops. They marched past in their splendid uniforms, and the Emperor said to Talleyrand “See my soldiers! See their bayonets, how they gleam!”

Talleyrand replied, “You can do anything with a bayonet, Sire, except sit upon it.”

Ortega’s point was that rule is not so much a matter of the firm hand as of the firm seat. The history of Afghanistan from Alexander the Great to the present is well known, and demonstrates that gaining a firm seat in that land was beyond the reach of everyone including Alexander, the Persians, Tamerlane, Babur the Tiger, the British Empire, and the Russians, and that no tactics would prevail. No one tried dispossessing the population and replacing it with colonists, but 21^st Century Americans were unlikely to do that in any event – and it is not impossible that even that would fail. Colonial empires that used that strategy have fallen to rebellion…

The history of Mesopotamia was no more encouraging, and worse, there had never been an “Iraq” in the first place. Iraq was created by jamming together three provinces of the Ottoman Empire. One of those provinces was a portion of what had once been Kurdistan, whose people wanted unification with their relatives in the Turkish and Iranian Kurdish provinces. The Kurds have been warriors for all known history, and under their great leader Saladin liberated Palestine and most of the Middle East from the Crusader Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem – and began the process of reunification of the Muslim world. Beginning with the allegiance of the Kurds he went on to become Sultan of Egypt and take the rulership of Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Palestine and other provinces, before the Mongol invasion and later the Turks established a new Caliphate.

I agree with Colonel Couvillon that there is no substitute for victory. Indeed, Colonel Bacevic would have been required to learn in Beast Barracks at West Point Macarthur’s dictum” "From the Far East I send you one single thought, one sole idea — written in red on every beachhead from Australia to Tokyo — There is no substitute for victory!" Every plebe must recite it many times.

It is possible that in Iraq we might, with the help of the Baath Party and the regular troops of the defeated Iraqi Army, have imposed some kind of enduring state with which we could ally in Iraq. It would have been expensive, and it would certainly have been the kind of state that Plato and Aristotle called a timocracy or rule by military honor. The classic theory is that such societies degenerate into oligarchies, and are inferior to the rule of the best, but they are greatly to be preferred to other degenerate states. Whatever the possibility of creating a stable ally in Iraq through a rule of honorable warriors, it was ended the moment that our proconsul disbanded the Iraqi army and unleashed a horde of armed but unemployed young men.

Had we understood that the objective in both Afghanistan and Iraq was to instill in the population and leaders the notion that life was better without America and an enemy, much might have been accomplished; but a failed attempt to install liberal democracy before the complete defeat of the enemy was doomed from the beginning, and American politics pretty well guaranteed that we would not pay the price in blood and treasure for such a complete victory. I had thought that we went into Iraq to assure two things, Iraq as a stable opponent of Iran, and the flow of Iraqi oil into Western markets. Both those goals may have been possible before the dissolution of the Iraqi army, but not later. And in Afghanistan we had achieved the goals President Obama has proclaimed as victory – that Afghanistan did not harbor the enemies of the American people – in months without the intrusion of masses of troops seen not as allies but as occupation forces.

Of course it is instructive to reflect on what we might have done, but it is more important to think clearly about what we must do now.

Technology marches on. Is the Second Law of Thermodynamics now at risk?

Another odd consequence of negative temperatures has to do with entropy, which is a measure of how disorderly a system is. When objects with positive temperature release energy, they increase the entropy of things around them, making them behave more chaotically. However, when objects with negative temperatures release energy, they can actually absorb entropy.

…

"We have created the first negative absolute temperature state for moving particles," said researcher Simon Braun at the University of Munich in Germany.

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/01/04/science-gets-colder-than-absolute-zero/?intcmp=obinsite

I note that some jobs previously exported to China and the oriental Tigers have been returned to the United States – but they are now done by robots. Sixty Minutes last night showed a $22,000 robot, good for three years, that will work tirelessly without health care benefits. It can be programmed by guiding it through a repetitious task (shades of Heinlein’s Door Into Summer!).

Assume that it will work two shifts a day, and that it requires “health care” of a value equal to its cost. Assume further that it requires a human attendant to care for six of those robots. (Skilled workers attended at least as many mechanical looms during the early Industrial Revolution, each doing more work than a single master weaver could have done by hand). Thus one worker supervises six of these. Assume he is highly skilled and costs $75,000 a year, or $225,000 for three years. The machines cost $44,000 each for three years, or $264,000. They do the work of 6 for not much more than the cost of one highly skilled worker. Assume that the job is simple enough to be assigned to someone less highly paid than the skilled supervisor, but also factor in the costs of having employees (including pensions, health care, and other government mandated benefits).

Now assume Moore’s Law applies to the cost of the robots and their care. Also assume that the robots continue to get smarter and more productive.

Science fiction tried to explore this sort of world in many stories. Some assumed that smart people stopped having kids, but the general population did not, with the least intelligent (those who didn’t understand how birth control works) having the most. Assume liberal democracy. Now go read Cyril Kornbluth’s “The Little Black Bag.” There is also Kornbluth and Pohl, Search the Sky, another take on much the same view.

There are others.

But a society in which half the population is essentially useless and knows that it is unemployable may not be stable.

It’s lunch time.

For a long time the maxim “You never appreciate how smart a moron is until you try to program a robot” was a fairly accurate observation. Apparently that is no longer the case. Would you buy that for a quarter?

While contemplating the advances in robot productivity and their elimination of the “skilled worker” factory jobs that created the blue collar middle class of our golden days, contemplate the population declines. Fewer and fewer workers must support more and more retirees and pay for their increasing-with-age health care. We’re going to need the robot productivity just to stay out of bankruptcy.  We have no idea of where the population will stabilize, but it may be a wild ride getting there.

And as robots get smarter, will they be able to write science fiction novels?

MIT is now rethinking its role in the Swartz case.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/17562678-420/mit-president-to-launch-probe-into-aaron-swartz-case.html 

“I want to express very clearly that I and all of us at MIT are extremely saddened by the death of this promising young man who touched the lives of so many,” Reif said in the statement issued Sunday. “It pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy.”

Critics, including Swartz’s family, blamed Massachusetts prosecutors and MIT for unjustly punishing Swartz.

On Saturday, the family issued a statement that included the criticism, stating, “Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The U.S. attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.”

Reif said he has asked Hal Abelson, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, to “lead a thorough analysis of MIT’s involvement from the time that we first perceived unusual activity on our network in fall 2010 up to the present.”

“I have asked that this analysis describe the options MIT had and the decisions MIT made, in order to understand and to learn from the actions MIT took,” Reif said.

View 758 Sunday, January 13, 2013

AARON SWARTZ, RIP

LA Times Obituary

Aaron Swartz was a Harvard University student who used his computer skills to collect a large number of scientific journal articles from JSTOR, the institution which controls the publication and release of most academic journals and which is also trying to achieve control of many historical publications. Many of those publications were scanned in the Google activity which is now stalled in litigation; I have seen no criminal charges brought by the Obama Department of Justice against the operatives who did the Google scans.

Swartz was arrested by the Department of Justice in July, 2011 and charged with wire fraud, computer fraud, malicious computer damage, and a number of other federal felonies, and sought to fine him $1 million and send him to federal prison for 35 years.

Swartz had downloaded some 5 million academic journal articles. His contention was that JSTOR collected money for access to academic journal content, but did not pay the authors or copyright holders, and made it prohibitively expensive for millions of potential readers to access results of publicly financed research. JSTOR is a non-profit corporation.

The government contends that Swartz intended to release the documents in some kind of pirate activity, although he had not done so at the time of his arrest. Since he was a fellow at Harvard/MIT he had legal access to all the documents, so his ‘criminal intent’ in downloading them seems to be the essence of the charges against him.

After Swartz’s arrest the JSTOR corporation dropped all civil charges against Swartz (possibly in reaction to the indignation of a great number of Internet users). The Obama administration continued prosecutorial activities, widely publishing its intention to make an example of Schwarz, and emphasizing that he could be jailed for 35 years. “Stealing is stealing” said one US Attorney.

On Friday, January 11, 2013 Aaron Swartz was hanged in his Brooklyn. NY apartment. It was quickly pronounced suicide. Swartz reportedly had been depressed by the possibility of a near lifetime in Federal prison for downloading but not releasing the academic journals.

Swartz’s death will undoubtedly spark new debates on intellectual property and the purpose of copyright. In particular, aggressive copyright protection of articles describing and reporting scientific activities largely funded by public or tax exempt sources, may not serve the constitutional purpose of copyright law:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

JSTOR has a complicated membership and access fee structure. It is not cheap, although members of institutions often get free access (apparently Swartz was one of those). JSTOR states emphatically that it is not a publisher, but it is often the only means of access for a number of academic journals and historical works. It pays no royalties to authors or copyright holders of the material it makes available for money (but which, it insists, it does not publish).

After Swartz’s arrest JSTOR testified that Swartz had returned all the documents, had published none of them, and there was no reason for prosecution. http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/swartz-arrest/

JSTOR is not a cheap operation, but a great deal of the content JSTOR charges for access to are papers reporting publicly supported research.

Making scientific, engineering, historical, and general academic research results, most funded by publicly supported institutions and often by public grants, is an important means of promoting the Progress of Science and the useful Arts; and the authors of most of those works benefit from the publication and promulgation of their work in academic journals. Of course they are entitled to publish their works through university presses and or private publishers, and such works are protected by copyright in the usual manner; but academic publications to be cited in other scientific studies need to be available to those who want to verify the work. Research repetition and verification is an important part of the scientific method. Restricting access to the publications cuts deeply into criticism, a perhaps unintended but still unfortunate result.

Swartz contended that JSTOR, having acquired a monopoly on electronic distribution of much of academia’s publication, made it expensive to obtain access to much publicly funded research, and of course it paid nothing to the authors or copyright holders although charging the users high prices.

Academic journals have always been expensive. They were traditionally printed by letter press, and the publication and mailing costs were enormous. When electronic publication became possible through the publicly financed original Internet backbone which connected academic institutions, costs of journal publications were not noticeably reduced. CDROM and electronic publishing programs took over from typewriters and letter presses and made the actual production costs of journals a great deal smaller, but subscription fees generally did not drop accordingly. Some went up.

It is not at all clear that JSTOR has passed those cost reductions down to the public that uses them, nor has there been any great incentive to do so. The government continues to inject money (through grants, but more by making loans that make students debtors for life) and academia absorbs all that money and raises prices. Some University systems have taken advantage of the computer revolution to reduce publication and distribution costs, but in many cases this is not reflected in the access costs to those outside the system, even though much of the funding for academic research comes from public money.

Aaron Swartz challenged all this. He may well have been wrong to do so in the way he chose; but he faced criminal charges and penalties greater than he would have faced had he taken physical copies of the journals, or for that matter, had he been charged with rape.

For more on this see the EFF memorial https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/farewell-aaron-swartz and the law blog published at the time of the arrest and updated today. http://www.litigationandtrial.com/2011/07/articles/series/special-comment/aaron-swartz-computer-fraud-indictment/

Most of my readers will know that I am no opponent of the legitimate copyright ownership of intellectual property. I make my living off sales or donations for access to my intellectual property. Authors, artists, composers, inventors, and other intellectual property creators have moral and ethical rights to their creations, and it is in the interest of society to protect that interest. This was considered worth its own clause in the Constitution of 1787. On the other hand, taxpayers and others who support public institutions and research have some rights too: particularly when the actual creator of the intellectual property are not being compensated, and in fact are often losing deserved esteem from citation of their works and general promulgation of their papers. Writers write to be read. Samuel Johnson observed that no man but a blockhead ever wrote for anything except money, but that isn’t quite true. Some do write to be read, and in the case of scientific research, widespread promulgation is essential to the scientific process.

It is not at all clear that the JSTOR monopoly is the best way to achieve the distribution of scientific and other academic research efforts. Perhaps it is, but I have not seen the case made. At the very least they might publish the salaries and perks of the executives and directors of JSTOR and ITHAKA. Indeed, one wonders why they do not, since they are quite proud of being non-profit corporations.

There might also be some explanation of why Swartz was considered such a threat to the nation that the Department of Justice threatened him with 35 years’ imprisonment. He wasn’t Bernie Madoff. He wasn’t Nidal Hasan, or Bradley Manning. But the Administration considered him an enemy of the people and used a great number of public resources (40% of which were paid for with borrowed money) to hound him even though the ‘victim’ (JSTOR) declined to press any charges.

It’s all very curious. Perhaps now we will learn more. Aaron Swartz, RIP

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/farewell-aaron-swartz

A sad day for the exchange of knowledge

From a NYTimes obituary:

In an online broadside directed at prosecutors, Mr. Lessig denounced what he called the federal “bullying,” and wrote, “this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.”

Of the indictment, he said, “The fact that the U.S. legal apparatus decided he belonged behind bars for downloading scholarly articles without permission is as neat an indictment of our age — and validation of his struggle — as you could ask for.”

Rune Aaslid

View 757 Friday, January 11, 2013

    Security Alerts

There is a zero-day alert. I was alerted to this by people I trust. Zero Day means that the threat is already released into the wild. The only remedy currently known is to turn off Java.

Turning off Java can break some things you need.

First, the threat:

Java Under Attack Again, Disable Now

http://www.informationweek.com/security/attacks/java-under-attack-again-disable-now/240146082

More on that in a minute. For the moment, just don’t go browsing around the Internet looking at strange new sites until you have read the rest of this.

Advice and discussion from a security expert. Read this carefully:

Note that "Java" is different than "JavaScript". JavaScript (JS) is used by a lot of web sites; disabling JS may cause problems.

Java is mainly used for web-based applications. Many business sites use Java web-based applications. Uninstalling Java will break those apps … not a good alternative in a business/corporation environment. Disabling Javascript will cause problems with many web sites.

There are reports that some on-line banking sites require Java (although this may possibly be just JavaScript). There is a procedure for disabling Java in your browser (here http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/625617 ) . Sun says to do this (link http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/technotes/guides/jweb/client-security.html#disable )

For installations where the highest level of security is required, it is possible to entirely prevent any Java apps (signed or unsigned) from running in a browser by de-selecting Enable Java content in the browser in the Java Control Panel under the Security tab.

The vulnerability appears to be in malicious web sites/pages that will contain the code that exploits the vulnerability. There don’t appear to be easy answers for all situations. Users may have to experiment with their settings to ensure that needed applications will still work.

Safe browsing seems to be one of the important keys here. Full anti-virus install/updates, installing Microsoft updates, installing application updates. The best way to do all of that update effort is to use the free (for personal use) Secunia Personal Property Inspector (available here http://secunia.com/vulnerability_scanning/personal/ ). Business should look at their business-level version to ensure updates are installed properly.

Rick Hellewell, security guy

Disabling Java apps in Firefox requires that you open Firefox, go to the upper left corner where you see the word Firefox (not its icon) and click on that. Go to plug ins, find the Java app, and disable. Then restart Firefox or nothing will happen.

If you use Explorer (I use Explorer when downloading Microsoft stuff) you probably ought to turn off Java there.

Note that there are likely to be fixes for these problems, but we don’t know when they will come out. And of course turning off Java may break something you need. Read Rick’s advice again.

And Good Luck.

Eric adds this advice:

As a rule, it’s simpler to regard Java as perpetually under and assess whether you need on a machine. My preferred torrent client is a Java app but I’m not aware of any site I regularly visit using Java (not to be confused with the widely required but unrelated JavaScript. Thanks for the dumb opportunistic name, Netscape.) and it shouldn’t break anything if I don’t allow my web browser to invoke the VM.

It has been a busy morning and it’s lunch time. More on what we’ve been doing after lunch.

View 757 Wednesday, January 09, 2013

I had eye exams today and that used up not only the day but most of my energy, which was a bit of a surprise. I didn’t think I tire that easily. I did get more done on the California Sixth Grade Reader, including some important notes on what I will have to say in the Introductions. Two introductions, actually, one to parents or teachers or who will be ‘assigning’ this to students, and one direct to the students who didn’t ask for this and will, if my memories of my reactions to such things has any relationship to the modern world, wonder why they are being stuck with this thing full of long poems and stories written a long time ago. Who the bleep cared about this stuff?

To which the only real answer is, maybe you should. If you can learn how to get both pleasure and some wisdom from tales and poetry, you’ll have a lot more fun in life. Learning from your own experiences is better than not learning, but learning from stories told about other people is even better than that. It’s not painless – that is if you do it right, some stories will be painful – but emotions experienced from reading prose and poetry are a lot less painful than if you’d made the same mistakes or had been dealt the same bad hand by life. And, by gollies, sometimes you have fun. Sometimes it can be pleasurable. But until you know something of the rules and have some experience at it, you won’t get much from Horatius at the Bridge, or The King of the Golden River.

Since most – not all, but most – of the kids who will find themselves reading this book will be smart, I can talk to them. I grew up smart. And I didn’t learn as much as I could have. Neither will the modern students, but you can at least be aware that people just like you, smart, understanding how to ace things at school without working, can wish they had the chance to get more out of their educations than they did. Not that I haven’t done pretty well over all, what with best sellers and having been in on some pretty important stuff; but I could have done better, and had more fun at it while I was doing it.

And I can still recite a bunch of long poems from memory, and you’d be astonished at how good it can make you feel to realize you can still do that.

Anyway, that’s out of my notebook from my hike and I’ll try to turn it into talk from a Dutch uncle. Maybe someone will listen.

I’m also making notes on why parents should care about old stories written long long ago, and big old poems that take forever to get the story across. Like The Courtship of Miles Standish, which has in fact a whacking good story and a real romance as well told as any Harlequin Romance ever was, and why Longfellow chose to use so many words to tell it can’t easily be explained – but once you see why he did it that way, you’ll know. I didn’t see that when I was first exposed to this in 5^th or 6^th Grade out in Capleville. After all, I could read all of the thing in a day or so, and remember just about all of it; but it took me years to realize why good poets take so long to get to the point, and I’m not sure I can explain it to anyone. I can say there is a darned good reason, and you’ll be a lot happier for knowing it.

Once again notes, not the essay.

I need new glasses, of course – especially since my fall flat on my face a few weeks ago scratched my Photo-gray Trifocals – but with the new ones I’ll be back about as good as I was on distance, and plenty good enough at computer distances. Can still drive without being a menace. And while they will do the full exam with drops next week my cataracts don’t seem to be growing much. I’m glad of that. I confess sheer terror at the thought of cataract operations. My late friend Bob Bloch couldn’t drive at night after his, and really didn’t want to drive in the daytime. That was my gain, in that I tended to drive him places, such as to the Studio Grand Opening of Star Trek, and yes, that was a long time ago. We came out after seeing it for the first time (in company with a lot of other writers and Hollywood people) and Bob said “They used ever cliché in the book, and made them all work.” So I went home and set my alarm clock so I could get up and get my broker on the phone to say “Buy me some Fox.” Which turned out to be a good investment at the time.

School non-massacre

BLOUNTVILLE, Tenn. — An armed man was fatally shot by deputies Monday at an East Tennessee high school after he went inside and pointed a gun at the principal’s head, a sheriff said.

"There’s no doubt in my mind he went there to kill someone today," Sheriff Wayne Anderson said at a Monday afternoon news conference hours after the gunfire at Sullivan Central High School. "I don’t know who, and I don’t know why."

WJHL-TV reported that Anderson said a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation will likely determine the motive.

No students or teachers were hurt and school was dismissed at 10:30 a.m. EDT.

Anderson said Thomas Richard Cowan, 62, of Kingsport confronted a security officer Monday morning after entering the school about 9 a.m.

Cowan entered the school with a .380-caliber semiautomatic and a .25-caliber handgun in his back pocket, Anderson said. The sheriff said that after Cowan grabbed the principal, Melanie Riden, and pointed the semiautomatic at her head, student resource officer Carolyn Gudger pulled her gun on Cowan and moved the principal to safety.

Anderson said Gudger moved Cowan down the hall and away from the cafeteria to a science pod. When Sullivan County deputies arrived, they ordered the gunman to drop his weapon, and he allegedly pointed it in their direction. He then pointed it back toward the school resource officer, prompting deputies to fire, Anderson said.

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2010/aug/30/man-shot-sullivan-central-high-school/

John Monahan

Another instance of the proposition that the best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to have some good guys – or women — with guns.

And now back to work on the Reader. I am well aware that I owe you several mail bags. They’re pretty good, too.