| Wednesday,
December 17, 2008 Creative Destruction:
Time To Make Companies Small Enough To Fail.
<http://techdirt.com/articles/20081208/0353473054.shtml>
- Roland Dobbins
=============
Harvard prof slams US nut allergy hysteria.
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/10/nut_allergy_hysteria/>
-- Roland Dobbins
==========
Education
Hi Jerry The discussions on Education (whilst
specifically about the US) does remind me of soemething I have believed for
some time. Nobody should be allowed to teach until they are at least 30 or
have 10 years life experience, teacher trainers must have 10 year "chalk
face" experience.I came to this conclusion listening to teachers, and with
the knowledge that they go to school, go to University, go to training
colledge and then teach.
My suggestion would ensure that they have some idea of
outside life and go into teaching with something to teach and want to teach
not just teaching because they have no other ideas.You might want to provide
a waiver for retired militry personel,I would accept that.
Andrew Deacon
The more important point would be requiring
professors of education to have ten years classroom experience. A 22 year
old graduate of a competent normal school with a 2 year AA degree can be a
first rate first grade teacher: I call to evidence my mother, who went to
Gainesville Normal in Florida and from there to the classroom, and who
taught all her pupils to read. (Except, as she said, "There were a couple
who didn't learn to read. But they didn't learn anything else, either.")
===============
Self proving statement?
You write "I am becoming the prefect example of the
absent minded professor".
Yours sincerely,
P.M.Lawrence
Very likely. Thanks.
============
Subject: On the US and Guns
Dr. Pournelle,
I read Tony's anti-gun tirade with interest. I am
always interested in the ideas of people from different cultures. I do have
a couple of points I would like to illustrate for Tony. First, the US, is a
country that established it's independence by shooting the soldiers of the
mother country. Australian Independence came about through acts of
legislation spanning two hundred years, ending in 1986 with England granting
full independence to Australia. Remember that killing people who act in a
way contrary to your perceived rights is the basis of America itself. We
have fundamentally different views about the utility of violence. Second, he
should recognize that he made a number of assumptions centering around the
false idea that legal access to some weapons is related to the illegal use
of other weapons. The fact is that the Swiss militia all have machine guns
and the Rwandans killed each other with cheap machetes. It is also worth
noting that methamphetamine is illegal in the United States but is plentiful
because it is in demand. People with a small amount of equipment can make it
from materials available for other common use. I suspect the same would be
true of firearms. Violence occurs because of our culture's taste for it, not
because the availability of firearms. If it were otherwise, prisons would be
the safest places in the country.
In Mumbai, the officers were not well trained and not
well equipped. In the United States, there was a bank robbery by men armed
with illegally full-auto rifles and body armor that were stopped after the
police went to a local gun store and got rifles available for purchase to
civilians. I shudder to think what would have happened had the store not
been there. We have had other shootings, like the tower in Texas that were
suppressed by civilians directing covering fire at the maniac. Every
shooting by maniacs that has had high casualties has been at a location were
the legal possession of firearms was made illegal. There have been no mass
shootings at gun shows.
Will Albenzi Gun Owner, Citizen, and Former Marine
I used to shop regularly at B&B Guns on Oxnard.
They are closed now; the owner declined to sell to anyone, and just
retired. Pity. It wan an excellent store. (That's where LAPD went to get
some equipment in the Victory/Laurel Canyon bank robbery.
==
Dr. Pournelle,
In case anyone thinks the Mumbai attacks couldn’t
happen here, just remember those two clowns who shot up LA after robbing a
bank. Yes the police depts. in most major cities are better armed now, but
would they be able to handle 4 or more separate incidents with explosives
added to the mix? I suspect the city would be in chaos for at least a day,
and then they’d spend a week looking for hidden delay fuse explosives and
waiting for a follow-up attack.
Sean
LAPD managed in this case. I suspect they'd have
handled a Bombay like incident as well; there are other police departments
and the LA Sheriff here. And armed citizens.
=========
On Pirates
Things like this are why I say "I know nothing of
naval operations".
"but I think he seriously underestimates the size of
the potential area of operations and the considerable logistics advantages
we had in the way we were able to undertake our operations during the
Tanker War that don't apply in the open waters off Somalia."
I well could be. I have to say this sounds like the
Navy got out of the underway replenishment business. A container ship can
carry lots of cargo containers, too. It's what they do. If USN can't support
this logistically they certainly can't support the probable alternatives.
"We know where the weed grows from and the only real
answer is to pull it out by the roots."
OK. I understand that as give the job to the ground
pounders, or the air-land pounders in this era. We can certainly launch
merciless punitive raids against any fishing ports we decide are guilty
sinners. And the USN can even cruise in close and bombard the towns with 5"
shell fire as in the good old days of the USS Constitution and the Barbary
Coast, despite the obsolescence of this kind of ordnance.
A Marine battalion landing team is already optimized
to do this. Tales of the CoDominium indeed! This will lead to lots of dead
bodies and lots of destroyed boats in fishing ports. Plus subsequent
pictures of starving Somalian tots whose parents can no longer catch fish.
Jerry can do this in his novels because he also controls the fictional war
crimes tribunals. UN Security Council resolution please as an immunizer
against subsequent war crimes charges?
I have to point out the Somalian pirates have been
reasonably careful about not killing indiscriminately or sinking ships. And
probably because they fear precisely the above response from the USMC. The
Barbary Wars/CoDo punitive raid tactic will therefore be ruled out by
International Morality as a disproportionate response, despite its certain
efficacy and economy of force.
If punitive raids are inadmissible as being too
barbaric, the next option is a baby-sitting mission. Here, Blackhawk Down
Redux, is where the UN and the Euro NGOs are insistently trying to nudge us.
This means every fishing port has to be occupied and the fishermen closely
supervised to ensure they stick to fishing. How long will it take for the
Somalians to adopt the path of righteousness on a self-sustaining voluntary
basis? They've gotten along without a central government for 20 years now,
and without any noticeable desire to have one.
Despite my doubts let's analyze this second approach.
On this coast this scenario requires a minimum of one infantry battalion
task force per fishing port occupied. This is the smallest unit that is
somewhat self-contained logistically and will also be able to reasonably
defend itself, as a sitting target, against attacks that will certainly
develop over the months. Even so there will be a drizzle of casualties from
occasional night time mortar attacks. And given a little time Al Qaida will
certainly return to set up a local IED & suicide bomber vest plant, plus
training base.
It seems to me all the fishing ports have to be
occupied simultaneously to prevent pirates from simply moving their bases of
operations to unoccupied ports. More populous ports will require brigade
task forces to occupy them.
How many fishing ports have to be occupied? The
commanders in Afghanistan are already calling for four more combat brigades,
which reinforcements must await an equivalent draw down in Iraq. And even so
we'll still need at least 10 container ships with helos. This time with
CH-53s and CH-47s to resupply the port occupation forces.
If 10 container ships and armed helos are
insufficient, I'll certainly raise the ante to 20. This is still a small
fraction of the cost of what's required for Real World alternative Two; land
based baby-sitting.
In my stories the war crimes tribunals would need
the Fleet and Line Marines to enforce any edicts. But I set it up that
way, of course. You will note that Sparta finds herself the victim of
something like that, and the hamper that puts on their CT efforts.
==
The more I contemplate this the more inclined I am
to non-intervention. They don't dare molest USN warships. Sealift command
long ago armed its cargo ships against Al Q. Plus they get escorts as
deemed necessary.
The one mission profile most likely to be decisive,
Marine Amphibious Unit punitive expeditions against pirate ports, is the
least likely to be approved. And truth be told, that would kill a lot of
relatively innocent people.
There's my fall back position of helos + container
ships. People in boats on the high seas are most likely to be guilty. I
still believe a few well publicized gunship attacks would curtail the entire
business.
The only land mission that would be approved through
the UN is a replay of 1992-1993. No.
Let the people whose trade is affected by this fishing
scow piracy figure this out. And if they can't figure it out then they don't
need to be trading on that route. Let 'em sail around the Cape of Good Hope
instead.
==
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081216/ap_on_re_af/piracy
"Under the resolution, nations must first get a
request for an attack from Somalia's weak U.N.-backed government, which
itself would be required to notify U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon before
any attack."
This is precisely the kind of rigmarole I predicted
would accompany any land action authorization. It's a certainty only
innocent villagers will be left in the kill zone by the time this process
with its built-in security leaks is completed.
==========
Net Neutrality
The WSJ 'network neutrality' story was fabricated
from the whole cloth. Google, like other large over-the-top (OTT) content
and application providers, like to work out deals with SPs with high
volumes of users to essentially provision caching farms colocated in the
points of presence (PoPs) of those SPs, caching commonly- downloaded
content (remember, Google owns YouTube), and even search results and the
like.
In other words, they're simply looking to expand their
content deliver network (CDN), which has nothing to do at all with so-called
'network neutrality', which is about settlement-free peering and quality-of-
service (QoS) prioritization of traffic to/from OTT networks, and the
possibility of the large backbone providers and/or broadband access
providers wanting to essentially charge extra 'pay-for-play' money despite
their existing peering agreements - sort of a Daley/ Blagojevich model of
network interconnection, vs. the East German model of the 'network
neutrality' proponents.
So, this genned-up 'story' is totally bogus, has
nothing to do with so- called 'network neutrality', totally misquotes Lessig
and others, and is clearly a provocation masterminded by the broadband
providers and/ or other parties (NOT Microsoft) with a vested interest in
seizing any blunt instrument to hand and beating about Google's head.
Networking expert
My question on network neutrality is just what
Rule, precisely, is wanted, and by whom should it be issued? And will it
encourage or discourage further investment in providing bandwidth?
==
Hi Jerry,
There has been an awful lot of attention paid to this
over the last couple of years. Certainly the whole Comcast debacle thrust it
into the limelight. Generally speaking, ISPs provide access to a shared
resource, very much similar to what a typical LAN does, where the switch
does its best to balance the bandwidth demands of the different attached
machines. Since it is shared, not every machine can use it to its fullest
capacity all of the time.
Virtually everything in life (e.g. water, electricity,
natural gas) is shared, because it is efficient. It gives us access to
things we could not otherwise afford. It is possible for me to have my own
private electrical system, but typically it is not cost-effective. With most
shared systems, there are mechanisms in place that keep access "fair". With
all of these services, I pay for use, not a flat cost. It is this
usage-based system that keeps things "fair". If I wish to heat my pool
water, my dog house, and my driveway to melt the snow, I use more natural
gas and I pay for that increased use, and that allows the gas company to
expand storage and/or increase delivery capacity.
How long would it take for the electrical grid to fail
completely if everyone was allowed to use as much electricity as they
wished, up to the limit of their service capacity? About 5 minutes is my
guess. Smart meters allow billing based on *when* electricity is used, so I
can save money by running my dishwasher at midnight instead of 7PM because
the electrical service provider wants to encourage off-peak usage, and so
will offer a cheaper rate for that off-peak use.
If we go back to the days of dial-up for the average
user, ISPs could offer unlimited packages because only gear-heads bothered
with a second phone line, and the speed of dial-up limited online
activities. People would buy software and music and movies on CD or DVD,
because downloading them was time-prohibitive. These realities kept use
somewhat fair. When broadband started to roll out, customers continued to
expect the "unlimited" part of the equation. The problem was that the
previous limiting factors of speed and phone-line tie-up had been removed,
while at the same time you have provided a service that is typically at
least 20x faster (mine today is 200x faster), and yet the cost was only
doubled. This trifecta of changes has brought us to where we are today,
where internet usage is exploding, and ISPs are between the proverbial rock
and a hard place.
In my opinion, the proponents of net neutrality fear
that if legislation IS NOT brought forward, ISPs will become the gatekeepers
of the content available on the internet, and will use their role as
gatekeepers for their commercial benefit, much as the cable and satellite
companies do now when it comes to television. This also applies to other
media such as print and radio. The internet has been incredibly open, and
the bar to entry is incredibly low. For very little money, you can publish
to the world, something that was impossible as recent as 20 years ago. If
ISPs become the gatekeepers, then that openness can disappear and the entry
bar raised high again.
Opponents of net neutrality fear that if legislation
IS brought forward that network management of ANY kind will be illegal. For
example, I am happy that my ISP has Quality of Service settings in my cable
modem that ensure that my VOIP traffic gets priority over my web browsing. I
would most definitely not want this made illegal, and I doubt anyone else
would either. Services such as streaming video that are more sensitive to
timing than say, a software download would not be allowed to be given
priority. Again, most people would not have an issue slowing their software
download a bit if it meant that the episode of LOST they were watching had
smoother playback. The key part here is that the filtering benefits the
customer. In the Comcast case, their filtering reduced the service to the
customer in order to benefit Comcast.
The grey area that exists here that is not brought up
is where these high-speed pipes are located. If Google were put some of
their content within the borders of an ISP, and assuming that the ISP does
not then give priority routing to that content, doesn't that simply improve
the service level for everyone? How is it different than an ISP just having
a dedicated fat pipe to Google? ISPs have peering arrangements all the time
because it makes sense - it improves traffic flow. Isn't Google's plan,
given what we know about it, just a mirroring (where customers are directed
to a server that is geographically close to them) solution on steroids?
Akamai does this now on a commercial basis, and other companies do it, just
on a less organized scale.
I believe the issue is not how the bits get to the
ISP, it's how they are handled when delivered to the customer. I want my ISP
to do its best to get the bits I request delivered to me as quickly as
possible, without limiting what I ask for, unless it benefits me (e.g. VOIP
traffic, blocking viruses). And what is getting blocked needs to be
published, because cases like
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/07/brit_isps_censor_wikipedia/
are what fuels the fire for net neutrality.
Glenn Hunt
The problems, as I understand them, are these:
Must Comcast provide the same speed of service for Vonage as it does for
its own VOIP packets? In the case of Comcast VOIP, someone has paid for
the service; Vonage comes in from somewhere else as part of a sharing
agreement, and Comcast is not paid anything other than reciprocity for
packets that go from Comcast to some other ISP. In the case of Comcast as
I understand it, they don't send VOIP packets through anyone else.
Thus the "level playing field" means that Comcast
must treat incoming VOIP packets exactly the same as it treats VOIP
packets that it originated; not that it can't route VOIP ahead of, say,
bit torrents or even email, but that if it does that for any VOIP then it
must do it for ALL VOIP packets, its own and those that come in from
Resume Speed, Michigan through a small family owned ISP.
That is my understanding of what net neutrality
would mean. I am open to corrections on this, but I have found that even
experts have problems with the simple question: what is the Rule, and what
entity issues and enforces it to achieve net neutrality. I find that
different advocates of neutrality have entirely different views of what
Rule they would impose.
==
Further to my previous email:
As much as it hurts me, since I am a heavy internet
user, ISPs need to introduce time-of-day caps. For example, they could give
users 50GB of traffic to use between 9AM and 11PM. Traffic outside of that
is say another 50GB. Cell phone companies do it this way, electrical
providers are starting to do this (with smart meters), and it works great,
because it encourages off-peak usage. I do download some things on
Bittorrent (typically TV shows that didn't get taped on our PVR and we can't
get through online streaming because I live in Canada), but I start them up
at night when usage is low and I am going to bed. Then I stop them in the
morning when I start work. A cap system such as this would then
automatically bill those who exceed the cap, providing extra income to the
ISP. If a user didn't want to pay the extra, they would find a way to stay
within the cap.
Glenn Hunt
============
And here we go:
Jerry,
A local public school system, Montgomery County, has
decided to do away with identifying students as "gifted".
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/
content/article/2008/12/15/AR2008121
503114.html?hpid=sec-education
Of course, this is consistent with "no child gets
ahead", but the article contains tidbits of jawdropping stupidity,
"Two-fifths of Montgomery students are considered
gifted on the basis of aptitude tests, schoolwork, expert opinion and
parents' wishes"
Yep, "parents' wishes" will get a kid identified as
gifted. It's the same in my local school district, another Washington DC
suburb. With that backdrop, perhaps we -should- get rid of a meaningless
label.
But, we shouldn't worry because,
"School system leaders say losing the label won't
change gifted instruction, because it is open to all students."
I guess Charles Murray calls this educational
romanticism, but I think this goes past romanticism and on to outright
stupidity and/or fraud.
Chuck
The future of America depends on actually
educating the brightest 20%. And we are failing at that. We sow the wind.
==============
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