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CHAOS MANOR MAIL

MAIL 238 December 30 2002 - January 5, 2003 

 

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IF YOU SEND MAIL it may be published; if you want it private SAY SO AT THE TOP of the mail. I try to respect confidences, but there is only me, and this is Chaos Manor. If you want a mail address other than the one from which you sent the mail to appear, PUT THAT AT THE END OF THE LETTER as a signature. In general, put the name you want at the end of the letter: if you put no address there none will be posted, but I do want some kind of name, or explicitly to say (name withheld).

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I try to answer mail, but mostly I can't get to all of it. I read it all, although not always the instant it comes in. I do have books to write too...  I am reminded of H. P. Lovecraft who slowly starved to death while answering fan mail. 

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Monday December 30, 2002 

Panic time:

Back in June, 2000, someone managed to follow the trail of some spammers, and reported it to me in Mail:

Hi Jerry,

I'd independently posted the "Behind Enemy Lines" story on my site. Evidently, my source was just slightly tangential from yours in that I was able to include this page: <http://premier.cluelessfucks.com/>  which consists of a broken mirror taken down at the request of the spammers (actually: threats). What's there in place of the mirror is supposed email from and chat logs with the spammer that show very recent dates and apparent admissions of spam activity. As usual, it is difficult to differentiate what is real and what is "Memorex" on the net.

regards,

Dan Bowman http://thetimesink.net A Daynotes site.

My reply was: And once again a wealth of material. I have no more knowledge than anyone else here. 

Since then that website <http://premier.cluelessfucks.com/> 
has been taken over by a porn site, and a particularly vicious one at that, since doing "back" on the place it gets you will get you in even deeper. One reader was trying to follow the spammer story and ended up in pornoland, to his dismay.

There's little anyone can do about this sort of thing: web site ownerships change, and the porn industry grabs what it can get and links that to other places. 

I am now going to run AdAware and a couple of other spy eliminators, since I probably got one through this investigation. If you don't have and run AdAware or something similar, you should.

Incidentally I found no new processes running, but there was the usual Doubleclick cookie on my hard drive, as well as a registry key; these can't be made to run the way I have set things, but it annoys me that they are there so I have AdAware delete them. I wish Norton would treat them as viruses.

Dr. Pournelle, 

After reading Monday's mail page I decided to check out the referenced web site, but I first went to www.archive.org  to bring up the page before it was co-opted by a porn ring. You can find working mirrors from there and follow the story again. Looking forward to an interesting year ahead.

Mike Ross

Yes, that will do it. Thanks.

 

 

 

 

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Tuesday,  December 31, 2002

This will have to be very brief since I have medical appointments.

Several from Roland Dobbins:

Surprise, surprise.

http://www.cnn.com/2002/TRAVEL/
12/31/tsa.employees.ap/index.html
 

 

I am shocked. Shocked.

Subject: The Monster of Aramberri

http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/
0,4057,5771068%5E401,00.html
 

wow

Subject: The year the criminals took over.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/849801.asp?0cv=CB20 

In a manner of speaking. But PT Barnum would have understood.

Subject: The Year in Publishing

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/
ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout
/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1035775946939&
call_pageid=968867495754&col=969483191630
 

Thanks. What a wonderful URL scheme...

The following is not surprising but potentially serious:

Subject: Microsoft Reader format cracked.

http://www.pocketpcaddict.com/article.php?sid=937 

(see below)

and then

Subject: An admirable exposition on spam-fighting.

http://theory.whirlycott.com/~phil/
antispam/rbl-bad/rbl-bad.html
 

All of the above courtesy of

--------- Roland Dobbins

Thanks


A number of readers including Eric found this next one. Thanks to all of you.

Brock Yates' column at Tech Central Station (TCS) reports that a Dr. Raymond Schmidt of Woods Holes has recently gotten much more concerned about cooling than about global warming. http://www.techcentralstation.com/1051/techwrapper.jsp?
PID=1051-250&CID=1051-123002A
 

Glen Reynolds, known to the blog world as "Instapundit", says: "BROCK YATES reports that Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle may turn out to be right"

Nope, Goode Doctor, I'm not accusing *you* of blogging!

RGMcF

Fallen Angels, anyone?

I'd probably hate Mozilla as much as you manifestly do if it did that sort of stuff to me. Yuck.

In my own environment, Mozilla is the browser of choice, or at least the browser of my choice -- it doesn't seem to do any of that stuff for me, and under Gnome it's as pretty and functional as any browser I've ever seen, and the tabbing features work, by default, just the way I want them to. (I haven't looked to see if there's ways to change them, just as I haven't figured out why it's not quite so pretty under fluxbox.)

My utterly uninformed guess is that Windows testing/fixing isn't as high a priority at Mozilla/Netscape as it should be. If it's to make the kind of penetration that it should, it's got to not muck about with Windows applications/settings without specific permission.

Joel Rosenberg

Indeed. And thanks. I'll have more on your conversion to a Microsoft free environment...

On the airlines case:

Re: The Monahan story http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/mail236.html#secure 

The attached file summary confirms there was an incident and matches some details in his story. Please only quote from the details, as the PDF has some 'public record' items which, although not embarrassing, could drown him in phone calls and snail spam.

(See attached file: Monahan.pdf)

Law enforcement and security folks around here have also used the 'we erase our video tapes in 72 hours' schtick, so there is a ring of some truth here. How much? Until we see the tapes which the JBTs are sitting on, we just don't know. He sure does know how to tell a story.

Sure is a shame that Mr. Monahan pled out instead of taking it to trial. I would have chipped in to the defense fund for sheer entertainment value.

-- John Bartley, K7AAY, telcom admin, Portland OR - Views are mine. http://palmwireless.cjb.net Wireless FAQ for PalmOS(r) http://celdata.cjb.net Handheld Cellular Data FAQ

Indeed. But pleading out is precisely what the authorities want. It saves on trial, gives them insurance against being sued for Ultra Vires, and makes their record look good.

But we were born free.

 

g

 

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Wednesday, January 1, 2003

Well wishing with a vengeance....

Subject: Cyborg Lobsters

In Hoffstadter's "The Mind's I", he posed a gedankenexperiment about the nature of self: Imagine one neuron of your brain being replaced by a suitably complex computer which modelled it, with a period of parallel running so there was no "cross-over" period, but a seamless transition. Now continue for all 10e26 neurons, one at a time. Would you still be "you" at the end of it?

Well, we may find out: http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/alobster.htm  is the first step. Replacing one of a Spiny Lobster's 14 ganglia with a silicon replacement. In the short term, this may be the key to curing gross damage ( ie no more quadriplegia..). In the long term, porting one's mind to different hardware.

See also http://www.academicpress.com/
inscight/11101999/grapha.htm
 

Alan Brain, Canberra, Australia mailto:aebrain@webone.com.au

Wow. I want to think about this one a while. Thanks. We live in interesting times...

I have had considerable mail about the Department of Precrime post.

I'm torn about the precriminal. My brother, a lawyer, says there's legal precedent for deciding he's guilty of something, but he doesn't defend it.

Elizabeth

And

Dear Dr. Pournelle:

First, I would like to wish you and yours a happy New Year! In reading the article regarding the conviction for attempted child rape, it does trouble me that he was charged with a crime for which there was no victim. I did a quick scan of my state's criminal code and found that, as I suspected, the law presumes an actual person as a victim. This case may go the way of the recent case decided by the US Supreme Court regarding "virtual" child porn, that is where no actual children are exploited. The Court there basically ruled no exploited child victim no crime. Frankly, in 18 years of law practice, I have never seen the State expend serious resources on a case with no clear, real victim unless someone in the DA's office wants to make a splash. I suspect that is the case here.

On the other hand, attempt crimes require the following 1. A person with the desire to commit a crime (sex with a child) 2. Intentionally engages in actions that would constitute a crime if the circumstances surrounding the conduct were as the person believes them to be; (talking to the woman about getting the child and going to the home at the time expecting the child to be there for his "use" and 3. He acts with the intent to complete the crime under the circumstances surrounding the conduct as he believes them to be, and the conduct constitutes a substantial step toward the commission of the offense. This person's entire course of action has to indicate the intent to commit the crime. Finally, its no defense that the crime was never actually committed.

In this case, it appears that he was there ready to do the crime, which makes it a crime. Not thinking about it, not talking about it, not planning it-on the premises and ready to have sex with a child. This is what takes it out of "pre-crime"

Since I tend to think that the best way to deal with child rapists involves a wall and a firing party and assuming the facts as reported were true then I hope that the Kansas prison system accords him the same type of reception that pedophiles get in the Tennessee penal system.

 

Rick Cartwright, Esq.

This chap clearly intended to commit a crime (or a jury believed he did anyway, which is about as good as we can do on intent), and given that he really meant to do it, getting him off the streets seems a good idea for protection of society. It's still disturbing: no victim, no possible victim.

The virtual porn case seems clearer, since no one is harmed by viewing either viewing or producing electronically generated pictures of any kind whatever. The notion that to make a kiddie porn movie required harming an actual kid and thus the existence of the stuff was evidence of a crime, and viewing it was therefore to make oneself and accessory -- sort of like possession of ivory or the skin of an endangered species animal -- was reasonable. If it can be shown that no human was harmed in the production of this video (although a few billion electrons were inconvenienced) it doesn't seem reasonable to punish its possession as a crime.

To continue the analogies, suppose it was electronic pictures of whale hunting, which is definitely illegal now. Or lion hunts, or elephant hunts.  Hmm. Such pictures exist. Should we dig up Gregory Peck's body and throw it into the Los Angeles River? He participated in making the movie, didn't eh?

We can agree there is something disturbing about people who want to fantasize about having sex with children, or committing violent rapes, or who like to watch snuff movies; but should they be prosecuted for thoughtcrimes? 

And this is only the beginning of the legal problems we're going to be facing this Century...

And see below


Hi Jerry,

On Dec 31st one of your items said:

"The following is not surprising but potentially serious: Subject: Microsoft Reader format cracked"

I honestly don't see why. Baen books sells their e-books in an open format and report very good sales. I also saw "Fallen Angels" back in the bookstore, and since I couldn't find my old copy I bought it again, this, inspite of the fact that it's available in the Baen Free Library and I could have simply downloaded it for free.

I do have some titles, both e-books that I paid for from Baen, and some from the free library that I don't have paper copies of, however they are in a minority since I inevitably want a physical copy of books that I enjoy reading. While I do not approve of and don't participate in the downloading of illegal copies of books, I truly do not believe that this is a major problem. I have yet to see Harlan Ellison et al actually provide any proof at all that this has hurt book sales, especially since the books he's complaining about most aren't even available for sale. (hint for Harlan: Maybe people want to buy them but can't, maybe he should make a deal to have his back catalogue reprinted instead of complaining that people want his novels)

Presently I'm reading "The Prince" and still hoping that I'll see another Janissaries novel in the not too distant future!

Have a Happy New Year,

John

Harlan actually makes considerable money from his older books: he bought up all the remaindered copies and sells them at his lectures, for considerable markup. 

But I tend to agree that electronic piracy is, as yet, not a big problem. My worry is that once the format is good and the instrument for reading them ubiquitous -- and I think the Tablet PC is both good enough and destined to be ubiquitous -- then electronic sales will become important, and digital rights management may be as well. We'll have to see. I'm not rabid on the subject, but I am concerned.

From Ed Hume:

I know that there are many theories, but this has the right feel:

December 21, 2002 5:20 p.m. Twinkle, Twinkle An astronomer says the Star of Bethlehem was Jupiter.

 

Yes, Virginia, there really was a Star of Bethlehem.

From http://www.nationalreview.com/miller/miller122102.asp 

An interesting theory. Thanks!

Iraq once more:

Hello, Jerry,

The news today -- Saturday -- carried accounts of President Bush's talks with the press about N. Korea and Iraq.

The Post said: "Bush also offered a new rationale for a preemptive strike on Iraq, declaring that an attack 'from Saddam Hussein or a surrogate of Saddam Hussein would cripple our economy.

'This economy cannot afford to stand an attack,' he said. 'And I'm going to protect the American people.'"

The full story is at: 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/
articles/A60819-2002Dec31.html
 

This sounds loopy: an insult to the skill and dedication of the US armed forces, and an insult to the intelligence of Americans.

(a) Are we supposed to believe that the Iraqi forces could ride their camels across Syria, around Israel, over the Suez canal, through Egypt and across North African to the Atlantic, and there hitch rides...no, enough...I'm being ridiculously sarcastic. (and Iraqis probably don't ride camels. I confess: possibly occidentalist prejudice and contempt. Oops.)

Instead, I'll quote from one of my favorite SF writers: no foreign army will ever drink from the Mississippi without our say-so.

(b) As preposterous as the thought of Saddam's forces getting over here, the President's answer damages the ways that Americans ponder our foreign policy. It assumes that he does not have to make a sane and rational case for his policy -- that it is enough that he says "boo", so we should jump.

Political leaders -- not "politicians" but leaders -- should have the moral core to demand that the President talk plain truth with America. Every time we accept nonsense from the President, something, maybe a little bit, but something real dies in what makes us the US.

I don't like to wave the flag, and boast, "Hey look! I'm patriotic!" (Some of that is probably linked to having heard too many sermons from my old pastor, Rev. Owen Osborne, in his Kentucky baritone, telling us to pray constantly but without showing off. "Don't say, 'Look how fervent I am...just be fervent.'"

Quietly, fervently, without American-flag leather jackets, I think this democratic republic lives by honest and open talk. When the talk, the "discourse", in more trendy terms, is a pack of blather that covers what the Administration plans, it mean that the Administration is planning and executing policy without attachment to the American people. An attachment should go two ways: they speak. We listen and reply. They listen and reply...Right now, anyone can see that the Administration does not believe what they're saying to justify their war in Iraq.

That kills a piece of what America really is.

Yes, the tendency started earlier. I know about George Creel and the office of war information / propaganda during World War I. Curiously, this new war has an eerie similarly to Wilson's golden hopes to make a war to make the world safe for democracy. I read Wilson, and something appeals to me, something makes my heart beat a little faster, but that something is not necessarily good.

The point of who started the habit of lying to America is not important now. The important thing, now, is to recognize that it's being done; to disentangle our natural eagerness to see the war and the slippery dishonest talk as only important in the endless baloney battles between Democrats and Republicans.

I'm one American who does not care. I don't want to be told to care whether Clinton was worse, or just as bad, or a shining example of honest discourse. He's not President anymore. It doesn't matter. Same for whether the Reagan/Bush CIA gave Saddam his nerve gas and helped him to use it against the Iranians. It no longer matters.

It's time to talk about the real issues with Iraq, and Pakistan's nuclear missiles, and North Korea's plans.

If those issues are too technical for Americans to think about, then we've lost what matters in this country.

(No, I'm feeling pessimistic tonight.)

Regards,

John Welch

Well, I am often the pessimist; I think I am less of one than you tonight. But I agree, to do the right thing for the wrong reasons is not good even if it is done well; and having the wrong reasons often mitigates against doing it well.

The bit about no foreign power being able to take a drink from the Mississippi was itself a quote, from Daniel Webster when Secretary of State. In the Revolutions of 1848 a Hungarian hero named Kossuth fled after the Holy Alliance put down the rebellions in Austria. A US warship picked him up in Trieste just ahead of Austrian Imperial agents. The Austrians protested, and Webster's defiant reply said in part that the United States peacefully governed an empire compared to which the Habsburg dominions were but a patch upon the earth.  Lincoln later said much the same thing. Both used the line about no one being able to drink from the Mississippi without our let and leave: partly a reference to the Battle of New Orleans, of course.

Policy discussion and summary continues.

And we have

Another nail in the coffin of the American airline industry. Delta, United, all the rest are going to become part of Amtrak, soon, at this rate.

Comair Pilot Arrested for Carrying Knife in Carryon Bag: http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGAW90FREAD.html 

The Associated Press Published: Dec 31, 2002 HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) - A Comair pilot was charged with disorderly conduct after federal airport screeners found a knife in his carryon bag, police said. Capt. Rickey L. Mayle initially denied he was carrying a knife, which was detected Sunday by an X-ray at Harrisburg International Airport before Mayle was to board a flight to Atlanta, police said. A screener searched the bag and found the knife with a 3-inch serrated blade. Mayle, 46, later said the knife had been in his bag since September, and he had forgotten about it, police said. The FBI was investigating the incident, officials said. The early morning flight was delayed more than 1 1/2 hours until another pilot could be found, Comair spokesman Nick Miller said. Mayle was released without bail pending a preliminary hearing, police said. He did not return a telephone message left at his home Tuesday.

I've really got to begin wondering if the reason for Homeland Airline Security isn't to get us all conditioned to accepting police state treatment. It certainly doesn't seem like true security is the goal. What other reason is there for this nonsense?

Happy New Year to you and yours,

Jim Riticher

That is probably not the intent, exactly, although a docile population is usually desired by government. It is certainly the effect.

Rules. Ordnung! Your papers, please.  Americans are not accustomed to this sort of thing. There's no evidence that it works at any level we'd tolerate -- now. So perhaps the notion is to get us to where we will tolerate secret police pervasiveness.

But as I say, probably not intentional in the sense that this is the goal. We are dealing with an ethic of intent: "WE MEANT WELL!" and so long at they mean well, they don't take responsibility for their actions. It's pretty common...

On the Star of Bethlehem

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

I have listened to preachers and read commentary on the Star of Bethlehem and the wise men for years. The wise men brought three gifts, but there is no mention in the Bible of how many men brought the gifts. One Baptist preacher I had said the number was given in literature as anywhere from two to fourteen. http://www.pbs.org has some commentary on the Star and the wise men. Even they admit it is speculation, with no verifiable answer.

Another Baptist preacher I had made a study of the Star in old manuscripts. He said the word translated as "star" could also mean "glow" or "aura", and it was his personal belief that what the wise men saw was an aura over the manger. Everyone commenting on the matter agrees that God could do as he wished, and it is not our place to tell Him what He can or cannot do. The book of Job permits us to speculate on what He did and why He did it.

regards,

William L. Jones wljones@dallas.net

Well there are several motives for trying to find a "natural" explanation of phenomena like the Star. One is simple debunking by people who don't believe Miracles are possible, and therefore that none happened. There is another group that's a bit harder to understand: generally churchgoers who try to explain away miracles by such means as psycho-somatic illnesses. The proper question for them is, "How do you explain the Resurrection?" And if that is explained away by something to do with suspended animation (thus asserting the incompetence of Roman executioners), the proper answer is "Why bother?" As St. Paul said, if Christ be not risen, then all our faith is in vain.

C. S. Lewis did one of his best works on Miracles. As he shows, most of those who write about them -- believers or otherwise -- don't seem to know what they are talking about. Miracles certainly do not contradict the laws of nature: If Nature were not lawful, miracles would be impossible by definition. If anything can happen, then nothing is miraculous.

None of this addresses whether certain events happened as described or not. Either one believes the accounts of Miracles, or one does not; but refusing to believe because "that's impossible" or "we know better now" is simply silly. We know more science now, but no one in Roman Palestine believed that women had children without having known men, or that men rose from the dead, or that leprosy spontaneously went away from whole batches of people.

As to the argument that "the Universe is vast, so much more vast than the ancients suspected, how can you suppose that the Earth is the Center of it?", no one who thinks about the matter supposes the Earth is at the center of the Universe or is even very important in God's plan. We are told that God loves humanity even though humanity doesn't often act in ways to deserve that; not that there are no other creatures God loves, or that the universe was created for humanity, or that humanity plays much part in God's overall Plan. We were told, sort of, that we get to participate in Creation and even become co-Creators, but there aren't many specifics on that; nor have we been assured that our participation is important. Of course we haven't been told that it isn't important.  Machiavelli: "God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us."

The following letter has been edited: it has several topics, and I have broken it into separate letters.

To: Jerry Pournelle, Chaos Manor

Re: Google

The architect Frank Lloyd Wright once wrote that he preferred crooked contractors to incompetent contractors, because he could police the crooked contractors. I have about 34 search sites listed in my bookmarks file. Of course, they don't all have independent underlying search engines, but they are mostly independent economic actors, capable of switching. This is a stopgap solution, of course. In the long run, the only viable solution is to incorporate metasearch capabilities into browsers, together with the ability to manages different querying languages, etc. Once Google understands that everything it sends will be automatically rechecked, verified, and cross-referenced, one need not worry very much about Google's integrity.

In a broadband environment, this would also have the advantage that much less personal information goes offsite. You write a specific query; the browser creates a more general one which is a superset of your query in the search engine's language; and uses it to retrieve thousands to millions of pages which it then caches. Your full query is then reapplied to these cached copies, as is the inevitable redirect query.

Andrew D. Todd 

adtodd@mail.wvnet.edu

http://rowboats-sd-ca.com/ 

-I confess some lack of understanding on how Google works; I gather that it uses a number of rules that include references to how often a site was accessed, and such like? It seems unlikely we can duplicate that on individual systems, but perhaps I have missed a point? I agree that competition will straighten out the problem. And see below.

==-

Re: Transportation and the Airlines

Of course, obviously, there are so many things that the internet can do better than any transportation system, and transportation should be thought of as a residual category. There are things you can do to promote internet expansion. For example, the noted management guru Robert Townsend (_Up the Organization_, Avis Rent-A-Car) stressed that as many people as possible should be set up as near-independent businessmen, with the central management as their banker. This would decrease the emphasis on corporate courtiership, "face time," etc. Fairly minor changes in the tax codes and SEC regulations could probably discourage companies from setting up their own internal socialism. Companies should be encouraged to meet their obligations to long-standing employees with buy-outs rather than lifetime employment. As it stands, we have a fairly large class of people who have to turn up every day and look busy.

Now, as to transportation proper, most airline routes and schedules are simply not viable once the time sensitive business travel is stripped away by the internet. Before September 11, the break-even point for flying versus driving on the basis of speed alone was about three hundred miles. What with incidental delays, near-shutdowns of commuter airlines, etc., the figure has probably moved up to a thousand miles or so. The question is not what to do about the airlines-- they are about to discover the brutal reverse leverage of network economics. When a town only has one flight a day, the airline's effective speed can drop down to some ridiculously low figure, like twenty miles an hour. When you flew to Comdex, I presume you did so on the assumption that other people would be there. At that level, all of the airlines are a single network. As each airline goes bankrupt, other airlines will become exposed, and go bankrupt in their turn. The experience of the railroads suggests that once a network-oriented industry starts downsizing in response to the threat of superior technology, the situation is likely to go out of control. Tactical retreat turns into uncontrolled panic. All investment is stopped. Everything gets cannibalized for quick cash without stopping to ask whether it is valuable in the new dispensation Paradoxically, there is also often a refusal to make judicious retreats until the last moment, which is of course when they are most likely to become panics. When the railroads went through their downsizing, they had to be dragged kicking and screaming into such basic improvements as unit trains for coal, etc. I suppose one of the major reasons that oil came to be used as stationary fuel, before being eliminated in the seventies energy crisis, was that oil was being delivered in pipelines all the way from Texas to the northeastern industrial belt, whereas the railroads refused to recognize that coal was a bulk commodity. Expect the airlines to display similar mental resistance. The gratuitous stuff like body searches are simply icing on the cake.

The real question is what is going to replace the airlines when they simply cease to function. In theory, the railroads can do so, and if we had railroads like the ones they have in Europe, it would simply be a case of "in practice." The Chinese are about to open the first working maglev railroad, between the city center and airport of Shanghai. I understand that they are already considering the next step, a line from Shanghai to Beijing.

However, in the case of American railroads, there is a strange complication which will have to be overcome. American railroads have been in economic decline since about 1914, and this has produced an ingrained "declinist" mentality. Railroaders are very, very phobic about using computers and electronic controls generally. A boxcar costs at least $100,000 and about all the electronics it has is a passive identification transponder, working on the same principle as merchandise anti-shoplifting tags. The situation is even worse in passenger railroads, what with Amtrak being a government agency.

Andrew D. Todd 

adtodd@mail.wvnet.edu

http://rowboats-sd-ca.com/ 

Sensible

==

Re: Harlan Ellison: and his remainder copies.

I think there may be one minor factor which Ellison has possibly not taken account of. It's called www.bookfinder.com, and it stitches thousands of used bookstores together into a more or less efficient market. I looked him up, and I got the impression that large numbers of his books were selling at about the minimum figure which would pay the postage and handling. No one is likely to succeed in cornering the used paperback market. The author would have to pay several dollars for a book which only realized twenty cents in royalties in the first place, and the bookseller would eagerly replenish his supply from the local salvation army store. When I was reading for doctoral comps, I used bookfinder extensively to avoid having to practically live in the library. I found that I could buy my reading list in at about nine dollars a book, and in the process, I got a pretty good feel for the kinds of people on the other end. There are a lot of housewives who visit garage sales, buy up all the books, and then turn around and resell them fast at low prices on the internet. Someone with a thousand dollars or so of working capital can make a fairly decent living on a home business that way, at least much better than working at Wal-mart.

Andrew D. Todd 

adtodd@mail.wvnet.edu

http://rowboats-sd-ca.com/ 

Actually Harlan has bought hardbound remainders and sells them as signed books after his lectures. Not quite the same thing, and while I don't do that, that's mainly to avoid the hassle factor. And Harlan may not be doing this now; he described the process to me some years ago. Seemed like a good idea, but I don't do lecture tours as he does.

 

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Thursday, January 2, 2003

I am laid low by a cold.

 

 

 

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Friday, January 3, 2003

I am still a bit out of things, but I'll try to get some mail up.

Re Google, I asked Mr. Todd in private mail which search engines he used:

My short list of search engines are Alta Vista, Google, and MetaCrawler. Alta Vista has the best complex search functions. It's very good at allowing you to progressively modify search queries to filter out irrelevant material. Google's strength is comprehensiveness with some kind of selectivity, and MetaCrawler of course is a meta-search engine, levying a lot of other search engines, but it doesn't do the best job in the world of allowing you to sieve things out. Do you remember Jane Austen's joke about how "'nice' is a very nice word-- it does for everything?

 If you have to search on a word like that, you need Alta Vista's complex functions. On the other hand, if you have a very specific phrase-- usually a proper name-- Metacrawler gets the best results. It does tend to generate false positives, so it's best used for rare phrases. Google is in between. The other thirty search engines are mostly just on file as a strategic deterrent-- like all strategic deterrents, most effective if not used. Oh, I should add Yahoo. The search engine per so isn't worth much, but at one time, Yahoo employed an awful lot of professional research librarians, and while I suppose they've mostly been given the boot by now, a lot of their classification work still remains in place.

Andrew D. Todd

Thanks.

On Transportation

Re: Transportation and the Airlines

Of course, obviously, there are so many things that the internet can do better than any transportation system, and transportation should be thought of as a residual category. There are things you can do to promote internet expansion. For example, the noted management guru Robert Townsend (_Up the Organization_, Avis Rent-A-Car) stressed that as many people as possible should be set up as near-independent businessmen, with the central management as their banker. This would decrease the emphasis on corporate courtiership, "face time," etc. Fairly minor changes in the tax codes and SEC regulations could probably discourage companies from setting up their own internal socialism. Companies should be encouraged to meet their obligations to long-standing employees with buy-outs rather than lifetime employment. As it stands, we have a fairly large class of people who have to turn up every day and look busy.

Now, as to transportation proper, most airline routes and schedules are simply not viable once the time sensitive business travel is stripped away by the internet. Before September 11, the break-even point for flying versus driving on the basis of speed alone was about three hundred miles. What with incidental delays, near-shutdowns of commuter airlines, etc., the figure has probably moved up to a thousand miles or so. The question is not what to do about the airlines-- they are about to discover the brutal reverse leverage of network economics. When a town only has one flight a day, the airline's effective speed can drop down to some ridiculously low figure, like twenty miles an hour. When you flew to Comdex, I presume you did so on the assumption that other people would be there. At that level, all of the airlines are a single network. As each airline goes bankrupt, other airlines will become exposed, and go bankrupt in their turn. The experience of the railroads suggests that once a network-oriented industry starts downsizing in response to the threat of superior technology, the situation is likely to go out of control. Tactical retreat turns into uncontrolled panic. All investment is stopped. Everything gets cannibalized for quick cash without stopping to ask whether it is valuable in the new dispensation Paradoxically, there is also often a refusal to make judicious retreats until the last moment, which is of course when they are most likely to become panics. When the railroads went through their downsizing, they had to be dragged kicking and screaming into such basic improvements as unit trains for coal, etc. I suppose one of the major reasons that oil came to be used as stationary fuel, before being eliminated in the seventies energy crisis, was that oil was being delivered in pipelines all the way from texas to the northeastern industrial belt, whereas the railroads refused to recognize that coal was a bulk commodity. Expect the airlines to display similar mental resistance. The gratuitous stuff like body searches are simply icing on the cake.

The real question is what is going to replace the airlines when they simply cease to function. In theory, the railroads can do so, and if we had railroads like the ones they have in Europe, it would simply be a case of "in practice." The Chinese are about to open the first working maglev railroad, between the city center and airport of Shanghai. I understand that they are already considering the next step, a line from Shanghai to Beijing.

However, in the case of American railroads, there is a strange complication which will have to be overcome. American railroads have been in economic decline since about 1914, and this has produced an ingrained "declinist" mentality. Railroaders are very, very phobic about using computers and electronic controls generally. A boxcar costs at least $100,000 and about all the electronics it has is a passive identification transponder, working on the same principle as merchandise anti-shoplifting tags. The situation is even worse in passenger railroads, what with Amtrak being a government agency.

Andrew D. Todd

Indeed.

 

 

Regarding the Department of pre-crime:

Jerry,

Part of me is really bothered by the guy getting convicted in this case, as there was no actual victim.

Reminds me of a story told by the Soviet defector, Victor Suvorov, in one of his books (I forget which one, but probably "Aquarium"). It seems there were a few Soviet engineering students who apparently designed a press that could turn out perfect copies of 100-ruble notes, and nobody could tell them from real ones. It was in the form of a box with a crank and an input and and output. They sold the machine to some farmers for 10,000 rubles, explaining that they could always make more fake money, but they needed some real cash for a special purpose. The students instructed the farmers what kind of paper to feed the machine with, and advised them not to get too greedy or they might get caught. The farmers paid the money and used the machine, sparingly at first, and were amazed at how perfect the notes were that the machine produced. Eventually, however, the machine broke down and wouldn't spit out any more counterfeit money. One of the farmers was mechanically inclined and he opened the machine to see what the problem was. The problem turned out to be that the farmers had been "taken in" by a clever scheme. The so-called counterfeit money the machine was producing was in fact real notes, but there had only been 50 of them. The farmers then reported the fraud to the police. Eventually the students were convicted of fraud and sentenced to 5 years in the camps, but the farmers were convicted of counterfeiting and sentenced to 10 years in the camps. Even though they had not actually committed any real crime, they were convicted because they THOUGHT they were committing the crime.

Mike Clark Olympia, WA

This continues next week

=======

You recently wrote:

"We invaded Haiti to force them to install a different crook from the one they had; how much good that did for Haiti isn't clear."

I've got it now: we had a little success with a little country like Haiti. We're bound to have a bigger success with a bigger country like Iraq. Yeah, if you buy that one, I have bridge for sale in New York....cheap at twice the price.

Thanks for your work. 

Craig Andrews

Yea, Verily.

Subject: The Internet at 20?

The Internet at 20?

http://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/
ietf/Current/msg18554.html
-------------- Roland Dobbins

Why so it is, and I survived that transition...

 

 

 

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Laid low by a severe cold or maybe it's flu.

 

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Sunday,

Hello, Jerry -

You wrote: "One of my sons (not the Navy officer) says it's public knowledge that there is evidence connecting al Queda to Saddam Hussein. If so I have been pretty absent of mind, since I don't know what it is."

I fear your son (not to mention a large chunk of our country's citizens) may be falling for the 'big lie.' For the benefit of your readers, that's a propaganda technique performed by repeating a lie so frequently and loudly that everyone belives it is true without ever requiring any evidence to support it beyond the number of times it is repeated.

I'm a relatively close news observer, and I certainly have not heard of any solid evidence that Iraq is connected with Al-Qaeda in any meaningful way.

A Google search for 'Hussein Iraq Al-Qaeda link evidence' turns up only stories reporting on the seeming lack of any such evidence. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-
1&q=evidence+connection+saddam+al-qaeda
 

Like you, I would certainly be interested to see any evidence of this alleged link. In cases where war and the lives of civilians and our military personnel hang in the balance I think that in a democracy we have the right to know the truth, and the duty to demand it, before accepting on faith whatever we are told and supporting the course of action proposed on a basis of those as-yet unsupported assertions.

Sincerely, Dan Becker

That's close to my impression. I was aware of the "Prague meeting" which seems to have now been discredited, and I am not sure there is anything else directly connecting Iraq and the 9-11 attacks.

I think the administration is determined to have its war, on the theory that it will be beneficial for everyone (including the people of Iraq). That may even be true. More, the war seems popular enough with the American people. Of course the public expects a quick victory, followed by using Iraqi oil to repay us for the costs of the war. And, I concede, the world may be a better place for our having done this.

Unfortunately, the contrast between Iraq and North Korea teaches another lesson that Khadaffi isn't likely to overlook: dictators are safer if they have a nuke or two, especially if they have a lot of oil.

 

 

 

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