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Mail 149 April 16 - 22, 2000

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Monday  April 16, 2001

I will be away for a week. I'll try to put up a fair amount of mail before I go. You may also want to visit

http://www.ttgnet.com/rbt/thisweek.html

which is Bob Thompson's site.

You probably saw this last week but it is worth repeating:

Jerry, I swear, this is the funniest thing Microsoft has ever done:

http://www.officeclippy.com/ 

This Web site, part of the Office XP ad campaign, shows how Office XP makes Clippy unnecessary.

There are some hilarious Flash animations featuring Gilbert Gottfried as the voice of Clippy. In the first one alone, representative computer users call Clippy "moronic" and "next to Microsoft Bob, the most annoying thing in computer history"!

It's just wonderful. :-)

. png

And it is all true...

And Talin asks some good questions:

1. After the AAAS meeting, you said you had some new views on global warming, and that you were going to send a write-up to subscribers about it. I must have missed this, and I searched the site and couldn't find anything more recent than December of last year.

2. What do you think of this new cattle virus? My friend tells me that the beef industry in England is basically dead, and it's very easy for the virus to spread on tourist shoes and such so we may soon have the same problem here.

I think that we as a civilization have far too many monocultures in our food and other survival chains. Although in this case, I don't think having more varieties of cattle would have helped.

3. What's your prescription for the power situation &; PG&;E bankruptcy? We know why it happened, what should be done?

4. With the increasing popularity of ADSL, there is an increasing disparity between how fast you can serve up content and how fast others can consume it. Large, well-funded commercial sites can afford tons of bandwidth, but what about the smaller, independent content hosts? Given that there are far more consumers than servers, and the consumers now have much faster bandwidth, how long will it take before hobbyist servers are perceived as unacceptably slow? Will the web become a sea of broken links as the smaller sites decide to call it quits? Will the only "pleasurable" browsing experience be obtained by going through AOL or MSN? I see a possible tipping point here...

-- Talin "I am life's flame, respect my name, Explorati, Inc. my fire is red, my heart is gold. http://www.explorati.com Thy dreams can be, believe in me, http://www.sylvantech.com/~talin if you will let my wings unfold!" -- Heather Alexander

Global Warming: I think it is happening. I don't think we can do a lot about it, but perhaps we can. I do think we need to know a lot more, and we ought to be spending several billion on finding out more: more about what is happening (is it a solar cycle, which seems reasonable since we have been through periods with warming that look like this at about 10,000 year intervals); is the CO2 doing anything (we have a higher CO2 level than we have ever had in the ice core histories) and if so what can be done? And so forth.

The key to all this is LOW COST ACCESS TO SPACE. By low cost I mean at a cost per pound down there around what you pay per pound for a first class airline ticket to Sydney from LA. That can be done, and if it is done, we will have the means to (1) measure what is going on, and (2) do something about it. Do that and we will be if not all right, then better off.

Depriving the west will do no good. It won't work. This generation is not precisely noted for its positive attitudes toward deferred reward. And those who are not going to be harmed by deprivation will find it hard to impose their solutions on those who will than they seem to think...

The proper answer to most economic questions is a larger pie. It is just a lot easier to divide a BIG pizza among a bunch of hungry children than it is to divide a small one. Of course all know that but we don't always seem to act as if we know it.

--

I don't know of a new cattle virus. Foot and mouth has been around a long time although not in the US. As a child in rural Tennessee I was aware of it and knew the symptoms. Never saw it. As to scrapie, I don't know anything at all that hasn't been in the literature recently.

--

There won't be any solutions to the power crisis until we have more power plants, and that doesn't mean windmills. Nuclear power is the most environmentally benign. And forcing the ratepayers to pay what power costs is the simplest short term remedy. But they won't. The State "surplus" is gone, of course. And the madness will continue. 

We need more power plants and lots of them. But then I said that in my columns and articles 20 years ago.  Things haven't changed much.

 

--

George Gilder calls it 'infinite bandwidth". I said much the same thing a few years ago. It will come and you can't stop it. I wish I had it now, but give it time.

I've nearly completed clearing the backlog accumulated during Lent. Will someone please tell me whether I should read the article below, or whether it is just one more AntiRacist who is on "our side"?

http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/19/apr01/sandall.htm 

The perils of designer tribalism by Roger Kimball A generalized tolerance will be best achieved if we leave undisturbed whatever it is which constitutes the special character of particular individuals and peoples, whilst at the same time we retain the conviction that the distinctive worth of anything with true merit lies in its belonging to all humanity. -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

[A] life without piety, including piety to the past, courts grief and does damage to the life of the living individual. -Edward Shils

They are very gentle, and know nothing of evil. -Christopher Columbus

In 1983, the French writer Pascal Bruckner published Le sanglot de l'homme blanc, an astringent, intelligently disabused attack on recent European efforts to sentimentalize the Third World. Duly translated into English a few years later as The Tears of the White Man: Compassion as Contempt (Free Press, 1986), the book excited a brief spark of interest among conservatives and then sank without trace into the tenebrous limbo of the out-of-print.

It was an unfortunate, and undeserved, fate. Bruckner's book is a vigorous indictment of "Third Worldism"-the odious species of romance that glorifies everything foreign, exotic, and primitive while simultaneously railing against civilization, science, and modernity. (That other social philosopher, W. S. Gilbert, was right to save a place on his famous list for "the idiot who praises with enthusiastic tone/ All centuries but this and every country but his own.")

The very power of Bruckner's indictment helps to explain its neglect. The message he brought was distinctly unwelcome music to the ears of politically correct intellectuals, whose smugness and sense of moral superiority, then as now, was inextricably bound up with the mendacities of Third Worldism and kindred specimens of emotional blackmail. (Just listen to Susan Sontag on Kosovo or Michael Ignatieff on Rwanda.) "Solidarity with oppressed peoples," Bruckner wrote,

is above all a gigantic weapon aimed at the West. The logic of aggression is at work in Third World solidarity, and this has made it a continuation of the Cold War by other means. Being non-European is enough to put one on the side of right. Being European or being supported by a European power is enough to make one suspect. The bloody messes in banana republics, and butchery of political opposition and the dictatorial lunacy by their petty chieftains are all brushed aside. Such trifles will not restrain the progress of these peoples toward socialism. What seems criminal in Cuba, Angola, and Guinea has the real purpose of washing away the far greater crime of colonialism. Clearly, Bruckner's message is as pertinent today as it was in the 1980s-more so, perhaps, since the attitudes it chronicles, if often less histrionic, are today more thoroughly institutionalized, more thoroughly absorbed into established opinion. It is worth pointing out that, unlike many Third Worldists, Bruckner had firsthand knowledge of the problems about which he wrote. Having worked as a member of the International Action Against Hunger, he animated compassion with deeds. If this tempered his romanticism, it also sharpened his vision. Bruckner did not march arm-in-arm with Jean-Paul Sartre. He was not a beneficiary of UNESCO's extortionist escapades. He did not rail against Western oppression. He did not curse the evils of colonialism. On the contrary, he understood that the West's real crime was not pursuing but rather abandoning its responsibilities as a colonial power.

And more. I found it an interesting but disturbing article.

As was

http://thenewrepublic.com/030501/easterbrook030501_print.html 

And finally from St. Onge:

From: Stephen M. St. Onge saintonge@hotmail.com

Subject: Waco Again

Dear Jerry:

See http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-395es.html  for an expose of the latest Waco coverup, and http://www.jewishworldreview.com/michael/kelly.html  for some of the facts on the public fool system mess.

Then, to get the bad taste out of your mouth, see http://www.adcritic.com/content/john-west-red-salmon-bear-fight.html 

And perhaps that will give you all enough to do while I am gone...

 

In case it isn't, there's a bit more below.

 

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Tuesday,  April 17, 2001

From John Bartley:

CMP's NETWORK MAGAZINE has this good overview of spam-fighting: http://www.commweb.com/article/printableArticle?doc_id=COM20010411S0004 

Also, an RFD to a proposed new group, comp.sys.palmtops.wireless (for the discussion of wireless h/w &; s/w for palmtops) has been posted to news.groups.

Discussion of the proposal has to be in news.groups, but it can be crossposted to other groups, should you be inclined.

There will be a vote after the discussion period, so even if you don't want to keep an eye on the discussion, you may want to watch news.announce.newgroups  for the Call For Votes (in the fullness of time).


Hi Jerry,

I just read the second installment of your article dealing with SAMBA on your home LAN.

Have you looked at a very good SAMBA admin tool called swat? It has a web-based front-end, so once you've set up the SWAT and HTTP servers you can admin your SAMBA services without logging on.

It comes as standard with the SAMBA distribution.

I am a confirmed UNIX bigot, and usually opt for vi as my system management tool, but I found swat to be useful enough for even me to use!

Regards,

Adam Nealis.

Thanks. Actually I am just learning the intricacies of SAMBA which has been around a long time but which I am just finding out about. The problem with being me and not one of a dozen clones is time...

Clearly we have a wide variety of readers in many places:

Dear Dr Pournelle, "And yet I wonder: Rome began with a mission to "defend the helpless and make humble the proud." A noble mission. It led to the Punic Wars (a phase we have already passed in the US), the Gallic Wars (a phase we passed without any domestic destruction here; the Gauls never threatened Washington although their equivalent did occupy the Philippines) and the Civil Wars and Spartacus."

A classical education is pretty useless overall but sometimes comes in handy. I recognised the Englishification of parcere subiectis et debellare superbos as part of Virgil's Aeneid (I think, across a gap of 30 years), and therefore dealing with early Rome, in fact the King period, but Virgil was writing - what - around 30BC? at the transition from Republic to Empire. So I always thought it was a justification of empire.

It seemed when learning Latin that Rome venerated courage but wasn't really interested in affairs outside its backyard, till the Gallic intrusions (Brennus? his thumb on the scales, growling vae victis to the demoralised Romans) showed them they needed buffer territory, what later Venetians would call a retroterra.

This would make "defend the helpless and make humble the proud" a response to aggression, not a precursor to it. Which I reckon means America - and I include Canada, at least - should continue to look out for its friends overseas. You might think only Israel and England would be special cases, but if you want to know who your friends are, they're the ones who feel a cold wind blowing down the back of their necks when someone nicks a superpower's plane and crew.

Just as a postscript: in another context you wrote "A plantation economy usually prevails over a small-holder peasant economy (as Rome found out)". >From what I remember, the consensus is that the huge cost of the first Punic war bankrupted the Roman state, which had to grant privileges (general farms on certain taxes, for example) to an oligarchy in order to prosecute the war. This in turn killed off smallholders; society became corrupt enough that smallholders were driven off the land by hired bully-boys. The resulting agribusinesses could be very efficient, but Rome eventually could no longer call on the sons of the soil to man the legions.

Regards, TC

-- Terry Cole, BA/BSc/BE/BA(hons) tcole@maths.otago.ac.nz System Administrator, Dept. of Maths and Stats,Otago Uni.

PO. Box 56, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND tel:64-3-4797739 fax:64-3-4798427

Of course New Zealand has its own views about US warships and their harbors. But I understand your view. I have tendencies to sharing it. But the logic of Empire is absolute: an Empire will tell New Zealand to keep it's nuclear scruples in a dark place, and take what measures are thought needed by the Empire. And so it goes.

And the  cold wind bothers me a bit; and perhaps there is nothing for it but to be a super power rather than a Republic. And when my generation is gone there will be none who remember when the US was a republic whose business was business and whose policy was to be the friend of liberty everywhere but the guardian only of its own.  And as to our friends, just remember that we will continue to be overpaid, oversexed, and over there.  It is a consequence of having powerful friends that they are more equal than you...

And something else to think on:

Dear Dr Pournelle,

 "In the discussion of schizophrenia as an inheritable disease, it was pretty thoroughly established that schizophrenia was unknown in some primitive peoples until contact with western civilization; after which it appeared and became more prevalent." Curiously, a TV item on the night I read that comment featured a piece of American research showing that (if memory serves) the risk for men over 45 of having schizophrenic children was an order of magnitude greater than for men 20-25 years old. A women on the research team noted that they tried to find whether confounding factors like socio-economic status would affect the result, but no. The voiceover stated a possible reason; unlike women, who are born with all the eggs (ova) they will ever have, men continuously manufacture sperm throughout their lives. This means that the aging processes which affect normal cells (like chromosome telomere changes) will affect the spermatozoa. It occurred to me that as average life expectancy increases, society should then see an increase in schizophrenia - and perhaps associated criminality. But the overall risk is still pretty low, about 1%. If true though, the introduction of modern medicine might explain why primitive peoples now have a noticeable incidence.

I've cc'd this to Ed Hume.

 

-- Terry Cole, BA/BSc/BE/BA(hons) tcole@maths.otago.ac.nz System Administrator, Dept. of Maths and Stats,Otago Uni.

PO. Box 56, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND tel:64-3-4797739 fax:64-3-4798427

And I wish I had time to comment. This should do it for this week as we are off in hours and I have yet to pack.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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