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View 541 October 20 - 26, 2008

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Monday, October 20, 2008

Liberalism has its roots in Jeremy Bentham's Utilitarianism, which took as its principal goal "the greatest good for the greatest number." Bentham believed that the entire doctrine of natural rights was "nonsense on stilts". He was in other words a child of the enlightenment, which took it for granted that justice and happiness were good things worth striving for, and that the unrestrained personal satisfactions of a Genghis Khan or Ted Bundy were evil and wrong, although there was little philosophical stuffing under that assumption. Socrates (recorded by Plato) wrestled with this in The Republic and other works, and although Socrates was executed for what amounts to teaching atheism, he was never able entirely to dispense with some source of morality, some fountain of justice. Much of the book is an attempt to refute the argument that the best life is to appear to be just, while actually doing what one wills. How well he did that has been debated literally for millennia.

In any event, Bentham and Mills began as champions of individual liberty, but their form of liberalism morphed into welfarism, which led to Lyndon Johnson's attempt to implement it all in The Great Society. While the measures taken were well intended, the economic consequences were severe. Socialism, a sort of synthesis of Marxism and Benthamism, has the problem that before wealth can be distributed, there has to be wealth created to distribute. As the Scandinavian welfare states have discovered, things work well so long as the population has the old Protestant Ethic that says work is good, idle hands are the devil's workshop, and one ought not take advantage of charity if one does not need it. Over generations this fades, particularly if there is a concerted effort to undermine the religious base of these beliefs, with the result that more and more of the citizenry choose to be recipients of benefits rather than creators of wealth. That process continues and the outcome isn't entirely predictable.

The conflict between individual rights and social welfare policies is relatively profound.

We are likely to learn a lot more about that after the election.

There are a couple of letters in mail that may be appropriate to this discussion.

==

Jeremy Bentham in 1979

I took the above picture at University College in London in 1979. Bentham, one of the founders, had himself stuffed, and on occasions was wheeled into meetings of the board of trustees where he was recorded as present but not voting.

====================

I'm still in work mode. Alas I don't seem to be catching up as fast as I would like.

There is a good bit of mail, and I'll see how much I can get to.

=================

I strongly recommend you read and pay attention:

Just In Time? 

Dear Jerry,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
finance/comment/ambroseevans
_pritchard/3227361/Do-our-rulers
-know-enough-to-avoid-a-1930s-replay.html 

This article focuses on the cliff dive of trade shipping rates and activity. And it indicates a need for forward thinking. The "cheap" Asian factories have much lower capital bases and operate on razor thin profit margins even after allowing for $1/hr and lower wages.

The question to ask is whether your activity is sole-sourced on just-in-time deliveries via container liner from one of these. Unpleasant surprises are very likely in both manufacturing and, worse, maintenance activities. "De-leveraging" is not just for paper finance. "Just In Time" and the intercontinental warehouse conveyor on ship, train and truck is part of extreme leverage.

"De-leveraging" and "capital building" has implications for increased inventory sizes to ensure continuity, too.

Best Wishes,

Mark

Preparing for an economic downturn takes a good bit of thought and work; some will do it, some will not. I repeat what I said over in Chaos Manor Reviews: now is a good time to take inventory of one's assets and abilities.

Japan has strong social traditions to enforce quality control and delivery on time, at least within Japan. Mao saw to it that China has few strong social traditions of any kind.

=========================

Can anyone tell me how to find the View controls for Firefox on the Mac? That is, there is a Tools dropdown on the toolbar at the top on the Mac, but unlike the Tools tab in the Windows Firefox there is no Colorful Tabs Options menu item; and without that I can't set the way the tool bar displays items, and Firefox isn't useful if it works differently on the two operating systems.  Is this a Mac defect or my idiocy? How in the world do I set the display options?

==============

Firefox Preferences: still doesn't let me change the display. The tabs are in one long horizontal line that scrolls from side to side. I hate it. On Windows I can use Tab Mix Plus to set that to three lines of tabs that scroll vertically. I can also set a close tab command on the open window, and a close open window tab over on the right. None of that is available on the Mac or if so I can't find it.  Why is this?

I have Colorful Tabs and Tab Mix Plus installed on both PC and Mac, but on Mac I cannot find any way to use the Tab Mix Plus display controls. There must be some way, but I sure can't locate it.

========

Tab Mix Plus

Jerry, You'll find the options for Tab Mix Plus at the bottom of the Tools menu in Firefox 3. I don't think that that's changed from version 2. I also love its ability to vertically stack tabs so I can still read them.

Just out of curiosity, my Dad, Bob Long, worked at Boeing Human Factors in Wichita around 1960. IIRC you worked there around that same time. Do you happen to remember him? He died of cancer back in 1980, so I'd appreciate any memories that you might have, although I know the odds are well against it.

Looking forward to the new Janissaries and Inferno books!

Jason Long

And indeed they are there -- now. Apparently the Mac has to digest this stuff and get it into the Mac top tool bar, and it doesn't happen immediately. Ah well. It works now, and thanks.

 

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Tuesday,   October 21, 2008 

We have to take Sable to the groomers -- she's just too big for me to bathe her myself -- and then go out to get our flu shots. Mail when we get back.

And now a notice from security expert Rick Hellewell:

Adobe Flash Update

Dr. Pournelle:

Adobe has released their latest update to Flash (for multimedia on web pages) to fix the "clickjacking" bug. (This allows an evil hacker to place a hidden 'button' on a web page that will do nefarious things when you think you are just clicking on a link on a page. This exploit is not widespread, and not terribly easy to do, but is rather sneaky.)

Users can check their Flash version by going to this Adobe page: http://www.adobe.com/products/flash/about/  . You'll get your current version, and a list of versions for Windows, Mac/OSX, Linuz, and Solaris operating systems. Notice that this is not just an Internet Explorer vulnerability, but also affect Firefox, Opera, etc.

All users should ensure they have this update.

Regards, Rick Hellewell

=====================

The options for Firefox Tab Mix Plus eventually appeared in the Mac version. I am not sure why they were not there until half an hour after I installed Tab Mix Plus, but it works now.

==============

I just got this in the mail:

https://www.webscription.net/p-930-the-pournelle-continuum.aspx

 

Emperor of Ideas. Story-telling Master.

"I loved it," mega-seller Tom Clancy said of Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven's Footfall. He was only echoing the New York Times Book Review (of a saner era), which proclaimed Pournelle and Niven's work "rousing, the best in the genre." And then there is the understated play on words of the Cleveland Plain-Dealer on Lucifer's Hammer: "massively entertaining." Massively. Especially after the "mass" slams Earth into a new Dark Age!

A Pournelle refresher course (as if you needed one—but it's fun to be reminded!): Politically incorrect. Provocative. A proponent of uncompromising scientific thought as opposed to scientism and malarkey. A political and social thinker who belongs among the greats. A story-teller in every sense of the word.

But you know this. Who doesn't? Who couldn't? Dr. Jerry E. Pournelle has passed the status of "bestseller": He's become a world-wide institution. A writer who creates and recreates entire genres. A thinker who fearlessly follows the logic to its ultimate conclusion (a species that's vanishingly rare these days). And did we mention he's hilarious when it suits his purposes?

It's all here. The "Pournelle Continuum." Footfall. Lucifer's Hammer. Collaborations with Larry Niven that defined the science fiction blockbuster. "The Imperial Stars" tales, massive multi-volume collections of stories by cutting-edge writers (many of them legends themselves) brought together by Pournelle's vision and illuminated by his masterful discussion, contained between the stories, of republic, empire, of what it means to make war, to negotiate. To lose. To win. To advance as a civilization. And there are more astounding essays in A Step Farther Out, Pournelle jewels gleaned from the pages of Galaxy magazine. The books, the essays—in aggregate an extended argument for settling the solar system. The galaxy beyond. For getting out there. For living out there in style. As humanity's birthright.

Want more? How about Pournelle's "Warwold" novels Blood Feuds and Blood Vengeance (co-written with such writers as Harry Turtledove, S.M. Stirling, Susan Schwartz and Judith Tarr.) Pournelle's take on the battle for a humane civilization on a lost planet at the long end the galaxy.

And don't forget Pournelle's espionage and political thrillers. Red Heroin. It's a book Robert A. Heinlein once called "the most realistic counterespionage story I've read in a long, long time." It's here—along with its sequel, Red Dragon.

Ten books. No shipping costs. No dead tree crumble. Big thought. Huge adventure. Massively wonder-inducing ideas. Characters who are amusing, torn, noble—and always courageous and resourceful in the face of a very tough, extremely unforgiving universe. It's a recipe for the best of the best in science fiction. And, of course, it's all presented in the reader-friendly, unencrypted formats Webscriptions is known for. For the next four months, the entire compilation will go for $20. Then the e-volume dissolves and we offer the individual ebook titles for $4 each.

Footfall <https://www.webscription.net
/p-920-footfall.aspx>
by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

Lucifer's Hammer
<https://www.webscription.net/
p-921-lucifers-hammer.aspx>
by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

A Step Farther Out
<https://www.webscription.net/
p-922-a-step-farther-out.aspx>
by Jerry Pournelle

Imperial Stars 1: The Stars at War
<https://www.webscription.net/
p-923-imperial-stars-1-the-stars-at-war.aspx>
Created by Jerry Pournelle

Imperial Stars 2: Republic and Empire
<https://www.webscription.net/p-924
-imperial-stars-2-republic-and-empire.aspx>
Created by Jerry Pournelle

Imperial Stars 3: The Crash of Empire
<https://www.webscription.net/p-925-
imperial-stars-3-the-crash-of-empire.aspx>
Created by Jerry Pournelle

Blood Feuds
<https://www.webscription.net
/p-926-blood-feuds.aspx>
 created by Jerry Pournelle
with S. M. Stirling, Judith Tarr, Susan Shwartz and Harry Turtledove

Blood Vengeance
<https://www.webscription.net/
p-927-blood-vengeance.aspx>
created by Jerry Pournelle
with S. M. Stirling, Judith Tarr, Susan Shwartz and Harry Turtledove

Red Heroin <https://www.webscription.net/p-928-red-heroin.aspx>
by Jerry Pournelle

Red Dragon <https://www.webscription.net/p-929-red-dragon.aspx>
by Jerry Pournelle

The Pournelle Continuum  Price: $20.00
https://www.webscription.net/p-930-the-pournelle-continuum.aspx

This is one heck of an offer. Many of those books have been out of print for some time. Blood Feuds and Blood Vengeance are War Worlds novels. The Imperial Stars trilogy consists of stories interspersed with my essays and comments.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Wednesday,  October 22, 2008

Distributism vs. Redistributism

Obama and the Democrats propose a redistribution of incomes through the "earned income tax credit". This is often confused with the distributist views of Belloc and Chesterton, The differences are profound.

Belloc and Chesterton were both conservative capitalists, and very much opposed to Socialism (which is the best single-word description of Obama and the left wing Democrats). They did not believe the State would or could be fair in implementing its policies. They did believe that using the State to distribute incomes would inevitably lead to corruption.

They also saw truth in Marx's observation that unrestrained capitalism led to capitalists devouring each other, with more and more of the wealth and means of production concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. Marx saw that as leading to revolution, with the elimination of social classes entirely. Government would shrink to nothing, and a man might be a worker in the morning and an artist in the afternoon. Management would not be for maximum profit, but merely for maintenance. The resulting stability -- some would call it stasis -- would be the end of history.

Fascism accepted Marx's principal observation that history was the history of class warfare, but solved the problem of class warfare by erecting a State superior to all the social classes and institutions that would force everyone to work together, not for the benefit of any particular class or institution, but for the good of all. Mussolini began as a Socialist and said he remained a Socialist to the day he died; his Socialism was intended to be progressive. He built airports and not only made the trains run on time but built many of the railroads.

Socialism is sometimes described as Marxism with a human face. Hilaire Belloc presciently said that the result would be "The Servile State" in which subjects begged state bureaucrats for favors, and nothing was allowed without a permit. A man might not erect a chicken coop in his back yard without permission -- indeed, it wasn't his back yard. It belonged to the state which graciously allowed him to live there. One may judge the success of this approach by the fate of Pruit-Igoe in St. Louis, or any Chicago or New York public housing project. Proponents of public collective projects have various fixes which they say will take care of the problems if applied. The fixes do not usually include giving actual ownership to anyone but the state.

The distributist approach would be to give actual title to the property to the occupants. Chesterton argued for peasant ownership of the land even as he understood that English yeomen would not care to be called peasants. At the time he was writing, about 90% of the land in England belonged to a few hundred families who rented out farmland to those who worked it. At that time agriculture was a significant part of the British economy, and factory management, though more complex than Marx believed, was still considerably simpler that it is today. From the distributist view, if peasant ownership of farms was a proper solution in agriculture, worker-owned factories would likely be the proper solution to industry.

Both Chesterton and Belloc were concerned by the trend of increasing consolidation of industry into large conglomerates and trusts, in theory responsible to stockholders but in practice responsible to no one but the managers. James Burnham, formerly an anti-Stalinist Communist and at one time a leader in Trotsky's Socialist Workers Party, took up this argument in The Managerial Revolution (1941) and Suicide of the West. He later broke with the left and became one of the founding editors of National Review; he was a major influence on the late Samuel Francis, the populist paleo-conservative.

Most of these socio-economic views have one major concern: the increasing concentration of control over society into the hands of fewer and fewer people. This is not quite the same as increased concentration of wealth: wealth itself is no great threat to the social order although it can be used for that purpose. Socialism would tax wealth in order to set up bureaucracies that would fairly redistribute the wealth. At one time Socialism demanded the nationalization of the means of production, but experience showed this didn't work very well, either in the Soviet Union, or in the Scandinavian welfare states, or in England. Bureaucratic management "for the public good" is neither efficient in production nor particularly effective at pleasing its public clients (who are usually very much treated as clients; see the Roman origin of the word).

Distributists claim to be a third alternative to ruthless capitalism and bureaucratic socialism. The distributist view can be summarized fairly in Chesterton's statement "Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists." They believed in transparency and subsidiarity  -- local control of most resources coupled with maximum freedom. (Note that the late Jane Jacobs thought those principles the only way to avoid a coming Dark Age.) One means of distributism would be through death taxes : the money would not go to the state, but be instantly and irrevocably divided.

Distribution of ownership of the means of production might lead to Jeffersonian Democracy in a largely agricultural country, but it's much more difficult in industrial states. Worker owned companies are sometimes both efficient and successful, but they often succumb to ruthless competition from manager-controlled companies and cartels.

There are plenty of Socialists who seek to redistribute the wealth through government action (which always means creating a bureaucracy). The neo-conservatives generally favor unregulated capitalism, which generally leads to concentration of wealth. There are few distributists in the modern political picture. Yet many of us can agree that "Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists."

I suppose that the free lance programmer who owns his own computers is the best modern example of what Chesterton and Belloc sought. I would also suppose that more vigorous enforcement of the anti-trust laws, even if that led to some inefficiencies, would meet their approval. To the charge that this would destroy local industries through ruthless international competition, they would probably answer by raising tariffs.

Incidentally, the Regulatory State seems determined to restrict America to two kinds of companies: those with fewer than 50 employees, and giant corporations with thousands of employees. No one in his right mind would expand a company -- particularly in California but Federal Law is making this universal -- from 49 to 51 employees. The instant one gets to 50 (or 51 depending on the state) a huge panoply of regulations kick in, so many that even if one can afford to comply with them all, one will also need a compliance staff of several employees to make sure one is in compliance. This means that up to 10% of one's work force does nothing productive except keep the owners out of jail. This makes the company singularly uncompetitive when faced with companies that don't have to devote so many resources to complying with regulations. This is probably not what distributists had in mind.

Continued below

 

=================

I very much recommend my Imperial Stars trilogy, which is part of The Pournelle Continuum. There are some good stories in there, and some of my best essays.

=================

Tomorrow I won't be posting before about dinner time.  Next week is the Microsoft Professi9onal Developers Conference at the LA Convention Center, and I'll be there, so most activity on this page will be in the evenings. Unless I get bored...

 

 

 

 

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Thursday,  October 23, 2008

0530: Sleepless in Studio City

I'll try to get back to sleep. We have things to do all day tomorrow.

============

1715: We're at the beach house for a couple of days. The pollens got to Roberta. The cormorants, who fly north for the summer, are back; at least one of them is here in San Diego. Joe is taking care of Sable. She gets two walks a day when he's house sitting so she's happy.

SECURITY ALERT

Security expert Rick Hellewell:

Critical Windows security hole

Dr. Pournelle:

My first reading of the various links about this vulnerability and patch (see below) indicate that, although the rating is critical, and the patch should be installed immediately, there is less exposure to Vista and Server 2008 and XP SP2+ systems because their default settings enable the firewall and block ports 139 and 445. Users can check if those ports are blocked by using the ShieldsUp test at www.grc.com <http://www.grc.com/>  .

Note that this vulnerability can have the same impact as the Blaster worm (the blocking of those ports and default firewall enable is the result of learning from the Blaster worm). That blocking will help with external attacks, but an internal attack (behind the firewall) may be possible. For instance, our organization was severely impacted by an internal attack of the Blaster worm, which caused a Denial of Service (DoS) type of attack on network traffic.

The initial takeaway is that patch, and probable upcoming AV patches will be very important for all users, even if a ShieldsUp test shows that you are blocking ports 139/445. Corporate/network users are strongly advised to get this one installed on all external and internal systems, even if their firewalls are blocking those ports.

There are reports of some limited attacks using this vulnerability; I suspect the hacker community is frantically working on exploits. A typical exploit might be to install spyware/malware on your computer to gather confidential information. It is less likely, I think, that an exploit would try to just do a DoS-type (Blaster) attack; most hackers are now targeting systems for confidential information.

More general info here: http://blogs.technet.com/msrc/archive/2008/10/23/ms08-067-released.aspx 

From the MS SDL (Security Development Lifecyle) blog http://blogs.msdn.com/sdl/archive/2008/10/22/ms08-067.aspx  ; an explanation of "why didn't we catch this".

The vulnerability details have been released to the anti-virus companies, so there probably will be some protection there.

Safe computing = keep patching.

Regards, Rick Hellewell

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Friday,  October 24, 2008

On the beach: I intend to put in the day working on Mamelukes.

Distributism and Socialism: Part Two

For those wondering why the short commentary on distributism, I happened to be reading Chesterton on what's wrong with the world and it came to mind. I'm not a convert to distributism, but I Infinitely prefer dispossessing the wealthy to grow the size of the middle class to dispossessing the wealthy to growing the size of the government and bureaucratic redistribution of the wealth. Breaking up the Earl's estates to hand out land to the tenants may or may not be a great idea, but it is infinitely better than making Earl and Tenant alike the tenants of the government in the form of collective farms.

The Socialist approach is that government knows best.  That has been disproven in many experiments, some of them quite bloody, others less bloody but in all cases with unsatisfactory results. The Iron Law of Bureaucracy prevails in nearly every case. (I may as well say in ever case, since no one has been able to give me a counter example.) The Soviet complex of states is generally held up as a good example of the failure of bureaucratic rule, and indeed it was. In addition, a particularly disastrous instance was the attempt by good Socialists to spread the wealth after the fall of Communism in the USSR. Most of those involved had good intentions. The results were pretty ghastly.

Pure capitalism leads to business cycles, in which the low point is generally better (in terms of standard of living) than Socialism (and certainly preferable to Communism, if only because the low points in a business cycle are considerably shorter than the reign of the bureaucrats in either Socialist or Communist states, even if the Communism has a human face, which it seldom does: see the movie The Lives of Others for illustration). As Mr. Chesterton said, the problem with pure capitalism is not that it leads to too many capitalists, but to too few capitalists.

 I learned freshman economics the hard way: I was suddenly required to take over a very large class in Freshman Economics when the professor was disabled, so I had no choice but to read the textbook, read other relevant books, and stay ahead of the class. Fortunately for me the textbook was that of David McCord Wright rather than some of the more popular economics texts, and I was struck by Wright's logic and became one of his fans. This may be why I am inclined to favor vigorous enforcement of anti-trust laws. I confess I was a bit distracted from this view by arguments from National Review when Buckley ran that magazine; but I have recovered. The argument against enforcement of anti-trust laws and preventing any single or small group of companies to dominate an industry is the argument of efficiency: a few small companies in competition will produce more widgets with a smaller number of employees because there won't be so much administrative redundancy. Note that this has always been a major argument for Socialism including the old Socialist fervor for nationalization of industries: what is the need for 27 companies making soap powder or breakfast cereal, each having personnel departments, marketing departments, legal staffs, and other such employees not concerned with making widgets or boxing cereal? I confess that as an undergraduate I was impressed with that argument and vigorously employed it myself. 

The Socialist argument failed in practice, succumbing to the Iron Law, as well as to the economic technical problems concerning flow of information: markets are better at concentrating and distributing information on demand than any bureaucracy could ever hope to be. Besides, competition keeps everyone on their collective toes: produce efficiently or lose business to the competitor. Certainly we have enough information now to conclude that for efficient production of widgets, or bread, or cars, or nearly anything else tangible, capitalism is the superior system. You get a bigger pie, and if one has a larger pie then distribution of the pie is a lot easier.

For most of the time this is unquestionably true: but there remains the problem of the business cycle: a time when everything seems to come apart. Fortunes are lost, employment drops, and panic -- usually but not always unjustified by the actual conditions -- sets in. The panic sends the western world deeper into depression (both psychological and economic). For a while economists were certain that John Maynard Keynes had solved this problem and the only requirement was to apply good Keynesian principles to even things out; there would be business cycles, but they'd never get to the panic stage because we now understood them and could halt the slides as they began.

This does not appear to be self evidently true in Fall of 2008.

One does wonder whether the efficiency of having a few very large financial institutions outweighs the cost of the disasters that ensue when a Black Swan appears; whether it might not be better to have, instead of one institution so large that it justifies paying its top executives $100 million a year, one hundred such institutions paying executives $1 million a year? Certainly this would be less efficient. The highs would not be as high. But would the lows be as low? Why must there be institutions so large that they cannot be permitted to fail, and must be rescued by the common purse?

I recently got this email:

Distributism vs. Redistributism

So what's your opinion about the government owning equities in formerly private (but publicly held) businesses? Distribute the shares to all citizens?

roger

I am not sure I have a proper answer to that: how does the government divest itself of ownership in key financial institutions? And can it do so in a way that benefits all? We have lessons in how NOT to redistribute the wealth from the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union. Giving everyone a share of stock and allowing them to sell to the highest bidder in an unregulated auction doesn't seem a bright idea, but then having bureaucrats negotiate deals for the people doesn't seem so bright either. Should shares be distributed equally to all? Should those who pay the most taxes get more shares? That latter seems more fair, but also concentrates wealth; but then an open and unregulated auction would probably end with concentration of wealth also.

I haven't thought about this enough to have a strong recommendation; but I do think it an important problem and I've seen little discussion of it elsewhere.

It is time to consider this question: is there a way to divest the government of its ownership and equity in the key financial institutions without causing total disruption; and can we do that in a way that minimizes the concentration of wealth into a few institutions who, however efficient they may be, can never be allowed to fail? Would it be better to use the government's power through these purchases to break these things up into a number of smaller institutions, any one -- or any dozen -- of which can be allowed to fail without ruining the lot of us?

========================

In case you missed the announcement of Baen's Pournelle Continuum deal, it's worth your attention.

============

There is a comment on Microsoft Certification in Mail. And now I am off to work on fiction.

 

 

 

 

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Saturday,  October 25, 2008

A slow day at the beach house. We'll be home soon enough and then it's PDP.

Pigs to the trough.

<http://apnews.myway.com/article/20081025/D941MO9G0.html>

-- Roland Dobbins

Astonishing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sunday,  October 26, 2008

Home from San Diego. Microsoft Professional Developer Conference tomorrow. I'll report with my interpretations.

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