Month: April 2003

True love, political style

Attorney General Bill Lockyer, a long-time nemesis of mine in the California Legislature, proved he’ll do anything for a vote when he married his third wife: The small, private wedding of William Westwood Lockyer and Nadia Maria Davis last Friday was limited to close family and friends, but 35 million Californians have an interest. The … Continue reading “True love, political style”

Attorney General Bill Lockyer, a long-time nemesis of mine in the California Legislature, proved he’ll do anything for a vote when he married his third wife:

The small, private wedding of William Westwood Lockyer and Nadia Maria Davis last Friday was limited to close family and friends, but 35 million Californians have an interest.

The groom is California’s Attorney General and is raising money to run for governor in 2006. Serving his second term in an office that’s a traditional springboard to the governor’s office, and with 25 years in the state Legislature also under his belt, Lockyer is a potent fund-raiser and Democratic power broker.

Now he has married a politically active Latino woman 30 years his junior, and the child they expect late this summer will turn 3 years old in the year Lockyer makes his gubernatorial bid.

Lockyer dated some much more substantial women before marrying this one, including the former head of the California Judges’ Association and state senator or two. The only question about this marriage is who the child’s father is, but we’ll probably never know. Congratulations are in order all around.

Restoring museum loot

The Washington Post reports that we’re making some progress in getting back the booty looted from the museum in Baghdad by Iraqis last week: Officials are also using tips from citizens to hunt down stolen items, and trying to prevail on thieves to turn them in voluntarily. Muslim clerics, at the officials’ urging, have announced … Continue reading “Restoring museum loot”

The Washington Post reports that we’re making some progress in getting back the booty looted from the museum in Baghdad by Iraqis last week:

Officials are also using tips from citizens to hunt down stolen items, and trying to prevail on thieves to turn them in voluntarily. Muslim clerics, at the officials’ urging, have announced over mosque loudspeakers that anyone with looted items should return them to museum curators, no questions asked. U.S. reconstruction officials said they plan to air similar messages on Iraqi radio stations starting tonight.
“It’s already working,” said John Limbert, the U.S. ambassador to Mauritania, who is serving as adviser to Iraq’s Culture Ministry for the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, the U.S. postwar agency for Iraq. “I’ve heard from our friends that a number of objects were collected in mosques in the neighborhood after appeals from the imams of the mosques.”

Some was explicitly taken for safekeeping by museum staff, as they’re trained to do.

Power to the people, Jack

From the pages of the New York Times: In Baghdad, power was restored to about one-fifth of the city for the first time in three weeks. That’s good.

From the pages of the New York Times:

In Baghdad, power was restored to about one-fifth of the city for the first time in three weeks.

That’s good.

Do the wrong thing

I’ll give a shiny quarter to anyone who can make sense out of this gem of post-modern ethics from Steven “Emergence” Johnson: Just because something’s morally right doesn’t always make it the right thing to do. Huh? What? Are you on drugs? Retarded? Demented? A tenured professor? A Ba’ath Party regular? That’s exactly what it … Continue reading “Do the wrong thing”

I’ll give a shiny quarter to anyone who can make sense out of this gem of post-modern ethics from Steven “Emergence” Johnson:

Just because something’s morally right doesn’t always make it the right thing to do.

Huh? What? Are you on drugs? Retarded? Demented? A tenured professor? A Ba’ath Party regular? That’s exactly what it means, nothing more and nothing less. Slap, slap, slap.

Mr. Welch on Mr. Havel

Reason: Velvet President: Why Vaclav Havel is our era’s George Orwell and more is a first-rate essay to read when you’ve got more than a few minutes of peace and quiet. This is your reward: …Havel has enabled Czechs to punch above their weight in international affairs for 13 years; this will likely end as … Continue reading “Mr. Welch on Mr. Havel”

Reason: Velvet President: Why Vaclav Havel is our era’s George Orwell and more is a first-rate essay to read when you’ve got more than a few minutes of peace and quiet.

This is your reward:

…Havel has enabled Czechs to punch above their weight in international affairs for 13 years; this will likely end as the extraordinary geopolitical circumstances that created him fade and are replaced by more provincial Czech political concerns. Havel himself sees his career as a massive historical accident, even a joke. But as he walks off the global stage, Czechs and the rest of the world can be thankful that someone like him was essentially in the wrong place at the right time. He remains a figure from whom not just insight but inspiration can be drawn.

“The most important thing,” Havel said in his final New Year?s address as president, “is that new generations are maturing, generations of people who grew up free and are not deformed by life under Communist rule. These are the first Czechs of our times who inherently consider freedom normal and natural. It would be great if the breaking through of these people into various parts of public life leads to our society more factually, thoroughly and impartially examining its past, without whose reflection we cannot be ourselves. I also hope it will lead to our successfully parting with many ill consequences of the work of destruction the Communist regime wreaked upon our souls.”

UN talks Internet to villages; electricity can wait

The UN is going to hold a meeting to talk about wireless networking in the Third World, with help from The Wireless Internet Institute: On June 26 , 2003, the Wireless Internet Institute will join forces with the United Nations Information and Communication Technologies Task Force to host “The WiFi Opportunity for Developing Nations” at … Continue reading “UN talks Internet to villages; electricity can wait”

The UN is going to hold a meeting to talk about wireless networking in the Third World, with help from The Wireless Internet Institute:

On June 26 , 2003, the Wireless Internet Institute will join forces with the United Nations Information and Communication Technologies Task Force to host “The WiFi Opportunity for Developing Nations” at UN Headquarters in New York City. The conference will create the conditions for informal dialogue and brainstorming among industry practitioners, government representatives and international development experts. It will feature plenary sessions and structured brainstorming workshops to establish strategies to overcome obstacles as well as develop environments favorable to the broad deployment of WiFi infrastructures. Conference conclusions will serve as a blueprint for national consensus-building programs, spectrum-policy reform and infrastructure deployment.

Maybe now that Hans Blix is out of a job, he can inspect Third World nations for strategies to overcome obstacles to Internet connectivity, like, um, no computers and stuff. At least that’ll keep him out of real trouble.

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m trashing the UN, not WiFi. I love WiFi, and not just because I invented most of its MAC protocol for Photonics back in 1992 (beacons, segmentation, RTS/CTS, and addressing). WiFi is a great solution to the “last 100 feet” problem, but it’s not a backbone or wide-area mesh solution, because: a) there aren’t enough channels in the 801.11b spectrum for that, and b) 802.11a doesn’t go far enough. So we need some better solutions to the infrastructure problem than 802.11, and we even need better solutions to the “last 100 feet” than the standard allows. As originally designed, the MAC supported the kinds of Quality of Service mechanisms needed for telephony, but the trio that shoehorned the standard dropped this feature, and now we’ve got a mess on our hands.

So 802.11 is nice, but it’s time to go to the second generation before we get too hog-wild about implementing it everywhere. And you already knew that anything the UN’s up to these days is likely to be crap.

And just incidentally, if there’s no such thing as RF interference (as David Reed and David Weinberger claim), then why should the FCC free up more channels for WiFi?

In Saddam’s pocket

Tim Blair has the goods on George Galloway, the British MP who received a half million bucks a year to lobby Saddam’s case in the Parliament. On top of the recent evidence of payoffs to Russia and Germany, and what we already knew about France, this makes the protesters and others who advocated for Saddam … Continue reading “In Saddam’s pocket”

Tim Blair has the goods on George Galloway, the British MP who received a half million bucks a year to lobby Saddam’s case in the Parliament. On top of the recent evidence of payoffs to Russia and Germany, and what we already knew about France, this makes the protesters and others who advocated for Saddam without being paid look like suckers.

Iraq’s WMDs and Al Qaeda connections

It seems that US claims about Iraqi WMDs and Al Qaeda connections were right after all. See Judith Miller in the New York Times: WITH THE 101ST AIRBORNE DIVISION, south of Baghdad, Iraq, April 20 — A scientist who claims to have worked in Iraq’s chemical weapons program for more than a decade has told … Continue reading “Iraq’s WMDs and Al Qaeda connections”

It seems that US claims about Iraqi WMDs and Al Qaeda connections were right after all. See Judith Miller in the New York Times:

WITH THE 101ST AIRBORNE DIVISION, south of Baghdad, Iraq, April 20 — A scientist who claims to have worked in Iraq’s chemical weapons program for more than a decade has told an American military team that Iraq destroyed chemical weapons and biological warfare equipment only days before the war began, members of the team said.

They said the scientist led Americans to a supply of material that proved to be the building blocks of illegal weapons, which he claimed to have buried as evidence of Iraq’s illicit weapons programs.

The scientist also told American weapons experts that Iraq had secretly sent unconventional weapons and technology to Syria, starting in the mid-1990’s, and that more recently Iraq was cooperating with Al Qaeda, the military officials said.

Some anti-war folks had already started gloating about the unfound weapons and impossible Al Qaeda connections a bit prematurely, it now seems. That’s not a good thing to do.

via Kausfiles.

WiFi the answer to Iraq?

The Washington Post published some especially clueless remarks on WiFi and Iraq recently: Will Wi-Fi — wireless networking technology — be the answer to reconstructing Iraq’s devastated telecommunications infrastructure? “By using Wi-Fi,” USA Today reported this week, “parts of Iraq could skip the build-out of traditional phone and cable networks altogether. The situation is similar … Continue reading “WiFi the answer to Iraq?”

The Washington Post published some especially clueless remarks on WiFi and Iraq recently:

Will Wi-Fi — wireless networking technology — be the answer to reconstructing Iraq’s devastated telecommunications infrastructure?

“By using Wi-Fi,” USA Today reported this week, “parts of Iraq could skip the build-out of traditional phone and cable networks altogether. The situation is similar to how cell phone technology enabled huge swaths of the Third World to avoid regular land-line phone systems. Wi-Fi equipment makers such as Cisco Systems, Proxim and Nomadix are talking to government agencies and non-profits about possibilities for Wi-Fi in Iraq.”

Nobody likes WiFi more than I do (I invented the largest part of the MAC protocol that WiFi uses), but I have to say that this article is nonsense. In the first place, Iraq’s telecom infrastructure isn’t “devastated”; the coalition went out of its way not to damage infrastructure, and even if it had destroyed some telecom switching centers, the bulk of the cable plant is obviously still intact. So the question is whether any reasonable person would substitute WiFi along with something like voice over IP as an alternative to a telecom network with shiny new switching centers. Gee, what a comparison: with wired telecom, you get as many interference-free channels as you have pairs of wires, or millions. With WiFi, you get three. With telecom, your conversation is digitized nearby, and all parts of it arrive at the other end within microseconds, intact and in the right order, while with VoIP and WiFi, some of it gets there, some of it doesn’t, some gets there pretty quick, some not so quick, and some in the wrong order and it’s all dependant on what your neighbor or the other guy’s neighbor or some other neighbor is doing. With telecom, you can connect to the system with a $10 analog phone, and with WiFi you need a computer, a WiFi NIC, a whole boatload of software and a headset, and your battery better be charged.

There’s a lot of nice things you can do with WiFi, but replacing the phone network isn’t one of them.