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A list of successful projects to which I contributed substantially as a software developer. (In reverse-chronological order.)
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Blog sites of friends and family (under construction).
6/30/2009 The O’Brien Trial: Judge Dismisses Defence Motion for Acquittal
L ast week, Mr. Justice Cunningham – the judge presiding in the O’Brien trial dismissed a defence motion for a “directed verdict of acquittal”, which would have brought the Ottawa Mayor’s legal troubles to an immediate end. But, no such luck – the Judge didn’t buy defence arguments, despite experts following the case suggesting a likely victory for O’Brien beforehand. Click the video associated with this blog entry to drill into Cunningham’s ruling and how O’Brien might well have done himself in as early as his Ottawa Police interview back in April 2007. For related stories and links, visit:
O’Brien Quotes from Video:
6/23/2009 Iran Election “Free & Fair” Say Callers to Conservative Talk ShowI couldn’t believe my ears driving to work this morning, listening to a morning talk radio show on Ottawa’s CFRA radio. CFRA’s listener demographic is largely Conservative, which is one of the reasons I was so surprised to hear a number of callers voice support for the Iranian government’s claim that the recent election, which had sparked riots in Terhan and other Iranian cities this past week, were “free and fair”. This view contradicts reports yesterday that international observers had uncovered evidence of widespread fraud at numerous polls – enough irregularity for these observers to harbour serious doubts concerning the overall result of the election. In particular one caller cited evidence that the regime hadn’t been toppled yet as evidence that it must have majority support, “else it wouldn’t be in power.” Sometimes I gotta wonder what people use for brains. I suppose according to this fellow, we might as well do away with elections in Canada because the government could be changed by means of an armed uprising. And if such an uprising should fail; well, obviously the majority must want the government to remain unchanged. Might is, after all, always right, isn’t it? Even more incredible was the show’s host – whose name wasn’t announced during the time I was listening, unfortunately, seemed unwilling to challenge the caller’s facts or intone a peep of disagreement. I’m starting to think CFRA takes this Conservative thing a little too far….the word isn’t supposed to mean preserving the status quo at the expense of hundreds or thousands of innocent lives. Or so I’d thought, anyway. Even were I willing to concede that the incumbent Iranian president (Ahmadinejad) actually won despite obvious evidence of fraud; no government that sanctions fraud, arrests journalists en masse, or is paranoid enough to blame “the west” in some kind of huge international conspiracy to control its destiny by agitating such a huge segment of its own population – to the point of becoming an enemy of the people it’s supposed to govern – no government of this sort can legitimately claim to represent the people, regardless of whether it or one of its candidates won an election. And, for the record, I don’t believe for a moment that Ahmadinejad won the election. A snowball staying frozen in hell would have a better chance; but the best thing Ahmadinejad could do at the moment is concede. Frankly, I don’t think he’s either courageous or smart enough to do so – but this movement that’s started in Iran might prove to have more longevity than his own political career otherwise. (Not that I’m all that hopeful he’ll emerge from any revolution with any kind of political voice.) Premier says apology punishment enough after Alberta MLA's commentsF reedom of speech is often cited by those defending politicians like Alberta MLA Doug Elniski, a Conservative back-bencher who joins a number of his kin on the political right embroiled in scandals sparked by what they said before and now regret. Conservative apologists complain he and others like him are merely doing what so many other politicians don’t – speak their mind – and it’s led us to a political culture dominated by image, spin doctors and political correctness. So they say, Liberals are just better at not getting caught. Speaking as an elector – and not one who, admittedly, tends to vote Liberal – I find this an extremely odd bit of reasoning. While it’s certainly true that our political leadership has honed its collective expertise at managing appearances over the last several decades, why shouldn’t we hold that leadership responsible for making ignorant remarks when they’re made? I really believe Conservative voters are understandably frustrated when yet another story of this sort breaks, but the solution isn’t stowing the cameras and microphones when someone like Mr. Elinski screws up. It’s shining the spotlight on him – and, as Conservatives, making sure that others like him don’t end up representing you in the future if he stumbles and somehow reveals what twisted thoughts are really occupying his mind. At the very least, such faux pas are “fair game” for the media to report on – for the simple reason Conservatives don’t raise this same complaint when a Liberal makes remarks of a controversial nature. Besides, muzzling the media really is more a game for regimes like the theocracy that’s clinging to power in Iran than Canada’s governing political party, isn’t it? 6/19/2009 WS-HTTP-Based Windows Service: Last Choice of WCF Devs?Y ou might not think that WS-HTTP isn’t the last choice of WCF developers when developing a Windows Service. Despite the protocol overhead of HTTP, often developers will default to this protocol in setting up a WCF application because of network rules, compatibility with other applications based on HTTP or just out of raw familiarity. Whatever the reason, HTTP still ends up being the first choice – as it was for me recently (albeit at another’s urging) and, being a veteran of net.tcp, I ran into trouble pretty quick:
Strangely, I didn’t visit the Help and Support Center, as directed at the bottom of the stack trace above. Instead I tinkered with my .config file for about an hour before it dawned on me that the settings were actually correct and I should follow the instructions. To summarize my visit to the Help and Support Center, there is an extremely obscure tool called HttpCfg.exe which is used on that platform I’m currently developing for – Windows Server 2003 (it’s netsh on Vista/Windows Server 2008, and less obscure). It demands that you divine an arcane string to pass as parameters for your application, security context, etc. Certainly, one could achieve the desired settings to make their HTTP-hosted service work…eventually. But I was fortunate enough to spare myself another indefinite period of maddening trial-and-error by stumbling upon an extremely helpful blog article by one Paul Wheeler, a former Microsoft SDE who apparently did some WCF development for the company’s Connected Systems division. In the article, Wheeler provides a tool for configuring local system HTTP settings with source code under Creative Commons (public license). The tool offers other advantages over HttpCfg for this purpose and was a lucky find indeed! I am still debating whether or not to push a lot harder to move my app to net.tcp. The decision rests with the project’s technical architect; and I’m not he on this project. But if you, like me, are stuck in a situation with HTTP – Wheeler’s HttpNamespaceManager is for you! 6/16/2009 Punditry Through a Looking Glass
P erhaps I am naïve. Or maybe I’m in some parallel universe watching a parallel version of CBC’s At Issue Panel. But I had a lot of trouble swallowing their characterizations of Canadian Liberal Leader Michael Igantieff’s interviews today. Ignatieff was expected to announce a decision on whether to make a concerted effort to bring the Minority Conservative government down on a motion of non-confidence today. The assertion of the pundits was that he’d threatened an election based on a “report card” on the government’s session performance last week, but instead Ignatieff had a list of things he wanted to discuss with the government and see sufficient progress on before making a final decision. Well, this has resulted in the pundits trotting out some very dismissive characterizations of Ignatieff – in sharp contrast with what they had to say about the man before. Suddenly Ignatieff is now “weak”, “afraid” and “back-peddling”; words used to describe Ignatieff’s defeated predecessor Stéphane Dion. Not that I thought this gang’s analysis of Dion was particularly on-target either, but just because Ignatieff didn’t up the drama by stating he’d bring down the government when he actually never said that he was about to seems a bit wild. No – a lot wild. Ignatieff might be guilty of allowing expectations of an election call to soar. He didn’t deny that forcing an election was one on a list of possibles he could have announced this morning. And he’d said he wanted 300-something hours as a new minimum set for EI qualification, among other things. But common sense sort of dictates that it was never actually going to be in his party’s interest to simply fail the government on its report card and state a non-confidence motion would be levelled at the first opportunity. Canadians aren’t in an election mood, to say the least, having been through 4 in the past 7 years. If an election call is to be had, the Liberals have to force it making it appear they’ve made every reasonable attempt to make Parliament work. During today’s round of interviews, Ignatieff looked neither indecisive, weak or afraid. He looked like a politician making an honest effort to get concessions from the government. And he may not want an election – he says so if you ask him, and did several times today. But “afraid”? If so, he handles stress well enough one might think he’d been emotionally lobotomized. So why the At Issue Panel found his responses as evidence of “back peddling” from an imagined threat to bring the government down is anyone’s guess. They did latch on to him supposedly “ditching” the 300-plus hours reduction for EI as a requirement for their support, but I’m not sure I’ve either heard Ignatieff say it was a demand; compliance with which was a condition for Liberal confidence in the House or that it was even off the Liberal wish list. Again, I have to wonder if I’m either watching or, more probably, in an episode of The Twilight Zone. Maybe Prime Minister Stephen Harper is in here with me, since today he also complained that Ignatieff had delivered no actual demand, joking it was unusual to have an ultimatum phrased with no condition prior to “or else”. Maybe Harper and the media are cobbling together separate facts to create these notions of demands, ultimatums and weak leadership. Sill, if there’s anyone back-peddling here it’s the NDP, not that you’d hear anything about that from the media. Thomas Mulcair, the lone NDPer from Québec elected in the Liberal stronghold of Outremont last election, amused the audience of CBC’s Politics with Don Newman today trying to explain how the party could claim to be making Parliament work while maintaining a policy of automatically voting against the government on all confidence motions, no matter what. How is it the Liberals are always to blame for singularly breaking Parliament when the other two opposition parties get away with automatic ‘no’s on non-confidence motions? If the Liberals adopted that policy, rest assured the media would be painting the Liberals as opportunists for defeating the government while riding high in the polls. But not the NDP, not the Bloc Québecois. They can do whatever they like without penalty. The best reason to not call an election is to ensure that infrastructure funding continues uninterrupted over the summer months. If the media can still be believed, apparently an election might jeopardize some of that money – and with the economy doing badly, it’s funding badly needed in Canada’s industrial heartland – where the Liberals are polling well at the moment. But if there is an election, hopefully my countrymen (and women) are able to see through this blame-the-Liberals game. Because if Parliament fails, all the parties have dirt on their hands – no matter what Ignatieff and his Liberals do this week. 6/9/2009 When a Pigeon Stumbles Amidst Cats
Q uite a day in Question Period today – the first such political theatre since yesterday’s tape of Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt conversing with her aide Jasmine MacDonnell (since resigned). Yet, somehow (as only God almighty knows), the Conservatives figured that the best strategy was to simply persist in their defence of the Minister and claim her comments neither amounted to a critique in earnest about her colleague, the Minister of Health, nor did it suggest she was really out to take credit for fixing a “money-not-moral” issue, such as the unavailability of isotopes for critical diagnostic care – not only in Canada, but in many countries. (The Chalk River nuclear reactor supplies isotopes needed for medical procedures all over the world; over 60% of the world’s total supply of medial isotopes, in fact.) Like most folks, I missed the actual live video feed at work today (must concentrate on tasks at-hand). However, I was able to review today’s footage on CPAC (Canada’s version of C-SPAN) and was quite astonished at what I saw. Admittedly, Question Period is your basic circus most of the time. But today was exceptional.
Failing the ability to review the video feed, you might also consider examining Hansard – which is the transcript of proceedings for all business transacted on the floor of the House. Everything that is said and made part of the official record is there (including a transcript of today’s Question Period debate, focussed on Raitt and the isotope crisis); a valuable resource for political junkies trying to find quotable quotes or, as in this case, to simply see how nutty things can get in Question Period. I’m still laying bets that Raitt’s days as a member of the Conservative cabinet are numbered after so many screw-ups in so short a period. But as one pundit today said, “If you’re the government you’ve got to appear 100%…not 40% or 75%…behind your Minister.” Hopefully, that’s all that’s behind this otherwise absurd defence of Raitt and her bunging of the Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL) portfolio. 6/8/2009 This Week’s Theme in Canadian Politics: IncompetenceW hether it’s the Ontario Liberals appointing an apparently greedy, corrupt and/or person of dubious competence to Ontario’s eHealth Medical Records Agency, or tonight’s bombshell on the federal Conservative’s Natural Resources Minister, Lisa Raitt making extremely ill-conceived comments about her colleagues in taped discourse; this has been a bad week for politicians. Heck, it’s been a bad month, and it’s only the 8thof June! First we have Sarah Kramer, CEO of eHealth Ontario being fired – by mutual consent of the eHealth board and the Ontario government – because of numerous spending irregularities. Consultants were paid large sums for watching documentary videos and chatting on the Toronto subway. Of course, there was the mitigating factor that some of the consultants were either known personally by Kramer or her husband. And it was far more common for contracts to go untendered prior to being awarded. None of the consultants seem to have been doing work related to advancing the mission of eHealth – which is to design and implement a provincial health records system by 2015. Contrasted with another failed government technology project, the federal firearms registry, this is a vastly more complex project. Yet despite Kramer’s past experience serving as CIO of Cancer Care Ontario, there’s no public evidence (I could find) she’s ever led a technology effort of this scale. And whatever medical records experience she might have gained there would surely be inadequate to meet the challenges at eHealth. So why are unqualified people being asked to lead government technology projects? I speculate that the incompetent leadership, unsure how to proceed, deliver little but decide to work the levers of newfound power turning into these gigantic money-pits. Perhaps believing that because technology implies complexity and lots of subject matter auditors won’t understand, they can get away with lax standards managing expenses or even giveaways to friends. Such conduct might even suggest there’s a little truth in the matter – and that such practices are common elsewhere in government. Too cynical a view? Well to be honest, I thought I was being a little cynical having these suspicions – until our next story broke, thanks to due diligence by a Halifax Chronicle Herald reporter, based in Ottawa, went back over some material collecting dust in his office since January to find the latest torpedo to hit the Conservative cabinet: Stephen Maher is to be congratulated heartily for bringing us this rare glimpse of thinking within the Conservative cabinet. Tapes were left behind in the Ottawa press gallery and somehow ended up in Maher’s hands. Raitt’s assistant, Jasmine MacDonnell – already in the spotlight for getting fired thanks to leaving behind sensitive documents concerning the Chalk River nuclear reactor (embroiled in a medical isotope scandal) – was told about the tapes back in January, but never picked them up from Maher. Maher finally decided to examine the contents of the tapes, and was set to publish his story on Friday until MacDonnell filed for an injunction to prevent publication. A Nova Scotia Superior Court Judge dismissed her motion earlier this afternoon. Where’s the story of incompetence here? Well, it’s hard to distinguish, frankly. I don’t think MacDonnell is entirely to blame for merely leaving a wake of sensitive material wherever she went (although there’s some truth in that notion), but the Natural Resources Minister doesn’t seem to have been particularly concerned about these items, until it was far too late. And it’s not as if Raitt was lacking systems to track these items – especially the Chalk River file. Someone asserted today that the tape was made without her knowledge, which seems incredible. And, even if true, and she didn’t know about the recording or the tape or its being misplaced; she still was the one responsible for hiring MacDonnell and putting her in a position to do so much damage. Yet the real incompetence of this leader wasn’t in the particular mishaps leading to today’s story. It was she herself stating how she thought of her colleagues and, more importantly, how she regarded the Chalk River matter – as something that money could fix. She was prepared, according to the tape, to do nothing about the problems of Chalk River and wait for money to fix the problem and then perhaps even take credit for it later! It will forever amaze me how we, as a people, can vote such personalities into elected office. That no matter how much scrutiny we expose our politicians to, there’s always enough disbelief, ideology and marketing gloss to cover up the inadequacies of our leaders and let them mis-spend or simply take all our money, compromise critical aspects of our health care system through technical or professional incompetence, and even destroy confidence in democracy; something for which we have ourselves partly to blame. Of course, I believe it possible to fix the system. But, as with anything, it will take our collective will to put greater emphasis on seeing our money spent properly. In the Ontario case, the eHealth fiasco is actually the second time this agency is facing overhaul – but the result might be success on the third attempt. As a closing note to this story: the CBC promises more to come on the eHealth file as they continue processing various tips filed from named and anonymous sources so, stay tuned! 6/3/2009 Why is Canada’s Federal Cabinet Haemorrhaging Secret Documents?W ell, it’s happened again – another Conservative government minister loses a secret document plunging the besieged cabinet into yet another document management crisis. And my question here, echoed on blogs and in news columns every which way you look: why is this happening again? Ministers, like any senior management, need to carry sensitive documents about with them from time to time. Indeed, they are legally responsible for such documents; it’s one of their core responsibilities as Ministers of the Crown. And they’re not unique in having this responsibility. Even a lowly consultant working in the Ministry of Justice (not the same portfolio as was the subject of this story – which was Environment) is responsible for ensuring the documents and any software materials I may have in my possession are secure and accounted for. In many respects, maintaining security on software is harder than hardcopy documentation because one is vulnerable to copies being made potentially without one’s knowledge. I would say that were I to simply lose a document or leave software files vulnerable to duplication on a public network that I should be held to account for such oversight. Although there is, particularly in my case, a certain motive to protect soft and hardcopy files merely by virtue of personal professionalism; holding someone individually accountable for materials which contain sensitive information is the final means by which the Government of Canada can offer its citizens some assurance such information is being handled responsibly. So if federal employees are rightly held to such a standard, why should the Minister be any different? We hear today through various media outlets that Environment Minister (and Minister Responsible for Atomic Energy of Canada, Ltd. [AECL]) Lisa Raitt was not the one who left the documents in question in the CTV news room. Apparently, it was a 26-year-old political aide (believed to be Jasmine Macdonald), who has since resigned herself. But these documents sat at the CTV bureau for a full week before the broadcaster itself finally called the Minister’s office to say they had them. I simply can’t – in my most sunny, optimistic and forgiving mood – imagine why the AECL Minister would leave sensitive documents about the Chalk River nuclear reactor at CTV for a full week without wondering where they went? After all, they are supposed to have systems to monitor these documents at all times. Did those systems work? Or, in the more likely case they did, why did the Minister’s staff not advise her they were missing (assuming they didn’t)? Yes, it’s hard (really, really hard) to not consider the worst-case scenario here and, if the Minister is to keep her job, don’t we, the electorate, deserve some kind of explanation beyond “I offered my resignation,”. I think the CBC is being far too forgiving – treating Canadian secrets as somehow undeserving of serious attention. You’d think Canada didn’t have any real secrets – despite the fact we’re talking about nuclear secrets here. Indeed, there are some folks who would consider that kind of information somewhat valuable, even if the CBC or the Conservative Party of Canada don’t. 5/29/2009 Just Say “Know!”R eading the CBC News website this evening resulted in my chancing upon a story concerning a landmark Supreme Court (of Canada) ruling. The case involved a woman who was facing having her house confiscated as a “proceed of crime”, having been previously convicted of running a “grow-op” in her home. The “grow-op” was relatively small scale and not operated for the purposes of trafficking, so the court ruled in her favour – to wails of “shame” from those who argue for more aggressive (and unfair) drug laws in Canada. Although most of the comments I read were members of this pro-police-state crowd, there were overwhelming votes of disapproval on each of the comments indicating a silent majority agreed with the Supreme Court ruling. I couldn’t resist adding my own reaction to the comments – risking having my name being associated with a view that might elicit vigorous disagreement. Admittedly, I do sometimes worry that a colleague, employer or potential client might disagree with my libertarian perspective or draw conclusions about me from them which could well be untrue. (In a fashion similar to a proponent of free-speech being mistaken for a sexual deviant after being caught defending a pornography vendor across the street from a high school.) But sometimes it’s important one announce their beliefs lest we, as a society (and democracy), mistakenly conclude that voices are silent because nobody agrees with us, or those who disagree with us feel justified in stifling our civil rights because our seemingly low numbers make our beliefs insignificant. The following is my response to the story linked above…
Not much has happened in the past several months in the “war on drugs” file. Well, Canada doesn’t really have a “war on drugs” (thank God), but every so often the Conservative government makes noises about strengthening already hefty police powers or increasing jail time so that there’s less room for real criminals like murderers, rapists, thieves and child pornographers. For some reason, those crimes don’t offer as many opportunities to attract the glare of television cameras. Anyway, this case will stir things up a bit and we’ll follow with updates to this story as they arise. 5/27/2009 Animal Rights Movement Gets it Wrong — Again!M y intro Philosophy Professor – one Dr. Arthur Schafer – challenged me following one of his lectures when I was enrolled as a Philosophy major at the University of Manitoba. I’d just finished remarking how I couldn’t find any logic in the arguments of those who claimed carnivores (meat-eaters) were guilty of anything morally objectionable. With very little skill he made mincemeat of my novice questioning of vegetarian doctrine by establishing doubt about what kinds of life are sentient, like human beings, and therefore one could quite conceivably be committing murder by raising animals for mere consumption. Of course, it didn’t negate any of his arguments that I pointed out other examples of how all life feeds off death in one form another; because sentient life (like humans) can make a moral choice.
In the end, I decided to cut down my meat consumption (“minimizing harm” like a good little utilitarian) and completely avoid consumption of animal products that exhibited signs of self-awareness or intelligence. Admittedly, this is sentience as I judge it and one could ask: who am I to judge? But there’s the price of having a moral choice, I suppose. I have argued (with some success, I think) and continue to believe that arguing that all animal life is automatically deserving or even collectively better off being given the same right to life awarded human beings. Certainly, I believe most animals are to some extent self-aware, and many have evolved nervous systems capable of performing tasks that are interesting – even remarkable. Some few, including whales, dolphins, most species of primate and certain domesticated species are even, I would argue, conscious – and deserve both legal protections rivalling human beings and being spared cullings for mass human consumption. But these species are more the exception rather than the rule. Under no circumstances does this mean that my view justifies (in my mind) just any treatment for animals that don’t quite reach the same bar as dolphins or the like. Take seals for example; cute, cuddly creatures – certainly possessing a talent for tugging on the heartstrings of carnivores and vegetarians alike. But they aren’t necessarily sentient and there are people who survive on seal products for their own sustenance. We would all agree that seals deserve humane termination and over the years much has been done to ensure that seal hunts meet with certain standards, although one obviously can’t claim every kill is humane – for a variety of reasons. Yet despite such measures, undertaken to specifically address the concerns of those who might shy away from products obtained “inhumanely” otherwise, groups ideologically opposed to the consumption of animals have turned seals into their poster-child. The objection of these groups is not grounded in concern for the seals specifically – rather in a more general objection about humans consuming animal products. But you won’t see any cute, cuddly cows in the literature these folks can often be found handing out on street-corners in cities around the world. What bugs me most about such so-called animal advocacy groups isn’t the massive hypocrisy inherent in a decades-old campaign that leverages the pleasing aesthetics of one creature to disguise a much larger agenda they know the majority of human beings would never agree with. It’s the dogma upon which their membership seems to thrive lacking not only an even cursory examination of the moral questions involved, but the more practical realities of the wonton economic damage and repeated tales of hardship caused by their manipulation of the public using images of furry creatures, spare cash donated by rich celebrity do-gooders seeking to maintain a youthful, positive image, and virtually unchecked disinformation. So you can imagine my reaction to the news today about Canada’s Governor General being embroiled in a supposed scandal over eating seal heart meat! Their latest attack as a result of this innocent indulgence on her part: Canada’s Maple Syrup industry. Because, as we all know, those who harvest maple syrup from trees are launching fleets of ships to hunt every seal on Earth to extinction… These animaniacs ought to be ashamed of themselves, not that the typically sanctimonious lot that leads this rabble could spare a collective clue what the word ‘shame’ means! And just to clarify this point – I’m talking here about a movement that is unrepentantly intolerant of the rights of individuals to decide what they consume and any notions of national sovereignty, international law, and last – but far from least – aboriginal culture. (In the above-cited story, the spokesperson for the Human Society International Canada cited the decision of Europeans to ban seal products as somehow binding on Canadians. The EU is certainly at liberty to take such action – and Canada is equally at liberty not to, last I checked.) The proverbial icing on the cake where the Governor-General is concerned came from across the pond. It seems her Majesty, the Queen’s agents are concerned about how her Canadian representative is behaving. And here I’d thought the confusion about Canada’s status as an independent nation (versus a British colony) was resolved some time ago. Maybe news about that hasn’t yet circulated through the British education system (renowned for its efficiency) to all her Majesty’s subjects – or at least to her personal staff. But ya know, I think all that need be said here is that if the Queen can sport objectionable clothing in support of Britain’s tenuous grasp of fashion, Canada’s Governor-General can eat seal meat in support of Canada’s legitimate, legal and quite ethical seal hunt. And I defy the animal rights movement to produce a coherent argument showing how the Governor-General, maple syrup or I have got it all wrong. I don’t invite comment ignorant of what those arguments might be — quite the contrary. But I’ll wager their membership - even those who’ve had the fortitude to read my rant through to the end - are. P.S. A special note here about Dr. Schafer. As his bio on Wikipedia indicates, he’s an extremely accomplished scholar with few peers and it was a genuine privilege and highlight in my college experience to be counted among his students. As the man singularly responsible for sparking my interest in Philosophy (studies in logic and legal philosophy in particular), I’ll be ever-grateful. That said, the views I’ve expressed herein are entirely my own and should not be assumed to be those of Dr. Schafer or anyone else. Admittedly, there are a number of places where I’m confident he’d disagree with me vigorously. And that too would do credit to the debate at hand since little has been offered by those who are otherwise ready to damage livelihoods, economies and even the cause of animal rights without apparent, rational principle to stand upon. 5/20/2009 Missing The Merit in Meritocracy
M uch like utopia, the word meritocracy derives a meaning from an inherently unachievable concept – or at least one immeasurable in absolute terms. Yet the guest on last night’s Colbert Report, an author named Walter Kirn (who’s just finished writing “Lost in the Meritocracy”), judges the leadership of his country – the United States of America – as having deviated from some collective notion of meritocracy. His is a commentary that expresses apparent shock that graduates of America’s noted institutions of higher learning (like Princeton, Harvard and even MIT) aren’t always the over-achieving elite that most Americans assume them to be. He goes on to cite specific examples from the Bush administration – including ex-President Bush, himself – as lacking the mettle to govern even a mediocre National League baseball team properly, much less the most powerful nation on Earth. Speaking as an alumnus of a Canadian institute of higher learning, I can sympathize with some of Kirn is saying. But in Kirn we have another example of what I don’t like about the Colbert Report; the occasional mediocrity of Colbert’s guests. Kirn isn’t saying anything radical or new here, of course. That Universities (or Colleges as they’re known in the U.S.) don’t include world geography, or internal combustion engine repair in every curriculum is hardly breaking news. That such institutions often judge students by metrics that are entirely subjective and that society, in turn, pays the degrees and the system of academic awards too much respect too often scarcely qualifies as an epiphany to anyone in the audience. While it might well speak to certain deficiencies in the American education system that there’s barely an American alive who could correctly answer that Ottawa is the capital city of Canada or that Iran is adjacent to Iraq on a map when asked, it doesn’t suddenly mean that graduates of MIT are no more technically savvy in their chosen disciplines than Mr. Kirn or other average Americans off the street. Nor does it mean that the knowledge acquired by economics majors at these or other ivy-league schools is entirely worthless, simply because the decision-makers failed to prevent this past year’s economic meltdown. Kirn is only doing what his fellow armchair economists and pundits on Fox are doing: generalizing and over-simplifying a complex problem using incomplete data brokered largely by television in a vain effort to first believe and then express understanding they simply don’t have. Conversely, it should surprise anyone that I can truthfully say I personally know a major of political economy who wrote a thesis a few years back wherein she correctly predicted much of the calamity confronting us in the markets today. And she wasn’t entirely alone in her analysis either, I might add. The key element missing from Kirn’s invective on The Colbert Report (and, I’ll wager, is also missing from his book) is what, exactly, ought to be done about his complaint. Again, speaking from first-hand experience, I can tell you it would be rather difficult to eliminate all of the subjective metrics from the grading systems used in judging your average paper in Legal Philosophy. Indeed, it would be hard to eliminate subjective grading from the average examination in Object-Oriented Programming theory – a technical discipline, most would agree. For that matter, what exactly is the merit in the meritocracy Kirn is vacillating about? Because, in the end, it’s going to be very difficult to measure success here, given that meritocracy itself is as achievable as it is different for everyone. Kirn’s book might be entertaining. It might even give some kind of insight into the Homeresque perspective of the average middle-aged American; or at least those in the demographic who are alike disgruntled about their Princeton experience. Beyond this, I’m at a total loss not only to understand what Mr. Kirn might contribute to the discussion concerning contemporary U.S. economic and political leadership, but also of the 9½ minutes I spent watching Colbert’s interview with him. And I desperately wish I could get it back. Maybe I should simply stick to Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show and quit while I’m ahead from now on… 5/11/2009 MSN QnA Beta is closing on May 21stI don’t know about the rest of you, but I get irked when Microsoft does stuff like this: QnA.live.com was Microsoft’s answer to Yahoo’s Answers service – a sort of generic questions-and-answers forum site where users could get answers on questions on any topic that comes to mind, although in cases where other forums were more devoted to the purpose of answering questions on specific issues (e.g.. technology questions) the asker would be referred to those specific forums by topic moderators.
There may be other scenarios which didn’t occur to me, of course. But I could scarcely imagine one that would make QnA’s closure a sensible act. At minimum, QnA didn’t seem to be drawing fewer visitors than say, I dunno, the msn.com homepage. Maybe this is one of the reasons Microsoft’s Internet division has consistently underperformed all the others year after year. Whatever views Microsoft’s most ardent critics espouse, most will concede the company is results-oriented. And, sooner or later, MSN and the Internet division need to join the rest of the company posting results in the black. At the very least, it doesn’t seem likely there’d be too much damage disclosing any intention to continue the QnA service in another form notwithstanding the absence of such a plan. Left with taking the QnA closure notice at face value, one can only draw the conclusion that MSN is some ways away from figuring out how to convert red ink to black. That’s unfortunate; both for QnA and its growing user base. 5/9/2009 SPOILER ALERT!T he title isn’t just an overture to sarcasm; it’s an intentional warning too. Don’t read what follows if you don’t want to know what happens in the newly-released movie Star Trek – because details of the ending are included in this article. When rumours of the new movie possibly compromising the Star Trek franchise first surface, I’d thought it might be due to the cast acting out-of-character, or maybe the film being some cheesy cliché. Rumours about a changed ship had surfaced to; would the Enterprise look too different from the original to be believed? But the franchise has been damaged in ways far more fundamental by this new film: the destruction of Vulcan effectively eliminates all that has gone before and become known as history in the Star Trek universe. The intention here seems to be to renew the franchise by replacing it with something different. And while it may well be that the franchise needed renewal, I can’t agree that such a fundamental alteration of the underlying plot is the best way to go about it. Without Vulcan, Federation history will be altered considerably. With Vulcan civilization reduced to a colony of 10,000 survivors, scientific contributions of the species are effectively eliminated. Vulcan diplomacy won’t play a role in the Federation for at least several centuries – well beyond the time of any of the past Star Trek series. And then there’s the issue of why the future Federation introduced in Star Trek: Enterprise didn’t intervene to protect the timeline. Vulcan isn’t supposed to be gone! Where was the temporal prime directive when Vulcan needed it? The only hope for the franchise that remains is that in some future movie the disaster that was launched this past weekend is somehow corrected. It is sci-fi, after all. Spock’s been dead before – and if you can resurrect a dead character, why not a dead civilization too? Oh there was one cheesy bit that did leave an impalatable after-taste: “red matter”? Please! Did imagination die with Vulcan? J. J. Abrahms did achieve the goal he laid out in one interview: he left the audience for wanting more; if only to fix this tragic mistake. 5/2/2009 American Justice: A Thing of the Past?I ’m not always proud of the decisions courts make in Canada. It’s not like we’re above making mistakes in this country to a point that somehow justifies us in thinking our society is somehow automatically better than that of the Americans. But then you read a story like this: …and you realize that there is a reason that, as Canadians, we sometimes feel a touch paternalistic – maybe even sanctimonious - toward our American cousins. Outraged indeed! HP Support: Missing More Than Just Drivers….
I admit, I can be a little terse with people sometimes. I’d like to think before my anxiety becomes too apparent, that there has to be a fair bit of provocation though – nobody’s perfect, after all. But I couldn’t take it this time – and so I’ve decided to share an experience I might otherwise keep to myself with the rest of the world online. So what provoked me this time? Well, it has been my observation that when I do a job people almost universally expect it done well. They have a right to – I’m paid good money to provide programming services, and if I make a mistake, usually there are consequences that can disrupt business pretty dramatically, which ultimately cost more money. So, in fairness, I expect people I pay for products or services to live up to the standards they set for themselves too; i.e. if a computer is advertised as being a 64-bit machine, I expect Windows Vista x64 editions to work fine. And if they don’t, that the vendor will ensure someone will help me out until the problem is solved. Hewlett-Packard (HP) Inc. didn’t do that today. And they haven’t been doing it now for over a week. Below is a transcript of an effort I made to acquire drivers for my HP Pavilion a6318f desktop PC. It was sold with Windows Vista x86 (32-bit) edition, but last week I started trying to upgrade it to the x64 (64-bit) edition of the same operating system. Would love to see some comments (obviously, I’m hunting for sympathy here, but I’ll take it all, so long as it’s constructive) following a read of the transcript:
And as is obvious, the messages are ordered in reverse-chronological order. So there has been no additional discourse with HP since Thursday. Again, comments are welcome – but of even greater value to me would be a solution, in the form of drivers or a URL pointing me in the right direction. Whatever solution is eventually arrived at, I will be sure to post it here (as is my habit) – assuming one is found. Additional threads have been started on both HP’s public Desktop PCs support forum and on Microsoft’s TechNet forums, under Windows Vista Setup. Additional background and details concerning this issue can be found there. Thanks! 4/27/2009 Google Celebrates Inventor of Morse Code
G otta love Google’s daily commemorative graphic. The Google logo ends up being decorated on days the company has chosen to celebrate certain special occasions. Today’s theme: the birthday of Samuel Morse – inventor of the Morse code, which of course was responsible for the popularization of electronically-transmitted information.
Lotsa familiar terms in that article, for those of us who work in the information technology field. Baudot and ASCII, in particular. Although the article doesn’t explicitly say so, I’ve long-suspected the term “baud”, used to refer to a modem’s speed (i.e. “baud rate”) was a direct reference to Baudot code. So maybe Google has it right – and there should be a special day set aside for a man who influenced the world so radically. 4/20/2009 Homeland Insecurity: Napolitano Needs to Enrol in “Borders 1001”?
A although Barack Obama has, himself, been extremely popular; his genuine charm and charisma has carried his approval ratings to historic highs, the folks he’s choosing to serve in his cabinet are certainly not winning any popularity contests. Former lawyers for the MPAA and RIAA have been appointed to serve the new administration over recent weeks which is raising concerns about the future for individual privacy rights and the extension of copyright law on the Internet. And now – of particular concern to Canadians – the protectionist, anti-Canadian mood of the United States Congress (and, increasingly, a noticeable constituency within the Democratic Party) has found a yet another champion for its agenda: the new Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano.
Napolitano gave a short interview on the CBC News channel (called CBC Newsworld) tonight during tonight’s airing of The National. During the segment, Napolitano couldn’t seem to keep her facts straight, remarking that there’d been problems with terrorists entering the United States across the border from Canada – including the 9/11 terrorists and alluding to other cases, despite there only having been 1 publicly-known case, in which Canadian authorities made U.S. authorities aware of the individual in question (an incident culminating in the suspect’s eventual arrest). When the reporter (Neil Macdonald) raised these points, she responded saying she might not be aware of every individual case, but that she was sure cases of terrorists entering the U.S. from Canada did exist and the U.S. Congress had made a decision to treat Canada’s border exactly the same as Mexico’s.
MacDonald raised the little problem concerning the story about terrorists coming into the U.S. from Canada being a myth, and Napolitano seemed caught completely off-guard. It was as-if she’d become so used to repeating the same fiction being exchanged on Capitol Hill with protectionist senators and being directly contradicted like this make her ill-prepared to stand by her comment, because she’d never really thought to challenge the myth!
Of course, the facts don’t support this “perception”, but Napolitano doesn’t seem the sort to let the facts get in the way of raising an iron curtain between itself and its ranking ally both in this hemisphere and the world. This woman hasn’t a clue what the situation is on the Canada / U.S. border, yet appears to have been making it her business to inconvenience millions of people who traverse the border annually by implementing all kinds of new policies. Policies which have, I believe, a political agenda – one related to punishing Canadian trade, which southern American states have historically regarded as competitive. Northern American states have been resisting these policies since many rely on trade with Canada; but there’s not enough support at the moment to stop these ill-advised moves. Indeed, it seems it won’t be long before the formerly largest undefended border in the world is redecorated with barb-wire fencing, concrete watch-towers bristling with spotlights and packs of guard dogs to net all those squads al-Qaeda operatives sneaking into the land of the free and the brave nightly. Obama could be planting the needs of conflict with Canada, which may be thanks in part to a remarkably stupid move by agents of Canada’s Conservative Party during the U.S. presidential race. If that’s even part of the reason for the new anti-Canada element within the administration, it' truly is unfortunate. The friendship Canada and the United States of America have enjoyed for nearly two centuries – a friendship that has been described as “unlike any other in the world” - could be coming to an end with these measures. Ironically, it’s not a victory for those who want to secure the U.S. against terrorism – the cited rationale. It’s a victory for al-Qaeda; since it means that U.S. trusts Canada less (or at least its border with Canada less, which is much the same thing) directly because these measures are one of the consequences of 9/11. What a shame! And what a shame that few in the U.S. are going to notice — at least not right away…. 4/17/2009 MPAA & RIAA Score Major Victory Against .torrent Files!
W ell, the outcome was expected – not that it makes swallowing this bitter pill any easier. The Swedish court capitulated entirely to pressure from special interests and found in favour of the cabal of media gangsters, bolstering its quest to erode privacy rights and ignore even the pretence that people on the Internet have a right to exchange data using whatever protocol they choose.
Of course, the ruling has not had the impact of shutting down thepiratebay.org – not yet. And its operators who are all away from Sweden at the moment claim they will appeal and eventually prevail in their litigations. Of course, it remains to be seen what strategy they have in mind that will achieve this seemingly daunting goal. The number of avenues available to these so-called pirates are fewer every day as the RIAA and MPAA continue to press their well-funded lobbying and litigation advantage. Stay tuned – more to come on this story today, I’m sure…. 4/16/2009 Microsoft Presents: Facebook!
I ’ve known about the express editions of both VB.NET and C# for a while now, but I hadn’t realized Microsoft was using them to advance the cause of its software development product line by partnering them with Facebook (FB). No longer are these junior versions of Visual Studio 2008 Team System merely the try-and-buy freebies aimed at acquainting otherwise reluctant but professional programmers to adopt Microsoft or lures for student developers. Microsoft is trying to create a solution that lets programmers of any stripe use their tools for free to develop Facebook tools. And make no mistake – this is likely the most sophisticated, comprehensive solution for Facebook API development that exists. And forget downloading that dinky editor you heard about on CNet Downloads – Visual Studio blows it and anything else that anyone would develop under the heading of freeware out of the water!
But why? Well, obviously hooking students and youth in general on Microsoft products would be one obvious angle. When these folks grow up and get jobs and need to consider or make decisions about technology, Microsoft will be familiar territory. And then there’s that other reason – Microsoft could be feeling out Facebook for eventual partnership and alliance; boosting its overall inventory of web properties considerably by having the largest and most successful social networking site in existence in their pocket (and pocketbook too, whenever FB starts making money). But as a programmer myself, I’m intrigued with the tools Microsoft’s created. Almost as interesting; Visual Studio Express isn’t all you need – there’s an extra download you need to get from Microsoft’s open source software (OSS) website, called CodePlex. Because it’s OSS, you, competitors and anyone else who can download Facebook.NET (as it’s called) can look “under the hood” to see how it all works. Oh, and naturally, Facebook.NET will work with the full, commercial versions of Visual Studio 2008. 4/15/2009 Canada Needs to Stay In Afghanistan
W e can’t do this by ourselves. In fact, we probably can stay there only as long as the Americans are willing. But I’ve decided Canada needs to stay in Afghanistan past 2011 – and possibly for an indefinite period. My rationale? Well, today’s story concerning the execution of a newly-wed couple sort of tells us all we need to know about the disposition of the Taliban. The Taliban are a group:
I think most of us want peace - even so-called "hawks" like me. The debate has been over what the best route to take to get there. As I’ve stated before - the Taliban have pretty much closed the book on meaningful negotiation. It's their way or suicide bombings. I mean; if you've got a supply of drones brainwashed into thinking God is really going to reward them with eternal bliss and paradise if they kill themselves and take as many infidels with 'em as they can, what possible incentive could you offer such a regime to negotiate? Even worse, winning in Afghanistan isn't enough (for the Taliban). Since it was the base for the 9/11 attacks, apparently if the Taliban win, they'll continue sponsoring such terrorism to pursue their own twisted, evil form of manifest destiny without end! Their philosophy appears to be that of we’re wrong, they’re right and they’ll continue to attack and kill us until either we’re all dead or they are, period. Canadians, indeed everyone outside of Afghanistan needs to remember, the superficial effect of withdrawing troops ending the conflict could quite easily be little more than a short-lived fantasy. Basically, I’m arguing for a just war – it’s a tough pill to swallow. But, to me, it really is starting to look as if it’s either that or living in a nightmarish dystopia with indentured, veiled, chronically-victimized females who’d sooner live in Margaret Atwood’s fictional Gilead than the misogynistic theocracy envisioned by the Taliban as God’s will. But I’ll ever try to remain an “enlightened” hawk – and remain vigilant for signs I’m happily wrong. I can say with unrestrained candour that I’m not interested in having our troops deployed into a combat zone indefinitely. The basic goals of the allies in Afghanistan – helping to establish a regime that both respects basic justice and some form of democracy while maintaining a military that yields to a constitutional authority – is, I think, the right idea. And I still argue, as I have for as long as I can remember, that there are certain rights human beings have which if systemically threatened or disrespected, justify the intervention of other nations representing the interests of humanity – regardless of what other interests may compete for consideration in a conflict (which there always are). 4/13/2009 Can Sweden make the charges stick against The Pirate Bay?
N oticed a decent article posted on the CBC News website this past weekend concerning the ongoing litigation in Sweden between the MPAA and The Pirate Bay torrent file sharing service. After reading the article, I decided to write the following comment and cross-post it here:
4/8/2009 Secrecy: Good for Business or Government?
A s mentioned here earlier, I’ve left (more nudged, really) my last job working for Microsoft (and Cactus Commerce) and am now employed by a very stable, successful Gatineau-based consulting firm and will be working for the Government of Canada for the foreseeable future. Notwithstanding any other previous mention specifically indicating the nature of my current work, I’ve decided to not discuss specific projects I’m working on in my blog any more. This is because I’m bound by a couple of agreements, both of which I take extremely seriously: the standard non-disclosure agreement (NDA) I signed for the consulting firm, and an oath I signed back in 2002, which resulted in my being assigned clearances under the Government of Canada Security Policy. The primary purpose of these agreements is to ensure the privacy of individuals and corporate entities, to safeguard trade secrets and technologies and business processes which have commercial value, and to protec![MCj03109980000[1]](https://jv6c1w.bay.livefilestore.com/y1mJkkp4fhZCEpSZA_ZKdy47bDeyAl33QhaXmLz_SV8pAuRuQRT8hER-MlWMrkCz8VG5-7slrvDFShoJqPbqK9ve_qBxqamlE-X2e3k7bDztQekqiMHYIwzU6rCTEHIh8XDywFCgu8Zg3_nmM81r8QeWg/MCj03109980000[1][14].png "MCj03109980000[1]") t Canada’s security interests. These are, of course, reasonable measures and it’s perfectly fair and necessary to have secrecy agreements for employees and government contractors. But my change in employment made me reflect on my experiences with NDAs and other secrecy agreements in both government and private industry. And there seems to be an almost obfuscated secondary effect: secrecy can breed inefficiency or cover up poor quality.
So the question needs to be asked, are such blanket agreements the way to go or would a different scheme serve the public better? While NDAs are very effective at protecting corporations, there is often a term which extends well beyond the last day of employment that prevents the former employee form disclosing the designs of technologies developed by him/her to a new employer, or from starting and/or engaging in commercial activity in the same industry for the duration of the agreement. Since a contracting programmer’s livelihood depends on leveraging relevant experience, preventing him/her form essentially re-using a block of code on a similar software project for, say a competitor might make it difficult for that programmer to find a job – were the prevailing practice to throw away any knowledge gained on one project in favour of innovating a different approach to achieve the same functionality. Imagine how much more expensive software would be if cut-and-pasting code from the Internet were suddenly impractical!
Luckily, the nature of NDAs and contract law generally means that programmers pretty much always get away with re-using old code since the process of compilation obfuscates code, making it virtually impossible for a covetous former employer to prove an NDA has been violated. That’s not to say NDAs are completely useless; the NDA I signed with Cactus would give either Cactus or Microsoft legal recourse if I were to take the knowledge I acquired helping to write Commerce Server 2009 and applied to create my own very similar retail web e-commerce server application. So NDAs do help prevent such technology “poaching”. But is that fair to the programmer – particularly when the practical impediments are in themselves plenty disincentive for such a venture being pursued. But what about national security and individual privacy? Surely, we all have a right to expect our Government will do all it can to protect our rights – isn’t a blanket secrecy oath or agreement the minimum measure needed to protect the public? It might be, yes. But usually, contractors don’t work in areas of public policy where any experience or any type of information disclosure would be harmful. If a contractor or government employee, for example, works on data including the Social Insurance Number, date of birth, address or other vitals – clearly the point of main risk is disclosure of that information beyond the work environment. But the terms of that employee’s security clearance may prevent disclosures of another nature – including being a whistle-blower: about bureaucratic inefficiencies that cost people money or loopholes that might give one group an unfair advantage at the expense of another. Normally, a government employee might be able to call a journalist anonymously to report about such things – but not if the terms under which their security clearance was issued specifically make such disclosure a criminal act; perhaps classifying such behaviour as treason.
Yet, ironically, the intention of the individual could be completely altruistic. Of course, there might be nothing that can practically be done concerning such activity effectively ending that person’s job with the Government (nobody wants to work with a whistleblower). But turning it into a criminal affair, as in the example with the NDA, might be taking things too far. What could be at the root of the practice of “blanket secrecy” in both commercial and government organizations is risk mitigation. Good lawyers, like any good programmer or project manager, will make every effort to mitigate risk for their clients. Microsoft, Cactus, the Government of Canada all have lawyers and H/R budgets to help craft secrecy agreements that ensure no employee – disgruntled or otherwise can get out of respecting professional disclosure. And few programmers are prepared to spend time and money, not to mention jeapordizing a potential new job, negotiating more favourable terms on a matter like disclosure. (Particularly, when one can’t know beforehand what isn’t being disclosed.) Employers need to recognize they aren’t risking anything tailoring NDAs and other secrecy agreements to address the particular points of risk associated with a position. And the government may need to impose some requirements on employers (including itself) to get the ball rolling, making sure to add new measures to protect whistle-blowers extends to agreements related to security clearances held by government employees. In particular, such agreements should be improved so that they never protect poor performance within the government, as they now likely do in some cases. As such, refining rules around disclosure can only help build a better, more efficient and well-run nation. A Post-Script: Should Whistle-Blowers Be Protected? I said above “nobody wants to work with a whistle-blower”. That may be presumptuous – and it’s really just a guess on my part. But you’d have to think it would be tough to work in a government office alongside colleagues whose own performance evaluations could be negatively impacted by an embarrasing public revelation. At the very least, colleagues might legitimately question whether you might not ‘snitch’ if you saw them doing something you deemed improper. Consequently, whistle-blowers are vulnerable to being not well-regarded. In my view, offering official protections for whistle-blowers probably won’t stop such a person from being completely hamstrung since a critical level of trust would be irrevocably compromised. The exception to this rule might be a particular kind of whistle-blower who’s acted in counsel with his/her colleagues, perhaps as a last resort in the absence of other options – or where the stakes for the public are high and remedial internal efforts have simply failed. We’d like to think every workplace in the Government of Canada is ideal and such circumstances never arise, but if they ever do it might be important in such rare cases to at least remove the threat of a criminal record. Unfortunately, like anything, whistle-blowing protections could be abused by disgrunteled employees or by those seized with other kinds of sociiopathic behaviour. I’m firmly of the view that all other internal remedies should be pursued before turning to public disclosures having the potential to result in political scandal. And even then, the public interest would have to be of sufficiently high stakes to make taking an action likely to impact the lives and careers of a portentially large group of people justified. So if being a whistle-blower is so rarely justified (one would home!), why is it worth having? It doesn’t seem that vehicles for employee feedback are very accessible in government structures. This has to do with the division between the bureaucracy and elected officials – a line that doesn’t really have a parallel in the corporate structure. However, were the risk of whistle-blowers drawing attention to deficiencies in the government present, bringing public officials and the bureaucracy closer together might be the outcome; with better service to the public being the inevitable by-product of both measures. 4/5/2009 April Fool’s: A Geek Holiday?I gotta say that I’ve found it hard to get all hyped about April Fool’s Day as it has turned To this, I can only say “wow”. I mean – finding an obscure compiler from a language itself built as a joke more than 30 years ago? Of course – post it on the Internet (and draw enough attention to it), and someone will figure it out…. Nuclear War: Inevitable?
There’s been a nagging question on my mind since childhood: will I ever live to see nuclear weapons used? When I was very young; between 8 and 10 years of age, I used to have nightmares about nuclear attack. Of course, this was in the last 1970s and early 1980s, which was the height of the cold war. Most of my younger friends can’t relate because they just don’t know what it was like growing up with the fear that the Soviet Union could vaporize every major city in North America, including nearby Winnipeg. The city was a strategic nuclear target thanks to the convergence of the CN and CP railways, being home to Canada’s 17th Air Wing and perhaps the proximity of Fargo, North Dakota a couple hours drive south. The military base at Fargo houses a number of ICBM launch facilities and was thought to be the target for some of the larger ordinance the Soviets would use in any nuclear exchange. It may say something about my childhood obsession with nuclear cataclysm that these were all facts I’d become aware of before adolescence. But all that changed when the Soviet Union suffered its economic collapse and my nightmares went away. And the thought occurred that maybe, at some point far in the future, we’d have to deal with the possibility of terrorists getting their hands on nukes or other weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). While certainly a legitimate concern, at least there was the consolation of knowing that if a terrorist detonated a small warhead in a large urban centre, the likelihood was it wouldn’t mean the end of the world. But then during the first Gulf War we started hearing about the possibility that Iraq might have a nuclear arms program. And suddenly the reality of powers other than the “big 5” on the UN Security Council started to seem a lot closer than I’d expected it to be at that point in time. At least, I thought to myself, if a smaller country got nukes they’d still be at a disadvantage in any confrontation with the major powers. A country like Iraq didn’t even have delivery systems capable of reaching North America and if they tried anything, one or more of the “big 5” would surely incinerate any nation that tried to nuke anyone else. It wouldn’t be mutually-assured destruction (MAD) as it was in the Cold War between NATO and the Warsaw Pact; rather “SAD” – singularly-assured destruction – for the smaller nation. Indeed, any ambitions a small country had toward being on “equal footing” with the U.S. or Russia by getting nukes seemed little more than fantasy. It would be crazy for any leadership to think getting nukes would gain a strategic advantage on the superpowers of the world. And then we started hearing from North Korea. Earlier this decade it even successfully tested its first nuke, effectively joining the nuclear club. The only thing it’s lacked to start making real trouble for everyone in the region (including itself) are delivery systems capable of reaching the continental United States. What baffles me is what North Korea hopes to gain here. It’s already been engaged in talks, gaining concession after concession from the world’s powers while clearly making every effort to create rockets that could attack the United States. But while it’s enjoyed some success at the bargaining table and has apparently put its nuke program on hold from time to time, it still seems intent on preparing for a war that it couldn’t conceivably win. It would likely be suicide to even start, because if the game is hurling missiles across the Pacific – the United States will win with breathtaking alacrity. Even worse for North Korea, the U.S. leads the world in missile intercept technology and in this field is years – perhaps decades – ahead of its nearest competitor. And Patriot missiles are just the tip of the iceberg, because it goes without saying that there are technologies kept well out of public view which might well be able to knock anything North Korea has out of the sky. Unfortunately, nothing is fool-proof and with nukes, lets face it, if one gets through countermeasures it’s a pretty big disaster. But North Korea won’t have a large number of missiles to fire at the United States for quite a while. So it all seems perfectly crazy to engage in a strategy that has zero chance of working. Strangely, this is actually a bad thing for everyone. If the leadership is actually as delusional as it appears, they might still cause a great deal of trouble. They may not be able to get an ICBM all the way to San Francisco, but that doesn’t mean they’re harmless. They could still attack Japan or perhaps even South Korea. Whether the current negotiations (which bear a striking resemblance to appeasement) aren’t actually allowing what could be a relatively small problem now to turn into a much bigger one later – is still very much an open question, in my view. And – in the longer run – I wonder whether nuclear war isn’t inevitably. If it’s not North Korea, then could it not just be someone else down the road? I have the feeling the clock is ticking on the question of whether a nuclear conflict will occur – will a crazy totalitarian dictator push the button? Or maybe a religious extremist? A terrorist? We really do need to clean up this world and eliminate starvation and poverty in the next few decades if we’re going to avoid turning my nightmares into reality. But I’m just not seeing the kind of progress there needs to be, although there seems to be growing acceptance about what needs to be done to turn Earth into the kind of world everyone can be happy in. 4/2/2009 EU Adopts Big Brother to Fight Piracy
Of course, this has lead to an outcry from technology experts and civil liberties advocates – both of whom argue that leaving it up to a court to decide whether the online activities of users can be disclosed to a third party (particularly a corporate entity) without notice or due process beyond an arbitrary finding of suspicious activity gives far too much power to authorities to monitor Internet activity. Beyond this, the law also requires that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) monitor and characterize traffic, which most in the EU do not currently. It’s hard to guage what, if any, impact this new law will have outside of the EU – whether it will influence lawmakers in the United States or Canada to take similar measures under pressure from their own entertainment industries. But it is conceivable that traffic logged in the EU could be invoked in legal precedings in Canada and the U.S. – possibly even to the extent of using such logs as the basis for new lawsuits. Even so, there are those who actually favour such measures and buy into the arguments forwarded by the MPAA and its membership; that defending copyright is worth sacrificing privacy – particularly when it’s likely to be only the guilty who will be affected.
– dijit44, story comments (responding to my remarks – the first story comment added) My response:
Of perhaps even greater concern is a key decision being handed down in a Sweedish court on Friday. This concerns “The Pirate Bay” torrent sharing website, which is facing legal action from the MPAA concerning whether the site facilitates the theft of movies. The ruling is expected to favour the MPAA, but the question remains how far the court will go in assigning either damages and/or whether information exchange with the MPAA (disclosing visitor network traffic) will be included in the ruling. Are you looking to buy a gift for me?!?!?! Well - never one to turn away free stuff - here's the list of where to look on the Internet for things I'm interested in having. The best chance these lists are up-to-date are near my birthday (less likely) and Christmas (more likely).
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And what do I mean by 'ethical pirate'? That's the name I give someone who copies copyrighted material, principally for their own use but patently not for profit or material gain, for themselves or any other entity be it personal or corporate. Such an individual is concerned and even supports the principal behind copyright, but takes issue when the same laws that are supposed to protect owners of intellectual property (because it injects value into ideas and ensures credit is given where it's due) are instead twisted into a hammer to beat down college students living on a shoestring budget so media aristocracy can preserve the outdated business model that made them stinking rich. 
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