Bogonomicon

The passion of the Deaniacs

2004-02-12T12:35:00.000-06:00

You know, in a way I'm glad Arianna lost her bid for Governor of California. Not that I think that she wouldn't make a better governor than the Groppenfeurer, she would have, it's that she has now returned to writting for Salon. Given a choice between Terminator 4 and Arianna on Salon, I'll lose T4.

Because she's one of the few people (along with Paul Krugman) who routinely hits the nail on the head, as far as I'm concerned. And today's submission is another example of this. Her point is that the Kerry campaign needs to woo the Dean contingent, otherwise we will decamp. The problem is that I don't see it happen. Kerry isn't winning this election because of the grassroots, he's winning it despite the grassroots. The Democratic Brahimns, of which Kerry is one, view us Nader/Dean supporters not as disenchanted or disaffected, but as disloyal. The Democrats are entitled to our votes and unstinting, unquestioning, support.

The reason why the progressive wing of the party more or less uniformily went gaga over Dean is that he actually wooed us. Arguably to the point of hurting his campaign- I would argue, however, that to the current corporatist media, any wooing of the progressives is enough to hurt a campaign. Fortunately, this isn't a mistake the Kerry campaign is likely to make.

If Kerry loses in November, it'll be blamed on the disloyalty of the Dean supporters- causing a disruptive primary season that unnecessarily hurt the pre-selected candidate, and not supporting him after our candidate was defeated. Mark my words. What we actually do here and now is irrelevent, it'll be all of our fault anyways. It happened after 2000 (unlike the media, my long-term memory works just fine, thank you very much). If 2000 taught the Democrats anything, it's that progressives make good scapegoats.

Unfortunately, a Kerry win in '04 makes things even worse for the progressives. Reagan's win in 1980 was set up because of Ford's loss in '76. What would have happened if Ford hadn't lost in '76? A Kerry win will be touted that the media- and the Democratic voters- were right, that Dean was unelectable and that Kerry was. Of course, if Kerry loses, it'll be claimed that Dean would have lost even worse. It's just that the argument in this case is much weaker. Post hoc ergo propter hoc ("it happened after, therefor it was caused by").

The question of wether the country can afford another 4 years of Bush is not the question, I'd argue. Because it's currently not if we're going to have another four years of coporatist/conservtive christian rule, it's when- wether that particular alliance will regain power in '04, '08, or '12. Kerry representings nothing more than a time out. Unless we change something fundamental, we are going to have another four years of Bush, sooner or later.

What is the real deficit?

2004-02-10T15:09:00.000-06:00

If there is one thing that is consistant about the Bush administration, it's that their numbers never add up. But Bush never was a numbers person, he was more on an idea rat.

Which leads me to this news that the current $7.4 trillion dollar debt limit will have to be raised again come mid-summer. Remember that we hit $7 trillion just last December. This tells me the real deficit- the amount of money the goverment is having to borrow- is higher than even the astronomical $500 billion that's being reported- at least $600 billion, if not $800 billion.

This is rather like when we were being told that Iraq was costing us $4 billion a month- and yet we somehow managed to blow through $64 billion in only 6 months.

Kick me again- I might start to like it

2004-02-10T14:09:00.000-06:00

It's been several days, so I'm finally cooled down enough to discuss this article in polite company.

I generally consider myself a generous friend. I have had, howver, people take advantage of my generosity. When this happens, I start saying "no". Some wake up and stop taking my generosity for granted. Others haven't forgiven me for "failing" them. But, in my experience, saying "no" is the only way to stop people from taking advantage of you.

As a liberal, I've been doing the Democratic party the favor of voting for them fairly consistantly. Consistantly enough that the Democratic party has started taking our votes for granted. The Democrats court "swing" voters- those who regularly tell the Democrats "no"- with great alacrity. Every election is full of talk of how the Democrats are going to woo the soccer moms or NASCAR dads. Liberals are expected to show up, vote the way we're told to, and not complain when the party does absolutely nothing to reciprocate. Can't we see how fundamentally important it is for the party to pander entirely to the swing voters?

Consider this: Nader voters are routinely blamed for putting Bush into power. But what about the people who voted for Bush? Heavens no- we can't blame them. Then they might not vote for us next time. But the liberals have an obligation to vote for Democrats no matter what the Democrats do.

This is even more pathetic when you consider how effective the Democrats have been at wooing the swing voters.

Well, Democrats, this is your 2004 wake up call. You've hit the snooze button at least twice so far- in 2000 and 2002. But I hate being taken advantage of. It stops now. Get used to the word "no" because you're going to be hearing it a lot from me.

And I refuse to accept any blame or guilt for what Bush has or may do. I didn't vote for the moron, nor am I going to- wether I vote for Kerry or no. Blame for the Bush presidency should lie squarely on the shoulders of the people who voted for him- where it belongs. If the Democrats want me to vote for them again, they can woo me, just like they woo swing voters.

They know where to find me. I'll be over here on the left.

Disney leagues with MS against democracy

2004-02-10T12:23:00.000-06:00

Disney has signed on to Microsoft's DRM initiative, along with Time-Warner-AOL-We're-Beatrice. Disney wants to make sure no one can pirate it's content, like it pirated the content of Hans Christian Anderson, the Brothers Grim, and (it appears) Pixar. They don't want anyone else to be able to steal a swag the way they stole theirs.

I agree that I don't have the right to distribute someone else's copyrighted material against their wishes- I'm not one of those "information wants to be free" radicals. I'm even willing to admit it's open to debate wether I have the right to space- and time-shift copyrighted materials I have legitimate license to. But I still have two fundamental, basic problems with DRM.

The first is do I have the right to produce- and distribute under terms of my choosing- original work of my own? Me, Brian Hurt, a person who doesn't have a huge law department and several elected officials in my pocket. If you say yes, then there is no technical way to prevent piracy. If you say no, then freedom of speech has gone the way of the dodo, and democracy is following closely behind. Unfortunately, the media conglomerates have painted themselves into the corner of demanding that the mere possibility of piracy needs to be eliminated. Which is obvious- they sole value-add is distribution (especially the music industry). The internet is nothing if not an efficient distribution mechanism. And while the future may be good for artists and writers as a whole, it sucks if your sole purpose for existance just went away. I'm just not willing to sacrifice democracy on the alter of protecting the buggy whip manufacturers.

The second problem is the persistance of culture. All means of inscribing information degrades- what the computer programmers call "bit rot" is a fundamental function of entropy. Even words carved into stone slowly abrade away. Most of our current forms of distributing information have a life expectancy of at most decades. The earliest CDs are already degrading into unplayability. Content only survives the millenia if it is copied. The works of Plato, Aristotle, etc. only survive to this date only because they were copied.

If we eliminate the ability/right to copy our current works, we run the risk of waking up one day to discover we've lost whole eras of our culture. It will make the burning of the library of Alexandria look like a small mistake in comparison. Unlike Alexandria, it won't happen overnight. Certain titles, certain works, will simply become more and more rare. The death of the last dodo wasn't marked at the time- it was just a while later that someone looked around and said "hey, wait a minute- what happened to all the dodos?"

Speaking of Disney classics- is it still possible to get a legal copy of "Song of the South"? Is it comming out on DVD?

Unfortunately, this debate is not going on- the decisions are simply being handed down the way the big corporations, who don't care a whit about democracy or preserving culture, but instead care only about profits, want.

Nothing so powerfull...

2004-02-07T12:19:00.000-06:00

There is nothing so powerfull as a bad idea whose time has come. Teaching computer science via x86 assembly language has to be one of the worst idea's I've ever come across.

First, let me mention the difference between correlation and causation. Is it that some of us are great programmers because we know assembly language, or do we know assembly language because we are great programmers? I'd actually argue there is a causal relationship between the two- but not in the direction this author is assuming. The great programmers know assembly language because they are great programmers, they are not great programmers because they know assembly language. The great programmers are, to a great degree, dedicated to our craft, and keep learning. We never say "OK, I now know everything I need to know"- we're constantly pushing the limits and learning new things. Sooner or later we get around to assembly language. As evidence of this, I point to the large number of mediocre and even piss-poor programmers back in the day when assembly language was the only choice.

Second, large chunks of computer science are not bound to any specific language. Sorting a list is the classic example of CS knowledge that transcends time and language. Especially the early education should be focused on these extralingual essentials, and not on the epiphenomena of a given language or architecture. My first real programming language (I don't count Basic) was Pascal- a language I have had 0 use for in my professional career. But it taught me huge amounts of how to program. I would argue that the first language you should learn should be a specialized teaching language. You don't learn to fly in a 747, and you don't learn to drive in an 18-wheeled truck- you learn to fly in a Piper Cub or equivelent, and learn to drive in an Escort or equivelent. Despite the fact that 747s and 18-wheeled trucks are what the professionals fly/drive. Same with programming.

I'd like to take this moment to point out the TeachScheme! project. The lessons of learned by the TeachScheme project are very relevent to this debate- especially with their comparisons of teaching Scheme compared to teaching Java or (a subset of) C++. One of the problems they experienced was just getting students over the hurdle of the syntax. And Java's syntax at least I consider regular and easy to predict (as I mentioned earlier, I don't consider C++ consistantly parsable even in theory). This may sound like heresy comming from me, but Scheme is a better first language than Ocaml. Of all the assembly languages to pick, they picked the x86- a more irregular assembly language I don't know of. 68K would be way better, as would PPC . Or, better yet, not teaching assembly language at all until much later in the course.

I've commented multiple times that the computer programming industry seems to have gotten stuck circa 1968. I'd like to see us move forward at least into the 1980's. But the alternative- moving backwards into the 1950's, is also possible.

No one here but us chickens

2004-02-07T11:42:00.000-06:00

From this article:

A TOP MICROSOFT lawyer has been appointed as chair of a committee which will monitor the behaviour of US courts judging antitrust settlements.

How on earth do you make fun of something like this?

10 new pipeline stages in Prescott?!?

2004-02-03T14:31:00.000-06:00

According to Ace's hardware, the new Prescott core has 10 more stages post-decode, for a total of 31. Add in the 8 stages to decode the instructions, and you have a total of 39 pipeline stages. By comparison, the Athlon XP has 15 (5 for decode), the Opteron has 17 (5 for decode).

It's obvious that Intel is going for sheer clockrate scaling, and damn the performance.

North Korea isn't how you think it is

2004-02-02T16:37:00.000-06:00

Just added the Island of Balta onto our links list, as this is the third article from there I've posted today. I have programming, he has football- no one's perfect.

The article in question is this op-ed peice, by someone who has actually negotiated with North Korea.

What we need to do with NK- and Cuba, as well- is to stop making them more paranoid and get them engaged in the world. This is, curiously enough, why I'm in favor of MFN status with China. The last thing we need is China going isolationists on us. Once the country is engaged, we can build a middle class with economic and political power and encourage liberalization. It worked with the Soviet Union, and it is working with China. But there are two problems with this. First off, it doesn't admit to a solution in a short time frame. We'll be decades chivying these countries slowly towards democracy. And second, it's boring to watch. We sit and talk and talk and talk and talk and nothing ever happens. War is, at least, exciting. Especially for those who don't have to fight it, and can just sit back and watch it on TV.

But a war with NK would be bleeding expensive. Too many countries and manufacturing regions important to our economy are within easy striking distance. For example, it's basically impossible to buy a computer these days without some part or another being made in either China, Taiwan or South Korea. All of whom would be in the "fallout" zone of a war with NK.

Civil War, here we come

2004-02-02T16:16:00.000-06:00

Two terrortist attacks on the Kurdish political leadership have left possibly as many as 200 dead.

We're ahead of schedule for Iraq degenerating into civil war. That wasn't supposed to happen until August at the earliests, hopefully even Novemeber.

I want off this rock

2004-02-02T16:13:00.000-06:00

From this article:

The Kansas Court of Appeals for a second time upheld the 17-year prison sentence of a youth who, at age 18, engaged in oral sex with a 14-year-old boy. For the same crime, if it had involved an act between an 18-year-old male and a 14-year-old girl, the sentence would have been 13 to 15 months.

This is the shining beacon of freedom and justice in the world?

The forgotten consequences of Columbine

2004-02-02T12:31:00.000-06:00

Today's Salon lead is today's required reading, about how the new Zero Tolerence policies at school are destroying kid's lives.

As unpleasant as my grade school experiences were (hint: shit I suffered on a daily basis the first 18 years of my life would result in my filing criminal charges today), I have to say I'm lucky I went to school when I did. I would have been one of those children who were expelled at the least, if not arrested. This is assuming that I wasn't taken away from my parents for "abuse". I was always turning up with poorly explained cuts and bruises- most of which were my own damned fault, and the vague unlikely explanations were a combination of "it made sense at the time" and leaving many details out so I wouldn't be punished for doing things I shouldn't have been doing.

The problem is that this is only one data point. Also relevent are the increasing popularity of three strike laws- which mean that there are now people spending life in prison for stealing a peice of pizza. And the popularity of mandatory sentencing guidelines for all sorts of violations- zero tolerance for adults. The increasing popularity of the death penalty. The increasing beleif that "once a perp, always a perp". We as a society are losing our ability to forgive.

There are a lot of reasons behind this increasing draconian behavior in our society. Part of it is political lobbying by the incarceration industry- there are companies who are hired to own and run prisons, who get paid per prisoner per year. Of course they'd like more "customers". Another problem is the emotional logic of 1+1=0, that 1 crime + 1 crime = 0 crimes, that if you've been hurt, that somehow if you just cause enough pain to someone else, your pain will be lifted. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.

But a large part of it is that we're moving to a two-law society. There is one law for the privileged, and another law for everyone else. That's where the word "privilege" comes from- the latin for "private law" (privi from the same root-word as private, lege from the same root word as legislation). It is demonstratably true that if you are of the right clan, you can get caught smuggling crack cocaine into drug rehab and only get 10 days in jail. Anyone else would get tens of years.

Our current situation reminds me of that of pre-revolutionary France, where the Marquis deSade (where are our word "sadism" comes from) could rape and torture to his heart's content with little or no punishment, because he was the cousin of the King (rather like Noelle). Meanwhile, the historical antecedents to Jean val Jean from Les Miserables really were spending 25 to life for stealing a loaf of bread.

Now think long and hard about where this lead ~200 years ago. Injustice always breeds violence. As it looks likely we will learn yet again.

The truth comes out

2004-02-02T10:39:00.000-06:00

I've developed a theory. The basic idea of it is that whenever Republicans accuse Democrats of something, they're usually guilty of it themselves. I first developed this theory at the height of the Clinton impeachment circus, when it was exposed what sordid love lives the Republicans who were most voracious in attacking the President had. There are a number of reasons for this- guilt transference, clouding the waters for when the crimes of Republicans will be exposed, and simply already thinking along those lines. The application of this theory to the Republicans who accuse liberals of committing treason and being anti-American is left as an exercise for the reader.

But the specific crime I want to inspect is the decades-old charge that Democrats use the welfare system to reward Democratic voters. The theory here is that Democrats support welfare, and that the people on Welfare would then vote Democrats back into power. Sprinle that statement with proper racist code words and you have a pretty standard Republican stump speech. For bonus points, throw in references to honest, hard-working (white) people taking their goverment back from the shift, lazy, (black) freeloading Democrats.

So, what would my theory say about this? That it is the Republicans who are rewarding their voters with federal support. And guess what we find- this article, talking about giver and taker states. Giver states are those states which pay more in Federal taxes than they get in Federal aid. Taker states are those states which receive more in Federal aid than they pay in Federal taxes. What's (perhaps) unexpected is that giver states tend heavily towards being Democratic, while takers tend heavily towards being Republican.

Now, to be fair, I don't think the entire disparity is due to the contrivance of the Republicans. The liberal states also tend to be rich (comparitively) economically- states like California and New York. And, yes, Minnesota. The rich should pay to help the poor. I would also argue that the wealth of the giver states comes, in large part, from being fundamentally liberal. Take one example- state funding of higher education (UC Berkley/Stanford in California, MIT/BU in Boston, UMN in Minneapolis) is what lead directly to the tech businesses locating in those places. People came to attend college, and then stayed to work. The rewards of being liberal occur years, often decades, later, and dispersed throughout the entire economy, but they do happen. And that many of us do see that the money we currently spend to help the taker states comes back to us, just like the money we spent on our own state has come back to us.

I just sometime wish we'd also follow the other golden rule- you know, he who has the gold, makes the rules.

The so-called liberal media

2004-02-01T12:48:00.000-06:00

Arnie- smart enough to realize he's a creation of the media, dumb enough to say it out loud. As the guy who told his third grade teacher that she was using that phsycology stuff on me, and further more wasn't doing it right amd proceeded to critique her style (proving I was very intelligent, but not real bright), I have a certain amount of sympathy.

Note, when you read that article, that there is no introspection as to why Arnie would think something as blatantly silly as that the press corp is his personal team of publicists. Except maybe that he's just not from around here.

To every who thinks Kerry is more electable than Dean

2004-02-01T12:22:00.000-06:00

Read this op-ed peice in the LA Times.

A quote:

Those minor problems paled, however, next to Kerry's positions on Iraq. To his credit, he was one of the Democrats who voted Oct. 11, 2002, for the resolution giving President Bush the authority "to use the armed forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate" in Iraq. This has caused Kerry a lot of grief among Deaniac Democrats, and he's twisted himself into a pretzel to explain away this vote.

What, you thought that the Karl Rove clique would say to themselves "Oh drat- they're nominating Kerry. Guess we'll have to play nice"?

A change in the reasons

2004-02-01T11:39:00.000-06:00

Every once in a while I like to rant on daily Kos- it's free advertising for this site. Today is one of those days- go read the article here.

As a bogo exclusive, I'm working on a long rant on Malthus. The problem is that's one of the core rants that touches dozens of other topics, each of which are rant-worthy in an of themselves. Patience- more is comming.

Sorry for not posting more

2004-01-30T01:41:00.000-06:00

I've been in coder monkey mode for the last couple of days. But good news- the bit blit routine works! Getting all the corner cases correct is most definately NP-annoying. Now if I can just get the assembler version working...

While I'm muttering, I wonder- how many people are actually reading this Blog regularly at this point? Hit the comment link below and say hello.

New reasons why C++ sucks

2004-01-27T23:15:00.000-06:00

I've just discovered that if my browser (Mozilla) crashes after I post a message, but before I publish it, when I restart my browser and come back, I can't publish my unpublished articles until I write a new one.

My browser only crashes because it is written in C++, and is therefor prone to memory leaks and wild pointers and corrupted memory. And, after running so long, or hitting the wrong web page, or opening too many copies of itself, or on days that end in Y, it has a bad habit of crashing without warning. So I decided to write an article about how C++ sucks. That way I'll at least be able to publish my articles.

First of all, all the arguments about how you can add garbage collection to C++ don't work in practice. Yes, you can add the Boehm-Demers-Weiser Garbage Collector, unless of course you're linking in a library that already overrides ::new(). Like, say, QT. Garbage collection should be designed in. Take a gander at that page, especially the advantages and disadvantages of Garbage Collecting C and C++ programs, and this paper. Oh, and while you're at it, this paper and this paper and this FAQ and this book. And so on. But hey- why let facts get in the way of a good theory?

C++ is not parsable. This isn't even something as mundane as a shift/reduce conflict- although my experience has been that if you have a shift/reduce conflict in a LALR(1) parser, you have a potiential for a bug (this is a fault I will lay at the feet of Ocaml- it has way too many shift/reduce conflicts in the language grammar). The classic shift/reduce conflict is C's dangling else. Which does cause real program bugs. And which, of course, C++ imported wholesale, but that was because it's a (more or less) superset of C. No, when I mean C++ isn't parsable, I mean something deeper. Consider the following sequence of tokens:

a < b , c > d;

Is this a) a weird expression using C's comma operator, and grouped like (a < b), (c > d), or a variable declaration using templates, and grouped like (a < b, c >) d? Even typing information doesn't help you- the same identifier can be both a variable name and a type name/template name simultaneously. This language is unparsable.

If they had simply used some different tokens than < and > for templates, these issues could have been avoided (not the other issues I have with templates, like code bloat and misuse, but at least the language would be parsable). This highlights the Ur-flaw as it were of C++. Effectively, it was designed by committee. A committee that would approve major language features, like templates, without them ever having been implemented- because even the most cursory implementations would have demonstrated the parsing problems and caused a change in tokens. Rather like the C99 committee (and there's a rant for another day).

In a way, I'm glad C++ has operator overloading. Because now I can state definitively that it's a bad idea, whereas before I was just unsure. It creates bugs, gets misused more often than not (even not counting iostreams) and is often not used by the very people who are most supposed to benefit from it (numeric programmers). Consider the following code:



    int i = 3;

    cout << i << 2;

What does this print? Does this print '6' or '32'? Now, for bonus points: what did the writer of this code intend to print out? And simply saying the programmer should refrain from making this mistake is missing the point. I'd love to stop making mistakes. I just haven't figured out how to yet. People new to programming make simple mistakes like the above for simple reasons. Seasoned professionals make simple mistakes like the above for complex and subtle reasons. And I've yet to be a on a programming team of more than three people without at least one yahoo who thinks he's being clever. This is not even counting the times I was a yahoo too.

I would actually count iostreams as a serious misuse of operator overloading- in that it weakens and obfuscates what an operator means- even to the most experienced C++ expert imaginable. In this slashdot interview, Bjarne Stroustrup himself demonstrates this confusion when he says, and I quote:

For example, It's clearer to say that a class must have a << operator than to say that it must be derived from "Printable" (that then has a << operator).

To the inventor of the language it is no longer clear what the "real" meaning of the << operator is- output, or left shift. There are classes I can easily think of that might want to implement both meanings of the operator- a bignum class, for example. But even ignoring iostreams, in the C++ code I've seen I see operator overloading abused more often than used legitimately. How many classes overload ++ so the authors can use for loops instead of while loops? Even when the concept of "successor" is entirely meaningless? There is no way C++ could gaurentee that the code that implements the operator actually fullfills some expectation of how that operator behaves. Operator overloading is the 21st century equivelent of old FORTRAN programmers redefining the number 2.

And lastly, the people who are most commonly cited as needing operator overloading- numeric programmers- tend to avoid it. Especially if they've had any experience with C++. The problem is temporary creation. If what you're dealing with is sufficiently small, like complex numbers (the classic example), then temporary creation isn't a problem. But if what you're dealing with is 1024x1024 dense matricies, temporary creation is very much a concern. And no, inlining does not solve the problem- optimial matrix multiply routines, for example, are difficult to inline (read this paper on the importance of blocking and copying to matrix multiply- and the remember that this makes matrix multiply a recursive operation).

Well, that's enough flaming on C++ for now. You will no doubt get more next time I have to work with the bastard. Or the next time my browser crashes near the end of a long post.

Quote of the day

2004-01-27T17:58:00.000-06:00

I do have to make fun of Attny General John Ashcroft for this quote, it's a moral imperitive:

"Weapons of mass destruction including evil chemistry and evil biology are all matters of great concern, not only to the United States but also to the world community. They were the subject of U.N. resolutions," Ashcroft said.

I have to agree with Ashcroft- there is certainly signs that both chemistry and biology were taking place in Iraq before the war. And we know that both chemistry and biology are evil, because they scientifically support evolution and not creationism, and therefor lead to godless secular humanism. Praise the Lord that we have George W. Bush in the Whitehouse, who is committed to stamping out chemistry and biology everywhere- even on Mars, which was recently discovered to have chemistry, and maybe even biology!

Iraqis want to see Saddam's allies stand trial with him

2004-01-27T10:23:00.000-06:00

Kudos to Michael Moore for pointing me to this gem. It seems that many Iraqis want to see Saddam's allies- specifically, us, or more specifically, the Bush administration, put on trial for war crimes right next to Saddam.

I guess the "Liberation- from the people who brought you the original Oppression!" advertising campaign wasn't as effective as we had hoped it would be.

Fear and Loathing at HP

2004-01-26T21:03:00.000-06:00

Personally, I think a new level of hell is being prepared for Carly for when she finally shows up, for what she did to the HP calculator division. But that's me. I see some of my predictions about the future of HP are comming true.

My basic feeling of what is going at HP is comprised of two points. The first is that HP is not the company Carly wanted to run. At a guess, the company she really wanted to run was Dell. Dell makes sense from an MBA's standpoint- do it faster and cheaper. HP's technical culture simply doesn't make sense in MBAville. I've experienced companies managed by management that really wanted to run some other company, and it was a diaster. Management made decisions that either only made sense in the context of the other company, not in this company, or that they felt would work to change the company to be more like what the company they really wanted to run. Notice how in neither case are the decisions noted for making sense for this company and this situation. The Compaq merger was a classic example of this- it was a way to bring in a more Dell like management structure. As was killing the calculator division (despite the fact that it was a profit center)- Dell doesn't make calculators.

The second point, which is really a variant of the first, is that the MBAs have taken over HP at all levels. Carly election to CEO was just the final acknowledgement that it's been all downhill since Bill and Bob left. See, HP used to be famous and/or infamous for being an engineer run company. Because that's what Hewlett and Packard the men were- old school engineers. Now the MBA's are in charge, the company will be incapable of making a rational engineering decision for the forseeable future. See, the rational engineering decisions will always be proposed by those who best understand the engineering issues- the engineers. And were a manager to actually follow the recommendations of his engineers, that would create the image that the engineers and not the managers were in charge again- among the poor guy's fellow managers, if not among the engineers. In companies where there is no question that the managers and not the engineers are firmly in charge, and managers will not face repurcussions for acquiescing to engineering requests, sane decisions can still be made. Not so in HP. They've got to put those unruly engineers in their place!

Unfortunately, once corporate insanities like this get wedged into a corporate culture, I have no clue how they can get unwedged. The manager makes dumb decisions (like kill calculators, merging with Compaq, and betting the future of the company on the Itanium), and then later needs to either admit that they screwed up (yeah, right- that'd be worse than agreeing with the engineers in the first place!) or defend to the death that it was the right decision, despite the overwhealming evidence to the contrary. Which means the insanity gets metasized. The logic of paranoia is that it's never safe to relax.

So, as much as I hate to say it, we're seeing the death throes of HP. It's sad- it was a good company, back in the day.

The Truth Deficit

2004-01-26T19:45:00.000-06:00

Today's required reading is this screed from Cal Pundit. At the very least, take a look at the graph. The report from the Congressional Budget Office has a baseline that shows us getting back to balanced budgets in 2011, and maybe a $200B surplus by 2013. But, if you add in all the goodies that Bush has already asked for, he has managed to turn that surplus into perhaps as much as a $800B deficit. That's a $1 trillion dollar turn around.

Here's the problem I have. According to the CIA World Fact Book, the US has a gross GDP of $10.45T. With a debt of $7 trillion dollars. In other words, the federal debt is already 67% of our GDP. But the Bush Administration is seriously proposing to add $500B to $800B a year in new debt between now and 2013. That's another $5-8 trillion in debt, making our total debt $12-15T. And, at current rates, our GDP will only grow to about $15.5T.

The last time the US Gov't was this heavily in debt, we had just finished defeating global fascism. What do we have to show for the debt this time? Even worse, who holds the debt has changed. In 1945, the debt of the US Govt was largely held by US citizens, with a personal stake in the American goverment (aka patriotism). Today's debt is primarily held by foreign investors, looking for good returns on the money they've made from the US trade deficit.

"Recipie for diaster" doesn't begin to cover it. We can go too often to the well- the supply of credit for the US Gov't to consume is not endless. And a bankrupt goverment can not do much of anything for anyone- stimulate the economy, provide for the well being of it's citizens, or even provide for the common defense. The best it can do is inflate the currency like mad in the hopes of getting out of it's trap- a cure almost as bad as the disease. Which is why this election budget matters are second only to fundamental issues of preserving our democracy. And why everytime on of these articles comes out, it instantly becomes the required reading of the day.

Billmon and the Blogs

2004-01-26T19:07:00.000-06:00

I'm reading this screed from Billmon about how the social elite have discovered blogging. I found the one advertising exec talking about swooping in and buying up blogs while they're still cheap to be incredibly humorous. If she's reading, Bogonomicon is up for sale- opening bid is a measly five million dollars. Call me, baby- we'll do lunch.

The freeloader problem is interesting, and, in the context he presented it, unsolvable. His fundamental flaw is assuming that the only reward for doing something is monetary. If you don't pay for it, it doesn't get done, or isn't worth anything. I call this the libertarian fallacy, as "mainstream" outlets which call themselves libertarian- for example, the Cato institute- tend very strongly to make this mistake. This is also a very common mistake made when considering open source software. If we don't pay our programmers, how will software ever get written? The trick is, once you realize that not all rewards are monetary, a number of otherwise unexplainable phenomema become readily explicable.

And the "mainstream media" is not as indispensible as it thinks. Yes, their is this romantic image of reporters meeting trenchcoat wearing deepthroats in shadowy garages, dodging hails of bullets as the bad guys try to scare them off the story, and yelling "stop the presses!" as they break the pulitizer prize winning story of the century. But how much of that goes on in reality? And standing against that you have Robert Novak- who is just one of many "journalists" who make their living dutifully parroting whatever spin is comming out of the halls of power.

OK, Billmon can't afford to go to Iraq himself, and neither can I. So if the news media doesn't exist, who is going to report from Iraq? Umm, how about the Iraqis themselves? Every Dean event is followed by a spate of blogging entries as eye witnesses report. In blog space, everyone is a reporter, therefor any event with human beings in attendence has potiential blog-space reporters there. And if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to witness it, is it news?

And objectivity isn't an argument either- primarily because I don't beleive objectivity exists with humans. Heinlein said one of the most artistic ways to lie was to tell the truth, just not all of it. The old gray lady herself, therefor, is telling you right on their masthead that they're lying- "All the news that fits in print". Not all the news, just all the news fits. Which, since it isn't all the news, it becomes a question of what aren't they telling you- and there (if nowhere else) does bias sneak in. What qualifies as "news"? And, if you've somehow gotten the notion that Bogo is fair and balanced, let me correct you right now. Bogo is unfair and horribly biased, almost as badly as the TV network which uses the "fair and balanced" slogan. Caveat lector- beware of the physciatrist with the odd eating habbits.

Which is the biggest value a blog can bring- the chance to tell your side of the story. The city council meets to discuss the highyway bypass. In attendence is the half a dozen city council members, fifty concerned citizens, and one reporter. The next day, only one person's viewpoint is printed- the reporters. And 56 people are left screaming at the newspaper "that isn't what happened at all!" It's not money that will drive those 56 people to write up their experiences of the meeting, it's the chance to set the record straight. And maybe make a difference in the city plans.

When thinking about starting this blog, in what I envisioned it might someday mean, the thought "and then we make money off it" never crossed my mind. Indded, I would argue any attempt to turn any blog into a "profit center" would destroy the blog- Bogonomicon, or Kos, or Instapundit. I did dream that one day I might have a vast readership- maybe even more than a dozen people :-). And therein lies the value of Bogo to me- it's the ability for me to affect the debate, and maybe put some ideas into people's heads. Bend reality a little closer to my heart's desire.

Which is why the death of mainstream media doesn't frighten me. And I think it's going to happen sooner or later anyways- as everyone who isn't a reporter stands to benefit. Five hundred years ago the invention of the printing press doomed the goverments based upon hereditary nobility. I imagine the dukes and earls asked each how on earth goverments would manage to function without control being firmly in the hands of the nobility. The answer, of course, was "just fine, thank you very much".

Dean & Roses

2004-01-26T13:25:00.000-06:00

Smirk of the day- this take on the Dean Iowa speech.

The physics theory I like...

2004-01-25T23:41:00.000-06:00

...is that the mysterious "dark energy" that is expanding the universe against the force of gravity is, of course, the expanding pressure of the storage requirements of google groups.

The fact that google groups, and therefor the web, is expanding faster than light does not violate relativity, however, as no information is being transmitted.

Political lightweights

2004-01-25T13:12:00.000-06:00

So the Democratic race has narrowed down to four frontrunners, all able to win - Dean, Kerry, Clark, and Edwards. Something to think about? Dean is the only one who is a political heavyweight. Clark is a virgin. Edwards is a neophyte. Kerry is a seatwarmer, with no significant legislation in his 19 years as senator. Dean, of course, gave Vermont the best fiscal record and the best health care of any state in the Union during his 11 years as governor. He has delivered everything the other candidates have talked about, and more.

I find this worrisome. Given the strange storm-tossed seas of the race, there is a substantial chance that Dean won't get the nomination (although I still consider him by far the frontrunner). Are we going to wind up with a candidate whose political record looks no better than this?

Why I'm still not Anyone But Bush

2004-01-23T22:41:00.000-06:00

Dean's performance in Iowa has caused a great deal of soul searching out in the Blogsphere- if Dean doesn't get the nomination, will you support who does? My answer is clear- NO.

Here's the problem I have with being ABB. My entire life has been one long game of one step forward, two steps back. And, post-Clinton, the Democratic strategy has lead to two steps backwards, one step sideways. All pretension of making forward progress has been dropped- Democratic language today is one of maybe hoperfully keeping some of what we have now. Maybe they won't overturn Roe v. Wade. Maybe they won't entirely repeal the first amendment. Maybe they won't bankrupt social security. And I'm supposed to be thankfull because in 2004 we might take a step sideways, instead of another two steps back? If we're lucky?

Bush is bad. That I agree whole heartedly with. But if we don't change something fundamental in the Democratic party- if we don't heed the wakeup calls of 2000 and 2002, we'll be right back here, with a new Bush, come 2008, or 2012. Nixon should have destroyed the Republican party for a decade at least- but 6 years later Reagan and Bush Sr. came right back into power. The ABB crowd isn't looking at the long term. The worst defeat possible for Bush wouldn't stop the Republicans from shedding their image like a snake shedding it's skin, and come right back into power in 2008. We need to start taking 2-3 steps forward, and that means radical change. We need to aim for more than status quo.

Unlike the majority of Americans, I was paying attention to this race 4-6 months ago. When the conventional wisdom was that the only way to win was to run as Republican-lite, which, when you inspected it, turned out to be exactly like being a Republican, except they felt guilty about it. Edwards, Kerry, Lieberman- they all voted for the war resolution and the PATRIOT act. Now they adopt liberal/progressive attitudes, like sheep donning wolf's clothing. My prediction: should one of these people actually win the nomination, they will immediately tack hard to the starboard, talking about wooing the soccer mom and NASCAR dad demographics, and ditch their liberal disguises. Clark will likely do the same- his advisors are almost universally DLCers, who will strongly advise a hard shift to the right. They all promise only one step sideways- not the radical leap forward we need to stave off long-term doom.

The New Deal coalition- and the Democrats- was a supermajority and thus dominated politics between 1932 and 1968, a run of 36 years. Take a long hard look at the Republicans of the day, especially Eisenhower- they'd be too liberal for the Democrats these days (Eisenhower tried to cut defense spending! Gasp!) Johnson, signing the Civil Rights act into law, killed it by causing the white southern protestant southern demographic (and a non-trivial amount of the immigrant catholic northern demographic) to pull out. Identity politics started a 36-year slide that culminated (to date) in the 2002 debacle.

But I think the fundamental political bent of this country is still New Deal/Great Society progressivism. Notice how even Bush has to cloak his proposals in Orwellian doublespeak titles to make them sound liberal/progressive- the Clean Skies act, the No Child Left Behind act, etc. If you wandered around and asked people if they beleived all children should be educated, that jobs should be safe and pay real wages, that everyone should have health care, that the environment should be protected, etc- people will say yes. And if we could just get people in the south to vote their economic interests and not their prejudices, we could put the New Deal supermajority back together. And go back to two steps forward, one step sideways.

But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the country really is becoming deeply conservative. In which case, the Democrats are doomed anyways. The question then becomes not if we can defeat Bush this time, it becomes when will Bush (or his ideological brother) will be back. Wether we make a doomed stand now, or surrender peicemeal, won't change the inevitable outcome- goverment by the cronyists, of the cronyists, and for the cronyists. And most probably the effective death of democracy and freedom in the US. It's only when we can stave off the impending doom that making a stand now becomes important. If not now, when do we make a stand? In not here, where? We've been retreating for thirty years- when do we stand and fight?

I choose here. I choose now. Death before dishonor, damn the torpedoes, I'm for Dean.

Kill the x86!

2004-01-23T21:39:00.000-06:00

Any article with that title gets my attention. Of course, I think the x86 architecture should have gotten a bullet in the brain no later than 1982, but that's me.

The problem is that circa 1982 was about the last time it was really feasible to kill the x86. The one lesson learned from the Itanic debacle is that people do not want to upgrade hardware and software simultaneously. The only times I know of that people have done that is when their old hardware/software architecture has died out from under them, and there is no choice but to do a simultaneous upgrade and vendor switch. The exception to this rule- Apple- proves the rule. When Apple switched to PowerPC from 68K, the new PowerPCs were fast enough to emulate the old 68K faster than a previous-generation 68K ran native. The first generations of Apple Power Macs mainly ran 68K code. The next generation of hardware has to run the previous generation's software at least as fast as the previous generation's hardware, with a promise of more performance in the future- that is the ironclad rule. And it's been true for at least 20 years.

The early-mid 1990's was an interesting time for Intel- and, I think, a missed opportunity to kill the x86. AMD was at least a generation behind Intel- the K6, Athlon, and Opteron were still in the future. Apple was proving that virtual machine emulation had arrived, and at least Sun/Java was listening. Right around the time Intel was going for the Pentium, or maybe Pentium Pro, they could have instead gone for a serious RISC chip, gotten an easy 50%+ speed increase, and spent most of it on emulation/JIT compilation of the x86 code into something sane. Unlike Apple, Intel would have had to help port 2-3 OSs- Windows, OS/2, and maybe NeXTStep, depending upon the exact time and wether Intel cared. In retrospect, only Windows really mattered. This is what Intel has actually final decided to do with the Itanic- unfortunately, I think it's too little, too late.

Unfortunately, the window closed, sometime back in the nineties. AMD released the K6, then the Athlon, and now the Opteron. Intel no longer has the generation or so of lead on it's competition- one could argue (and I will, elsewhere) that AMD has a generational advantage over Intel. Nor is there the easy big wins anymore. The advantage RISC has is it does the same work in fewer transistors- except that in modern CPUs the actual CPU tends to be just shoved in a corner, the vast majority of the chip is cache. And cache is the same between x86 and RISC.

Intel's hope was that VLIW would provide enough of an advantage over RISC that they would still be able to pull and Apple- get enough of a speed increase out of a new architecture to pay for the emulation of the old one. Unfortunately for Intel it didn't work. Wether it would have worked if Itanium had been released in 1998 like originally planed I'm not sure. But the performance advantage of the Itanium over the x86 and RISC competitors today is small enough that emulation isn't really a feasible possibility- a 50% speed advantage is minimum to pull that trick. And the Itanium's speed advantage disappears, and becomes a huge speed disadvantage, when using anything except the most advanced compilers. While the x86s and RISCs have a lot of ability to make up for suboptimal codes, the Itanium has none. Watch that first step, it's a doozy. Unfortunately, most code is compiled with not very advanced compilers.

And even code that is compiled with an advanced compiler gets run on the wrong CPU. The Itanium requires the compiler to "bundle" instructions that can be executed in parallel. Imagine a set of 12 instructions which can be broken into either 2 groups of six instructions, or 3 groups of 4 instructions. And that there are two different Itanium CPUs, one with four instruction pipelines and one with six. If you compile the 12 isntructions as 2 groups of six instructions, it executes in 2 clocks on the 6-pipeline CPU, but it takes 4 clock cycles on the 4 pipeline CPU (the CPU can execute 4 instructions from the first bundle in the first clock, then the remaining 2 instructions from that bundle in the second clock- remember it can't mix isntructions from different bundles!- and the same break up happens with the second bundle), a 33.3% speed reduction from breaking the instructions into 3 bundles of 4 instructions each. But breaking the instructions into three bundles takes 3 instructions, even on the 6-pipeline machine (the extra two pipelines are never used), a 50% speed reduction from it's optimal. Optimizing for one machine deoptimized for the other, often signifigantly. So we will always be dealing with suboptimal code.

Notice one thing- AMD's Opteron CPUs run the "old" 32-bit code at full speed, signifigantly faster than the previous generation of Athlons. And AMD made it easy for 64-bit OSs to run 32-applications (in a manner very similiar to how the 386 and successors could run 16-bit apps inside a 32-bit OS). No emulators need be included in the OS. This means that you can justify buying Opteron computers right now and using them to run your old 32-bit apps on your old 32-bit OSs. Then, in 6-18 months when you're upgrading your software, you'll be able to upgrade to a 64-bit OS, and maybe those apps which would really benefit from 64-bits. Other apps can happily stay at 32-bits. Or not- the Opteron is perfectly justifiable as a 32-bit only CPU. This makes users much more willing to upgrade- they don't have to do everything right now, and they aren't locked into any future plans.

Unfortunately, this means that we aren't going to be able to kill the x86 anytime soon. 64-bits will be enough room that we won't need to go to 128-bit machines for 15-25 years, assuming Moore's Law continues for that time frame. Unfortunately, that's the point where Moore's Law as we currently understand it starts hitting real hard physics limitations- another 30 years of doubling clock rate every 18 months means computers will be running at ~10¹⁵ cycles/second. At that frequency, the quantum energy of a photon is enough to break up atoms and change their atomic structures. The next shot to kill the x86 is going to be right around the time Moore's Law runs out.

I think hitting the end of Moore's Law will bring RISC back into play- as we start being able to super-optimize and tune our chips without constantly have the parameters of how many transistors we have and what process we're designing for changing out from under us all the time. But the end of Moore's Law will have profound and far-reaching consequences that I will dig into predicting some other time.

SCO jumps shark, begins to self parody

2004-01-23T19:24:00.000-06:00

The latest missives from SCO has that Linux is evil because it could be used by the Axis of Evil.

I'd add a sarcastic comment here, but none seems to be sufficiently saracastic for the situation. What do you do when legitimate news is less believable than parody?

Thoughts on conspiracy theories, logic, and proof

2004-01-23T19:16:00.000-06:00

Today's required reading is this post over at Orcinus, about the differences between theories about real conspiracies (which do exist- as Nixon, COINTELPRO, and Iran-Contra proved) and conspiracy theories. Especially this part:

Real conspiracies, by their very nature, have the following characteristics:

-- They are limited in scope, their purpose being usually to achieve only a singular, often narrow, purpose.

-- They are limited in duration in time.

-- They include only a limited number of participants.

-- As the boundaries of these limits increase, the likelihood of the conspiracy failing or being exposed rises exponentially.

Conspiracy theories, in direct contrast, almost universally feature the following qualities:

-- They are broad-ranging in nature, and usually boil down to a massive plot to enslave, murder or politically oppress all of mankind or at least large numbers of people.

-- They are believed to have existed for long periods of time, in some cases for hundreds of years.

-- They involve large numbers of people, notably significant numbers of participants in high positions in government or the bureaucracy.

-- The long-term success of these conspiracies is always credited to willing dupes in the media and elsewhere.

There is a natural human attraction to conspiracy theories, I think- they're the political equivelent of ghost stories told around camp fires. In that sense, I enjoy them as next as the next guy, and endulge in them on occassion. The problem comes in with the fact that most people have never been taught logical thinking or the concepts of a proof, and don't want to deal with shades of uncertainity between TRUE and FALSE. And that the truth of a proposition should be readily decidable, if not pre-decided. Which is a problem for me, as I like playing in the maybe-world of what-if. What is interesting is what is not yet known. Yesterday's weather doesn't interest anyone (well, except maybe climatologists), it's tomorrow's weather which is interesting.

October Surprise #1: Terrorists for Bush

2004-01-23T17:26:00.000-06:00

Gwynne Dyer, who did the seminal (and largely forgotten) series War thinks that Al Qeida may help get Bush re-elected. It makes sense- Bush is the best recruiter for Al Qeida ever.

This opens up the whole discussion of wether Bush will attempt his own October Surprise. Another terrorist attack on US soil is October Surprise theory #1 (with a bullet). Actually, I wouldn't be surprised that the black-ops side of the CIA didn't have a few cells of muslem terrorists kicking around who think they're part of Al Qeida but really report to Langley. After all, the CIA trained Osama in how to be a terrorist- it's not like we don't have contacts. The only problem now is that the CIA hates the Bush administration for a) blaming them for the bogus intelligence on Iraq (unfairly- I'm not a fan of the CIA, but in this case they are innocent), and b) outing an agent (Plame). Which doesn't make it impossible (you're telling me there isn't a single christian conservative working out of the black ops side of the CIA that doesn't think Bush is answer to their prayers?), but does make it less likely. I have to agree with Mr. Dyer- if it happens it's most likely to be true-blue Al Qeida (unless it's a home-grown militia).

Kay Reports: No WMDs in Iraq

2004-01-23T16:11:00.000-06:00

David Kay, who resigned from being the lead WMD hunter in Iraq, has stated on the record that there were no WMDs in Iraq. No nukes, no chem, no bio.

The Bush Whitehouse, meanwhile, is proving that denial ain't just a river in Egypt.

Dean's real problem

2004-01-23T16:05:00.000-06:00

I have to admit, I like this author's explanation of what Dean's real problem is:

Sam Smith, editor and publisher of The Progressive Review and a long-time observer of Washington politics, nailed it when he wrote a few days ago that Dean's biggest problem is his failure to properly bow down to the permanent power culture.

"Dean failed to accept the fact that before you can get elected by the people you have to be selected by the crowd in charge," wrote Smith. "You don't just run for president in the Democratic Party (unless you're a Sharpton or Kucinich doomed from the start); you ask permission nicely just like Clinton did. Show the elite that you want to come to Washington to serve them, not lead others. . . . It's bad enough when a Georgia peanut farmer like Carter tries it, but Dean came out of the establishment himself so his crime was worse: betrayal rather than naivete. And he paid the price.

"It's not political. Washington is a place where more things are done illegally or under the table than just about anywhere in the world. Where your laws are made - and broken - as Mark Russell used to say. And it's the world's most powerful private club. If you want to get ahead here the first thing you've got to do is shut your mouth. And show you respect the people who really run the place. Dean didn't do that."

Actually, I'd argue that the whole point of the Dean campaign is to break the back of the Democratic power elite. The whole idea of having a Democratic power elite is kind of wrong- an oxymoron, like jumbo shrimp, compassionate conservative, or Microsoft Works. My opinion is that even ignoring the philosophical problems, the leadership of the Democratic campaign should get fired for incompetence and disloyalty.

But the problem is that the Democratic power elite is nigh onto indistinguishable in many respects from the Republican power elite. Both of them are selected by a media that is not so much liberal or conservative, as pro-big-business, aka corporatist. The big corporations (and the billionaires who control them) are their customers- and the first rule of any business is never torque off your customers. It just helps that the mainstream media is a big business these days as well- that just makes sliding into the corporatist frame that much easier.

Which is why I don't have a lot of hope that the media will let up on Dean, despite the fact that he is no longer technically the front runner. Time will tell, however.

A threat to our very Republic

2004-01-23T15:26:00.000-06:00

Krugman joins me in calling electronic voting machines a threat to our very Republic.

We all make fun of countries with sham elections- you know the ones, where everyone turns out to vote El Presidente back into office. But that is exactly what we ourselves are becoming. The real problem here is we don't need some grand Illuminati conspiracy- just one, maybe three, people in the right places to totally subvert democracy in the US.

What is deeply annoying about this is that computers could make voting easier, and be every bit as secure. What is needed, at an absolute minimum, is that the machine print out a ballot (not difficult nor expensive with how cheap bubblejets/laserjets have gotten recently) which the voter holds in their hands. The computer just helps put the ballot together. Inserting the printed ballot in the accept slot casts the vote. Then you just recount some statistically signfigant random subset of ballot machines (the computers should know exactly how many votes are in each ballot machine). Any difference between what the computer thinks and the actual slips of paper in the locked box triggers a total system recount, with the paper ballots being the real votes. And since which ballot boxes get recounted get picked by random after the election (but before the results are certified), any attempt at rigging the election (or any software bug that effects the recount) would almost certainly be detected. We could do so much better than any electronic voting machine I've seen. It'd almost be hard not to.

DeCSS no longer a trade secret DVD CCA admits

2004-01-23T13:38:00.000-06:00

From the department of some good news for a change, we have this press release that the MPAA has finally admitted that CSS- the Content Scrambling System, the encryption scheme for DVDs, is no longer a trade secret.

The Social '31337

2004-01-22T17:28:00.000-06:00

It's the story with everything- Republicans breaking the law, Democrats being dumb and victimized, Robert Novak releasing private documents, and- the cherry on top- a lesson in computer security. It's the news article that showed up on Bug Traq (a computer security mailing list), Slashdot, and the Minnesota for Dean mailing list- and was on topic in all three. It seems that for over a year now, Republicans have been exploiting a weakness int the Congressional servers to read, and release to the press, confidential Democratic memos.

Now, as amusing as it might be to see several Republican congressional staffers, and maybe the odd Republican congressman, frog marched out of the Capitol in handcuffs for computer crimes (I don't think this will happen- that would require the Democrats have guts), what is most disturbing about this story is the utter and complete lack of technological savvy of the Democrats. They don't even know enough to know they need to hire someone.

It's the whole wise prince issue again. Machiavelli (required reading, IMHO) said that a wise prince will pick wise advisors- and listen to them. A foolish prince may, by chance or inheritance, end up with wise advisors, but he will not heed them. Howard Dean has demostrated that even if he himself isn't capable of setting up and locking down a Linux/Samba server, he knows enough to hire people who do- and listens to them. Not only about server issues- I comment that Dean was a guest blogger on the Lawrence Lessig blog (that was the point where he won my heart), is releasing his community building software under GPL, and now has had his position paper on the internet reviled by the Cato Institue.

The Republicans have also demostrated some technological awareness- at least at the script kiddy level. Too bad they're blackhats. Which makes them the social '31337 (I'm from the "never apologize, never explain" school of joke telling- if you don't get it, pass on). The Democrats, meanwhile, have demostrated less technological awareness that the Pointy Haired Boss. Which should be expected of the party which gave us two Microsoft "settlements" neither of which is worth the paper they're written on, the DMCA, the Sony Bono copyright extension, and three different incarnations of the CPA (internet censorship).

Which is part of the reason why I'm so disgusted with the Democratic party leadership- and so enamored of Dean.

A longer pipeline on Northwood P4s?

2004-01-22T16:38:00.000-06:00

Time for some unapologetic hardware geeking. The news is that the new P4 core will have a longer pipeline. I find this interesting news. Especially with the news that the double-pumped adder was going away.

When the original P4 came out, I formed the suspicion that something had gone wrong with the P4 design. My theory, in short (and I have to emphasize based upon almost no evidence- this is just me going off) was that the surprise assault of the 1GHz athlon had scared Intel. Up until that point, they had most of their engineers working on what would become the Itanium (and was at the time called Merced), with a much smaller crew working on the follow up to the P3 and last of the x86 line at Intel. But AMD stole a march on them, and in it's fear it pulled engineers off the Itanium and threw them at the P4 with marching orders to make the P4 go fast- and by that, management meant up the clock speed as much as possible. Intel had for years been touting the concept that clock speed == performance, something which is flatly untrue but easily for people not familiar with hardware to fall for.

Intel's sudden shift of hardware engineers had two effects. The first was that it delayed the Itanium and the Itanium 2, by probably something like 12-24 months. Enough so that instead of having incredible performance, they only had good performance- and that plus the cost to switch over killed those CPUs.

The second effect it had was on the P4. The easiest way to raise the clock rate on a CPU is increase the number of stages. Modern CPUs act a lot like assembly lines these days. The "work" of executing instructions is broken down into multiple stages, and different instructions can be executing in different stages. Sort of like building a car- you have one station putting the engine in, and the next stage attaching the doors, both stations working in parallel on different cars.

How many stages the CPU will have is general decided very early in the design process. You need to balance the work done at each stage to maximize the overall speed of the processor. It doesn't help if putting the engine in takes 10 minutes, and attaching the doors only 2- the people working on the doors will spend most of their day standing around waiting on the people putting the engine in. Same thing with CPUs. But when the orders came down to up the P4's clock rate, it was decided to simply double the number of pipeline stages. The theory here is that since each stage is now doing only half the work, it only needs half the time- allowing Intel to double the clock rate. Note, the actual amount of work being done doesn't increase (actually, it goes down some), but that wasn't important. What was important was having a really high clock rate.

The P4 succeeded, at least enough to force AMD to introduce it's marketinghertz, aka "performance ratings". But I still think something deep inside the P4 was wrong. Since the original work balancing between the stages wasn't completely redone, some stages were unbalanced. They took longer to complete than other stages. One of the stages that was too light- that completed too early, was the addition stage. So Intel decided to make lemonaid from their lemons and simply brag about their "double-pumped adder". At least until people figured out how difficult it was to take advantage of this "feature".

Fast forward to today. Now we're hearing that a) the double pumped adder is going away, and b) the new tweaked P4 core is going to have more stages. This sounds to me an awful lot like Intel went back through and split the heavy/slow stages into two, helping balance the pipeline again. This would lay the ground work for a serious speed bump if P4 processors, and just in time. As I've mentioned earlier, the Athlon-64/Opteron line is comming on strong. And while I don't see it reclaiming the clock rate crown from Intel, they could get close. Close enough to scare a jumpy Intel, and take a clear lead in real performance.

But, as usual, the situation isn't that simple. AMD has made the switch to Silicon On Insulator- SOI. The problem is heat. You can make a chip run faster by pumping more power into it. Vague analogy here- this is kind of like putting a bigger engine into a car- it makes the car go faster, at least until the frame bends and the powertrain breaks. With CPUs, increasing the power increases the speed, but also increases the heat. Increase the power too much and the chip melts. Literally. SOI allows you to get the same performance from the same process with less power- or, equivelently, more performance at the same process with the same power.

Unfortunately, the smaller the process the more power it takes. Which is why CPUs have gotten ever more elaborate heat sinks as time went on.
This spells trouble for Intel, as we shall see.

AMD switched to SOI with their 130nm process for the Athlon-64s and Opterons. This was an aggressive decision from AMD- a process shrink, a major switch in process technology (going to SOI is about as difficult as a process shrink, it appears to me), a 64-bit extension, a new processor core, an integrated memory controller, and a new bus standard, all in one heroic leap. This was aggressive because a delay in any of these would cause a delay in all of them. The SOI + 130nm conjoined allowed Intel to get half a step or so ahead of AMD, because Intel didn't do SOI when it went to 130nm. Nor much of anything else, 130nm was more of a standard process shrink.

AMD has cleared the hurdle. It looks like it's getting the last fab problems out of the way and is ramping up production. And, thanks to some combination of good design and SOI, AMD's 130nm processors are quite handily competing with the best Intel has to offer. Intel, meanwhile, is facing severe heat problems. See this article for some more info (AMD is using the same process as IBM's 970 fabs- IBM and AMD are swapping process technology). Especial as Intel tries to move to 65nm, and then 45nm, technologies- see this article.

The heat problem, however, is mainly a question fo real performance- how fast the transistors can toggle back and forth. You can raise the clock speed, however, without raising performance- do half as much work per step in twice as many steps. This inclines me to beleive that what Intel is going after is phantom speed boosts- bump the speed of the clock but not the speed of the processor. Without moving to SOI- which almost certainly won't happen in '04- it will be hard for Intel to see real speed jumps. Sooner or later Intel will be forced to go SOI- Intel is just hoping later rather than sooner, because doing so would slow it down, and put it back on par with AMD's process.

Those of us geeky enough to read benchmarks will likely not be fooled by this phantom performance boost. But Intel may have to write off the geeky segment. Especially with the extra geek cool factor of 64 bits in AMD's favor. What Intel is targetting with this move is your average pointy haired boss, who still thinks clock speed is an accurate measure of performance. The idea here is to use this perception of a performance increase to help stave off massive defections.

It's a Hail Mary pass from Intel. But, as this week has shown me, sometimes Hail Mary passes connect. We shall see.

Thoughts on the Iowa Caucus results

2004-01-20T21:57:00.000-06:00

Interesting results from Iowa. Dean has come in third- a rather distant third, in fact. Which was a rude enough shock in and of itself. What was the real surprise was numbers one and two- Kerry and Edwards.

First off, this isn't doom for Dean. A disappointment, sure. A cause for a campaign rethink, I hope so. But not a doom. Remember the last non-incumbant who won both IA and NH and the WH was Carter in 76- almost 30 years ago. And there is a long list of candidates who won Iowa and yet still lost the nomination. Iowa simply isn't that important.

Second, Gephardt is out- if not officially yet, then soon. Which has several positive effects for Dean. First is that Gephardt was by far the worst of the negative campaigners- which is one very good explanation of what happened. Gephardt's negative campaigning hurt him, but it also hurt Dean, enough for Kerry and Edwards to pull out surprise wins. And second, Gephardt was a real threat come mini-tuesday- three of the seven states having primaries/caucuses that day are MO, OK, and ND. Gephardt would have simply owned MO (his home state), and would have been very strong in OK and ND (fellow bread basket/midwestern ag/union states). I could have seen Gep taking three of the seven states comming mini-tuesday- meaning that Dean would have had to sweep Clark in all four states to beat Gep's take. Now, with Gep out, those three states are in play again (with no homefield advantage for any candidate).

Neither the Kerry not the Edwards campaigns have a lot of money (I could argue that Kerry's campaign is $6 million in the hole). Nor do they have a lot of time to raise that money- NH is in a week, mini-tuesday in two. Nor will the money just automatically start rolling in- the big donors might decide Iowa as a fluke and require the campaigns to prove them wrong by winning again. And both only have large campaign presences in one other state (NH for Kerry, SC for Edwards). They won Iowa by focusing on it. This is the classic problem with Iowa winners, and why so many of them go on to lose the nomination.

The states they selected for the second victories are also interesting- as it puts them in competition with Clark as much as Dean. Kerry especially with the whole war-hero thing. It's just a matter of time before they light into each other, especially if Dean can retake the underdog position- a position he does better at.

There are several things I think Dean can, must, do at this point. First and foremost, stop being quite such a tightwad. Yes, not having money after you win the nomination is a problem- but only if you win the nomination first. Edward's result came from his willingness to spend money on airtime. Volunteers help, but not as much as a good advertising campaign. More paid campaign staffers would be nice too.

The image the campaign itself puts out needs to be changed. How the heck did Dean lose his position as the health care candidate? To Gephardt of all people? This doesn't mean change positions, it means change the subject, which positions you talk about. Actually, talking about the war hurts Dean. In many ways it's his weakest spot- and by harping on it, he helped remind people of his lack of foreign policy experience. And it reinforces the whole "Angry Liberal Dean" meme. Focusing on other issues allows Dean to highlight his positives, and shuck the whole angry liberal image.

Third, and most importantly, win New Hampshire, preferrably by large (>10 pts) margins. Because if Dean doesn't win NH, it will be to one of Clark, Kerry, or Edwards, and that would put Dean into Hail Mary pass territory.

Might as well throw the "agreement" out

2004-01-20T20:52:00.000-06:00

In a little noticed ruling recently, Microsoft was given permission to punish OEMs who sell PCs without OSs. Or at least not reward them, which amounts to the same thing. All Microsoft has to do is price it's OSs out of reach of the OEMs (who are in a low margin business and don't have a lot of profit to give up), and then "reward" those OEMs who play ball with the ability to actually make a profit. Or at least not be driven into bankruptcy quite so fast.

When this agreement was reached, I argued that a) it was too weak, b) it wouldn't get enforced, c) Microsoft would feel it couldn't afford to abide by the terms no matter what, and d) we'd be back in court with them in a couple of years anyways. We've done consent agreements with Microsoft before- the '95 consent agreement, violations of which lead to the most recent round of litigation. We need to stop giving them community service they don't bother showing up for anyways.

Note that my prediction that this would be the year of Linux on the desktop stands. I took into account the current "consent agreement", assuming it wouldn't be enforced (indeed, I completely forgot about it). Remember that, according to Linux, all you are buying with a site license is the OS upgrades- you need to buy an original copy of the OS seperately (i.e. preinstalled on the machine) which you then throw away (you can never use it on another machine) before "upgrading" to whatever OS you bought the site license for. The fact that this looks suspiciously like needing to buy 2 OSs for the machine is begining to dawn on people, which is why I predict Linux on the Desktop this year.

Herbert Hoover Redux

2004-01-19T01:09:00.000-06:00

The graph in this Salon article alone is worth the price of admission. It's a graph, 1993-2003, of the month by month measure of job creation. What's striking is that except for the very tail end of 2000, the best Bush has ever managed to do did not quite get up to the worst that Clinton ever managed to do.

But what really kinda surprises me about this is not that the Bush record is so bad- it's that even with the worst job record of any administration since Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression, Bush is widely considered not only to have a chance in the 2004 election, but actually to be unbeatable. All of those unemployeed people, people without heath insurance, people who didn't even get cost of living increases, people who have no job security, are going to run right out and vote for Bush because otherwise the boogy man might get them.

What we've got here is failure to communicate. The media, by playing up the threat of terrorism sensitises us to a irrelevent threat- terrorism does exist, but you are far more likely to die slipping in the bathtub tomorrow than to get killed by a terrorist. Heart disease- now heart disease is a real killer (although auto accidents snuff out the largest number of potiential years of life). The threat of getting laid off or downsized is, on the contrary, very real. But since it's not publicized, your job woes are therefor seen as a unique, exceptional circumstance. So the image, as perpetrated by the media, is that fighting terrorist is way more important than fighting unemployeement. And thus Bush's aura of Invicibility.

Another Opportunity for the Democrats

2004-01-18T11:41:00.000-06:00

Feeling that maybe congress shouldn't have a say in who gets appointed to the bench, Bush made Pickering an appeals judge via recess appointment. Generally, midterm appointments are only done in the case of a surprise vacancy and with unobjectionable candidates, but I've always wondered how long that would last with this administration.

What this gives is another opportunity for the Democrats to gain points. It's blantantly obvious to anyone who pays attention care not one fig about democratic processes- witness the redistricting in Texas, the stunts DeLay has pulled, and now this. It's another opportunity to slam the Republicans, especially Bush.

We'll see if they take it.

The cost of going to Mars

2004-01-17T00:56:00.000-06:00

In addition to more politically motivated decisions (like cancelling all global warming research- Bush has said it doesn't exist and that should be good enough for those liberal scientists), another thing being axed from the NASA budget is maintainance for Hubble. Next time something breaks, Hubble is done.

This isn't just Bush at work here. How much do you want to bet that in a year or two, when the political benefit of this plan has played out, that Congress will cut funding for the Mars mission? Of course, the projects that were axed to pay for the Mars mission won't be reinstated, heaven forbid. We'll end up with no moon base, no mars mission, and no global warming research or Hubble either. Let alone no space elevator. Bush has political reasons (especially the $7 trillion dollar debt) to be worse than your average elected figure- but cutting NASA's budget and scaling back NASA's mission is a feature of both Democratic and Republican administrations.

The reason for this thirty-year death by a thousand cuts is depressingly obvious. The supporters of NASA approach the problem like the good scientists and engineers they are. Facts and figures and logic figure prominently in their discussions. Get this- politicals don't give a damn about logic and facts. They care about money and votes- and money only because it can be used to buy votes. Space supporters are multi-issue voters, and are unlikely to change their votes (or their contribution habits) on the basis of this one issue. As such, they're not worth courting- as a politican of either party, about half will vote for you anyways, and about half will vote against you, and there isn't much you can do to change that.

Think about it a for a moment- are you willing to change your vote on the basis of a politicians' support of space exploration?

When I ask that question at science fiction conventions, I can make rooms of 200 people all look at their shoes simultaneously. It'd be funny if it weren't sad. And until that fundamental fact changes- until the Planetary Society can claim to have tipped a couple of elections- NASA's budget will continue to get whittled down, in favor of tax cuts and other programs which do garner votes for politicians.

Krugman gets it too

2004-01-16T15:03:00.000-06:00

Today's required reading is, much to no one's surprise, Paul Krugman's newest installment. Especially for his second to last paragraph:

So what's the answer? A Democratic candidate will have a chance of winning only if he has an energized base, willing to contribute money in many small donations, willing to contribute their own time, willing to stand up for the candidate in the face of smear tactics and unfair coverage.

Unfortunately, that's not all a candidate needs. From personal experience, class-A smear jobs by the media are an emotional meat-grinder for the targets (and I had the advantage of being three steps away from the target, I have no idea what it's like to be the center). Everything you say can and will be misconstrued against you. Facts get ignored, and lies and innuendo get repeated over and over again until they become the truth for most people. And all your cries of "but that's not true!" fall on deaf ears.

But that's exactly the shit- and I use that word advisedly- that's comming down for whomever the Democratic nominee is. And guess what- the shit isn't going to stop November 5th either- has Leno stopped making Clinton penis jokes yet? I mean, it's early- Clinton has only been out of office for three years at this point. Is that Clinton death list still going around?

Do not expect fair treatment at the hands of the press. I'm not sure they could be fair even if they wanted to be. Especially if Howard Dean gets the nomination, I expect 2000 to be tame in comparison. But here's the thing- you can still win despite the media. Gore did (technically), despite being out of money for two critical months and not getting a single break from the media smear machine. People are wising up to the Wurlitzer, and getting their news from other sources.

But frankly, I have my questions about wether Clark could stand the heat. Dean's getting tested right now, and passing- to the point where people are talking about the Dean teflon. Dean, having run campaigns before, has some clue as to what he's getting into. Dean even managed to win re-election after passing the civil unions bill (which had 70% of the population opposed to it)- he knows how to woo over a hostile electorate. Clark, meanwhile, has never run a campaign for dog catcher before, let alone President. And thus doesn't have a clue as to what he's letting himself in for. When, in those old war movies, we see the grizzled old vetran of many campaigns and the fresh faced youngster just in from basic, we all know who is going to bite it first. For all the stars on his shoulder and medals on his chest, in this arena Clark is the fresh faced youngster, while Dean is the grizzled vetran.

And now, a larch. A larch.

2004-01-16T14:30:00.000-06:00

If all you have is a nail gun, every problem looks like the Messiah. Which is certainly the case for this administration.

The Bush administration, hoping to fend off Democratic attacks that it has failed to come to the aid of the country's ailing manufacturing sector, is calling for the creation of a new presidential council to give U.S. companies a greater voice in government decisions.

They are getting hard to even parody at this point.

The Mighty Wurlitzer doesn't like Dean

2004-01-16T14:26:00.000-06:00

It's official. While 78% of news stories about Dean's Democratic opponents were favorable, only 49% of news stories about Dean were favorable.

Dean is winning despite the media's negative portrayals. Which just makes it that more impressive.

Charlie Manson and floating static routing

2004-01-16T00:12:00.000-06:00

Subject says it all.

It's amazing how much Charlie sounds like the better sysadmins I know. Doesn't have as impressive a body count, tho. 'Course, he didn't have those handy raised floors to stash bodies under...

To infinity - and beyond!

2004-01-15T11:08:00.000-06:00

I love it when i get to snipe at both Republicans and Democrats in the same breath. Thanks to Bush and the usual liberal whiners, i get to do it again!

The issue? The moon. Bush is getting a lot of free press about his proposal to put Americans back on the moon by... well, sometime long after he has retired. And the usual round of liberal nincompoops complain that it costs too much when we have all these poor people, and besides someone could get hurt! Yawn. Now, i'm hugely in favor of setting up a permanent manned presence in space, particularly a moonbase with a launchpad and manufacturing facilities. Beating Earth's atmosphere and gravity well would be a huge win for further detailed exploration of the Solar system and beyond. And why explore it? Because it's there, dammit, and we're human beings!

Of course, the Bush proposal is bullshit. He's talking about spending $12B in five years - $11B of which will be cannibalized from other NASA projects. He gets to brag about going to the moon, but is unwilling to spend more than the cost of FOUR DAYS of the Iraq occupation over the next five years to do so. This isn't vision, it's demogoguery.

And what are the mainstream liberals saying? We can't afford it! And worse, someone might get hurt! These are stupid arguments, the sort of wimpy blindness that gives liberals a bad name.

Here's what i'd like to see Dean or Clark or some other Democrat leader do... steal the vision. First, set a REAL date, like 2010. Why will it take us 11 years to get to the moon again, when we managed to do it in six years, over 40 years ago, without ever having done it before? Push up the schedule. Second, fund it properly. Put up, say, $100B for it. We can afford it, especially given the amount of technological spinoff it can provide. Third, and most importantly - tie it to an international treaty on the demilitarization of space. Get China, Europe, Japan, India, and everyone else to sign on a treaty banning all weapons in space, and dedicate it to the peaceful advancement of humanity.

Do this, and it becomes a real vision, a reachable goal, AND a vehicle for long-term peace in the world.

Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one

2004-01-15T00:38:00.000-06:00

I've stated before that the problem we are facing, the Ur-problem as it were- is that as a society our communication channels are not free, but for-pay. Plutocratic, not democratic. And that there for money corrupts, among other things, the political process- he with the most money gets the most air time and has the most ability to spin information their way.

But at least it's a fair plutocracy- I mean, poor people are locked out, but at least if you have money, you can buy air time. Run your own superbowl ads if you feel so inclined, right?

Not exactly.

A spokesman for CBS said the Viacom-owned network has received the request from MoveOn to run the ad in the Super Bowl, but added that the ad has to go through standards and practices before CBS will say if it can run an advocacy ad during the game. The spokesman said he didn't think it was likely that the spot would pass standards and practices.

And no, this isn't one of the Hitler ads that Ed Gillespie's panties in a bunch. Those finished near the bottom of the barrel.

The problem is that it's not just about money. Nor is it about "community standards"- I flat out gaurentee that the beer comercials they'll be showing will be skating soft core porn, and will be much more objectionable than anything MoveOn.org came up with. No, what CBS objects to is political ideas being shown. Some concepts are simply not welcome, no matter how much money the people bring to the table.

And the politics doesn't have to be CBS's. The Coors family is notoriously conservative. Even a small chance of losing the lucrative Coors advertising budget for the Super Bowl would rapidly make any money made from MoveOn.org not worth it. MoveOn.org simply cannot replace Coors. So, from CBS's perspective, this is simply a good business decision.

But it completely ruins the concept of freedom of speech. Some speech is simply not acceptable, and not distributed, even if it has money to pay for the distribution. And this is why a plutocratic communication network is so corrosive. Because, in the end, it's not just plutocratic, it's autocratic.

Tinfoil Hat Time

2004-01-15T00:18:00.000-06:00

Put on your tinfoil hats, boys and girls- it's time to explore Brian's World of Conspiracy!

Ranting about Zell Miller in the last entry, and remembering dKos ranting about TNR, I've come up with a new conspiracy theory. Republican operatives are infiltrating Democratic ranks and acting as Agent Saboteurs.

OK, as soon as you stop laughing, think about it seriously for a moment. Other than the Democratic party is the largest group of co-dependent wimps ever assembled, it's the only theory that makes sense. And it's exactly the sort of thing that would appeal to the evil overlords of the vast right-wing conspiracy. They are, after all, a bunch of Tom Clancy (and other spy-thriller-war genre) readers. Infliltrate a bunch of high-level operatives into enemy ranks, with code names and licenses to kill (the Democratic party at least), and when the agents are in place- whammo.

In either case, the response of the Democratic party should be the same. Even if we can't force these people to change their voter registrations, we can drum them out of the party leadership, out of seats they were elected to on Demcoratic tickets, and out of the limelight. And if we want to have any coherence as a party what so ever, I think we need to.

Clark being a Republican

2004-01-15T00:00:00.000-06:00

I do wish Dean would lay off the "Clark is a Republican" line. I mean, 'cmon- Clark is no more of a Republican than Kerry, Gephardt, or Lieberman. No, wait- that didn't come out right...

Seriously, compared to some "Democrats", Clark is radical left wing loony- in that he's not a radical right-wing loony, like some "Democrats" are.

Read those two news articles for a moment. Here we have a number of supposedly Democratic party members not only supporting George Bush, but endorsing him, fundraising for him, and campaigning for him. Could you imagine what would happen if, for example, John McCain endorsed Dean? There'd be blood in the streets.

And yes, this is a Democrat-Republican issue. Lieberman v. Dean OK, I can see. They're at least both Democrats. Staying silent, and not endorsing anyone (at least until the convention) I can see- especially if you don't want to make enemies. But if you're not willing to support your party, your party shouldn't support you- and they should find someone to run for your seat they can support and who will support the party. Every one of these bozos endorsing Bush should be facing well-funded party-endorsed challengers next primary season. I don't think the Democrats can technically kick someone out of the party- if you want to call yourself a Democrat and still vote for Bush, I don't think the party can stop you. But the party can damned well stop you from being elected again.

Of course, this requires a party leadership with backbone, and a willingness to take it's seriously unruly members out back of the woodshed and make an example of them. Which we don't have to worry about right now.

In the face of BS like this, arguing about wether Clark is a Republican seem, well, petty.

Arnie's a one-termer

2004-01-14T23:37:00.000-06:00

You heard it here first. Even if he manages to avoid being recalled- which he might, simply because the last one was enough of a zoo to put people off the whole idea (for a while, at least)- the next election cycle will simply be brutal for him. The conservative Orange County Republicans will denigrate him because he is insufficiently pure conservative- pro choice, married to a Kennedy, etc. He will probably face a serious challenge from the right. And the Democrats, still smarting from the recall, will pull no punchs. And what an arsenal they will have.

It's easy to run as a tabula rasa- and that's what Arnie did- and Jessie before him. Or better yet, a Rosarch ink plot candidate- all fuzzy and ill defined, allowing anyone to see what they want to see in the candidate. Getting elected the first time is easy. Getting re-elected, once you have a track record everyone knows about, gets to be a lot trickier. Once you have to make hard decisions and life by them, what sort of person you really are becomes apparent. Unfortunately, this only happens after you've elected them, as Californians are finding out.

I would argue that George Bush ran as a rosarch ink blot candidate in 2000. Yeah, he supposedly had a record as Governor of Texas, but it was so uninspected by the media that it might as well not have existed. If it had been inspected, campaign themes like "I'm a uniter not a divider" or "compassionate conservative" would never have flown.

Wesley Clark is the current Rosarch Ink Blot candidate. With no track record to speak of, he can be all things to all people. How do you fight that? It's like trying to nail jelly to a tree.

This is one place were Howard Dean stands head and shoulders above the rest. He has a track record, and it's not lying uninspected. Certainly not if I have anything to say about it. He was re-elected five time. The fifth time he was elected after making a seriously unpopular choice- when the civil unions bill was passed, 70% of Vermont's citizens were opposed. After doing this, he still got re-elected (granted, by much narrower margins than normal, but that is to be expected). Dean is many things, but a Rosarch Ink Blot candidate is not one of them. Nor does he need to be.

In the long run, I don't think Arnie is quite the bad news for Democrats many people thought him to be. He is, in fact, bad news for the Republicans. Can they win in many parts of this country not running as tabula rasa?

Welcome back, Carter!

2004-01-14T13:59:00.000-06:00

So on Sunday - the eve of the Iowa Caucus - Dean will spend much of the day in Georgia with President Jimmy Carter. Will there be an endorsement? Or a non-endorsement endorsement? Or what? It's all very curious.

I'm really glad to see this. It's good to see Dean back to doing the unpredictable, rubbing elbows with the wise and honorable leaders the Democratic Party has chewed up and spit out in favor of borderline creeps like Bill Clinton. If it's a good story, and I expect it will be, then pictures of Dean with Carter will be above the fold on the front page of every newspaper in Iowa - a big improvement over another day of articles about the latest mud being slung at him. And really, I don't see one last day in Iowa helping that much. A few more hours of flipping pancakes and giving stump speeches won't change more than a handful of minds - a real flourish like Carter will.

Neither Fish nor Fowl nor Terrorist

2004-01-13T16:47:00.000-06:00

Building on Dave's riff that the administration invented a new category- "terrorist"- that was neither soldier or civilian in order to sidestep the Geneva Convention, we have this news that they're doing it again. You see, Saddam Hussein is not a prisoner of war- which is a defined category with various rights inherit in it in the Geneva Convention- but is instead an Enemy Prisoner of War, and EPW not a POW.

You see, a POW has certain rights under the Geneva Convention- like the right not to be tortured, and the right not to be executed- which is why we can't let him be a POW. But he's not really a terrorist either. So we introduce a new neither-fish-nor-fowl category, and merrily go on our way.

So what was the headline?

2004-01-13T16:33:00.000-06:00

After the last post I got interested in what the headline was. It was this article, more bad news for the mutual funds.

I'm not 100% sure what's going on, but from the description:

The SEC's investigation into the practice, called revenue sharing of directed brokerage, revealed that 14 of 15 firms targeted for investigation accepted some form of payment from mutual fund firms to aggressively promote their shares over competitors. Only about half of the brokerages, which remained unnamed, disclosed the financial arrangements to customers

it sounds skanky to me. I still think that the national debt topping $7e12 was at least as big of news, but it's nice to note that corporate governance is once again on the headlines.

All the news we see fit to print

2004-01-13T16:20:00.000-06:00

In an underheralded milestone, the national debt just passed $7 trillion dollars. That's $7,000,000,000,000. The IMF is warning that the increasing US debt is endangering world fiscal stability. 18% of federal revenue is going just to pay interest on the debt. Consider that for a moment. The debt is going to put upward pressure on interest rates, currently only depressed due to deflation fears. An increase (or worse yet, a dramatic spike) in interest rates puts any "growth based budget plan" at serious risk.

So what is the Bush administration doing about this? Nothing-

Treasury Secretary John W. Snow, however, said Wednesday that the administration still intends to make permanent tax cuts the "very center" of its fiscal policy while slashing the "entirely manageable" deficit in half over the next five years. Snow maintains that sufficient spending cuts can be enacted to do so. But given Congress' enactment of increases in permanent, nondiscretionary programs like the new Medicare drug benefit, serious spending cuts are an illusion.

So, why isn't this the headline of every newspaper out there? I mean, we are talking the financial stability of the entire planet.

Dean vr.s the Media

2004-01-13T15:46:00.000-06:00

This rather long story over on Salon is today's required reading (the new Krugman, while good, isn't required). The media's caricature (I wouldn't even call it a characterization) of Dean is already more or less set- Angry, pessimistic, liberal, and doomed. The complete lack of facts to back this up is immaterial and irrelevent. What- you think news reporting is objective or something? Where have you been the last couple of decades?

Seriously, when I see a consistant pattern of behavior, I look for a consistant motivation. This is an application of the old saw that once is chance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action. So here we have multiple instances of the press echoing the spin the RNC puts out almost to the letter. Sheer intellectual laziness is not a sufficient explanation- the DLC puts out it's own spin as well. So if the journalists were simply interested in downloading pre-written press releases with a minimum of effort and/or investigation, both side's spin would be more or less equally adopted. No, there has to be some extra factor as to why conservative spin is choosen consistantly over liberal spin. What is the consistant motivation behind the consistant behavior?

I will accept without comment the assertion that most reporters are liberal. However- most editors and pretty much all media owners are most certainly conservative, and increasingly desire their political opinions to be reflected in the media outlets they own. And that this desire translates into a Darwinistic selection mechanism favoring conservative reporters and/or reporters who are willing to pretend to be conservative.
The fearless reporter who reports the truth no matter what the cost will sooner or later will discover it costs him promotions, payraises, and even his job. The reporter who mindlessly repeats liberal spin without any facts to back it up will be fired/demoted even sooner. The reporter who mindlessly repeats conservative spin, on the other hand, is rewarded. This consistant motivation then sets up the consistant behavior of reporting conservative fantasy like fact.

This is one reason why getting people onto the internet is so important- most people don't realize just how manipulative the media is, until they see the other side. Also, don't overestimate how effective this media smearing is. Gore got it about as bad as it can get, and still managed to win more votes than Shrub. And, basically, no one who voted for either Gore or Nader is going to vote for Bush in 2004 (assuming Nader gets the nomination)- the only question is how many people who voted for Shrub will switch. But it's still annoying.

See!!!

2004-01-13T10:25:00.000-06:00

I told you so! (in reference to this blog entry).

They found oil on Uranus!

2004-01-12T17:04:00.000-06:00

I'm not sure wether to laugh or cry, but according to Joe Conason, the reason Bush wants to go to Mars is... oil drilling contracts for Halliburton.

The problem with satire these days is keeping ahead of reality. Personally, as little as I think of the Bush administration, I still have a hard time buying this. The alternative explanation- that Bush was looking for some cheap political points and no more intends to actually fund a manned mars mission than he does to balance the budget- is just so probable I can't give it up.

The problem with manned space missions, from a bilk-the-goverment perspective, is that they actually have to work. No, ballistic missile defense is much better. The likelyhood that anyone will actually launch ballistic missiles at us is so small I don't worry about- cargo containers, that's the cost-effective way to get nukes to the US. So star wars allows you to rack up the tens of billions of dollars of profit, and what you deleiver will never be used. If it's never going to be used, quality control becomes so much simpler...

Shi'ite support in Iraq may be eroding

2004-01-12T16:55:00.000-06:00

Most of the resistance against the US occupation is currently comming from the Baathist/Sunni triangle- Baghdad, Tikrit, and places like that. Unfortunately, it's starting to sound like the Sunni majority is getting unhappy with US plans.

Of course, one of several problems we are facing in Iraq is to prevent Shi'ite majority of the country from converting it into an anti-US theocracy like shi'ite dominated Iran. What fun, what fun.

When in doubt, smear

2004-01-12T15:13:00.000-06:00

So your ex-treasury secretary is on sixty minutes telling the world that you intended to invade Iraq days after taking office, what do you do? If you're the Bush whitehouse, you start trying to discredit the messenger. Even if you don't succeed, you've changed the subject. What the Mighty Wurlitzur grab onto this like a drowning man grabbing a life preserver.

Too stupid to know it

2004-01-12T15:01:00.000-06:00

The occassional Allen Hollub newsletter points me at this this gem.

We argue that when people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.

This has implications all over- from programming to politics (Ed: there is something else?). For example: does Bush even recognize what a bad job he's doing?

This is one I'm going to have to cogitate on for a while.

How to get fired from talk radio

2004-01-12T12:57:00.000-06:00

And just in case you might be thinking that the mainstream media isn't biased, read this article over at the American Conservative (a left-wing pinko commie rag, no doubt).

The revolution will not be televised

2004-01-12T12:35:00.000-06:00

But it will be on the internet.

Interesting news on Salon today. A new poll shows vastly increased usage of the internet (and, unfortunately, cable news) as a source for campaign news, compared to four years ago. About 1 person in 3 gets at least some news from the internet, while 13% primarily get their news from the internet. And an increasing number are worried about bias in the mainstream media.

Did Dean Lie?

2004-01-11T21:56:00.000-06:00

Josh Marshall is accusing Dean of lying, or at least accusing Dean of saying things that are not true.

Too bad for Josh that in digging through old emails, I found this gem from the New York Times. Let me quote the relevent section (currently it's viewable only to subscribers):

"At the time, I probably would have voted for it, but I think that's too simple a question," General Clark said.

A moment later, he said: "I don't know if I would have or not. I've said it both ways because when you get into this, what happens is you have to put yourself in a position -- on balance, I probably would have voted for it."

...

"I want to clarify -- we're moving quickly here," Ms. Jacoby said. "You said you would have voted for the resolution as leverage for a U.N.-based solution."

"Right," General Clark responded. "Exactly."

Sorry Josh, you lose.

Neither fish nor fowl

2004-01-11T16:04:00.000-06:00

The Geneva Convention defines the modern rules of warfare, insofar as there are "rules". At the very least, when a country decides to violate the Geneva Convention, everyone else can stand around wringing their hands, and threaten to deplore them. Snottiness aside, there is a certain meta-structure to the specific rules. Part of that meta-structure is that there are only two classes of human beings - soldiers and civilians. From there, one set of rules applies to the treatment of enemy soldiers, and another set applies to the treatment of civilians.

Of course, neither set of rules is good for the Bush administration's War on Terra. So now we have "terrorists", who are neither fish nor fowl, neither civilian nor soldier. If they're soldiers, they must be given access to the Red Cross and repatriated to their own countries in reasonable time. They cannot be kept for years or brutally interrogated. On the other hand, if they're civilians, the rules are even more strict. They cannot even be kept as prisoners then. So we pretend "terrorists" are neither soldiers nor civilians. The Geneva Convention simply doesn't apply.

Sigh.

Why Paul O'Neill matters

2004-01-11T12:15:00.000-06:00

The news of the hour seems to be that former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill is claiming that the administration had plans to invade Iraq back in January 2001- long before 9-11 "changed everything".

This is important because it confirms the influence the PNAC crowd had over thinking in the Whitehouse. That the invasion of Iraq was a planned afair. And if the invasion of Iraq was planned before 9-11, what to make of the PNAC call for a new Pearl Harbor?

Hmm. Thinking about it, I want this document preserved. I just grabbed a copy and made sure the quote is still there. Here's the MD5 fingerprint (taken with md5sum on my Redhat 9.0 box):

46d699cdca6a13ce3930da218c12b1e6 RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf

This isn't my document to distribute, so I'm not putting it up on the web unless they take it down or change it. I just want to keep a copy myself. Yes, I'm being paranoid. Can I recomend you keep a copy too? Currently their attitude is "Yeah, we said it, so what?'" But if war crimes tribunals start getting called, expect this attitude to change in a hurry. And the evidence to disappear.

Every now and again Josh gets one right

2004-01-11T01:28:00.000-06:00

I have to admit it, but Josh has a point. Actually, I think wether Clark was anti-war a year ago is open to debate, but frankly I don't think it matters that much one way or another. And compared to some of the shit that has been directed Dean's way recently, it's pretty milquetoast.

What especially annoys me about this is that there are so many legimate reasons to critize Clark, why bother bringing up such a loser issue? You want to talk experience- has Clark every ran for office before? Or put together a budget? Or appointed a judge? Or managed an economy? Or rammed a bill through an uncooperative legislature? Or passed a highly unpopular peice of legislation (>70% disapproval rating) and managed to get re-elected immediately afterwards? Does Clark have the knowledge to spot when the pharma companies are blowing smoke? Or the financial companies? Health care and prescription drugs have been big issues in every election in the last decade- it's not that radical to think they'll still be important this election. And if corporate governance should be an issue. Yeah, Clark has the foreign policy experience over Dean. But foreign policy is Bush's home turf, it's where he wants to direct attention, away from the problems here at home. Try to run a campaign based solely on foreign policy and be steamrollered.

And Clark hasn't impressed me with his leadership ability. Take a long hard look at how he got into this campaign. The second the answer to wether or not he was going to run became "maybe" he should have started boning up on all those aspects of being president he doesn't have any experience with, thinking about the issues he hadn't really thought about before, and deciding what his positions would be. But no. Instead we get "Mary, help me!", and Clark still working out what his positions are even in general weeks later. I thought the month he took wimbling with his thumb up his butt he had spent studying. I would have thought that as a general he would have had the decisive thing down- maybe a week tops to make a 99% sure decision, then start calling in the experts. Obviously not.

The man is a tabula rasa, and thus actually hard to nail down. He doesn't have a record, therefor he doesn't have a record to run from. Or on. In this sense is like Arnie in California, or Ventura here in Minnesota. Or, I would argue, Bush in 2000 (who technically had a record as governor of Texas, but the record was so unexamined that he could run as a tabula rasa). The great advantage of tabula rasas is that having no record, they can define themselves however they wish, and be all things to all people. The big disadvantage of tabula rasas is getting re-elected when they no longer have no record and can no longer be all things to all people. Jesse the Governor discovered this. Arnie is going to discover this the hardway (if he isn't recalled). And I think Bush is going to discover this. The question is not just who can get elected in 2004- I think a chimpaneze could get elected in 2004, I think Bush is going to defeat himself. The question is who can get re-elected in 2008.

But this sort of BS doesn't help the campaign. When a Dean campaigner sees a Clark supporter, or a Kucinich supporter, or a CMB or Sharpton or even a Kerry, Gephardt, or Lieberman supporter, what they should see is a potiential Dean supporter. Attacking Clark is, in some sense, attacking Clark supporters. And that's stupid, and something we shouldn't be doing. This is the second real gaffe (as opposed to media distortion gaffe) I've seen the Dean campaign make in short order. I wish we'd cut it out.

Today's Required Reading- Income Instability has increased dramatically

2004-01-11T00:44:00.000-06:00

Here is today's required reading. Income instability among the poor and middle class has been on a fairly dramatic and steady increase over the last thirty years. Meanwhile, real earning potiential has not risen signifigantly. The downsides are much greater, and there is less upside.

What has been happening, I think- and this is yet more evidence for it- is a steady shift of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich, especially the neuvo-aristocracy. The rich get richer and the rest of us get screwed.

The Other Shoe Drops

2004-01-10T15:43:00.000-06:00

Looks like the economy only added 1,000 jobs in December. Oh, and the previous month got downgraded by 66,000 jobs while they were at it. Which means in a couple of months, when the inevitable downgrading of December's job market happens, how many jobs do you think we lost? Yeah, the economy grew at an (adjusted once already) rate of 8.6%- but this was all taken up by the 9.6% jump in productivity, and thus didn't create any jobs. The only reason the jobless rate went down was yet more people leaving the work force- now, one person in three who could be in the work force isn't even looking. This is the lowest it's been since 1991.

There is one bright spot to all of this. It's the economy, stupid.

A Nader run doesn't matter

2004-01-10T15:31:00.000-06:00

It looks like Nader, although he won't be running on the Green ticket, thinking of running anyways. Presumably as generic third party. A fellow Dean supporter I met this afternoon told me she was "close to tears" when she heard this. Personally, I could care less. If Dean gets the nomination- as is the most likely scenario at this point- there will not be a signifigant challenge from the left, Nader or no.

I was a blue-green voter who strongly considered voting Nader in 2K. The reason I did was that the Democratic party was loudly moving to the right. They were telling us liberals, to our face, that a) we didn't matter, b) they wouldn't represent us at all if elected, and c) we were obligated to vote for Democrats no matter how bad because the Republicans were marginally worse. We were going to vote for Republican-lite and like it. And these campaign promises they actually abided by- the war in Iraq, Bush's tax cuts (both of them), PATRIOT I and II, on and on- every dumb idea that's come out of the Bush whitehouse has found strong and ready support among the Democratic party. This is causing justifiable anger among the liberal base of the party- if we wanted to vote Republican, we'd vote Republican for Pete's sake. The effect of this anger was Nader support in 2000. And the effect was even more pronounced in 2002.

But the situation is different in 2004 than it was in 2000. Dean, by moving the party back towards the left, is re-engaging the liberal/progressive base and bringing them back into the fold of the party. He's not a whole-loaf candidate- his position on the death penalty and gun control are at variance with mine among others. Almost all Dean supporters I know of always say "I don't agree with him on everything, but..." But his positions on gay marriage, health care, the war in Iraq, and other issues makes him much more than a half a loaf candidate for the liberal/progressives- three quarters a loaf at least, if not nine tenths a loaf.

There are a certain number of people who will vote Green no matter who the Democrats run- Liberman, Dean, or Kucinich, it doesn't matter. And I suppose there are some number of people who actually voted for Nader who will vote for Nader again, no matter what party he is running as. But most of the people who voted for Nader in 2000 were really just voting against Gore/Bush. With a Dean candidacy, those people will (by and large) be voting for Dean. Not to mention the surprising number of Perot/McCain voters Dean has been pulling in, who were the other base of voters Nader pulled from (I've seen reports that 30% of Nader's supporters came from the Bush camp). A Dean candidacy will prevent any mass exodus of liberals and progressives out the left hand side of the party. A Nader/Green ticket might get half a million votes. A Nader solo ticket will be struggling to get half of that.

In either case, I don't see Nader being an important player in the 2004 elections. He runs, he doesn't run- either way, he won't make much of a difference.

Another Day on the Campaign Trail

2004-01-10T14:59:00.000-06:00

This post over on Berry's World is worth the read. I think it's satire. The trick with satire is that it has to be over the top enough to be obviously comedy, which is a trick lately.

Thoughts on the Canada Tape

2004-01-10T14:46:00.000-06:00

Well, it looks like the media finally caught Dean saying something stupid. He's on the record four years ago not liking the caucuses because of their length driving people away. Which in some sense is understandable if you don't understand the caucus system, which keeps it from being boneheaded, but it's still stupid.

This stands in stark contrast to most of the time when the media plays "gotcha" games, where if you actually go back and listen to what Dean said, he's in fact saying very intelligent things. When Dean said that we weren't any safer after capturing Saddam, everyone was scandalized. 37 dead US soldiers and several weeks at Orange terror alert later, Dean was right. When Dean said that he should be the candidate for southerners who drive pickup trucks with confederate flags on them because they need health insurance and good schools too, he was right. People just left off the last part when they got on their high horses. And so on. Commenting that the emperor has no cloths has always been scandalous.

Actually, the entire Dean campaign can be viewed as his attempt to address the question "why should I go out on a cold and snowy january day to argue politics with my neighbors?" Is there more to political involvement that just spending fifteen minutes on the way home to cast a vote? In this sense, the Canada tape is simply a statement of the problem (although it's not phrased that way) without a solution. The solution is to realize that leaving your home on a cold and snowy day to talk to your neighbors is the reward. The we humans like getting together with others of our kind and talking/arguing. This is Dean before he read "Bowling Alone".

But long term I don't think this will matter. It's not like someone is going to write a book of Dean's boneheaded gaffes or something. Or if they did, it'd be a real short book.

And Iowans- especially the ones likely to leave their homes on a cold and snowy january day to go caucus- are serious enough about their votes that they are unlikely to be swayed by one gaffe. Now, Harkin's endorsement- that is big news, and will sway people. And I could actually see it working (subtly) in Dean's favor. Is this the worst thing they could dig up? This is praising with faint damnation (the opposite of damning with faint praise).

Buffer Overflows and Bounds Checking

2004-01-10T14:20:00.000-06:00

So it looks like AMD has some hardware "fix" for bounds checking. Sigh. At a certain level it's like what the hey- it's not like you are messing up some clean, neat architecture with unnecessary cruft. The x86 architecture is almost nothing but messy cruft. And it already has bounds checking support- look up the "bound" instruction in your handy x86 instruction manual.

The problem is that this is so totally unecessary. Even without hardware acceleration bounds checking is almost free with an optimizing compiler. It's called "strength reduction" and it's already widely done.

Here's how it works. Let's say you have a loop like:


    for (int i = 0; i < n; ++i) {

        a[i] = 0;

    }

A naive implementation without strength reduction would implement that code like you had written:


    for (int i = 0; i < n; ++i) {

        if (i < a.length) {

            a[i] = 0;

        } else {

            throw IndexOutOfBoundsException();

        }

    }

This requires you to do a branch every single loop iteration- slowing you code down, right? Except the compiler if it's at all smart can reorder the code like the following:


    for (int i = 0, limit = min(n, a.length); i < limit; ++i) {

        a[i] = 0;

    }

    if (n > a.length) {

        throw IndexOutOfBoundsException();

    }

Now, instead of having O(N) branchs, you only have 2 no matter how large the array is- one for the min and one to see if you throw the exception. Bounds checking has only added a very small constant factor to the runtime of your program- maybe a nanosecond or two.

Buffer overflow exploits are a direct result of the fact that we programmers use stupid languages. We're still using C to write applications in. And, unless you religously use templates, C++ has the exact same problems. We keep making the same mistakes over and over again. In 1988- so over 15 years ago- the Morris Worm exploited a program that used the C library routine gets(), which was the first big news exploit of a buffer overflow attack. The problem with gets() is that it doesn't bounds check its arguments. This behavior was considered bad enough that the GCC compiler was modified to produce a warning if you used the function gets() at all. But then C++ came along, and just a few years later wrote the iostreams library. And what do you know- it includes the function istream::operator << (char *). It's our old friend gets(), still not bounds checking it's values, still vulnerable to buffer overflow attacks, but now dressed up in fancy new operator overloaded cloths. Demonstratably we seem to be incapable of learning lessons from even a few years ago.

So they'll try to fix it in hardware. My prediction is that it won't work. The problem isn't hardware, it's between the keyboard and the chair. We can solve this problem any time we want- all we have to do is stop using broken languages.

Dean eats babies!

2004-01-09T16:58:00.000-06:00

Is it just me, or has the media been absolutely brutal on Dean for the last week or so? I don't remember them playing this fast and loose with the fact since... well, since Bush decided to invade Iraq in order to stop terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

The current hot theme appears to be "dirty tricks" from the Dean campaign. There are three stories right now. First, there's the claim by the Gephardt campaign that the Dean campaign is directing out-of-state volunteers to fraudulently enter the Iowa Caucus. It's nonsense. Think about the numbers... about 100,000 Iowans will caucus. The Dean campaign plans to have about 2000 volunteers in Iowa that day. That means at best, they could skew the results by 2%. It may be a close race, but i doubt it will be that close. Now, that 2% figure assumes that all out-of-state Dean volunteers successfully pass themselves off as Iowans and caucus. This would require organization and training. Instructions would need to be communicated in detail. Speaking as a Dean volunteer who will be in Iowa on caucus day, i've received no such instructions.

More importantly, if someone from the Dean campaign DID ask me to do it, i'd go up the heirarchy and demand that person be fired. And if it went up to the national organization, i'd publicly and loudly leave the Dean campaign. I suspect the vast majority of Perfect Storm volunteers would feel the same way. Therefore, the Dean campaign can't just ask all of us to do it, for fear of getting caught and publicly flogged.

This leaves a secret conspiracy of Dean supporters, limited to people who are willing to commit voter fraud for Dean and who can be trusted to not reveal it. That might be what, a couple dozen people? Against a hundred thousand? It would have a negligible effect on the caucus, and STILL be risky. Why do it, when Dean is in the lead, and could probably still win nationally even if he lost by a small margin in Iowa?

Logic is very powerful, but rarely used.

Next, there were the two out-of-state Dean supporters in Iowa caught spying on the Kerry campaign. The Dean campaign publicly dumped them, and no evidence has been offered that they were doing anything other than acting on their own. Stupid, but hard to avoid that sort of thing with a large, decentralized organization.

Finally, there are questions of push-polling in NH that were noted not by another campaign, but by the ARG pollsters. Although it appears that someone is calling elderly voters, telling them that unless they are supporting Dean, they aren't eligible to vote in the primary. But whom? Is this something the Dean campaign would actually do? Again, the risk/reward ratio is awful, and Trippi isn't the kind of guy who takes large risks for small rewards. On the other hand, the source is trustworthy - someone is doing a pro-Dean dirty trick. I suspect the reason is to stir up trouble and more accusations against Dean. The publicity around something like this would cost Dean far more votes than the push-poll might cost his rivals. Now, who would do such a thing? It's widespread enough that ARG noted multiple complaints, so it's probably not a lone nut in the basement. If it's an organized effort, it could be either a rival campaign, or Karl Rove in early troll mode.

Will we ever find out? Nah.

Thoughts on SETI/CETI and the Drake Equation

2004-01-08T00:15:00.000-06:00

Personally, I think it's exciting that we live in a time where we are finally starting to put some numbers into the Drake equation. But I'm not optimistic about our ability to talk to alien civilizations anytime soon- not because I don't think they're out there, but because I think it just takes a while after discovering radio before communication is established. This article is just a collection of my thoughts on the subject.

First off, people don't generally grasp just how frigging huge the galaxy is. Every if you put exceedingly optimistic numbers into the Drake equation and have millions of technological civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy alone, there are over 400 billion stars in the galaxy. This means the next nearest technological civilization will be one to two hundred light years away. We didn't start broadcasting signifigantly in radio bands that escape the atmosphere (radio doesn't) until the 1940's- we haven't been broadcasting all that long. Radio and TV signals travel at the speed of light- so if they're say 200 light years away, they won't hear us until 2140. If they immediately turn around and dash off a "We hear you! Let's talk!" signal back to us, we won't receive it here until 2340AD. More conservative numbers plugged into the Drake equation say that the nearest technological civilization would be tens of thousands of light years away- and the turn around time would be longer than the amount of time humans have engaged in agriculture.

Won't we be able to hear them first? After all, they've likely been around a lot longer than we have. Some dinosaurs, for example the Deinonychus, were well on their way to being intelligent, tool using creatures. If that pesky asteroid had just held off a few million years, the evolved descendents of the Deinonychus might have built space ships, gone out, and stopped the collision from ever happening. That would give Dinosaur civilization an easy 60 million year technological leg up over man. The Andromeda galaxy is less than 3 million light years away, so 60 million years is more than enough time for radio signals to propogate even from distant galaxies. Wouldn't we be hearing their radio signals?

This is assuming that they are broadcasting in a manner we could differentiate as random from even a few light years away. First off, the number of bits per time period that can be transmitted over any given frequency range is finite, and set by Claud Shannon's information theory. Every square meter of ground has only so many bits of information per time period that you can shove through the radio spectrum. And (I assume) the demand for information communication is infinite, especially over the tens of millions of years time frame we're talking about here. Big powerfull transmitters will be replaced by small, weak, local transmitters. Especially since land line communication is infinite, or much nearer. You can always lay another fiber optic cable if you need more bandwidth. So radio communication will more and more be local only, long haul heavy transfers will be done in cables, undectable from even two inches away, let alone two hundred light years. We're seeing this already with human civilization- big TV and radio stations blasting their signals out over hundreds of miles are being replaced by cellular telephones sending their signals out over thousands of feet, or wireless network hubs and cordless phones whispering their signals out over dozens of feet. A lack of strong, isolated signals and the cacophony of millions of weak signals interferring with each other would make it iffy to detect the planet earth as radiating intelligent signals from even a few light years away.

The second thing the limit on bits/sec that can be broadcast in radio spectrum implies is the increasing use of compression. Compression is the act of removing the redundancy from the communication- in effect, making the signal appear more random. Also, broadcast communication is public and hard to really control who receives it. Which is sort of the point from our perspective- we're not the intended recipient of the radio signal, but we'd like to hear it. But for me, while I don't mind aliens two hundred light years away hearing my cordless cell phone communications, I do have a problem with my neighbor evesdropping in. Or my goverment. If the alien race has the same or similiar desire for privacy, the use of encrypted communication will become standard. Already we're starting to get encrypted handsets, and while the US goverment isn't happy about this, they're trying to sweep back the tide. Sometime in the next few tens of millions of years, encrypted cordless phones will become the standard. So in addition to being low-powered, multiply reused frequency, and compressed information, alien radio communications will be encrypted as well.

And not this wussy-assed weak AES stuff either. We've only been doing this math thing seriously for a few hundred years, so it's not a surprise that a medium-hard problem like proving P != NP hasn't been solved yet. I'd expect the alien crypto algorithms to all be proven NP-hard, even if P != NP is undecidable. The only way that encryption wouldn't be standard is if the aliens were sitting on a proof that P = NP, and that encryption is a pointless exercise only technological backwards people do. But encrypting the communications makes them look even more random. In fact, the stupid, ignorant, backwards human cryptographers already beleive that if you can easily differentiate an encrypted stream from a random bit stream, the encryption algorithm is broken. I wouldn't be surprised if the aliens were sitting on a mathematical proof that their crypto system couldn't be differentiated from a random sequence in the expected lifetime of the universe. We're almost capable of doing that now.

What all this means is that I doubt our ability to detect an advanced technological civilization from their radio transmissions alone, even one as close as the moon (no, I don't think there is intelligent civilizations on the moon), let alone 200 light years away.

Another, more intriguing, conjecture presents itself here. Assume, just for a moment, that faster than light communication is possible. Yes, I know the physicists all say it's impossible. Or at least many do. But assume it is possible. In that case, radio communications would be a terrible way to communicate interstellar distances. Why send a message by radio to the next civilization over, when that takes hundreds of years, when FTL allows you to send a message there and back in a small fraction of the time, possibly even instantaneously?

In this case, the technological threshold for joining the intergalatic pen pal club would not be the development of radio, but instead the development of FTL communication. A threshold we haven't crossed yet. Which explains why we haven't heard anything, we aren't listening on the right channel. It's rather like the American Indian, dutifully looking for smoke signals of the horizon, not being able to detect the radio signals washing over him.

So why aren't they here? Even assuming a linear growth of population and sixty million years there should have been enough population growth that they would have gotten here if for no other reason than they have no where else to go. With even the slowest exponential growth curve and sixty million years they should be all over the galaxy. That American Indian in the previous paragraph didn't have to wait to invent radio to communicate with the europeans- the europeans came to him.

The problem is that I don't think humans will grow forever- the UN thinks human population will limit at less than 10 billion later this century, see this USA Today story. The main reason for this is the increasing wealth of society, not some Malthusian catastrophy (remind me to do an article someday about why Malthus was wrong). In poor socicities, children are both social security for your old age, and economic benefit right now (children can do chores). Add in a healthy dose of child mortality, and the impeteous for having lots of kids is there. In a rich, technological society, children are 100% capital drains. Yes, there are advantages to having kids, but no advantages to having more kids.

A personal example helps make this clear. My father was born on a farm. He was doing chores- feeding chickens and the like- and increasing his families wealth by age six. Not long after puberty he was working with his father and contributing almost as much to the family wealth. So there was an economic incentive for my grandparents to have lots of children. So my dad grows up, get's a Ph.D. in mathematics, and moves off the farm to be a computer programmer, and I come along. I wasn't really capable of working with my father in a productive way until after 12 years of grade school and 4+ years of college (even ignoring the detours I took). Call it 22 years before I could start contributing in a meaningfull way to my parent's wealth. By which time, naturally, I was on my own and still didn't contribute diddly squat to my parent's wealth. There were other factors involved, but you see the economic incentive towards or against having more than a minimum number of children changing. Statistically, the changing economic incentives change the population growth rates towards ZPG.

So assume there is never more than about 10 billion human being ever. With a finite limit on the human population, the number of stars we need to colonize drops radically. Once we start getting about a thousand or so star systems colonized, that means we only have 10 million people or so on average per star system. And a star system is a pretty big place for so few people. We only think 10 billion people is a lot because they all insist on living on the same planet. If we spread them out just among the planets of this solar system, that'd only be a billion or so people a planet- or the population of the world circa 1804. You know, back when the flag only had 17 stars. ~10 million people spread among ~10 planets is only a million people per planet. You're not even getting decent cities at that point. For humans, I doubt we'll ever get much beyond a thousand or so star system colonized if our population says around 10 billion. We humans simply don't like to be that spread out. We do like to clump if we can. There are more than a thousand stars within a 100 light year radius of earth.

So assuming the aliens have similiar limitations on their growth (fairly safe assumption) and a similiar tendancy towards clumping (a not unreasonable assumption- civilization is marked by it's cooperation and interaction, which requires clumping), our hypothetical alien civilization centered a mere 200 light years away has colonized out maybe a hundred light years or so in all directions- barely half way here. Possibly less- if the civilization s signifigantly more clumpy than humans are, they might have colonized only a few hundred systems, only a few dozen light years from their home star.

So why haven't they at least done a fly through? Sent a probe around for a look-see. Maybe even sent an exploration team for a meet and greet, and maybe do a little sexual experimentation on the side? First off, timing is everything. For the vast majority of the last sixty million years there hasn't been much of interest on the earth- especially if the panspermia theory is correct, and terrestrial life was seeded from outer space. This would make life common- both in the probabilistic sense (lots of planets with life on them) and in the sense of being basically the same everywhere. "Woo hoo," the aliens might say, "yet another planet with DNA-based multicellular life. Let us know when they develop sentience." Remember that humans have only existed for the last million years or so- only one chance in 60 of a probe sent any time in the last 60 million years to see humans. A probe sent through our system two million years ago might have noticed the primates as promising- if the aliens said "make a note to check up on these guys again in, shall we say three million years?", we'd still be a million years shy of their return. And technolocial humans are only about 10,000 years old or so- one chance in 6,000. It is quite likely, in fact, that they just called while weren't home.

This is why I'm not optimistic about SETI's chances anytime soon. But maybe we'll get lucky. And maybe I'm wrong.

Some terrorists are more important than others

2004-01-07T15:13:00.000-06:00

We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.

"Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."

"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."

"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

Gustave Gilbert's account of a discussion with Hermann Goering

Goering had a point. Human beings, in general, simply aren't that ambitous most of the time. We much prefer to deal with issues closer to home- stick to our knitting and live and let live. It's not so much peacefull or lazy, as a matter of priorities- the problems in our face are always more pressing than the problems far distance. You have to goad people, of every race and era, into marching to war. And the easiest way to do that is to scare them- take the problem far away and shove it into their face. Say "if we don't go there and deal with them, they will come here and deal with us."

That requires, however, that you stay on message. And reality has a bad habit of not playing along with you.

That Goering quote lept to mind when reading this sotry. It seems the FBI got a lucky break- a letter delivered to the wrong address allowed them to break open a major terrorist plot. The terrorists were caught with the components to a bomb that would kill anyone in a 30,000 square foot facility, as well as 65 pipebombs and briefcase bombs, 500,000 rounds of ammunition, and even more disturbingly evidence that there is a nation-wide conspiracy of terrorists.

So why haven't you heard about this yet? Because the terrorists were white christians, not brown muslims. In this day of orange terror alerts, where the FBI is looking for people carrying the Farmer's Almanac, that's the only explanation I can think of.

One of the problems with christian terrorists is that they are, as Old Goering noted, useless for goading a nation to war. What are we going to do- invade Wyoming and Michigan? Brown muslims are much better for that.

Once you start viewing "security precautions" in terms of scaring people (aka "reassuring people") and not in terms many of them start to make more sense. As an example. When I took the train from Minnesota to New Hampshire, at one stop a guy from Immigration got on the train and asked everyone for IDs. In a scene remenescent of those old World War II movies, with the Nazis walking down the train intoning "Papers, please" in a fake german accent. Note that this train was taking the *southern* route around the Great Lakes, we never left the states. When travelling between states, remember to take ID with you. What do you think this is, a free country?

And it's not like the train could be hijacked and taken to Cuba or run into a building or anything. Hint: the train goes where the train tracks go, and nowhere else. The most you could do is use it as a crowd of people to attack, but in that case the local mall (especially my local mall) would present a more inviting attack. And it's not like terrorists wouldn't have good fake (or even legitimate) IDs anyways. And it's not like he was inspecting IDs close enough to tell a good fake- he had a whole train to inspect.

No- this guy's chance of catching a terrorist was precisely 0. No, his purpose there was to instill fear. "Be afraid- terrorists can be anywhere! The guy sitting next to you could be a terrorist!" he might as well been announcing.

The other problem with white christian terrorists is that they are uncomfortable close- in looks, in religion, in ideology, in politics- to
fine upstanding if slightly eccentric members of our community (IMHO, anyone who in this age of genetic engineering and human cloning still debates evolution is a few cans short of a six pack. But the rich are simply eccentric, not nuts). Or for that matter esteemed ex-Senators and senior administration officials. It's hard to seriously pursue terrorists whom you mostly agree with.

But this does present an interesting what-if scenario. There is a major terrorist act in the US in the comming year, killing hundreds of people. But after several rounds of Bush talking up the Muslim threat to the US as why he should get re-elected, the terrorists turn out to be white christian militia members, with ties to organizations that Ashcroft also has ties to. This added to the expected hue and cry that after three years, two PATRIOT acts, two wars, and hundreds of billions of dollars spent Bush still has not made us any safer would sink the Bush administration then and there. The question is wether the evidence that the terrorists are christian would come out in time to affect the election, or stop another invasion.

Yet Another Carbon Nanotube breakthrough

2004-01-07T14:14:00.000-06:00

Researchers in the People's Republic of Berkley have managed to managed to build carbon nanotubes on silicon chips. This opens the doors to super cheap, super sensitive bomb and chemical detectors, not to mention computer memories 10K times denser than current. That 10K number, by the way, represents about 20 years of Moore's Law. Carbon Nanotubes- in addition to these nice features, also allow us to build space elevators, faster computer busses, higher res (and cheaper) flat screens, quantum cryptography devices, and more. They are bordering on an argument for intelligent design, IMHO. Forget plastics- invest in carbon nanotubes. The only problem is that everyone else is as well.

The Dean Revolution

2004-01-06T21:17:00.000-06:00

I'd like to comment on this article in City Pages, linked to from Dave's diary (hey man, don't forget you have a blog too). I have to agree with Dave that I disagree with a lot Steve Perry says.

First off, I think Dean will stick true to his principles. What he's saying he's saying because he beleives it to be true, not due to some strategy about appealing to some demographic or another. Which is why he's quite willing to torque people off, and take unpopular positions. As witnessed by his decision to oppose the war over a year ago, when all the rest of the Democrats were lining up to bow and scrape. This approach to getting elected stands in foursquare opposition to the theory held by the DLC. And the DLC's power came from them being the custodians of the magic formula which allows you to lose elections by small margins. Which means any success by Dean meant a dust-up with DLC was inevitable. He's attacking their base of power, intentionally or no.

And he's not stupid. There are two ways of winning elections, historically- and I'm talking about November general elections here. The first is to energize your base while simultaneously depressing you're opponents base. 2002 was a classic example- the Republicans got out, the Democrats stayed home. The second way is to lure a whole bunch of people- that vast, silent majority who doesn't traditionally vote- to get out and vote for you. Dean has hit on a strategy that does both. He'd be an idiot to give up on that strategy- and Dean is no idiot.

But a war with the DLC does NOT mean a war with Democrats in general. This is the number one mistake Steve Perry makes- the DLC is not the Democratic Party.

If Dean gets the nomination, there will be a "Democrats for Bush" movement- populated with the likes of Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman. DINOs- Democrats In Name Only- in other words. Note that I predict there will be one surprising face missing from the DINO party- Hillary Clinton. Personally, I think these DINOs should take a long hard look at their party affiliation. If they want to be Republicans, that party is the next door down. Zell Miller has already endorsed Bush for President- obviously even Holy Joe is just too dang liberal for his tastes.

I don't think Dean needs to apologize for the now infamous "confederate flag" remark. This is one case where context makes a huge difference- if you read his original words in context a completely different meaning.

Which leads to an interesting question. The Dean campaign is malicously and with malice of forethought reaching out to traditionally Republican constitutiacies- NASCAR dads, Eisenhower/Goldwater fiscal conservatives, civil libertarians (especially gun-owning civil libertarians), Perot/McCain populists, etc. As well as Nader greens and Wellstone progressives. Who he is not appealing to is the Neocons and Religous Right- two vote blocks he has no hope of gaining anyways, as Bush is their man. So why wouldn't he appeal to the conservative wing of the Democrats as well?

The answer is that he is. Notice the Gore endorsement. The DLC's fair haired boy, or at least willing dupe. The #2 man in the Clinton Whitehouse, the heir apparent (four years ago) to the DLC New (business) Democrats. So why did Gore jump ship? Because Gore didn't already have a horse in this race, and his loss in the 2K elections (and wise IMHO decision not to run this time around) has cut him out of the power-broker loop. Gore is DLC in name only. Which means his decision of whom to endorse wasn't clouded by political calculations of his own future in the party.

There is an unbridgable gap in the Demcoratic party, between Dean and the DLC. But it is unbridgable because the DLC is not allowing to be bridged. They tear down any attempt at bridging the divide- they have drawn their line of death in the sand, and promised to fight to the last against Dean.

Ten Predictions for 2004

2004-01-06T12:58:00.000-06:00

Hey, it's that time of the year. Mainly want I want to do is set my prognostications into stone, so that 12 months from now I can look back and see how well I do. There is a certain temptation to load this list with sure-bet predictions- there will be unrest in the mideast, the presidential election will be hotly contested, the sun will rise in the east and set in the west, things like that. No, I want to skate closer to the edge. Nine things I think are likely, but are by no means sure. Those are the more fun predictions. Why nine? Because that's how many I could think of.

1) Dean will win in a huge landslide, with Bush only getting a handful of states, maybe none at all. I base this on the candidate's positions right now. Bush is already walking away from seriously big states, like California, New York, and Illinois. Bush looks at those states and doesn't see any way to win. Dean looks as "solid read" states like Texas and Georgia and goes "we might be able to win those states- it's a long shot, but don't write them off just yet". This will force Bush more and more to defend what should be "safe" states- and give the momentum over to Dean. Plus, I don't see either the economy or Iraq turning around, and those will be two huge loadstones around Bush's neck.

2) Intel will announce a 64-bit x86 chip. That isn't that radical a proposition- they are almost forced to. But this is- it will be instruction set compatible with the Opteron. It'll come out later this was because Microsoft demanded it, in return for supporting the Itanic at all. Not that Microsoft support of the Itanic will help diddly squat, that chip is already dead, the corpse just hasn't stopped twitching yet. Intel will, of course, try to paint this as some big victory, but everyone will know Intel just got gutshot by AMD. The chip won't actually be available until '05 or later, but it'll be announced in '04.

3) 2004 will be the year of Linux on the desktop. Yeah, I know I've been predicting this since 1998. The delay has served Linux, however- allowing it to acquire more polish, and sneak onto yet more desktops. For example, I haven't used a windows desktop, at home or at work, regularly in 5 years. And I know I'm not alone. Linux is sneaking onto the desktop the same way it snuck into the server room- without management noticing. 2004 will be the year management notices. The driving causes will be new Microsoft licensing restrictions, the further delay of Longhorn, and yet more virii problems.

4) The Blair Goverment falls over Iraq. Bush & co. don't really care much about the Blair goverment. If by doing something- like pre-emptively pulling out of Iraq and leave Blair holding the bag, or blaming Blair for faulty information that lead to the invasion- Bush thinks he might help his (increasingly desperate) re-election bid, he won't think twice. Tough luck, Tony.

5) The US pulls out of Iraq late-june or july. The timing will be entirely decided by political calculations- early enough for the declaration of victory to have an effect on the elections, but not so early that the inevitable civil war, Turkish invasion, etc. will have an effect. Nah, this isn't aggressive enough. So I'll add- and the US initiates military actions against one of the following: Syria, North Korea, or Iran, in September or October. If it's NK, it'll be a military blockade, if Syria or Iran, an invasion. By that point, Bush should be seeing the writting on the wall from prediction #1, and possibly looking for a way to distract people from the civil war in Iraq. But the ball will bounce the wrong way- everyone will denounce the military action as blatantly political, so it won't help and will probably hurt Bush.

6) A new law will be introduced into congress mandating DRM in all PCs at least. This law will have the backing of at least three interest groups- the media company conglomerates MPAA and RIAA will be the instigators, Microsoft who will want to shut down Linux (especially on the desktop), the insider politicians threatened by Dean's internet campaign (including all the presidential wannabes from the Senate and House who will be holding grudges in a couple of weeks). All three groups will realize that the Dean insurgency will be opposed to such a bill, and if they want it passed they need to do so now. It'll either fail by narrow margins or be declared unconstitutional however.

7) There will be more financial scandals, including one that will wipe out billions of dollars of shareholder value and display Sarbanes-Oxley as the fig leaf it is. The Dean campaign will try to make an issue of this, but the press will go with Bush and downplay the entire incident.

8) More bad news for Intel. The Athlon-64 line of chips will top 3GHz real clock rate. Meanwhile, the P4 will be stuck with hot spots and excessive heat and won't make it to 4GHz. This will position AMD to retake the clock rate crown (last held by AMD with the 1GHz Athlon) in 2005. Worse yet, AMD's better per-clock performance will be that even with a 1/3rd clock rate disadvantage, the Athlon-64s will be clearly superior to anything Intel has (the P4 needs to be 50% faster clock-per-clock than the Athlon-64 to be competitive). This will become even more pronounced as 64-bit apps become more common and people discover that they're about 10% faster than their 32-bit cousins (not because of 64-bits, but because of the 8 extra registers AMD added in 64-bit mode). Come about mid-year, Intel will be forced to make an emergency process change to SOI to address these problems. Unfortunately, the process shift will explemplify "more haste, less speed" (sort of the tag line to this entire charade) and be dogged with problems and delays. Meanwhile, AMD's market share will simply grow, especially as whitebox manufacturers start churning out Linux-based 4-way and 8-way Opteron servers for 1/10th the cost of equivelent servers from Sun, HP, and IBM.
So they aren't quite as reliable- buy two.

9) Dean will be shown to have incredibly long coat tails- the Deaniacs will get out and donate money to and hit the ground for Democratic politicians across the board. The Democrats will sweep back into power in both houses of congress- it'll be 2002 or 1994 but in the other direction. Basically any "vulnerable" seat will go to the Democrats. Not veto-proof majorities, but solid majorities. The Republicans will vow to mimic the Democrats "obstructionist" tactics of the last two years. OK, that last part was a "the sun will rise in the east" prediction.

Interesting Freeper Article

2004-01-04T19:20:00.000-06:00

OK, so I was slumming a bit today. But I found this article, on how Dean could win in '04. On Free Republic.

Personally, I think the article underestimates the importance the economy, the debt, and Iraq will have in the election (to the detriment of Bush), and overestimates the importance of guns in the election. I think the NRA will simply sit out the election. They'd have a hard time explaining an endorsement of Bush when they gave Dean an 'A' rating, especially to the IRS wondering why they should still have tax-excempt status. Bush would like to keep the campaign on God, Guns, and Gays, but I think most people simply won't care.

But what this does show is that even the Freepers are starting to consider the possibility of a Dean presidency.

Dean is a Ninja!

2004-01-04T19:03:00.000-06:00

If Trippi is a Jedi, Dean is a Ninja.

As proof, I offer Dean's IMDB entry. Right there, in black and white- Dean was in "Ninja III- the Domination". As Red Shirt #5 or something, but still.

Damn. Now I have to find and watch what is obviously a piece of dreck.

A change in tone?

2004-01-04T19:01:00.000-06:00

I don't want to turn this blog into a bash-Josh 24/7 blog. Frankly, I don't think the guy is that important. But reading this latest entry from him made me start thinking about the change in tone we're seeing.

I've been expecting for a while that the field will collapse into a Dean and an anti-Dean, and the only question is who will be the anti-Dean. What I find humorous is that Josh doesn't seem to feel Dean's lead to be worthy of comment, that what's interesting is the fight for second place. I don't think this is a slam on Dean (it might be, but I don't think so), I think Josh has a point. Recent polls show Dean with a 19-point lead over Gephardt in Iowa, and a 25-point lead over Kerry in New Hampshire.

Gephardt could still win in Iowa, due to the fact that it's a caucus, not a primary. If you caucus for a candidate in Iowa who gets less than 15% of the vote, you can change your ballot. Currently, that includes Clark, Kerry, Lieberman, and Edwards supporters. It's a more or less open secret that the Gephardt campaign plans on heavy use of cell phones to try and woo caucus goers for these candidates to switch over to Gephardt at the caucus. This gives Gephardt a strong argument in favor of him being the anti-Dean. It also explains why Kerry is suddenly abandoning New Hampshire and campaigning hard in Iowa (although I wonder if Clark's presence in New Hampshire and absence in Iowa has anything to do with that)- if Gephardt has an unexpectedly poor showing, Kerry might be able to pick up the "cell phone vote". The argument against Gephardt is his lackluster showing elsewhere- can he beat Dean anywhere except Iowa and Missouri?

Which answers, I think, Josh's question. The Clark campaign doesn't want Gephardt (or Kerry) to win in Iowa. Anyone who defeated Dean in Iowa would immediately position themselves as the anti-Dean. A surprise upset by Kerry in Iowa is even worse (I wouldn't stay awake nights worrying about it, were I Clark). A Dean win in Iowa can be written off by saying "of course he won in Iowa- he hasn't run against me yet!" A win in New Hampshire is just local-boy advantage as well. I suppose they could write off a Gephardt win in Iowa as local-boy advantage, but the Clark campaign needs to be carefull about how often they use that line, lest people notice how close Arkansas and South Carolina are. Of course, SC is just one of six states having primaries that day- by 3 Feb we're into multi-state airwars. Which is exactly the campaign that Clark wants to run.

Also note- 3 Feb is the date for Missouri's primary. This is Gephardt's home state, a win here is expected, and an insufficiently big win for Gephardt qualifies as a loss. Of course, even a close loss here is a diaster. But if Gephardt has any anti-Dean cred come 3 Feb, a MO win is pretty much in the bag. So a Gephardt win in IA basically means a Gephardt win on 3 Feb- taking thunder away from Clark.

No, Clark does not want a Gephardt win in Iowa.

Was Clinton electable?

2004-01-02T20:33:00.000-06:00

The latest screed from Joe Conason (who is always worth a read) points out this preserved gem from the 1992 election about a previous "unelectable" candidate- Bill Clinton.

The quotes from this article are just priceless (quoting seems to be broken):

***

It is little wonder, then, that a growing number of Democrats are only questioning Clinton's electability in the fall.

"Both of these candidates are so flawed that there is no possibility of their defeating President Bush," former New York Mayor Ed Koch said of both Clinton and former California Gov. Jerry Brown. "Bill Clinton has no credibility."

Koch, among a number of Democrats, wants to force a brokered convention in which party leaders would regroup behind an experienced national consensus candidate as an alternative to Clinton--perhaps Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen or Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore.

In a head-to-head match up on March 20, Bush led by only 52-43 percent and Clinton was indeed within striking range. But as the weekly disclosures took their toll during the ensuing primaries, Clinton's margin fell to 54-38 percent on March 29 and then fell further to 54-34 by the beginning of April.

***

Yeah, that's the ticket. Replace the unelectable Bill Clinton with the shoe-in Al Gore. Um, right.

The only number this article quotes which Dean doesn't beat is Bush's negative opinion number- Bush Sr. had a 61% negative opinion rating, while Bush Jr. has only a 49% negative opinion rating. And compared to the scandal problems Clinton already faced (Genifer Flowers, the inhaling thing, draft dodging, conflict of interest accusations against Hillary, etc), by comparison Dean looks ready for sainthood. But we didn't have Faux News back then, and CNN was something approximating objective.

More thoughts on Deans "Disloyalty"

2004-01-02T18:59:00.000-06:00

Thinking about Josh Marshal's take on Dean a little more, it's obvious to me that Josh is unintentionally falling into the trap of beleiving the autocratic fallacy.

Basically, the autocratic fallacy is the assumption that there are a small number of "leaders" among humans- people with special genes or a destiny or what have you that have the ability to make decisions. Everyone else are sheep- lacking a leader forcing them to do something, they tend to just stand around and do nothing. Most people are incapable of making decisions any more monumental than what to have for dinner without some leader telling them what to do.

Stated so baldly, the autocratic fallacy is obviously false and more than a little insulting. And, I'm sure, were Josh Marshall to read this, he'd be saying "That's not what I think at all!" But the assumption Josh is making is that I'm a follower, I've just choosen to follow Dean. And were Dean to play nice, Dean would tell me to go vote for Joe Lieberman- and having no decision making capability of my own, I would. Note that Howard Dean himself doesn't make this assumption- that's what Dean was saying. Simply because he leads doesn't mean we follow.

Actually, there are authoritarian leader/follower power structures out there. The Republican party is a good example. The authoritarian fallacy is the assumption that there are only authoritarian power structures. That everyone is either a leader or a follower.

The cause of this fallacy is obvious. Authoritarian power structures are very comfortable to us on some level. It's a very primate-style of social organization- you are part of a tribe/pack, and the tribe is lead by an alpha male, generally the biggest baddest asshole of the bunch. This organization is very successfull (for all involved, although it is obviously better to be king than serf), predates humans, and is bred into our genes.
This is part of the explanation of the popularity of the conservative movement- and dictatorial movements the world over. They appeal to a deep pre-human part of us, to follow a real mean S.O.B. of an alpha male.

But we are more than primates. In evolving into humans we became more than our monkey ancestors. And one of the things we evolved is the ability to invent our own social organizations, rather than just using the ones that our genes have bequeathed us. And the most powerful of these was the concept of emergent behavior based social organizations. These organizations are exactly like alpha-male lead tribes, but without the alpha-males. No single individual is in charge- decision making for the entire group is instead distributed, each individual in charge of themselves, and the group level organization emerges from the stochastic sum of the parts.

A classic example of emergent behavior organizations, that the conservatives hype all the time, is the idea of capitialistic markets. Many participants, each operating independentally and making decisions by themselves, lead to global emergent structures. Another example of emergent behavior organizations is democracy itself. Democracy is not a contest to see which alpha male has the most followers, democracy is the marketplace of political ideas- it's people deciding for themselves.

In this sense, the Dean campaign is the ultimate emergent behavior. Dean didn't build this campaign- it already existed in the anti-WTO protests and the anti-war protests. People were organizing and communicating, and building a leaderless movement long before Dean came along. But it still doesn't feel "natural". It's not- it's a invention of humans.

This is exactly the problem I have with the Democrats. We already have an alpha-male party, with it's demagogy and it's mindless following of Der Leader. They're called the Republicans. The Democrats should be the emergent behavior party. But the Democratic leadership still insists on playing alpha-male games with me. Which gets nowhere with me. Howard Dean doesn't control my vote, and neither does John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Terry McAuliffe, Josh Marshall, or anyone else who isn't me. I control my vote. And I will decide for myself who to vote for.

If there was one message I'd like to send to the Democrats and Josh Marshall, it's this: we don't have a king, we're an anarcho-communist collective. But I don't think they'd get the joke.

How Clark may help Dean

2004-01-02T10:27:00.000-06:00

This article, linked to from dKos back on the 29th (hey, I was travelling) qualifies as seriously interesting. It seems that thanks to rules enacted after Jesse Jackson's run, any candidate in any primary that gets less than 15% of the vote gets 0 delegates- the delegates are split up among those candidates who get more than 15% of the vote. Now, in a 2-3 horse race, this prevents boutique candidates from having an "undue" influence on the election. The fact that it was Jesse Jackson who caused these rule changes just adds an interesting race aspect into the debate.

But we don't have a 2-3 horse race, we have a 5-6 horse race- Dean, Clark, Kerry, Gephardt, Lieberman, and maybe Edwards. Not to mention a decent field of strong "boutique" candidates pulling 2-5%- Kucinich, Braun, and Sharpton, who as a group pull 10% or so of the vote away from the "main" candidates, leaving just 90% of the vote for the main candidates. 90/6=15. Life just got interesting.

So, for example, if this poll were the results of the New Hampshire primary, Dean would get 69% (42/(42+19)) of the delegates, Kerry would get the remaining 31%, and Clark would get nada. If everyone who voted for Clark, Edwards, Lieberman, or Gephardt, would instead go over and vote for Kerry, Kerry would get 19+13+7+5+3=47% of the vote,
giving Kerry 53% (47/(47+42)) of the delegates, and Dean only 47% of the delegates.

So, by the exact logic by which a vote for Nader was a vote for Bush (logic, I comment, that I have a slight problem with, but seems to be conventional wisdom), then a vote for Clark, Gephardt, Lieberman, or Edwards is a vote for Dean, at least in New Hampshire. If your candidate isn't going to win 15% or more of the vote, and most aren't, then you are throwing your vote away on a candidate who won't win a single delegate from your state.

I'm looking forward to this meme taking root. Should be fun.

Return of the King Summarized

2004-01-01T17:31:00.000-06:00

Plagiarized from someone i don't know on LiveJournal...

RotK in Summary

Can't be bothered going to see the movie? Fell asleep half way through? I am here to save the day. Except I've only seen it once and so I don't really remember what heppens when. You know, you really would think I had better things to do, or could at least wait till I saw it again. But I am very impatient.

BBFC Certification
Audience: Yay! Woo! *claps*
Title
Audience: Yay! Woo! *claps*

Scene - a river
Audience: Yay! Woo! *claps*
Deagol: *splash*
Smeagol: eep
Deagol: glug
Smeagol: ooh
Ring: *whisper whisper*
Deagol: erk
Smeagol: Preciousssss

Scene - a mountain
Gollum: *evil cackle*
Sam: *worried face*
Frodo: *angsty face*

Scene - Isengard
Merry: I am so high! How are you Pippin?
Pippin: I am soooo high!
Merry: I am like way higher than you, dude
Pippin: Ha ha h ah aaha. Hey look it's Gandalf and Strider and the poncy elf!
Gandalf: *stern look*
Legolas: *pout*
Palantir: *glimmer*
Pippin: Ooh shiny!
Gandalf: Mine!
Treebeard: creak

Scene - Edoras (outside)
Legolas: *looks pouty*
Aragorn: *looks manly*

Scene - Edoras (inside)
Pippin: *steals Gandalfs shiny ball*
Merry: Er
Pippin: Argh!
Merry: o0o
Pippin: Argh argh argh!
Gandalf: *very stern look*
Pippin: wibble
Gandalf: Pull yourself together and tell me what you saw.
Pippin: I feel great paaaain and loooonging....
Gandalf: Right, best be off then.
Merry: huff
Pippin: I'm soooooo sorry!
Merry: Talk to the hand.
Pippin: Merry my love!
Merry: teary wibble
Pippin: wah!
Gandalf: *rides off with Pippin - sternly*

scene - Rohirrim Camp
Eowyn: And after we've finished playing soldiers we can play elves!
Merry: Can you braid my hair like Legolas?
Eomer: Good grief!

Scene - Minas Tirith
Gandalf: Don't tell him anything, Pippin.
Pippin: No problem.
Gandalf: *enters hall sternly*
Gandalf: Hello not-the-king. Do as I say or else!
Denethor: Talk to the hand.
Pippin: BTW, it's all my fault your favourite son is dead.
Denethor: Mmmm... hobbit.
Pippin: Eek!
Gandalf: Respect my authority!

Scene - Rohirrim Camp - a tent
Elrond: I can't believe how much better than the Matrix this movie is! And check out this rad costume!
Aragorn: Huh?
Elrond: Oh right, sword, plot, thingy...
Aragorn: *brandishes sword in manly fashion*

Scene - Outside the Paths of the Dead
Aragorn: *looks manly*
Legolas: *looks pouty*
Gimli: *looks hairy*
Eowyn: *looks weepy*
Theoden: *looks concerned*
Eomer: Good grief!

Scene - the Paths of the Dead
Horses: Eek!
Aragorn: I fear no danger!
Legolas: I fear only cobwebs in my silky hair, but I have brought a comb.
Gimli: *looks hairy*
Ghosts: Woooo!
Aragorn: Respect my authority!
Ghost King: Talk to the hand.
Aragorn: Talk to the sword!
Ghosts: nice sword

Scene - Minas Tirith
Faramir: My life is so hard.
Denethor: Gandalf's stern looks have driven me mad!
Pippin: *looks worried*
Denethor: Leave my presence, Faramir. Your nose displeases me and I suspect your father was the milkman.
Faramir: Fine then! *slams door*
Pippin: er...
Denethor: You have such a pretty mouth... entertain me with it.
Pippin: *sings*
Denethor: That's not what I meant!
Faramir: Just wait till I'm dead, then he'll be sorry.
Denethor: *munch*
Pippin: la la la la
Orcs: *twang*
Faramir: ow!

Scene - a mountain
Gollum: *evil cackle*
Sam: *worried face*
Frodo: *angsty face*
Gollum: *sneaky face*
Frodo: I hate you, Sam. Go home!
Audience: Yay! Sam is so annoying.
Sam: Wah! *leaves*
Audience: Aw, poor Sam!
Gollum: Gotcha!
Frodo: Whu?
Shelob: *scuttles*
Audience: Eek!
Frodo: Eek!
*much running around*
Shelob: *stab*
Frodo: glug ack ugh bleh urgh gah wibble whee urm *thump*

Scene - Minas Tirith
Denethor: I am mad for no real reason and now I shall burn my only remaining son alive and kill myself, mwah-ha ha ha!
Faramir: *groan*
Pippin: Wtf?
*scuffle*
Denethor: Argh! *falls off cliff*
Faramir: *groan*

Scene - a mountain
Sam: *unfeasible killing of giant spider*
Shelob: erk
Frodo:
Sam: pain woe angst
Orcs: Hey look, hobbit to go!
Sam: Nooooooooooooooo!
Frodo:

Scene - Minas Tirith
*much battling*
Theoden: Today is a good day to die!
Rohirrim: Err
Eowyn: Chaaaaarge!!!
Merry: Grrrrr
Eomer: Good grief.
*more battling*
Theoden: How much do we rock!
Audience: Huzzah!
Oliphaunts: *rumble*
Rohirrim: Erk
Theoden: Oh well, dying's back on the schedule.
Eowyn: Chaaaaaarge!!!!!!
Audience: Eep
Witch king: Woooooo!
Theoden: Uh-oh
Fell Beast: *munch*
Eowyn: Nooooooooooooooooooo!
Witch King: Mwah ha ha ha
Eowyn: Die foul fiend!
Merry: What she said!
Witch King: *poof*
Theoden: My potty is broken!
Eowyn: Whu?
Theoden: You must rule in my stead.
Eowyn: Wah!
Aragorn: *looks manly*
Ghosts: Wooooo!
Legolas: Whee!
Gimli: *looks hairy*
Eomer: Good grief.
*much routing of the foe*

Scene - an orc tower
Frodo: whimper
Sam: Chaaaaaarge!
Orcs: wtf?

Scene - the battle field
Pippin: Merry my love!
Merry: whimper
(for rest of scene see extended edition)

Scene - Mordor
Frodo: Woe
Sam: Chin up and all that.
Frodo: *falls over*
Sam: Why is it always me that has to carry him?

Scene - Minas Tirith
Aragorn: What happened to those two guys, the short ones?
Gandalf: Their scenes got cut.
Aragorn: No the other two, the fat one and the angsty one.
Gandalf: Oh them. I had completely forgotten about that.
Aragorn: Something about a ring.
Gandalf: Right, I guess they must be in Mordor by now.
Aragorn: Where Sauron's army is...
Gandalf: Right...
Aragorn: Oops.
Gandalf: Oops.
Eowyn: Chaaaaaarge.
Eomer: *face palm*
Gandalf: What we need is to divert Sauron's attention away from them.
Aragorn: Right, some way of diverting the army from Sam and Frodo's path.
Legolas: Ooh I know I know! A diversion!
Eowyn: Like I said. Chaaaaaaaaaaaarge!
Merry: Chaaaaarge!
Pippin: Chaaaaarge!
Aragorn: Oh what the hell. Chaaaaarge!
*much battling*

Scene - a volcano - exterior
Sam: *falls over*
Frodo: Ow!

Scene - a volcano - interior
Frodo: *angsty face*
Sam: *worried face*
Frodo: Well this has been fun.
Sam: Whu?
Frodo: But really, it'd be a terrible waste of a perfectly nice ring.
Sam: Um...
Frodo: *disappears*
Gollum: Preciousssssss!
*semi-invisible scuffle ensues*
Audience: *tries not to giggle*
Gollum: *bite*
Frodo: Ow! *reappears*
Audience: Eeeeew!
Gollum: *falls into burning lava*
Audience: Eew! Finger! Eew!
Ring: *melts*
Sauron: Eek!
Orc Army: Eek!
Sauron: *poof*
Good guys: Yay!
Volcano: *boom*

Scene - RivendellMinas Tirith - a bed
Frodo: ungh
Gandalf: He's awake.
Heroes: Yay!
*unexpected group orgy*
Audience: Ooh, Legolas is soooo pretty! Is the film finished yet?

Scene - a weddingcoronation
Aragorn: *looks laundered and yet manly*
Subjects: *bow*
Legolas: *looks pretty*
Aragorn: *looks captivated*
Arwen: *clears throat*
Legolas: *gazes into Aragorns eyes*
Aragorn: *clasps Legolas shoulder*
Arwen: *clears throat again*
Legolas: *stands on her toe*
Arwen: *kicks him in the back of the knee*
Legolas: *stumbles aside*
Aragorn: *accidentally kisses Arwen*
Arwen: mmmmmm
Audience: Ooh, Legolas is soooo pretty! Is the film finished yet?

Scene - the Shire
Hobbits: *arrive triumphantly home*
Audience: *start putting on their jackets*
Hobbits: *go to the pub*
Audience: *slurp the last of their coke*
Sam: *marries that Rosie bint*
Pippin: *catches bouquet*
Merry: *pinches his ass*
Frodo: *writes book*
Audience: I mean any minute now, right?
Sam: *has babies*
Audience: Right?

Scene - The Grey Havens
Bilbo: *looks old*
Gandalf: *looks wise*
Galadriel: *looks shiny*
Frodo: *looks pensive*
Audience: Is Legolas going to be in this scene?
Bilbo: *leaves*
Galadriel: *leaves*
Audience: Should we leave?
Frodo: Wait for me!
Sam: Wtf?
Merry and Pippin: Wah!
Sam: But...
Frodo: I just can't get the hang of not being pensive.
Sam: Wah!
Merry and Pippin: Wah!
Audience: This has to be the end right?
Gandalf: *leaves*
Frodo: *leaves*

- The End -

Audience: o0o
Audience: Yay! Woo! *claps*

PNAC rides again

2004-01-01T14:09:00.000-06:00

Perl and Frum have sent a position paper to Bush that we should invade Syria and Iran, blockade Cuba, and declare Saudi Arabia and France our enemies. This is all sounding vaguely familiar to me.

For those who don't know, PNAC- The Project for the New American Century, was a group of second-stringers from Papa's administration who were torqued off that we Pappy didn't invade Iraq back in 1991. The project just happened to include people with names like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and so on- people who came into power with the Bush administration. What is even more scary is that a year before 9-11, PNAC was calling for a New Pearl Harbor to set their plans in motion. Note the link there- I'm not sending you to Alternet or IndyMedia, that's ABC News. The report they're talking about is here, from their own website and in their own words (the quote in question is on page 63).

It has always been PNAC's stated position that Iraq was just the stepping stone to a wider permanent US military prescence in the gulf. From the above report: While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of Saddam Hussein. In this context, Perle and Frum's latest paper is seen as a call to stay the course, and not a radical new foreign policy. What is interesting is why Perle and Frum seem to feel the need to call on the administration to stay the course. I don't know anything, but I have my guesses.

My call- based entirely on my lack of inside source, my distance from the power circles in washington, and my inately paranoid nature, is that the PNAC Clique is feeling the heat from two different directions. On one side you have the tattered remains of the realists, mainly Condi Rice and Colin Powell. But the real counter-balance to PNAC in the administration is, I think, Karl Rove- the god of the election. Karl has to hate the war- not that he cares one whit about brown people in foreign lands, they don't vote and therefor don't count towards getting Bush re-elected. But the steady water-torture drip-drip-drip of dead soldiers comming home is slowly but surely wearing away public support for the war, and by extension Bush. Bush's popularity numbers are the lowest they've been in the entire administration. Even worse, the trends are all wrong- steadily downward. If he wants to get Bush re-elected, he needs to reverse those trends.

This means the war has to end. And any invasion of Iran or Syria, means either pull out of Iraq, a probably public relations diaster, or instituting a draft, a gaurenteed public relations diaster. Karl wants the troops to come home (preferably to ticker-tape parades), the sooner the better. Which puts him in direct conflict wth the stated PNAC goals of using Iraq as a springboard for permenant troop deployments in the Gulf. But Karl is the golden boy, the rain maker. You don't question Karl. So the PNAC crowd goes after the group they can attack- the realists.

The realists, probably riding on Karl's coattails, have been winning recently. Condi Rice got control over rebuilding Iraq from Wolfowitz, and James Baker v3.0 is back in the headlines looking to get people to forgive Iraq's debt. And they get to say "I told you so" even if they're smart enough not to vocalize it. But the Baker trip was an interesting case- just as he was getting on the plane, Rumsfeld's Pentagon announced that only American companies, and companies from nations that supported us going into Iraq, would be getting the plum contracts for rebuilding- French, Russian, and German companies need not apply. This cut the legs out from under Baker's trip quite effectively. Unfortunately, this was the PNAC crowd reacting, and not acting- and even PNAC thinks this was a dumb idea.

But that is exactly how this fight is being carried on- as a bureaucratic knife fight happening behind closed doors. Perle's position in the Defense Advisory Board and Frum's lack of any official position in the administration relegate both of them to the peanut gallery. Which means they can't do more than shout "Win one for the gipper!" from the sidelines- which is exactly what they're doing.

The danger here is that the realists could be defeated, and Rove convinced that what Bush needs is a wartime boost- that the way to ensure Bush's re-election is to invade Syria or Iran. In effect, that what the problem with both the Kuwait and Iraq wars was a matter of timing. I've been listening for the drums to start up on this, but haven't heard them yet.

An even scarier possibility exists. That plans for us to invade Syria are already in progress, and the Bush administration is just waiting for another convient Pearl Harbor to give as the excuse. Hey, it's worked before...

Our so-called boom

2004-01-01T12:52:00.000-06:00

As always, Paul Krugman is required reading.

Krugman's closing question- "Can an economy thrive on sales of luxury goods alone?"- is one we all should be contemplating. Because it is obvious that what is going on is a transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the rich, and the creation of a neuvo-aristocracy.

Even worse, just like the upside gain is not being distributed at all evenly, the downside risk is not being distributed evenly either. This is one case where the poor and middle class are getting more than their fair share. Consider- what happens if the richest parts of our society get scared economically and stop spending? Demand drops, and companies lay people off. Poor and middle class people. You're not benefitting from this upswing, but you will be hurt by the comming downswing. And, as always, the gap between the rich and everyone else will simply widen.

Worse yet, the downswing for the poor and middle class might happen even without the rich slowing spending. Other than the store clerks at Neimen Marcus and Sharper Image, nothing says the stuff they're buying has to be made here. Remember that your job can be shipped overseas as well. "Class war" is already happening folks, and unless you're making at least a third of a million dollars a year, you are losing.

The silver lining in this cloud is that people are, on some level, aware of what's going on. The campaign motto "It's the economy stupid" which was the doom of Senior's presidency will likely also be the doom of Junior's. Junior needs to grow about 300,000+ jobs a month between now and the election or he will go down as the first president since Hoover to preside over a net job loss. Unless there is another major terrorist attack on US soil by arabs (Christian terrorists don't count), this election will be over the economy- a sure loser issue for Bush.

Shameless plagiarism

2003-12-30T10:14:00.000-06:00

USA Today is running an online poll on whether Reagan should replace FDR on the dime. Over on DailyKos, Ray in TX suggested that Reagan's face more properly belongs on Treasury notes. Every new chunk of deficit could have Ronnie's wrinkled mug on it. Beautiful!

Why the Washington Democrats lost my vote

2003-12-29T21:55:00.000-06:00

Hmm. Interesting aspect of comments on this blog- the comment field allows you to type in as long a comment as you want, but crops you off. So if my comment on Dave's Blog entry seems to cut off in midsentence, that's because it was cut off in midsentence.

I am a Dean supporter, and I will not vote for Kerry, Gephardt, or Lieberman should one of them win the nomination. Dean's endorsement, which I'd expect, will not change this.

The problem is that the Beltway Democrats demonstratably don't bother listening to those of us outside the beltway except when they're running for office. Even then, they listen but they don't follow. They are all so surprised at the depth of opposition to the war that Dean has tapped in to- where the heck where they when I, Dave, and millions of other people were marching in the streets back in '02? How loud do we have to shout to be heard? Only once their presidential prospects were in jeopardy was any change in the rhetoric forthcomming.

And rhetoric was all that changed. I watched the New Mexico debate, with every candidate bragging about how they stand up to Bush. Well, when the time came to stand up and oppose the cutting of accountability for contractors in the $87B Iraq budget came, where were they? When the Patriot II act was being passed, where were they? Oh, right- busy piling on Dean for daring to sugest that capturing Saddam didn't make us any safer (an observation that, given the high security alert and dozens of dead soldiers in Iraq since the capture shows as prescient). In at least one case, the rhetoric didn't even stay changed- after the capture of Saddam, Kerry was up bragging about how much he supported the war. Well, guess what? Just like capturing Saddam didn't make us one whit safer, capturing Saddam didn't change my opinions on the war one whit either.

This is ignoring the last three years of craven appeasement of the Bush adminstration before this last quarter- the war itself, Bush's tax cuts, Patriot I, the Clear Skies act, the No Tree Left Behind act- every dumb idea that's come down the hill from the Bush Whitehouse has found widespread support among the Democrats. A large part of the reason the last three years under Bush have been so bad is because these morons have fallen down on the job. Before you try to blame me for being responsible for Bush's tenure for not voting for these Beltway Democrats, consider how much responsibility they hold for voting for Bush proposals.

They've had their second chance, and their third chance, fifth chance, and fifty seventh chance. They're out of chances with me. This isn't a case where I'm leaving the party, here the party has left me.

Josh Marshall is a big fat idiot

2003-12-29T17:15:00.000-06:00

In his latest anti-Dean tirade, Josh Marshall claims that Pied Piper Dean is now playing a tune to march his poor hypnotized childlike supporters away from the Democratic Party, should he not get the nomination. He says Dean hasn't made a pledge of "committed" support to whomever wins the nomination, should it not be him.

Bullshit. Big, fat, stupid, lying bullshit.

What Dean said, and it is true, is that even though Dean would support another nominee, there is no guarantee his supporters would do so. This isn't a plot to lead us into the wilderness - it's just a statement of fact. Dean does not own my vote. Therefore, he can't sell it or give it away. I vote for whom i will.

As far as i know, and correct me if i'm wrong, Dean is the only Democratic presidential candidate who has pledged support for any nominee. What I do know is that at a recent presidential debate, when Ted Koppel asked who thought Dean was electable, one hand (Dean's went up) and eight stayed down. Eight candidates have publicly stated that they do not believe Dean can beat Bush. Are they going to refuse to support him when he is the nominee? I think this is a serious question.

Frankly, i'm far more concerned about Clark supporters bolting and doing write-ins, or even voting Bush, than i am about Dean supporters not holding their nose in November and voting for some other nominee. But will Josh Marshall hold Clark to the same standard? No, because Josh Marshall is just another Establishment tool with a no-comments blog who pretends to be hip and New Media because he publishes on the Internet. He's well on his way to becoming a liberal Bob Novak, dutifully doling out off-the-record spin from anonymous sources in exchange for being invited to all the best parties.

Why strong type checking is important

2003-12-29T16:15:00.000-06:00

Bognomicon is about more than opinionated political rants. We have opinionated technical rants as well! And just to prove that, I thought I'd fire off a rant on a subject that has been annoying me for a while (although probably not you)- the increasing trend in new programming languages away from strong compile-time type checking, especially in the open source world. The two big "post-Java" languages to have caught on- Python and Ruby- both are run time type checked. But the trend goes farther back than that- Perl, SmallTalk, and Scheme are all run time type checked. It has been stated to my face that compile time type checking was going the way of the dinosaur.

In a way, I understand the genesis of this movement. I did some Java programming over Thanksgiving. The problem with the Java type system is that there is no way to express an "of" type- I wanted an iterator of iterators of strings, and an arraylist of hashmaps from strings to doubles (or should I say Doubles- a minor but annoying design flaw of Java). But the Java type system has no way of expressing these types in the type system. Which was state of the art- for Algol 68, maybe. So you are required to be typecasting everything to and from type Object and depending upon the run time type checks to catch any errors. Which is the one thing Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, Scheme, and SmallTalk all have in common- none of them have a more powerful type system than Algol 68 did.

Run time type checking comes at a cost. It comes at a cost of memory, as every object needs to keep type information with it (this extra type information is especially unwelcome if basic types like ints and booleans are also objects). It comes with a performance penalty as the program needs to check the types for compatibility at run time- a non trivial cost. And unlike bounds checking of array accesses (which can generally be optimized away via strength reduction), these checks can never be elided- simply because one element of the list happens to be of type foo doesn't mean that the next element will be as well.

Run time type checking also comes at the cost of code stability as well. ML was originally invented as an experiment in proving code correct- now many bugs can the computer detect a-priori? In the general case, proving code correct is equivalent to solving the halting problem- so is perfect optimization. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't optimize our program, nor does it mean that if the computer *can* detect the error it should. And as a tool for detecting software bugs type checking has succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. As any ML or Ocaml or Haskell programmer will tell you, a good type system will find a surprising number of bug (surprising to those programmers only familiar with Algol-68/Pascal style type systems)- forgotten cases, bad algorithms, and more will generally show up as type errors in ML programs. More recent research (moving into the 1990s) have pushed type checking systems every farther- for example, type checking has been extended to detect race conditions.

Yeah, yeah- unit tests are the silver bullet and answer to all of our prayers. Well, for every programmer I know that come close to providing complete unit tests for their code, I can name at least 10 others who don't even try. Plus you have to deal with Murphy's law. You only need one moron who doesn't play by the rules to spoil the entire game. And I've yet to see a development team of more than 3 people which didn't include at least one moron. By being built into the compiler, strong compile-time type checking keeps everyone honest. Strong type checking isn't a replacement for unit testing, I strongly agree- but unit testing is not a replacement for strong type checking either.

"What about C++ Templates?" I hear you cry. Yes, as much as it pains to me admit it, in this sense C++ is better than Java, Python, or Ruby. Via templates C++ actually can express "of" types- my iterator of iterators of strings would have a type Iterator<Iteterator<String> >. C++ templates are a cure almost as bad as the disease. First off (though this is a minor nit), they're unparsable without type information. If you see the string "a < b, c > d;", do you parse it as two comparison operations conjoined by the comma operator (a holdover wart from C)- like
"(a < b), (c > d);", or as a variable declaration of an instantiation of template a, with parameters b and c, and a name of d- like "(a < b, c > ) d"?

An even bigger problem is the code bloat that instantiating the various templates costs- given a template of type foo, foo creates one instance of the code for foo, foo another, foo another, foo another, and so on. This is even assuming the compiler is smart enough to recognize that foo, foo, foo, foo, foo, foo, etc. can often all use the same implementation. All of sudden you're looking at dozens or hundreds of copies of essentially the same code- while even Java's cast-everything-to-Object implementations only need one. This is non-trivial, with the cost of a cache miss at 100-350 clock cycles, the amount of time your program takes to run (assuming it isn't I/O bound) is much better predicted by the number of cache misses it generates, and not the number of instructions it executes. By unnecessarily duplicating code, you are increasing the number of cache misses and thus increase the run time of your program. This problem gets to be an even bigger problem when the moron factor is taken into account. I have seen (no kidding) a templated array class that took not only the type of element held in the array, but also the length of the array as a parameter to the template. So the compiler generated different blocks of code for arrays of length 4 and arrays of length 5.

But both of those could be fixed with slightly different design decisions. If the standard committee had pick just about any other symbols other than < and > to designate a template, it'd be parsable. And if C++ had declared everything an object (and mandated unboxing for some types), templates could have been implemented as a type-checking wrapper around old Java-style Object (or C-style void *) data structures. Maybe Java's templates will fix these problems (probably not- to me it looks like Java is morphing more and more into C++). No, the biggest problem I have with templates is that they make generic programming exceptional or unusual. Generic programming should be the norm, not the exception. C++ programmers are beginning to approach this with their heavily templated programs.

Nor does strong type checking mean annotating the source code with lots of unnecessary type information- thanks to a wonderful invention known as type inference. This allows the compiler to automatically determine what type a variable or function should be without input from the programmer. Unfortunately, type inference wasn't invented until the later half of the 1970's, meaning that most programmers haven't ever seen a language with it. Those who do know about it tend to associate it with "fruity" functional languages, despite the fact that, like garbage collection, type inference does not require functional programming.

The problem with type checking is that it's sole purpose is to improve the quality of code- to detect and localize bugs. There is no incentive in the industry to improve code quality. Customers pay for features- and if they cared one whit about code quality, Microsoft would have declared bankruptcy years ago. Open source software is primarily driven by the commercial software world- your average open source developer is not an undergrad CS major with too much time on his hands, it's a professional programmer doing weekend or evening programming.

Without any market push to increase code quality, management is not just ambivalent about improvements, they are actively hostile. Think about it- how often does a manager go "we really should push the release off a month or two for code cleanup. Oh, and after this release I want to send a bunch of programmers off to train in some new language I hear will improve our code quality. A little delay now will be made up later on down the road three fold." No, managers go "We're moving the release up three months to release before our competitors do- time to market is everything. Weekends are now canceled from now until release. Get something out the door- no major changes if they can be possibly avoided! Just get something, anything working, and we'll worry about tomorrow , or maybe the day after." And customers reward this behavior. Combine this with an environment that punishes risk taking and not following the herd (i.e. you average corporate culture), and you have an environment where major advances are impossible, where real technological change has come to a complete standstill. Which is exactly what we see- an industry mired in 1968 and unable to advance forward.

The solution, I think- and this will be very controversial among my fellow programmers- is software liability. I'm not talking about anything extreme- just the same implicit guarantee that Ford motor company or Firestone tire company is forced to give. And, to a large extent, what we programmers and software companies want is rapidly going to become immaterial. Software bugs and maldesigns are already costing billions of dollars a year, and increasingly costing lives. This doesn't mean "release a program with a bug in it and immediately go bankrupt"- which is what people assume. When Ford releases a new car whose brakes, for example, fail after 4,000 miles, what do they do? They send everyone who bought the car a little note basically saying "we have discovered your new car has a tinsy little problem with the brakes- if you'd be so kind as to bring it by any Ford dealer, we'd be happy to fix it for free." Ford simply guarantees that they tried to fix all the problems before shipping the car, and that they're willing to fix reasonable problems if and when they arise. If you response is still "no one will be able to afford to develop with that sort of litigation overhead!" you are probably right- development as it occurs today will be lawsuited out of existence. The problem is that we're sweeping back the tide here- the question is not if the software engineering field will be subject to the same requirements the other engineering fields are, the question is when.

But what if I told you that there was a magic way to detect software errors automatically, at compile time? I'm already using it. Perhaps you might take a look too.

Waiter, these words in my mouth taste funny!

2003-12-29T12:21:00.000-06:00

What do you do when the subject of the news won't stick to the official storyline? You just make up words to put in his mouth!

Dean: Dems Doomed If He Loses Nomination, screams the headline for the AP story currently syndicated across a zillion different news sites, including USA Today, Salon, and ABC News. The fact that he never said that, or even implied it, can't be allowed to interfere with the plot of today's political reality tv. And one of the plots is that Dean and the Deaniacs are some sort of wild independent streak, not really part of the Democratic mainstream. If Dean doesn't get the nomination, he's supposed to jump ship and run as an independent, despite having repeatedly said that he would endorse the eventual nominee and would not run as an Independent. The Deaniacs, of course, naive little political virgins they are, are supposed to support the Independent Dean run, or stay home, or write him in, or vote Nader, or do SOMETHING other than hold their noses and vote for whomever stands the best chance of beating Bush.

Sigh.

Frankly, i don't think Dean stated it very well. I think the majority of his supporters are mainstream Democrats and/or solidly ABB, and will vote for whomever the Democrats run - Clark easily, Edwards less easily, Kerry or Gephardt while holding their noses, even Lieberman while rending their clothes and tearing out their hair. Some will flee to the Greens or other third parties. A few will stay home. But really, the Deaniacs will mostly vote for whomever the Democrats run, and those who won't probably aren't enough to matter.

What another Democrat won't get from the Deaniacs is their love, their devotion, their time, probably their money. And you know what? They wouldn't have gotten that anyway. But that's not the official story. The official story is that we're a bunch of independent wildcats, and Dean is our Pied Piper. And if supporting that story means pushing out headlines that are flat lies, then that's what the media will do.

2003-12-12T11:08:00.000-06:00

Help contribute to the unelectable google-bomb!

And contribute to the miserable failure meme, although that one makes a good unelectable google-bomb too.

Here's how it works... when you link a word or phrase like miserable failure, google uses it for a search match. If a LOT of people do it, google raises its priority. Pretty soon, it's the first thing people see when they enter certain phrases into google.