Month: July 2007

links for 2007-07-14

“You may have heard something about the iPhone in the media.”

An endorsement:

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For twenty years I’ve been a contented user of Apple computer products. I’m not sure how many incarnations of the Mac I’ve owned over the years. I can’t imagine using another brand, and, in fact, I never have, excepting a troubled affair with a Kaypro in my freshman year of college. On Sunday I bought an iPhone, and my contentment has increased. You may have heard something about the iPhone in the media. Its usefulness boils down to this: tonight I’m leaving for Munich, and ordinarily I’d want to bring along my iPod (for the plane and visits to the hotel gym), my cellphone (for brief, exorbitantly expensive calls home), and my laptop (allegedly for writing, mainly for checking e-mail and retrieving contact information). This time I’m bringing only the new gadget, having loaded it up with my address book from Abramovich to Zalewski, itineraries for the Munich Opera Festival, MP3s of works by Unsuk Chin and Wolfgang Rihm, favorite Dylan and Radiohead playlists, Furtwängler’s Tristan und Isolde, two episodes of the show Friday Night Lights, and, yes, Chinatown.

Oh, so that’s why people are buying them.

Have we reached the point where references to the Newton as a personal digital assistant start to work? No, it doesn’t try to “assist” as the Newton did (write “Bill Clinton lunch Tuesday” in the Assist slip and watch it create a calendar even for noon on the next Tuesday with the appropriate contact information for your guests), but it does quite a bit that the Newton was never intended to do. And with OS X-enabled iPhones due by Christmas, who knows what’s next?

Lead and Anti-social behavior orders (ASBO)

In Freakonomics, the authors made the argument that a drop in the crime rate was due to the legalization of abortion in 1973. The argument was the children most likely to grow up to be criminals were those from households where they, to put it simply, were unwanted or were unlikely to receive the guidance they needed.

But could there be a medical reason for it?

ScienceDaily: Lead In The Environment Causes Violent Crime, Reports University Of Pittsburgh Researcher:

Exposure to lead may be one of the most significant causes of violent crime in young people, according to one of the nation’s leading researchers on the subject.

“When environmental lead finds its way into the developing brain, it disturbs neural mechanisms responsible for regulation of impulse. That can lead to antisocial and criminal behavior,” reported Herbert L. Needleman, M.D.

Impulsiveness is a big part of criminal behavior, after all. Rational behavior is not part of the criminal mindset.

Lead in automotive fuel is still in use in England (perhaps elsewhere in Europe) where the ASBO originates, though it has been banned since the 1970s in the US.

Check out the Sample Prohibitions from ASBOs, things that restricted individual are banned from doing:

ASBOs can prohibit an individual from specific behaviour and from entering a particular area. The following sets of prohibitions are all taken from actual ASBOs granted by the courts and are examples of the type of behaviour that can be prohibited by an ASBO. Prohibitions contained within an ASBO must be necessary to protect people not in the same household as the offender from further acts of anti-social behaviour. The prohibitions will vary according to the details of each case.

Continue reading “Lead and Anti-social behavior orders (ASBO)”

Schneier on Security: Correspondent Inference Theory

Schneier on Security: Correspondent Inference Theory:

Defeating terrorism means increasing security.

Increasing security can also mean that you are allowing the terrorist to control your behavior (witness the ban on lotions of mass destruction at airport checkins). Does evaluating their stated goals and, where possible without capitulating or abandoning one’s own principles, addressing them enter into this?

from the original post @ Scheier’s, 6 of bin Laden’s policy goals :

1. End U.S. support of Israel
2. Force American troops out of the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia
3. End the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and (subsequently) Iraq
4. End U.S. support of other countries’ anti-Muslim policies
5. End U.S. pressure on Arab oil companies to keep prices low
6. End U.S. support for “illegitimate” (i.e. moderate) Arab governments, like Pakistan

Other than 1, few of these are in America’s interest anyway. While we would prefer lower oil prices and moderate governments, are they worth losing the WTC and the subsequent waste of blood and treasure in Mesopotamia?

Does the US need troops in Saudi Arabia? How is our support of an undemocratic kingdom that treats women as it does reflect on our own ideals? Does the US need to appear to control puppet governments in central Asia? I think we know how well the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq are going.

I don’t support Osama bin Forgotten but opposing him just because he attacked or refusing to examine why he and his minions were provoked enough to conceive and execute the 9/11 plot is a recipe for more of the same.

an accurate self-identification

Operation Yellow Jackass: June 2007:

This blog is the answer a [sic] extreme left-wing anti-American, anti-war group. Young Republicans and College Republicans have been harassed by these idiot[sic] since the beginning of the Iraq War. Yet, they refuse to tell you the truth about themselves. The truth is simple: they hate America, and they themselves have never served in the military. Talk about hypocrisy.

The author of this ungrammatical rant:

  • makes no mention of his/her own military service
  • accepts no comments (one was left, since deleted)
  • offers no background on who they are
  • and is foolish enough to accept the “yellow” label, extending it with jackass.

The authors at OYE are outside recruiting age and have health issues that preclude their service, even as reservists, from what I have read over there.

OYA will go away just as quietly as the Victory Caucus, so any visits from here will likely represent a spike for them.

victory from the jaws of defeat, or TiVo annoyances overcome by iTunes

I instructed my TiVo to record the All-Star game the other night. Judge of my annoyance when I found out it recorded nothing, nada, not a second.

Turns out if the antenna (we don’t have cable) is disconnected and reconnected, the TiVo loses its mind and can’t find any channels anymore. Rather than explain that somehow, either in its conversations with the Mothership or as a console message, it blithely accepts new instructions and just drops them on the floor.

Excellent.

But as it turns out, the game was available from iTunes for $1.99, commercial-free. So I was able to redeem myself in the eyes of my young baseball fan.

Anyone else have this problem?

At some point I have to figure out how to integrate TiVo and the iTunes media: I think a network card for the TiVo is all the stands in my way.

health care rationing

Anyone who thinks we don’t ration access to healthcare in this country hasn’t visited their doctor lately:

Altogether, it was a wholly unremarkable visit to the doctor, but for the fact that I’d seen SiCKO a week before. I find now that I have become utterly intolerant of health care inconvenience, especially anything associated with my insurance. Sure, I might have had to wait as long in Canada or France (although the prescription would probably cost less), but that’s rather the problem; if you’re going to sell the US system based on convenience and short wait times, then it should be convenient with short wait times. It shouldn’t have taken me two months to get my prescription refilled, when both myself and my doctor knew that there was no other plausible outcome. By the end of the hour long wait, I was seething and ready to walk out, a state I doubt I’d have been in were it not for the Moore film. If you haven’t seen the film, it’s almost certainly his best, but be prepared to become more irritable on a regular basis.

I have taken to calling before I go to see if the Doc is ontime: mine never is, as he likes to chat and get a sense of how patients are doing beyond the symptoms that brought them in. I have waited as long as two hours.

do the math

Time for Presidents Roosevelt and Truman to put an end to the Japanese threat? 1361 days.

Days since 9/11/2001? 2128

echo “2128 – 1361” | bc -l
767

767 days. 2 years, 37 days. 109 weeks and 4 days.

A child born on 9/11/2001 would be entering school this fall. A college freshman from that September would have graduated and completed more than a year at their first job.

And all the Worst President Ever has to show for that time is 3,500 American dead, 15,000 wounded and disabled, and a re-constituted threat from the same enemy.

Can Jan 20, 2009, come soon enough?

October 27, 1947–The Real Day of Infamy?:

Imagine it is October 27, 1947. Why October 27, 1947? Because that date is 2128 days from December 7, 1941 and the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. So what? Today, 12 July 2007, marks 2128 days since Al Qaeda attacked us on 11 September 2001.
Can we envision President Harry Truman holding a press conference to discuss trumpet the progress in the war against Japan while the leaders of Japan remained untouched?
[…]
Al Qaeda does not have . . . .
an armada of battleships and aircraft carriers. Al Qaeda does not have an air force of crack fighters. And Al Qaeda has not killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.

The truth is we conflate Al Qaeda with Islamic extremists in general. We talk about Al Qaeda as if it is a hierarchical international corporation, with groups regularly signing up as “new” members. We act as if they issue identity cards to their members. Sort of like AARP or the Sierra Club, only lethal.

Just read the whole thing.