It's at moments like these, when I've just found a program that solves my problem and I'm downloading it, but before I've found out it will take three days to install and won't quite do what I need, that I most love Free Software. -me

Wherein the Author Vents his Spleen, Disgorges the contents of his Gallbladder, and Dispenses freely from various other Organs within the Abdominal Cavity. Dedicated to everyone who read the China journal and mistook my constant complaints as an expression of unhappiness; you see, that's Just the Way I Am.

Viewed from the perspective of a passholder, people seem strange. They seem strange from any perspective, of course. But as a passholder, you get to see a steady stream of people having the same experience for the first time. "Is this the ticket line?" "What are you in line for?" "What's going on?" "What movie are you seeing?" "Is this the ticket line?"

And you get to see the same annoying promotional clip before each showing - fifteen times and counting, and its small quotient of humor leaked out by the second viewing. But the audience still chuckles, a little bit, every time.

Being in crowds brings out my (never deeply buried) misanthropy. Large crowds of people, healthy young people, walking up stairs at the pace of the elderly. And on the way out the ballot box is always a surprise, always a choke point.

At the afternoon screening, someone in the aisle front of me chose a seat at the end of the row. When you choose a seat at the end of the row, and you start your careful nesting of belongings, taking off the sweater to lay underneath the seat where you can get to it later, turning around three times to discover your purse on your hip where you left it, digging in pockets - you're blocking the whole row, and this is what the woman in front of me chose to do. So I went past her, down two more aisles, strode in three empty seats, and bounded up over the seats two rows, heading for the sweet spot that is my due as a passholder, as a faithful queuer, as someone who follows the rules. There were two empty seats in the right zone, bounded by a fat woman and a skinny woman. You would have done the same. My bag was already in the empty chair next to the skinny woman and I was turning back for the fresher air of the lobby when the skinny woman, who had been watching me approach, announced that the seat was taken.

"Thank you for indicating that," I snarled, snatched my bag up, tossed it into the next seat, and bounded away. I guess she's never been to a movie before; where I come from, we put a garment or a folded newspaper over the claimed seat, or when we see someone charging towards a seat we want we drape an arm over it. All I'm saying is that humans are naturally territorial and for her to fail to mark the seat appropriately was not merely an omission but in fact must have been a deliberate, conscious supression of instinct in order to annoy and bother. (And the seat was not retroactively claimed in response to the anticipated foulness of the author's company, as you less generous readers may assert - there really was a second party, he really did sit in that seat, and he really did talk and grunt and snort throughout the movie. And there was a distinct smell, probably a body odor, like sour oranges, but both he and the fat woman on the other side left at the same time so I was unable to assign responsibility.)

And speaking of grunting. At the evening showing, a Bukowski documentary, I sat in nearly the same location and this time the grunter was a woman on my left. She seemed nice enough before the film, chatting with her male friend on the other side, thanking him for the tickets. She did squirm convulsively, but I failed to heed the warning sign and in any event the movie was very sold out and changing seats (as I did several days ago at a Hungarian movie, when a young man sat down next to me, argued with his girlfriend, took off his boots, and turned to me to say something - I nodded, not hearing him, got up, and moved to a different row) would have been impractical. But what the hell is wrong with those people who vocalize throughout a movie? I'm not talking about talking, whispered comments with piercing sibilants or even low-toned conversation; I'm talking about the subconscious grunts of the weak-minded, who must vocalize every moment of revelation, every surprise; must second every strong statement with a sound. The grunting is distinct from the gasping; most grunters also gasp but plenty of gaspers do not grunt. The gasping attends moments of shocking revelation: she was just 12 years old! (gasp) He was killed in the chemical attack! (gasp) And then I found out I was pregnant! (gasp) Whereas the grunting accompanies quiet understated revelation; "And that was why I told her to leave, and after that day I never saw her again." (huhn.) "I spent ten years doing that." (huh.) And sometimes the grunting is almost a sigh, when something sad is revealed. "And this is the bathroom where he beat me." (ahh.) "Most of them have HIV." (ohhh.) Death to the grunters and gaspers, people unable to absorb information without forcing their emotional response on everybody around them.

In other news, Pacific Place burned another print. I used to go to a weekly screening Sunday mornings at Pacific Place; while there was post-film discussion and the films were usually pre-release, the big plus for me was that we never knew what we were going to see, and often I was completely surprised. They would have flyers on the table and some of us (not me - I was behind the curve, but grateful) complained and so they put the flyers face-down so as to preserve the mystery another ten minutes. During that series of perhaps a dozen films one Spring, I think they burned two and broke a third. But hey, small price to pay for breaking the projectionists' union, right? Anyway, Pac Place's pimpled popcorn pubescents struck again, cooking Spring Subway right good. Next showing of that print should be a good minute shorter. Broadway Performance Hall has done a bunch of video projection, and that's gone as well as can be expected given that they don't appear to actually test the equipment before using it; a short film this afternoon went several minutes without volume (and with the dull glare of the promotional slide projector bisecting the screen); once volume was fixed, it apparently didn't occur to the projectionist (or was beyond her capabilities) to restart the short from the beginning. Fortunately the rest of the short wasn't very good so probably nothing was missed. (It was Walls, for those keeping score at home.)

On the bright side, SIFF is showing surprise short films before many movies this year. The short film definitely needs more exposure and more distribution outlets - I wish that mainstream movie theaters would show shorts packages. If the multiplex has sixteen screens, why not use one to show a 90-minute collection of short films? Charge for it like a movie; plenty of shorts producers must be so desperate for any money at all that they would happily collaborate with one another for the packaging and distribution. And while many of the shorts at SIFF are flawed, they're short, so you can enjoy the good parts and ignore the bad parts, which is much harder to do for a two-hour meditation on loss and longing shot in the desert without budget for a steadicam.

I did a triple-header at Pacific Place - that't the multiplex. It's nice because you don't have to wait in line on the sidewalk, which gets old. I made the discovery that with a sufficiently large number of Matrix Reloaded screenings, all with staggered start times, you essentially have a fast-forward control for the silver screen. So I left my bag in a good seat and went and caught part of the Oracle's scene, and much of the freeway scene, and Agent Smith's multi-sneer when Neo flew away. Then I went back and they had started the movie on time, so I scrambled for a seat by the front near the aisle, unwilling to squeeze past everybody to my primo bag-reserved seat. And well that I did, because when the movie was over and I was looking for my bag, a guy came over and asked, "Are you looking for your bag?"

"Yes, I am. A black bicycle bag with hooks."

"Yeah, well, it was unattended so I gave it to the lady at the door. It was making me uncomfortable." He was apologetic, but still an idiot. What, does he think that there's a bomb in my bag? That an Turkish nationalist is bombing the screening of an Iranian Kurd movie set in Iraq? People leave bags in seats before the screening of films. This is not an abnormal occurance. The bag is not unattended; it in fact is attended to reserving a seat. What the hell is wrong with you people?

So overall, I'd say the festival is going quite well; I haven't seen any four-star movies yet, but about half of the films I've seen have been excellent documentaries (with of course that one hideous exception, which seemed to have been made by and for the righteously indignant gaspers and grunters.) and I'm back in the subtitle-reading groove, to the point that occasionally I forget I'm reading subtitles and then am surprised to notice the people on screen are speaking French. (That only happens with languages I can follow a bit, though; no such effect pertained to the Kurdish and Polish films.)

Assorted notes that don't add up to whole movie reviews:

The Seattle International Film Festival started last Thursday. As I write this, Monday night, I've seen ten films or packages. I'm a light-weight, it turns out; counting weeks of press screenings, some passholders are already over thirty or fifty movies.

I skipped the Opening Night movie: $40 to see something mediocre in a concert hall (an acoustically live space, meaning an echo, is very good for most music and very very bad for movies with dialog) and then endure a huge crowd of strangers in a confined space as we wait in line for drinks. Instead, I volunteered to help set up the party and then I "bar-backed." I spent three hours running between two bars and the kitchen, keeping four bartenders stocked with ice, full juice containers, limes, soda, etc. It was a blast; I'll happily do it again - in a year. My ability to handle tasks like "find the ice carts and get them to the bars" and "figure out the condiments," and to tell the Sheraton event manager things like "Bar 1 will run out of ice in 20 minutes" seemed to make people happy. See, I am a people person, just in an abstract, impersonal way. Anyway, I had far more fun than I would have as an attendee and I saved $40.

I walked out of my first movie of the festival Saturday, Nudity Required.

The first shorts package was a bit disappointing. Animated shorts. I like Wallace and Grommit, sure, but ten in a row was a bit much, especially when they left the annoying musical logo scene before each one, so we saw it ten times. So most of the shorts were heartfelt, too-cute, edgy, and trite all at once. The best featured two upholstered armchairs having freaky sex in many positions on a rooftop.

I liked the first Secret Movie a lot.

These are the lead paragraphs for two of BEA's products. Can you tell which one is a java application server and which one is middleware for mainframe transaction-processing? (A java application server is a program you run on a big computer so it can run lots of smaller java programs that do things like tell you that FedEx just shipped your package to the wrong address. Middleware for mainframe transaction processing means a program that runs on a big water-cooled mainframe computer that hasn't been turned off since before most current CS graduates were born, and allows the mainframe computer to understand what the whippersnappers' web site programs are doing, so that when you try to buy an airplane ticket it can tell you that no aisle or window seats are left, and that by the time you've decided that you don't mind a middle seat for your twelve-hour flight out of Singapore, even those are sold out, and you're too late to escape the SARS.)

"The BEA XXXXX™ is a proven, extremely reliable, and super scalable multi-language enterprise platform-one that can connect and empower users, while integrating corporate applications and legacy data stores into powerful, flexible, end-to-end enterprise software solutions."

"BEA YYYYY™ increases productivity and lowers the cost structure for enterprise IT organizations by providing a unified, simplified, and extensible architecture. BEA YYYYYY™ includes application infrastructure technology from proven BEA products that are used by thousands of customers worldwide, including BEA ZZZZZZ™, BEA WWWWWWWWW™, and BEA VVVVVVV™. These technologies are combined with BEA UUUUUUUU™ to offer a single, unified, easy-to-use infrastructure platform for application development, deployment, and management."

I think this picture is brilliant.

This, this, this, this, this, and this are also especially good.

... in the last three days the Central Committee in Beijing had been using a new secret code ... I was very nervous because the Air Force cable communications monitoring station had reported the same code phenomenon ... Now I was beginning to feel there was a real possibility that Mao had been making secret contact with Beijing while he was away.

This kind of situation was quite unusual. Mao was possibly plotting against some people in his own ruling circle. That "somebody" might well be us.

... Lin Biao interrupted Huang Yongsheng and asked, "If I wanted to attack the Soviet Union now, could I? If the order were given now, how many minutes would be required for my order to be carried out?"

Huang Yongsheng didn't know how to answer. He looked at me. I was also unprepared. He looked at Li Zuopeng. Li Zuopeng said: "Intelligence Report #1577 [a falsified report] declares that the Soviet Union is posing serious threats to China's defense. We telephone you [Huang]. You recommend fighting, the conversation is recorded and your name is signed by proxy. Within twenty or thirty minutes, or even less, we will be able to submit the signed document to the Chief."

Wu Faxian was the Air Force Commander in Chief for Marshall Lin Biao at the time of Lin Biao's attempted coup in 1971.

True, there is something chilling about the way she rips the gills out of softshell crabs while they're still alive, as she did on a recent show, murmuring instructions in that calm, deep voice of hers. "Take a pair of kitchen shears like this, and first thing you do is cut off this part of the crab." Um, you mean its face, Martha?

William Harley created the thumping staccato in 1907 when he opted to graft a second cylinder onto his one-cylinder engine design rather than whip up a true two-cylinder engine. Harley used a connecting rod to join two pistons to a single crankshaft. This, combined with Harley's V-shaped engine design, resulted in a rough rumble caused by pistons that don't fire at even intervals. And so the sound was born.

Spine-rattling vibrations that stress the bike's structure and components were a byproduct of that design choice. Due to all that shaking, rattling and rolling, classic Harleys tend to age rapidly ...

I need some translation help. I want to make a t-shirt for my upcoming travel to Europe, and I need translations for the five other official languages of the United Nations, Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish. If you can, please email me a translation in any of these languages. Thanks.

The text consists of two lines. The first is, "American Traveler International Apology Shirt." The second is, "I'm sorry my president's an asshole. I didn't vote for him."

I recruited the first group we took to Ghana the way I would have recruited geeks for Tripod. I looked for type-A workaholic supergeeks, and I discovered that type-A workaholic supergeeks have a really hard time with the developing world. After figuring this out, we started recruiting for flexibility and a sense of humor. We looked for people who we felt were a lot more likely to roll with the punches and were less gung-ho but more flexible ...

"Many of you already know that BEA has a long-standing relationship with Accenture. Together, we have helped some of the world's most trusted companies solve their business problems including, BellSouth, Chase, DuPont, British Telecom, Singapore Airlines and Verizon." -- Alfred Chuang, CEO of BEA Systems, internal email

... the Bush administration, [Wolfowitz] said, was disappointed that the Turkish military “did not play the strong leadership role on that issue [i.e., the Iraq debate] that we would have expected.”

Outside the context of Turkish politics, that statement might seem obscure or insignificant. But in Turkey the meaning seemed painfully clear: The United States wished the Turkish military had either overruled the elected government or perhaps even pushed it aside in favor of one more subservient to U.S. demands.

But doing a second redistricting for partisan reasons during one census cycle hasn't been the norm since the 19th century. The last instance of it, according to a redistricting expert I spoke to today, was in Washington state in the 1950s -- and the tactic was unheard of even then.

"When you're dealing with computer scientists, they deal in a world of theoretics, and under that scenario anything is possible," Ms. Bonsall [director of the Federal Election Commission's Office of Election Administration] said. "If you probe a little further, the chance of these failures, the risk of that happening wide-scale in a national election is almost nil."

... Paul Terwilliger, director of product development at Sequoia Voting Systems, ... "I think the concerns being raised are 100 percent valid," Mr. Terwilliger said. "However, they're being raised by people who have little idea about what actually goes on."

Here's a bit about what actually went on in 2002:

Florida voters, including Gubernatorial candidate Janet Reno, experienced delays (ranging from minutes to hours) due to touchscreen machines not working properly or at all. Reno, and others (including Duval County officials) reportedly sought court orders requesting additional time for the day's voting session. Governor Jeb Bush granted a two hour extension, but some of the polling places did not receive notice and shut down their machines at 7PM, only to discover that restart was impossible because of the way the machines had been designed.

In addition to polls and machines that opened late, many precincts reported problems with some electronic cards voters used to activate their ballots. A few machines in Miami-Dade County reset themselves while voters were trying to vote. Even the mark-sense ballots proved troublesome -- in Orange County many votes will have to be hand-counted because defects made them unreadable by the optical scanners. (Mercuri, Rebecca. Florida Primary 2002: Back to the Future)

A computer glitch in South Florida's Broward County caused 103,222 ballots not to be counted on election night, but the missing votes did not affect the outcome of any races, county officials said Thursday. (CNN. Election glitch missed 103,000 votes in Florida county)

Alabama had a contested 2002 Governor's election for about two weeks, with the encumbent governor and all counties calling for a recount of the 3,000 margin vote. There were accusations of election fraud which were never withdrawn or, I think, adequately pursued by the press.

This is a brief & very incomplete synopsis of what happened after the Alabama Governor's election.. ... (Voting machine glitch not pursued by press)

Some touch-screen machines in Florida and Georgia were misprogrammed or not accurately calibrated. Others froze and had to be rebooted, and cards voters need to access machines malfunctioned. Problems were quickly corrected and, at worst, only lengthened lines. (Associated Press)

Two things make me throw up my hands in disgust. First, the optimal solution is obvious and proven but ignored by snake-oil voting machine vendors. The optimal solution is standardized paper ballots marked with pens and counted by machines. The error rate is extremely low; counting and recounting are fast; the forensic trail is very easy to follow; the poll-worker training is minimal; the technology is proven and cheap. I would change only one things from the machines used in my (urban, white, middle-class) precint: after I put my ballot into the machine, I would like to see a screen appear showing all of my votes. Then I would hit a cancel or an approve button. If I cancelled, the paper would be voided and I would start over.

The second thing is that we still use winner-takes-all voting for most elections in this country even though it's long been mathematically proven to be one of the worst ways to capture the democratic wishes of a population. Why isn't there more noise for voting reform? Even if we don't want to go parliamentary, just changing from winner-takes-all to instant runoff would be a simple but dramatic improvement.

How come the sleazy vendors never use connections and back-room dealing to get out the good solution? I understand how power companies want to evade pollution controls forever, because they can make a few extra pennies per share and the tens and thousands of premature deaths don't really affect the executives much, and of course the car manufacturers resist every safety improvement and fuel efficiency standard because they would potentially lose a bit of money for a year or two - these systemic failures are easily derived from the Tragedy of the Commons. But why don't the paper ballot counting machine vendors fight the paperless jerks? Why can't we harness their greed for the greater good (which is really the best systemic solution we have for most social problems)?

Hey, maybe Rush Limbaugh will pick this up and spread the news:

The General Accounting Office found that three-fourths of the 762 Forest Service projects to cut wildfire risk in the past two years went ahead without any challenge. That allowed treatment such as logging or controlled burning on 3.8 million acres of national forests.

Projects that were challenged by environmental groups or other parties generally move ahead within 90 days, according to the report by the investigative arm of Congress.

From the Konqueror (Linux/KDE web browser) bug system:

In Country select, there is an option named "Tibet". That hurts we Chinese very much.

As all we know, Tibet is a province of China. It CANNOT be singled out as an individual COUNTRY.

The situation is not the same as Taiwan.

Tibet must be removed from the list.

Personally, I'd be very happy if Texas was singled out as an individual country.

I suppose this constitutes the first entry in my new travel journal. I'm still in Seattle, but I'm trying to leave. I've got a month-long trial contract in Copenhagen to do some open-source web development work, and I'm pretty excited. I've got a few blank pages left in my passport, a used laptop on order from ebay, and a lack of interest in staying in Seattle. What I do not have is an airplane ticket, and that is the topic of this entry.

I ordered a ticket from Travelocity. I refused to use Expedia when they were part of Microsoft, and now they're not Microsoft but they still have the Microsoft Attitude; Orbitz uses pop-up ads and doesn't book international flights. Travelocity has finally (years after the Internet and decades after it became technically possible) added a feature where you can see all (or rather, some) of the relevant fares; you then pick a fare and it shows you a calendar covering a few months, indicating the days for which that fare is available. It still has some glitches - picking a starting day usually causes most of the available return days to disappear - but those are glitches of the underlying system, not the web site. This system gives more visibility to the buyer, and while it still has a long way to go at least it's progress.

Speaking of progress. Or not. Travelocity wouldn't issue an e-ticket; they insisted on paper delivery. Which is fine, but they charged me 25 bucks for FedEx 2nd day. Package delivery gives me the heebie-jeebies, because I've had three or four consecutive UPS nightmares. They have several delivery options - they can leave stuff, they can let somebody else sign for it, they can let you let somebody else sign for it, they can let you sign to let them leave stuff, or they can insist that you sign in person. They refuse to specify even to the nearest day when they plan to deliver a package, so the sign-in-person option is pretty early-20th-century. The option that says you have to sign for it is worded similarly to the option that says you can sign the notice and have them leave it next time, so when I tried that once I got a second notice with a vigorous underlining of the relevant word or two differentiating the options. Since then, I've been careful to tell vendors to tell UPS to let me sign to have them leave it. This request has been ignored every time by UPS. UPS can rot in hell as far as I'm concerned.

Expecting more of the same, I put in my current workplace as the delivery destination for FedEx.

Two weeks later, on May 14th 2003 if you want to be exact, and I do because this time I've caught on early to the fact that I'm in the middle of a developing not-my-responsibility clusterfuck where the best possible outcome is merely losing a bit of money and wasting a few hours on the phone, and the worst possible outcome a $800 loss and serious jeopardy to my travel plans (having read the airline deregulation book, I'm now aware that airlines can basically take your money at will, and delivering a service such as the safe translocation of your corporeal form is done at their discretion if at all), I went to Travelocity to find out where my ticket was. I found the FedEx tracking number, and looked it up, only to find it had been delivered to an address in Bellevue (a suburb of Seattle) and signed for by a P. Curtis. Further detective work on Travelocity's site revealed that they had my ticket delivery address as the apartment complex where I used to live. A place where the office cheerfully signs for residents' packages. And perhaps, former residents?

I called them and left a message; they left a message in return saying that they had indeed signed for it, and then delivered it to the current resident of my old apartment, who eventually returned it to the complex office, where they returned it to FedEx. Nobody in the sequence apparently thought to try and contact me. (Salt in the wound: I visited friends at the same complex right in the middle of this sequence of events. I remember walking down the railroad tracks and realizing I hadn't even looked towards my old apartment.)

So I called FedEx and got a computer system that was very eager to interpret voice commands. I use hands-free headset when I know I'm going to be waiting a long time and thus need not one but both hands free for, for example, plotting the demise of my enemies, such as the inventor of voice mail. The combination of a sensitive microphone and a computer system as inventive as the Door in the Heart of Gold - well, it's a bad combination. When I reached the inevitable point of saying, "fuck you," it said, "I think what you said is, 'I want to enter another package number.'" Ultimately it hung up on me when I sighed loudly.

I called back and held my breath until I was transferred to a Mister Joey Iacovelli, who was able to give me a new fact not present on the web site: the package was in Issaquah, due to be returned to sender as of May 14 (today, for those keeping score at home). Nothing, he said, could be done.

I then called Travelocity (888-709-5983). Their voicemail was more polite and slightly more helpful, and when I said "help" it said, "I think what you said is 'help'." I was able to identify some of the Muzak, including Groovy Kind of Love, and Marvin Gaye's classic Piece of Clay. Not that the Muzak version was very classic, or classy, so I pulled up the real thing to listen to while I waited. And waited. And waited. They were experiencing unusual call volume, you see.

Eventually, Ronnie, Agent Sign ARW, came on the line. He insisted that I had typed the three-year-old address into the web site when I ordered the ticket and was not willing to entertain the notion that their web site might theoretically be at fault. When he made it clear that I would be paying the $19.95 charge to have the ticket sent a second time, I made it clear that I would try much harder to find palatable alternative vendors for future travel purchases. Ronnie asked if there was anything else he could help me with. I thanked him for his attentive service and twenty-three minute hold time. He apologized for the hold time. I then asked if they anticipated going out of business in the next six months or if they thought SABRE would kick in more money. Ronnie said that he wasn't a fortune teller. It's possible that may have been a sore spot for him.

So it looks like Travelocity's website bug (okay, to be fair it's only about 80 percent likely that it's their bug. It's possible that I only intended to have the ticket delivered to my current workplace, though that wouldn't explain my memory of digging online for the zip code. It's also possible that they just used the old address on file and never showed it to me, though I would consider that a bug as well. From Steve and Jessie's horror stories about the internal workings of Expedia, an outright bug where an address is gathered and then discarded would be unexceptional for the industry.) will end up costing me an extra $20 and an hour of hypertension. Why is designing a working computer so damned difficult? Clearly this species has access to technology that it's not yet mature enough to use. Anyway, now I can start worrying about visas and work permits. And how much fatter I'll get with steady access to Danishes. But they don't call them Danishes there, says Lonely Planet. Come to think of it, I'll bet they don't call hot dogs Hebrew Nationals in Israel. And never mind British-owned French's Mustard, made in the USA. But the USPS, bless their testicle-cancer-survivor-sponsoring souls, left my grandmother's latest package of chocolate on the doorstep, so if you'll excuse me, it's time for some food therapy. Next week we'll nationalize the airlines - I bet Halliburton wouldn't mind the work.

Lord Renton: My Lords, will the Minister explain how it is that an inedible tinned food that lasted for ever and was supplied to those on active service can become an unsolicited e-mail, bearing in mind that some of us wish to be protected from having an e-mail?

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, I am afraid that I have not been able to find out why the term "spam" is used, but that is the meaning it now has. It is a matter that should be taken very seriously because it not only clutters up computers but involves a great deal of very unpleasant advertising to do with easy credit, pornography and miracle diets. That is offensive to people, and we should try to reduce it.

Lord Faulkner of Worcester: My Lords, I can help the Minister with the origin of the word. It comes from aficionados of Monty Python, and the famous song, "Spam, spam, spam, spam". It has been picked up by the Internet community and is used as a description of rubbish on the Internet.

More seriously, is the Minister aware that up to 85,000 pieces of unsolicited e-mail are received by the Parliamentary Communications Directorate each month? Will he join me in congratulating the directorate on its valiant efforts to filter out that menace, given that a high proportion of it is rubbish advertising from the United States and that some of it consists of profane material? The directorate is battling against a rising tide; the Government's assistance is needed in combating it.

...

Lady Saltoun of Abernethy: My Lords, do the Government have any plans to restrict unsolicited faxes? My fax paper is always being wasted by people who send me faxes I do not want. I do not know whether they could be called "corned beef" or something, but I have had enough of them.

If this is true and the Iraqis had some success with airplanes in 1991, why didn't they use any in 2003? My assumption would be that they had been unable to maintain the airplanes or keep the pilots in training.

Did you know that a MiG-25PD recorded the only Iraqi air-to-air kill of the Gulf War? It dropped an F-18C on the first night of the war--then went on to fire another missile at an A-6 and buzz an A-7, all while avoiding escorting F-14s and F-15s.

An isolated incident? How about the single Iraqi Foxbat-E that eluded eight sweeping F-15s then tangled with two EF-111As, firing three missiles at the Ravens and chasing them off station. Unfortunately, the Ravens were supporting an F-15E strike, and the EF-111's retreat led to the loss of one of the Strike Eagles to a SAM. Oh BTW, the Foxbat easily avoided interception and returned safely to base.

There's more. When F-15 pilots were fighting for the chance to fly sweeps east of Baghdad late in the war, itching for a chance to get a shot at an Iraqi running for Iran, they weren't expecting the fight that a pair of Foxbats put up. Two Foxbats approached a pair of F-15s, fired missiles before the Eagles could get off shots (the missiles were evaded by the Eagles), then outran those two Eagles, four Sparrows and two Sidewinders fired back at them. Two more Eagles maneuvered to cut the Foxbat's off from their base (four more Eagles tried, but were unable to effect an intercept), and four more Sparrows were expended in vain trying to drop the Foxbats.

The Iraqis had a total of twelve MiG-25PDs at the beginning of the war, of which maybe half were operational at any given time. Imagine what trouble they would have caused if there had been more. The Foxbats, when well flown, proved capable of engaging allied fighters and avoiding them at will. Only the limitations of their weapons proved a problem.

So they made 47 Blackbirds, including variations and trainers and such. Twenty were lost, thusly: Flew into clouds, ran out of gas, controls wired wrong, unknown, landing accident, caught fire, controls locked up, hit a drone, tires blew up while testing anti-skid, disintegrated, mysterious explosion, tires blew up, lost control, lights went out, stalled, flew into clouds, hit a fuel tanker, engine blew up, wheels failed, landed too fast w/o parachute. Highlights:

A-12 (60-6939 / 133) ... lost on approach to Groom Lake on 9 July 1964 following a Mach 3 check flight. ... Lockheed test pilot Bill Park was forced to eject at an altitude of 200 feet in a 45 degree bank angle! ...

M-21 (60-6941 / 135) ... Both made safe ejections, but Ray Torick opened his helmet visor by mistake and his suit filled up with water which caused him to drown.

SR-71A (61-7950 / 2001) The prototype SR-71 was lost on 10 January 1967 at Edwards during an anti-skid braking system evaluation. The main undercarriage tires blew out and the resulting fire in the magnesium wheels spread to the rest of the aircraft as it ran off the end of the runway. Lockheed test pilot Art Peterson survived.

SR-71A (61-7954 / 2005) This aircraft crashed on 11 April 1969 under conditions similar to 61-7950. New aluminum wheels and stronger tires with a beefed up compound were retrofitted to all SR-71s because of the crash.

SR-71A (61-7969 / 2020) ... initiated a normal full power climb. Stretching before him was a solid bank of cloud containing heavy thunderstorm activity which reached above 45,000 feet. Heavy with fuel, the aircraft was unable to maintain a high rate of climb and as it entered turbulence both engines flamed out. The RPM dropped to a level too low for restarting the engines. Lawson and RSO, Maj. Gilbert Martinez ejected safely after the aircraft stalled.

SR-71A (61-7974 / 2025) ... This aircraft was lost on 21 April 1989 over the South China Sea and is the last loss of any Blackbird. Pilot Maj. Daniel E. House said the left engine blew up and shrapnel from it hit the right-side hydraulic lines, causing a loss of flight controls. House and RSO Capt. Blair L. Bozek ejected and came down safely in the ocean. They had been able to broadcast their position before abandoning the Blackbird, and rescue forces were immediately on the way. However, the crew was rescued by native fisherman.

SR-71A (61-7952 / 2003) This aircraft disintegrated on 25 January 1966 during a high-speed, high-altitude test flight ... Lockheed test pilot Bill Weaver survived although his ejection seat never left the plane! Reconnaissance System Officer (RSO) Jim Zwayer died in a high-G bailout.

The SR-71 flight manual is available online, mostly declassified. "[Maximum] liftoff speed corresponds to 234 knots groundspeed (rated tire speed minus 5 knots)." But normal takeoff speed is only 207 mph. Or rather, you start pulling up the nose at 207, and five seconds later you are airborne. By then, you're going 241 mph. For comparison, a 747-400 takes off at about 170 mph and a 737-300 at 190. (Aircraft Statistics, Air New Zealand) The SR-71 has about a 44% thrust to fully loaded weight ratio; a 747 29%, and an F-15 74%. The magic, apparently, is not in the raw power so much as in the not melting like butter when cruising at Mach 3.3.

And the tires really do explode:

SR-71A (61-7950 / 2001) The prototype SR-71 was lost on 10 January 1967 at Edwards during an anti-skid braking system evaluation. The main undercarriage tires blew out and the resulting fire in the magnesium wheels spread to the rest of the aircraft as it ran off the end of the runway. Lockheed test pilot Art Peterson survived.

SR-71A (61-7954 / 2005) This aircraft crashed on 11 April 1969 under conditions similar to 61-7950. New aluminum wheels and stronger tires with a beefed up compound were retrofitted to all SR-71s because of the crash. Lt. Col. William "Bill" Skliar and his RSO Maj. Noel Warner managed to escape uninjured.

State troopers and the elite Texas Rangers were ordered to track down and bring in 59 Democratic lawmakers who brought the Texas House to a standstill Monday by going into hiding. ... The Texas House cannot convene without at least 100 of the 150 members present ...

...measures on state government reorganization and school finances ... must pass out of the House and be sent to the Senate by Thursday or risk dying.

"New rumors that Saddam Hussein is planning to flee to a castle in Libya with 10 billion dollars. Now President Bush doesn't know whether to nuke him or give him a tax cut." — Craig Kilborn

"President Bush has said that he does not need approval from the UN to wage war, and I'm thinking, well, hell, he didn't need the approval of the American voters to become president, either." —David Letterman

Around every romantic target, envision a series of concentric security zones; the outermost area is for store clerks and bankers; inside that is the area for same-sex friends and fathers; and inside that, I postulate, is a narrow band of flirtatious airspace that, were it possible, would be guarded by infrared sensors and dobermans. If you can map and occupy that space you are well on your way toward signaling that you don't give a damn if you never went to Princeton, tonight's the night.

... You are now in the area of the tipping point. Stay there. She will probably be holding her ground heroically, wondering if you're serious, wondering how long it's going to last. Stay there just long enough so she knows you're serious. ...

You have to do something while you're in there that she will remember. Damn. I can't think of anything. Oh, quick, quick, quick, think of something. You've only got three seconds before she spots her girlfriend across the room and waves. Quick! Quick! Her buttons! Her shoes! What does her father do for a living? Does she have a leopard-skin purse? Are her eyes the color of a blueberry jellybean? Is her nose like a little button? Does she have a mane of hair you'd like to see on a palomino? Are horse references good or bad? Is her hair too close to her face to make a horse reference? Is making a horse reference confusing the issue of who will be the rider and who will be the horse?

Sorry. That was the buzzer. You're out of time. You're going to have to practice.

(From a Slashdot interview with Michael Robertson, founder of Lindows)

Not having viruses is one of the upsides of [linux]. Why do you sell a virus scanner for Linux?

Shouldn't you be presenting the lack of viruses as one of the reasons to switch?

Robertson

I shared your viewpoint initially, but then we heard from users and discovered something new. What people thought was most lacking from LindowsOS that prevented everyday use was “virus protection”. ... It turns out that they have been so traumatized by the virus problem on Microsoft Windows that it has shaped their view of the world. Many told us they would NEVER use a personal computer without virus protection because either they had been infected and publicly embarrassed or they knew someone close to them who had. ... Microsoft has cleverly positioned it as a solely external problem so they don't have to incur the cost to fix it. Bravo to Microsoft for good marketing which has saved them billions in support.

Priest, Dana. The Mission. 2003.

Fly-on-the-wall reporting on the US military, in three different areas. The regional Commanders in Chief: Anthony Zinni comes off very well and the rest of the brass are well-intentioned and narrow-minded. Special Operations: Based on the flawed assumption that training foreign soldiers will lead to their being less brutal; instead, they just become more effectively brutal. Peace-keeping: a mix of success, fiasco, and farce, but many nations share the blame. In general the US military comes off as professional and well-intentioned but, if I had $300 billion a year to spend on making the world safe for Americans, I wouldn't spend it on the instruments of war. Of course, the military is in large part of jobs program and a system for wealth transfer from taxpayers to military contractors, and on those terms it seems fairly successful.

(How would I spend $300 billion a year to make America safer? First, I would spend $70 billion a year to end most infectious diseases (WHO Fact Sheet N° 189, WHO press release, another WHO press release) - which would produce a 5x or greater improvement in productivity, providing many socioeconomic alternatives to America-hating for billions of people.

I don't have hard numbers for this one, but I imagine we could afford to simply pay all the evil dictators to retire to an island somewhere (especially if we stop making more, as we are currently doing in Uzbekistan, Pakistan, (all of the 'stans, really), Indonesia, Sudan, etc etc.). Then at least people would have a chance to hate us for who we are rather than what we've done to them by supporting totalitarian regimes because they are more convenient for our policy makers and our corporate interests. Oh, and as long as we're on the subject, and as long as we're still training terrorists at Fort Benning, Georgia, let's stop. That should save some pocket change.

A billion dollars a year would be enough to fund all of the domestic political races and eliminate lobbying, at which point we could have real debate leading to, for example, increasing CAFE fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks and eliminating our dependence on foreign oil, most of which exists underneath people who have come to mistrust us because we act like we only want their oil (and do things like let their cultural treasures and hospitals be looted because we didn't want to spend the money to have enough troops on hand to protect both those sites and the oil wells and buildings. (And, to be fair, most American troops were apparently busy protecting caches of weapons throughout Baghdad, weapons that were mostly sold to the Iraqi by the French and Russians, not Americans. Mostly.)) (Judah, Tim. The Fall of Baghdad. New York Review of Books. May 15, 2003.) Also on the subject of domestic politics, $600 million would let us buy optical scanners for every voting precinct in the US (not just the middle-class white ones). I'm not talking about the paperless, inherently flawed crap that Florida bought because they're stupid. Then we could have some fair elections (though not free, not until the police stop harassing black voters) and maybe elect a president who merely bores the rest of the world, or vomits on world leaders, rather than one who insults, provokes, and infuriates the other 5.8 billion people on the planet. I think at this point I would feel safer with Zombie Richard Nixon in the White House.

We could fund our fair share of the UN. That would only be a few billion dollars a year. We could fund more than our fair share, and then UN peacekeepers could provide integrated policing, judges, and legal system support, backed by neutral military units, that would provide a safe environment for the International Red Cross and other groups to come in and support recovery of failed states. Then we could take Western Sahara, Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea, East Timor, Cyprus, Georgia (the other one), Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, and Kosovo off the list of anti-American terrorist breeding grounds. (UN Peacekeeping Missions. Infoplease.com).

By now we're down to $200 billion. How else can we spend money to make America safer? There's always tax cuts for the rich, guaranteed to cure any ailment, but I somehow feel like that's a copout - surely there's one more thing we can waste money on?

Well, we could spend $5 billion to build a space elevator to cut the cost to orbit by a factor of a hundred and unleash a new wave of exploration for the human race. It might not make people stop hating us, but we could just leave. (A cheaper option: for $3 billion (300 million people times $10 per buzz), we can all get bad haircuts and then pretend we're Canadian.))

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Perez-Reverte, Arturo. The Club Dumas. 1993, 1997 for English translation.

The source material for the very good movie The Ninth Gate. Very readable but not great by any measure. An excellent example (in this sense up there with Blade Runner and its source, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by the incomparable Philip K. Dick) of making the right decisions creating a movie from written material.

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Sturken Peterson, Barbara , and Glab, James. Rapid Descent: Deregulation and the Shakeout in the Airlines. 1994.

Everybody who ever ran an airline was either a union-busting bastard, a fool, or just a plain nitwit. That's the main takeaway. We'll never know if deregulation works better than regulation because we can't do either well. More precisely, attempts both to regulate and to deregulate are routinely subverted by special interests, and neither system (based on my wholly inadequate research, driven primarily by the frequency at which books by veteran industry reporters about deregulation in the industries they cover appear in the $1 rack at Elliot Bay Book Company (see my other posts on regulation, specifically the FCC and digital television (fka high-definition television), the latter of which was based on a $1 read)) seems at all resistant to abuse.

(For more information the use and abuse of parantheses, see Lisp: Function calls, parentheses, and blanks)

Brinkley, Joel. Defining Vision: The Battle for the Future of Television

(I wrote this 17 Oct 2002).

This book is a political history of HDTV, from 1986 to 1994. The history of HDTV is best thought of as a children's story (though Brinkley doesn't put it quite that way), full of witches and villains and ... less obvious villains. I'm summarizing his book here for you, in part because of all the interesting names that will pop up. Let's begin:

The Short Form:

Broadcasters:  BAAAAAD!
Japanese manufacturers: GOOOOD!
Consumers: SCREWWWWWED!

A slightly longer form:

Have you ever wondered why you can't just plug your computer monitor into your vcr, or your computer into your tv? (shut up, Amiga users) If not, good, that's probably healthy. If you did wonder but then decided there was a good technical reason, well, did you wonder why the technical reason hadn't been solved? It's because TV broadcasters are big dicks. Manufacturers are dicks too, but because their greed is channeled into a legitimate market space with less bad regulation, it tends to work out in our favor. Sometimes.

The Long Form:

Back in 1986, Motorola and other manufacturers banded together as "Land Mobile" to lobby the FCC to give them a bunch of bandwidth, specifically all the unused VHF and UHF TV channels. The broadcasters freaked, because spectrum was theirs by birth. When pressed to come up with a more specific reason they should continue to control a public resource that they weren't using, John Abel at the National Association of Broadcasters (choose your slogan: "happily consolidating tomorrow's media - today," or "proud murderers of community low-power radio") had a brain flash. "We need those extra channels because, see, there's this thing called high-definition television, and, see, it takes -two- channels 'cause it's so good."

To bolster his case he arranged for NHK, Japan's answer to PBS and the BBC, to demonstrate its production-ready HDTV system, called Muse. They did, it looked good, and Washington's response was overwhelming:

"You mean the Japanese have us beat in television, too? Over mah dead body!"

So the FCC kicked off a special advisory committee, headed by Dick Wiley, to figure out how the US was going to reclaim the lead in HDTV. What they came up with was basically a race. Each entrant would pony up hundreds of thousands of dollars to participate in a competition to set the new HDTV standard. Modern televisions, you may recall, use something called NTSC, which specifies what TV signals should look like, electrically speaking. At least in this country. In much of the rest of the world they use PAL, which is basically the same but incompatible, and in France they use SECAM, which I assume sucks because, hey, it's French.

Competitors included: Zenith, the last remaining US TV manufacturer, already building sets in Mexico and losing money on a daily basis; Sarnoff Labs, the research team from RCA that had "\productized television and invented color TV; a professor from MIT; NHK, the Japanese govcorp whose product kicked off the competition, also joined in. And finally, a small company in San Diego, VideoCipher, a division of M/A-Com.

Now it gets complicated. Sarnoff Lab was originally a research arm of RCA. When GE bought RCA, it gave Sarnoff to a research consortium, and Sarnoff later partnered with Philips and Thomson. The MIT team had some connections to the Media Lab, newly formed by visionary Nicholas Negroponte, but when it became clear that they might actually do concrete, real-world work Negroponte made sure to dissociate the Media Lab, which after all is not in the reality business.

And the dark horse, VideoCipher. The consortium that extruded VideoCipher did so from parts of a company it had previously bought called Linkabit. Linkabit was a defense contractor which built satellite links, and regular Slashdot readers may recall someone recently touted as a "Father of the Internet" - sorry, I forgot his name because he seems to be the only person doing the touting - he was a Linkabit founder in the '60s. And VideoCipher, which was the top manufacturer of set-top cable boxes in the 1980s, you know, the kind that pirates sold hacked chips for, was sold in 1986 to General Instrument, which in 1990 acquired a new CEO: Donald Rumsfeld.

Let's talk tech. Sarnoff was pushing ACTV, which was a minor improvement over NTSC. NHK's Muse was pretty nice, over a thousand lines of resolution, but analog. Everybody was working on analog, except the ex-defense contractor in San Diego, where they didn't know that digital was impossible so they built digital. Then everybody had to build digital.

Meanwhile, the NAB had figured out that going to high-definition TV meant every station had to spend a lot of money, and there was no obvious way to make more money out of HDTV than out of ordinary television. So the NAB, which had started the whole thing, started trash-talking HDTV. Then the FCC said, oh, well then you won't need those channels, will you? And the NAB said, wait, hang on, we'll get back to you. So the FCC, brilliant, hard-nosed negotiators that they are, said, "well, we'll lend you all extra channels for the transition. You can all have an extra channel so that you can do both old-style and HDTV at the same time, and then we'll phase out the old TVs over time and then you can give back the extra channels." (This exercise was not just overly generous but inconsistent with the claims that HDTV would itself take up more than one channel.)

Meanwhile, the HDTV competitors kept plugging away, finally bringing their systems in one at a time for independent testing. One team's excuse for a poor performance, "implementation error," became the running joke of the whole thing. NHK's entry, a dumbed down version ("Narrow Muse") of the analog Muse system they had spent $200 million to develop, sucked. Even in Japan, when the real thing (which looked great: 1125 lines) debuted in 1991, manufactures sold only a few thousand $30,000 sets in the first year. VCRs were available for only $115,000. (Yes that's dollars, not yen.) NHK dropped out, though eventually a few hundred thousand sets were sold in Japan.

With digital we get a new wrinkle. Instead of HDTV which takes up two channels, we can use digital TV to pack up to six conventional channels in the spectrum that one NTSC signal takes. Now the NAB party line was: "Yes, we need HDTV, so give us the extra channel, and then we'll just keep it and broadcast twelve low-def digital channels." Notice how they started talking about HDTV and ended talking about digital? Well, the FCC didn't. So the broadcasters are on track to get scads of extra bandwidth for free. (Though some broadcasters complain that they don't want any of this - they know how to make money with the status quo, so why rock the boat at all?)

Now the computer industry gets involved. Ditch interlaced scan, they said. It's just a clumsy hack that was needed for a few years in the fifties and as a result all TVs for fifty years have been crappy. We tried interlaced in the computer world and gave it up, and so should you. Well, it turns out that some people in the TV world still make money from interlacing patents (comb filters, maybe - who the hell knows) so they're not about to walk away from that. Long story short, if you still can't plug your computer into your TV in ten years, blame the TV people 'cause it's all their fault.

Finally, well into the 90s now, the surviving competitors for the HDTV, tired of the bullying of the Advisory Committee, band together to form a standard and split the profits (which is probably what the Advisory Committee wanted anyway). The Grand Alliance, the result of a competition intended to beat out the Japanese and give America an HDTV advantage, comprises Sarnoff (owned by Dutch Philips and French Thomson), GI (still American), an MIT prof, and Zenith. Zenith promptly sells out to Goldstar, a Korean company. Meanwhile, all the sets everybody's been using throughout testing are made by Sony. But we've got an American standard.

So. It's 1997 and we've finally agreed on a standard for HDTV. It's not quite a clean standard, though. Its size, a ratio of 16 units wide to 9 units high, is alleged to be "movie-standard." But movie-standard is "Academy Flat," or 1.85:1. 16:9 equals 1.78:1. Well, I guess things will just have to be "slightly" letterboxed. And don't even mention Cinemascope. It provides for an array of different screen sizes and frame rates, including frame rates of 24 (movies), 30, or 60 frames per second. But it also allows broadcasting at the old TV standard of 59.94 frames per second, or 1000/1001 (don't even ask why), so that should keep TV engineers happy. (That's sarcasm - nobody likes doing fractions.) So our new, international, world-wide standard to last us most of the way to 2100 now supports the "infamous Table 3", with about a billion different combinations of size (480, 720, or 1080 lines), aspect ration (4:3 or 16:9), frame rate (23.976, 24, 29.97, 30, 59.54, and 60 Hz), and scan format (progressive or interlaced). That's one hell of a standard, carefully preserving for future generations the compromises made three generations ago to allow black-and-white sets to receive the new color broadcasts. Just try not to think about it. (Oh, and the movie people are now working at 4000 lines, not 1080.)

So, who's broadcasting HDTV? Nobody. But why should they? A station has to pay millions of dollars for equipment (especially if they're an early adopter) and has barely any competitive advantage over other stations, particularly while nobody has an HDTV set. In economic theory, a few stations with little to lose might make the leap, and if they found some competitive advantage then all the other stations would have to jump to keep up. And the consumer would win. In practice, we have trade associations, whose purpose in life is to make sure that however their members are making money today, they can continue to make money forever without changing.

Okay, well the solution to a chicken-and-egg economics problem is government intervention, right? Bush's FCC guy was strongly pro-HDTV. Clinton's guy, Reed Hundt, seems to have been about half as smart as he thought he was, and just couldn't get a clue to save his life - or an industry. So he blathers on and on and gets excited about the information superhighway and how HDTV (or digital tv - he gets them confused too) will be the way to provide all this. Eventually Congress starts talking about mandating that all televisions built after a certain date have to be HDTV. Then, when the broadcasters switch (which they'll do because why? dunno), the government will subsidize the manufacture of set-top translator boxes so that people who didn't buy the new TVs can still watch the all-digital signals on their old TVs. Yes, that's right, our social contract includes not only elimination of (some) elderly poverty and health care for (some) veterans, but government-subsidized TV for all.

Meanwhile, in reality, the first time I ever watched anything like high-definition television in the privacy of my own home was when I watched a bootleg DVD of Hamlet (the Ethan Hawke one) on my 14" computer monitor in China. It was a little jerky, but the picture quality was fantastic. And that was only 720 lines, the DVD standard, not 1080, the HDTV one. So personally I think HDTV could be a non-trivial improvement that would be worth a few billion dollars (to the extent that anything TV-related could be said to be "worth" anything).

But wait, it gets more complicated. The FCC steps in to break the chicken-and-egg deadlock, and simply requires that all TVs sold in the US after, say, 2006, have to be high-def. This mandate is being driven, in proposed law and in committee tongue-lashings, by Billy Tauzin. Billy Tauzin is the chairman of the U.S. House Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Telecommunications, Trade and Consumer Protection. He's a Congressman from Louisiana. You know, Louisiana, a state noted for its involment with broadcast television. (Oh, and he gets a lot of campaign contributions from industry trade groups. But that only buys access, not votes.)

And let's throw in one last wrinkle. Digital Rights Management. All those new TVs are probably going to have legally required DRM programs that make it both illegal and a pain in the ass to exercise your rights according to the doctrines of First Purchase (i.e., this DVD is mine, I bought it, it's mine, and as long as I don't interfere with the publisher's selling more copies I can do what I damned well please with it) and Fair Use.

Remember, the broadcasters wanted High-Def as a pretense to hang on to extra channels, then came to embrace Digital as a multi-faceted money-making oportunity, and now are working with the content people (Hollywood) to wage war on their own customers by passing laws that dictate how and when people are to watch and listen to things they've paid for.

So now you will never again wonder why it's taken so long to get high-definition television.

References

I had some other sources, like Birkmaier, Craig. The Future of Digital Television. 1998-2000, but mostly if you want to learn more you should just Google on stuff like Tauzin and high-definition television and digital rights management and Fritz Hollings (D-Disney).