Bob Morris @ Dec 13th 2002 16:10 - Category: Unfiled ;
They wouldn’t let him bomb any peasant villages
Kissinger quits 9/11 inquiry role.
The former US secretary of state steps down after just 16 days as chairman of a commission looking into the 11 September attacks.
Bob Morris @ Dec 13th 2002 10:20 - Category: Unfiled ;
Los Angeles Peace Vigil
Tomorrow, Sat Dec 14, 7 PM, Hollywood & Highland
It’s looking like this will be big!
Bring banners, posters, candles, drums, costumes, etc. This is a vigil, we will be lining the sidewalks, hopefully for blocks and blocks.
Co-sponsored by Answer, NION, ICUJP, Coalition for World Peace.
Help make posters
Rock City News house
7030 De Longpre
(1 bl e La brea, 1 bl s Sunset, walking distance to vigil)
Fri & Sat from Noon-7 PM
NION contingent
Meet at Hollywood High
Sat 6 PM
Sunset & Highland
ANSWER
Help make banners, posters
Sat Noon-5 PM
422 S. Western Avenue #114
(4 blocks N. of Wilshire)
Bob Morris @ Dec 13th 2002 00:43 - Category: Unfiled ;
“He fought integration of his college fraternity; he has hobnobbed with white supremacists; he submitted an amicus brief defending Bob Jones University’s right to prohibit inter-racial dating; he has twice regretted the fact that Strom Thurmond didn’t win the 1948 presidential election on an explicitly segregationist platform; he voted against the Voting Rights Act extension in 1982; in 1983 he voted against the Martin Luther King Jr holiday; last year, he cast the only vote against the confirmation of Judge Roger Gregory, the first black judge ever seated on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In these last three instances, even Strom Thurmond voted the other way.” [Latino Vote News]
Bob Morris @ Dec 13th 2002 00:40 - Category: Unfiled ;
How to keep your private data safe from prying eyes.
“When I was in school, I shared a computer with several housemates. This arrangement meant there was little to no privacy when it came to our files, so I copied mine to a floppy disk and stored it in a safe place.
Now I have my own computer, so I’m usually the only one looking at the contents of my hard drive. Still, for those times when friends and family come over to use my computer–and to protect myself should my PC fall into the wrong hands–I like to keep things like my journal and financial records in an extra safe place.
These days, instead of copying my files to disk, I use software that encrypts or password-protects selected folders on my computer. Here are three programs you can use to protect your personal data from prying eyes.” [Privacy Digest]
Bob Morris @ Dec 13th 2002 00:33 - Category: Unfiled ;
The all-seeing database?
Total Information Awareness (TIA) is the Bushies plans plan to monitor everything we buy, what books we check out at the library, our credit cards, medical history, etc, so they can (ostensibly) be on the lookout for terrorists.
Well, of course it’s a noxious, Orwellian, probably unconstitutional plan and should be fought as hard as possible.
It also can’t work. What they want is a gargantuan database pulling in data from hundreds of thousands of computers, all with differing operating systems and database formats. Among other things, I’m a database programmer, and I’ve done many data conversions. Just transferring data reliably from one or two different systems into a master database can be problematic. To do this reliably on a daily basis from countless computers, all of which may be changing their data formats at any time, then to expect to be able to mine this data to extract crucial info on a timely basis - well, it’s absurd.
This is like saying, “Assemble a pile of twenty million rocks, boulders, pebbles, and sand particles at random every day for a year. Now tell me the patterns you find between them, and do it right, because we’re trying to find terrorists here”.
Our policy in war is somewhat the same. A bloodless high level technological approach that attempts to be all-seeing. Bomb them from the skies using “smart bombs”. Which is not unlike “Scan all data looking for patterns”. It’s a computer only approach. What happened to using people? Both on the ground in counter-terrorism and on the ground in war. (Well, we may be about to see out troops engaged in war on the ground, but that’s another topic.)
Back to TIA. It would cost billions upon billions to even begin to implement it. Even if every computer in the US is hooked into TIA (which would cause howls of protest from civil libertarians and from business - because of the cost), and these computers could somehow reliably transmit data into TIA (hint: they won’t be able to, trust me, it would be nightmarishly complicated and error-prone), there is no way to analyze all that data in anything close to real time to provide anything useful.
You’d have to employ thousands of programmers just to keep the behemoth somehow running, then thousands more to write and maintain the code to analyze the data. Then, oh, thousands more to determine if the data actually means anything coherent. Plus thousands more to get the data to however might need it.
Did I mention the security needed to insure the programmers are loyal and not up to mischief and/or sabotage? Did I mention the hundreds of terabytes of data per minute streaming in that must be made sense of?
No, it can’t work. And I haven’t even gotten into all the ways it could be tricked or manipulated.
Bob Morris @ Dec 13th 2002 00:23 - Category: Unfiled ;
Bob Morris @ Dec 13th 2002 00:22 - Category: Unfiled ;
Who will resign first, Cardinal Law or Trent Lott?
Church covered up priest child molestation, Massachusetts AG says.
If this were Survivor, Trent Lott would be voted off next.
I say Lott goes first, followed by Law. What say you? (12/13. Whoops, Law went first…!)
P.S. As to the vexing question as to which is more clueless, I think Trent Lott clearly gets the nod here for his complete inability to see why people are upset.
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