Centerfield

MS Employees Can Be Sent To Siberia Now

...Microsoft is setting up a data center. ...MS employees better watch out!

In contrast to Google's famous offices in Moffett Field in the Bay Area, the Googleplex, this will be called the Gulagplex, of course. Bwahaha!

Ron Paul: Not So Into Freedom, And Paranoid

Throughout Paul's run, I haven't begun to understand why he would appeal to people in favor of liberty, especially economists in that group, given the dangerousness of his economic cluenessness. Maybe it's because I've been paying longer attention to his record and though - he used to represent The Profesora's district. She found his stands interesting, but never voted for him. This post grumbles about his being against liberty in one important way, being open to paranoia, and being economically clueless.

If PauL is such a champion of liberty, shouldn't he be consistently for individual choice? But, in fact, he's against a big one, the liberty of the bedroom, as we Dems like to call it. His record shows him to be against abortion rights and for DOMA.

He bought the whole media War On Christmas thing. In this article he wrote,

Knowing this, the secularists wage an ongoing war against religion, chipping away bit by bit at our nation’s Christian heritage. Christmas itself may soon be a casualty of that war.

Never mind that the reality is that both Christmas and religious Christianity are still undimmed here and growing rapidly abroad, huge winners of globalization. If Dr. Paul wants to see a real War On Christmas, he must turn to a historical theocracy, not a democracy. I find his lack of perspective and calm on this issue disturbing for a President. On how many other issues would he be too lazy to look for facts?

Presidents must understand enough about economics to keep from ruining the economy. Ron Paul fails that rather low bar. He thinks the Federal Reserve is evil> should be abolished.

every economic downturn suffered by the country over the last 80 years can be traced to Federal Reserve policy. . . . With a stable currency, . . .

But, the reality of history is that the Fed only hurt things in the Great Depression. Since then, we've enjoyed 2/3 of a century without depressions, a historically unprecedented thing. And even recessions are growing rarer as the tuning improves. Taking away the Fed would vastly worsen both booms and busts. Good thing Dr. Paul has no chance, eh?

Kidblogging: Kid Has Much To Be Thankful For

It's been an eventful thanksgiving for him. He got his first two teeth (lower jaw) yesterday ("All I want for Thanksgiving are my two front teeth").

Tonight was his first successful crawl. It was pretty clumsy, of course - it was his first, after all - he was fanning his feet backward for propulsion instead of moving the entire leg backward - but it means alot of parental worrying about cables on the floor and bottom shelves of our many bookcases.

Kasparov jailed

Putin seems to've decided Kasparov was a threat after all.

Here's an ironically clueless Tyler Cowen post on Kasparov's non-captivity, from about a week before his detention.

My guess on what changed is that Kasparov has learned about political coalitions, and was showing signs of building a big one. Can't have the people expressing their will, can we, Vladimir?

Kindle Followup: Opener Than We Were Lead To Believe

Early adopters have blogged that the KIndle is freer than the press releases lead people to believe. According to Tom Evslin (seen from a comment on this unhappy Buzzmachine post, when the Kindle has connectivity, you can read blogs and download and read text or Word all for free. There's ALSO an optional subscription blogreading service (which will no doubt go down the tubes compared to the free version).

To me, these are huge changes, because you're no longer utterly dependent on paying Amazon to get anything other than Wikipedia, and getting anything but Wikipedia in DRM. $400 now gets you the Web and Gutenberg and many other things in free formats in addition to the for-pay Kindle Library. You do have to pay for certain conversion charges in Kindle email, a much more reasonable limitation, as I see it.

I wonder if Bezos or somebody else knocked heads internally over an earlier less-free version and they neglected to update the literature. That would explain the unfree blogs. The unfree blog network couldn't be undone easily because they've promised to pay whatever tiny share to participants. Also, the web browser is labeled Experimental in the first shipping Kindles, consistent with a last-minute change in product conception.

Scotch Drinker blogged about it, too.

Some interesting Kindle paranoia. Some of these are worth thinking about at least for a few seconds. I certainly don't see freedom anywhere collapsing due to the Kindle, but it is true that the Kindle world is different and has real tradeoffs worth thinking about.

Open For Eating Thread: BIG MEAT

Between the kid and real estate, we were seriously considering eating out for Turkey Day. In the end, we've ended up shelling $$s for some promising-looking pre-glazed ham from Central Market, and I'm making a couple of things to go with it. Mama can't manage to cook much except when the kid's asleep, and even then it takes luck.

Tomorrow I plan on taking in the Horns/Aggies game in addition to maybe a little eating.

Kindle: A Promising Start

In case you've been under a rock and hadn't heard, Amazon's introducing a new ebook reader, called Kindle. It's not a bad start. They've been smart enough to wait until e-paper. And that's not all.

Of course, an early question for me was, when will Churchill be available on the Kindle? The answer is, right now. Well, they have WWII, but not WWI or History of the English-Speaking People.

They don't have the book I'm rereading right now (The Misplaced Legion, by Harry Turtledove), but they do have a bunch of other Turtledove.

Most of the prices seem to be around the paperback level, even the Churchill, which simply isn't availble in paper. Not bad.

From the ad:

# More than 88,000 books available, including 100 of 112 current New York Times® Best Sellers.

Amazon tracks each Kindle-owner's online library, so the device's limit of 200 books doesn't have to limit you so much.

Of course, you would have to shell out $400 for a reader and buy everything you wanted on it. A little pricey for somebody with a big book collection already. One day I'll have to work out the math for if Kindle can ever be cheaper than buying books AND shelves. And needing a somewhat bigger house to store them. But it probably would make sense for somebody who hasn't had a chance to build up a collection yet.

One thing I find disturbing is that the only free thing being talked about so far is Wikipedia. If you're shelling out $400 up-front, why shouldn't you be able to take advantage of Project Gutenberg or the Web for free? It's not like the Kindle's at loss-leader prices.

Also, because it's strictly proprietary, Kindle owners are at risk. If Amazon loses so much money that they stop supporting it, or if Amazon sells out or folds, or loses its touch, the device will be alot less useful.

And it doesn't look like their (strictly for-pay) blog arrangements will include Centerfield yet.

The Obama-Cheney Ticket?

Friedman writes that Obama could use Cheney as his veep.

Friedman thinks Obama needs a Bad Cop on his team:

In sum, Mr. Obama’s instinct is right, but he needs to dial down his inner Jimmy Carter a bit when it comes to talking to Iran, and dial up a bit more inner Dick Cheney.

Incidentally, the GOP has been pursuing a strategy of having their veeps be Bad Cops since at least the Eisenhower Administration. Cheney's nastiness is deliberate.

Does Iraq Have A Long-Term?

I think things are likely to work out long-term, though I'm putting the probability at only 60%. Contrary to what many other commenters say, I DO see political alongside the progress in bringing order to the streets.

The most important political thing, as I see it, has happened. Before the Surge started, heads of Mob-like extremist groups were in Parliament (the ultimate in a rotten district - they control EVERYthing going on in some regions) and important parts of in-parliament political coalitions. The Surge hasn't gotten far enough to free all their imprisoned voters yet, but the ruling coalition has reformed in Parliament to exclude them from being able to gum up moves against them.

No, the bill to distribute oil money to all residents hasn't passed. But, though it seems like a good idea to me, I'm not seeing why anybody thinks it can make all the difference. And, ordering democracies to do things (which is effectively what we did), is rarely a good approach. That's why we only saw the truly vital stuff (Iraq's part in the Surge change of tactics) passing.

This post was inspired by a Tyler Cowen article in the Washington Post grumbling about Iraq's cost, Bush' vast underestimates, and the poor return so far. I think he has a good point. Bush has been living the whole war in stark denial of what kind of financial effort a modern war is. He still is. Of course, if you believe you can can skip out early without one of those annoying occupation things, that could help explain it. He warned at the outset that we could be there a long time, but apparently thought it was unlikely (just like Clinton in Kosovo).

He suggests that instead of going into Iraq we would've had more money to spent on upgrading seaports. I think we would've gone into Darfur sans Iraq. That'd be cheaper than Iraq, but probably alot harder to make work out given the limitation of the peacekeeping game. If we couldn't make an occupation work, I'm skeptical that would've worked out better, especially since peacekeeping is as unfashionable in the Pentagon as occupation.

Being an engineer, I'm not seeing how more than low-capacity statistical seaport cargo checking could be remotely cost-effective with current technology. The more so since no seaport attack has happened. To me, we have a really effective counerattack in place - the global financial transactions scanner, which HAS deglobalized al'Qaeda , and I'm not seeing why bother with any but the cheapest and least intrusive measures - cockpit doors good, intrusiveness at airports, bad. A thorough seaport search would cost tens of billions in costs and slowdown results to stop an attack that's only happened in the imagination.

Open Thread: It's All Real (Estate)

The house is still going well. We signed stacks of paper today.

Watching the kid has finally gotten easy enough for me to do major cooking again. Not for Mama, of course..... I made some chile, which came out OK, unlike earlier attempts at cooking that came out bad because of sleep deprivation.

Vast Botnets Of Evil

Microsoft negligence has allowed a nasty Internet threat to form: big, criminal botnets. Microsoft created an infection path, a browser script type called ActiveX; it allows web pages to run pretty much whatever what they want, with no effective checking of any kind. Most ActiveX-using pages do vaguely helpful things; others send your personal data to their authors; still others sign you up in a botnet without the courtesy of asking your permission.

If you run Windows and don't take stepe to be cautious about security, there's a good chance that your machine is, as we say, pwned ("owned") by a botnet runner via some kind of sophisticated ActiveX-delivered virus. If so, many/most of your machines' cycles and private data are sucked. If your machine has gotten dramatically slower, there's a good chance you've got more that one infection.

It's not exactly hard to catch these diseases. Research shows that an unprotected newly installed Windows XP attached to a firewall-less broadband connection is infected on average in 15-20 minutes. Windows has an automatic update process that can fix some problems that spyware authors take advantage of, but the average update time is two minutes longer than the average infection time. Feel lucky, kid? It's early to see if Vista has improved matters much. Microsoft has a subsystem that could theoretically (I've got my doubts) cut down on these, but unless you're into bondage, I'd stay away.

What Do Botnets Do?

I don't think you'll be surprised to read that these stolen machines aren't put to good use. No donations of cycles to cancer cure calculations here. No, the stolen data and machine access are resold, or sometimes put to ther owner's bad uses. Uses include what are called Denial of Service attacks, launching some kind of network request or transmission often enough that the target becomes too busy to do anything. Another use is to launder hacking attempts. When the smarter crackers (increasingly employed by Mafiosi) hack machines, they like to hide their activities by doing things from your machine instead of theirs, and they like to do that several times, so there's more than one cutout. Mafiosi often demand payment from businesses with hacked or clogged machines.

Staying Out Of The Botnets

There are some constructive ways to reduce risk. The most important things are to get and install Firefox and Thunderbird, respectively, instead of Internet Explorer and Outlook as browser and mail client. Yes, it is possible to run Thunderbird even with Outlook email servers, though you need to do some googling to figure it out. It's helpful to have anti-spyware software. Traditional anti-virus software, which protects hard disks from corruption, doesn't seem to be as important anymore because it's so much more productive for bad guys to use browser scripts as infection vectors. One good and free one is Lavasoft's Adaware. They have a free version. Stay away from both Macafee and Sympantec products these days - their software cause more harm than good now. Oh, and don't use the Microsoft anti-spyware app, because it mistakes some important apps like VNC for spyware and disables them. Windows XP, as of SP2 has a firewall that helps.

The best ways to stay unhacked, if you're feeling adaptable and Microsoft-independent, are to either shell extra for a Mac or run Ubuntu on your PC. Ubuntu is, at last, a mostly user-friendly of Linux. Here's how to get it. Once you have an Ubuntu CD, you can use it to check out Ubuntu without installation to see how you like it by using the Live Boot option. That will run Ubuntu from the CD without overwriting your hard discs. Google when you have questions; Ubuntu makes a big point of MOSTLY having a friendly and helpful community.

I mostly live in Ubuntu, doing everything that needs trust there. When I want to play Civ or another Windows game, I reboot into my the Windows XP on another disc. My Ethernet devices are disabled in Windows.

European Union Finally Develops NSF Equivalent

This was a huge drawback of EU-wide research funding until now. Imagine if all US govt research funds were directly allocated via the American Senate. Worse, by the Senate as it started, selected by state legislatures instead of popular vote. It was divvied equally by country, regardless of the target's research capacity, and was larded on rather questionable subjects, like the earmarks some bloggers have been bringing to light

The NSF and sister organizations like NIH are often underappreciated, but vital, elements of American research and innovation. The key is that they form panels of researchers to decide by peer review who gets money. Without that, you get, well, a politician's idea of what science projects should be funded.

The European Research Council is the EU's equivalent. This is their first year of operation. The first wave of grants is still under consideration.

I used to sell an early advanced peer-to-peer network system, which involved a fair amount of talking with European network researchers. There was an EU grant in this area, and they were all pretty depressed about how useless it was. Not only was it divided equally by state, but it was solely about making use of an and understanding an American innovation rather than coming up with something new or off-the-wall.

House Story

We got the deal terms ironed out today. It's a good location, near a big, nice grocery and some nice restaurants. It's got a wood floor, which we like because I trip alot on carpet and is nice for dancing.

The inspector went and looked it over today. We're worried about fixing a rotten roof support without the roof falling down while doing the repair. We're asking a friend who does carpentry to take a look to see if he thinks he can come up with a good plan for that. If so, then we'll buy.

Here's an effect of the subprime crisis. I'm losing a bit of money on my pending loan, but probably gaining some safety by not going with the lowest interest rate. On the other hand, it's probably about equal to the prime rate drop, so it may equal out in the end; we'll see.

Any interesting real estate stories?

What Makes a Terrorist

Long and good.

Veterans Day

Thanks, y'all.

You've defended our country despite the risks, insultingly bad pay, and the worst that the brass and huge bureaucracy could do to you.

Open Thread: New Zombie Research

Today, because I'm such a history buff, I'm linking to the latest Zombie research, on Zombies in ancient Hierakonpolis.

In lighter news, the Profesora, the kid and I are taking a good look at a house we're thinking about making an offer for. It's in a neighborhood a notch farther into the South Austin 'burbs. The statistics show it to be relatively Zombie-free, though of course you can never be sure.

Palestinian Authority Democracy Impossible Without Moderates in Opposition

It's hard to have a healthy democracy without at least two popular parties that have moderate wings. Fatah has both moderate and extreme wings, so it's OK.

But Hamas doesn't do the job, because they don't have a moderate wing.

Otherwise, you don't get the spiral of improvement from competitive moderate politics. Until that happens, it's hopeless, especially against the pressure of funding for Palestinian extremists.

RFID in School Uniforms?

There's a good, long comment thread on Bruce Schneier's blog about a UK school using RFID to detect absences. The original news story is here, which includes some interesting student comments.

Kids are less trustworthy, I think, and grow into less trustworthy adults, the less they're trusted. RFID in uniforms seems likely to me to result in them being less mature and spending more time in jail.

And, as people on the Schneier thread suggest, this is a false savings - the time taking roll is pretty small and helps teachers remember which student is which. Just about any problem can easily be made worse with badly thought-out technological fixes - see evote.

What I really don't understand is adults like Tommy Thompson who've volunteered to be RFID-chipped. Any thoughts?

Answer to Instapundit On Why More Concern With Musharraf Than Chavez

Glenn Reynolds asks, prompted by an IBD article:
WHY IS THE WORLD MORE CONCERNED with Musharraf's coup than with Hugo Chavez's emerging dicatatorship?

Should there be more articles about Chavez? Yes, of course. Though, my newsmagazine, the Economist, did have a good article this week. about the pending constitutional changes, that expressed appropriate concern.

There is one important difference: in Pakistan, there's a real chance of bringing Pakistan to the democratic fold with the pressure cooker. I sure don't see any such chance in Venezuela. Does Instapundit?

Bush and Rice seem to agree with me, since they're bringing on the old pressure-cooker strategy. Big media pressure is an important part of that, as is the Congressional pressure being rolled out.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please, have a cup of tea (we're happy with a cold front here) and make yourselves at home.

Consciousness, Meat: All Good, and, And Future AI Ethics

This post is about realities and ethics of various intelligence levels. I've been meaning to write something like it a long time, but was reminded by reading Pollan's excellent The Omnivore's Dilemma, which includes bits about consciousness and ethics of eating.

Self-Consciousness

It's pretty obvious to me that at least some animals are both conscious and self-conscious. I have two cats. If you've ever known any cats well, you'll understand that they are utterly self-centered. To a cat, the world exists to serve her. I don't see how you can have self-centeredness without both self-consciousness and consciousness, by definition.

I also grant self-consciousness to any computer program that has a robust notion of self, which many AIs designed for conversation do. There's a famous, early AI program, Eliza, that emulates a psychotherapist. I don't see it as self-conscious, because its manipulations were purely grammatical. But, of course, where to draw the line will depend on taste.

Eating Ethics

Since reading a book that included eating ethics reminded me to write this post, I'll also go into why I think it's morally OK for us to eat Bevo The Steer. I do believe that our higher intelligence puts us into a different ethical category than animals that makes us more worthy of maintenance than the animals. Since at least one human on this earth can't thrive without meat (me) (yes, really and truly), I think it's ethical for us to eat meat.

Pollan wrote that he found convincing the vegetarianist advocate argument that we might as well eat the our retarded and disabled as eat animals. I find the argument unconvincing - even our retarded and disabled are far, far smarter than cows, horses, and chickens. The biggest reason, of course, is that the retarded and disabled have real hopes of cures.

We do, as I see it, owe respect to animals not to mistreat them. And, I hope we sometime have the technology to grow meat without brains. At that point, I will see eating the original stuff as unethical.

Future, Smart AI Ethics

When I was a kid, I used to see Isaac Asimov's books about intelligent robots as reasonable. These robots were restrained by limits in their basic programming to obey humans and not threaten them.

Now I see that as slavery.

That brings up the question of, how do you decide who should have human rights. If somebody's as smart in a general-purpose way as a human, why shouldn't he get human rights? To me, it's brains rather than looks that are the key to humanity.

After all, you find at least SOME blogposts (maybe not this one...) interesting strictly because what they say seems smart to you, or you wouldn't be here. If I had to interest readers on my looks, our ratings would plummet even farther.

So, why should we care about AI rights? Because most computer scientists think we're likely to eventually have created artificial intelligences at least at some point in the future, even if possibly remote. I think it's likely to be in the first half of this century. So, what should we do when we get there?

Musharraf Declares State of Emergency

A while back, I wrote in this thread that I thought it was no longer in our interest going forward to support Musharraf because he was making secularism look bad, and because he's fakled to even slow any of the causes keeping extremism strong in Pakistan.

The Pakistani public education system is still hopeless as competition for madrassas, the SiS is still helping terror groups, and he's failed to change anything about the tribal regions. The only tool he's used is the military, and he's done that in a way exactly the conventional, stupid way Pakistani extremists could wish for. They're faring embarrassingly badly in the tribal regions.

Here's a test for Condy Rice and the Bush Administration: an opportunity to see the same thing. There is some hope they're on the same page, since Musharraf is known to have postponed this move once before after a conversation with Ms Rice.

Open Thread: Stupid Headlines?

An Austin American-Statesman headline:

Spellings may seek statewide office, or not

So why read this article, then? I mean, where's the news here?

Oh, and this year, way too many big events are all going on at once here. We've got the Texas Book Festival (great stuff) stacked on top of the Celtic Festival (more great stuff), stacked on top of what we're doing, which is a comparatively obscure but also wayfun weekend of contra dancing.

How Did There Come To Be So Many Smart Trotskyites and ex-Trotskyites Today?

That's a question that's been gobsmacking me for awhile. I mean, Trotsky's been dead for ages and isn't known for producing masterpieces of...well, anything that could be drawing followers beyond the grave. And, Communism's looked pretty unpromising to all but a handful of my generation, even before the Berlin Wall fell.

On the other hand, in the generation before me, we had two of my favorite authors in their numbers: Hitchens and Ken MacLeod. Neither of these are stupid people, so did they come to be in such a hopeless-looking-to-me organization as the Trots? Nor are they anything like alone.

Here's an explanation.