Monthly Archives: May 2006

The Chicken-Hawk list

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Tomorrow is Memorial Day, when the US honours those who have died on active service. How nice then to find a helpful list of the “Chicken-hawks” who have blithely volunteered other people’s kids for war duties in Iraq and Afghanistan. They include:

  • President George W. Bush – served four years of a six years Nat’l Guard commitment, some say after daddy’s friends pulled some strings to keep him out of Vietnam. The circumstances of his early separation from state-side service are still controversial (details)
  • Karl Rove, occasional Deputy Chief of Staff and alleged full time smear artist, escaped the draft and did not serve
  • VP Dick Cheney – several deferments, by marriage and timely fatherhood  
  • Former VP Chief of Staff I. Lewis Scooter Libby – did not serve
  • Secretary of State and former NSA Condaleeza Rice – did not serve
  • Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist – did not serve.
  • Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert – did not serve.
  • Former House Majority Leader Tom Delay – did not serve
  • House Majority Whip Roy Blunt – did not serve
  • Majority Whip Mitch McConnell – did not serve
  • Rick Santorum, third ranking Republican in the Senate – did not serve.
  • Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott – did not serve

    • And then, of course, there are the fearless right-wing hacks who want (other) Americans to whip the asses of Islamicists and other non-Americans everywhere. They include:

  • Rush Limbaugh – did not serve
  • Sean Hannity – did not serve
  • Pat Buchanan – did not serve
  • Ann Coulter – did not serve
  • Ralph Reed – did not serve
  • Bill O’Reilly – did not serve
  • Michael Savage – did not serve
  • Bill Kristol – did not serve

    • As the man said, Hell hath no fury like a non-combatant.

    Travel-time maps

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    Terrific piece of ingenuity by Chris Lightfoot and Tom Steinberg of mySociety — travel-time maps showing journey times via public transport and shortish taxi rides. Using colours and contour lines they show how long it takes to travel between one particular place and every other place in the area, using public transport. They also show the areas from which no such journey is possible, because the services are not good enough.

    The detailed map of Cambridge is very interesting because it shows how some destinations in the neighbourhood are easy to reach by public transport, whereas others (e.g. outlying villages) are effectively cut off.

    Link via BoingBoing.

    Amazon.com’s architecture

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    Lorcan Dempsey, whose Blog is a thing of wonder, pointed me to this riveting Conversation with Werner Vogels – Amazon’s CTO on the thinking which led to the company’s transformation from online bookstore to e-commerce juggernaut. The conversation is with Jim Gray, a Microsoft Technical Fellow and should be required reading for anyone responsible for scaling up online services.

    Lorcan also spotted an important aspect of the Amazon S3 storage service that I’d missed when I blogged it.

    One interesting feature was the absence of a feature – the user interface. It did not have its own user interface: it is available only through machine interfaces. One of these is BitTorrent. So it is built from the start as a network service, a service that other applications communicate with.

    Only the paranoid…

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    … survive, as Bill Gates knows. This week’s Economist reports that:

    On May 18th America’s State Department said it would not use 16,000 computers it recently bought from Lenovo, a Chinese firm, for sensitive “classified” work. Instead the PCs will be used for more prosaic matters… Moreover, the department said it was “initiating changes in its procurement processes in light of the changing ownership of IT equipment providers”.

    Interesting. Lenovo, you will remember, is the firm to which IBM sold its comjputer manufacturing business. So when you buy an IBM Thinkpad today, you’re really buying a Lenovo machine.

    Why the State Department’s paranoia? Well, as the Economist tactlessly points out, the US has long experience of convert surveillance. For example, in 2001 there was a minor diplomatic scuffle when the Chinese discovered that a Boeing plane built for the then Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, was stuffed with bugging devices.

    The Homburg factor, contd.

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    Mary Riddell, writing in today’s Observer about the way the female vote is beginning to slip back to the Tories.

    It is a minor tragedy that Brand Gordon is so difficult to sell. No modern politician has a better record on doing good things for women and children. Unlike Cameron, he has a proven track record on social justice, child poverty, SureStart and daycare. Up close, he is engaging, good fun and heartfelt in his attachment to his family. All my female colleagues and friends prefer Brown’s policies and saturnine style to Cameron’s porridge-cooking, apron-wearing, PR-driven smarm.

    But we may be in a minority. If women are going Dave’s way, then what is Gordon to do? The usual answer is that he will have to lighten up. That, though, may be neither possible nor prudent. Brown might be much too leaden, but he is never going to win a levity contest with a man liable, if he sheds any more Tory ballast, to shoot heavenwards like a helium balloon.

    Page’s rank

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    Well, well. If I’m reading this SEC form correctly, Google’s co-founder Larry Page grossed $149,569,511 between April 19 and 17 May 2006 by selling some of his shares. Wonder what he’s buying with the loot?

    First Amendment 1: Apple nil

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    Hooray!

    SAN FRANCISCO, May 26 — A California appeals court ruled Friday that online reporters are protected by the same confidentiality laws that protect traditional journalists, striking a blow to efforts by Apple Computer to identify people who leaked confidential company data.

    The three-judge panel in San Jose overturned a trial court’s ruling last year that to protect its trade secrets, Apple was entitled to know the source of leaked data published online. The appeals court also ruled that a subpoena issued by Apple to obtain electronic communications and materials from an Internet service provider was unenforceable. In its ruling, the appeals court said online and offline journalists are equally protected under the First Amendment. “We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish ‘legitimate’ from ‘illegitimate’ news,” the opinion states. “Any attempt by courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment.” The ruling states that Web sites are covered by California’s shield law protecting the confidentiality of journalists’ sources…

    [Source: New York Times report.]