ebw's blog

It was a so-so speech. Those of us confined to a gate waiting area for the prior five hours moved towards the CNN monopoly monitor (interrupted every 15m by the TSA "This is a special announcement" loop). The delay irritated important people used their cell phones to "just touch base" with some family or business contacts. For the rest of the gate area he had our complete attention for just about an hour.

I was waiting for a reference to the Glass–Steagall Act of 1932. It wasn't there.

An interesting summary in le monde. She's planning on leaving Foggy Bottom in January, replaced by John Kerry (queue another electoral campaign in Mass).

Greenpeace has carried out a pervasive pentest of the commercial nuclear powered electrical generating stations in France. The government and the industry is disputing the extent of the pentest. Sarko is calling the action (which shows that a bunch of hippies can enter a future Fukashima equipped with a tsunami or a banner to the effect that Kilroy was Here) irresponsible, so the task should have been left to a responsible armed organ of a hostile state or non-state actor. Going non-linear, the spokes-creature for Young UMP, Maxime Buizard, twitted that the Greenpeace activists should be shot as terrorists. He's since recovered a modicum of sanity and may support arrest and trial before execution of critics of the party in power.

Links to le monde's coverage.

Neutrios pass though walls of lead and lies with ease.

At a regional conference, speaking as a private person. By way of context, see wikipedia.

What, other than limitless malice, was passing through the minds of Anglo-American targeteers when dumping a 1.8 ton mine at a random point in Koblenz? How is dropping a delayed detonation device of this size causally related to any lawful military end? The entire "strategic bombing" argument, the raison d'etre of the Air Force (which by the way, has been looking for another raison d'etre, along with the ballistic submarine fleet, since the departure of the Soviet Union / Warsaw Pact from the fields of budgetary folly), being that killing civilians will cause civilians to kill the military.

In other News of the Dumb on War a bright young thing in Tonopah Nevada has transfered a intact RQ-170 to the Islamic Republic. Because technology transfer to the OpFors is somehow better than memo transfer to the civilians (that's a Wikileaks reference).

RQ-170-rearview.jpg removed.

The "China doesn't have nukes" meme is something his campaign could turn on a dime and put him, and the PRC, and the evils of Communism / Yellow Peril / Trade Imbalance / Strong Yuan stories back above the fold.

He didn't know, but he was busy running a main street business. Newt and Mitt and Michelle and Rick and Ron however were not running main street businesses (except perhaps into the ground as lackeys of financial capital and banksters) and they were in a position to know, along with the evils/peril/trade/currency/tibet set of issues, but clearly don't either. So who's too dumb to be the one with the red phone as office decor?

Out of no where Ha'aretz reports that one or more SS-N-26 have been delivered to Syria. As happy as moving 200kg of stored kinetic energy at 800m/s may make any targeteer, absent an OTH guidance capability, it assumes that some high value target, say an element of Carrier Strike Group Two, is carelessly driven by its cowboy command to within two, perhaps even one, super-sonic minutes from an aim point.

Not quite a fire-and-forget weapon when stripped from an integrated C&C context, a wicked fast and furious bottle rocket, with a credible bang at the end, but more a forget-to-fire for a red player engaged in a locally asymmetric contest with a poorly armed opposition while sophisticated counter-force is in the theater, but not yet authorized to commence defense suppression.

And in the same news cycle Ehud Barak says he's not going to start a hot war with Iran -- for now. A man between two fires playing with matches.

I'm paralyzed (nearly) by a spinal injury (it will pass, and return, in turn) so this will be short.

IMHO, the most important bit about Wikileaks is that it has data about data. The _this_ of this thing we call the net. link (fr).

A month or so ago I remarked to my mom (a USN programmer and applied mathematician for 35 years of her life) that the diplomatic language from Turkey concerning the intensity of state violence in Syria was ... signalling the possibility of counter-force, at least sufficient to limit the territorial scope of state violence and allow refugee camps to exist in Syria, proximal to Turkey. Today a writer for a serious arabic language newspaper told a shocked colleague from Al Jazeera English -- on the record and on camera -- that he considered a movement order -- involving forces from Turkey, Jordan, and two of the Gulf Emirates, and possibly one or more European countries -- certain within the next 30 days.

Meanwhile, elements of Russia’s Northern Fleet, the heavy aircraft-carrying missile cruizer Admiral Kuznetsov (eight Sukhoi Su-33 all-weather fighters, two Kamov Ka-27 anti-submarine helicopters and several Mig-29K fighters), accompanied by the heavy ASW ship Admiral Chabanenko, are being routed from the Barents Sea, via the Strait of Gibraltar, to the eastern Med. The Black Sea Fleet frigate Ladny is being routed through the Bosphorus to the eastern Med. As Carrier Strike Group Two re-entered U.S. Sixth Fleet AOR last week, the eastern Med is getting crowded with symmetric naval forces.

Written questions to the DoC are due today at 2pm Eastern. Here's what I sent:

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Prior related contacts have been Cost Plus, e.g., the original IANA function contact with USC’s ISI, the NIC function contract with SRI International, the NOC function contract with BB&N, etc. These have provided for the public interest without distortion due to revenue maximization or profit seeking.

The plan of record of the incumbent contractor, formerly “the New Corporation”, now ICANN, is to create an annual revenue of $20,000 for each new delegation from the IANA root,¹ in addition to the approximately $20,000,000 in annual revenue it receives for the delegations from the IANA root which existed prior to its existence. This plan of record anticipates several hundred such units of recurring revenue, commencing in the second year of the proposed contract, subject to approval by the United States Department of Commerce (DoC), National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

As a private-party third-party beneficiary of services provided under the contemplated government contract, we estimate that ICANN’s present benefit from IANA function services is at least seven figures per year, and, when its plan of record is realized, closer to eight figures per year than seven.

Question 1: What is the incumbent contractor’s current year cost as represented to the Government to provide the IANA function? A line item breakdown would provide the greatest assistance for the preparation of a competitive bid.

The RFP anticipates a possible response from one or more Universities. We commend the government’s openness to the return of fundamental public interest activities to the academic institutions in which these activities originated. Given the planning cycle constraints on public and private academic institutions, and the restriction on (slightly modified) CONUS-ONLY bidders, we are concerned that the government’s intent may be frustrated by the limited time to respond, to what was, to most, ² an unanticipated event.

Question 2: Will the government extend the response date to mid-January to allow greater bidder response?

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¹ Originally this amount was $75,000/annum, reduced after a meeting at between ICANN’s COO and the author at ICANN’s 33rd Public meeting in Cairo in November 2008.

² We draw attention to our own comment earlier this year that the IANA functions were both separable, and usefully separated from the policy development entity, currently ICANN. [todo: link to original at NTIA]