The cost of ethics
If I hadn't read Suburban Guerrilla this morning I wouldn't have read The Cost Conundrum, and it was worth my time.
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May 31, 2009
So long sales tax
The alternate reading of the California Supreme's ruling last week is that if "marriage" means anything other than "marriage", that the court will strike down whatever law creates a right in "marriage" that isn't present in whatever that other civil status is, or simply end the intrusion of the cult practice in a secular state.
So if the executive branch of government of the state of California ends or disproportionately curtails tax payed services to residents of the state who do pay, if not California income tax, then California sales tax, even if the instruments with which this class of persons make these tax payments to the state of California are with WIC or TANF or similar, will this court, the court which has made very clear that all that "marriage" means, under Prop. 8, is that a class of persons may use an eight letter word to describe their civil status, and no other right not available to the class of persons in same-sex couple family relationships, allow the state to continue to compel the poor and the non-poor alike to pay California sales tax, and deliver tax paid benefits disproportionately to the non-poor?
May 29, 2009
3 days in May
The owner just called. His back-to-back booking of a lease-breaking tenant and a lease-holding tenant just hit a snag -- the lease-breaking tenant won't leave, so we, the lease-holding tenant, have three days before our scheduled move-in to ... find something else.
Back to camps, insertion into Minneapolis having failed on the first attempt.
Today's Cyber Security Announcement
The 60-day review that Melissa Hathaway completed on April 17th contained a recommendation for a cross-agency oversight of network and host security. Today President Obama announced that he's going to accept her recommendation and "appoint an adviser to oversee the security of government and business computer networks in response to widespread attacks and information theft."
Cspan coverage is here: http://cspan.org/Watch/Media/2009/05/29/HP/R/19192/Pres+Obama+announces+cyber+security+policy.aspx
Since Ira Magaziner shorted the first Clinton administration on public policy in the post-ARPA network, there's been nothing, so this is a significant speech. Still, he didn't say "reports to me" or other indica that the appointee will start with real responsibility and authority, or just muddle along his or her way via jaw power.
may i share your process address space? i'm benign, honest!
Someone on a list wrote this morning that:
Barack Obama mentioned Conficker by name in his cyber czar remarks today.
In a series of notes I've written in the past few days on a list I concluded earlier this morning that
on bad days i think the credit card model is past its sell-by date, and that it is now standard art to use domains, like compromised addresses and the attached nodes, as infinite sources of zero cost to replace transient assets for system designers.
I write a lot more than that actually, but like this blog, it is more for personal reasons than anything else.
May 28, 2009
Attack on infrastructre on a financial scale
via TeleGeography's CommsUpdate 28 May 2009
Wataniya Palestine launch plans, loans in doubt
Loans earmarked to support the launch of a new mobile operator in the Palestinian Territory are at risk following continued delays in the release of frequencies by Israel, Reuters is reporting. Wataniya Palestine revealed in a letter to the former UK prime minister Tony Blair, that a loan worth USD85 million from sources including the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank’s private sector arm, could be cancelled as a result of the delays. In a separate letter the IFC noted its concerns that the delay of spectrum release could impact on the operator’s ability to meet its financial obligations. It is understood that should the failure to resolve the frequency allocation issue continue the IFC would view it as a ‘material adverse effect’ and could cancel the loan. Wataniya has called on Mr Blair, now acting as a Middle East envoy, to intervene in the matter, claiming that future foreign investment in the Palestinian economy could be at stake.
Wataniya Palestine, a subsidiary of Wataniya of Kuwait (itself controlled by Qatar Telecom), was declared the highest bidder for a combined 2G and 3G cellular concession in September 2006 with a reported bid of JOD251 million (USD352 million).Progress on the release of spectrum appeared to have been made last year, with reports in August 2008 confirming that an agreement between Wataniya and Israel’s Ministry of Communications had been reached. A commercial launch had been expected in early 2009.
May 27, 2009
My baby (singular) rides the short bus
Jonah took this picture this morning, and it survives because he handed me the iphone to board the bus. I don't know how much longer this will last, insertion into Minneapolis is failing to thrive on numerous axii, and I'm not sending Sam back to school as the note he brought home yesterday contained a "contract" that punishes perseverative behavior. If autism could be cured by beating, it would be an iffy proposition at best. Since autism can't be cured by beating, beating (or whatever delightful form the negative reinforcement takes) for the benefit of others is a less than iffy proposition.
Three weeks ago I'd four at-camps children working in age and grade appropriate materials, using the math curriculum "not judged deficient by Mathematically Correct". The math curriculum they are now required to use was judged "Not suitable" by the reviewers at Mathematically Correct. Three weeks ago I'd four at-camps children, today I've got only Jonah in school, after a massive effort at enrollment. Kezzie and Gracie are unable to go to school as they've symptoms consistent with flu ... and so ... they are not allowed to return to the schools where they most likely contracted what ever it is they have.
Overall a negative return on investment.
Then there's housing. ...
May 26, 2009
Broadband adoption in the OECD states
From something I'm writing at the moment (actually slaving away over several, progressively less opaque, drafts of since the middle of last week):
...
The interesting question is how this will happen, and who will benefit.Video cable operators, latecomers to the residential loop IP address provisioning industry, were able to use DHCP to enter the access network market and compete with the generally lower DSL prices.
The transformation of address blocks from sources of addresses allocated by Carriers to their POP constellations across LATA boundaries, globally unique but with no persistent association to individual computers across dial-up sessions, to sources of addresses persistently allocated by subscriber loop and CATV plant operators, only locally unique and with persistent association to individual computers has been a fundamental change.
Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox, Cablevision, Charter, Bright House, Qwest, AT&T and Verizon all compete on pricing, bundling and marketing strategies, and persistence and locality models drives consumer and geographic profiling across all of their broadband service areas.Cable operators offer broadband service tier priced in the range of $40 to $45 per month, and standard cable modem speeds have climbed from an average high of three Mbps in 2004 to 10-15 Mbps, and in some markets as much as 30 Mbps.
Verizon offers FiOS Internet and TV services and similar services1 are offered by AT&T and Qwest, augmenting their 256Kbps xDSL services market priced in the range $30 to $35 per month.
are offered by AT\&T and Qwest, at the same data rate tiers and prices. DHCP has made residential broadband possible, for both CATV and DSL technologies.The fundamental technical and policy issue is that the DNS is about to become an application with local semantics, a residential application, and coincidentally share a significant property of the DHCP model --- the locality and persistence of address mappings. This yields an important policy tool to the urban registry operator.
...
I probably shouldn't explicitly point out that the Mayor of Gotham has the same keys that the Mayor of Beijing has, but the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York has a certain reputation of where white collar criminal law is made, and what better describes some "Internet business models" than white collar crime?
1Bundled voice, data, and video, aka "Tripple Play", or if you prefer "Tripple Pay".
May 24, 2009
Indianz is bumping over to 64.38.12.138
Hope they get there, the site is semi horked at present.
Going to Cairo
The Maoz Ester outpost was dismantled on Thursday, for the seventh time. Seven pre-fabs of no particular significance. Presumably this is how the Netanyahu-Lieberman regime is going to mollify the Americans and the Europeans and put a happier face on the settlements.
May 23, 2009
I do not support ...
For reasons having little to do with the present war, but more to do with how a scholarly community, a rather loosely defined one, where the organizing theme is probably Indians and Pacific Islander survivors of the second-half of the twentieth century residential tertiary schools, academics attempting something in addition to demonstrating that each has mastered the colonial standard ...
But a segway ...
When we, the ICANN elite, bummed our way from upscale Heliopolis to Gaza, to mill about before being admitted to the large tented area were we'd be wined and dined and someone would read a 40's script about the Pharohs and mighty Egypt before the lights went up on the sphinx and pyramids ... while we milled about a quintet played several pieces of chamber music. Someone I've known for years, a European, someone on the ICANN Board, came over to me and remarked how surprised he was that Egyptians were playing European chamber music.
It struck me as unsurprisingly, after all, I've known this guy for a long time, Eurocentric, and shortly he beatled off to mix and mingle with more important chat-ups and I continued to listen to the quintet, enjoying their art.
But its not the Eurocentricism that really is "teh wurst".
Its the rather absurd idea that there is anything hard in executing the European. That the string standards that form "easy listening classical", the only European music most Europeans know, are harder than the standards of the Arabic string and winds repertoire, that European Trade Goods are the peak of artistic expression.
So I was looking at Blog Them Out of the Stone Age because Mark Grimsley's made his blog a scholarly cite, an asset in the armed academic's assault on generation and record. Apropos of making bloggity blog suggestions to the Indian and Indigenous survivors of Anglo-American academia using a drupal on our hardware ...
And I saw this: “The Warrior traditions all affirm that, in addition to ..." plus another 25 words of silliness. Which leads me to this: Not only do I not "support the troops", I don't support the Sgt. Rock wash of comic book stupidity that is poured and repoured over the dumb end of the stick. We and the Russians have arsenals. We and the Chinese have arsenals. We and the Zionist Entity have arsenals. We and the European Union have arsenals. We and Pakistan and India have arsenals. Those arsenals are the only things that present existential threats to the regimes in each weapons state. The "warrior" stuff doesn't translate well from the infantry to the Navy, where ship systems are the assets, and death by fire or water in the anonymous sea is all that attends every sailor.
For most of the history of the colonial regime in Washington it has had a larger Navy than it has had an Army, and we Indians, and our co-mingled settler neighbors, err in thinking that its Army during the Indian Wars were the primary killers, and therefore, the 19th century Conquest the explaination for a non-fact, that soldiers, not civilians, were the wanton casual murders who depopulated the Indian West. This distinction between settlers and soldiers as the agents of massacres, this loss of the small, the many unmarked deaths, for the few grand historic panoramas of careless poses, creates the fiction that between the Revolution and the Civil War and 1941 that there was an Army of any historical significance, that 1776, 1861 and 1917 and 1941 are simply times of a larger Army, not complete discontinuities in a minor institution which won its wars by surrendering its insularity and becoming, briefly, popular.
The present period is unamerican. It is unlike any prior period. The "warrior tradition" is junk military science from morons who confuse counter-insurgency in Vietnam with maintaining the state of non-war with the Warsaw Pact forces, and maintaining parity between Blue and Red planners. The Army, as the center of NATO hasn't had a conventional, or fully committed CBN conflict scenario since the Warsaw Pact ended, and colonial wars in West Asia are insufficient to create a non-fictional mission, the Army in the defense of the United States.
The demand for our Army’s forces will remain high for years to come. Fully resourcing the Army to reset the force as soon as possible will increase strategic depth, decrease times units are not ready to deploy, and increase the Army’s capability to surge to meet requirements in support of the National Security Strategy in this era of persistent conflict.
Source: 2009 Army Posture Statement.
What persistent conflict? The Army is causing us nothing but problems. Not only do I not support the troops, or the political elites that use that phrase as cynically as any earlier parasitic, and eventually exterminated elites, but I do not support the Army, a half-million men and woman misused by this regime like the regime it replaced, as an ongoing institution.
May 22, 2009
Chad will run again
The Cherokee Nation District Court ruled that elected officials who have served since 2003 may run for office again.
So Chad is looking to be a two-term Principal Chief elected to office in 1999, 2003, 2007 and 2011, for a total of 1462 days in only 8 years.
Being Cherokee is a gift that keeps on giving.
Re ... witterate???
The O-bots did a better job of executing their capture-the-caucus plan in Iowa than Howie's Orange Horde the previous cycle, and I repect the O-bots competency at executing ctc plans, their Texas performance was more effective than the only remaining alternatives, which because it was the ora, included lots of people who think that rules and process matter more than outcomes, "meanies" not "endies", so they weren't as competitive in the absence of any national party caucus protection, during the caucus or later when the spoils seized were offered as legal delegates.
So we're stuck with ... an administration that's not going to "relitigate the past eight years". How witty, to create the fiction that grand accomplishments of the prior regime, appointed by a gang of corrupt lawyers after the House Republican Caucus staffers rushed the Miami-Dade recount, from Iraq-by-torture to looting-on-a-grand-scale, have already been litigated, and necessarily found to be fully consistent with whatever remains of the rule of law.
May 21, 2009
What are the symptoms of urban readiness to ... carpe netum?
So there are the top 25 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), and I'm spending today, today -1, today -2, ... and likely today +1 and today +2, ... finishing off a response to a "request for information" to any random registry, registrar, or the growth industry of "gTLD domain consultants" (the predicted pyramid ponzi scheme as people who came to the ICANN zoo with less than enough pocket depth to last out the last five years of winter, and looking now at starvation spring, having eaten their seed corn) that the largest entity within the largest MSA published for a ".NYC" ...
But what makes one MSA more likely to adopt a program to develop a TLD? To choose to find an alternative to .COM and its clones, or the local ccTLD1? Is it a muni wifi? Is it the literacy rate? What are the meaningful criteria to distinguish between Riverside–San Bernardino–Ontario, ranked 14th, and Seattle–Tacoma–Bellevue, ranked 15th?
What does it take to seize the net? A permission slip from Adelphia or Comcast or Time-Warner? A note from a open-government-is-a-joke doctor of public policy? Enough quarters to feed the Internet Advertizing Board's pervasive cookies and coke vending machine?
If you think you know the heading of a column in a spreadsheet for deciding the netability of a city, dork on the comment link and type, please.
1For these 25 urban areas, the local ccTLD operator is unfortunately the company for which I wrote the winning application back in 2001. The operator prefers a .COM clone in its properties-under-management because if it makes the .COM rich, it must be the best idea in town.
May 20, 2009
My babies ride the short bus
The boys happily bounced onto the bus this morning, our first time, and I had a placid rather than frantic run over to the other Lake schools to drop off the girls and was able to make all but the first few minutes of my 9:30am CDT (15:30pm CET) staff call to Oslo, Dortmund, Geneva, and Barcelona.
With appreciation to the blog that inspired this line.
May 18, 2009
Does anyone care what his schtick is?
So is he selling homeowner's insurance or timeshares someplace warm, and not yet underwater, or is it worse, is he selling that he can skip payments on a debt, a major debt, because ...
May 17, 2009
Slowboating Single Payer
David Plouffe, who writes for barackobama.com, sent this:
Subject: Swiftboating health careEric --
We knew healthcare reform would face fierce opposition -- and it's begun. As we speak, the same people behind the notorious "swiftboat" ads of 2004 are already pumping millions of dollars into deceptive television ads. ...
And here I thought the deceptive television ads were by the Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama campaigns during the primary season, and the DNC after one single-payer-never front for for-profit illness squeezed out the other single-payer-never front for for-profit illness, and the transition point from the Bush-Cheney state-secrets / wiretap / torture-is-lawful wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the Obama-Cheney state-secrets / wiretap / torture-is-non-prosecutable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The deception that the right-wing of the Democratic Party would deliver more than a feel-good moment, a "yes we can deliver pigment but not policy" change, and in particular ...
If not the health care that European elites allocate to their populations out of the GDP created by their populations, at least something closer to what the Anglo-Saxon elites in the UK and Canada allocate to their subjects.
Of course, Comrade David Plouffe was looking for a hand-out, because ... without it he'd be unemployed, looking at $319 a week in UI benefits and $267 in COBRA premiums1, which he would of course forgo, being a twenty-something O-bot.
There's a reason Indian Health Service is so low on the federal totem pole, it just wouldn't do if Indians got single payer while the rest of the "Rainbow Coalition", less the red stripe, is stuck with single sucker.
1A report issued on the same day that the government released its latest unemployment data shows why most laid-off people are likely to lose their health coverage: The average national premium costs for family COBRA coverage consume almost 84 percent of average unemployment benefits.
The report, issued by the consumer health organization Families USA, focuses on the unaffordability of COBRA coverage, which allows laid-off workers to retain their employer-based insurance if those laid-off workers pay the full cost of that coverage.
May 15, 2009
Google is just an app, its not (really) infrastructure
Craig Labovitz at Arbor Networks posted this. 5% of the North American traffic went away for a couple of hours yesterday, the outages list exploded, mostly with junk content.
May 13, 2009
Light blogging
For about 10 days I was monitoring an election in an occupied territory, some on-site, some from a safe international election monitoring site (that sounds so much more impressive than "I set up and ran the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association's first election on a drupal, and did some of the work from Barcelona, before the soccer match with Chelsea).
It gets worse. I joined an organization yesterday. I don't do that often. A food cooperative in Minneapolis. That suggests I'm investing in Minneapolis. Yesterday was Gracie's first day in 6th grade, and today was Kezzie's first day in 1st grade. Sam and Jonah are still at odds and ends as we wait for the Minneapolis public schools autism program to find them spots in schools with ASD programs. Then there's the house. Which one?
I spent part of the morning on work for ICANN Sydney, and part of the afternoon on ICANN process work, as ICANN re-arranges the deck chairs of the GNSO and calls it "reform". I'm sure I've forgotten something, like getting the Tsalagi localization of mediawiki ready so that tsa-la-gi can go into the ICANN IDN test and be added to the IANA root.
Hotels in Sydney are rather more expensive than hotels in Los Angeles, Paris, New Delhi, Cairo, or Mexico City, and the Travelodge wants an additional $20 per day for network access. Where do they get their business models from? Is there a market for people who are on-line, but who need hotel space when in Sydney, and only use the coin operated kiosk in the lobby for $2 per 20 minute intervals?
The Obama Health Yawn
More really exciting OBM flopped into my inbox today. Wicked exciting messaging and issue framing on health and why only some people need it. Or why we have a delete key.
Of course we knew all along that Obama and the Bots were unafraid of leaving Single Payer for the 2010 off-cycle to measure the true value of, or the 2012 primary challenger to try and make the defining issue.
1Obama Bot Mail
May 11, 2009
Cobell vs. Salazar (was C. vs Kempthorne, was C. vs Norton, was C. vs Babbitt)
Well, eff Obama and his "but we're different" campaign. He's decided that screwing to screw the Indians just as Bush (and Clinton) did.
May 08, 2009
The Syrian Sanction
The man who mistakenly signed the Syrian Sanctions Bill and who did not speak out as the Representative from Maine, the man who could allow Marines to rotor over the Syrian border and shoot farmers and day laborers, is retired from public life. Today Chellie Pingree has the option to opine on the Executive Order 13338 of May 11, 2004.
Congresswoman Pingree can either do the easy thing and go with the multiply dumb "New American Century" policy and decline to distance herself, and ourselves, from the letter of Reps. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and Eliot Engel (D-N.Y) which urge elected President Obama to renew appointed President Bush's executive order, but she does have a choice in the matter.
It is in these small things that the present is detached from, or continued from, the past. How many members of the majority in the House will support a President who does not accept instruction from Tel Aviv, in particular, from this instance of Tel Aviv -- Likud married to Russian mobsters and a generation of skinheads and xenophobes? Did we vote for change, or for continuity? Is an elected government different from one created by the storming of the Miami-Dade election offices and affirmed by a group of GOP judicial activists?
On this, it should be possible to find difference, between Maine's public servants, Chellie Pingree, and Susan Collins.
May 07, 2009
Barca v Chelsea
Barca managed to score the tying, and on the away field, winning goal in the last minute, and the fans in the bars and restaurants went wild, with men dancing on the sidewalk and men in cars honking their mad rushs up and down the streets. It went on for hours, into the early morning.
Back to our new home in Minneapolis this afternoon.
My co-workers no longer ask me about the "populist", about the "miracle", about "the Obama". I spared them the knowledge that the Obama Justice Department's position on the Individual Indian Trust issue is ... indistinguishable from the Bush Justice Department's position on the same issue, or the Clinton Justice Department's position on the same issue.
May 02, 2009
Minnesota DPS AGED rolls the dice
We were in Iowa City when the Minnesota Department of Public Safety (DPS) Alcohol and Gambling Enforcement Division (AGED) served notice to 11 national and regional telephone and Internet service providers (ISPs) that it was ordering those ISPs to filter (block access to) some 200 gaming sites. A copy of the notice letters, and the pages of websites is here (.pdf). It was a happy co-incidence, as Iowa City was our base for the Draft Gore 2008 PAC and we spent some quality time there.
The ISPs the DPS noticed are AT&T Internet Services, San Antonio; Charter Communications, St. Louis; Comcast Cable, Moorestown, N.J.; Direct TV, Los Angeles; Dish Network, Englewood., Colo.; Embarq and Sprint/Nextel, both of Overland Park, Kan.; Frontier Communications, Stamford, Conn.; Qwest, Denver; Verizon Wireless, Bedminster, N.J.; and Wildblue Communications, Greenwood Village, Colo.
The ever-feckless Declan McCullagh, who invented the "Al Gore claims he invented the Internet" fable, writes this sweet treacle in Cnet, about Pennsylvania's 2002 attempt to filter (block) some 300 sites characterized as "carrying child pornography".
One reason the law failed to survive the court challenge was because of the way the modern Web is designed. Because many Web sites can share one Internet Protocol (IP) address, blocking the IP address makes the entire list of sites inaccessible. (An expert report prepared for the trial says that out of over 20 million .com, .net, and .org domains, over two-thirds of the sites shared an IP address with at least 50 other Web sites. In many cases, Web sites shared an IP address with thousands of other sites.)
I read this to MB and then asked "What kind of sites are these? One address, on one wire, to one pizza box, for thousands of sites?" She got it in one. Ad Sense landing pages. Portfolios of typo squats and search squats serving up Google Ad Sense content and making, on average, slightly more than the $7/yr Verisign and ICANN rent, and in aggregate, slightly more than the colo cost of a pizza box with one interface and one address.
Declan the genius is aware that Apache and other HTTP servers have had support for virtual hosting (for years), but he hasn't worked out the operational details of mass virtual hosting. A lot of down-ticket Dems shared Al Gore's fate in 2000, and a lot more people, down-ticket and off-ticket, shared a lot more fate when Bush/Cheney went off the rails and started issuing torture orders to justify movement orders and start wars. Its not "the way the modern Web is designed", its how to optimize the per-click business model exploiting the sweet spot where the cost curve and revenue curve intersect at the domainer fixed cost floor.
Declan's making the case that domainers are engaging in protected speech.
I'll write a longer piece eventually, after all, those are my tax dollars at work now that MB's paid the seat deposit at Polar Law and we're Minnesotans for the next three May Days.
May 01, 2009
Open season on classified documents, no bag limit
A week ago the Likud press in the Zionist Entity (or whatever) were going gaga that their guys held all the cards.
It appears they were correct.
Its probably still espionage when its done by East Asians rather than West Asians.
Morning in Minneapolis
We made camp at Dakotah Meadows, within the Mystic Lake hotel casino complex grounds of the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community. High winds nearly sailed the kayaks off the roof of the truck at several points near the Iowa - Minnesota boundary, and when we crossed the state line at Lyle Jonah shouted excitedly "Minneapolis house!"
The Cedar was really high when we crossed it at Cedar Falls, and MB pointed out the spot where she last spoke with John Edwards, before the broken zipper surfaced, back when there was a Progressive choice.
These past days we've been driving an Indian Truck. The second hobo weld (nominally in Kentucky, but only just) on the exhaust pipe just below the passanger side exhaust manifold re-cracked before we got to the Ohio, so we've been as loud as a main battle tank. I try to feel better about the noise by reminding myself that some people pay extra to have loud pipes.
May Day 2012 will be our last (barring transfer up the law school food chain) mandatory minimum in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
House hunting, jeans gathering, chevy parts cultivation and an overdue visit to a barber for Jonah are today's agenda.