CRN (Macpherson, “Safety first for IT executives in China,” 16 Sep ’09) quotes Mark Bregman, Symantec’s CTO:
“I don't let my IT department near my laptop.”
Also noteworthy: “I was advised by people in three-letter agencies in the US Government to weigh the machine before I left and when I got back [from China].”
(Q: What do you call it when you have a bunch of screws left over after you reassemble your laptop? A: Optimized.)
...and here it is, at least according to Getty Images:
WASHINGTON—FEBRUARY 24: A military aide carries the nuclear football, with the nation's nuclear launch codes, through Statuary Hall as President Barack Obama arrives at the U.S. Capitol for his address to a joint session of Congress on February 24, 2009 in Washington, DC. U.S. President Barack Obama will address a joint session of the Congress at 9:01pm tonight where he plans to address the topics of the struggling U.S. economy, the budget deficit, and health care. Getty Images
Scuffed, with one of those irritating luggage locks—the first line of defense.
(cryptome)
Kaplan, “Hunting the Taliban in Las Vegas,” theatlantic.com (Sep ’06):
But the Predator, especially as it is improved, may also interfere with decision making. As one pilot told me: “No general will want to attack something without visual confirmation from a Predator. It’s the old story—by the time you have all the evidence, it’s too late to affect the outcome.” Rather than expanding the opportunities for operations, the Predator could end up restricting them, even as we fight enemies who have no compunction about waging total war.
Moskos, Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, ’08):
Car patrol eliminated the neighborhood police officer. Police were pulled off neighborhood beats to fill cars. But motorized patrol—the cornerstone of urban policing—has no effect on crime rates, victimization, or public satisfaction. Lawrence Sherman was an early critic of telephone dispatch and motorized patrol, noted, “The rise of telephone dispatch transformed both the method and purpose of patrol. Instead of watching to prevent crime, motorized police patrol became a process of merely waiting to respond to crime.” [p. 93]
(Moskos via marginal revolution)
...and now my dreams have come true!”
The NYT covers the hype about a new digital device, a letter-size grayscale screen, but omits key words such as “hard” or ”stiff” in lieu of the more flexible term “flexible.” Apparently unaware that the hardcopy NYT has been printed in color for over a decade (since 16 Oct ’97), the NYT reports that the device‘s grayscale display capacity “mimics the look—but not the feel—of a printed newspaper.” No word yet on whether the device’s resolution will allow it to display engravings, use an eight-column design, or make a big deal about running factually incorrect headline in italics (1, 2, 3, infinity).
Somewhere in the mists of time, an NYT poobah dismissed USA Today along these lines: At last it’s come full circle: television you can wrap your fish in. A spokespage for Google was contacted but would not confirm the comment.
(BB)
Good news:
Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:03:50 -0700
From: vim@duncan.cx
Subject: States throw out costly electronic voting machinesThe demise of touch-screen voting has produced a graveyard of expensive corpses: Warehouses stacked with thousands of carefully wrapped voting machines that have been shelved because of doubts about vanishing votes and vulnerability to hackers.
What to do with this high-tech junkyard is a multimillion-dollar question. One manufacturer offered $1 a piece to take back its ATM-like machines.
Bad news:
Some states are offering the devices for sale on eBay and craigslist. Others hope to sell their inventories to Third-World countries
Good news:
or salvage them for scrap.
(Risks)
On 29 Apr ’08, the Seattle Times ran a story about Microsoft’s “COFEE,” or Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, a special-purpose USB device “that was quietly distributed to a handful of law-enforcement agencies” the previous summer and, a day before the story ran, “described ... to the 350 law-enforcement experts” at an MS-sponsored conf. According to Cnet, attendees came from “more than 80 agencies in 35 countries,” including the USAF. The basic idea is that COFEE includes 150 standard software forensics tools to allow officials—“on raids,” naturally, never any other time or place, right?—to gather various kinds of data from MSish systems:
For instance, attendees will learn how to pull evidence off PDAs running Windows CE and how to gather evidence from Microsoft's online services and products like Hotmail and Windows, says Aaron Kornblum, a senior attorney for Microsoft's Internet Safety Enforcement Team.
“If there is one central focus” of the three-day “LEtech” event (with the usual orthographic variations: “LE tech,” etc), MS’s SVP/GC Brad Smith said, it was “what the Web 2.0 phenomenon means for criminal activity on the Internet. Certainly from our perspective it is leading to new forms of criminal activity.”
That’s the title of a paper delivered at Appropriate Healthcare Technologies for Developing Countries 2008 (program here) by Michael Dobson MRCP, FRCA, University of Oxford, UK, Robert Neighbour C.Eng, F.I.E.T., Diamedica Ltd, UK.
Abstract: The anaesthetic standards committees of the ISO are dominated by representatives from equipment manufacturers. The standards produced are such that their main effect is to drive sales of complex equipment in rich countries. Most of the committee members are ignorant of the needs and specifications required by developing countries. Developing countries are not represented, their needs are ignored, and most new equipment meeting ISO standard fails to perform in the harsher environment where technical infrastructure is lacking.
The presentation slides (pdf, 320k) are here.
Thanks to M.E., who (rightly) said: Best academic title ever. It’s also true and a general problem, that is, not at all specific to anaesthetic equipment or the ISO.
Compare Tyler Cowen’s “Gridlock Economy.” (With one proviso. He writes: “I learned that The New York Times used eminent domain to build its new headquarters because otherwise assembling such a large parcel of land in midtown Manhattan was very difficult.” Sure, but of course the more relevant point is: they used it because they could. Cowen “currently writes the ‘Economic Scene’ column for the New York Times.” NYT’s coverage of NYC real estate is distorted, incoherent, and self-serving to the point of corruption. It’s a shame to see Cowen blunder into that mess; but for a guy who gets his jollies from counterintuitive analyses, such a credulous remark is, as Clark Clifford put it, either venal or stupid.)
Title: Fairchild/Silicon Valley Genealogy Chart
Author: Don Hoefler, Harry Smallwood, and James E. Vincler
Created: 1977
Publisher: SEMI
Donated By: James E. Vincler
Filename: doc-45ff3e214d9ea.pdf (Size: 656 KB)
Pages: 1
Description: The first published version of the Silicon Valley Genealogy chart that traced the lineage of 66 semiconductor companies founded between 1959 and 1976 back to Fairchild was prepared as part of the The Semicon/West '77 Souvenir Banquet Program honoring Drs. Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley on the 30th anniversary of the discovery of the transistor. It was subsequently updated and reprinted at least twice by SEMI.
OLPC mesh networking + Windows XP? Oh dear.
Groklaw asks: “What are you doing to those children?” C|net’s Matt Asay expands:
OLPC is rather about liberating developing nations from their vassal status that continually keeps them at the mercy of the pricing and licensing of Microsoft and other proprietary vendors. By building on Windows, Negroponte cuts his vision off at the knees, stultifying its potential to benefit children in developing nations.
Stirring words. My own suspicion was that OLPC was also about, among other things, creating artificial markets to help vendors build up production capacity of hardware that wouldn’t neatly fit into existing niches or strata (e.g., hi-res screens too small for laptops but too big for phones).
Darn those meddling open-source kids:
[T]he Sugar graphical user interface aimed at children “grew amorphously” and “didn’t have a software architect who did it in a crisp way,” he said. Also, the laptops don’t support the latest versions of Flash animation, which is widely used on children’s and educational Web sites.
He said the laptop’s open-source software had actually scared away potential adopters.
They even have the temerity to argue back:
If Sugar is a problem, Negroponte has no one but himself to blame, Krstić said. “Nicholas’ recent claim of Sugar growing amorphously because it ‘didn’t have a software architect who did it in a crisp way’ is similarly muddy: convincing him of the need for an architect is a battle Walter and I fought for months without success,” Krstić wrote.
They should (PC World) “stop bickering, unite and jointly develop a Windows user interface.”
RMS: “OLPC has not structured its development so as to reach out to the community for help.”