Gary Robinson's Rants

What a classic piece on the traitors to the Left!

I've always voted Democratic. I've always identified far more with left-wing views than right-wing views. And now despite the fact that I fear that Bush is fiscally insane and leading us all down the road to financial ruin by overspending, I may well vote for him in the coming election. Why?

This piece by Paul Berman spells it out almost miraculously well. It is an amazing piece on the real betrayers of the left. I find it difficult to even quote from it because it is all just so great, but I'll pick one point at random:

The left doesn't see because a lot of people, in their good-hearted effort to respect cultural differences, have concluded that Arabs must for inscrutable reasons of their own like to live under grotesque dictatorships and are not really capable of anything else, or won't be ready to do so for another five hundred years, and Arab liberals should be regarded as somehow inauthentic. Which is to say, a lot of people, swept along by their own high-minded principles of cultural tolerance, have ended up clinging to attitudes that can only be regarded as racist against Arabs. [Dissent]

Read the whole thing. Really.

Kerry's incredible self-contradiction

Check this out for the most extreme example of self-contradiction I have ever seen from a politician. Two letters, written to the same constitiuent, 9 days apart in 1991, claiming exact opposite positions on the Gulf War. I guess he didn't notice that he was writing to the same guy:

"Thank you for contacting me to express your opposition ... to the early use of military force by the US against Iraq. I share your concerns. On January 11, I voted in favor of a resolution that would have insisted that economic sanctions be given more time to work and against a resolution giving the president the immediate authority to go to war."

--letter from Senator John Kerry to Wallace Carter of Newton Centre, Massachusetts, dated January 22 [1991]

"Thank you very much for contacting me to express your support for the actions of President Bush in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. From the outset of the invasion, I have strongly and unequivocally supported President Bush's response to the crisis and the policy goals he has established with our military deployment in the Persian Gulf."

--Senator Kerry to Wallace Carter, January 31 [1991] [The New Republic, thanks to Andrew.]

Commentary from the article:

Will someone PLEASE put this guy out of his misery? Please?

At least I get the impression that Dean means what he says.

We have a winner

We promised a $50 iTunes gift certificate for one of the people responding to our Goombah poll, and we have one! I don't think I can reveal who it is due to privacy concerns without his permission. I'll ask. :)

Update: the winner is: Tim Meesseman. Congrats!

Oh man, the patent system is berserk.

New patent, brought to my awareness by Slashdot. Claim 1 says:

1. A method for assigning URL's and e-mail addresses to members of a group comprising the steps of:

assigning each member of said group a URL of the form "name.subdomain.domain"; and

assigning each member of said group an e-mail address of the form "name@subdomain.domain;"

wherein the "name" portion of said URL and said e-mail address is the same and unique for each particular one of said members such that an only difference between said URL and said e-mail address for said member is that in said URL the "@" symbol of the e-mail address is replaced with a "." and wherein said "subdomain" portion of said URL and said e-mail address is the same for all members of said group. [USPTO.gov]

The Slashdot commentator says:

This is nonsense. My friend who ran for political office in 2000 used this exact naming scheme for his web site. All of us here can see how asinine this is. Will our legal system?

He's right that it's nonsense. It once again shows that the PTO is completely incapable from telling what is blatantly obvious from what is not. Unfortunately his friend doesn't count as prior art, since the patent was filed for in 1999.

It does seem quite likely that some prior art will show up. But really, as a matter of principle, this should be overturned based on obviousness alone. Otherwise it is really scary -- it means that the courts are also incapable of distinguishing the obvious from the nonobvious. And if that is the case, the patent system will unavoidably do more harm than good, because it is not fulfilling its reason for existence: reward those who come up with truly novel ideas for the work it takes to come up with them and to make them known to the world (and freely available to the world 20 years later) through patents. How can it do that, if it can't distinguish what is novel? It can't, period.

Goombah in the press

Goombah just got a fair amount of page space in The Independent (a U.K. newspaper). It's based on a response I sent to some questions from the reporter, Charles Arthur, who has a technology column there. Thanks, Charles! We appreciate it! :)

News update re Goombah: here at Transpose, through most of January we've been heavily involved in matters relating to our NSF grant, which we have successfully finalized. That slowed down Goombah development considerably.

However, we are now free and clear to concentrate fully on it again, and you can expect things to be progressing fairly rapidly. We're really excited about the potential, obviously, or we wouldn't be doing it. Stay tuned!

The Jobless Recovery

A fascinating article from the Washington Post on the "jobless recovery" (hat tip to Andrew Sullivan). I personally don't feel I have any real understanding of the implications of the offshoring of jobs to countries like India (which is happening a lot recently in my own profession, software), except that it seems very worrying because we need jobs here and they're going there.

The Democratic party is, of course, playing this up as much as they can and blaming Republicans in general and Bush in particular. This blaming has always seemed very suspect to me, because to me it's seemed obvious that it's the Internet and ongoing increases in voice communications capability that are enabling programming jobs and call centers to be moved offshore, not Bush's, or anyone's, politics. For instance, my company is very "virtual" and distributed in a way that wouldn't have been easy to do fifteen years ago. One of the three people involved in the early days of this company lived and worked in Canada all that time, because he was the person we wanted for the job, and that's where he lived. The other two founders are 120 miles apart in Maine and have needed to get together physically infrequently enough that it arguably wouldn't make a huge difference if one of us was in Mexico. We use the Internet to exchange data, email and IM's much as we probably would if we were across the hall rather than across the state. We use an Internet-based phone service with a only-slightly-nonzero flat monthly fee. It's not only possible, but very easy and inexpensive to work in this distributed way. Does this have anything whatsoever to do with Republicans or George W. Bush, or Clinton for that matter? Obviously not.

Still, of course, it's worrisome because if those jobs are outside of the country, that money is going outside of the country, and that has to hurt everyone in the U.S. (particularly those who lost their jobs!)... right?

The Washington Post story says:

This is not the first jobless recovery. In 1991-92 the economy grew steadily, but job growth was almost nil. The reason for such recoveries, as a study by the New York Fed argues, is that the structure of the economy is changing faster than previously. In the 1970s and '80s, unemployment was roughly 50 percent "cyclical": Recessions drove firms to lay off workers and recoveries drove them to hire workers back into the same jobs. Now, by contrast, the "structural" component of unemployment accounts for most job losses: Technological and organizational shifts are driving firms to close jobs down permanently, and laid-off workers are having to look for entirely new work. That takes time. Firms have to create jobs they never had before, which takes longer than re-creating old ones. As a result, the new structural nature of unemployment means that job creation lags in the early stages of a recovery.

...

the bigger question is whether jobless recoveries are a bad thing. They are, after all, the flip side of good news. There is less cyclical unemployment these days, so recessions are milder; fewer jobs are being created now because fewer jobs were destroyed during the downturn. Moreover, a jobless recovery means, by definition, that each worker is producing more. Higher productivity, in turn, is the best promise possible of higher wages and employment in the future. Just look at the past decade: The jobless recovery of 1991-92 ushered in the longest economic expansion of the postwar period, which drove unemployment down to previously unheard-of levels, and fueled improvements in poverty, crime and other social indicators.

If you're curious about this issue and what it means, it's well worth reading the entire article, which has a lot of interesting things to say.

The argument it makes is that, in effect, the U.S. has a system whereby sometimes many jobs are lost because of improvements in technology, but a little bit down the line new, better jobs tend to be created. Sort of like Adam Smith's "invisible hand". According to this view, it's a good that automatically emerges from the overall process.

Maybe it's true, maybe not. I really don't know. But historically there seems to be real evidence that there is at least a significant amount of truth in it. (Just as there is much, but not total, truth in the "invisible hand" thesis.)

One thing for sure: as a country, it would take guts to "stay the course" in the face of this offshoring, give up the jobs in the short-term, and trust that it will all work out for the best in the end.

Hewlett-Packard: No WMA for IPod

Contrary to reports, Hewlett-Packard will not be supporting Microsoft's Windows Media Audio format in its forthcoming HP-branded iPod. [Wired]

This looks like a fairly reliable report.

Bar code patents thrown out

A rare case of justice:

A federal district court judge invalidated patents on bar code products--in a victory over one of the technology's most prolific patent collectors.

Philip Pro, chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Las Vegas, on Jan. 23 ruled against defendant the Lemelson Medical, Education & Research Foundation, calling the claims of 14 of its patents--some of which dated from the 1950s--invalid and unenforceable. [News.com]

Too many files in Spirit?

Nasa scientists say hundreds of computer files that have accumulated on the Mars rover Spirit may be the cause of problems that have crippled it. [BBC News]

Well, I won't claim I've never been involved in computer systems that had a problem due to running out of disk space... :) Still, for the money they've spent on the development of these rovers, one would think they would have the resources to test for this kind of thing in advance.

Let's hope "too many files" is the problem, because that really has a decent chance of being fixable from the ground.

Mars Rover's lack of pre-flight testing

Prior to its troubles on Mars, Spirit was being put through its paces -- doing things that were not tested with as much vigor here at JPL before being launched.

Spirit does not have a huge track record of testing, a source said, for fear of damaging the robot and not meeting an unforgiving launch window.[Space.com]

OK, let me get this straight. They were afraid that the operations they planned to do on Mars might lead to "damaging the robot." So they don't test them, and just sent the thing straight to Mars.

Does anyone else see a problem in reasoning there? I mean, there really was, as far as I know, very little that has happened on Mars that was strange or unexpected (like falling off a 5-foot cliff or something). All the rover really did was roll off the lander and roll to a rock, and then test it with its instruments. And we're saying that Nasa thought that testing such operations in a realistic way might "damage" the robot?

Suppose it was true that doing those operations would damage the robot. Does it make sense to wait until the robot is on Mars, where no human hands are available to fix it, to find that out? Or would it make more sense to find that out here on Earth?

If they didn't have time to do that kind of testing (and the subsequent repairing of any problems that emerged) somebody is guilty of some really poor planning.