Tuesday, July 12, 2005
Random thoughts: - On ABC's This Week, Martha Raddatz made an excellent point. Instead of asking the Bush administration for a timetable for withdrawal, why not ask for a timetable for getting the Iraqi security forces (fully) up and running? Answering that won't 'encourage the insurgents', as Bush likes to put it.
- In today's New York Times op-ed about tech jobs moving to India, this line:
[Rich Western countries] can't provide huge subsidies for their agricultural conglomerates and complain when Indians who can't make a living on their farms then go to the cities and study computers and take away their jobs. Is it true that farm subsidies to red states and outfits like Archer Daniels Midland have been a significant factor in turning India to tech? (And let's not forget Europe's similar programs of farm support.) That support for retro economics at home causes emerging countries to leapfrog over activities like farming (and mining) and focus instead on higher-value jobs, like computer programming, for which there is no government support? Also, it's interesting that farm subsidies that go overwhelmingly to red states may result in third-world nations competing against the U.S. in economic areas that are largely the province of blue states.
- Our first ever agreement with New York Times columinst John Tierney, who this time is ranting against computer hackers and focuses on the creator of the Sasser worm.. We've spent literally dozens of hours disinfecting friends' computers that have been struck with Sasser, and it's a royal pain to fix. Tierney has some excellent suggestions for punishment in his penultimate paragraph:
Make the hacker spend 16 hours a day fielding help-desk inquiries in an AOL chat room for computer novices. Force him to do this with a user name at least as uncool as KoolDude and to work on a vintage IBM PC with a 2400-baud dial-up connection. Most painful of all for any geek, make him use Windows 95 for the rest of his life. Tierney forgot to include:A mouse that doesn't repond nicely. Fourteen inch monitor set to 16 colors, 640x480 pixels. 32 Meg ram. The 'heaviest' browser available (which we believe is Netscape's version 6). Memory hogging screen saver that starts after 1 minute of inactivity. Tons of worthless crap in the StartUp folder (Windows). - Supreme court resignations: Some are talking about Stephens. It's always been our understanding that he indicated he'll only leave the court 'feet first'. His health seem okay, so we're not particulary worried at the moment.
posted by Quiddity at 7/12/2005 08:19:00 AM
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It's also interesting that Republicans pursue destructive policies abroad that increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks on Blue cities. Outsourcing civil war...
I don't have hard data for argriculture but it is absolutely the case that Western subsides destroy native industries in developing countries.
If you give the author of the Sasser worm a monitor whose sense codes don't correspond to the p.c. they are using; preferably one from another country; it should randomly and without diagnosable cause crash their computer. (spend an ugly year in England with a American purchased computer and and English monitor; know the pain)
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