Erdos Had The Number First

I found two things cleaning out that box, a cigarette case and a library card from college. It’s funny what looking at this old stuff will do to your head. Or maybe it was last night’s pizza but
I woke up at 4:30 to a vomitting cat (that little bugger’s been eating plastic again) and I couldn’t get back to sleep.

Which was probably for the best since I’d been awakened from dream about Mastadons. I figure that there are few things worse than dreaming of long-extinct animals, especially mastadons. Especially Mastadons.

Mastadons, as you may know, are native to the midwest. Now that I’m living in the Atlantic region, I suspect that dreaming about extinct midwestern elephants is probably a bad sign.

Either that or I’ve been listing to Cake a bit too much.

With this is sounds like Apple Computer is about to enter the living room fray. Think Secret – Road to Expo: Reborn Mac mini set to take over the living room

They will join (somewhat belatedly) the rest of the computer and media world (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, D-Link, everybody else) in trying to put computer stuff in the living room. TVs were definitely mature tech until the flat panel came along and changed things (albeit for now).

But does The Steve really want to try to compete in this space? Look at First Mover extraordinaire and their BubbleIscious stock chart. They’re dying fer Pete’s sake and they are the master of the Tube right now.

Given the fact that content producers (as TV stations like to think of themselves) are pushing all kinds of DRM and stuff to block the kinds of tech that Apple et. al. seem to want to push, I don’t think this is a wise business move for them.

No Road Trips for Toyota’s i-unit

I’ve been researching this. It looks like the price point they are going for is near the $10,000 range. Holy crap, I say. If they could sell this for half of that, it would sell like there’s no tomorrow. Even with the 30 minute running time. I also looks like this would be a great candidate for a very small hybrid powerplant. That would fix the run-time issue. I think this thing is way better than the segway, if for no other reason that it looks more stable.

Space Raiders (1983)

One of the worst movies ever made. If you get a chance you’ve got to see this film. I remember seeing this movie, since I saw it when it came out (or shortly thereafter). I was about 10, and the movie was about a 10 year old who was kidnapped by aliens and had a wild adventure.

What 10 year old doesn’t want to get kidnapped by aliens? The only concern I have is that this movie, like Ice Pirates, does not hold its magic when viewed as an adult. I suspect some stories are better remembered than retold.

Welcome to the office of Congressman Nathan Deal, representing Georgia’s 10th Congressional District in the United States House of Representatives.

“By granting the child citizenship, that child then is able, down the road, as he becomes an adult, to legally make the parents citizens of this country as well,” said Rep. Nathan Deal, R-Ga.

It should not surprise anyone that Congressman Deal has a solid grasp of the

14th amendment.

What is surprising, however, is that he would then propose legislation that is so constitutionally problematic. The problem seems to stem from the line “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”. Cong. Deal seems to indicate (at least to
FOX News) that there
is a Strict Constructionist approach that can really help our Nation with its Illegal Immigrant problem.

“If you look at the original debate of that amendment in the Congress, it was obviously not intended to give carte blanche birthright citizenship to anyone who happened to be born on American soil,” Deal said.

Now here’s the thing: It says quite clearly that all persons born on U.S. soil are citizens. It’s in the first sentence. When the 14th amendment was passed the modern idea of illegal immigrants was not something they were dealing with. The jurisdiction line in the amendment allows people who are not US citizens to not have their children made U.S. citizens if they don’t want them to be. It also allows somewhat sticky problems of tourists and visitors to not have to worry about the U.S.A appropriating their children.

Illegal immigrants are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S.A. and while their parents nation may still have a claim to them they may not. This law could have some interesting ramifications for refugees and others of questionable legal status within the U.S. It also opens the door for revocation of citizenship for these “Anchor Children”. I suspect that Cong. Deal is simply looking for a way to make his constituents happy and has found a group that is pretty much defenseless and that no-one in their right mind would spend political capital to defend. The problem with Illegal immigration is much like the problem with drugs: there is still a substantial economic incentive for it.

Legislation will not change the economic realities that are there. Neither will enforcement unless enforcement can be made 100% and nearly instantaneous. If these jokers really wanted to do something about illegal immigrants, they should simply make it the penalty for hiring an illegal immigrant the loss of
charter. I can guarantee you that if those who hired illegal immigrants faced the loss of their corporate charter that background checks would suddenly become the norm and the economic incentive of coming to the U.S. would evaporate like a morning fog.

Footnote: I realize that it is somewhat ironic in these times of “Activist Judges” to note that it was the Supreme Court in 1886 (see the Charter link above) that made corporations into people in the first place, complicating a “death penalty” proposition like I make. It is, however, well within legislative power to make a law like this, especially given the commerce clause to make such laws given the evident inter-state nature of immigration policy.

Getting Skittish About Skype

CAMPUS PARIAH
Some organizations are clamping down. Pharmaceutical giant Novartis (NVS ) in Basel, Switzerland, doesn’t let employees use Skype. Neither do Goldman Sachs (GS ) and German chemicals giant Degussa. A growing number of schools ban the technology, including Oxford University, the University of Texas, and the University of Minnesota. In September the French government recommended research personnel at universities and government labs avoid using Skype.

Ok, first pharma is a paranoid monster. They don’t let their employees use many of the instant messaging tools available.

Goldman, thanks to rule 17-4a (SEC) can’t let them use it either, because they can’t record it and store it on WORM drives for 7 years.

The fact that the French and Schools have banned skype has everything to do with economics and NOTHING to do with Skype. France Telecom has always been terrified of VOIP because they will lose their precious (and profitable) monopoly on phone services. The same with schools. Universities in the US
have a long tradition of making a boat-load of money on Long distance charging. Now, thanks to cell phones and VOIP, their cash cow is pretty lean. They’re not going to take that loss of revenue lying down.

Basically, this article is pretty much a shill for Cisco, Avaya, and SBC. “oooohh skype is insecure, don’t use it or someone could intercept it. No kidding? The same is true of ALL electronic communication. Risk is a continuum, just try to understand that Business Week.

5) A larger subscriber base gives Netflix more power to become HBO-like with content acquisition and production.

from Fool.com: Netflix [Post of the Day] November 22, 2005

Wow, it’s a great idea, but really? I mean, come on, HBO is able to do this because production costs are lower for them at the outset. They do not have to distribute their content on DVDs if they don’t want to.

But NetFlix would have to do a DVD release, and they would want to sell it, too. Region encoding would allow them to do international releases without it comming back to US markets but the important question here is WHY?

Netflix is not a content producer. They, like Amazon, are a logistics powerhouse. All of the New Companies are really just logistics masters. Amazon would not benefit from being a publisher of books. It’s not their thing. It’s not Netflix’s thing either.

Netflix isn’t HBO and they should not try to be. They ship movies. Focus, Nextflix, focus.

I love docbook. I used to be a Lout user. But then, bowing to peer pressure, I went back to LaTeX and was happy for a long time. LaTeX had much to offer, and my reports were typeset well. The problem was that LaTeX made certain things harder than it should, and it’s PDF output left something to be desired. And, well lets face, I was young and LaTeX was old. (this is as funny as I get, you know).

Then I found DocBook. A buddy of mine had been using it for a while, and he talked about how great SGML was, and how much you could do with it.

So I gave it a try. At first, things were slow going. I was a SuSE user, and setting up a working SGML environment was not as easy as it was under Debian. I also worked a lot in Windows, and getting a working SGML environment in Windows was a trial for a neophyte such as me.

So I switched to Debian, and the XML dtd’s came around and the rest is history. It’s great. There is a fantastic book by Bob Stayton that shows you how to do an aweful lot of great things with XSL and docbook.

The only problem I have with docbook is that it is SO G*&!%AMN HARD to create rtf documents. I have people I work with you will only accept word documents, and word documents with a certain template. I’ve tried commercial products, I’ve tried a lot of stuff. What I have to do now is

1. Process document with Openjade (but only if it doesn’t have XIncludes, which I use)
2. Hand edit the produced rtf document in word so that it works

I know there is a way to do what I want, the thing I fear is that I might have to learn RTF to accomplish it. Or may buy FrameMaker .

CNN.com – Post editor: Woodward ‘made a mistake’ – Nov 16, 2005

You can bet that the press will fall on Mr. Woodward like vultures. The Post has been pointing fingers at the other journalists on the playground for a while about the
whole Plame-gate thing, and now the others have something on Mr. Goody-two-shoes Woodward.

Or do they? Woodward didn’t tell anybody about the conversation. He didn’t write a story about the CIA out of it. When the grand jury asked, he told them what he knew. That all sounds like what you are supposed to do with confidential sources that may or may not be newsworthy. I think that the Wolf-man has forgotten that having a classified operatives name doesn’t make it a story. The story here is that someone destroyed the career of a CIA agent because her husband said some things that powerful people didn’t like. The story here is that the NYT helped them do it.

Bob Woodward didn’t. You go Bob.

I hate to say it, but I think this (MIT suffers hubris over $100 PC idea) guy may have a valid point. I’m not sure that giving laptops to people is a good solution, just in general. I think what india has done with their satalight
system may be a better use of resources. Computing resources can be centralized, and lightweight computer equipment could even be run using the TV as a monitor.

One of the real problems is that this technology isn’t robust enough yet. They are talking about deploying it in regions that may not even have access to paper and pencil, let alone the tech required to connect one of these laptops up to a functioning network.