In 1962 the United States began what I believe now to be the ultimate expression of bull-headed foreign politics, namely the Cuban Trade Embargo.
It was designed to be a means to removing Castro from power, and "protecting" us from communism. Our fears were not wholly unjustified, as the Cuban Missile Crisis followed shortly thereafter. Clearly though, after forty-five years, the strategy has failed. Castro is still in power, planning to pass that power to younger, more vibrant leaders, and communism is as alive as it ever was in the tiny island nation.
More to the point, it has not only failed, but may have even strengthened Castro's position by positioning us as a scapegoat for any government failings.
We now find ourselves, lo these forty-five years later, enforcing a policy which impoverishes the people of Cuba in the name of removing a dictator who has proven immune to public criticism for the sake of retaining an image of authority and power in a world which wholeheartedly disagrees with us. This does not sound like a recipe for success!
Recently the United Nations, an organization we helped establish with the intent of providing a forum for countries to abide by a higher law than their own sovereignty, voted 184 to 4 in favour of a resolution asking the United States to cease the embargo. We refused.
It's time to stop the embargo. As a country we have a difficult time admitting failure. We believe ourselves immune to the normal pitfalls of humanity on the basis that we are somehow God's chosen country. Whether we are God's chosen country or not, we have certainly proven ourselves fallable: deadly sin number seven is pride.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
What's the problem, if you have nothing to hide?
I am a self-proclaimed privacy advocate. I don't care how much it will help fight global or even local terrorism. I don't want the government to snoop where it ought not. When people I know discover this side of me, they try to dissuade me from my privacy moral ground with phrases like "if you have nothing to hide, why are you concerned?" While it's certainly true that I have nothing to hide, I am, nevertheless, quite concerned. Now I finally have fuel to add to the fire. Those same people who criticize my views on privacy will undoubtedly find most appalling the idea that the government could be allowed to sift through their hard drives without their permission*. With great joy and satisfaction I will be able to turn them back to their own arguments. After all, if the argument holds for telephone lines, why not hard drives? If you have nothing to hide, why do you care?
* see this article, somewhat far down the page it mentions that there is nothing to stop the United States from doing this... meaning our government may have already implemented this plan!
* see this article, somewhat far down the page it mentions that there is nothing to stop the United States from doing this... meaning our government may have already implemented this plan!
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Computing women
Frequently men are known to compare the understanding of women to the most difficult problems they face. As a computer scientist, this implies that understanding women is an algorithm of exponential or even factorial time and space complexity with possibly non-deterministic results. Perhaps this is a reason why men are still blundering about finding incomplete solutions to ill-defined problems relating to the involvement of women in the computer field. Why is computing still a male dominated field? Clearly, it has some appeal to women. My wife and sisters are excellent examples of this. Yet women are still found under-represented at commencement. Are we as men discouraging them from continuing through the degree program? Are we making the field uninteresting to them through our teaching methods and/or hygiene practices? Is it possible that women are simply not interested in the field? In order to find the solution, we truly need a better conception of the problem. The truth is that we don't know what keeps women from becoming prominent and successful in our field, and until we achieve that vital problem formulation, we will never be able to make the changes that we clearly need to make. Has anyone ever thought to ask?
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Fly by.... joystick?
I managed to dig up a reasonably well sized image of the Airbus A380 cockpit today. Well, managed is probably the wrong word; Wikipedia pointed me in the right direction. At any rate, here for your enjoyment is the A380 cockpit. Notable features include the QWERTY keyboard for interfacing with the flight computer, LCD display screens, ethernet communication for the plane's components (not visible, but very much there!), and my favourite: the joysticks. Pilots naturally call them side-sticks to sound more professional, but we all know what they are.
Fly-by-wire (the technology which affords the humble joystick a place in a cockpit) is a technology that abstracts the pilot's control of the airplane from a mechanical to an electrical interface. Instead of pulling and pushing the control surfaces manually (or with the aid of hydraulics), the pilot is now sending electrical signals to servo systems. In theory, it is a technology that has been possible for as long as electrical engineers have had reasonably accurate means of measuring and setting angular position on a servo. It is certainly not a new idea, but it is one that has been slow in adoption. Its advantages include ease of use, reduced weight, modular implementation, and modular replacement.
For all the advantages of fly-by-wire, it has one glaring disadvantage: warm fuzzies. Most of us realize that electricity is sometimes less reliable than physical control in the domain of our homes and appliances. Whether this is true or not in an airplane, we extend this belief to the airplane, and we avoid boarding just because we don't have the warm fuzzy happy feeling evoked by knowing that a competent pilot has final physical control over the airplane. So strong is this feeling that airplane manufacturers have been loathed to use it on a grand scale. Even those airplanes which currently use it do so with an interface indistinguishable from more primitive airplanes.
Like it or not, the A380 is using the joystick as its fly-by-wire interface. It is in production, and the first one was delivered this week. If you are one of the many passengers who relied on the warm fuzzy feeling of physical control, you may need to supplement your flight with something else warm and fuzzy. May I suggest a teddy bear?
Fly-by-wire (the technology which affords the humble joystick a place in a cockpit) is a technology that abstracts the pilot's control of the airplane from a mechanical to an electrical interface. Instead of pulling and pushing the control surfaces manually (or with the aid of hydraulics), the pilot is now sending electrical signals to servo systems. In theory, it is a technology that has been possible for as long as electrical engineers have had reasonably accurate means of measuring and setting angular position on a servo. It is certainly not a new idea, but it is one that has been slow in adoption. Its advantages include ease of use, reduced weight, modular implementation, and modular replacement.
For all the advantages of fly-by-wire, it has one glaring disadvantage: warm fuzzies. Most of us realize that electricity is sometimes less reliable than physical control in the domain of our homes and appliances. Whether this is true or not in an airplane, we extend this belief to the airplane, and we avoid boarding just because we don't have the warm fuzzy happy feeling evoked by knowing that a competent pilot has final physical control over the airplane. So strong is this feeling that airplane manufacturers have been loathed to use it on a grand scale. Even those airplanes which currently use it do so with an interface indistinguishable from more primitive airplanes.
Like it or not, the A380 is using the joystick as its fly-by-wire interface. It is in production, and the first one was delivered this week. If you are one of the many passengers who relied on the warm fuzzy feeling of physical control, you may need to supplement your flight with something else warm and fuzzy. May I suggest a teddy bear?
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Privacy and security in the digital age
How much does your freedom cost? Most of us would say that our freedom is priceless. Most would say that freedom is our right. Most would say that nothing can take our freedom from us. Most would be wrong.
Much like the agrarian and industrial revolutions which came before, the information revolution has changed our lives. Instead of living to produce, we live to inform. We are no longer defined by what we can craft physically, but what we can craft with words, music, decision, deals, or style. Gone forever are the days of Marx's free artisan. We live now in a society driven, produced, and destroyed by knowledge.
So great is the importance of our own information that business sectors have been founded merely to protect it. We buy information and we buy protection for our information. We pay for services which do nothing but monitor our information to ensure it isn't changing without cause. We pay so that we can have information delivered to our house instantaneously through internet and cable access, something our forefathers may have scoffed at; yet we do it willingly.
There are some who believe that nothing is free. If we are blessed with quick and (mostly) accurate information, then are we cursed in some other facet? If we have been given the gift of technology that allows mothers and sons to communicate face to face over a span of hundreds of miles, have we sacrificed something in exchange? The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, father of Taoism, once said "If you would take, you must first give." We are clearly taking, what have we given?
Most commonly we have given something rather benign: time. We send encrypted messages in order to maintain informational integrity whilst traveling the internet. We willingly sacrifice the time required to encrypt and decrypt our messages. We willingly sacrifice the time required to send passwords to authentication servers. We willingly sacrifice the time needed to scan our email for viruses and filter out dangerous or invasive email.
The more cancerous of the gifts we lay on the altar of information is our privacy. We feel threatened by the ease at which hackers, terrorists, and other such villains break through the barriers we have created around our information. When we feel threatened, we turn to our government. When we turn to the government, we are doomed - as Lao Tzu wisely observed - to "give first."
September 11, 2001 was a day when our course as a nation changed. Until that day, we fought constantly to regain those privacies sacrificed to the gods of the Cold War. After that day, we gladly brought our sacrifices again to the altar in the form of the Patriot Act. Our own government bureaus responsible for protecting us now have access to any of the most personal and intimate facts they desire. On a whim and without hard evidence any citizen of the United States has the chance of being put under government scrutiny. No secret may be held inviolate, and no information may be too private. We know, but we trust. We trust in the rule of law, the respect of our peers, and common decency for a fellow member of society.
Cliff Stoll, author of The Cuckoo's Egg and instigator of the first high profile hacker chase in history, believed that the internet in its infancy was held together by trust. In some respects he believed the internet to be an extension of the society we live in. He expressed his own sadness in the breach of that trust by those seeking personal gain. If we cannot trust internet users at large to respect the bounds of normal society, can we expect it from our government?
Our rights come at a price. When the price is met, we exchange our goods and depend on trust.
How much does your freedom cost?
Much like the agrarian and industrial revolutions which came before, the information revolution has changed our lives. Instead of living to produce, we live to inform. We are no longer defined by what we can craft physically, but what we can craft with words, music, decision, deals, or style. Gone forever are the days of Marx's free artisan. We live now in a society driven, produced, and destroyed by knowledge.
So great is the importance of our own information that business sectors have been founded merely to protect it. We buy information and we buy protection for our information. We pay for services which do nothing but monitor our information to ensure it isn't changing without cause. We pay so that we can have information delivered to our house instantaneously through internet and cable access, something our forefathers may have scoffed at; yet we do it willingly.
There are some who believe that nothing is free. If we are blessed with quick and (mostly) accurate information, then are we cursed in some other facet? If we have been given the gift of technology that allows mothers and sons to communicate face to face over a span of hundreds of miles, have we sacrificed something in exchange? The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, father of Taoism, once said "If you would take, you must first give." We are clearly taking, what have we given?
Most commonly we have given something rather benign: time. We send encrypted messages in order to maintain informational integrity whilst traveling the internet. We willingly sacrifice the time required to encrypt and decrypt our messages. We willingly sacrifice the time required to send passwords to authentication servers. We willingly sacrifice the time needed to scan our email for viruses and filter out dangerous or invasive email.
The more cancerous of the gifts we lay on the altar of information is our privacy. We feel threatened by the ease at which hackers, terrorists, and other such villains break through the barriers we have created around our information. When we feel threatened, we turn to our government. When we turn to the government, we are doomed - as Lao Tzu wisely observed - to "give first."
September 11, 2001 was a day when our course as a nation changed. Until that day, we fought constantly to regain those privacies sacrificed to the gods of the Cold War. After that day, we gladly brought our sacrifices again to the altar in the form of the Patriot Act. Our own government bureaus responsible for protecting us now have access to any of the most personal and intimate facts they desire. On a whim and without hard evidence any citizen of the United States has the chance of being put under government scrutiny. No secret may be held inviolate, and no information may be too private. We know, but we trust. We trust in the rule of law, the respect of our peers, and common decency for a fellow member of society.
Cliff Stoll, author of The Cuckoo's Egg and instigator of the first high profile hacker chase in history, believed that the internet in its infancy was held together by trust. In some respects he believed the internet to be an extension of the society we live in. He expressed his own sadness in the breach of that trust by those seeking personal gain. If we cannot trust internet users at large to respect the bounds of normal society, can we expect it from our government?
Our rights come at a price. When the price is met, we exchange our goods and depend on trust.
How much does your freedom cost?
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Family history and me
What do you get when you cross genetics, politics, history, geography, and a crossword puzzle? Why, genealogy of course. Backed by the bible, and supported by the church, we as members of the church are all (even in a small way) part of the most complicated and difficult puzzle the world has ever seen; one unlikely to be solved in my lifetime.
I was bit by the genealogy bug when I was around thirteen years old. My parent bought our first IBM-compatible PC, and so we could finally run PAF. After some amount of searching, our local family history guru located a gedcom in the church's own files submitted by a relative which detailed our family's history as far back as the 1100's. (in reality it stretched back further, but of course we all know that pedigrees were bought and sold routinely back then, so the probability of true data is vanishingly small) I could never have imagine how much fun it would be to look back at the names of people long since dead and imagine how many of their traits I still carried in my own genes
Later on of course, computer evolved, I matured, and a dot matrix printout seemed old hat. I married a beautiful midwestern girl with no documented genealogy to speak of (finally my chance to do new research!). A brief stint working technical support at MyFamily.com (parent company of Genealogy.com and Ancestry.com) ingrained the bug even further, and here I am today. With software, laptop, and internet in hand I forge through old records the way earthworms break through mounds of dirt. I'm covered and surrounded, but I'm loving every second!
I was bit by the genealogy bug when I was around thirteen years old. My parent bought our first IBM-compatible PC, and so we could finally run PAF. After some amount of searching, our local family history guru located a gedcom in the church's own files submitted by a relative which detailed our family's history as far back as the 1100's. (in reality it stretched back further, but of course we all know that pedigrees were bought and sold routinely back then, so the probability of true data is vanishingly small) I could never have imagine how much fun it would be to look back at the names of people long since dead and imagine how many of their traits I still carried in my own genes
Later on of course, computer evolved, I matured, and a dot matrix printout seemed old hat. I married a beautiful midwestern girl with no documented genealogy to speak of (finally my chance to do new research!). A brief stint working technical support at MyFamily.com (parent company of Genealogy.com and Ancestry.com) ingrained the bug even further, and here I am today. With software, laptop, and internet in hand I forge through old records the way earthworms break through mounds of dirt. I'm covered and surrounded, but I'm loving every second!
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Herzlich Wilkommen Symphony!
IBM recently announced that Lotus, a primary part of IBM's Software Group, is releasing (for free) an OpenOffice based productivity suite called Symphony. For those in the know, this is a rebirth of a long-since departed Lotus brand. For those out of the know (present company included) this is a polished, well-mannered, and generally simpler OpenOffice. It's polished because, well, anything is polished by comparison to OpenOffice (before I get flamed, let me contend that OO has improved monumentally in the last five years!). It's well-mannered because by night it masquerades as Superman (or possibly just because IBM engineers like to produce quality products). It's simpler because it lacks some of the features that OpenOffice users may expect it to have. That could be a good thing, especially for that someone in your life who routinely uses about 1% of the features in Microsoft Word.
So why use Symphony? Here's my list of good reasons:
1) It's free
2) It's simpler than Office. How many of us need all those features anyway!
3) Tabbed windows in one window frame. I mean documents, spreadsheets, and presentations all cohabiting on the same window. Neat!
4) Did I mention it's free?
Download Symphony here
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