Flexible Reality
Saturday, May 08, 2004
Sasser Worm Suspect Confesses to German Police
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=5080508&src=rss/topNews§ion=news
HANOVER, Germany (Reuters) - German police have arrested an 18-year-old man suspected of creating the "Sasser" computer worm, believed to be one of the Internet's most costly outbreaks of sabotage.
The Value of Feedback on eBay for PowerSellers
On May 7th, 2004 -Richard @ Bizmart wrote to eBay PowerSellers Help saying:Original Message: How can one enter negative feedback on a transaction that
warrants it, without being subject to an undeserved retributory posting?
It says 90 days is the end of the feedback 'cycle', so I waited until 3
minutes before the end of 90 days to post negative feedback on a
dishonest Seller. Lo and behold, 90 days and one hour later the listing
is still accessible, and they can probably still flame me in
retribution. How can one honestly enter negative feedback without being
subject to retribution? Does the 90 day expiration mean midnight PST? or
what? Without this being an option, what Seller in their right mind
would post negative feedback about a Buyer? Especially if they are a
PowerSeller? 99.x% of my transactions are excellent; but there is always
that 0.x% that causes the problem. I will leave N/FB but only if I don't
have to be concerned about that Yo-Yo saying negative things about me,
especially when they are not warranted.
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Thank you for writing. I will be happy to help.
...
This reply was useful for new users and for general purposes; however it does not offer any solution to the problem, nor provide a good reason why feedback cannot, and does not end after a certain, definite time. Again, no reasonable PowerSeller will post negative feedback about a Buyer because of the time, effort, cost involved and the probability of retaliatory responses.
Of what use then is the mention of a 90 day time frame? An approximation? Bidding, Buying, Paying eBay fees, etc, are all not approximations...they are definite, precise, limited. Why not do the same thing with Feedback?
Again, stating that the time frame for close of feedback functions on an auction are not definite.
http://pages.ebay.com/help/confidence/problems-dispute-resolution.html
Square Trade has proven to be helpful only if the other party is willing to be rational or abide by neutral arbitration, and it costs $10-$20 directly, plus about an hour of time to file a claim. Many sales are not worth the effort it requires to file such claims, nor do I suspect that SquareTrade has achieved a high order of satisfactory arbitrations, whereby the PowerSeller chooses to repeat the effort on a later case.
Please pass this up the chain of command to suggest valid reasons for making the feedback timeline definite.
Thanks,
Richard @ Bizmarts
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Friday, May 07, 2004
Brain Cramps
Question: If you could live forever, would you and why?
Answer: "I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever,"
-- Miss Alabama in the 1994 Miss U.S.A. contest.
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"Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean I'd love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff."
-- Mariah Carey, singer
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"Smoking kills. If you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life,"
-- Brooke Shields, during an interview to become Spokesperson for the Federal Anti-smoking Campaign.
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"I've never had major knee surgery on any other part of my body,"
-- Winston Bennett, University of Kentucky Basketball Forward.
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"Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country,"
-- Marion Barry, Mayor of Washington, D.C.
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"I'm not going to have some reporters pawing through our papers. We are the President."
-- Hillary Clinton commenting on the release of subpoenaed documents.
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"That lowdown scoundrel deserves to be kicked to death by a jackass, and I'm just the one to do it,"
-- A U.S. congressional candidate in Texas.
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"Half this game is ninety percent mental."
-- Danny Ozark, manager of Philadelphia Phillies
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"It isn't pollution that's harming the environment.. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it."
-- former U.S. Vice President Al Gore
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"I love California. I practically grew up in Phoenix."
-- former U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle
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"We've got to pause and ask ourselves: How much clean air do we need?"
-- former president of American Motors, Lee Iacocca
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"The word "genius" isn't applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein."
-- Joe Theisman, NFL football quarterback &sports analyst.
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"We don't necessarily discriminate. We simply exclude certain types of people."
-- Colonel Gerald Wellman, ROTC Instructor.
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"If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure."
-- former U.S.. President Bill Clinton,
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"We are ready for an unforeseen event that may or may not occur."
-- former U.S. Vice President Al Gore
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"Traditionally, most of Australia's imports come from overseas."
-- Keppel Enderbery
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"Your food stamps will be stopped effective March 1992, because we received notice that you passed away. May God bless you. You may reapply if there is a change in your circumstances."
-- State Department of Social Services, Greenville, South Carolina
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"If somebody has a bad heart, they can plug this jack in at night as they go to bed and it will monitor their heart throughout the night. And the next morning, when they wake up dead, there'll be a record."
-- Mark S. Fowler, former Federal Communications Commission Chairman
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The Oil Crunch
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Op-Ed
Published: May 7, 2004
Before the start of the Iraq war his media empire did so much to promote, Rupert Murdoch explained the payoff: "The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil." Crude oil prices in New York rose to almost $40 a barrel yesterday, a 13-year high.
Those who expected big economic benefits from the war were, of course, utterly wrong about how things would go in Iraq. But the disastrous occupation is only part of the reason that oil is getting more expensive; the other, which will last even if we somehow find a way out of the quagmire, is the intensifying competition for a limited world oil supply.
Thanks to the mess in Iraq — including a continuing campaign of sabotage against oil pipelines — oil exports have yet to recover to their prewar level, let alone supply the millions of extra barrels each day the optimists imagined. And the fallout from the war has spooked the markets, which now fear terrorist attacks on oil installations in Saudi Arabia, and are starting to worry about radicalization throughout the Middle East. (It has been interesting to watch people who lauded George Bush's leadership in the war on terror come to the belated realization that Mr. Bush has given Osama bin Laden exactly what he wanted.)
Even if things had gone well, however, Iraq couldn't have given us cheap oil for more than a couple of years at most, because the United States and other advanced countries are now competing for oil with the surging economies of Asia.
Oil is a resource in finite supply; no major oil fields have been found since 1976, and experts suspect that there are no more to find. Some analysts argue that world production is already at or near its peak, although most say that technological progress, which allows the further exploitation of known sources like the Canadian tar sands, will allow output to rise for another decade or two. But the date of the physical peak in production isn't the really crucial question.
The question, instead, is when the trend in oil prices will turn decisively upward. That upward turn is inevitable as a growing world economy confronts a resource in limited supply. But when will it happen? Maybe it already has.
I know, of course, that such predictions have been made before, during the energy crisis of the 1970's. But the end of that crisis has been widely misunderstood: prices went down not because the world found new sources of oil, but because it found ways to make do with less.
During the 1980's, oil consumption dropped around the world as the delayed effects of the energy crisis led to the use of more fuel-efficient cars, better insulation in homes and so on. Although economic growth led to a gradual recovery, as late as 1993 world oil consumption was only slightly higher than it had been in 1979. In the United States, oil consumption didn't regain its 1979 level until 1997.
Since then, however, world demand has grown rapidly: the daily world consumption of oil is 12 million barrels higher than it was a decade ago, roughly equal to the combined production of Saudi Arabia and Iran. It turns out that America's love affair with gas guzzlers, shortsighted as it is, is not the main culprit: the big increases in demand have come from booming developing countries. China, in particular, still consumes only 8 percent of the world's oil — but it accounted for 37 percent of the growth in world oil consumption over the last four years.
The collision between rapidly growing world demand and a limited world supply is the reason why the oil market is so vulnerable to jitters. Maybe we'll get through this bad patch, and oil will fall back toward $30 a barrel. But if that happens, it will be only a temporary respite.
In a way it's ironic. Lately we've been hearing a lot about competition from Chinese manufacturing and Indian call centers. But a different kind of competition — the scramble for oil and other resources — poses a much bigger threat to our prosperity.
So what should we be doing? Here's a hint: We can neither drill nor conquer our way out of the problem. Whatever we do, oil prices are going up. What we have to do is adapt.
More Incredible News!
U.S. Rules Morning-After Pill Can't Be Sold Over the CounterBy GARDINER HARRIS
NY Times
Published: May 7, 2004
Federal drug regulators yesterday rejected a drug maker's application to sell a morning-after pill over the counter because of concerns about whether young girls would be able to use it safely.
The Food and Drug Administration told the pill's maker, Barr Pharmaceuticals, that before the drug could be sold without a prescription the company must either find a way to prevent young teenagers from getting it from store shelves or prove, in a new study, that young girls can understand how to use it without the help of a doctor.
Company executives expressed confidence that they could clear those hurdles, although it was unclear how long that would take. The decision was a surprise because in December, a panel of independent experts assembled by the Food and Drug Administration voted 23 to 4 to recommend that the drug be sold over the counter. The majority concluded that the drug was not only effective but that women could be trusted to use it correctly without a doctor. The Food and Drug Administration normally follows the recommendation of its advisory panels.
The drug, called Plan B, is presently available only by prescription. But Barr's application to sell the medicine without a prescription has been embroiled in a controversy that has now spilled into the presidential campaign. Advocates say that making the pill more broadly available will prevent unwanted pregnancies while opponents say it will encourage promiscuity and risky sex.
"By overruling a recommendation by an independent F.D.A. review board, the White House is putting its own political interests ahead of sound medical policies that have broad support," said Phil Singer, a spokesman for Senator John Kerry's presidential campaign. "This White House is more interested in appealing to its electoral base than it is in protecting women's health." Plan B consists of two high-dose birth control pills that either interfere with ovulation or prevent implantation of a fertilized egg. It can be taken up 72 hours after unprotected sexual intercourse and may prevent up to 89 percent of unplanned pregnancies.
James Trussell, director of the office of population research at Princeton University and a member of the advisory board, said that the agency never raised the issue of label comprehension among young teenagers when it approved other products to be sold over the counter. "The White House has now taken over the F.D.A.," Mr. Trussell said.
In some European countries, drugs are offered by prescription, over the counter and behind the counter. For the latter, patients must discuss the drug's purchase with a pharmacist but need not get a doctor's prescription. In the United States, there is no widespread "behind the counter" system of drug delivery. And it is not clear that federal drug regulators have the authority to construct or approve one.
Thursday, May 06, 2004
Time for Bush to See The Realities of Iraq
By George F. Will
Washington Post
Tuesday, May 4, 2004; Page A25
Oh? Who?
Appearing Friday in the Rose Garden with Canada's prime minister, President Bush was answering a reporter's question about Canada's role in Iraq when suddenly he swerved into this extraneous thought:
"There's a lot of people in the world who don't believe that people whose skin color may not be the same as ours can be free and self-govern. I reject that. I reject that strongly. I believe that people who practice the Muslim faith can self-govern. I believe that people whose skins aren't necessarily -- are a different color than white can self-govern."
What does such careless talk say about the mind of this administration? Note that the clearly implied antecedent of the pronoun "ours" is "Americans." So the president seemed to be saying that white is, and brown is not, the color of Americans' skin. He does not mean that. But that is the sort of swamp one wanders into when trying to deflect doubts about policy by caricaturing and discrediting the doubters.
Scott McClellan, the president's press secretary, later said the president meant only that "there are some in the world that think that some people can't be free" or "can't live in freedom." The president meant that "some Middle Eastern countries -- that the people in those Middle Eastern countries cannot be free."
Perhaps that, which is problematic enough, is what the president meant. But what he suggested was: Some persons -- perhaps many persons; no names being named, the smear remained tantalizingly vague -- doubt his nation-building project because they are racists.
That is one way to respond to questions about the wisdom of thinking America can transform the entire Middle East by constructing a liberal democracy in Iraq. But if any Americans want to be governed by politicians who short-circuit complex discussions by recklessly imputing racism to those who differ with them, such Americans do not usually turn to the Republican choice in our two-party system.
This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think and, having thought, to have second thoughts. Thinking is not the reiteration of bromides about how "all people yearn to live in freedom" (McClellan). And about how it is "cultural condescension" to doubt that some cultures have the requisite aptitudes for democracy (Bush). And about how it is a "myth" that "our attachment to freedom is a product of our culture" because "ours are not Western values; they are the universal values of the human spirit" (Tony Blair).
Speaking of culture, as neoconservative nation-builders would be well-advised to avoid doing, Pat Moynihan said: "The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself." Here we reach the real issue about Iraq, as distinct from unpleasant musings about who believes what about skin color.
The issue is the second half of Moynihan's formulation -- our ability to wield political power to produce the requisite cultural change in a place such as Iraq. Time was, this question would have separated conservatives from liberals. Nowadays it separates conservatives from neoconservatives.
Condoleezza Rice, a political scientist, believes there is scholarly evidence that democratic institutions do not merely spring from a hospitable culture, but that they also can help create such a culture. She is correct; they can. They did so in the young American republic. But it would be reassuring to see more evidence that the administration is being empirical, believing that this can happen in some places, as opposed to ideological, believing that it must happen everywhere it is tried.
Being steadfast in defense of carefully considered convictions is a virtue. Being blankly incapable of distinguishing cherished hopes from disappointing facts, or of reassessing comforting doctrines in face of contrary evidence, is a crippling political vice.
In "On Liberty" (1859), John Stuart Mill said, "It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say" that the doctrine of limited, democratic government "is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties." One hundred forty-five years later it obviously is necessary to say that.
Ron Chernow's magnificent new biography of Alexander Hamilton begins with these of his subject's words: "I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be." That is the core of conservatism.
Traditional conservatism. Nothing "neo" about it. This administration needs a dose of conservatism without the prefix
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U.S. Army report on Iraqi prisoner abuse
Complete text of Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th
Military Police Brigade by Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba
Security Experts Warn of Nastier Sasser Worm
Wed May 5, 2004 05:54 PM ET
By Bernhard Warner and Spencer Swartz
LONDON/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -
Computer security experts warned on Wednesday that the Sasser worm could merge with earlier virus-like programs to wreak more havoc on the Internet, just as companies and PC users clean up from the last attack and authorities hunt for those responsible.
Since appearing on the weekend, the fast-moving Sasser computer worm has hit PC users around the world running the ubiquitous Microsoft Windows 2000, NT and XP operating systems, but is expected to slow down as computer users download anti-virus patches.
But Sasser could mutate by combining with the two-month-old Netsky worm, making it a launching pad for further Web attacks that would put it on par with Blaster, the destructive worm that appeared last year and used infected computers to attack Microsoft Corp.'s Web site.
For now, the more benign Sasser worm does its harm by duplicating itself and slowing down Internet connections.
"My expectation is that Netsky and Sasser variants will merge and become what we call one 'abundant threat' that attacks through e-mail and software vulnerabilities," said Jimmy Kuo, a research fellow at Network Associates Inc.'s McAfee anti-virus unit.
The fast-moving Sasser worm, which has hit home users, corporations, and government agencies throughout Europe, North America and Asia, does not appear to damage hardware such as disk drives but it may damage software applications on PCs, analysts said.
Estimates on how many users have been hit globally by the virus vary from 150,000 to 1 million, although analysts say the final tally could be in the millions by the time the four Sasser variants work their way through the Internet.
COST STILL UNKNOWN
Analysts were also unsure what economic damage Sasser had caused so far but said the costs associated with things such as installing new software on PCs and labor costs are likely to make it an expensive clean-up process.
Infected computers - if they are not cleaned up with a security patch and protected by firewalls and anti-virus software - could be used by virus writers to launch future attacks, experts said.
Microsoft said on Wednesday it was working with the Northwest Cybercrime Task Force, a joint effort by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Secret Service, to hunt down those responsible for the latest worm outbreak. Microsoft created a page (http://www.microsoft.com/sasser) on its corporate Web site to deal with the Sasser threat and also offered a clean-up tool to rid infected computers of the worm, said Stephen Toulouse, security program manager for the company's Security Response Center.
The world's largest software maker declined to say whether it planned to offer a bounty, such as the $250,000 reward it offered for the Blaster worm creator.
One theory about the motives behind Sasser is that the creator is part of a Russian group calling itself the "Skynet anti-virus group," the same group behind the recurring Netsky e-mail virus outbreak.
A message found deep in the coding of a recent Netsky variant claimed responsibility for Sasser, analysts said.
Police say criminal groups, many of whom are believed to operate from Eastern Europe, have hatched a string of computer viruses and worms capable of taking over PCs.
The origin of Internet threats is notoriously difficult to track, but authorities managed to find teenagers responsible for creating a copycat version of the Blaster worm. Minnesota teen Jeffrey Lee Parson was arrested in August, followed by the arrest of an unidentified juvenile in Seattle in September.
Red Cross Says Repeatedly Warned U.S. on Iraq Jail
Thu May 6, 2004 04:02 PM ET
By Richard Waddington
GENEVA (Reuters) -
The International Committee of the Red Cross said Thursday it had repeatedly urged the United States to take "corrective action" at a Baghdad jail at the center of a scandal over abuse of Iraqi prisoners.
The Geneva-based humanitarian agency, mandated under international treaties to visit detainees, has had regular access to Abu Ghraib prison since U.S.-led forces began using it last year, said chief spokeswoman Antonella Notari.
"The ICRC, aware of the situation, and based on its findings, has repeatedly asked the U.S. authorities to take corrective action," she told Reuters.
Notari declined to give details of what the ICRC had seen during the visits, which take place every five to six weeks, or about its reports to the U.S. authorities.
Asked about the ICRC alerts, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said: "When they raise concerns, we take those concerns seriously... When it comes to the Red Cross, there are actions that have been taken."
"And when allegations of prisoner abuse came to light more recently, the military in the region immediately began taking steps to ... see just who was responsible for these actions and take steps to punish those individuals."
The ICRC, which has been operating since the late 19th century, keeps a public silence about what it hears from detainees as the price for gaining access to jails in trouble spots around the world from Chechnya to West Africa.
Pictures of grinning U.S. soldiers abusing naked Iraqis at Abu Ghraib -- the largest prison in the country and notorious for torture under Iraqi President Saddam Hussein -- have sparked an international outcry.
President Bush told Jordan's King Abdullah he was sorry for the humiliation suffered by Iraqi prisoners and their families. "I told him I was sorry for the humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners and the humiliation suffered by their families," Bush said at the White House after a meeting with the Jordanian monarch.
"I assured him that Americans like me didn't appreciate what we saw," he added.
WANTON CRIMINAL ABUSES
Abu Ghraib jail was also been the focus of a separate earlier probe by a U.S. general. Maj.-Gen. Antonio Taguba's report, covering October to December last year and completed on March 3, cited incidents of "sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses."
The ICRC's Notari dismissed some U.S. media reports suggesting that the Red Cross had not had access to a special wing in the jail where the abuse took place. "To the best of our knowledge we have had access to all sectors," she said. And she rejected a proposal from the new head of the jail, Maj.-Gen. Geoffrey Miller, that the ICRC set up a permanent presence there, saying: "We are not going to be part of their organization."
The ICRC has visited thousands of prisoners under the control of U.S. and British forces, which are also being investigated after a London newspaper published pictures of a soldier apparently urinating on an Iraqi detainee.
But Notari declined to comment on what officials had seen in British-run jails.
Under the Geneva Conventions on prisoners and the treatment of civilians in wartime, the ICRC must be allowed to interview detainees in private and on a regular basis.
On these terms, it has carried out two visits to Saddam, in U.S. custody since his capture shortly before Christmas.
"It is important that people understand our role, which is to be present and to have a dialogue with the authorities," Notari said.
But on a few occasions the Red Cross has broken its vow of silence, because either the authority concerned has issued a partial account of the ICRC's findings or has simply failed to take any action after a long period.
The ICRC recently expressed mounting frustration over the situation of Afghan and other detainees at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, announcing that its concerns about conditions and treatment were not being addressed.
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Excerpt from: "The Tragic Fallacy", The Modern Temper, Joseph Wood Krutch. 1957
"Comedy laughs the minor mishaps of its characters away; drama solves all the difficulties which it allows to arise; and melodrama, separating good from evil by simple lines, distributes its rewards and punishments in accordance with the principles of a naive justice which satisfies the simple souls of its audience, which are neither philosophical enough to question its primitive ethics nor critical enough to object to the way in which its neat events violate the laws of probability.""A sophisticated society...like ours...has neither fairy tales to assure it that all is always right in the end nor tragedies to make it believe that it rises superior in soul to the outward calamities which befall it."
"True tragedy capable of performing its function and of purging the soul by reconciling man to his woes can exist only by virtue of a certain pathetic fallacy far more inclusive than that to which the name is commonly given."
"Like the belief in love and like most of the other mighty illusions by means of which human life has been given a value, the Tragic Fallacy depends ultimately upon the assumption which man so readily makes that something outside his own being, some "spirit not himself" - be it God, Nature, or that still vaguer thing called a Moral Order- joins him in the emphasis which he places upon this or that and confirms him in his feeling that his passions and his opinions are important. When his instinctive faith in that correspondence between the outer and the inner word fades, his grasp upon the faith that sustained him fades also, and Love or Tragedy or what not ceases to be the reality which it was because he is never strong enough in his own insignificant self to stand alone in a universe which snubs him with its indifference."
"Modern psychology has discovered (or at least strongly emphasized) the fact that under certain conditions desire produces belief, and having discovered also that the more primitive a given mentality the more completely are its opinions determined by its wishes, modern psychology has concluded that the best mind is that which most resists the tendency to believe a thing simply because it would be pleasant or advantageous to do so."
Excerpt from: "The Tragic Fallacy", The Modern Temper, Joseph Wood Krutch. 1957
"Comedy laughs the minor mishaps of its characters away; drama solves all the difficulties which it allows to arise; and melodrama, separating good from evil by simple lines, distributes its rewards and punishments in accordance with the principles of a naive justice which satisfies the simple souls of its audience, which are neither philosophical enough to question its primitive ethics nor critical enough to object to the way in which its neat events violate the laws of probability.""A sophisticated society...like ours...has neither fairy tales to assure it that all is always right in the end nor tragedies to make it believe that it rises superior in soul to the outward calamities which befall it."
"True tragedy capable of performing its function and of purging the soul by reconciling man to his woes can exist only by virtue of a certain pathetic fallacy far more inclusive than that to which the name is commonly given."
"Like the belief in love and like most of the other mighty illusions by means of which human life has been given a value, the Tragic Fallacy depends ultimately upon the assumption which man so readily makes that something outside his own being, some "spirit not himself" - be it God, Nature, or that still vaguer thing called a Moral Order- joins him in the emphasis which he places upon this or that and confirms him in his feeling that his passions and his opinions are important. When his instinctive faith in that correspondence between the outer and the inner word fades, his grasp upon the faith that sustained him fades also, and Love or Tragedy or what not ceases to be the reality which it was because he is never strong enough in his own insignificant self to stand alone in a universe which snubs him with its indifference."
"Modern psychology has discovered (or at least strongly emphasized) the fact that under certain conditions desire produces belief, and having discovered also that the more primitive a given mentality the more completely are its opinions determined by its wishes, modern psychology has concluded that the best mind is that which most resists the tendency to believe a thing simply because it would be pleasant or advantageous to do so."
Excerpt from: "The Tragic Fallacy", The Modern Temper, Joseph Wood Krutch. 1957
"Comedy laughs the minor mishaps of its characters away; drama solves all the difficulties which it allows to arise; and melodrama, separating good from evil by simple lines, distributes its rewards and punishments in accordance with the principles of a naive justice which satisfies the simple souls of its audience, which are neither philosophical enough to question its primitive ethics nor critical enough to object to the way in which its neat events violate the laws of probability.""A sophisticated society...like ours...has neither fairy tales to assure it that all is always right in the end nor tragedies to make it believe that it rises superior in soul to the outward calamities which befall it."
"True tragedy capable of performing its function and of purging the soul by reconciling man to his woes can exist only by virtue of a certain pathetic fallacy far more inclusive than that to which the name is commonly given."
"Like the belief in love and like most of the other mighty illusions by means of which human life has been given a value, the Tragic Fallacy depends ultimately upon the assumption which man so readily makes that something outside his own being, some "spirit not himself" - be it God, Nature, or that still vaguer thing called a Moral Order- joins him in the emphasis which he places upon this or that and confirms him in his feeling that his passions and his opinions are important. When his instinctive faith in that correspondence between the outer and the inner word fades, his grasp upon the faith that sustained him fades also, and Love or Tragedy or what not ceases to be the reality which it was because he is never strong enough in his own insignificant self to stand alone in a universe which snubs him with its indifference."
"Modern psychology has discovered (or at least strongly emphasized) the fact that under certain conditions desire produces belief, and having discovered also that the more primitive a given mentality the more completely are its opinions determined by its wishes, modern psychology has concluded that the best mind is that which most resists the tendency to believe a thing simply because it would be pleasant or advantageous to do so."
"Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul."
W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)
"The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth. A Galileo could no more be elected President of the United States than he could be elected Pope of Rome. Both posts are reserved for men favored by God with an extraordinary genius for swathing the bitter facts of life in bandages of soft illusion."
H.L.Mencken (1880-1956)
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. "
H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)
How To Discipline Private Contractors
What consequences do the companies involved in Abu Ghraib face?
By Phillip Carter for Slate Online
Posted Tuesday, May 4, 2004, at 3:10 PM PT
Criminal charges have been filed against the U.S. military personnel accused of torturing prisoners at Iraq's infamous Abu Ghraib prison. Reports have also alleged that government contractors coached these soldiers on how to abuse the Iraqis, in apparent violation of international and domestic law. These contractors are not subject to military justice, and so far, the Justice Department has taken no steps to prosecute them. When private military contractors break the law, what can be done to discipline them?
Quite a bit, as it turns out. Misbehaving firms can have their government contracts terminated; they can be barred from competing for future contracts; and they may also be subject to civil and criminal liability. However, nearly all of these penalties are at the discretion of the agency that issued the original contract. Procurement officials, political leaders, prosecutors, and judges get to decide whether to sanction contractors for allegedly breaking the law in Iraq.
Google Gmail
Read My Mail, PleaseThe silly privacy fears about Google's e-mail service.
By Paul Boutin
Updated Thursday, April 15, 2004, at 2:26 PM PT
Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were the heroes of the Net from the moment they launched their better-than-the-rest search engine in 1998, right up until two weeks ago. On April 1, they announced plans for Gmail, a Googleized alternative to the free Web-based e-mail services offered by Hotmail, Yahoo!, and a slew of smaller companies. Depending on your take, Gmail is either too good to be true, or it's the height of corporate arrogance, especially coming from a company whose house motto is "Don't Be Evil."
At first, Web hipsters dismissed Gmail as an April Fool's hoax. But Google's offer is real. Gmail will provide each user an entire gigabyte of free e-mail storage. That's about 250 times the 4-megabyte limit of a basic Yahoo! Mail account and 10 times Hotmail's 100-megabyte "super-user" package, which costs $60 a year. In return for all that inbox space, Google wants just one favor: to be allowed to scan the content of your incoming messages and serve content-targeted ads alongside them.
If you haven't tried it, it sounds creepy. But after a week of testing the prerelease version of Gmail, I'm on the other side of the fence. Gmail isn't an invasion of privacy, and its ads are preferable to the giant blinking banners for diets and dating services that are splashed across my other Web mail accounts.
Judging by the reaction of lots of people, Google might as well have asked for everyone's ATM passwords. California state Sen. Liz Figueroa told Reuters she was drafting legislation that, if passed, would prohibit the scanning of e-mail in order to serve ads. In England, watchdog group Privacy International filed a complaint that Gmail would violate the European Union's privacy laws. Silicon Valley's paper of record, the San Jose Mercury News, fretted on its editorial page, "If Google ogles your mail, can Ashcroft be far behind?" The controversy bubbled all the way up to late night, where Conan O'Brien joked about Google inserting ads for 1984.
The outcry isn't new, only the scale of it is. Ten years ago, some Web pioneers had a similarly squeamish reaction when the first search engines began crawling their sites and including them in searchable databases, along with ads matched to users' queries. As a manager for HotBot, one of the first ad-carrying search engines in the mid-1990s, I heard from plenty of Webmasters who demanded that their pages be removed from the system. Today, their objections seem quaint.
Ten years from now, we'll probably look back at the Gmail dust-up with similar befuddlement. Even now, most Google-bashers have one thing in common: They haven't actually laid eyes on Gmail. Critics have falsely claimed that Google staff, rather than automated software, will read your e-mail, that ads will be inserted into e-mail message text, rather than alongside it in your browser window, and that Google will collect a log of which ads are served to your account. Most important, Gmail critics have ignored the fact that automated software already scans the contents of your incoming e-mail messages. Antispam and antivirus software at most ISPs and corporate firewalls comb through the personal contents of your e-mail all the time. Gmail is just a little more upfront about it.
Gmail's ads are text-only, in the same spartan format used for the ads next to Google's search engine results. In my tests, a mailing-list discussion about in-ear headphones was flanked by terse ads for headphones and audio stores. Press releases about developments in the Wi-Fi industry were accompanied not by ads, but by links to "related pages" from Google's search engine. Social chit-chat, such as "let's catch up" or "what are you doing Friday," got no ads or links at all. I tried forcing Gmail's hand with keywords like "Claritin" and "suicide," but it ignored them.
Best of all, my outgoing messages are free of the appended shills tacked on by other services, such as "Yahoo! Tax Center—File online by April 15" or "FREE pop-up blocking with the new MSN Toolbar—get it now!" If you've ever found one of those at the bottom of an e-mail about a death in the family, Gmail's ad strategy sounds appealing, not invasive.
But Gmail's user-friendliness won't quiet critics who fear that Google has implemented a tool akin to Carnivore, probably far more efficiently than the FBI did. I called Google co-founder Sergey Brin about this and got a half-encouraging response. Gmail's ad server, he says, doesn't collect any info on which ads it serves to which specific users, nor does it record users' browser cookies or IP addresses. There's a twofold benefit to that. Advertisers can't get reports on who saw what, Brin says, and Google won't have personal data about your ad viewing to hand over to the Man, should a subpoena or warrant be served.
The real threat of using Web mail—from Google or from anyone else—is having your mail itself subpoenaed or just plain leaked. Web mail accounts have been cracked despite the best efforts of their administrators. CNET cyber-rights advocate Declan McCullagh listed past security breaches at Yahoo! and Hotmail in a column this week, then slammed critics of Gmail's ad plan on his Politech mailing list. "I'm starting to suspect that these pro-regulatory privacy folks who are so upset about Google are really just anti-advertising," he wrote, because they haven't raised similar cries over antispam software.
The most obvious way for Google to mollify Gmail critics would be to allow users a chance to opt out of the targeted ads, and hope that most won't bother. Brin insists the company has no plans to do that, contrary to recent news reports, but he says it hasn't been ruled out, either. In return for turning off the company's ad targeting system, Google could offer, say, only 10 megabytes of disk space to those who opt out. It would still be a better deal than Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail, and skittish customers might reconsider the ads as they near their inbox quotas. Still, critics would demand that the ad-targeting system be opt-in instead of opt-out, even though they make no similar demand for spam-filtering software. What's more, the opt-out solution wouldn't assuage non-Gmail users who fear their missives to opted-in Gmailers will be handed over to advertisers, or worse, John Ashcroft.
Luckily, there's a better option. Ten years ago, the privacy objections of people who didn't want their Web sites crawled by search engines were put to rest with a simple fix: Webmasters could place a file named robots.txt on their sites as a "No Trespassing" marker, a sign that they didn't want their site to be searched. Google needs to offer a robots.txt for e-mail, some kind of tag that any Web user can include in a message to indicate that it shouldn't be scanned by Gmail software. Given that antispam and antivirus software will scan the e-mail anyway, this solution would be somewhat phony. But if McCullagh is right that Gmail-bashers are just opposed to helping advertisers, it will do the trick.
The Google guys need to implement this before the backlash gets out of hand. Otherwise, they may be forced to abandon the best Web mail system yet because of a few well-placed people who've never even tried it. That really would be evil.
Paul Boutin is a Silicon Valley writer who spent 15 years as a software engineer and manager.
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Why so many Muslims deeply resent the West, and why their bitterness will not easily be mollified
by Bernard Lewis
Atlantic Monthly: Sept. 1990
The online version of this article appears in two parts. Click here to go to part one, click here to go to part two.
Caution for Broadband Users
We've written an article on one of the hazards of broadband exposed by the Sasser worm.Tuesday, May 04, 2004
Sasser Is a New Kind of Worm...If you use Windows you better learn how it propagates !!
Sasser worm begins to spreadLast modified: May 1, 2004, 10:25 AM PDT
By Robert Lemos
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Update
A worm, dubbed Sasser by antivirus firms, was spreading slowly throughout the Internet on Saturday, taking advantage of a vulnerability in unpatched Windows systems to infect new hosts.
The Sasser worm began spreading Friday night and seems to be moving at a pace far slower than previous worms such as MSBlast and Code Red, said Alfred Huger, senior director of security firm Symantec's response team.
"It is a slow burn," he said. "It is picking up speed, but right now we aren't seeing too much activity." Symantec initially rated the Sasser worm as a two on its five-point scale of threats. A five is the highest danger rating on the scale. Rival antivirus firm Network Associates rated the threat a medium danger, and the Internet Storm Center, which monitors network threats, raised its general Internet danger level to yellow, essentially a medium rating as well.
"Due to the release of this worm, we moved to infocon yellow for the next 24 hrs," the Internet Storm Center site said. "The exact impact is not clear at this point." Security experts did not know how far the worm had spread, but many companies reported some infections, said Vincent Gullotto, vice president of Network Associates' antivirus emergency response team.
"We have had 25 to 50 reports from companies that have had up to a few hundred machines infected," he said. "One company wanted to patch this weekend, but the worm infected their network first."
The creation of the worm didn't surprise the Internet's security community. Security experts widely predicted that a worm would soon start spreading using that particular flaw by exploiting a recent vulnerability in a component of Microsoft Windows known as the Local Security Authority Subsystem Service, or LSASS.
The Sasser worm spreads from infected computer to vulnerable computer with no user intervention required. The worm scans for vulnerable systems, creates a remote connection to the system, installs a file transfer protocol (FTP) server and then downloads itself to the new host.
The worm opens up the initial connection on a specific application data channel, or port, numbered 9996. After the worm infects the new host, the FTP server listens on port 5554 for new files.
The worm uses multiple processes to scan different ranges of Internet addresses. The scans attempt to detect the vulnerable LSASS component on port 445. Microsoft has analyzed the worm and believes it also spreads through port 139. Both are data channels used by the Windows file sharing protocol and, in many cases, are blocked by Internet service providers.
A team of Microsoft engineers worked through the night to analyze the worm, said Stephen Toulouse, security program manager for the software giant.
"We are still studying the worm, but we do know customers that install the update are protected from Sasser," Toulouse said. The worm will cause the LSASS component of Windows to crash, according to analyses. Infected systems will then perform a 60-second countdown before restarting. Microsoft has created a Web page telling customers how to manually clean up the worm.
Antivirus firms also continue to analyze the worm.
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Monday, May 03, 2004
If he needs help with coming up with one...
Note: During Mr. Bush's latest press conference/speech, he said he could not remember any mistakes he had made while in Office. The Center for American Progress has compiled a list of "100 Mistakes" which can probably make his task a bit easier.Number One on the List is the Most Damaging: "1. Failing to build a real international coalition prior to the Iraq invasion, forcing the US to shoulder the full cost and consequences of the war."
Above all others, this mistake should force him from the Presidency and back to his "beloved Crawford ranch" in January 2005
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Wolfie's Fuzzy Math
By MAUREEN DOWD
NY Times Op-Ed
Published: May 2, 2004
WASHINGTON
This administration is the opposite of "The Sixth Sense." They don't see any dead people.
Beyond the president's glaring absence at military funerals; beyond the Pentagon's self-serving ban on photographing the returning flag-draped coffins at Dover; beyond playing down the thousands of wounded and maimed American troops and the thousands of hurt and dead Iraqi civilians, now comes the cruel arithmetic of Paul Wolfowitz.
Asked during a Congressional budget hearing on Thursday how many American troops had been killed in Iraq, Mr. Wolfowitz missed by more than 30 percent. "It's approximately 500, of which — I can get the exact numbers — approximately 350 are combat deaths," he said.
As of Thursday, there were 722 deaths, 521 in combat. The No. 2 man at the Pentagon was -apparently- oblivious in the bloodiest month of the war, with the number of Americans killed in April overtaking those killed in the six-week siege of Baghdad last year.
This is, of course, an administration that refuses to quantify or acknowledge the cost of its chuckleheaded empire policies, in bodies, money, credibility in the Arab world, reputation among our allies or the reinvigoration of militant Muslims around the globe. Duped themselves, they duped Americans into thinking it would be easy, paid for with Iraqi oil. But Donald Rumsfeld's vision of showing off a slim, agile military was always at odds with the neocons' vision of infusing enough security into Iraq to turn it into an instant democratic paradise.
But it's unhealthy to censor the ugly realities of war. The real danger is when the architects of war refuse to rethink bad assumptions, wrapping themselves in the blindly ideological nobility of their mission. Hiding the faces of the war dead makes the motivation seem like saving face in an election year.
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Sunday, May 02, 2004
For Kerry, war dwarfs politics
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 05/02/2004
Cynthia Tucker
How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?
-- John Kerry, veteran, 1971
John Kerry's campaign has suffered from a curious redefinition of patriotism and heroism -- a revisionism that glorifies armchair warriors while denigrating combat veterans. His combat medals haven't quieted the Bush campaign machine, which sends its minions out to denounce Kerry as unpatriotic and anti-military.
It is an odd thing, but it did not start here. Two years ago, Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) defeated Max Cleland -- a Vietnam veteran whose service left him a triple amputee -- partly by challenging his patriotism. Chambliss doesn't want to own up to that now, but many remember his attack ads that featured photos of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden and questioned Cleland's "courage." (Chambliss, by the way, avoided service in Vietnam because of what he says was a bad knee.)
This was not a smear reserved for Democrats. In the 2000 GOP presidential primary, the Bush machine did not hesitate before turning John McCain's record as a prisoner of war against him. Recognizing in McCain a military résumé with which they could not compete, Bush strategists started a whisper campaign, insisting that McCain's years in the custody of the North Vietnamese had left him "mentally unstable" and unfit for the presidency.
So it comes as no great surprise that the latest Bush tactic is to denounce Kerry for his activism against the Vietnam War. In a display of gall that can only be described as astounding, campaign strategist Karen Hughes, interviewed recently on CNN, insisted that reporters ought to prod more deeply into Kerry's activities during the Vietnam War.
Indeed, they should (as they should further explore the activities of President Bush during that same war). What they will find in Kerry's past is a young man who had the courage to say what so many were thinking and some, such as former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, only belatedly admitted -- the war in Vietnam was folly, unwinnable, a quagmire.
Kerry was, as he now acknowledges, angry about the official lies, the ludicrous military strategies, the lives lost. His rhetoric, as he concedes, was over the top. But his crusade to end the war -- based on his observations as a naval officer who had come under fire after volunteering for hazardous duty -- was the very definition of patriotism.
That honorable definition may be returning to vogue as the war in Iraq grows increasingly unpopular. According to a New York Times/CBS poll, nearly half the country now questions the wisdom of the war. And nearly half -- 46 percent -- believe U.S. troops should come home as soon as possible.
Kerry doesn't agree. Like Bush, he believes the United States must stay the course. Both men have suggested more troops may be sent to Iraq to quell the insurrection and create the stability needed to allow the Iraqis to elect a government. They may be right in their refusal to leave.
But, in public at least, Bush seems almost obscenely serene about his decision to send young Americans to die by the hundreds in Iraq. Never mind that he avoided combat in the relative safety of a National Guard "champagne unit" that sheltered other sons of the wealthy and well-connected.
His vice-president, Dick Cheney, is similarly self-righteous, though he had "other priorities" during the Vietnam era. Perhaps it is mere coincidence that his wife, Lynne Cheney, gave birth to their first child exactly nine months and two days after the Selective Service lifted its ban against drafting childless married men.
Kerry, by contrast, has seen the waste of war up close. After the combat death of his close friend, Dick Pershing, in 1968, he wrote a letter to the girlfriend who would become his first wife, Judy: "If I do nothing else in my life I will never stop trying to bring to people the conviction of how wasteful and asinine is a human expenditure of this kind."
He knows what it means to send other people's children off to die.
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