Here's a graph from the Fraser Institute on how bad queues have gotten since 1993.

"Canada has the best healthcare system on earth – so long as you don’t get sick!" That quote is from David Frum (link thanks to Rob again), who is so right-wing as to have been a speech writer for Bush. Not surprising this article is as much about belittling Gore as about health care. But I did follow his links to the Fraser Institute's study on queues in the Canadian Health Care system.

Queuing is one of only a few ways of rationing a scarce resource. Assuming the supply of angioplastys is not infinite, then a public health care system can ration angioplastys in only a few ways:

• Queuing
• Favoritism
• Bribery
• Market pricing
• Central planning

It seems that Canada uses queuing and favoritism (as Frum alleges), and central planning of course was the original idea of a single-payer health care system. But bribery and market pricing are illegal. Of course if queuing becomes bad enough, it becomes impossible to prevent bribery, as shown in any centrally-planned country after enough years. That leaves market pricing as the only tool not used -- which seems vastly unfair.

But as Frum says, as long as I was healthy I was perfectly happy living in the Canadian system.

Dave Barry published a mildly funny rant on Modern Art a month and a half ago (but I just got the link last night from my karate instructor). Basically, it's "the emporer has no clothes" -- this art that professional art appreciators pay so much money for, Barry claims, is shit, is nothing, is empty and sterile (or not).What is the public value of a work that can only be appreciated by somebody immersed in the social and historical context of the art world?

Appreciating minimalist art seems to me to be a very intellectualized endeavor -- if you know how one artist influenced another, you can compare a canvas painted all over in a single colour to a canvas painted in two colours and see the sheer extravagance of the second.

Terence Spies is the guy who started to introduce me to this extremely intellectualized appreciation of art, and sometimes I can grok it. In his not-recently-updated blog, you can see this tendency in a different realm -- a greater appreciation of certain food from an intellectual understanding of the processes and ingredients that go into it.

Emotionally I prefer national health care, but intellectually I have problems with it. Here's one problem: when the government runs out of money as prices go up, they pull the rug out from underneath. Grandmothers wondering if they can buy Christmas presents!

It's not often I see or hear something that makes me wish I had television channels. But now I wish I could see the Daily Show, which this article is mostly about (link found via Volokh). I love the quote from Jon Stewart:

"CNN has bought the show, I really don't know why. I'm not sure they realize that we're actually making fun of them.".

I'm now co-chair of a new IETF working group called XMPP: Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol. To my surprise, there's already news coverage of this working group.

XMPP grew out of the Jabber work but many people are now trying to bring it to more formal status as an IETF standard.

This morning on the jitney in San Francisco, two obvious tourists got on. I offered directions & public transportation advice to the couple, who turned out to be from BC. I said I was also Canadian, but had been living in the US for seven years. The woman replied sympathetically "Oh, that must be hard."

I blinked. I hadn't put any negative emotional spin on my statement. What did she mean? Did this random Canadian believe that, living in the US, I must be a victom of vast amounts of crime? Subjected to poor and expensive health care? Suffering from racism? Or simply subjugated by the heavy yoke of capitalism?

I've never thought of living in the US as "hard". Amusing, yes, especially when elections come around. It's a little extra effort deciding to pronounce Z as 'zee' or 'zed', or choosing to write "colour" or "color". But the office jokes about Canadians are so mild they make me feel like one of the team rather than an outsider. The health care system is mysterious used to at times, but I managed to schedule my regular physical with my regular doctor less than one month away from when I called (that's much easier than scheduling an electrician). I have never been a victim of a crime in this country.

The benefits of living in the US are nothing to sneeze at either. I get lower taxes and higher wages (which together offset the higher living cost), and most of all I get to work at an exciting small high-tech company that has a chance of success because of the business laws here.

This isn't intended to try to convince Canadians (or Americans) that living in the US is superior to living in Canada. Canada is cool too, and I'd live there if it worked out that way with my job and my boyfriend. All I want to point out is that it's not so different. If that Canadian tourist has swallowed the demonization of the US and Americans that I've been hearing from north of the border recently, it's from a lack of critical thinking, not because its true.

The Republican party posted a response to the DNC flash ad from last week.

You know your front page is too fat when...

There's this one user, a Google zealot - we don't know who he is - who occasionally sends an e-mail to our "comments" address. Every time he writes, the e-mail contains only a two-digit number. It took us awhile to figure out what he was doing. Turns out he's counting the number of words on the home page. When the number goes up, like up to 52, it gets him irritated, and he e-mails us the new word count. As crazy as it sounds, his e-mails are helpful, because it has put an interesting discipline on the UI team, so as not to introduce too many links. It's like a scale that tells you that you've gained two pounds.

This Reason article goes into great detail about British gun control and their crime problem.

Americans shouldn't feel too bad if they're disliked by Europeans. These charts helpfully show how Europeans think about each other.

This article claims that people fear crime from teens (e.g. Columbine style killings, teen gang slayings) far out of proportion to their actual contributions to the crime rate, because the media whips up the fear of these incomprehensible "youths".

What percentage of violent crime would you guess is committed by under-18's in Orange County? I'd be interested to hear, because I saw the answer before being able to guess. Click here to see the answer after you've thought of your own.

My friend Rob argues that the right-wing cannot argue with the left-wing because even mainstream left-wing advocates use name-calling and demonization rather than logic. He pointed me to this ad on the Democratic National Committee site which at least proves that the DNC is capable of misrepresenting positions, demonizing Bush, etc.

The ad tells how Bush wants to "put your social security savings in the stock market". Whether you agree with Bush, the DNC or other, that seems like a misrepresentation, because the Republican plans seem to be to allow (not force) people to channel part (not all) of their social security taxes to private investment accounts. But worse, the ad shows Bush pushing an old lady in a wheelchair down a sliding stock price graph, at which point she falls, screams, and goes splat at the bottom.

Most of the time it's not that bad. It's rather common to see Dems accusing Reps of favouring "privatization" of social security, because although the public is in favour of choice in SocSec investment, they are not in favour of privatization. That's not too bad - attempting to cast a policy in its most negative light is the usual way of opposing it. It's the portrayal of an opponent as a murderer that does seem to me to cross some line of decency and fairness.

However, that's not proof that the Republicans don't use similar tactics on other issues. Any examples?

This was pretty much me this morning... except I spilled yesterday's leftover coffee on the carpet as I tried to sit down and wake up with today's coffee.

I've been talking about the 'bad attitude' growing amongst Canadians with respect to Americans... Doonesbury notices it too.

I was handed a photocopied note on Kearny street at lunch today. It's scary what a mess popular culture can make in obviously a disturbed mind. Here it is verbatim. Only the question marks and location info in italics are added by me.

Moms oldest son Mike sex abused me almost all my childhood (Brian's father). The Jews pressured Sigmund Freud not to speak of the child sex epidemic and 2 men were destroyed last century for bringing it up. Jews been ordering mom years & harming her in Florida where she was betrayed Aug 21, 2002 trying to sell her condo in Pompero Beach. The 2 men bought another condo. Jews wouldn't let Mom advertise her condo in paper until 2 days ago -- closer and closer to Jeb Bush re-election. Constant threat to harm mom with missing, heart, car etc. Jew Goldie Hawns boyfriend starred in a movie w/red Pickup about missing woman. They made sure to play that at one shelter. Mom was healthy when I left 2000. When I returned 2002 she looked like someone was drugging her. Tammy Wynette's daughter wrote a book. She knew her mom was murdered (lots of money). It was Jewish doctor Bob Levy. I don't trust the Chandra Levy case (spectacular coverup) esp. since Jews threatening mom with missing. In Houston Jew and people the found abused the Jew funded Homeless place called Search (near Greyhound). One looked like actor from Uncola commercial but he's from Ohio where mom wants to live. Her furniture is moved to Ohio and she was there one week. I've given my info on Montgomery St. in San Francisco. Montgomery etched in Sidewalk. After Montgomery Md (Bowie) sniper shooting -- a white man circled me in Bowie TShirt the day after; These attacks take attention away from Chandra Levy which was made huge. Montgomery Md has a huge Orthodox Jewish movement. I don't trust these attacks and Grapes of Wrath unedited is of sensational murders done to take away from fighters for Rights. [Esp. the I am God mallarkey.] In moms backyard is huge Orthodox Jewish movement, (M?gate -- where 2 Jews f?ed for harm to mom on Easter Sunday at church w/ firetruck. Jews order mom. I'm in San Fran again like in 2000.

On left edge: moms son steve hit mom to ground to get me in front of her condo 2002

On right edge: Male police are viscious

Well, now I know exactly what's going on in my area -- graphically, too!

This article criticizing the Precautionary Principle should have been called Precautionary Principal Considered Harmful.

Could Canadian loosening of pot laws be in part anti-Americanism? For years, the major argument in Canada against loosening pot laws was that the US would disapprove tangibly. Now, Canadian resentment of being under the thumb of American politicians may have broken through this restriction.

More thoughts on Robert Wright's prescriptions for free trade and transnational governance. He isn't consistent with his own prescriptions.

If he believes that free trade is important for countries to get a leg up, improve quality of life, and reduce causes of discontent thus terrorism, then he shouldn't see the WTO as a tool to enforce treaties on nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Instead, the WTO should continue to open trade where possible, not be pressured to close trade. Another indpendent organization (NATO? An internationally-run mercenary group?) devoted to security should encourage security, on behalf of the treaty organizations that cover each dangerous or internationally illegal weapon.

OK, so it's a 9-party essay. And it's got some less-than-good parts. For example, in part 6, Wright makes a policy prescription: "To blunt some of globalization's sharper edges, carry political governance beyond the level of the nation-state, to the transnational level."

Some transnational political governance is good. But I believe it's very difficult to do at all, and even more difficult to do right. Wright specifically mentions that "Western labor unions would like to use the leverage of the World Trade Organization to upgrade foreign working conditions—whether with child labor laws or workplace safety standards or a guaranteed right to bargain collectively, or whatever. So far they've been foiled, but there's no reason in principle that the WTO can't address labor issues and even the transnational environmental issues that concern anti-globalization activists, thus evolving from a right-wing form of governance toward the center."

I have some problems with this. First, the WTO is about trade, not within-a-country labor laws. Transnational organizations are going to be more successful if each one addresses fewer issues, not more. There's a scaling problem that becomes particularly bad at the transnational level -- larger bureaucracies are less effective. If a typical national government has different departments for labor and trade, then the world should have at least that division, if not have even more granular divisions.

Second, labor laws from rich countries can be bad for poor countries. Outlawing any child labour may make children much worse off in countries where orphaned or abandoned kids must take care of themselves. Minimum wages in Bangladesh may help American workers much more than the average Bangladeshi, by increasing the price of goods to the point of uncompetitiveness.

Transnational organizations (perhaps governance organizations, perhaps simply lobby/aid/education organizations) are probably good in some ways but can certainly cause damage and waste time when ill-conceived.

I'm reading Robert Wright's 10-part Slate essay on terrorism, technology and culture. So far, it's got good parts. For example, this shameful factoid: "According to the World Bank, economically advanced nations levy tariffs against developing nations that are four times as high as the tariffs they levy against other advanced countries... The United States denied General Pervez Musharraf's pleas to open its textile markets to Pakistan as a reward for his vital support in the Afghanistan war."

Perhaps I should join the Anti-Idiotarians, too. Ron Rosenbaum makes a good case (link via instapundit). He freaks out at people who show "the inability to distinguish America’s sporadic blundering depradations" from far worse crimes. "All empires commit crimes; in the past century, ours were by far the lesser of evils"

I, too, frequently find myself arguing against common left-wing positions, even though I'd like to be left-wing in many ways. And I find myself defending the US and Americans, even though I am not American, and even though the defense must often be mounted against Americans.

An old link, but a good one: how election methods work, including Condorcet and Approval voting, and why no voting scheme is perfect. Required reading before you tell me that the US should move to instant runoff!

If the UN and the IIS agree that poverty is being reduced (not increased!), and that poverty is being reduced because of (not in spite of!) capitalism and free trade, why do they stillprotest these things? How can they say it's for social protection, or that there's a race to the bottom?

More links and info on MCMS (Microsoft Content Management Server), though you're unlikely to be as interested as I am:

• MCMS used to be NCompass, before an acquisition earlier this year.
  
• Although it involves authoring pages for the Web, it doesn't support WebDAV, the standard for Web authoring.
  
• Although it supports content syndication, it doesn't support RSS or any other open syndication standard.
  
• Its architecture is based on OLE controls embedded in Web pages, so sites built with MCMS probably can't be used by non-Microsoft Web clients.

Microsoft thinks Instapundit can't increase readership by providing links away from instapundit.com. This is explicitly mentioned in a powerpoint presentation on the new Microsoft Content Management Server: "Aggregate sites cannot simply provide hyperlinks to source... Potential to lose customer to competing aggregate sites."

Obviously, I think they're already being proven wrong on this one. It's not just Instapundit and Weblogs that prove them wrong, but also sites like Penny Arcade -- a real site much like the XBox.com and related fictional example used in the same presentation.

When I don't have time to do a decent job blogging, Natasha can do it for me:
"Do I really want an employee so out of touch with the world that she wasted four years of a very expensive education learning how to spot harassment at every turn?" A great description of graduates with degrees in Women's Studies.

A cool game like Boggle.

How the feminist movement is increasingly making itself irrelevant

How DARE leads kids to get their parents arrested.

I was in Canada on vacation for a week, then I was too busy to blog. Now I'm too busy to blog, but I'm going to anyway.

In Canada general opinion is unanimous on some issues that are more mixed here. E.g.:

• The Iraq war proposals are really about oil.


• Bush is an idiot, probably retarded. He got his university degree through family connections.


• Kyoto is a good thing, already leading some Canadian companies to good changes

OK, so opinion is not quite unanimous. My dad, who's in the oil business, says that the war is probably not about oil because US dependence on Middle-East oil is nowhere near where it was 10 years ago. Right now, the US could do without M-E oil with some pain. In the near future, US will be able to do without M-E oil entirely if need be.

I shouldn't stay up so late that I turn into an insomni-zombie (grumpy and tired but can't sleep). But I did finish the hat for now-2-week-old Payton:

A closeup of the hat shows where I finally departed from the pattern, and did my own thing on the crown of the hat, terminating in a bit of I-Cord.

Instapundit Glenn Reynolds is right that we're seeing more meta-commentary (he's speaking particularly about Democrats) about the justification for a war than actual positions: There's a case to be made against war -- maybe even an intelligent one as opposed to the of-course-America-is-wrong line we're getting from the usual Chomskian suspects. And we'd be better off if someone were making it clearly and responsibly. (Robert Wright has been doing a much better job than Daschle, et al.) But making that case requires taking a position that someone might hold against you later, as opposed to carping from the sidelines and hoping to capitalize if it all goes wrong. Those who lack the backbone to take a position at a time like this aren't qualified to hold office.

Well, I for one enjoy carping from the sidelines! Though I'm not attempting to hold or obtain office, so I hope he'll excuse me.

Natasha asked me (rhetorically, I hope) in email why the administration should go to war against Iraq, when there are larger dangers to the lives of Americans. This Pravda article supports that position -- it's about 200 Soviet-era nukes in Ukraine that nobody can account for. Link via Instapundit.

More on Chretien's bad-taste comment on Sept 11, 2002 from National Review Online.

I find Tom Nichol's article a little much, though. E.g. "Given Chretien's inane comments prior to the meeting, Bush can hardly be faulted for not trying to lay out a case to his Canadian colleague. Indeed, given the lack of substance in their meeting and the clear Canadian aversion to shouldering the burden of the fight against terror — an aversion, by the way, that does not seem to be shared by the brave and able men and women of the Canadian armed forces — ... " Hey, Canada was there in Afghanistan, and not just because the armed forces decided to go. The government decided to send them. Nothing excuses Bush from laying out a case -- to the world, not just to Canada.

The same paragraph ends with "September 2002 might well be the date affixed by future historians to Canada's last days as a world power." Nice to know in retrospect that Canada was a world power! Heh heh.

Co-workers report the usefulness of Starbuck's wireless support. Yes, the press releases were a year ago, but more locations seem to have it now. On the other hand, you now have to pay, but that's worth it to these three road warriors.

Of course, you don't have to go into Starbucks to access their wireless (no wonder you have to pay). They can take a cab from one place to another in NY City, getting in and out of range of Starbucks instances, and racking up enough connection total to synch up email during the trip. Or if they're driving, they park in a Starbucks parking lot and whip out their laptops. Unless one of them says "You know, I'm actually going to go in and get myself a coffee, too!"

I have finished a sweater for a week-old baby named Payton (hope Payton's parents aren't reading this!). It's a little large for a newborn but I'm basically happy with the way it turned out:

I took a larger picture too.The sweater is knit with Mission Falls 1824 Cotton in light blue, light purple, green, dark purple, black and grey. The pattern is from Mission Falls "Wee Knits" book, called "Colours".

I can never get the gauge tight enough (typically I'm 10% off and changing needles doesn't quite get me to gauge), so I'm used to making adjustments. This time I had to cut the sides in a couple stitches. Rather than reknit the back after I had completed it, I just moved the seam over two stitch widths on the back. Unfortunately, this makes the seams a little bulky, not as flat as I like to make them. Then for the rest of the stitch counts I just subtracted 5-10% and it all came out.

The buttons are little purple hearts on top of dark purple circular buttons. That's right, two buttons, just attached together with the thread used to tie them on. The light hearts are cute, and the purple circles give the overall button enough size to fit in the button holes and not be too hard to button up.

Some, particularly Paul Krugman, criticize the White House for citing first one reason to do something, then another. Krugman calls it a "shifting rationale" and accuses the White House of this both for justifying tax cuts and for justifying the war on Iraq.

Critics should be clear on whether the administration is abandoning its earlier reasons or not. It's not truly a shifting rationale unless early reasons are abandoned when the situation changes, at which point new reasons suiting the current situation are brought out. On the other hand, if the administration brings out one argument and exposes it to the media, lets it sink in and explores the details, then brings out another reason without disclaiming the previous argument, then the administration is actually building a case on many arguments.

My impression is that tax cuts were justified by a shifting rationale, but the war on Iraq is being justified by accumulating several independent reasons to attack. I don't claim that the sum of arguments is sufficient, I just claim that's what the administration is trying to do.

It's an odd facet of human nature that presenting multiple independent arguments can be a bad tactic. If one of the arguments is perceived as weak, opponents seize on that argument. Then the other arguments are ignored, as if they depended on the weak argument, and it becomes very hard to convince that person. However to a rational listener, a weak argument should only cause the stronger arguments to be thrown away if they depended on the weak argument, as in a chain of causes.

Ekr and Terence have significant experience designing protocols. Ekr's also a chemist. Recently they were asked by a regular programmer "What are the top things to keep in mind when designing a protocol?" Ekr compared this to having a layman ask a chemist "What are the top things to keep in mind when synthesizing phosgene in the lab?"

Phosgene is a toxic inhalant that quickly destroys the lungs, so clearly this is not a good idea. I like the comparison.

Tax compliance costs are taxes that benefit nobody. Duane Freese puts it into numbers.

Why it's been a busy week: a few pictures from the WebDAV Interop event at UC Santa Cruz, Monday to Wednesday. These pictures show people testing WebDAV clients and servers against each other. While I did very little testing myself because I was busy talking about careful changes to the standard, some great testing did get done.

Ekr suggests that if dissent has been crushed, it's only from being smothered by news articles about how dissent has been crushed -- so many, that there's no column inches left to discuss real issues! As usual, the media's favourite topic is the media.

I find it hard to disagree with the adjectives "boorish", "weak and petty" used to describe Chretien. His exact words taped for Sept 11 were "You cannot exercise your powers to the point of humiliation for the others. And that is what the western world -- not only the Americans, the western world -- has to realize. Because they are human beings, too."

His timing, at least, was bad: It was laudable for him to try to bring up the debate about poverty ... but this may not have been the most opportune time. People need to grieve and people should be allowed to do so. (from Edmonton Journal) And he could have prefaced this remark with an explanation that it does not justify killing innocents.

But it's not just this interview, it's other actions too. His fit of pique when Bush did not visit Canada first after his election seemed -- well, petty.

I claimed in a recent post (Sept 8)that there had been no dissent-crushing to speak of in the US since 9/11. And it's not just bloggers that provide alternative viewpoitns. Tim Blair provides more data to back that up.

McCalman also repeated one of the two great post-9/11 myths: that dissent in the US has been crushed. She didn't provide any examples because there are none. "In the first two weeks after the September 11 massacre," reports Los Angeles journalist Matt Welch, "the LA Times published more than a dozen impassioned antiwar essays from the likes of Barbara Kingsolver, Robert Fisk, Howard Zinn, Alexander Cockburn and Jonathan Schell." (Note to Janet: All of these dissenters were, at the time of writing, still alive.)

Neil Clark defends Americans in The Australian. Even more strongly, he blasts "the left" for racism:

The Left of Smith, though, while preaching equality and brotherly love between all races, conveniently does allow for exceptions. All men are equal; all men, that is, except Americans, Serbs, white Africans and Protestants from Northern Ireland.

A lot of people are saying the US should be more "multilateral" (Slate, Guardian). Bush addressed the UN this morning, asking basically "Are you going to take this?", reminding the UN of all its resolutions broken or unheeded by the Iraq regime.

Some might consider Bush's appeals increased multilateralism, but it's not at all clear to me that everybody will think so. In other words, I bet that what would be an acceptable level of multilateralism to Europeans will be considered unacceptably high (too much sovereignty ceded) to Americans. Even if we all agree "more cooperation", it's not clear that common ground can actually be reached. So I predict (and this is an easy one) continued criticism of American arrogance and unilateralism, for years to come.

Penny Arcade (video game critics and cartoonists) is running an interview series (parts 1, 2 and 3) with Dr. Henry Jenkins of MIT on some rather social and philosophical issues related to video games. Topics discussed include education, ratings, art, using games as a military tool, and the legal case that decided that video games aren't free speech.

For one thing, Dr. Jenkins is critical of the research that claims to show that video games promote violence: If you look at criminals incarcerated for violent crime, you find that on average they consume less violent entertainment than the general population does.

Code visualization has come a long way in 6 years, when I considered doing my master's degree in that area. There's now a map of the Linux kernel, done by the Free Code Graphing Project. At the lowest level, each routine in the code is represented with its loops (circles) and branches.

It's very cool looking, but has a ways to go (as they authors discuss) before being very useful. For example, one could use code graphing to mark modules with a lot of dependencies for review or rewrite.

Matt Welch has a article in the National Post on alleged press censorship. The American Prospect had a similar article way back in January. These are in response to articles like Michael Steinberg's recent complaint that although he has 5000 Web readers of his site, people at his office seemed hawkish and thus he's afraid to promote peace at work.

One of Welch's paragraphs caught my eye (since I'm Canadian): The view looked just as bad north of the border. Linda Diebel of The Toronto Star wrote an article under the banner, "Freedom of speech casualty of a new war." The Globe and Mail's Simon Houpt lamented, "Dissent has all but disappeared." (To be clear, Matt Welch thinks these writers were wrong). Why do Canadians seem to believe that dissent disappeared? It sure didn't in the Bay area (Berkeley can be counted on), among the people I talk to, on the Web, or on the news I read.

It seems rather normal for a country to veer towards a more militant attitude after an attack. The US did. It also seems rather normal for people who suddenly have a common enemy (all sides of the political spectrum) to agree somewhat more rather than less. But to say that dissent had disappeared any time after 9/11 was always ridiculous. Even without counting the anarchy of voices on the Web (blogging exploded), mainstream media covered and included views opposing invasion of Afghanistan, methods of war, and treatment of prisoners. The only voice I'm aware of that tried to stifle debate is that of John Ashcroft, who is an asshole.

Instead, what I think is happening is that people who fear to express dissent directly turn that into a claim that dissent is being crushed. But the only reason I can find for that fear is the worry that ordinary people and other pundits might disapprove, and hotly disagree in articles, emails, Web sites and letters to the editor. That's not crushing dissent, that's lively debate, and commentators who are afraid of that and try to use political correctness to get people to nicely agree are using underhanded methods.

At the same time, people who oppose war cite a "growing chorus of dissent" opposing the hawks. Can't have it both ways, you know!

My friend Natasha has her own blog now. Although I'm dismayed I won't be able to steal from her emails to me, and she'll probably blog links to Guardian articles rather than email them to me, it's a good thing. Just take a look at her no ballot, no bitching post for proof.

A picture of the quilt I'm working on right now. It's my own design based on a machine pieced triangle grid of fabrics that remind me of the colours of the ocean at sunset. The wave designs are machine couched variegated cotton yarn. Around the crest of each wave are clusters of sparkly seed beads. In the middle, you can kind of see the hand quilting between each line of the cotton yarn (that's the step I'm finishing now).

Pictures of my team (left to right: Michael, Melissa, Barry, and Orlando, Ed, Brian, Conrad and Henry at the other table). We had a farewell lunch for Conrad, the intern, who has finished his summer to my dismay. Best picture is Michael with Cutlery.

The Daily Summit blog referenced below was started by David Steven and friends just to cover the Johannesburg summit. Interestingly, it's funded like science (including travel), according to an article covering the blog (very meta): "Steven, who doesn't think of himself as a journalist, says he approached the British Science Council in early August to pitch the idea and it agreed to sponsor the site and his travel expenses. A week later, he says, the site was up and running."

It's an excellent site. Too bad I only found it today. I love this Q&A from the FAQ:

Do you know what you’re doing?

No. But we think we can find out!

The Times Online has an interesting analysis article from Anatole Kaletsky (link found via Daily Summit). I hear echoes of Julian Simon, particularly in the fifth paragraph: "The experience of the past two centuries suggests that the generations of the future will be infinitely cleverer than we are. They will devise solutions to their problems with an ingenuity that we cannot begin to imagine today. It is not just lazy and selfish to leave the solution of many long-term problems to future generations; it is rational."

A picture of me from last night, occasioned by new haircut.

His Excellency the Honourable Saufatu Sopoanga, Prime Minister of Tuvalu, made an unfortunate choice of words when he told how his country was being annihilated by rising sea levels (from Times Online). He said “We are being submerged because of the selfishness and greed of the industrialised world. "When are the leaders of the industrial world going to take the moral high ground?”

But since they've already taken the physical high ground...

Natasha clarified her position: "It's not necessarily that yuppie activists represent the poor better than the poor themselves, but that truly poor people can rarely afford to attend summits like this. Many (though admittedly not all) activist organizations that attend these events often spend a significant amount of time speaking to farmers and tradespeople in the developing nations, and work directly with them to shape their agendas and debate. The developed world citizens who can afford to travel, and who are voters in the countries that make many of these decisions act more as lobbyists, many times with the blessing, encouragement, and guidance of the people whose issues they take up."

That's great when it happens. Still, when a group is too weak to represent themselves, what happens when the motivations of their supporters finally conflict? Another example from Other Powers (book linked below) is that Horace Greeley, editor of the Tribune, originally supported
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Stanton in their suffrage movement. However, they fell out when Greeley asked the women to wait for blacks to get the vote first (rather than all at once). When Greeley's wife signed a petition that made it publicly obvious she disagreed with her husband, he took his revenge on Stanton, vowing she would never get positive treatment in his paper.

I've been corresponding with Natasha about the Johannesburg summit, which is always interesting because we see different things and point them out to each other. Not only do we notice different articles about the same topic (we tend to frequent different news sources), we notice different things inside the same articles. Then we firmly agree on some important things like this: "But the main things produced for export by the sort of mom & pop shops and struggling laborers conjured up by the word poor are durable goods, like cloth. These goods have been heavily tariffed for years on purely protectionist grounds. This is an issue that has nothing to do with environmentalism, mocks the idea that free trade is any kind of true ideal, and genuinely hurts a great many people."

One thing I haven't made up my mind on is who best represents "the poor"? In the Tech Central Station article we discussed, James Shikwati says "Where are the poor in the summit? They are hardly represented by those "Third World" NGOs here - who pander to wealthy countries in the name of Sustainable Development - perhaps to sustain themselves." Natasha thinks however that first-world "yuppies" (activists) do a better job of representing the third-world poor than their own government ministers. So there are at least four main options (and I'm not sure what Shikwati himself is, although he appears to try to represent the poor):

• Third World NGOs
  
• Third world government ministers
  
• Citizens of rich countries (activists, global NGOs)
  
• The poor themselves -- voting, demonstrating, etc.

I'm reminded of the book I'm currently reading, "Other Powers" by Barbara Goldsmith (loaned to me by my co-worker Quinn). This biography of Victoria Woodhull, a spiritualist and women's rights activist, contains lots of material on the movements that fought for the rights of women and blacks. It's interesting that the first woman's rights convention had a man (James Mott) chairing it. However, soon they attempted to elect a female president for the convention, "a move so unprecedented that even Elizabeth [Stanton] opposed it." Ultimately, men had to approve universal suffrage, which vastly improved the ability of women to represent themselves.

I can't help linking to Paul Ford's stuff at FTrain some more. He has a bit of dialog in a musing which illustrates how I perceive The Semantic Web:

PEF: "I don't understand how all this XML/XHTML/XLink/XPointer/XPath/XSL/SVG/FO stuff is going to work together, what the goals are, where the vision is. I mean, it's all great, don't get me wrong. I use it to build Ftrain.com."

W3C: "Just look at the standard and all will be manifest."

PEF: "But it's 9000 pages, and is filled with Backus-Naur grammar statements. I'm a human, not a computer! What are you guys really trying to do? What vision are you trying to promote?"

W3C: "We're trying to build <bigbrightlights>The Semantic Web </bigbrightlights>"

PEF: "But what is it? Can Ftrain.com be part of <bigbrightlights>The Semantic Web </bigbrightlights>?"

W3C: "Whether you wish to or not, all must belong to <bigbrightlights>The Semantic Web </bigbrightlights>."

PEF: "You're transforming into a giant terrifying aluminum robot!"

W3C: "<loud>Must...<louder> have... <loudest>corporate...<loudest-yet> funding... </loudest-yet> </loudest> </louder> </loud>"

Just drink the koolaid, children.

Den Beste gets mad at cultural relativists who constantly criticize US today (link via ekr). There's a lot of detail of practices in Mid-eastern or African cultures that should by all rights have horrified Western feminists and all opponents of capital punishment. I was already thinking along the same lines, so what interested me most was the thoughts about why these people are so horrified by the US:

• It's the drunk looking for his keys under the streetlight. It's only when it comes to a country like the US that these people have a chance of getting heard; it's not because US is the best place to make improvements.
  
• If they believe that all cultures are equal, then they must beat down American culture because it is so infective. The belief that all cultures are equal is so primary to them that facts must get reinterpreted to fit with this belief. Thus, the American culture is infective but low, unsophisticated, cheap, materialistic; therefore not in fact better in any way!

Coincidentally, this evening I also ran across a speech by Larry Wall, writer of the Perl programming language, in which he says that cultural relativism is ... the notion that everything is as good as everything else, because goodness is only a matter of opinion. It's like claiming that the only thing you can know absolutely is that you can't know anything absolutely. I think this is really just another form of Modernism, a kind of existentialism really, though unfortunately it's come to be associated with postmodernism. But I think it sucks.

If you saw my link to FTrain below, and didn't explore, you should; it's got some gems. Some of my favourites:

• A poem about Apple's ad campaign
  
• A sad, dirty, funny Christmas poem
  
• Imaginary list of forthcoming trade science books
  
• An imaginary trip report, to London
  
• Recovering from PostModernism
  
• Sublimely riduculous insurance policies
  
• If Steven Spielberg Directed Porn

An article in TechCentralStation by James S. Shikwati, Director of the Inter Region Economic Network, IREN Kenya, has this para (Link found through Instapundit):

A delegate from Sweden pointed out that "the poor should not be allowed to make the same mistakes the developed made leading to pollution, the poor should leap-frog in order to attain sustainable development." But what gives the developed nations the right to make choices for the poor?

Exactly.

Some light humour today. Sanrio is a riot already, and FTrain satirizes their character descriptions in Engrish.

I can't believe the guy quoted in this article (link via Instapundit). Gar Smith bemoans electricity. He thinks that a peasant's life is better when they are sewing their own clothes via pedal-powered machine (probably manufactured using electricity)

Although Gar is proud that friends commute via bicycle or mass transit (Gar doesn't say if he does), Gar doesn't seem to realize that public transport (and bicycle manufacture) depends highly on electricity and other modern inventions. And his friends would not be able to live in large cities and commute to their jobs if it weren't for the highly electricity-based economy that keeps water clean and running, removes sewage, runs grocery stores, and otherwise allows so many people to live in such close proximity.

Even the founder of Greenpeace thinks this guy is a nut.

I had never realized that the copyright laws easily risk making Web caches, including the one on your hard drive, illegal. A CNET article points this out in an interview with a Verizon vice president. (I got this link this morning through ditherati email. Ditherati liked the VP's quote: "It's been an interesting time to be on the same side as groups like Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.")

Just noticed that the French phrase for "sustainable development" (chosen by the Johannesberg conference) is "Développement Durable". Translated back it would be more like "long-lasting development". That's a subtle difference from "sustainable" because it seems to imply that it's the length of duration of the development improvement that is important, not that there are two different kinds of development, sustainable and unsustainable. In German it's "Nachhaltige Entwicklung", or "lasting development" (literally, next-halting development, or development that doesn't end until a later date.)

I do sometimes wonder how much differences between speakers of different language depend on the way they phrase things. But I don't think that accounts for the American vs. Euro differences at Johannesberg this week!

"The United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development is being called a last chance for the international community to set a reasonable course on environmental protection, or face the possible collapse of the planet's ecosystems." (from Radio Free Europe). Although the article is vague, it seems to attribute this "last chance" language to Nitin Desai. When the "last chancers" are proven wrong again and again (things get worse, things get better), doesn't this rhetoric start to seem ridiculous?

A number of recent articles criticize the catchphrase "sustainable development" (1, 2, 3 and 4 from Bjorn Lomborg) and the proponents of sustainable development (notably at Johannesburg) who oppose economic growth in at least some forms. James Glassman puts it well, if idealistically: "the word "sustainable" bothers me. While imprecise, it carries connotations of constraint, of limits to growth. The best way to improve the well-being of the people of the world and to improve the environment of the world is to eliminate constraints - especially on the human achievement and imagination. A goal of sustainable development sells the world short. We can do much better."

On the other "side", Nitin Desai, the Secretary General of the Johannesburg summit, defines sustainable development in this interview. Part of his answer: "What does it mean to talk about sustainable energy? It means that you are not going to approach this simply from the perspective of pure environmental management, nor or we going to approach this simply from the perspective of: here is the demand for growth, how are we going to meet it? We need something which seeks to combine the two!" South African president Thabo Mbeki, who spoke at the summit, says "A global human society based on poverty for many and prosperity for a few, characterized by islands of wealth, surrounded by a sea of poverty, is unsustainable." However that seems to be an incompatible (or irrelevant) definition next to Desai's.

According to this article, the phrase was invented in 1987 in the Brundtland report. 'Sustainable development seeks to meet the needs and aspirations of the present without compromising the ability to meet those of the future,' said the report. 'Far from requiring the cessation of economic growth (the notion of sustainability) recognizes that the problem of poverty and underdevelopment cannot be solved unless we have a new era of growth in which developing countries play a large role and reap large benefits.'

I found this article on American foreign aid and private charitable aid very cheering. Carol Adelman points out that American governmental foreign aid is only a fraction of private aid, not even counting direct remittances from immigrants living in US to their families back home. I prefer to be able to choose how and where to give my charitable dollar, so I approve of this state of things.

Although the article states that "our government gave more foreign aid, in absolute terms, than any other country in 2001, topping second-ranked Japan" (in absolute terms means counting private charitable donations as well as government foreign aid), I wish the article had done a better job of including numbers from outside US. E.g if Japan is second-ranked, I'd like to know how much of its foreign aid is private and how much is public.

The personal remittances part is really interesting. A government report says that "Remittances increased from $8.4 billion in 1990 to $11.8 billion in 1995. More than 60 percent of remittances went to the countries of Central America, the Caribbean, and South America". More probably goes through uncounted, brought directly across the Rio Grande inside peoples' wallets. Remittances are finally being seen as a development tool. "In 2000, over $20 billion was sent overseas from immigrants in the US in 80 million separate transactions... the remittances sent to Haiti, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Jamaica account for 10 percent of the GDPs of each of those countries." Holy cow.

Many governments (Kenya, Cuba) restrict personal remittances from residents (Cuba limits to $300 per quarter). Other countries tax remittances (Brazil) even though they may already have taxed the money once as income. The US remittance limit seems to be $10,000 without requiring any paperwork, and more if you do the paperwork to prove you're not laundering money. I do not know if there's an absolute limit.

People seem shocked that the government would consider making what up to 1/5 of Americans do illegal (that is, to share copyrighted files peer-to-peer). That hasn't stopped the US government before. Prohibition, for example. Oh wait, that wasn't such a good idea either. Maybe we'll see "share-easy" cafes in obscure corners, where laptops are whisked out of sight at the approach of law enforcement?

I find it hard to complain about more wireless access, but it's hard to see how Starbucks will make money with it. Or do business-people really have meetings in Starbucks, for which they're willing to pay at least $3 for the right to (wirelessly) hook in?

In more recent articles, Steve Gillmor interviews Raikes and Mangione on further Microsoft .NET strategies. The Raikes article is boring but he does say "Office 11 not only has the same level of XML support that we had in Excel and Access but also a more advanced form of XML support that we have for all of those products in Office 11, which is the ability to support arbitrary schemas."

I was really tickled by Mangione's statement that "We may not be there today but the reality is, the way you're going to interoperate, the way you're going to bring it together is all going to be over standard protocols. I think the biggest thing in the 10 years I've been at Microsoft is to finally realize that protocols really do matter." That wasn't really true two years ago, judging by the effect my standards work had on my career there, but it may be true now.

Also in the Mangione article, Gillmor asks "Things like SIP [Session Initiation Protocol], for example. There's no XML in SIP, right?" Umm. That's a really, really stupid question with no relevance to the discussion before or after. It's a stupid question because SIP is a standard protocol whether or not it contains XML. XML is just a way to format data; SIP chose another format. Did Gillmor leave the question in just to make fun of Mangione's repetitive response? Or is that a glitch?

Finally, Mangione repeats the new keyword "federated" that Bill used in his .NET speech. No doubt they've been hearing loud and clear from customers that it's not OK for Microsoft to run centralized services for businesses. Like AOL IM, for example!

On Aug. 3 I translated "BillSpeak" from a recent .NET strategy speech. Steve Gillmor does the same (two days later, go blogs!) in an InfoWorld article. Steve makes some inferences I hadn't made, but I think he's not wrong. On the other hand, he ignores many implications too. For example, he completely ignores the emphasis Bill put on notifications, reducing it to a product availability hint.

I like this article on health advice, although I don't think it's all helpful. At least the recommendation to take both the new findings and the conventional wisdom with a grain of salt is good advice. What it really communicates to me though is just how complicated it is to attempt to live healthily, unless of course we ignore all conventional wisdom and new findings!

I don't know about suing the US Government, but this article on obesity and the official food guide pyramid is pretty damning. I know I can't eat 6-11 servings of grains, cereals, rice and pasta per day without gaining serious weight. Two servings a day is probably the max for me! On the other hand, I can eat more than 2-3 recommended servings/day from the meat, beans, eggs and nuts category, and easily more than 3-5 servings of vegetables.

New country-by-country economic freedom ratings show Hong Kong still at the top, and the US third (and Canada ninth). These ratings now include 37 new variables. One of those is per-capita income, which seems to confuse things- if the ratings institutes want to use these numbers to prove that economic freedom is correlated prosperity, this really confuses the issue. Maybe nobody will notice?

I also noted that protection of intellectual property is one of the new variables, but the news article doesn't say whether protecting intellectual property increases a country's rating or decreases it. I'd guess the former, although I'm seeing more and more libertarians argue that protecting intellectual property decreases economic freedoms.

Great post by Dan Simon on what it costs to subsidize Amtrak, and how that subsidy largely benefits the well-to-do. Another example of social programs that help those who don't need it.

Last week Bill and Steve gave an interesting Microsoft strategy presentation at Redmond. I haven't worked there in years, and my focus may be myopic, but here's some thoughts.

"There were some competitors who dismissed this approach, the centricity of XML, the importance of Web services"	I still don't get the importance of Web services. Or rather, I understand that but I don't understand the value-add of UDDI and WSDL.
"this is a software problem, one of the toughest software problems ever tackled, easily greater than tough engineering problems like getting to the moon or designing the 747"	In some ways, I agree with this. If they're smart, however, the problem will be broken up into many smaller problems, which can be far more independent of each other than could be possible in a space mission or airplane. Software is very complex, but it can be extremely modular. Hey, XML can help with that!
"today think of your address book information that's in your buddy list, it's on different machines, it doesn't get up to date, somebody can change something, it doesn't automatically get to you, so the information management is not people centric, and .NET My Services, the direction there is to solve that"	It's definitely not clear from this who "owns" your buddy list. That's the problem with making something centrally available. On the other hand, we've gotten over that anxiety with email - many people use hotmail for email without worrying about Microsoft owning their emails.
"It's important to think of the breakthroughs that were required once we got that connectivity really in two parts. One is how you represent the information and the other is how do you exchange that information. The first is about information formats and schemas and the second is about a rich set of protocols."	Yes! It's not enough just to have the Internet, we have to define how data is represented, exchanged and used. There's much confusion on that score. Today somebody posted a proposal for a RPC protocol to the general IETF list, as if it were the protocol to end all protocols. Well, we can have layers and layers and layers of protocols, but there still needs to be an understanding about how the information is formatted and what it means to the sending and receiving computers.
"In a sense you could say it's the Holy Grail that computing has talked about for a long time, having applications written by people who don't have to meet each other, because the number of connections are too great for that, they don't have to trust each other, their system can run even if the other guy's system is unreliable or even if it's malicious you can make sure that the wrong things don't happen to that application."	OK, this is totally bogus. .NET is not the holy grail of computing. It won't give computers the intelligence to talk to each other! Duh.
"Jet Blue is an example of a competitor in the airline industry who's decided they're going to keep their IT costs below 2 percent and that's against a fairly typical industry average there of about 5 percent."	Wow. That's exciting! IT costs are too high. Cutting IT costs like that, if it's generally applicable, would rock for the world economy. Not that I believe the cost reduction is all Microsoft's doing, however.
Portals are mentioned, in the sense that a government (or I assume a company) can standardize on a portal and then plug all sorts of value services into it without planning a single architecture for all the services.	That wish will not come true for 5-10 years. Since I've had recent experience working with and comparing portals, I can attest that they are so different there's a significant learning curve and even some architectural differences required to plug into them. Some portal products (Sybase's) are all about architecture, and locking a bunch of valuable services into one architecture.
"Federation, the idea that all these different systems can be connected together without their being any unique root, that is if two companies want to trust each other they can just federate."	This is a cool thing, but not that new. We federate email, why not instant messaging? Competition amonst IM services has stifled federation in that area. I won't be surprised if IM stays in its isolated islands, or if more services are islands.
Sharing authentication information"What we announced recently is what we call "TrustBridge," where you can take that internal Active Directory and say OK, if I want to share these identities outside the company, how can I use this WS security protocol to, say, take the Intel Active Directory implementation and the Microsoft one and exchange that information? That's the corporate-to-corporate case..."	OK, but does every TrustBridge require individual attention? It won't do me much good most of the time, because the IT departments of companies employing my collaborators couldn't be bothered setting up a TrustBridge with my employer.
"Notification is the idea that instead of going and finding information there are certain things you care enough about that you want to be notified."	I've discussed this technology recently on this blog. It sure sounds from the way Steve talks about notification that they want to centralize it. E.g. rather than getting new-email notifications via IMAP, and appointment-reminder notifications via CAP, and document-unlocked events via WebDAV, they want to use one protocol to transport all these notifications, and one notification server to collect them for the user. That's not the way the standards are going, so MS is either going to drag the standards in that direction or be non-standard. Probably both to a large extent.
To remove barriers in communication media, to improve user centricity: "A big part of this we believe is bringing the voice world and the screen world together and you're seeing this in a number of real time things."	I believe in this big time, but again, it's very hard. How does your IM client know what your email contact book is? These are so separate today, separate servers and protocols and clients, that it will be hard to unify.
"Outlook will evolve from being an e-mail client to being far more than an e-mail client."	Yeah, you can see that happening -- its had calendaring and contacts and journal and tasks for years, recently a little buddy list functionality, next I imagine it will integrate NetMeeting
"SharePoint, you're going to see, is really a key part of Office."	Ouch. SharePoint is really not standards based. In fact, open standards are really not a focus of this strategy. I guess this is the "extend" phase of "embrace and extend" the Internet. I hope the damage from MS not following open standards in key components won't be too great, but I'm pessimistic.
To break down barriers between islands of information on your own computer, e.g. so you can search across your files and email with one search command, they plan to unify storage of this information.	This shouldn't be too hard, since modern file systems are half-way there, having dual streams so that the file contents can be stored with arbitrary amounts of metadata. But I'm not intimately familiar with the problems here.
"So you're going to see with the PC a lot more changes in these next three or four years than in the last three or four."	That's really unlikely. Systems get larger and more unwieldy as time passes. Unless they've spent the last three years simplifying PCs rather than adding features (which they have not), the next three years are more likely to involve smaller and smaller incremental changes in PCs. Unless they're talking hardware form factors rather than software GUI, in which case a breakthrough may radically change things.

Summary: It's all about putting the data in XML to exchange via Web services (SOAP); that's .NET. SOAP is now built into Windows XP. Increased privacy, but at the same time increased authorization information exchange. Increased federation, but also increased centralization. "So there's a lot of direction here." No kidding!

OK, one more blog today about libertarians. A neat article about libertarian ideology and health starts by defending busybodies. It argues that public health experts exhorting people not to smoke, to have a healthy diet, etc. can be consistently libertarian as long as they do not advocate regulations impinging the individual's right to engage in unhealthy activities that do not hurt others. One point I disagree on is the mandatory health warnings on cigarette packages -- the authors of the article find that restricts freedom too much, and I do not.

The article goes on to discuss the medicalization of unhealthy behaviors, the increasing tendency to see addicts as helpless, either sick or insane people. It's a little overly wordy but otherwise interesting.

Here's an example of a report that recommends what I consider to be libertarian and economics based principles (market principles), without entirely forgetting social compassion. The report (note that it's funded by the Reason Public Policy Institute, and it's not a scientific study) shows that when you charge people according to how much garbage they throw out they throw out up to 17% less garbage (the rate can be lower depending on the pricing scheme) and recycle more. One important consideration is whether variable pricing, which is more complicated, costs more than it saves. However the report addresses this too, citing a benefit/cost ratio of 7.6 in a year alone!

The report discusses subsidizing low-income customers. This recommendation makes much more sense to me than subsidizing everybody, or subsidizing those who waste more as the more common flat price scheme does. (OTOH, I also find it wasteful for every social program that exists to have a separate way to subsidize low-income customers. Wouldn't it be more efficient to centralize that too? )

BTW, only 20% of the US population gets charged according to how much garbage they produce (at the time of the original SERA study).

Jeremy Lott says libertarians are more fun, which I agree with. I have a few reasons to add. First, they don't tell me what to do. Second, they think things like alcohol, drugs and sex can be fun (not to mention potluck picnics). Third, they at least pay lip service to using science, including economics, and tools like analysis and reason to overcome bias and wishful thinking, so they tend to be a little lest frustrating to argue with.

The main thing I'd like to see changed in libertarians is more compassion. The pro-personal-independence stance of many libertarians seems to encourage them to overlook suffering. I guess that reveals my preferences to be as much socialist (that is, I support taxes & many social programs) as libertarian (I support individual liberties).

Law professor Neal Katyal has an editorial in today's NYT. He bemoans cyber-lawlessness and suggests remedies:

"The federal government should develop programs to increase awareness of computer security issues... More research is also needed on solutions like palm and fingerprint recognition, which could reduce or even eliminate the need for passwords... Congress should ... increase financial and technical assistance to centers that train computer scientists in advanced techniques. The industry itself should also educate the general public about the proper use of computers and good password practices."

General education certainly seems like a good thing. I am appalled at the poor administration I have seen in systems that are supposed to be secure, like outsourced email services. Administrators choose extremely poor passwords for users (e.g. each user's social security number, or the same easily-guessed password for every person in the company who has an account).

However, I fail to see how computer scientists need to be trained in advanced techniques. Many of the advanced techniques we already have suffer from severe deployment problems, such as public/private key systems. The basic techniques deployed so far aren't so terrible, except that they're consistently used badly. It's not computer scientists that need training in basic techniques, it's users and particularly system administrators, who generally aren't computer scientists.

Also, it's not clear how to follow through on the suggestion that "the industry itself should also educate..". It seems any company using computers has in its own best interests to train its users about proper use of computers and passwords. These companies are far more likely to act in their own self-interest than have the software industry step up and do it for the general public.

I just found a wierd article on self-modifying protocols. It is inspired by self-modifying games such as Nomic. Vreeswijk justifies the need for protocols which may be modified in the fly by reference to human conversation, where we constantly modify the protocol in use. For example, I can say "I invented a game called Big Brother", and you will understand when I refer to "Big Brother", I'm referring to a game you may never have heard of before. The article also discusses the bootstrap problem and ensuring that the protocol doesn't go dead. Although there are some interesting ideas, the link between self-modifying games and protocols that are modifiable by the computers that use them seems rather tenuous.

More obviously useful (by which I mean lucrative) would be modifiable-rule computer games. I briefly played BattleTech or some such game, where you can design your mech warrior. The only part of the game that really held my interest was that it felt like I could customize the rules by which the next battle would be played. Of course that's a rather limited sense of rule changing, in that of course the real rules encompass all the possible mech designs. There's also the games where you can design the terrain before beginning the game played on the terrain, like Age of Empires. I can't think of any existing computer game that involves significantly more flexibility than these two types.

I gathered a list today of notification work related to various IETF applications area working groups, past and present. There's a lot.

For the purposes of this discussion, a notification is a message sent to a client from notification server, where the server initiates the connection. The notification was solicited, because the client previously requested a subscription for a specific kind of event from the server. The notification problem is not easy because to solve it properly it requires clients to either have a new kind of server, a notification management server, to manage and receive their notifications, or it requires clients to listen on a port and accept incoming requests (which is forbidden by many firewalls and corporate policies).

General: In Aug 1998 the NOTIFY BOF was held at IETF with much controversy and huge scope problems. GENA (Generic Event Notification Architecture) is one of the more concrete proposals that came out of this. It has received some unofficial discussion and review in the WebDAV WG (which I co-chair), where notifications would be useful to let users know when new documents show up in their folders, when documents they want to edit become unlocked, etc.

ENP (Event Notification Protocol, May 2000) is a notifications proposal based directly on WebDAV, but perhaps no less generic than GENA. This proposal was also discussed in the now-defunct SWAP (Simple Workflow Access Protocol) WG.

HTTP: In 1998 a workshop called WISEN (Workshop on Internet Scale Event Notification) discussed general notification, focusing on the Web. Many of those involved in 1998 were UC Irvine grad students, and UCI professor Richard Taylor advised at least some of those. The Institute for Software Research at UCI frequently works on notifications, distributed systems, event-based systems, etc. Adam Rifkin put together a somewhat-dated but very comprehensive survey of event systems. One of those UCI students, Rohit Khare, left to found KnowNow, which implements HTTP-based notification clients and servers.

SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) isn't applications area (it's transport area) but they recently came out with a reasonably extensible notifications RFC. A recent academic paper acknowledges debts to SIP in the design of a Group Event Notification Protocol.

SNAP ([Smart/Simple] Notification and Alarm Protocol) is another concrete proposal. It has been discussed most in the VPIM (Voice Profile for Internet Mail) WG, but it showed up at the Lemonade BOF at last week's IETF, proposed for use in "unified messaging", to notify mail clients of new types of messages in their unified mail inboxes. SNAP has also been proposed for use in MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service). There are also claims SNAP has been implemented by "major email vendors" and Comverse.

The CalSched WG could use notification in order to let users know when an appointment is coming up.

The OPES WG and the recently-defunct WEBI WG discussed the requirements for a Web notification architecture. WEBI wants Web page cache servers to subscribe to Web content servers, so that rather than poll for new page versions, the content server could send a notification when the cache should be thrown out or updated. They also discussed using GENA.

The LDAP-EXT (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) WG has discussed notifications and LDAP.

The IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) WG has discussed notifications and has a current Internet-Draft discussing requirements.

Instant messaging even enters the fray. It's long been understood (see the draft I wrote in 1998, or this or this other one) that finding out when somebody is online may best be done with subscriptions and notifications. Last week's Jabber BOF brought to light a protocol for which there exists an Event Notification Service.

For future reference: when emergencies involving many injuries arise, don't give blood. Instead, wait for a time when the blood banks need blood.

Clearly, blood banks could use a number of changes to even out the flow, some suggested by the New Republic article:

• Turn away qualified donors when there are too many. Ask them to come back rather than waste time, money and blood, even though most don't come back.
  
• Publish more information. Links from local daily web sites? Perhaps the local newspaper could be encouraged to print a daily "blood supply meter" showing when the pipeline is full, and when it's empty and more donors are needed.
  
• Simplify the questionnaire. Some questions, as the New Republic article points out, are uselessly vague or even indeterminate. Those questions are useless as a supplement to the pathogen lab tests that already exist.

Wired has a breathy article on the Apt. club where guests can DJ with IPods. Isn't that pretty much a jukebox?

If you're interested in a huge mess of photos from the 54th IETF, I've got links to photo albums put up by various people.

Thank-you, Queen's Square mall in Yokohama! I stopped at Starbucks there last night to fortify myself caffeine-wise before the long plenary. I must have left my wallet there. I didn't realize this until this morning putting stuff in my bag. I went to the hotel desk first where they put the words "lost black wallet" etc. on a piece of paper. I took it to Starbucks, where they seemed to say they had found it, and I should go to Information. The Information lady called around and told me to go to security. At security, they simply handed it to me and asked me to sign my name in their register! Not a single yen was missing.

Tech Central Station has an article today on wireless ubiquity. I am one of those who already takes it for granted. I am sitting in a large meeting room using wireless access to post this. However, what I am currently most grateful for is that the conference center did such a good job of putting power strips down every third row of chairs so I don't run out of battery juice - many conferences don't provide enough power outlets for geek groups like this one.

Power, network -- these are only two of the services provided free here. I also benefit from light, air conditioning (Tokyo is hot and muggy), snacks, water, and washroom facilities. These are all cheap services in the long run (except the snacks), and can all be included in the price of a venue rather than being charged separately. This is cool.

I attended a working group meeting this morning of possibly general interest. The geopriv working group is chartered with not only standardizing a format for geographical information, but also to deal with privacy issues around such information. For example, a user might publish their geographical information minute by minute to their friends, just like their instant messaging presence. Or a user might send their geographical position to a server that can respond with the nearest pharmacy or post office.

I found it quite amusing that most of the conversation I heard was about truth. Various presenters talked about how clients might want to lie about their position, or at least not be quite truthful. There was serious talk about how this affected the standard framework or protocols involved. I can't see how truth is anything but a philosophical issue, and definitely not an engineering issue. Truth may be conveyed in information and information may be conveyed in computer protocols, and protocols can't even guarantee that they are delivering information (the protocol may be given nonsense or garbage rather than information), let alone truth.

The Center for Democracy and Technology has somebody involved in geopriv, and discussed some of the basics in their one and only standards bulletin last May.

"Transparency" is on many tongues, in discussions of the media, big corporations, governments and any other organization and how they should operate. It came up tonight at the IESG Plenary here. I suspect transparency is overblown as a solution to all ills.

In the example tonight, an IETF participant felt that a proposal had been improperly blocked by an area director. The IETF participant felt that an opaque process allowed the improper behavior to remain unobvious for a long time. But really, in what way can transparency fix that? The same personality clashes and technical disagreements will still occur, and any sufficiently flexible and powerful process is subject to being affected by those who run it.

Here's me in a kimono! Last night at the IETF social, Ayako and Rei (and friends) were very kind to loan me a "yukata" or summer kimono, and dress me up in it. I loved it. Several people promised me pictures, shortly I should be able to post links to more, including the lovely Ayako and Rei.

What is it with us Canadians and navel-gazing surveys? Here's another, indicating Canadians are feeling insecure about health care, economic stability and unemployment.

It may be a good sign that Canadians survey themselves so much. If you're going to have a paternalistic, protective government, you'd better have data to do it as well as possible. However, this particular survey is by a group that I distrust because they very clearly and openly have a social development agenda. Yet, the Globe and Mail reports their survey results as if they were neutral. That's a mistake with "how do you feel about" surveys, where the exact wording of questions and the attitude of the questioner have a big effect on the response.

I'm in Japan, and really noticing the big screens in major squares. E.g. across from Shibuya station. That's because one of the major brands is "Super Lisa"! The "lisa" stands for LED Informational System of Akami. Here is an example with the logo, and here's the one I saw yesterday in Akihabara.

Janis Ian wrote an article about music copying and downloading, now published on her Web site. The article is written from the point of view of a recording artist, but she does a good job of looking at larger issues. I like her point that it's the hypocrisy of the labels that she most objects to, that they're trying to protect artists and consumers, when mostly they're trying to protect their own asse(t)s. Janis puts her money where her mouth is, posting MP3s of her songs for downloading.

A New York Times opinion piece by Harvard/Penn professors claims to illustrate the problem of corporate morality by looking at history. Their claim is that we have much increased corporate law in the last century. This I have no trouble believing. However, they also say "With all this criminal law, we ought to have achieved a high level of corporate honesty by now. Needless to say, current events suggest otherwise." I have trouble believing either of these statements, and both require significant backing up.

In other words, it's not clear to me at all that current events prove corporate honesty has gone down. Current events only prove that our standards or expectations for corporate honesty are higher than reality. That could simply mean that our expectations have risen faster than corporate honesty has.

The National Post has a good article about why the LA shooting can be called a hate crime. It has a bunch of good points, some of which are related to my arguments below.

Does calling something a "hate crime" imply that it isn't "terrorism"? I thought yes, but my boyfriend thought no. Now I conclude that it's the whole definition of hate crime that is the problem.

I understand it's "pick on the FBI" year (and they have much to answer for). However, caution in assigning motives to a sudden killer who had not been on their radar seems understandable. It even seems wise not to get embroiled in the discussion of defining "hate crime" and "terrorism" by not mentioning either.

The NYT's snide headline implies that while the FBI is unable to determine the LAX shooter's motives, any five-year-old should be able to -- based on an interview with a single man who had known Hadayet for one month. Instapundit extends that theme to scorn the FBI for their "duck and cover" act. However, early reports of eyewitnesses mentioned an argument that spun out of control, and in another NYT article, relatives of the shooter said it was probably an argument over limousine fare. While that theory seems wishful thinking at best, it's the mess of early theories that makes it appropriate for the FBI to be noncommittal until more thorough investigation of the shooter, his relatives and acquaintances.

It's true that when it suits the FBI's purposes they spout off with half-baked theories about investigations, and when it doesn't they're mum. However, it also seems that the FBI is criticized either way. And LA's mayor James Hahn said the same thing as the FBI, but is not criticized by Instapundit.

I've been influenced by Landsburg's argument that the most effective use of one's charitable $$ is to donate all of it to the most effective charity. This idea runs counter to most regular peoples' giving habits, where they give small to medium donations to a variety of organizations when reminded or canvassed. It's been a useful idea to me because it inspired me to do research into effective charities so that I could pick one I really liked, and give it most of my charitable funds.

However, the idea falls down if one takes into account the other reasons charities want donations, as Natasha pointed out to me this weekend. Charities regularly canvas people for extremely small amounts of money, hardly enough to cover the canvassing costs. Here are some reasons why charities want large amounts of small donors:

• A large population of small donors shows enough popular support to attract a few much bigger donors.
  
• Proof of popular support can help attract government funding
  
• Proof of popular support can assist in advocacy, whether the advocacy is targetted at government, corporate, or other
  
• Even small donations commit people. In Influence, Power of Persuasion, Cialdini describes how people who previously did not have a deep commitment to a cause become more committed after donating a small amount of money. This may lead to larger donations or other contributions later. Unlike the previous three points, this point may influence you not to donate small amounts.
  
• Small donations may prove an interest in learning more. The charity may highly value a role of informing people who have already shown some interest, rather than simply extract more money from them. The small charitable donation may be just large enough to cover the cost of a member's newsletter.