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I'm so ready to receive my check for $0.35US

That's all too typical of these sorts of class action lawsuits. The only people who come out ahead are the lawyers.

In the one against Apple about running OS X on older Macs, I could have gotten $25, but only if I did all sorts of paperwork and jumped through a series of hoops. Even if OS X ran badly on my beige G3--and it didn't--it wasn't worth it. I'd have rather seen Apple make my floppy drive work in OS X.

The judges (lawyers themselves) pander far too much to the lawyers in class action lawsuits. Die horribly of cancer in some release of a toxic gas by a major corporation and your family may get a few hundred thousands dollars. But the lawyers who file such lawsuits walk away with tens of millions of dollars EACH for no more than a few months of their time.

The "you die, you get a pittance" and "you're a lawyer, you make out like a bandit" inequalities of our current legal system are obscene. We need laws to limit just how badly the lawyers can rip us off.

But how do you change the law when some many of our legislators are lawyers, and when one major party (the Democrats) gets about 25% of its donations from lawyers. --Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle

Can the open source community create its own patents?

The people commonly referred to as the "open source community" - in this instance meaning the hackers and developers who write much open source software -- can never generate the number of patents obtained by the big patent powerhouse companies. Filing patent applications simply takes too much time and costs too much money.

I'm less than impressed with this guy's reasoning. The fact that we can't generate the same volume of low quality patents as a Microsoft is beside the issue. Quality can beat quantity. A few key patents could exert enormous leverage, particularly if they were closely linked to widely accepted standards that even a Microsoft has to respect.

The writer also does not realize that an open source group could accept donated patents, and (in the U.S.) return some of their value to the inventor (or corporate owner) in the form of a tax-deduction. The donor would be a double winner. His idea would be widely adopted and, if he/it has taxable income, he/it would get a tax deduction.

And while it is true that those patents would offer no protection to a patent-holding company with no other business (no patent can), it would offer some protection against a SCO or a Microsoft. And that's where the real danger lies.

--Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle

I'd be more impressed with Apple if they'd lose a few of these design competitions by listening to the rest of us. OS X is arguably the best OS in existence today. But it's married to the most user-hostile hardware on the planet.

Apple markets to narrow niches. The eMac, ugly and bulky, is great for schools worried about theft. The iMac, impossible to upgrade, is fine for those with tiny apartments and limited needs (an iPod accessory). The iBooks are a good deal for those who want a small laptop. The other laptops are little more than metallic fashion statements. And finally their desktops, oversized, overpriced, overfeatured, and unnecessairly quiet, are for the few who edit audio and video professionally and can afford to pay twice what a comparable PC would cost.

So why aren't the people who said they were making a computer "for the rest of us," making a computer that the rest of us might want to buy? Look at computer sales. What most people want is an inexpensive, expandable desktop that lets them choose the monitor or monitors and add cards to their hearts content. They want to be able to make choices not follows the dictates of Steve Jobs.

Fashion statements are for clothes and jewelry. Computers are a tool and need to be designed and built as such. Apple should listen more to the people who are, would be or were their customers.

--Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle

Not to worry....

But Garcia insisted the Democrats have the computer security situation well in hand, with the help of security specialists from Cisco Systems Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

... Microsoft will be there ensuring that everything is as secure as Windows itself.

--Mike Perry, Inkling blog

I mean, 650,000 brains are a lot smarter than the 50 . . .

Not really. Mobs tend to be dumber than small groups. The former's large size gives participants a feeling of power that the facts don't support. Over time, they get worse and worse.

Dean's 650,000 spiraled into ga-ga land because the Internet created a mob-on-a-dark-night environment for them. Through the wonders of modern technology, a group that represented a tiny fraction of one percent of the population came to believe it was a nation of almost 300 million. That's where their silliness about "taking back" the country was born.

In reality, Dean was too strange to win the support of most registered Democrats, much less the nation as a whole. Unfortunately, in rejecting Dean, a weird and insular sort of New Englander, the party turned to Kerry, a cold and arrogant New England brahmin whose only talent lies in marrying rich women. And thanks to the silence of the party leadership, all the conspiracy thinking of the Dean campaign has entered into the party's campaign rhetoric, as you can see in Michael Moore's film. Liberals are now as crazy as the MacCarthy right was in the 1950s.

No, delete that. Today's left is much more mixed up than the anti-commie right of half a century ago. The latter at least had a coherent idea who their enemy was. Today's left can't decide if Bush is a puppet of Jewish "neos" manipulating US foreign policy to serve the interests of Israel, or if he's controlled by rich Saudi oil shieks. In fact, from the New York Times on down, they can't even decide if he's a dumb puppet or a clever and scheming Machivelian. All they know is that they hate him.

Liberalism has, in fact, become the nation's premier hate group. They hate Bush. They hate Texas. They hate the all the people who get mushy when they see the flag. They hate those who're proud of their country for unseating the bloodiest tyrant in the Middle-east. They hate those who think what's in a mother's tummy is a baby, They hate, they hate, they hate.

There's an old proverb that runs, "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad." Taking "mad" in both senses--angry and crazy--that's what's happening to the Democratic party. And both Dean and the Internet played a role in that decline. Technology does have its down side.

--Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle

First, the technology for this is nothing new. IBM and Xerox have have been selling equipment to do this for years and quite a few publishers use their technology either to keep older books from going out of print or, like me, to publish books without high inventory costs. You can see a list of the 22 titles I've published on IBM POD equipment at:

Inkling Books

Second, the company behind this, On Demand Machine, is the SCO of publishing. They've never managed to create a commercially competitive product. But like SCO, they're attempting to exploit the current mess in IP law to enrich themselves at the expense of those who have created a different and more successful business model (placing far more complex POD systems in wholesale book channels). Think Linux for their competitors. On Demand Machine has a badly worded patent on a kiosk-based, book-at-a-time scheme that they've never managed to make viable. Now they've managed to dupe a jury into accepting that their patent applies to the very different business model used by LightningSource/Ingram/Amazon.

On Demand Machine is currently going after the big guys (Ingram/Amazon). But if they win there, they'll have lots of money to sue mom-and-pop print shops and those who have developed online file to book print systems, including those using free/open source software and public domain etexts.

Fortunately, there's a lot of prior art for print-on-demand from the late 1980s that could invalidate their now-dangerous patent. If anyone has legally sound evidence that illustrates books being printed one-at-a-time after being ordered from before the early 1990s, please get in touch with me via the InklingBooks.com link above. I'll help to put you in touch with the good-guy lawyers in the lawsuit. Interestingly, as with SCO's attack on Linux, in this case IBM is among the good guys.Unfortunately, the case is not being fought with IBM's lawyers.

--Mike Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle

Gates' vision of television of the future was: "TV that will simply show what we want to see, when we want to see it. When we get home, the home computer will know who we are from our voice or our face. It will know what we want to watch, our favourite programmes, or what the kids shouldn't be allowed to see."

Gates has given a near-perfect description of what I find so irritating about Microsoft products. They arrogantly assume they know what I want better than I do. Their products appeal to those who want to be wrapped in a warm and cozy, 'you need not think' blanket. They irritate the rest of us.

Of course, Steve Jobs has his problems too. OS X is arguably the best OS on the planet. But his obsession with products that look "cool" is just as irritating. People like dull, inexpensive, boxy towers with lots of slots because they regard a computer as a tool and that gives them the best value. They no more want their computer to come in wild colors and odd shapes than they want a hammer that's odd looking.

In short, both Gates and Jobs have a problem with listening. Gate's wants to dictate how our software works, contrary to our wishes. Apple listens carefully about what we want in software but ignores our hardware wishes.

The latter is the primary reason why Apple's share of the computer hardware market is a mere 2.8% and declining. My Mac is almost eight years old, and I'd love to upgrade. The PC market is filled with hardware I like, but Apple makes nothing worth the cost and hassle of an upgrade.

--Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle

H. G. Wells would find this fuss delightful! If you've ever wondered why all his good fiction dates from before 1900, it's because, starting with his 1901 Anticipations, he turned political. What he wrote the last half-century of his life delighted those on the left, who made him a secular saint, but it turned off most readers.

Wells' goal was a world state run by a small cadre of experts and built on the ideas of Malthus and Darwin. At the heart of his agenda was ensuring that the "efficient" members of the white races (primarily English-speaking) weren't swamped by the more prolific darker races or by the "people of the Abyss," meaning the white underclass.

Wells wrestled with various means for carrying out his eugenic agenda. One of his more clever schemes was the creation of "pleasure cities," where the"'unfit" would be allowed unlimited pornography and sex to distract them from having children. Huxley's Brave New World is that same idea rendered hi-tech.

You can find out more about this, including extensive quotes from Wells and his allies, on my blog at:

H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and the British Fabians

Understand Wells and you'll understand the liberal zeal for both saturation-level porn and providing poor, minority women with "safe and legal abortions."

--Mike Perry, Seattle, Editor: Eugenics and Other Evils and The Pivot of Civilization in Historical Perspective

' The G5's aesthetic is a pure and graceful expression of Apple's philosophical precept of leaving no detail un-designed. This is what results when engineering and design play nice with each other.'

The G5 is like a beautful wife who can't cook and costs a fortune. Yes, it has impressive speed--speed you might have to pay half as much to get in a PC. But the G4 desktop family could accept twice as many external & internal drives even though it was smaller. And the G5's quietness reflects Steve Job's 'French General' mindset. He's always going overboard to correct the most criticized last problem--in this case a G4 model that was overly loud.

If Apple keeps losing 0.5% marketshare or so a year, in less than a decade it'll be history. That's sad when you consider just how impressive OS X is in comparison with Windows. It's sad when you consider that, unlike Microsoft, Apple really is innovative. It's sad when you realize that Macs really are far more hassle-free.

Apple's problem is that it's too obsessed with winning design awards like these--awards that are likely translate into maybe 1000 additional sales a year. That's a tiny drop in the great ocean of desktop computer sales and a recipe for disaster.

Apple needs to realize that Windows (and soon Linux) have improved visually to the point where most untutored buyers can't see a difference. They're buying a computer to do something other than make a fashion statement, and by that standard Macs simply don't measure up.

I've own Macs for almost 15 years. But when I consider replacing my seven-year-old beige G3 I balk. Apple's dismal desktop sales reflect the unpleasant fact that, unlike their laptops, their desktops are grossly uncompetitive. In the PC world, I could find a dozen and more models that have a blend of features and price I like. With Apple I find nothing making the hassle of an upgrade worthwhile.

In desktops, Apple has the same mindset that almost sent Henry Ford into bankruptcy. Ford's problem was a "any color you want as long as it is black" mindset. He paid no attention to the market and let General Motors steal away his customers. Apple's 'don't listen to the market' mindset is identical to Ford's. I've got two perfectly good monitors. I don't want to pay more for an eMac or iMac to get a computer that forces a monitor on me and leaves me no option to add a second. I want what the PC world provides in abundance--a box that lets me mix & match to get the features I want at a reasonable price. I don't want optical audio out or a WiFi card built in. I don't want a low-end machine that probably cost Apple more to make because they deliberately crippled it in comparison with pricer models.

Apple is, unfortunately, still mired in the Eighties, when it was different enough to maintain market share despite the fact that it didn't deliver what the market was really wanting. But now isn't then. If if doesn't want its computers to become mere appendages to iPods, it needs to look at the sort of computers people are buying, and build models just like them. It needs to copy as well as innovate. Wise people know how to do both.

In short, Apple needs to listen more to us and less to a bunch of elitist, stuck-on-themselves artists and designers. A computer is a tool. It isn't an object to be placed in an art museum to be "ouuud" and "ahhhhd" over.

--Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle

'"If we're in an environment where the government says you've got to get fingerprinted and background checked, and spend three to four months to do it, (adults are) not going to participate in my hobby,"

How silly! Seattle required me to get fingerprinted and have a full FBI background check before issuing an emergency worker's pass that would get me through checkpoints in a terrorism incident. That makes perfect sense. If I were a terrorist, that card could let me slip away from the scene of a crime or create havoc at an emergency command center.

All this requirement means is that someone, perhaps the local police, would come to a club meeting, check IDs and take fingerprints. That'd take about half an hour. Then the club members simply need to wait a few weeks to a few months until the FBI runs the check. They're not going to be poking through your garbage or peeking in your bedroom window.

Some of you have need to get a life, watch a few less weird movies, and stay away from paranoid websites. The shrill left, in particular, seems to be getting as nutty as the John Birchers were in the 1950s. Don't become one of them.

--Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle

The only wrench in the scenarios, is how do you protect your populace versus terrorist who don't play by normal rules? Will it come down to holding "terrorist" countries hostage to the actions of a few of their people or the groups they support?

"Countries hostage" is inaccurate. Remember that this weapon should be able to accurately hit small targets 250 miles inland within a few minutes, with no warning, no pilot at risk, and very limited collateral damage. The people who have something to fear aren't relatively innocent populations, but terrorists who venture above the surface, however briefly. This will make them live like mushrooms.

Israel has already adopted a policy of terrorist leadership decapitation to good effect, but their approach--attack helicopters--requires air supremacy and is useful only over a small area like the West Bank. This gives the same effect up to 250 miles inland anywhere on earth. I believe the term is, "You can run but you can't hide."

If bin Laden hears about this, I doubt he will sleep very well. It demonstrates that, as with the Barbary pirates of two centuries (when Europe wimped out and Thomas Jefferson held firm), terrorism is best met with an emphasis on the use of force, not with panty-waisted French diplomats waving white flags.

--Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle

Given that Paul Allen is funding this project, could they be using Windows for their flight control OS? If so, that might explain the glitch? Imagine on some future flight:

Pilot to Ground: "Ground this is One. I am experience attitude control problems. Oh no, it can't be that! Not that!"

Ground to Pilot: "One, what is it? Tell us what is wrong?"

Pilot to Ground: "It's .... it's.... it's .... The blue screen of death" [Loud gasping sound followed by silence.]

--Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle

I wonder if Brazilian law is like that in the UK. In the latter the grounds for winning a libel/slander lawsuit are much wider than the US and there is a nasty presumption of guilt by the court. But the very seriousness of the charge means that, once in court, the defendant acquires very wide powers of discovery. Microsoft would be force to give up evidence that they've been behaving as charged. Microsoft haters would have a delightful time with the evidence and, at least in Latin America, the publicity would be terrible for Microsoft.

That's precisely what happened to pseudo-historian David Irving in British court. When he sued a genuine historian for a few unpleasant pages about him her book, the publisher fought back. He ended up having to supply video tapes he had made of speeches to seedy little Holocaust denier groups. He not only lost his suit, he ended up providing valuable ammunition for his critics.

You can find Groklaw-like records of Irving v. Lipstadt at

The Nizkor Project

--Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle, editor: Eugenics and Other Evils

Having said that, I think the court erred. If a company has a privacy policy, and the court says unless we read it and understand it we have "a low expectation of privacy"? That to me makes zero sense.

Passing over the court's other rationale, this portion makes quite a bit of sense. "Privacy" is a subjective and emotional matter. At the time of their flights, these people cared so little, they did not even bother to read the policy. The court simply ruled that if they didn't care then, they can't claim to care later. It's a bit like saying yes to sex and later crying rape.

We'd have to read more to find out, but in all probability these people were either after money or were caught up in the general nuttiness that's fallen on the American left since 2000.

Federal law enforcement under Clinton killed innocent people with reckless abandon (Ruby Ridge and Waco). Add up the numbers and you'll probably discovered that Clinton/Reno killed more harmless civilians than all the other twentieth century presidents combined. It also used INS thugs to send a small boy whose mother died to get him out of oppressive Cuba back to appease that brutal dictator.

If you are hung up on privacy rather than federalized murder, then consider the 100-plus provisions in the (fortunately dead on arrival) Clinton 'health care initative' that would have criminalized those who approach their health care in ways a federal bureaucracy did not approve. "Crimes" the feds would know about because no aspect of our health would be hidden from the government. That is a serious privacy violation.

Yet these pitiful people whine and fret because their "privacy" is being violated under a Hitler-like Bush/Ashcroft. Under a Patriot Act approved by a majority in both parties, they tell us with a quivering voice, the feds could find out what books they've checked of the library. Imagine that! The feds could find out what the librarian and the person behind you in the line already know. Yeah, that's a real yawner compounded by the fact that the feds have yet to use that provision a single time.

In the 1950s, with conservative thought then on the wane, many on the right went nutty, seeing communists everywhere. The same disease, though perhaps to a far greater extent, seems to have inflicted today's left.

That's really scary when you consider that such people could be running the executive branch a year from now.

--Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle

Why do so many primary Slashdot posters get the story all wrong? You'd think those responsible for approving the posting would check to see if the remarks actually fit the news source?

In this case, the feds had a very good reason for not setting up a No-Spam registry. Spammers would simply use it to get our email addresses. Here's how the AP story actually begins:

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration said Tuesday it will not create a national do-not-spam registry to discourage unwanted e-mail, fearing it could backfire and become a target list for new victims.

The Federal Trade Commission told Congress that senders of unwanted sales pitches might mine such a registry for names. Its chairman, Timothy Muris, quipped that consumers "will be spammed if we do a registry and spammed if we do not."

That sensible decision hardly deserves the snide remark, "The moral of the story is: never try."

The real moral is to read the article before you post.

--Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle

Yet more hysteria from Sir Michael of the School of The Sky is Always Falling. Economically, the US continues to beat the socks off Europe because we aren't falling into the twin quicksands of subsidies and protectionism that are the only things the government can do about offshoring.

As a recent Swedish study noted, all but a handful of our 50 states (i.e. Clinton's Arkansas), have a per person GNP greater than almost all the countries of the EU. And the few European countries (Switzerland and Luxenberg) with levels of productivity comparable to the US average do so because their secretive banking laws allow them to live off other economies. France's basket-case economy, for instance, is why they're so eager to sell dangerous technologies to the world's nasties.

For that we should all thank the recently departed President Reagan. He not only 'won' the Cold War, he ended the dreadful stagflation created, for the most part, by LBJ's pursuit of self-glorification by bloating the government.

Even the Clinton administration had enough sense not to break with Reagan's economic policies. The real economic issue question for Election 2004 is whether Kerry belongs to the Clinton pragmatic side of the Democratic party or the 'mad in both senses of the word' Dean side of the party. That's what Dean supporters mean when they call themselves the 'Real Democrats.' Real as in dumb, real as in for losers and whiners.

Given Kerry's voting record, he's more likely to be the latter. Of course, given his dismal lack of leadership skills demonstrated during his 18 years in Congress, little he tries to do is likely to happen. Congress will run that show. The real harm a President Kerry would do, would be to 'coordinate' our war on terrorism with the French, a country with an almost unblemished record for losing wars.

--Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle

The United States is the home of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, an internationally respected agency which contributes to the worldwide effort to protect and govern intellectual property.

Someone should inform Ken Brown that if you're going to be discussing open source code and its license scheme, the appropriate agency is the U.S. Copyright Office and not the USPTO. Anyone who doesn't understand that distinction doesn't understand IP law.

--Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle

Lets work out the numbers. At Microsoft's suggestion, Baystar invested $50 million cash in SCO. They getting back $13 million in cash and $13.7 million in stocks that will soon be almost worthless.

That means that Microsoft now owes Baystar something in excess of $50 million - $13 million = $37 million and $50 million - $26.7 million = $23.3 million.

The former is more realistic, and Baystar execs deserve something for their willingness to play the fool. So, in the next year or two look for Microsoft to do something that'll net Baystar a quick and easy $50 million in profit.

Am I being cynical or conspiratorial? I think not. Just realistic.

Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle

This is not flamebait

The guy also seems to have an interesting blog albeit focused on his hobby ... studying the damage of the Eugenics Movement has done to humanity

At the risk of stirring up the foil hat and Area 51 crowd, I noted the dangerous First Amendment implications of this bill on my blog about three weeks ago.

Stripped to its essentials, an administration that wanted to squelch any author, musician, periodical, book publisher, or media outlet could go after them for copyright infringement. They would not have to target the speech they dislike. They would not even have to win. The cost of a defense against all the financial resources of the federal government would to crush all but the very deep-pocketed.

You can read the entire argument at:

Free Speech

--Mike Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle

It was a great article and I'm encouraged that the US and EU are working together to ensure we'll eventually be able to get inexpensive GPS receivers that'll use both systems.

But alas there is this remark:

And, since US policy was to "limit availability of their radionavigation systems in the event of a real or potential threat of war or impairment to national security", Europe saw that its access to this vital new utility depended on the decisions of a single nation, with which it might well disagree on matters of national security. Recent event have given examples of just such disagreements. Europe's response was Galileo.

Alas, this cultural difference has been with us at least since the days of Thomas Jefferson and those earlier terrorists, the Barbary Pirates. European nations paid off the pirates rather than fight. Under Thomas Jefferson, the U.S. had a policy, "Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute." It seems someone has posted more about that history at:

Barbary Pirates

Then as now, Europe thinks being nice to nasty folk is a better than getting tough, sending out the frigates, and making them behave. Hence their policy of leaning toward the Arabs. In contrast, the U.S. supports feisty little Israel, perhaps the only nation in history to fight four major wars in one lifetime with foes that outnumber them twenty to one and win every one. We back a democracy and a winner. They (particularly the French), back repressive dictatorships and losers.

In that context, it helps to remember what Churchill warned in 1939 after the Munich Agreement, "Britain and France had to choose between war and dishonor. They chose dishonor. They will have war."

In the end, every people gets the government they deserve. If the Europeans have so little sense of 'honor,' that they cannot defend their free and democratic societies from an ideology driven by hatred and revenge, then perhaps they deserve to drop into history's dustbin, always knowing precisely where they are thanks to a Galileo that will never be turned off to fight terrorism. And in their obsession with not fighting a few brush wars, they may lose a far greater and more critical cultural war. Europe may become Eurabia. In a generation, European women may only leave their homes clad in a sack from head to toe.

Am I the only one to catch the madness of all this? For perhaps two decades we've been told that there was a 'religious right' or 'fundamentalism' spanning from Jew and Christian to Arab that is a threat to free and democratic societies. But when push comes to shove, when religiously sanctioned terrorism and repression must be fought, it is the secular left who apologizes for religious repression and who wants little or nothing done to open up brutally repressive Arab societies. The left of western democracies is defending Saddam with all the zeal they once had for cruel Stalin.

All this brings to mind the Chinese proverb about the curse of living in "interesting times."

Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle

Well, Riefenstahl made films that glorified Nazism. Among other things, Nazism was responsible for mass murder on an industrial scale and attacking most of Western Europe. I'd be interested to hear which group that Moore glorifies has done anything on that scale?

Oh how easy this is! "Mass murder on an industrial scale"--Legalized abortion. "which group" Virtually every liberal group on the planet. They all consider pre-birth babies to be 'subhuman'--exactly how Nazism defined Jews and Slavs.

And, lest we forget, quite a few groups in Western Europe and the U.S. were quite willing to see Saddam stay in power, practicing genocide on a massive scale and conquering his neighbors. Being a coward or an apologist for great evil differs little for being an advocate of that great evil.

Incidently, I have a new blog that will document how closely linked the liberal to socialist left of a century ago was to the same Darwinian/Eugenic ideas that Hitler adopted. In the U.S. and Western Europe well into the 1930s, eugenics was an enlightened, progressive idea opposed only by religious conservatives (particularly Catholic) and "reactionaries" such as G. K. Chesterton, author of Eugenics and Other Evils. The NY Times even praised eugenics, meaning controlled breeding, as a "wonderful new science." Nazi Germany adopted eugenic sterilization after the U.S. (legalized by the Supreme Court in 1927). But it beat the U.S. (though not Sweden) to eugenic abortion (1935) and the infanticide of 'defective' children (1939). At present, only a few countries like the Netherlands have followed the Nazis to that final step--killing the 'unfit' after birth.

Unfortunately, at present only the first two topics are posted online at:

Inkling University

The rest should be there in a few weeks. These are original source documents drawn from liberal magazines such as the New Republic and Nation, as well as articles by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. You get the whole article, not Moore-like lying by quoting out of context.

And these liberal eugenic beliefs never really died out. The chief driving force behind abortion legalization, for instance, was liberal fears as the birth control pill (circa 1960) lowered white birthrates while leaving that of poor blacks high. That's why Roe v. Wade begins with a cryptic remark about "racial overtones" in the abortion debate. That's why liberals are so eager to make sure a poor black mother can abort her child but so hostile to giving that same mother the right to choose a better school for her child than the typical shoddy inner-city school. They want her child's future to be so shoddy she aborts.

So, yes, Moore-like groups are quite a bit like Nazism with one exception. Evil as it was, invading Poland and the USSR took a twisted sort of courage. Killing babies or consigning the Iraqi people to the horror of Saddam does not.

Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle

Well, Riefenstahl made films that glorified Nazism. Among other things, Nazism was responsible for mass murder on an industrial scale and attacking most of Western Europe. I'd be interested to hear which group that Moore glorifies has done anything on that scale?

Oh how easy this is! "Mass murder on an industrial scale"--Legalized abortion. "which group" Virtually every liberal group on the planet. They all consider pre-birth babies to be 'subhuman'--exactly how Nazism defined Jews and Slavs.

And, lest we forget, quite a few groups in Western Europe and the U.S. were quite willing to see Saddam stay in power, practicing genocide on a massive scale and conquering his neighbors. Being a coward or an apologist for great evil differs little for being an advocate of that great evil.

Incidently, I have a new blog that will document how closely linked the liberal to socialist left of a century ago was to the same Darwinian/Eugenic ideas that Hitler adopted. In the U.S. and Western Europe well into the 1930s, eugenics was an enlightened, progressive idea opposed only by religious conservatives (particularly Catholic) and "reactionaries" such as G. K. Chesterton, author of Eugenics and Other Evils. The NY Times even praised eugenics, meaning controlled breeding, as a "wonderful new science." Nazi Germany adopted eugenic sterilization after the U.S. (legalized by the Supreme Court in 1927). But it beat the U.S. (though not Sweden) to eugenic abortion (1935) and the infanticide of 'defective' children (1939). At present, only a few countries like the Netherlands have followed the Nazis to that final step--killing the 'unfit' after birth.

Unfortunately, at present only the first two topics are posted online at:

Inkling University

The rest should be there in a few weeks. These are original source documents drawn from liberal magazines such as the New Republic and Nation, as well as articles by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. You get the whole article, not Moore-like lying by quoting out of context.

And these liberal eugenic beliefs never really died out. The chief driving force behind abortion legalization, for instance, was liberal fears as the birth control pill (circa 1960) lowered white birthrates while leaving that of poor blacks high. That's why Roe v. Wade begins with a cryptic remark about "racial overtones" in the abortion debate. That's why liberals are so eager to make sure a poor black mother can abort her child but so hostile to giving that same mother the right to choose a better school for her child than the typical shoddy inner-city school. They want her child's future to be so shoddy she aborts.

So, yes, Moore-like groups are quite a bit like Nazism with one exception. Evil as it was, invading Poland and the USSR took a twisted sort of courage. Killing babies or consigning the Iraqi people to the horror of Saddam does not.

Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle

He claims it blew off a truck (kind of like buying a DVD player that "fell off the truck"). Second, he took the seeds from the plants, which was miraculously resistent to Round Up, and then resowed his field with it the next year. 95% of his 1000 or so acres were found to contain this Monsato-frankenstein-canola. Not quite as simple as Monsato finding a few plants in one field, and sueing him. He probalby woudln't have been guilty at the end of the first year, but the second year, when he re-used the seed, he was.

You sound much like Monsanto's lawyers. Having seeds on 95% of the acres doesn't mean that 95% of the seeds were Monsanto's variety. Seeds blow around and if he simply reseeded his land like farmers typically do, a few seeds from an infested area would be all over his farm the next year.

The real issue is a simple one. Farmers shouldn't have to spend one cent of their own money or take one second out of their time to protect Monsanto's patents. It's Monstato's responsibility to halt the spread and pay to clean it up when it does. If they want farmers to report infestations, they can reward them for doing so. If they want them to not replant with contaminated seeds they can offer, gratis, seeds that are not contaminated to any farmer that asks.

And even that does not take into account the loss this farmer would suffer if Monsanto-supplied seeds were not as well-adapted to his land as those he had been planting for many years.

Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle

Tanenbaum's remarks are marvelous, particularly the bit about Ken Brown's much repeated, "We have multiple funding sources." Yeah, multiple as in Microsoft, Bill Gates, Paul Allen....

But he slips off into his own "Alice in Wonderland" with this remark:

And this was before the Patriot Act, which requires John Ashcroft's written permission before you can open your mouth.

Even taken as sarcasm, that's as strange as anything Ken Brown is saying. Nobody in America needs "Ashcroft's written permission" to say anything. My neighborhood is filled with people engaging in bizarre rants about why Bush should be impeached. Yet at the same time they're convinced that they are in a police state. Living in Seattle has become like living next door to a John Bircher in the 1950s.

Yes, the left is now as nutty as the right was half a century ago. Conspiracy theories abound. Strange books of the None Dare Call It Treason variety flood the market and there'll soon be a movie with the same theme.

Every few weeks the press is seduced by media attacks as bizarre as any cooked up by the drunken Senator Joe Macarthy. Any day now, I expect to see Senator Ed Kennedy, his gait a bit unsteady, hold a press conference to announce, "I hold in my hands the names of 132 people, known to authorities as part of 'Big Oil,' who are members of the Department of Commerce."

Reality, as in the fact that demand from China and gas-guzzling domestic SUVs are driving up the price of oil, is beyond such folk. For every problem, they must have an evil conspiracy.

It's like living in a time warp. A exceptionally likeable and decent president from the American heartland (Ike/Bush--both born in Texas) is alternatively portrayed as the dumb tool of dark forces or as evil incarnate. Like those suffering from some forms of mental illness, these poor folk can't even sort out why they hate this Ike/Bush so much. Perhaps it's because he's reasonable and sensible, while they are not.

And if history repeats itself, like the right in Goldwater/1964, the left is headed for a big crash.

Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle

Heck, as expensive as the space station is to support and how little research of scientific value is coming out of it, we should GIVE the Chinese our share in the station with our thanks for taking it off our hands.

Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle

Many police, fire department, hazmat units and a whole host of people rely on cell-phone communications and to the extent you use jamming devices designed to jam terrorists, you may be jamming the first responders, whose communication is critical in an emergency situation.

First, this use of cell phone jamming isn't hypothetical. It's exactly what is being done with 'suicide' bombers in Israel. Some of those wired to blow up come to their senses at the last moment. A cell phone is a cheap way to blow them up anyway from a safe distance. It also has one advantage that no other transmitter has. Carrying a cell phone won't attract suspicion. And keep in mind that the jamming is needed BEFORE a blast. Afterward, it can be turned off.

Second, I work as a volunteer with emergency communications in Seattle. Cell phones are typically worthless near a major emergency. Those who see what has happen call 911. Those near the scene call their spouse to assure them that they're safe. Those driving by call a friend to find out what is happening. And then media descends like locusts with their cell phones already active. As a result all available channels are quickly blocked.

It would be foolish for a community to depend on cell phones for anything important. In Seattle, even our expensive Motorola 800 MHz trunking system for local government agencies overloaded in our most recent earthquake. And no one could get on that system but various government employees, all of whom seemed to have had the urge to call a buddy to say, "Did you feel that?"

That's also why for inter-hospital communication, which is where I volunteer, we rely on amateur radio repeaters with backup frequencies and alternate repeaters. And if all else fails, we can run off batteries and talk direct. Each hospital already has one or two amateur radios set up to run off the hospital's emergency power, and I arrive on scene with two more. We drill constantly, so we know what to do.

In similar fashion, state troopers, who often arrive alone at crime and accident scenes far from metro areas or phone lines, fight being drawn into complex trunking system. They typically use simple VHF repeaters and have high-powered transmitters in their cars, so they can punch through even if the repeater goes down. Their frequencies are just for themselves and they're quite professional at using them. The guys who fix traffic lights or read water meters can't get in the way, much less a twit who wants to use his cell phone to tell his brother-in-law about the big fire he just drove past.

The No. 1 Rule of Emergency Communication is KISS-Keep It Simple Stupid. The more complex the system, the more likely it is to fail in an emergency. When 9/11 hit NYC, the two major emergency hospitals on the south end of Manhattan could not talk to one another. Most of the phone cables, fiber optics, microwave and cell phone links were under or on the Two Towers that came down. In that sense, it was good the system was not swamped with thousands of injured people.

There is a scary use for these easily available cell phone jammers. Quite a few people rely on cell phones to call the police when threatened. A brighter-than-usual criminal could jam all cell phone frequencies before attacking.

Mike Perry, Inkling Blog , Seattle

Those who're interested in reading about the first bicycles in China might want to read Across Asia on a Bicycle by Thomas Allen and William Sachtleben. They crossed northern China in 1892 on bikes, attracting quite a bit of attention. One Chinese described a bike this way:

It is a little mule that you drive by the ears, and kick in the sides to make him go."

The book, out of print for over a century, was brought back into print last summer by yours truly. Alas, for this struggling writer and editor, someone else is about to bring out a competing edition. But if you check both books on Amazon.com, you'll find they are so clueless about the story that on their cover they date the trip across Asia to 1890. Duh!

After graduating from college, the two left St. Louis by bike for NYC in June of 1890. Crossing the Atlantic by boat and departing from London, they biked across Europe, wintering in Athens. The Asia leg of their around-the-world trip began in April of 1891 and wasn't completed until the fall of 1892. It's the 1891-92 Asia leg that's covered by their book. Unfortunately, they didn't do books on the U.S. or European portions.

These two guys were amazing. Along the way and almost as an aside, they became the first two Americans to summit Mount Ararat. You can find quotes from the book at Across Asia on a Bicycle.

Quite a tale. Two years after their journey, someone tried to repeat their feat and was murdered by Kurdish bandits near the Turkey/Iran border.

--Mike Perry, Seattle

This whole thing reminds me of a thing Jerry Seinfeld did, making fun of chinese people eating with sticks. He said something about that he could not understand why they kept eating with sticks, since "they have seen the fork".

It feels just like that hearing about "US Letter", Yards, Pounds, Stones, Miles et al. YOU HAVE SEEN THE METRIC SYSTEM ;-)!

I know you're joking, but having seen the metric system, I am not greatly unimpressed. The metric system got the meter from a miniscule fraction of the (incorrectly measured) distance from the pole to the equator (snobbishly measured through Paris). Of what use is that? I can't carry the earth around with me as a ruler and chop it into 10 million pieces. On the other hand, the English system is derived from average lengths of body dimensions, giving us a ready way to make quick measurements.

In addition, the metric system is based on the number ten, a relatively worthless number that can only be divided in halves or fifths. The more practical English system often bases measures on 12 (or 16) of a smaller unit. As a result you can divide a unit (say a foot) and have it come out in even-sized smaller units (i.e. 6, 4, 3 or 2 inches) not never-ending decimal numbers like .333333333.... That's marvelous for doing real work in the real world.

Alas, the metric system is a typical product of French philosophers, abstract and useless. About the only thing it has going for it is that the speed of light quite accidentally turned out to be a relatively handy number, 300,000 km/sec, which is easier to work with than 186,000 miles/sec. That's why radio and electronics everywhere adopted the metric system.

In short, real men doing real work with caloused hands and LOUD power tools use the English system. Metric is for pasty-faced wimps.

Mike Perry, Inkling Blog, Seattle

P.S. Those with math-oriented minds might look into what might have happened if we had had 12 or 16 fingers and used base 12 or 16 math. Would that allow us to have the moving-the-decimal advantage of the metric system AND the easy-to-divide advantage of the English system?

No. I don't know what the EPA ratings for it were, but my klutzy and heavy 1981 Toyota Corolla station wagon gets 34 MPG on the highway, almost as good as these hybrids. And it still easily passes EPA polution tests.

If hybrid owners are mad now, just think how mad they will be in a few years when they have to replace their NiMh battery packs.

Mike Perry, Inkling Blog, Seattle

. . . but whether open source firms will be tremendously successful- to rival even the likes of a Microsoft or IBM.

Compared to:

. . . how much longer can we expect to see hardware companies such as Hewlett Packard or even IBM stay friendly with the open source community? How long will it be before these relationships go from cooperative to predatory?

At best, this Ken Brown is clueless. At worst he's a troll for Microsoft, trying to stir up trouble between IBM and the open source community.

The top quote is the only time Brown's article mentions Microsoft and it does so only in the context of Microsoft being "tremendously successful." No mention is made of its predatory monopoly behavior. No mention is made of internal documents that make clear Microsoft regards Linux as a foe to be crushed by any and all means.

Given Microsoft's covert backing of SCO's copyright lawsuit against IBM/Linux, and Microsoft's recent move into patenting everything it can (10 applications a week), it is clear that Microsoft intends to use patents to attack open source and Linux. That's a fact. What IBM may or may not do is idle speculation. Yet Ken Brown says nothing about the first and makes much about the second. Very suspicious to say the least.

Perhaps someone should see if this Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (or Ken Brown personally) has gotten or is waiting, cap in hand, to get money from Microsoft. As the 'good book' warns, money lies at the root of all sorts of evil.

Mike Perry, Inkling Blog, Seattle

Some museums use very short range radio transmitters, which let you use inexpensive and easily replaced FM radio receivers with a memory frequencies. Very low-powered FM transmitters are cheap. And since it's an ordinary FM radio, your theft problems would be virtually zilch.

If the exhibits are far enough apart, you might get by with all 10 stations broadcasting on the same frequency. With FM, the strongest signal will capture the receiver and the others will not be heard. If that does not work, you could have an ordinary FM radio with ten frequency presets. But that would require users to switch channels.

The real plus of such a system is that you are not locked into a proprietary system. Everything in it is an inexpensive commodity item.

Mike Perry, Inkling, Seattle