Larry Osterman recently explained the Windows Vista layering quality gate. There is a big poster in 26 that plots out all the components, what layer they live at and how they connect to lower layers. It’s amazing to look at.
Gideon Rose claims that the Bush Doctrine has colapsed
Mr. Rose of Foreign Affairs in a NyTimes Editorial “Get Real“ talks about the back and forth between idealists and realists, and claims that the pendilum has now swung back to the realist camp.
SEVEN months into George W. Bush’s second term, it is clear that whatever his expansive second Inaugural Address may have promised, American foreign policy has taken a decidedly pragmatic turn. In practice, the Bush administration has recently begun to pursue interests rather than ideals and conciliation rather than confrontation.
…
The real story is simpler: the Bush doctrine has collapsed, and the administration has consequently embraced realism, American foreign policy’s perennial hangover cure.
Republicans and Science, Part I
I can’t help but think that Republicans don’t like or respect science anymore. It might be a misunderstanding of what science is, or an attempt to appear more mainstream or the belief that many scientists are liars with an idelogical bent, but either way I think there is a pattern.
Today’s example is Rep Joe Barton’s (chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee) attack on the MSM ‘hockey stick’ papers that the IPCC cite. RealClimate has a good wrap up of what’s going on and Promethesus blog has some good background to where this dispute comes from.
Schneir Points Me To An A Hrefhttpwww
Schneir points me to an excellent interview at the American Conservative about suicide terrorist attacks with Robert Pape, professor at the University of Chicago.
TAC: So if Islamic fundamentalism is not necessarily a key variable behind these groups, what is?
RP: The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland. From Lebanon to Sri Lanka to Chechnya to Kashmir to the West Bank, every major suicide-terrorist campaign—over 95 percent of all the incidents—has had as its central objective to compel a democratic state to withdraw.
…TAC: So your assessment is that there are more suicide terrorists or potential suicide terrorists today than there were in March 2003?
RP: I have collected demographic data from around the world on the 462 suicide terrorists since 1980 who completed the mission, actually killed themselves. This information tells us that most are walk-in volunteers. Very few are criminals. Few are actually longtime members of a terrorist group. For most suicide terrorists, their first experience with violence is their very own suicide-terrorist attack.
There is no evidence there were any suicide-terrorist organizations lying in wait in Iraq before our invasion. What is happening is that the suicide terrorists have been produced by the invasion.
…TAC: There have been many kinds of non-Islamic suicide terrorists, but have there been Christian suicide terrorists?
RP: Not from Christian groups per se, but in Lebanon in the 1980s, of those suicide attackers, only eight were Islamic fundamentalists. Twenty-seven were Communists and Socialists. Three were Christians.
…TAC: Does al-Qaeda have the capacity to launch attacks on the United States, or are they too tied down in Iraq? Or have they made a strategic decision not to attack the United States, and if so, why?
RP: Al-Qaeda appears to have made a deliberate decision not to attack the United States in the short term. We know this not only from the pattern of their attacks but because we have an actual al-Qaeda planning document found by Norwegian intelligence. The document says that al-Qaeda should not try to attack the continent of the United States in the short term but instead should focus its energies on hitting America’s allies in order to try to split the coalition.
What the document then goes on to do is analyze whether they should hit Britain, Poland, or Spain. It concludes that they should hit Spain just before the March 2004 elections because, and I am quoting almost verbatim: Spain could not withstand two, maximum three, blows before withdrawing from the coalition, and then others would fall like dominoes.
That is exactly what happened. Six months after the document was produced, al-Qaeda attacked Spain in Madrid. That caused Spain to withdraw from the coalition. Others have followed. So al-Qaeda certainly has demonstrated the capacity to attack and in fact they have done over 15 suicide-terrorist attacks since 2002, more than all the years before 9/11 combined. Al-Qaeda is not weaker now. Al-Qaeda is stronger.
Times article about Rob Moore and Battlestar Galatica
The New York Times has a great article about Rob Moore and the creation of the new Battlestar Galactica series:
To be fair, though, there are androids. As in the original show, the humans of the Galactica and its fleet are relentlessly pursued by evil robots called Cylons. But in the current version, conceived by Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, most of the evil Cylons look like people and have found God. Ruthlessly principled and deeply religious, the Cylons have been compared by fans and critics both to Al Qaeda and to the evangelical right. And the humans they are relentlessly pursuing are fallible and complex. Their shirts are not clingy or color-coded; the men of space wear neckties. They are led by Edward James Olmos as the Galactica’s commander and Mary McDonnell as the president of the humans, and their stories revolve as much around the tensions within — between the military and civil leadership of the fleet — as they do around the Cylon threat. As Eick described the show to me last month with evident, subversive pleasure, ”The bad guys are all beautiful and believe in God, and the good guys all [expletive] each other over.” Moore, who is also the show’s head writer, put it more simply: ”They are us.”
Carrie and Keshav were nice enough to host for the Season 2 Priemere last friday night and this might quickly become a rotating house (or just my house?) thing for the length of the season. Special props for the Battlestar Galatica theme’d drinks Carrie put together.
Listening to David Irons
David Irons a city council member is running for King County Executive and spoke at Microsoft today. Some random notes:
- $3.3 Billion budget for King County
- 12th largest county in the nation
- Goes for a very minimalistic approach
- Education Background
- Wants an elected auditor – Larson was too technical not enough management experience
- 4 year vrs 13 year homeless soln.
- Growth\Land Use
- Believes that land use has failed in King County, goal 15-30 ride for workers.
- Seattle fails it’s growth projections, eastside meets or exceeds
- Too much single family home in seattle
- raising height limits
- Norm Maleng has the jurisdiction to act and hasn’t on voter fraud.
- CAO, science wasn’t done well, and the suburban and urban parts aren’t addressed.
IPV6 and Managed Code
The Code Project has a article playing with IPV6 in C# on the 1.1 CLR. (BenjaminGay)
Fellow Time Travelers
BrentBlog reminds me of the constant effect that we redmondites are always dealing with. Windows XP was a sureal experience, all the new features and experiences were well grooved familliar friends when it finally came out.
Since then, the feature work seems to have gotten “completed” further and further from when it finally ships. All the feature work we did for Windows XP sp2 was done for almost a 3/4 of a year before it was released, and the Windows Server 2003 sp1 work was done even earlier then that. Even now as Longhorn Beta 1 marches to completion, my team has finished all of our big features months ago, and Longhorn still has a way to go before shipping. Some of this is a measure of Window’s not quite speedy code velocity, and some of it is that my team works on infrasturcture peieces which gets done much earlier then a lot higher level/user facing OS components, but most of the time is integration and stabalization.
I also agree about how fustrating it can be to have fixed so many customer pains that we hear about, but only in a product that you haven’t shipped yet. Working on IIS6 was the most extreme version of that feeling I’ve experienced. It’s a feeling I’ve seen mirrored by MVPs when they tells us about a product problem and we tell them that we have fixed it in the next version.
However, even with the pain it can be to dogfood pre beta software, working here is an experience of living a couple years in the future.
Party platforms
After feuding with my wife about what vacation we are going to do this year before the baby is born, I found myself reading a Left2Right blog entry about the Oklahoma Republican Party’s Platform. Since it seems way out wack, I got curious to see what the local Washington State Republican Party Platform looks like.
Things that I like:
· The defense of Israel statement has a coexisting Palestinian state piece.
Things that I like but don’t trust the Republican Party to actually do (or do right):
· Property owners implementing environmental practices that are supported by sound, peer-reviewed scientific method are a model of responsible natural resource stewardship
· Increasing competition among health care providers to promote accountability to patients
· All people are entitled to be treated equally by government.
Things that I don’t like:
· The protection of innocent human life born or pre-born through natural death.
· An amendment to the United States Constitution defining marriage as the union between a man and a woman.
· A policy that public schools not promote or identify homosexuality as a healthy, morally acceptable, or alternative lifestyle.
· Research of adult and placenta stem cells and oppose human cloning.
· Compensating property owners when government actions reduce the value of their land secures our right to own property.
Stuff I found cute:
· Support President Bush‘s Energy Bill to reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign crude oil. This is immediately followed by the ANWR drilling platform element, I guess foreign is the keyword there.
While there is a couple things that I find off for me, it sounds like the more tolerable form of the republican party. Let us see how the democrats do: (-1 to start with by making me open a pdf)
Things that I like:
· Oppose the “Corporations are people too“ Supreme court ruling
· reinstatement of I-728 that calls for reduction of class sizes;
· enforcement of sunshine laws and transparency in sessions that discuss and make policy
· the separation of church and state, and we oppose organized prayer in publicly funded schools
· the right for medically assisted death with dignity with suitable safeguards for terminally ill patients;
· a woman’s right to choose as protected by Roe vs. Wade and the Washington State Reproductive Freedom Act;
· the right to confidentiality of medical records and genetic information.
· that the state should not interfere with couples who choose to marry and share fully and equally in the rights, responsibilities, and commitment of civil marriage, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.
· property forfeiture should be permitted only after criminal conviction, not on arrest or by seizure
Things that I like but don’t trust the Democratic Party to actually do (or do right):
· Supporting diversity of ownership in broadcast media
· dedicating tobacco settlement monies only to tobacco-related health care programs and tobacco use prevention;
Things that I don’t like:
· Proclaim the executive and legislative branches of government shall abandon the doctrine of pre-emptive warfare and shall make nonviolence the primary organizing principle of foreign policy.
Stuff I found cute:
· Supporting Kyoto, but against marketplace pollution credits
Overall, the Republican Platform avoids specific actions and tries to go with general principals. The problem is that while it is easier to agree with the Republican principals, I know a number of the actions they actually have in mind behind some of the principals and I generally don’t agree with the actions. The more specific the Republican Platform is the more I have a tendency to disagree with it.
The Democratic Platform has a huge laundry list of ideas and like a rainstorm; you can’t avoid getting hit by a few drops. There is going to be some that I like, while also have a large number that I just don’t care about or in some case dislike. As a whole it looks impossibly expensive to do all of them.
A quick scan pretty much sizes me up as socially liberal on all the big conservative causes, and since that has always been such a defining aspect to that party I believe I’m pretty much lost to them. But aside from a couple pet causes the democrat one isn’t all that much better. I wonder if the Democrat Platform in a heavily republican state would be more appealing to me, but that’s for another blog entry.
20 Week Ultrasound
I just got back from the 20 week ultrasound, where I’ve seen the first human looking pictures of my first child. I walked in not ready for the event. I knew what was going to happen but turned numb to it happening. Pam’s uterus has been getting bigger and bigger, but still can be somewhat hidden, I couldn’t think that there could possibly be something so developed in there. The doctor that did the exam tried to make it a very supportive and emotional event, and might have been dismayed at the apparent lack of emotion from either of us. This is probably because Pam and I where like deer in headlights. In the second half of the exam I finally started asking questions and reacting. The first image based rendered 3D view of our baby’s face I couldn’t recognize. It was only after the second that I could actually understand and recognize what I was seeing. We made a default decision in finding out the gender, namely we didn’t make a decision so we didn’t find out. The doctor took photos and video of the genitals and then wrote the down the sex while we didn’t look. Right now that knowledge is in the bag next to me. The only “problem” that the doctor saw was one umbilical artery instead of two (2-3% of babies), but he looked quite a bit at the heart and found everything normal.
Right now I’m still shaken from what I saw, I’ve never been the most emotional person, but this one is a pretty fundamental and awing change. The reality of a face looking back at you is something you can’t forget or deny.
There are so many small changes to the way I look at things; did I buy a house in the right place? are there the right influences near by and the wrong ones far away? Do I get home from work early enough to be a good father? I remember my father always getting home at 6pm, and yet I hardly ever saw him. Will I be around enough? Will I stay fi so that I can play and keep up with my child? Will my work be stable enough to support him/her?
Which brings up the sex part again. My mother tells me that the Pernick’s only know how to make boys. The last heart rate we measured was on the lower range of normal heart rates that might mean a boy. This time the heart rate was 150 which is more of a pointer to a girl. My mother jokes and tells me to go ahead and start buying blue. How far will we get without finding out? Having made it past this milestone, I’m ready to wait till the very end to find out.
The next step is to scan in the pictures and transfer the video to a digital format. I feel almost silly that we can’t just use a USB keychain thing to walk out with it, but I guess that will take a couple more years. The need to buy a video camera has just gone way up, so I guess I need to finish choosing one and buy it.
Note to the baby if you ever get a chance to read this: Hi, welcome, we love you.
Doubt's Blog 