The Powell Triangle

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Thoughts on the NSA scandal

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
-- Benjamin Franklin

The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society...
-- John F Kennedy

I've been reading a lot about the NSA and the disclosures relating to it of late, and I have some thoughts on the situation, as those who know me might expect. As always with me, nothing is simple, and I am not going to give you a two line TL;DR synopsis. Read it if you care, and if you don't, well, then don't.

On Edward Snowden

Everything in the media about Snowden - his background, education, girlfriend, behavior, where he is, and so on - is a side show. Yes, he broke the law. But whistleblowers do that all the time, trying to raise attention about things that violate their principles.

Is he a criminal? Probably.

Is he a traitor? Maybe.

Is what he has done wrong? Not in my mind. You may feel differently.

Should be punished? Answering that is beyond my pay grade, though my gut says "no".

What is important - really important - is what he's exposed. Most of us knew - or at least suspected - it was going on to some degree, but the documents Snowden has released help shed light on programs that have been hidden for far too long. That is a good and necessary thing, and for that I thank him.

And that is all I am going to say about Snowden himself.

The Problem

Going back decades, but really gaining momentum after 9/11, we - as a nation - have run in fear. Fear of communists. Fear of the Soviet Union. Fear of terrorists. Fear of China. Fear of gays. Fear of the opposing political party. Fear of the other, of the different. Fear, pure and simple.

And after 9/11, it became possible for any lawmaker, of any stripe, to pass just about any law, no matter how restrictive or silly, by claiming it would help "secure the homeland" or improve national security. Fear is a powerful motivator.

And so we've become slaves to our fear, and make far too many decisions based on it.

The intelligence community is the major beneficiary of all of that fear, and (of course) the money all those new laws have made available. We used to have (and sometimes worry about) only a military industrial-complex. Now we have an intelligence-industrial complex. It's a huge beast of a system, employing tens of thousands, and consuming vast amounts of money that often cannot be tracked at all. Someday we're going to be appalled at what the NSA is paying for toilet seats, but up until very recently it's all been black budgets and a complete lack of detail about what they are doing. The recent leaks have shone a small amount of light into the system, and the results are, to me, rather scary.

What we know seems to include:

A president who ran for office espousing openness and transparency, but who has changed his tune and now runs a horrifically tight lipped and closed administration, particularly on national security.
Lax - or nonexistent - oversight of these programs by congress and the courts that are supposed to oversee them.
Agencies operating on secret interpretations of laws that are (and were) controversial. In one case, I have read speculation that the NSA is allowed to collect and record the contents of all the calls and emails it wants because that isn't the actual "intercept" the law prohibits without a warrant. In this interpretation the "intercept" only happens if some agent actually listens to a call or reads an email. Whether that is really true or not, I cannot say, but given the nature of the disclosures to date, it seems entirely plausible.
There are few obvious safeguards in place to assure these programs aren't (and won't be) abused, and certainly no proof that abuse hasn't already occurred. In fact one article I've read documented abuse of these programs recently, including capturing the calls of a certain senator from Illinois long before he began his presidential run.
There is no assurance these programs are actually useful. The head of the NSA recently said these programs had helped avoid over 50 acts of terrorism, but there is no way to verify that. And, on the rare occasion in the past six months when I have read actual research by journalists into claims of the benefits of NSA style intelligence gathering as they relate to specific incidents, they have all be debunked. In other words, in all the cases I have seen where an attack was thwarted by signals intelligence, the claims have been proven false, and the actual intelligence that did the job was collected in other ways.
The head of the NSA has lied to congress - and thus to the people of the US - about the nature of these programs. Don't take my word for it, though. Google him up - General James Clapper - watch him tell congress, in answer to a direct question, that the NSA is not collecting data on millions of Americans. Then read about the court order requiring Verizon to turn over call metadata for every call on their network. He lied, plain and simple. How can a person who does that be trusted with anything? How can a system that encourages that be trusted with anything?
And if you're not an American, it appears the NSA can do whatever they want with the data they collect on you: record your calls and listen to them, search your email, save it all forever. And all with no consequences. Isn't the USA just a shining beacon of truth and justice?

The NSA PR machine would probably tell you I am mistaken in all of these claims, but they will offer no proof. Proof would imply exposure, and that is inherently bad in their minds. I disagree. I think it is possible to tell the citizens of the US what the NSA - and any other agencies working in similar ways - are doing, at least in broad strokes - in our name, clearly and succinctly, without risking agents or compromising techniques. They won't do it, of course, but they could. If they did, however, they would have to deal with the backlash, and that might be a bit of political problem.

Personally, I think we've overreacted to 9/11. It was, of course, a horrible tragedy. But what we have done in response is either entirely reactive - looking for things that were done before, so now we're patting down little old ladies and making everyone remove their shoes at airports - or is so secret that we cannot talk about it under any circumstances.

Well I am sick of it all. The introductory quotes I gave are spot on. Just how much liberty should we be giving up? And just how much secrecy should we tolerate? The answers aren't necessarily obvious, but if we cannot discuss these issues, we're giving in, and creating what amounts to a police state in the process. America, the police state. How does that sound? Or how about: "Come to America for the freedom, stay for the monitoring."

They Can Watch Me - I Have Nothing To Hide

I have heard that argument from so many people over the years. It's practically an invitation: please, government (or company), feel free to read my email and listen to my phone conversations. Go ahead and track my movements even. I don't mind, because I am a law abiding citizen and I have nothing to hide. Only the bad guys have something to hide, so go get 'em!

I have two responses:

First, you may have nothing to hide now, but will that always be true? What if you're the one who discovers a crime on the part of those in power? Shouldn't you be able to protect yourself from discovery while you figure out how best to do something about it? Alternatively, maybe your tastes change at some point and you don't want the government knowing about some little habit you've picked up. Maybe it's just a fascination with subversive literature. Maybe you're a historian and you start digging into an event in the past which the current administration wants to keep buried, or sees in a different light than you do. Isn't it possible you might want to hide something, someday? Legitimately? If you cannot imagine that, I submit you're not trying hard enough.

Secondly - and more insidiously - a giant database of call records and similar data can - at the very least - be used to make most anyone look bad in hindsight. If you have interacted with me personally, for example, that makes a connection. And if this (or some future) administration decides this blog post is a problem, you could be looked at with suspicion. And who else have you talked to? Are you certain that every last one of them is a perfectly upstanding citizen, free from any possibility of shame or recrimination? That NSA database of phone call data - combined with a simple reverse phone directory to get at names - can be used to find any number of disreputable people we might have associated with. And five years from now, we won't remember the details, so we'll have a very hard time defending ourselves, if we're even given the opportunity.

The most repressive regimes in the world would love to have the kinds of data the NSA has admitted it is "accidentally" collecting about US citizens right now. Think about that for a minute. You know it's true.

On Our Elected Representatives

President Obama ran promising greater transparency in government. At the Whitehouse website, as I write this, you can find a page about Transparency and Open Government where you can read this opening paragraph:

My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.

I call "bullshit". The Obama administration has been just as bad as - and possibly worse than - the previous administration on transparency. We continue to have a government that stamps things "secret" just for fun, and anything to do with national security is inescapably hidden. The NSA programs have only grown under his watch, and the Patriot Act - a bad law that never should have been passed in the first place - has been extended.

It didn't have to be that way. With a simple presidential directive and a few hours of work on the part of a few key people, the broad outlines of the major programs the NSA is undertaking could be released, and we could have a conversation based on real data, not suppositions, rumors, and leaked documents.

Yes, the terrorists might learn some things not to do - maybe - but remember that Bin Laden was only interacting with others via courier when we finally found him. No satellite phones, no cell phones... just people. And email encryption is a reality already. Don't you think maybe the bad guys already have a pretty good idea about this sort of thing? If they are using unencrypted text in gmail to talk amongst themselves, perhaps they are dumber than we give them credit for.

On the other hand, we the people - the ones paying the bills and electing the leaders - would probably learn a lot. Remember rendition and secret prisons? How about waterboarding and government sanctioned torture? Destabilizing foreign governments? Assassination attempts? All in our name. And now we can ad near universal spying and cyber espionage/warfare (even against our allies) to the list.

And if we're outraged by those disclosures, well, then maybe putting these programs in place was wrong, or the ways in which they are implemented need to be changed. That's part of democracy. But maybe the President - and the rest of our government - has forgotten about that.

Farther down the chain we have a few senators who may or may not have been briefed on these things in some detail. Just how much they know is, of course, unclear. Some of them have missed the briefings entirely. Others have come to the conclusion that the intelligence system is worth every penny we throw in its direction, and that everything the NSA says is true. My own senators have both let me down on this. It appears they think anything and everything is allowed in the name of national security, and I simply do not agree.

I recently read a claim from a Senator that the problem with the system is that it employs too many contractors, as if government employees wouldn't give secrets away. I can only laugh. Benjamin Franklin had another quote that applies here: "Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead." Note that Franklin doesn't mention who these people might work for. And just in case you think the fact that the NSA related leaks came from a contractor justifies the claim, I have one name for you: Bradley Manning. Private First Class Bradley Manning, in fact. He's the US soldier - definitely a government employee - who passed a treasure trove of classified material to Wikileaks. That government paycheck really saved us in that case, didn't it?

The real problem is actually very simple. It's people. They can't keep secrets, no matter who they work for.

And the only real fix is not to have secrets. The less we classify and withhold, the easier it is for everyone to do their jobs, and the harder it is for someone to break these laws, or surprise others with revelations.

I will be writing my Senators, my Representative, and the President to express my extreme displeasure with the state of our security apparatus. And I suspect I will be voting differently come the next election as well.

I note, however, that with very few exceptions, both of the major parties are filled with people in the pockets of the intelligence industry. If you think you can just switch your vote to the other big party and cause change, you're fooling yourself. You'll have to look much farther than that.

Summary

Imagine for a moment that we're all rats in a maze. In this scenario the NSA is the guy running the experiments and watching from above, with video cameras and digital tape recorders. He can hear just about anything you say, if he wants to, and see just about everything you do. Sometimes you can hide in a tunnel for a minute or two, but the NSA guy knows when you went into that tunnel, when you come out, what you took with you, and everyone you met while you were in there. And if your personal maze happens to be overseas, the NSA guy is actively recording everything you say and do just because he can. And watching and reading it later, trying to determine if you're the right kind of rat or not.

Is that the kind of world you want to live in?

If not, I suggest you tell your elected representatives about it, loudly and clearly. A big backlash is about the only tool we have to change things at this point. A small backlash will only get the noisy ones watched more closely, and eventually their friends will be tarred with the same brush when these systems are misused by those in power.

All of these intelligence gathering systems are begging to be abused. If not by the current administration and people in charge, by those that replace them in the coming years. We will all suffer, and the McCarthy hearings will look like a cakewalk in comparison.

References:

I've read a lot of articles focusing on these issues in the past few weeks. The list below is roughly in time order, and contains links to articles I found interesting, or that I bookmarked for one reason or another. It is far from a complete list of my research, which it would be difficult for me to regenerate at this point, though - and I say this fully understanding the irony - the NSA could probably tell you what I've read in a matter of minutes if they wanted to. There are a lot more articles to read if you dig. Feel free, if you don't mind building a track record on the web that the NSA will be able to follow, of course.

And one from December 2005, still shockingly relevant now:

http://www.pulitzer.org/archives/7040

Sunday, June 23, 2013

Much Ado About Nothing

TL;DR: go see Much Ado About Nothing. Really. Just do it. Great movie.

Joss Whedon - who created enough of the modern American TV canon that I am starting to think of him as the Shakespeare of my generation, though I am certain he would disagree with that characterization - has done it again.

This time he's created a movie from a play by the original Shakespeare, and he's done it very well. He cast a bunch of people you will recognize if you know his work, and they clearly have a great time.

Put simply, Much Ado About Nothing is great. Amy Acker and Alexis Denisof have great chemistry as Beatrice and Benedick, and their acting is superb.

So, honestly, just go see it. You'll have a great time.

Thursday, June 20, 2013

Yellow Jackets: Scourge of the Earth, or something...

I started to do some mowing and tree trimming on Tuesday. I am trimming up a bunch of trees along the road I live on, as well as mow a field. It all belongs to a neighbor who doesn't mind if I do the work. In fact, I've been mowing this field for him for several years now - to the benefit of us both - and I am finally trying to trim up the trees so they don't rip my face off when I mow under them. And to reduce the ladder fuels as well.

I had been working on to the very first tree on my neighbor's side of the property line for maybe 20 minutes when I felt a sharp pain in my right hip. Inside the pocket. It hurt. A lot.

No sign of the critter, but it had all the hallmarks of a yellow jacket sting. Only then did I note the nest in the ground, not three feet from where I was standing. Grrr.

So I backed off, made sure I wasn't about to die from anaphylactic shock, and kept working, just a bit farther away.

Maybe half an hour later I noted that the inside of my left elbow was starting to itch. Odd... no bites or stings or anything... just a consistent itch. Keep working.

Half an hour after that, though, my elbow is covered with small pustules and swollen up. And itches like mad. Grrr. Again.

Take a break. Wash the elbow clean and examine. No bite or sting marks that I can see. Slather on some topical antihistamine. Examine hip. Clear sting mark and minor swelling. Slather on some antihistamine there too. Start wondering...

Two years ago I was stung by a yellow jacket on my left elbow, just about where it is all swollen now. Could the new sting on my right hip cause the swelling on my left elbow?

The rest of the day goes along without additional excitement. That evening the elbow swelling recedes, but the hip swelling (and pain) increase, then decrease overnight, then increase again the following morning.

And continue increasing during the day. Grrr for a third time.

Finally, despite the fact that I am not obviously dying, I decide to go see a doctor. Mostly about whether the new sting could cause my left elbow to swell than about the swelling in my right hip.

And here's the takeaway from this blog post. Things I didn't know:

Less than 1% of people have an allergic reaction to bee stings. That means that unless it itches - or your neck swells up and you cannot breathe - antihistamines don't help. This makes sense in my case. The antihistamine did nothing at all for my hip. Maybe it helped the elbow, but then again maybe not. There is no way to be sure without extensive testing, which given the situation is something I would rather avoid.
The doctor says he has never seen an infected bee sting either, and he has seen hundreds of them over the years. That means antibiotics are wasted treatment for them too.
The swelling around a bee or yellow jacket sting is actually a reaction to the toxin the little blighter has pumped into your system. It can make your whole arm or leg swell up before it resolves itself, but there is nothing much you can do about it. Maybe some pain killers if it hurts too much, but all that stuff we were taught about allergic reactions and the like: wrong. Unless you're part of that tiny group that actually has one, or you're stung in the mouth.
There is no pattern to whether later stings are more or less bad than earlier stings. You never know.
Oh, and get the stinger out ASAP if the bee left one stuck in you. Don't worry about squeezing it, just pull the thing out to get it to stop injecting more toxin into your body.

So the doctor told me not to worry about the sting. It will work itself out just fine, and given I hadn't already gone into anaphylactic shock - and the sting site didn't itch - I didn't have an allergic reaction to it. Wait it out is all I can do. OK.

Beyond that, though, my question about whether the new sting could have caused the site of the old sting to swell up and itch was new to him. He didn't know the answer, but said he would try to look it up. It does happen in some cases with poison oak, he knew, so it is at least an interesting question. If I hear anything from him about it, I will share that.

This morning the swelling on my hip is down again. Maybe it will swell back up, maybe not. And the elbow is basically back to normal. Life goes on.

Finally, if anyone knows of a way to render yellow jackets completely extinct - wiped from the face of the earth - with no side effects, please share it. We live with skunks, spiders, bees, wasps, poison oak and maybe scorpions and rattlesnakes (though I haven't seen any of those in 21 years), but yellow jackets are definitely the worst. They all need to die. Now.

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Richard Stallman Is Wrong About Cloud Computing, At Least In Some Ways

TL;DR: No matter what Richard Stallman may say, there is a place for cloud computing.

In an article in The Guardian, Richard Stallman calls using web based programs "worse than stupidity" and a trap to get people locked into proprietary systems.

Is he right? In some ways, maybe, but as I see it, for the population in general, he's off base.

I'm probably not the right person to criticize. I've only got about 20 years of programming behind me, mostly for companies no one has heard of. I've worked for one ISP, one OS developer, and a bunch of other places. I graduated with a CS degree long enough ago that OO was still a university concept, not actually in use in the field, and I never took to it for several reasons. As it happens, I'm sick of all of that now, and would rather carve stone, but that doesn't matter. I still do a lot of things on computers, using cloud computing of one sort or another, as well as some local computing power too.

Oh, and I know Stallman will never see this, which is just fine with me. I'm a nobody in comparison, but I still think I have a valid point.

Stallman claims that cloud computing is all marketing hype. But let's look at this a bit more deeply.

If you have a computer at home, the chances are it runs Windows. Alternatively, if you don't run Windows, it is most likely you're an Apple Mac user, and thus run MacOS. If you fall into those categories, Stallman has no use for you. Those are both proprietary operating systems and lock you into the same evils that cloud computing does. You're screwed, by definition.

In terms of popularity, I think after that come tablets and smartphones. Those generally run Android - which is open source - or IOS (from Apple) or Windows. Let's just assume that Stallman hates anything from Apple and Microsoft - probably a good bet - and think about Android for a minute.

I have an Android phone, and I love it, but it is running an old version of the OS. It's not even two years old but - despite promises to the contrary - both the manufacturer and mobile carrier have failed to update it.

Yes, technically, I could root the phone, back it up, and install the latest version of Android myself. But that takes time, risks turning the phone into a brick, and requires me to do all ongoing maintenance from there on out as well. While I might eventually attempt it, most of the people who own smart phones aren't going to bother. Too much trouble. So, many people running Android are locked into an old, unsupported OS by a combination of their carrier and phone maker. Stallman probably writes them all off to, if I had to guess, though he might claim the the companies involved are doing evil in the process.

So far, no matter which of the choices I've listed, you're very likely to be in a category that Stallman dislikes.

What does that leave?

In the personal and mobile computing world, that leaves Linux and the latest version of Android, the latter getting updated all the time and leaving more and more people behind as that happens.

So, what makes the few percent that actually run those systems - the ones Stallman might like - tick? They're all serious geeks, for starters. They know their tech and aren't afraid to mess with it. It's fun to do so, in fact.

Let me give a different perspective on this: I run Linux at home and it requires real effort. Here's an example:

Recently, Ubuntu discontinued support for the version of Linux I was using. Their newest version no longer supports older CPUS - like the one found in my laptop - so it cannot run out of the box on it for me. It does run on my desktop, but it has a new UI that I really don't like, which completely changes the way I have to interact with the computer. (I strongly prefer focus-follows-mouse, not click-to-focus, for various reasons, but the Unity UI makes that choice unavailable by default. And there are behaviors in this UI that make no sense on a desktop, but since they are trying to create on UI that will also work on pad computers and smartphones, we're stuck with it. In short, I think it stinks.)

And then there was the time that I had to wait a year for Linux to support a new motherboard, and the time Ubuntu changed to the open source graphics card driver too soon, and it didn't support my system, and getting printing to work was a pain, and I had about three choices for scanners that the manufacturer actually says support Linux, and when I did the recently required OS upgrade, the scanner stopped working and I had to go find 2 totally different things that were required to make it work and execute commands at the command line, as the superuser, to make things right again. Really.

None of that is going to be easy to explain to most users. Stallman would have no problem with it, and compared to most I had little trouble, but I am not about to make Linux support a brand new motherboard. I have a lot of other things to do with my life.

Stallman might argue that I can change to another Linux vendor, and I did look around when Ubuntu unilaterally decided that non-PAE CPUs were so old that no one would care if they weren't supported anymore. But I am not all that happy with anything I have seen so far. Over the years I have used a number of Linux versions, and I have suffered from all kinds of problems with both hardware and software compatibility. Thus far, Linux Mint runs on the laptop - despite being Ubuntu and Debian based - but I am not convinced that I want to run it on my desktop yet. Too many unknowns. I have no idea how that issue will shake out.

Looking at this objectively, Canonical - the makers of Ubuntu - have done their very best to both lock me into their system and piss me off about their hardware support changes. They act just like a proprietary OS vendor in some ways. And given past experience, most of the other Linux vendors I have used do the same.

So on the OS front just about everyone is going to have a problem. Either Stallman won't approve of your OS (walled garden or crap) or, in the unlikely event that we happen to select something he approves of, we're in for a perpetual maintenance nightmare. And I repeat: am fairly well versed in the technology. My parents are never going to run Linux. Never. Way too complicated.

But let's think a bit more about the nature of the beast here. The OS is only the start of the issue, and Stallman's real complaint - at least in that article - is about cloud computing, which goes beyond the OS and into the application arena.

For example, apparently Stallman doesn't like gmail. Because it - and other webmail systems like it, one assumes - will lock their users into one solution, and put them at the mercy of Google (or Yahoo, or Microsoft, or whoever).

Perhaps, but...

I ran my own instance of sendmail for several years, so I could totally handle my own email. It's a configuration nightmare. Not fun. No way is grandma going to do it. And you have to update the software all the time to patch for security issues, and there are always things breaking in weird ways. It is my belief that mail server administration is only for those who enjoy pain.

Beyond, that, though, come other issues. If I run my own mail server at home, I've got no simple way to do something like have email that gets delivered to that home computer also be available on my Android phone when I am not at home. I could setup a POP or IMAP server, I suppose, but then I have to have some way to make it visible to the outside world, when my ISP NATs everything by default. Possible, maybe, but way too much trouble. And not something my mother is ever going to want to understand.

Oh... maybe Stallman wants everyone to have their own server in a data center somewhere, with a public IP address. That would let them run all of this server software in a simpler way, I suppose, but does grandma really want to do that? Or maybe we should all be using virtual machines for this? But wait... that's cloud computing. Can't do that.

What else does using a webmail system get me? Over the years I've had disks fail and lost everything on them. So running my own email system means a very intensive backup system is required. Gee... with webmail, someone else is backing things up, storing multiple copies, and generally making sure the hardware isn't going out of date or failing. I'd call that a win. They are also monitoring capacity and adding more (and faster) CPUs when they are needed. Another thing I can avoid.

So, let's summarize: with gmail - or any of the other major webmail systems - I can read my email anywhere, it's backed up, and I don't have to do hardware or software maintenance on anything on the server side. That adds value in my eyes. But according to Stallman, it's all just there as marketing hype and to lock me into a particular service. I guess the choice is obvious to him.

How about other software?

My various Linux installs come with LibreOffice (formerly Open Office, before Oracle did the nasty to Sun), and it's a fine office suite as these things go. But sharing documents with others - and having edits done in just one place, rather than having to sync up everyone's changes, which is something I actually do - isn't easy with LibreOffice, just as it isn't easy with MS Office. But Google's office apps - available via Google Drive - do a nice job of that. And I never have to update the software. They make my life easier, not harder. And there are other office suite vendors as well, so I have choices. And Google lets me export my data in a number of open formats. So I am not really locked in at all. Huh. Interesting.

I also use the image manipulation program Gimp regularly, and while it is very powerful, it isn't as easy to use for some photo work as I have found some cloud photo software to be. And again, there are many choices here. And since images can be downloaded in common formats... no lock in. Fascinating.

What does all of this mean?

For me - and I suspect for most of us - cloud computing provides real value in the form of simplicity. Of course it is possible to pick a bad provider and/or get locked into something you cannot get out of, but as my examples above indicate, that is happening on the open source side as well. Just how many times should the average user have to reinstall Linux until he gets a version that works for him? And how much research should he have to do to keep it running? (And never mind figuring out how to configure the nightmare that is sendmail.)

For Stallman - and those like him - running everything themselves on their own local hardware may be fine. And I don't mind a bit if he does that. In fact I hope that over time it gets easier for all of us to run this stuff ourselves if we want to. But most of us aren't going to be able to master all of the knowledge needed to make these things run well, or even work at all in some cases. Cloud computing can help simplify things for the end user immensely if all they need is an OS and an up to date browser. That's a lot less to maintain, backup, and keep virus free.

On the business side things get a bit less clear, I admit. But what some forms of cloud computing offer is hard to beat. If your business grows, do you really want to have to add racks of servers yourself to support it? Maybe, but perhaps you'd rather use Amazon's cloud services to deal with at least some of that. If it saves you time and/or money, it might be worthwhile.

Are you locked in if you go that route? Yes. But you're just as locked in with any solution. If you do it yourself you're locked into the OS you pick, the hardware you chose, the data center you lease space from (or the building you lease or own to build your own data center), and so on. And when you go down the application route, you're locked into whatever you buy or build.

Lock in, to some degree, is a matter of fact, and no major change is simple when you think about these things. None.

But if cloud computing means you can get more capacity quickly, when you need it, rather than waiting two weeks for the servers you need to arrive and get configured, that could be a real win for at least some businesses. To discard it as all marketing hype is to miss the point.

I respect Richard Stallman for his principled stance, but in reality, things are a lot more complicated than he lets on. There is a place for cloud computing - of various kinds - for both end users and businesses. Of course there are tradeoffs - and even risks - but if he thinks that doing everything locally avoids those issues, his head is firmly planted in the sand.

Thursday, May 30, 2013

The Thing About Things

The internet does weird things to me.

A few weeks ago, Amanda Palmer put up a sound only recording of a brand new song on her bandcamp website, I think it was. She'd performed it for the first time at a live concert and someone there had recorded it, possibly on a cell phone, and made the recording available to her.

As you might imagine, that recording wasn't all that great. Hardly ideal circumstances for such a thing.

But the song... the song grabbed me. It's titled The Thing About Things.

Without specialized software it wasn't even downloadable... you could only listen to it on the website. I really liked it.

Fast forward a couple of weeks, maybe even a month. I find out that now she's made it downloadable. And that she has recorded - but not yet released - a better version of it in a studio. I downloaded the concert version, and am waiting for the song to appear somewhere that I can actually get a good version, for which I will happily give her money.

Fast forward some more. Today, on Amanda's blog - which is in my RSS reader - I see a new post. It's the text of a speech she gave about writing. She gave the speech after a poem she dashed off after the Boston bombing horror caused a kerfluffle, and I'd already watched the speech elsewhere. It's quite good, and a reminder to me to keep creating, and that there are a lot of people in the world who judge without understanding. Here's a link to it. If you're an artist or creator of any sort, you really should watch it: http://vimeo.com/65681037.

Anyway, as I'd already watched - and been moved by - that speech, I just skimmed the blog post. But down at the bottom I found a link to a post by someone who runs Grub Street, which is the writer's organization that Amanda was speaking too. Amanda said it was a good post, so I read it too. And it was. The author talks about some points Amanda raised - about how writers feel validated and who decides what you're doing is worthwhile. Good stuff. Chase that link too.

Now, in that post, there was an embedded video of Amanda playing her Ukulele Song, which is very funny, and worth a listen too. I've heard it before, several times, and figured I'd listen again. And it was worth it. Again, chase the link.

Are you getting how my morning was going yet?

Anyway, the Ukulele song finished up and Vimeo handed me a list of other videos I might be interested in, and there was a link to Amanda playing The Thing About Things. The first version I heard was Amanda and her piano, and despite being a bad recording it brought tears to my eyes. This recording is Amanda and her ukulele, and once again, I cried. It's a much better recording of the song, and she sings it with passion, which is her trademark in my mind.

And so, in my meandering way, with lots of diversions, here, finally, is the point of this blog post: Amanda Palmer's The Thing About Things, performed live at Grub Street in Boston.

May it bring you joy, and maybe a few tears as you remember someone, somewhere.

Peace.

Edit 6/25/13 - corrected the link to The Thing About Things... Not sure how it was wrong unless Vimeo changed it on me.

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Programming Rant... Sorry.

For those of you who are not technical, or who don't care about programming, feel free to skip this post. I just have to get this out of my system.

I'm currently slogging through a book on JavaScript. I have a project I want to work on that needs to run in a browser and perhaps be turned into a stand alone smart phone application, so JavaScript seems to be the way to go given what I read. I could be wrong, but it's where I am starting.

The book in question is an O'Reilly JavaScript tome, and as an introduction to the language it isn't too bad, at least if you have some programming background. But the language itself is leading me to continue my belief that OO programming is a disaster.

I get the basic idea behind objects and methods. I am certain that some percentage of programming problems benefit from a system in which objects are available, but I suspect the number of such problems is pretty small overall. Pick your percentage... I really don't care. What matters to me is the complexity increase and efficiency decrease that come with OO. Most programmers have no clue just how their code actually works at the lowest levels anymore, and most schools certainly aren't teaching it. OO techniques just magnify those problems in enormous ways.

By way of example, here's a bit of code from the book I am reading, reformatted a bit to look OK in this post. It's only an example, and the author does mention that it will be slower than other approaches, but, well... just take a peek:

function Range(from, to) {
// Don't store the endpoints as
// properties of this object.
// Instead define accessor functions
// that return the endpoint values.
// These values are stored in the
// closure.
this.from = function() { return from; }
this.to = function() { return to; }
}

// The methods on the prototype can't
// see the endpoints directly: they have
// to invoke the accessor methods just
// like everyone else.
Range.prototype = {
constructor: Range,
includes: function(x) {
return this.from() <= x &&
x <= this.to();
},
foreach: function(f) {
for(var x=Math.ceil(this.from()),
max=this.to(); x<= max;
x++) {
f(x);
}
},
toString: function() {
return "(" + this.from() +
"..." + this.to() + ")"; }
};

and with that code defined, he shows how it can be used:

// An "immutable" range
var r = new Range(1,5);
// Mutate by replacing the method
r.from = function() { return 0; };

The first thing - for the uninitiated - is that this code is implementing an object called a range, which is nominally just two integers. The range (1...5) means the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 are in the range, and all other integers are not. Simple enough. And obviously ranges have two endpoints, right? So where, exactly, are those endpoints stored in that code?

The author has an earlier version of this code that uses two variables to store the start and end of the range, but in this version they are not obviously present. I read this code several times, trying to figure it out, before the very last line in the example - the one starting "r.from =" finally tipped me off.

I'm an experienced programmer, and a reasonably good one. Not the best, but above average in my professional experience. I've worked with some really brilliant people over the years, and know where at least a few of my limitations are. Given what I know, this sample code can only be described as ugly and unmaintainable.

The use of a closure is enough to drive some programmers to drink. (I know plenty who never understood recursion. Closures are much, much worse.) Code of this kind is intrinsically difficult to read, difficult to follow, difficult to edit, and so on. And for those brilliant programmers out there who think this is easy to read and maintain, I cannot stress strongly enough how wrong you are. You're only thinking of it from your point of view, not the poor sod who is going to add something new to this code 2 years after you've changed jobs.

Once, years ago, I saw code like this in some C code my employer was maintaining:

int f( char *a, char* b)
{
char *temp;

/* ... lots of code that doesn't refer */
/* to the variable "temp" in any way ... */

strcpy( a, temp );

/* ... code that doesn't matter ... */
}

I was doing some porting work and found that cruft. Digging into the change history of the file in question showed me that a support engineer had "fixed" a bug by inserting the temp variable and making use of it in that way. The fact that he hadn't allocated space to copy into and was instead writing over who-knows-what on the stack didn't even occur to him. He'd tested his code and it worked just fine, so what did it matter? And yes, I tracked him down and talked to him personally. He simply didn't get it.

Really.

The world is full of cases - and people - like that. As a result, the best code for the real world is, sadly, the most readable and maintainable code possible, not the fastest, not the most clever, not the shortest. Fancy programming techniques - like the vast majority of OO - simply make things slower, harder to understand, and vastly increase the "go wrong" space in which programs can fail.

What I am learning about JavaScript - and about OO in general - is that my gut feel was right. These languages are disasters. Inexperienced programmers are creating things that should never see the light of day using idiomatic programming techniques they should never even try to use.

Sure, if you're writing some one-off bit of code that will never be reused, or will only be maintained by you, fine, write it however you want. I don't care. But if you're working on something that will outlast your time with it, or (more likely) your time with the employer who owns it, you have an obligation to write it in such a way that the next guy that looks at it can quickly and easily figure out what you were doing, why you were doing it, and make changes as needed without breaking the universe.

OO was supposed to help that, and within limits it may. But if JavaScript is any example (or C++, for that matter), the languages themselves have an amazing ability to make the code harder to read and maintain.

If we were all brilliant programmers, that wouldn't matter, but we're not, and it does.

Thursday, January 31, 2013

On Memory

Way back in 1979 - when I were a lad, as a friend of mine would say - the movie Alien came out. I'm not sure if I saw it in the theaters during its first run or sometime later, but I definitely saw it in a theater before I went to college.

Over the years since, my memory of that experience has become somewhat interesting to examine. I recall the interior of the spaceship as being incredibly realistic and scary, and it seems there were miles of corridor full of venting steam, all dark and full of hiding places. I see the egg/face hugger scene in flashes, so it seems truly terrifying, even now. I know I spent a lot of the time studying the tops of my shoes during the movie because I was too scared to watch it closely. And, of course - being a teenage boy at the time - I remember Sigourney Weaver getting into the space suit at the end. (If you need an explanation of that, well, you must not be - or ever have been - a teenage boy. Or you didn't see the movie.)

I've avoided several opportunities to see the movie again, including at least one in college. Possibly as a result, time has made Alien into something larger than life, something so scary and so real that seeing it again was not something I wanted to do. But finally, just the other night, I broke down and watched it again.

For reasons that are amusing but too complicated to go into here - except to say "well, I guess Alien is a period costume drama... of a sort" - I now own the DVDs for all four movies in the Alien series. So I watched the theatrical release of Alien again, just to see how it compared with my memory.

And I can now confirm that my memory is really bad.

Yes, the movie is good, but it's not nearly as terrifying as I remember it. The sets are nicely made, and the entire thing is well filmed, but a bit less dry ice and steam would have been better. The infamous scene in the dining room on the ship - you know the one, if you've seen the movie - is still striking and memorable, but the creature itself almost struck me a laughable this time around. The larger version of the xenomorph is still well done, particularly for the time the film was made, but I simply didn't think it that scary.

But it turns out my memory of Sigourney Weaver getting into the space suit at the end was just about perfect. Go figure.

Memory is a very odd thing, when it works.

Sunday, January 6, 2013

Half the population...

The latest news about women from afar - India, Afghanistan, and similar locales - and even from some places much closer to home, is awful. Rape, murder, and repression are all too common.

Why do so many think women are less than human? Why can't they speak their minds and contribute to society?

Leaving half the population of the planet out of the list of "those who can" is a serious mistake, whatever the reason.

Back in 2003, Joss Whedon wrapped up Buffy The Vampire Slayer with an interesting ending. In the final episode we get a brief glimpse of a girl coming up to bat in a little league game, just as she becomes empowered. Her smile - that quirky, here I come, just try and stop me smile - sums up the entire series for me, and I suspect it's how Whedon would like it to be remembered. She was becoming something powerful, and that was a very good thing.

I wish Whedon's vision was reality, everywhere. All women should be empowered. They should never take crap from anyone, and if for some reason they do, they should defend themselves fully and be supported in that by the rest of society.

Any religion, philosophy, or person that says that is wrong is not worth knowing, and should be forgotten.

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Rough Days

We have three dogs:

Leah: a 13 year old, spotted, mix breed.
Danno: an 8 year old, Siberian Husky.
Skookie: an 8-ish year old, Shepard mix, who moved into our house because it was better than her previous home. Really.

Skookie is in good health as far as we can tell.

Leah, being quite a bit older, has been panting a fair bit for a long time. Even when it is cool and she's been doing nothing. She doesn't always pant, but it definitely happens more than should be required.

And something like four or five weeks ago, Danno, our big Siberian Husky started showing unexplained pain on occasion. He would just stop what he was doing and start howling like he was being stabbed. Huskies aren't notoriously stoic about pain, so we didn't take this too seriously in general, but we always went looking for a cause and never found one.

As it happens, we had plans to go out of town for a week to see family, and the dogs were going to be kenneled while we were away. We decided to take them to the vet to be sure they were OK before we left, rather than deal with surprises while we were gone.

Sometimes it seems it is better not to know.

Leah's panting is almost certainly something called Laryngeal Paralysis. As some dogs age the larynx gets stiffer and won't open easily to let air in and out of the lungs. These dogs have to work harder to breathe over time, and thus pant a lot. The diagnostic tip is to listen for a deep resonation while they are panting, and Leah has that. The actual diagnostic requires sedating the dog and observing the larynx at work, but we aren't doing that to her just to confirm a diagnosis.

This condition is essentially fatal, but it takes a long time. Leah could have months or years left with us, and is in no immediate danger. The only available treatment is to tie half the larynx open surgically, which makes breathing easier, but can allow them to aspirate things into the lungs. Pneumonia is a relatively common result, and our vet says she probably wouldn't do that surgery on her own dogs.

So we let Leah's situation play out. We have to keep her walks short and keep her out of the sun, though, because she has a hard time cooling off given this condition. Otherwise, we wait and keep her happy. She's in good shape and still has plenty of energy, so nothing here is all that urgent.

Danno's situation is much, much worse.

Sparing you all the diagnostic details, it turns out he has cancer. Probably two tumors, one affecting the neck and another the brain. The impact of these tumors hit so hard and so quickly that we were stunned.

Just a couple of days before we were to leave town, Danno was unable to drink any liquid. He'd just cough up a bunch of clear, viscous, phlegm after each drink. He was dehydrating as a result, and he wasn't eating either. His right eye was turned in - something called Horner's Syndrome - and the right side of his face collapsed in as well.

But two days of overnight care with IV fluids, antibiotics, and (most importantly) prednisone helped quite a bit. He could eat and drink again, and while none of that was going to fix the underlying problem, his quality of life was back to the point that he was enjoying things again.

We discussed surgery, but decided it is not an option. Given the expected location of the tumors, they would not be fully removable, which means they would just grow back, and quickly. Recovery would be long and painful - for a dog that actually screams when he stubs his toe - and the specialist vet told us that even after all that, he might live another six months. The cost for all of this proposed treatment was astronomical as well, but that wasn't what made up our minds. I wouldn't want that kind of treatment for myself given the probable outcome, and we won't do it to Danno either.

As I said above, prednisone gave relief from the pain and let him drink and eat again, to the point that we went on our scheduled trip. We came back late on Friday, and picked all our puppies up from the kennel on Saturday morning.

Skookie and Leah are as they were - though Skookie really wants her big, white friend to play with her again.

Danno was as good as could be expected, but is clearly on a relatively quick decline. Despite the prednisone, he is still coughing up phlegm regularly after a few days, losing weight, and some coordination. I fear he has only days - perhaps a week or two - left with us, before we have to make the final choice.

These things are always hard - awful, in fact - but we've had great times with our 85 pound furball. He's brought joy - and an overwhelming amount of hair - into our lives, hearts, and home. We watch over him carefully, doing our best to make him happy and comfortable, knowing it is our responsibility to keep him from suffering.

In some ways, these are dark days in our home, but Danno is still with us. He still loves laying at our feet, begging for most any vegetable that we're cooking with or eating, and being petted as much as possible.

And we remember all the good times he has given us: the unconditional love and trust, the need to lick everyone's nose just to show he's completely submissive, and the complete friendliness towards every human and dog he's ever met.

The vets all tell us he has an unusual disposition for a Husky. Apparently some members of that breed aren't all that nice. Danno is amazingly friendly, even now in his decline, and no matter what happens I will always think of him as our canine ambassador of good will.

The last chapter isn't written yet, but there isn't that much time before it is. He's asleep behind my chair as I write this, and even now I smile when I look at him.

You're not a good dog, Danno. You're a great dog. And you always will be.

Thursday, August 9, 2012

If You Read This, You Will Probably Be Offended

I've been asked for my political opinions of late, which just goes to show that some people don't have nearly enough to do. In any case, here's a list of things that influence how I will be voting in the coming election, and what I think about politics in general. There was no way to keep this short enough to read if I justified even a single item, so I gave up on that. It's just a list. You will almost certainly disagree with at least some of it. Don't say you weren't warned.

You might consider looking at pictures of cute kittens instead. You will stay calmer, and sometimes ignorance really is bliss.

By the time anyone is running for (or being appointed to) high office, I assume they are totally corrupt. No exceptions.
Politicians and their campaign staffs will - deliberately - take anything their opponent says out of context in an attempt to make him or her look bad. I call this what it is: lying.
No politician - of any party - will be able to reduce the deficit. They will never be allowed to stop spending. Both will get bloodied by their constituencies if they even try. Don't even bother listening when a candidate claims otherwise.
The only way to shrink the deficit is to get the economy moving again, and then avoid both increasing spending and pay down the deficit while times are good. Yes, that is highly unlikely, but it is the only approach that could work.
Just how important is the deficit in the short term? I honestly don't know. But if it is as bad as some make it out to be, why is the rest of the world loaning us money at about 2.6% for 30 years as I write this? That doesn't even cover inflation. We must look like a good bet, or everyone else looks really bad. Right now, at that interest rate, borrowing money isn't all that big a deal. Heck, simple (low) inflation will pay the interest and even some of the principle.
In the longer term, the national debt is unsustainable. That has to be fixed over time, and the fix will require several things:

Stop spending money on pointless wars. Get us out of the ones we are in now.
Stop spending money on pointless military weapon systems.
Reduce the size of the standing army.
Reduce the nuclear arsenal stockpile in a big way.
Phase in cost savings to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. That probably means gradually increasing the age at which people can collect, and gradually introducing means testing, so the wealthy collect less, or not at all.
Increase taxes on the wealthy.
Here's a big hint: we cannot solve the nation's fiscal problems with only spending cuts or tax increases: nothing is ever that simple. Nothing. Current tax rates are at record lows and spending is at a peak. Changes to both things must be part of the solution. A growing economy would help too.

Despite stating above that we have to make changes to our social programs, there is an iron clad, real, need for a social safety net. It must remain, and probably be made even more effective in the process, given the number of people who are falling through it now. To remove or reduce what we have in any substantial way is immoral and repugnant.
In any system - government or business - there will always be people who cheat and take advantage of it for personal gain. This is not a good thing, but pointing the finger at government corruption without admitting that the problem is just as big in industry - or vice versa - is missing the point. Reducing corruption is a good thing, and the way to do it is openness and accountability in all transactions, both public and private. Until we get to that - or at least closer to it - there will always be corruption, regardless of which system you prefer. And that corruption hurts us all, regardless of where it occurs. Don't be so narrow minded as to think that business is better than government on this front, or the other way around. Humans are the real problem.
Not all regulation is evil. More regulation and monitoring of the high risk mortgage and derivative markets would have been a good thing back before 2008, and we are still suffering from that lack. That said, regulation can be overbearing and stop things that are actually good if it gets out of hand. The trick is to walk the razor's edge, and it is hard to do. Mistakes will be made - in both directions - and need to be corrected without going too far the other way and causing significant new issues.
Unions aren't my favorite thing. There was a time when they were required - in certain industries, at least - to offset serious abuses. I get that. And there may be similar problems in places now. But every union is made of people, and people cheat, work systems for personal gain, and so on. Unions are just as corrupt as business and government. It has to be that way thanks to the human element. Besides that, unions simply cannot be universally good. How does a great employee shine in an environment where she cannot ask for a raise or get promoted more quickly than her peers because of union rules and agreements? Waiting for everyone who was hired before you to be promoted, quit, retire, or die is not good for anyone's job or position in an organization. I don't think unions work well with human nature because of this issue.
Personal responsibility should be a bigger part our our culture. People need do much more on at least these fronts in my opinion:

Save for their retirement.
Save for their own health care.
Keep their debt down.
Defer instant gratification in favor of longer term stability and financial security.
Stop suing everyone for every little thing.

Such things would let phasing in changes to our social programs be simpler and more effective, among other things.

Health care in the US is all screwed up. The wrong incentives are used to pay too much for the wrong things. In addition, the legal system creates additional, perverse incentives that drive prices up as well. The net result is that we pay way too much for comparatively poor health outcomes.

Insurance companies are evil. Give me a single payer system any day, but remember that the wealthy should pay for more (or all of) their health care themselves, probably by reimbursing the single payer system for some or all of their care.

Anyone who thinks his religion trumps our (man made) laws is inherently unfit for office.

Anyone who thinks forcing his view of religion on others is acceptable is also unfit for office, and is pretty much unfit in general.

Anyone who discriminates on the basis of religion, creed, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, etc. is unfit for office - and generally - as well.

Abortion is for the woman (or the woman and her partner) to decide upon, not the government, which should stay out of it entirely.

The war on drugs is lost. Decriminalize most of it and tax it. Release - at a minimum - anyone in jail for charges solely related to drug possession (for use) and who has no history of violence.

Mandatory sentencing laws are, in general, idiotic.

Marriage is a loaded term. We should stop using it in any legal way. Instead, all states and the federal government should recognize contractual, civil unions. Anyone of age should be allowed to specify who their partner is - regardless of gender - and all the things that currently go with marriage (hospital decision making, visitation rights, child custody, inheritance, etc.) should be based on that contract. If you want to get married - in the eyes of your church - that's fine, but it should have no benefit as far as the government is concerned. You can set that up with your church and do whatever you want there.

Assuming that we cannot get to a strict civil union setup, it is important to note that your marriage is in no way threatened by the marriage of a gay or lesbian couple. Get a grip on reality and let them be happy together, in the eyes of the law such as we have it setup now.

What consenting adults do in their bedroom is no one's business but their own. Butt out. As an aside, I'd bet that anyone who disagrees with this would be very uncomfortable if someone started digging into their private lives in the same way. "Don't mind me... I'm just setting up a bunch of wireless video cameras in your bedroom and, oh heck... your whole house. Just go about your business. You'll never know you're being watched if you have nothing to hide."

Personal liberty - which I will inadequately define as freedom of expression and the avoidance of pointless, intrusive surveillance - is critical, and must be supported. In passing I note that ever since 9/11 the entire US population is so terrified of its own shadow that any government from any party has no problem passing just about any law that claims to make the population safer in some way, no matter how idiotic said law might be. And those laws are places where all kinds of abuse can hide.

I like clean air & water. Regulation is needed to avoid pollution because humans are weak and stupid and some of them will do the wrong things. And pollution doesn't keep to state or other boundaries... it moves around. We're all much better off since the EPA was created. It - and a few other organizations like it - need to stick around. But always with that pendulum in mind. If any organization gets too nasty and causes more problems than it fixes, it needs to be reigned in.

Global warming is real - very real - and humans are causing it. Get over your pointless disbelief and let's work to figure out what - if anything - we can do to mitigate the problem. I worry that it is already too late, but I don't have kids who will suffer. You might... let's do something about that.

I like markets that are fair. Capitalism may be the most efficient way to move goods and services around, but it is subject to the same thing I have been harping on: people are weak and stupid and some will cheat if they can. That cheating, when it happens, can affect millions of us, and regulation is needed to reduce the chances that it will happen, and to correct the problems when it does. Again, though, the caveat about pendulums and keeping both regulations and regulators in check is key.

Do you remember the saying: "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent"? Well, guns are the very last refuge of the most incompetent. It is just barely possible you could be the 1 in 100 (or whatever... it's a tiny number) who happens to have his firearm handy sometime in his life when it can be used to save a life or stop a crime. Statistically, though, you're much more likely to have it stolen, or worse. The wild west is (thankfully) long gone, and we don't need firearms around all the time anymore.

The death penalty is dumb. Remember, people are weak and stupid. Prosecutors and police will sometimes make things up, or just get something wrong. People will confess to things they didn't do because they don't know what else to do, or they are browbeaten, tired, and confused. Lawyers can give bad advice. Juries are notoriously inaccurate as a gauge of the truth. Eyewitness testimony is unreliable. And nothing will bring back the dead, not even killing someone who might have committed the crime. We should eliminate the death penalty entirely and stop stooping to the level of state sanctioned murder. We already know we get it wrong from time to time.

If you are wealthy, you owe more to society. It's really that simple, and it is a key part of the compact that keeps us going. You may be very smart, or have created something new and wonderful that everyone wants, but you stand on the shoulders of those who have come before you, and who did or created things you depend upon. Much of that stuff that came before is now in the commons: roads, bridges, etc. Be generous and willingly pay for your share and use of such things. That's the right way to live. Taxation is the general way such things are paid for, and that's why taxes on the wealthy are higher. It's fair that way, and makes everyone's life better, including that of those paying the taxes.

Health care for the poor and indigent benefits the wealthy. The reduction in communicable disease is one direct way. The increased output of the economy is another that is less direct. Letting people die when they could be treated is counter productive as well as immoral and unethical. It's also stupid.

That said, there is a population problem, and more people isn't always better. While we may not yet have reached the maximum capacity of the planet, we will one day. And it will get ugly. The single biggest thing it appears we can do to keep the population under control is educate girls everywhere. Once they start school, they take control of their own reproductive future, and birth rate goes down. That's a good thing, and should be encouraged.

Communism sounds great on paper - to me, at least - but it will never work in reality. Humans aren't wired like that, and no matter how many times a heart surgeon listens to John Lennon singing Imagine, he is always going to expect to be paid more than a ditch digger, and there will always be people that cheat on their taxes, or find ways to game a system. Sadly, they tend to wind up in power, and then you have serious nastiness.

Superstition is not an alternative to science, no matter how you sugar coat it. Move on. Science is our best hope for finding the truth, and for saving our species from disaster.

As you might guess from this list, I am a cynic about human nature, and probably a hypocrite about a few things as well. Such is life. I also think the chances of changes I like are vanishingly small, which means I am unlikely to be happy about American politics for the foreseeable future.

So how will I vote in this election? Nothing is certain, but examining the issues I see the following:

Since I don't think either party will make any headway on the deficit - short term or long - I discard that as a reason to choose one over the other. Mind you, both parties will claim they are going to fix it, but they aren't telling the truth, and the American people won't let them fix it in any case.

Both presidential candidates will do just about anything to get into (or stay in) office. As a result, neither has a lead there. Honesty would be such a nice change, but neither side has shown it in the heat of the campaign.

On issues relating to privacy and personal liberty, neither party has an advantage either. Both stink.

On the ongoing wars and related foreign entanglements, once again neither party has a particular lead. Obama hasn't exactly gotten us out of Iraq and Afghanistan faster than I think a Republican would have, and he may even have delayed our exit as I see these things. Then again, confronted with the situation, McCain might well have kept us in longer than Obama will in the end. No way to tell, and thus I cannot lean one way or another on that.

That more or less leaves the social issues, and I there come down more on the side of the Democrats. They aren't a perfect match but the Republicans - with their overwhelming religious intolerance, bigotry, and war on women - are actually repugnant, so here the Democrats really do have a lead with me.

So unless things change - and they might, I am not a registered member of any party, and I don't think any of the parties accurately represent my view of things - you can pretty much guess which way I'll go. Those who know me will not be surprised, even if individual items above might surprise (or more likely disappoint) them.