Stupid political arguments of our time

John McCain says it is 'Time To 'Pull The Trigger' On Tougher Iran Sanctions' [TPM LiveWire].

There is just one teensy little problem. The US already has a full economic embargo on Iran. It is illegal for any US citizen to engage in any form of commerce with Iran including buying Iranian made goods and selling goods to Iran. So when McCain is saying that the US should pull the trigger, he is referring to a gun that has already been fired.

The only way that the US can bring any greater pressure to bear on Iran is by getting other countries to support the sanctions regime. And that in turn is made rather difficult by the fact that US credibility is rather poor after the lies told by Obama's predecessor to gain support for the US invasion of Iraq.

Waiting in line not for an iPad, but for a new shell - Local News Updates - MetroDesk - The Boston Globe

Cool

Waiting in line not for an iPad, but for a new shell - Local News Updates - MetroDesk - The Boston Globe

Using field studies, lab experiments, and computer models, the biologists discovered that hermit crabs join together in what is known as a "synchronous vacancy chain" when they are looking for a new home.

Cry Anti-Semitism

There are still a large number of people who ascribe to a wide variety of bigotries. But I think rather few people will agree that current criticism of the Pope's handling of priests who raped children is in any way motivated by sentiments comparable to anti-Semitism [BBC News].

At the root of the current crisis is the fact that the current Pope was determined to suppress criticism of the church by any means, even if doing so would inevitably lead to offenders being left to rape yet more victims. And now the claim of anti-Semitism is being made in the faint hope of bullying critics into silence.

The claim might be received a little more sympathetically if the Vatican had actually managed to apologize for its failure to condemn the holocaust as it was happening. Likewise it is rather hard to see an institution as being victimized by bigots when it spends so much time and effort promoting the cause of anti-gay bigotry.

Scholarship at the AEI

In the wake of the firing of Frum, Charles Murray makes an unintentionally revealing post on the nature of the AEI and AEI scholarship.

Murray is also an AEI fellow, but he purports to be posting independently. In particular he states: I do not have any certain information to convey about David’s departure, except what Arthur Brooks has already said publicly: David resigned.

In other words the only "certain information" that Murray is stating is best described as a lie. While Murray's statement may be technically a true statement, it is intended to deceive and thus a lie. Murray is no doubt aware that the condition under which Frum could remain was to go from being paid what Murray describes as a 'handsome salary' to being unpaid. To insist of calling this a 'resignation' is dishonest.

Once we understand that this is the game Murray plays, we can see that the apparent denial of donor pressure influencing AEI policy in Murray's third paragraph is in fact nothing of the sort. Murray describes a very specific scenario in which donor pressure does not take place "The idea that AEI donors sit down to talk with AEI’s president...". The scenario is presented as being a 'fantasy', but nowhere is there actually a denial.

Murray is again being intentionally deceptive. As he must know, Frum alleged only that he was told not to write on Health Care Reform as it was likely to upset the donors. He did not allege that the donors made any complaint, which is the charge Murray decides to rebut.

After stating that he has no information, Murray theorizes that the reason for Frum's departure is his lack of work for the Institute. Murray himself admits to drawing a salary on the same basis, but gives no explanation for why Frum was forced to resign and he was not.

In making this complaint against Frum, Murray unintentionally admits one of the principal charges critics make against the AEI: it disburses patronage to Conservatives who toe the party line without expecting anything in return beyond use of their name on the letterhead. But for the pseudo-academic patina of his AEI 'fellowship', Charles Murray would be just another crank who wrote a covert racist screed.

But then look at how Murray finishes his piece:

I think that’s what happened. I also think that for David to have leveled the charge that Arthur Brooks caved in to donor pressure, knowing that the charge would be picked up and spread beyond recall, knowing that such a charge strikes at the core of the Institute’s integrity, and making such a sensational charge without a shred of evidence, is despicable.

Here Murray unintentionally demonstrates a complete lack of any capacity for self-examination. The next sentence after making a charge he admits he has no evidence for, Murray accuses Frum of having made a charge without a shred of evidence.

As Murray himself admits, he has no evidence other than what is in the public domain. While Frum has provided no evidence to support his assertion that members of the AEI were told not to write on health care, the AEI has made no attempt to refute the charge and no evidence has been presented to show the contrary. Since it is implied that Frum himself was one of the people told not to write on Health Care Reform, his own testimony is evidence. Now whether the word of Frum alone is persuasive (he was an AEI scholar after all), it is clearly not true to claim that there is no evidence.

If Charles Murray is representative of AEI 'scholarship', it is an institution whose integrity is not so much compromised as non-existent.

Police: Fired worker disabled cars via Web

Hot on the Pensylvannia school webcam case, another case of what happens when companies only think 'what is the worst that could happen to me'.

An auto dealership fitted radio GPS systems with a function that enabled the engine to be remotely disabled. The company only worried about getting the car back if the customer didn't pay. They didn't consider the possibility that a fired employee might use the system to get back at the employeer.

The dealership is now facing demands for compensation from the owners who were denied use of the cars for several days. Some had their cars towed, all suffered unnecessary inconvenience. the dealer has suffered damage to its reputation and will almost certainly end up paying substantial compensation to the customers.

It does not look as if the dealer has learned its lesson either. Changing passwords won't help as the real cause of the problem was that the employee had too much authority. Since disabling a customer's car should be a last resort, the system should probably require authorization from more than one employee. Velocity controls to prevent one employee disabling hundreds of cars at the same time would be a sensible additional control.

Truth in Power Lunching

I am particularly interested in two little mentioned new features of the new MacBook Pro. The features of interest are all on the back edge:



The first change is that Apple has finally seen sense and decided to support an SD card slot. the ability to transfer photos and video from camera to computer without additional dongles is a major hassle eliminator for professional and serious photographers.

But the more important change for me is that there is now an indicator of remaining battery power on the back edge where the user is unable to see it.

Why is this so important?

Well a very common situation in a conference room is that you have n available sockets on a power strip and n+1 (or more) people with laptops to plug in. This inevitably creates a situation where various people attempt to gain access to the plug by pleading imminent exhaustion of their battery.

The power strip meter is a dead giveaway. Now we will know whose machine is about to croak and who is merely bluffing.

What should the School District have done?

The Pennsylvania school district being sued for allegedly spying on students now claims the feature was only used to recover stolen laptops.

Recovering a stolen laptop is an objective that most people would accept as valid. But at the very least the school district implementation has created a major legal liability. Even if they 'win' the lawsuit they could easily spend a million dollars in legal costs.

What should the school district have done instead?

Disclosure: Any security mechanism that you would not want to disclose to your users is likely to be a bad idea. A mechanism that is kept secret to avoid controversy is a very, very bad idea.

Dual controls: Banks require every important operation to involve at least two people. Its not just to reduce the risk of embezzlement, its to provide protection for the personnel. If one employee could open the safe by themselves they would be a target for kidnappers and if any money did go missing they would be a suspect.

Audit Trail: Every system that could be misused should generate a tamper proof audit trail.

Security people don't just ask 'what is the worst that can happen', they think 'what is the worst that someone could be accused of'.

Adding the necessary controls does not need to create excessive overheads. Simply generate a unique access code for each end point and seal the access codes in tamper-evident bags. Make the custodian of the bags a different person to the one that has the password for the recovery system. Alternatively use a software based mechanism to enforce dual controls.

This problem has been solved for a decade in key recovery systems. There really is no excuse for not applying that technology.

Clueless pundits

What I find most depressing about the state of the Washington Post is the sheer political cluelessness of some of their pundits. Lane argues that Bayh's last minute withdrawal from the race has set himself up for a Presidential run against Obama.

There are many problems here, not least the fact that there really isn't a constituency in the Democratic party base that thinks Obama has failed to be sufficiently open to working with the Republicans.

I suspect that his timing was designed to prevent a big name GOP candidate from entering the race. But most party activists seem to have assumed that his real objective was to ensure that the party apparatus would install a blue dog candidate. That has pretty much made the Bayh brand toxic as far as national politics goes.

Bayh's departure appears to be driven by pique as the loss of the supermajority and the GOP tactics of total obstruction have transformed his role from cloture power-broker to a marginal player in the reconciliation-rules 51 vote game.

Human Error

According to the Olympic committee it was 'Human Error' that caused the death of luger Kumaritashvili.

I beg to differ. Human error was merely the cause of the crash. The crash was fatal because the luger collided with an unprotected steel support.

Every corner on a Formula One track is protected with walls of rubber tires. The speeds are faster, but the drivers are riding in reinforced chassis designed to withstand high speed impacts. It might be that no amount of protection would have been sufficient, but failure to provide any would seem to be negligent.

But whatever the cause is ultimately determined to be, any judgment made at this point is premature.

Woods not a good Buic salesman

One of the things I could never understand about GM was why they paid Tiger Woods to be the pitchman for Buick. It always seemed an odd fit, seems that I was right [USA Today].

My impression of Buick was that it was little more than an excuse to charge a slightly higher price for a range of uninspiring sedans made from standard GM parts. That is not an impression that you break by paying a celebrity to drive it when they would obviously be much happier in a Porsche or a Ferrari.

Seeing Woods step out of a Buick was never going to make people think 'hey I want to drive what he drives'. To the extent the brand of the car registered at all most people would think either 'rental' or 'being paid to drive it'.

People understand that Woods is also paid to tout the goods Nike makes in low wage sweatshops of course. But there the idea is that the spokesperson has at least some input into the goods on sale. It is unlikely he would stay with Nike clubs and balls unless they were amongst the best in the industry, there is the expectation that he at least sees the clothing range before it launches.

Arnold Palmer was a very successful spokesperson for Rolex for the simple reason that it was totally believable that a Rolex is what Palmer would choose to wear. It is hard to imagine many spokespersons that that would be true of for Buick, which is probably why the brand is best buried.