Author: geoff

Thoughts on the Tyco mistrial and the jury system

So another multi-million dollar trial collapses because of a mistrial related to the jury system. Can anyone give me any good reason – other than “tradition” [cue Fiddler On The Roof music] – for requiring unanimity in juries? For most (?all) trials in the UK, they moved to a 10-2 majority requirement years ago. Requiring 12-0 means that you are at the mercy of jury tampering or the wacko who wants to play Henry Fonda in Twelve Angry Men. It’s much harder to intimidate or bribe three jurors than one…..
I’ll make an exception for capital cases, although since I’m opposed to capital punishment on principle, this exception is more tactical than anything else.
Legislate 10-2 juries in every state and at the Federal level; those who vote against it can pay for the mistrials!

Blogspamming

OK, I’ve been blogspammed. I’ve now had three comments added to my blog which advertised spectacular medical opportunities. I know the IP address of each (e.g. 62.99.209.54), but I haven’t yet done the spelunking required to find out if its coming from a business or (more likely) from a compromised PC somewhere.
The obvious fix would be to fix the “add comment” module of MT to require interactive validation to enter a comment. (E.g. type back a code displayed as a JPEG.) I’m going to investigate what’s online at Blogspam and I’ll report back.

Music

Remember the scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian:
BRIAN: Look. You’ve got it all wrong. You don’t need to follow me. You don’t need to follow anybody! You’ve got to think for yourselves. You’re all individuals!
FOLLOWERS: Yes, we’re all individuals!
BRIAN: You’re all different!
FOLLOWERS: Yes, we are all different!
DENNIS: I’m not.
ARTHUR: Shhhh.
FOLLOWERS: Shh. Shhhh. Shhh.
BRIAN: You’ve all got to work it out for yourselves!
FOLLOWERS: Yes! We’ve got to work it out for ourselves!
Most of us like to think that we are independent thinkers, that we won’t follow the herd and latch on to each new craze. On the other hand, if the “new craze” is really good….?
All of this is an elaborate way of saying that I’m hooked on the eponymous first album by the Scottish group Franz Ferdinand. I heard a review on NPR‘s All Things Considered, was intrigued, received a rave recommendation from a friend, and bought it. Now I’m helping to spread the meme…. As for a description, imagine what would have happened if XTC hadn’t lost the recipe. There are definitely overtones of the Dukes of Stratosphear, the alter ego that XTC created to fool around with music from different genres and eras. But lyrically the FF songs are superior to XTC’s, and that’s saying something.

We have always been at war with Eastasia….

If you visit Amazon.com and look up “1984”, you’ll see a review which begins with the following words:
Airstrip One is part of the vast political entity Oceania, which is eternally at war with one of two other vast entities, Eurasia and Eastasia. At any moment, depending upon current alignments, all existing records show either that Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia and allied with Eastasia, or that it has always been at war with Eastasia and allied with Eurasia. Winston Smith knows this, because his work at the Ministry of Truth involves the constant “correction” of such records. “‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'”
I was reminded of this when I saw the photographs of Scott McNealy and Steve Ballmer, laughing and shaking hands last Friday. I’ve worked at Sun for nearly 19 years, and during that time Microsoft has always been the “Eastasia” with which our “Oceania” was at war. It was particularly awkward for me in the early years, because I worked on PC-NFS®, a software product that enabled DOS and Windows PCs to use Sun’s NFS [network file system] to share files. This obviously involved down’n’dirty systems programming hackery of Microsoft’s operating systems. I can still remember my first visit to meet the SunOS (Unix) group in California back in November, 1985, and their reaction when I told them that the NFS and UDP/IP software in PC-NFS was written as a 64KB device driver in x86 assembly language. And in the spirit of “using what you write”, I was always a PC user, attacting odd looks from colleagues with their Sun workstations. (I’m still an odd-ball, with my Mac PowerBook rather than a SunRay.)
Initially I think the competition with Microsoft was healthy for Sun – it certainly helped us punch above our weight in the marketing game. However, over the years the rivalry intensified and by the late 1990s it got w-a-a-y too heated for anyone’s good. It all culminated in various nasty lawsuits over Microsoft’s forking of Java and other monopolistic practices. My view was that the suits were thoroughly justified from a legal standpoint, but that it wasn’t clear that they were helping us in our primary rôle as a commercial enterprise. It probably distracted our customers, and I know that it distracted us. I’m sure that psychologists have a term (and a DSM IV category) for people who define themselves by what they are against rather than what they are for, by who they are not rather than who they are. Anyway, it became an institutionalized thing, much like the Red Sox and the Yankees, or Glasgow Celtics and Glasgow Rangers.
But now the Ministry of Truth has spoken. We have always been at war with Eurasia, and Eastasia is our ally. It’s going to take some getting used to…..

Me

Reading Terry Karney’s blog I encounter a series of whimsical Internet quizzes, which I proceed to take. For some reason it’s important for me to try to answer correctly…. Anyway, they reveal that I am a Grammar God, an Ideal Lover, that if I were a Greek god I would be Eros, and that if I were a weird Latin phrase I would be Furnulum pani nolo (“I don’t want a toaster.”)
All of this beats spring cleaning, of course. As I said on the ASML last night, spring cleaning involves:
(1) Remove and wash all curtains (or drapes – your choice).
(2) Replace storm windows/doors with screens. (Destroy at least 2 fingernails during this process.)
(3) Doing (1) and (2) on a sunny day reveals all the cobwebs and dirt that have been invisible or ignored for the last 5 months. Clean quickly in case someone notices.
(4) Open garage, remove cars, wash/sweep out all of the salt and dirt that have tracked in over the winter. Make elaborate plans for painting garage floor with epoxy paint. Abandon after you realize that you didn’t know how to prepare the surface last time, and why should it work this year?
(5) Drain and clean humidifiers, remove to basement. Notice window air conditioners, try to figure out excuses for deferring installation as long as possible.
(6) Skip the other plans in favour of a long walk through the Arboretum to look for the first buds of the year….

Cognitive dissonance

Press release from the White House:
Iraq Fact of the Day
Civic Pride in Iraq’s Capital
The CPA, responding to a Baghdad City Council request, is allocating $10 million to brighten the city’s public parks, squares and playgrounds. The funding will provide lighting in the capital’s outdoor public places, new murals, sculptures, and landscaping. Revitalization of Baghdad’s public areas shows civic pride and is another example of the Iraqis’ faith in their future.
Source: Coalition Provisional Authority, Baghdad

Deletions that aren't – M$ style

There’s an account here of a delightful little experiment in electronic dumpster-diving. An enterprising hacker crawled all public Micro$oft web sites looking for Office documents that contained interesting data – specifically, text that had been “deleted”. The results are predictably entertaining….