"into the woods"

It’s the intermission… I’m at the 5th Avenue Theatre, attending a sparkling performance of Sondheim’s “Into The Woods”. It’s been years since I last saw a musical, and I can’t imagine a better choice to break the drought. It’s simply wonderful.
Almost time for the second half. What if “happily ever after” isn’t the end…? 🙂
[Later]
That was a really wonderful performance. It’s a local production, not touring, and it’s only running for one more week so if you’re in the Seattle area you owe it to yourself to go. Seattlechannel.org has posted a nice video clip about the production.

The tip of the (wireless) iceberg

Some years ago there were stories of RFI mucking about with garage door openers. Now we have the “Satanic car key”. As we rely more and more on wireless replacements for mechanical systems, there will be lots of opportunities for “interesting” distributed systems failures…

Stranded motorists in Kent were forced to turn to Ofcom after a rogue car’s central locking system took possession of other vehicles in the same Gravesend car park. More than 12 cars at the Parrock Street car park in the comfortable yet earthy Medway town decided not to open or start on Tuesday, the Beeb reports. […] The regulator’s boffins said they eventually traced the problem to “a small family car [that] was intermittently sending out signals blocking other fobs in a 164ft (50m) radius”.

Bruce Schneier's "The War on the Unexpected"

Bruce Schneier has just posted an essay called The War on the Unexpected which captures the zeitgeist of paranoia to a T:

Watch how it happens. Someone sees something, so he says something. The person he says it to — a policeman, a security guard, a flight attendant — now faces a choice: ignore or escalate. Even though he may believe that it’s a false alarm, it’s not in his best interests to dismiss the threat. If he’s wrong, it’ll cost him his career. But if he escalates, he’ll be praised for “doing his job” and the cost will be borne by others. So he escalates. And the person he escalates to also escalates, in a series of CYA decisions. And before we’re done, innocent people have been arrested, airports have been evacuated, and hundreds of police hours have been wasted.

Exploding Marmite!

The Register reports that the House of Lords debated the ban on carrying liquids onto planes, and thereby demonstrated that British politicians are as stupid and scaremongering as their US counterparts.

At times, the debate seemed to verge on the whimsical.
“We should not complain too loudly,” said the Baron. “I always celebrate the fact that there is effective security at airports… A friend of mine had two jars of Marmite confiscated, which I thought was a bit tough at the time, but these are the things that we have to put up with.”
The only possible reading of this is that, now that the Baron has been briefed in by security experts, he no longer considers the Marmite seizure unjustified. The implications of this are literally breathtaking.
Yes, that’s right: the government have warning of a fiendish terrorist plot to destroy airliners using EXPLODING MARMITE. (Aiee!)

Where’s Neddy Seagoon when you need him for the voice-over?

Leopard: the complete review

Or at any rate, the closest thing to a a complete review that you’re going to find outside a $20 book. We’re talking about Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: the Ars Technica review, by John Siracusa:

These two views of Leopard, the interface and the internals, lead to two very different assessments. Somewhere in between lie the features themselves, judged not by the technology they’re based on or the interface provided for them, but by what they can actually do for the user.

In other words, it’s both comprehensive and balanced, covering everything from the apps and the UI to the developer frameworks and kernel features. ((Siracusa’s description of Dtrace verges on the orgasmic ecstatic.)) It’s a must-read for all Mac users as well as system software aficionados.

Flexcar merges with Zipcar

Flexcar and Zipcar have just announced that they’re merging. This is excellent news. It means that I’ll be able to rent vehicles as and when I need to in both Seattle and Boston (and San Francisco, come to that). Unfortunately I doubt that they’ll complete the integration of their systems by the time I next head east (in January). That would be a great Flexcar opportunity…

"Takeover"

Andrew Sullivan has posted a review of “Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency” by Charles Savage. It looks like an essential, if blood-pressure-raising, read.

One thing I’d forgotten, of course, is one central case in which torture did give us actionable intelligence:
“Al Qaeda continues to have a deep interest in acquiring weapons of mass destruction… I can trace the story of a sernior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to al Qaeda. Fortunately, this operative is now detained and he has told his story.”
The man who spoke those words was Colin Powell at the UN. The “operative”, we now know, was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libbi. He was waterboarded and given Bush-approved hypothermia treatment, i.e. frozen till he could take it no longer. It was only then that he told of al Qaeda’s links with Saddam’s WMDs. Guess what? Libbi subsequently retracted his confession. According to ABC News, the CIA subsequently found al-Libbi “had no knowledge of such training or weapons and fabricated the statements because he was terrified of further harsh treatment.” So I now realize that part of the reason I believed the WMD case for war against Saddam was because the Bush administration had been secretly torturing suspects and got false confessions. The biggest intelligence failure in recent US history – the WMD case in Iraq – was partly created by the torture policy.

Of course this will not convince those who respond reflexively to the term “waterboard” by comparing it to student hazing, or argue that it can’t be torture if it was used in SERE training. ((Sully cites the Chief of Training at SERE, who wrote: “SERE staff were required undergo the waterboard at its fullest. I was no exception. I have personally led, witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people. It has been reported that both the Army and Navy SERE school’s interrogation manuals were used to form the interrogation techniques used by the US army and the CIA for its terror suspects. What was not mentioned in most articles was that SERE was designed to show how an evil totalitarian, enemy would use torture at the slightest whim. If this is the case, then waterboarding is unquestionably being used as torture technique.“)) Such people are utterly beyond the reach of reason.