For all the talk of rampaging political correctness and liberal media bias, it looks like the network news is dominated by white Republican men. Let’s quote FAIR’s press release directly: A study of ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News in the year 2001 shows that 92 percent of all U.S. sources interviewed were white, 85 percent were male and, where party affiliation was identifiable, 75 percent were Republican. ...
I’m back from my trip. We took four flights over the weekend (two trips of two legs each), and I was randomly searched once and my wife was randomly searched twice. That sucked. Recently I’ve been made aware of the controversy surrounding amalgam fillings, which are made primarily of mercury. I had all my metal fillings removed by my dentist at his suggestion, but not because of mercury risk. They were small, old, and needed to be replaced anyway and my dentist suggested using composite as a replacement. Any considerations of mercury poisoning aside, composite fillings are preferable because metal fillings expand and contract with temperature changes and will eventually crack your teeth and cause you major dental problems down the road. ...
I’m going to be out of town until June 3, there probabably won’t be any updates until Tuesday. In the meantime, enjoy the World Cup. Another thing that’s not changing in the ongoing conflict in the Middle East is that new settlements keep going up. Ariel Sharon demands that the Palestinians alter their behavior with no guarantee of anything in return, and yet Israel refuses to change its behavior. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were some sort of good faith gesture on either side at this point? ...
Today the Washington Post has a disturbing update from the war on terror. As many people already figured, many al Qaeda members have set up shop in Pakistan, and are now working with existing Pakistani militant groups. The article reports that al Qaeda members have been involved in every major anti-Western attack this year in Pakistan. FBI director Robert Mueller admitted yesterday that if the FBI had put all the available clues together, it’s possible that the attacks on 9/11 could possibly have been thwarted. I think that’s an accurate statement, and I think it’s important for the government to acknowledge that fact at all levels, because it says something about what we can do in the future to stop more attacks. It’s important to gather as much information as possible, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that the fundamental problem was not information gathering, nor was it analysis, rather it was a failure of communication between field offices and the headquarters. It seems that every week more and more field reports speculating that Middle Eastern students at flight schools might be terrorists are unearthed. The question is, why wasn’t anyone consolidating all of these reports and assigning people to follow up? ...
So I was all set to write about this decision by the Supreme Court, which once again shows just how far afield the current court is on constitutional issues. The details of the case are uninteresting, it’s only worth noting because it shows the lengths that “Justices” Scalia, Rehnquist, and Thomas are willing to go to torture the poor old Constitution. Then I heard on the radio about this decision (in Festo v. SMC), which deals with patents. To oversimplify, there’s a rule that says that you can’t avoid violating a patent by making trivial changes to the patented invention. An appeals court ruled that this rule did not apply to patents that had been amended during the application process. Because most patents are amended during the application process, this decision basically eliminated the “doctrine of equivalents” for the majority of the patents that are currently in force. I’m honestly not sure how the ruling will affect the intellectual property landscape, but it bears watching. ...
A test of the Visionics face recognition system in Palm Beach International Airport has been a failure. Not only did the system fail to flag the people it was supposed to, but it also generated a bunch of false positives. This outcome was totally predictable, and in fact, was predicted by Bruce Schneier last September. I quote: Suppose this magically effective face-recognition software is 99.99 percent accurate. That is, if someone is a terrorist, there is a 99.99 percent chance that the software indicates “terrorist,” and if someone is not a terrorist, there is a 99.99 percent chance that the software indicates “non-terrorist.” Assume that one in ten million flyers, on average, is a terrorist. Is the software any good? ...
Bad Thomas Friedman, Bad! It looks like Thomas Friedman is [grousing](<a href=) about the Web again. I greatly respect Friedman’s writing on topics concerning foreign policy and the Middle East, but a tech journalist he is not. He starts his column this week by noting that several of the highjackers on 9/11 made their travel arrangements online. Are we to assume that they would have been unsuccessful in making their arrangements had they made their arrangements by phoning the airline or a travel agent? Fortunately, he drops that point right there and digs into the meat of the issue, which is that many technologies (specifically, in this case, Internet technologies) can be used for both good and evil. ...
Obviously Pakistan has to deal with a growing crisis with India, but there are plenty of domestic problems there as well. FEER has an article on Pervez Musharraf’s lack of public support since the fake election that was held at the end of April. Apparently the referendum held to elect Musharraf president for life has united all of the opposing political groups in Pakistan, Musharraf’s tough talk about dealing with Islamic militants seems to have been a sham, and the Pashtun tribes in western Pakistan are up in arms. Even if the conflict with India simmers down, the future isn’t looking too bright for Pakistan. ...
There are reports today that India might grant Pakistan a two month grace period to dismantle the Kashmiri terrorist groups it normally supports, which things may once again be moving away from the brink. The tough talk on both sides continues, but it appears some negotiation is going on behind the scenes. Business 2.0 finally comes around to what I’ve been saying here for years, which is that Amazon is successful because of their great software. The article points out how well Amazon has done providing an e-commerce platform for other companies like Target, Toys R Us, and Borders. Those companies didn’t sign up with Amazon because they wanted to leverage Amazon’s brand, it’s because they wanted to use Amazon’s software and expertise. Check out Amazon’s listing of software development job openings, it’s pretty obvious that Amazon is a software company masquerading as a retailer. ...
The current line from the pro-Bush camp seems to be that columnists and commentators who are criticizing the President’s entourage for the deluge of warnings about terrorism over the past week are just trying to set him up so that they can slam him when the next terrorist attack occurs. Maybe that is the motive of some of the President’s critics, but I think it’s reasonable to reject warnings that are made simply for the purpose of providing some sort of plausible political cover. ...