US messes up in middle east -- again !

Mahmoud Abbas's government was brought around by the US and Israel. It is "democratic". Hamas was elected in a landslide victory when Fatah was in power. It is "undemocratic". US, Europe and Israel do not support  undemocratic governments. So they withdrew or blocked all sources of funding for the PLA.



Obviously, US being on the side of democracy, supplied arms and training to Fatah militant Mohhamed Dahlan in a clandestine manner. Hamas was supposed to sit idly by and watch. In stead, they dared to destroy Dahlan's organization and take control of the area that they were elected to govern. So, with US backing, Abbas sacked the Hamas government (never mind that he has no power on the ground). Immediately, the pro-democratic Western forces came to Abbas's aid with promises of lots of money. This is supposed to turn a hostile Palestinian population pro-US and pro-Israel.

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From dual-boot to vmware with minimal changes

I had set up my Dell D620 for dual boot in Linux and Windows Vista. What I really want is to be able to instantly switch between the two depending on needs. So VMWare is the way to go. I gave up my initial idea of running Vista inside VMWare on Ubuntu. Microsoft didn't give me the permission. So I set it up the other way round -- Vista host and Ubuntu guest.



I didn't want to set up a new hard disk for Ubuntu. So I downloaded VMware server and VMware player. Installed the first, created a virtual machine using my existing hard disk as the VMware hard disk. Then I uninstalled VMware server and installed VMware player. The server software is older. Networking and sound didn't work. I edited the .vmx file ( C:\Virtual Machines\Ubuntu\Ubuntu.vmx ) to enable sound



sound.enable = "TRUE"



VMware player took off from where VMware server left off. And I am posting this from Ubuntu inside VMware.

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Setting up bluetooth headset under Linux

I figured out how to use my new Jabra BT-150 headset with Linux. Here's the deal.

• Install bluetooth-alsa and libsbc packages (feisty backports not there yet)
  
  
• Put the headset in pairing mode
• bdaddr=$(hcitool scan | awk '/BT150/ {print $1}')
  
  
• sudo hcitool info $bdaddr
• cat /usr/share/doc/bluetooth-alsa/sample.asoundrc >> ~/.asoundrc
• Change the default BDADDR in .asoundrc
  
  
• headsetd

That's it. Test using 'mplayer -ao alsa:device=headset'. Now I need to find out how to dynamically switch output based on whether bluetooth headset is there or not.

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US Supreme Court raises bar for obviousness in patents

Until now, the obviousness test was defined as non-obvious "to a person having ordinary skills". This allowed for rather low standards of obviousness and there are a lot of patents that are simply blocking innovation. The latest decision makes mere combination of existing technologies fail the test.



May be one day we will see the length of exclusivity granted under a patent depend on the industry it is in. A patent about cars is useful for 20 years. A patent on software (which shouldn't be patentable anyways) is not.

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Somalia in tatters again

Mogadishu is once again the most dangerous place to live in the world, but we have displaced the Islamic government. In the 15 years that Somalia had no government (as opposed to a dysfunctional one), no one bothered about it. When the Islamic courts came in, the governments of the world gave Ethiopia tacit support in its fight against them.



The EU has appealed to the Somali President to intervene! Wow, the same president that had no real power until Ethiopia showed up to help it.



http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=71805

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Matrubhoomi

Watched this movie called Matrubhoomi. The acting is great (few Hindi movies can boast of that), and good direction.



The movie has a really tragic story, which is sadly much closer to reality than I would like. It is about a young girl who is "married" to  a five brothers (there were some press reports similar to this) and her survival through regular rape and torture.  Horrors like this are still going on in this world and most of us turn a blind eye. How do we get out of these nightmares?

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Could Naboj save scientific publication?

Anyone who has tried to read a scientific journal knows how complicated getting access to them is. If you don't live in the US or Europe, you have to working at a pretty wealthy organization to be able to access the latest research. It is mostly because of the established publishing clique that the inefficient practice still abounds. I would love to see the day that all scientific articles are published to be freely accessible by all citizens of the world. Science advances not by restricting information but by making it available to everyone. Open systems would also allow automated tools for information harvesting (did I make that term up?).

The physics and math people had understood this long back. So they set up http://arxiv.org . arXiv is a great resource with all the latest research available for free and on time. But it has the drawback that the articles haven't been refereed. Now there is a new open reviewing system -- Naboj. Naboj allows anyone to review the papers on arXiv. It will be interesting to see how well this process works. I hope someday every technical publication will be similarly available.

IEEE needs to reform

From there Mission page:

Vision



To advance global prosperity by fostering technological innovation, enabling members' careers and promoting community worldwide.



Mission



The IEEE promotes the engineering process of creating, developing, integrating, sharing, and applying knowledge about electro and information technologies and sciences for the benefit of humanity and the profession.

Let's check that with reality:

1. They require the copyright for papers to be transferred to them and preprints to be taken down once the article is published. Of course, their journal subscriptions are so cheap that most people in the world can't afford them. Section 7 of their copyright policy allows use of public domain articles. But see http://cr.yp.to/writing/ieee.html for contrary actual practice.
2. They don't disclose how much they spend on lobbying efforts. In the latest financial report, I saw $60m for membership and public services. I am assuming public services includes lobbying.
   
   
3. IEEE opposes H1B visa program. They also oppose "off-shoring". The idea of being able to protect domestic wages by simply restricting others from coming in is bogus. People need to wake-up and realize that national economies are slowly giving way to international economies. Protectionism is also another name for inefficiency. Markets may not be entirely efficient, but the increasing possibility of separating the workers from the market means, protectionism is only going to hurt the US economy. The US is still a pretty good place to do business in spite of higher wages because of lower taxes, consistently enforced laws and highly skilled worker pool. Try protectionism and that's going end pretty soon.
   
   
4. They support software patents.
   
   
5. They support tax credits for a whole array of things. Tax system has been overused over the years as an instrument of policy instead of a revenue collection system. No need to burden the system with credits for things that companies want to do anyway. The trouble with the R&D scenario today is not incentives, but disincentives of the quarterly reporting phenomenon.
   
   

To be fair, they have some decent positions too:

1. They support reverse engineering.
2. They have come out somewhat in support fair-use limitations on DMCA, though I think their stance is not strong enough.

I will post again if I find more information.

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Thou and You

Once upon a time, you used to be the plural form of thou. Then the language changed and you became the formal way of addressing a superior. For some reason, thou stopped being used. The only place it shows up is in the King James Bible and some ancient text that is still read (Chaucer, Shakespeare, etc). These days, because of association with the Bible, thou has come to take on connotations of respect, while you is the egalitarian second person pronoun. Interesting how they flipped positions.

Economics and Political Weekly

The "Economics and Political Weekly" is a pretty erudite publication that is reportedly one of the more influential ones that affect policy formation in India. I read their analysis of the budget for 2007-2008. Have to admit, it reads like a peer reviewed paper, but is on topics that actually are of interest to normal people.

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IMF in action

Excerpt:

In countries such as Niger, Mali and Chad, which hug the southern fringes of the Sahara, there is always a shortfall of food at this time of year, between one harvest and the next. Some children will always die in this lean season. The same used to happen in Britain, in the depths of midwinter; hence the need for a December celebration to lift everyone's spirits. This year, unusually, the shortfall in Niger has been devastating. The reason, analysts say, is not locusts or drought, which only dented last year's harvest by about 11%. According to the Famine Early Warning System Network, a Washington-based group that tracks such crises, a major factor in Niger's shortfall was the export of food to wealthier West African countries, driving prices in the market out of the reach of the poorest.

The Niger government offered food at subsidised prices, below market rates, but even this was too much for the very poor. The medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres blames Niger's pursuit of free market policies for escalating the crisis. The government refused to distribute free food in the worst-affected regions because they feared it would disrupt the markets, the charity says. The comparison with Mali is instructive. Mali, which neighbours Niger, was also hit by locusts and drought after last year's harvest. But the Mali government instantly handed out around 10,000 tonnes of millet, the staple crop, for free to the hardest hit. It has since organised the free distribution of a further 11,000 tonnes of millet.

Don't blame the locusts -- The Guardian

BA staff strike again

BA's decision to cancel its 500 flights scheduled for today has left at least 70,000 passengers stranded. The stoppage - although not a dispute of the airline's own making - threatens to become another public relations disaster and a costly setback.

"This is the third straight August that BA employees have taken industrial action. This is an annual event for BA."

Striking BA staff told to resume work -- The Guardian

Famine in Niger

One of the main results of the attempted use of private enterprise to tackle malnutrition was to push up drastically the price of staple foods. The policies were not President Tandja's own. The International Monetary Fund has pressed for structural changes to the economy, including the introduction of 19 per cent VAT on basic foodstuffs and the scrapping of emergency grain reserves. As a result the price of basic food rose by between 75 and 89 per cent in five years.

President Tandja: 'The people of Niger look well fed, as you can see' -- The Independent