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On Tuesday night, we watched the Terminator 2 DVD, some sort of extended edition. After watching it, I was reluctant to see T3: I was afraid a poor sequel would mar the good feelings I had of the preceding film — the apotheosis of the 1980s manly-man-shooting-quips action movie genre — much as memory of Star Wars has been degraded by the miasma from the most recent two movies. I was especially reluctant after reading this review, which argues that the ending of T3 repudiates the philosophical underpinnings of its predecessor. But, my brother had tickets Saturday night, and we saw T3 in Bayside.

The sold-out audience was a bit sedate; I would have expected some clapping when Schwarzenegger’s name appeared, but there was no enthusiasm. Bad sign: hooting and cheering from a big crowd helps make a movie more fun. By the end of the evening, it was a fairly standard summer action movie with Terminator-like twists: car chases in Los Angeles with incidental stuff getting smashed along the way; slow motion shots as terminators emerge from smoke or fog; guns, lots of guns. T2 is perhaps one of the finest action movies ever made; its special effects, though more than decade-old, are amazingly effective. Most of all, T2 had a bright thread of humanity running through it. T3, while a pretty good action movie given the clunkers this year, will just get forgotten by the time the summer is over, or maybe before.

In T2, the thread of humanity makes the Terminator the best father John Connor ever had; it recovers Sarah Connor, who starts the film as robotic and single-minded a killing machine as the Terminator she has nightmares about, from the darkness; and it illuminates John Connor with the signs of emerging charisma that is supposed to make him a leader of men decades in the future. For the Connors, humanity comes from making moral choices, and hoping that these moral choices alter their future. And this hope for changing the future rubs off on the pre-programmed machine, so that the Terminator can make the self-sacrificing moral choice at the end to save the world. T2 is a complete story; it ends with paths wide open, and fates no longer constrained by the narrative.

In T3, this sense of moral choice changing the world is gone. Not just gone, but terminated with extreme prejudice. Pardon the spoilers, but in T3’s universe, choices have little consequence, and the future is fixed; we have a special-effects version of the old parable, “death in Baghdad” (A terrified merchant runs into a friend, and tells his friend that he’s just seen Death. He is frightened that Death is now stalking him, and tells his friend that he’s fleeing for Baghdad today; maybe Death won’t find him there. Shortly thereafter, his friend himself runs into Death, and demands that Death explains himself for frightening the merchant so badly. Death says that he himself was surprised to see the merchant in town, for he expected to meet him tonight in Baghdad.) In some sense, this is closer to T1’s world view, where time is looped, and the future is a precondition of the past. But it lacks T1’s mystery and excitement. In this sense, the aforementioned Slate review is a bit off: it’s only the underpinnings of T2 that are renounced. T3 more closely resembles T1’s Moebius strip time line.

Coincidentally, the Planet of the Apes series is on right now, speaking of movies that have come out on July 4th weekend that feature loops in time. T3 probably is more akin to the later movies of that series than to the classic first movie: just a summer movie to make some money, and nothing special except that it belongs to a strong franchise.

Update: I can’t believe I posted a serious review while Jake posts a
seriously non-review.

Robert Kaplan’s article in The Atlantic

I would say that a liberal power like the United States cannot spread its liberalism without military power as well. That the reason the Balkans are democratizing is not because everyone woke up one morning and said, “Let’s be democrats.” It’s because the United States proved dominant militarily in the Cold War and was willing to intervene. In the 1930s many of the intellectuals and university people in the Balkans were fascists, because the fascists were militarily and economically dominant at the time. It’s not enough to have the right ideas. You also have to have military and economic power behind it, or else your ideas cannot spread.

The Columbia Political Review has a subscription-free excerpt from a Salon interview with Paul Berman on what the Democrats have to do to beat Bush in 2004. Any strategy has to address two points: the Naderites have to be crushed politically and the Democrats have to work around Bush’s credibility on the war on terrorism.

The Naderites may draw off five to ten percent of the popular vote, which may be critical in swing states, where the main parties are evenly balanced. The problem is that it’s not clear how the Democrats can effectively stand up to them. Berman notes:

I interpret the Green Party as a movement of the middle and upper-middle class, as actually having a certain satisfaction with the way things are — which is to say, the reason you should vote for the Greens is because you want to feel the excitement of political engagement, the adventure of it, but you don’t really care what it’s going to mean for other people if the Republicans get elected. It’s the sexiness of sheer political fantasy. The advantage of the Green Party is that you can feel good, like you’re playing a role, but your own good feelings about yourself aren’t going to do anybody else one bit of good.

Berman’s suggestion is that the Democrats have to say to the Greens: you cannot sacrifice the interests of the majority of the country for your ideological whims. The problem is that the Greens may be somewhat deluded about, say, the difference between Democrats and Republicans, and may be working under some theory of “heightening the contradictions”, where the country, in the throes of social and economic crisis, will suddenly see the luminous halo around Nader and vote him into power. If the Greens are indeed thinking this way, it’s not clear if any reasoning will penetrate their ideological cocoon, though perhaps Bush, having “heightened the contradictions”, has made the less hardcore Greens realize that there are differences between the GOP and Democrats.

The second part of any Democratic strategy will have to address how Bush is fighting the war on terrorism. The public as a whole (along with me) believes the Administration has done a pretty good job in war fighting thus far. As noted elsewhere, who would have thought on the evening of September 11 that within two years that the Taliban would have been crushed, Saddam swept from power, al Qaeda scattered, and Iran teetering on the edge of revolt against the ayatollahs? And I for one believe that Iraqi liberalization will be the fulcrum on which the rest of the Middle East will be liberalized over the coming decades, and that this liberalization will be our only path to safety; the war was a necessary first step. The Administration’s record here can’t really be attacked without looking like partisan sour grapes and sniping:

To complain about the absence of WMDs at this point would be like having liberated Auschwitz during WWII only to grouse that there wasn’t any cylon-b in the concentration camp, just dead bodies.

The thing the Democrats will have to note, though, is that military victories aren’t nearly enough. What we need is the spread of liberal ideals throughout the Middle East. Berman argues:

Where Bush appears to be satisfied with military measures, the Democrats should be saying it’s not nearly enough: that much more effort should be put into Afghanistan and Iraq; that the U.S. government should be engaging in enormous programs to conduct a war of persuasion and ideas; that much greater resources should be committed to building up a political culture of liberal democracy and institutions in these places — which is ultimately the way to defeat the fanatical movements that present so much danger to us and the rest of the world.

Berman doesn’t say this, but the Democrats should also note that the Administrations “defense” strategy is weak. Insufficient funds are being spent on Homeland Defense. One thing is to connect GOP fiscal policies with the war on terrorism — these fiscal policies may be threatening American lives. The NY Times has an editorial on the recent arrest of the Ohio truckdriver plotting to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge (in case the the article is unavailable for free on the Times site, Roger L. Simon has a comment on it). Basically, GOP fiscal priorties — tax cuts regardless of any reasonable economic rational — undercuts civil defense and local police and emergency agencies, which will be the first in the line to face any domestic disaster. The so-far successful offenses in the war on terrorism may then be undermined by a lack of defense that lets slip through a catastrophic event. The example of Rand Beers may be an interesting one.

It should be noted that Bush has driven the Democratic party troops into a delirium, where the mouth can only repeat simple slogans that resonate only with the party core, the eyes have been blinded to their ineffectiveness, and the brain locked into the “Bush is evil” mantra. It’s not clear if the party can rid itself of this fever in time to contest 2004. But we really do have to contest the GOP next year: the most ideological Republicans are running domestic policy into the ground, and the offense-obsessed foreign policy appears to be neglecting the real fight, which is to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan. Hopefully, this fever will break, and we’ll see a debate that will influence American policy for the better.

I just purchased/built a new computer for my parents. The old Compaq was becoming more of a headache to maintain: it’s an old Win98 box that feels sluggish even for its specs. We recently reinstalled the OS from the Compaq recovery disks because of five years of bit rot; it’s still slow and prone to crashing. My realization at that time was that it’s not worth the effort to maintain this five-year-old computer. It’s worth the couple hundred dollars to buy a new one to replace it.

So, I ordered a Lindows computer made by Wintergreen Systems last week. It’s a pity the Linux install has to be removed because of the apps that my parents run (in particular, AOL dial-up for the time being, and MS Works). Linux would have made backup easier, since I would have taken the old Compaq harddrive as a secondary disk and done the occassional rsync on it, or, perhaps a straight mirror, depending on how the larger disk in the new computer gets sliced up.

This is actually the first more or less complete system I’ve ordered for personal use since i486 days, with my first Gateway. I’ve built all the subsequent boxes. Usually, building the boxes involves parts that don’t quite fit together: the jutting front USB connectors on the current computer is a prime example of this. I figured I should get a pre-built system for my parents because, while I can deal with hardware oddities on my own machine, I won’t be able to deal with it quite as well if the computer is in Bayside. This was the least expensive complete system I could find, outside of perhaps a Wal-Mart Lindows computer.

The box arrived earlier in the week, and I powered it up for the first time Friday evening. It starts up the moment I plug in the power cable — fans spin up, the disk drive makes noise — and suddenly the machine shuts down. There are no POST noises. I fiddle with the power button on the front. Every third or fourth press gets it to power up with the same, sudden shutdown. So I call Wintergreen, and they tell me that there’s been a number of similar complaints. Apparently a manufacturing problem with the power button. We test this by unplugging the power button from the motherboard and shorting out the pins on the front panel head. The machine boots up. The problem is the 5 cent button: it must be shorted out internally. I could return the computer, or I could try to fix or replace the power button myself.

So, on Saturday, I drag out this old case I had. I bought it to put the parts for my old computer inside, to get rid of the gigantic noisy tower case. The old computer had stopped working, though, so the case was never used. But I’m sure the power switch on it worked. It was, of course, a different design from the one on the Wintergreen case. What to do?

I wound up more or less building a computer from components on Saturday, taking out all the bits and pieces from the Wintergreen and putting them into the other case. It took about an hour, less time that building a machine from even more basic components because there was no need to fiddle with the CPU/fan/heatsink stack and all the irritation that involves. I did need to splice in the power LED wires from one case to the other: for some reason, the spare case had a 3-pin LED plug, but the motherboard had a 2-pin head; scissors and tape took care of this. But the whole building process was what I wanted to avoid earlier. I was just foiled by a 5-cent component.

Oh, while looking through the components for the Wintergreen system, I noticed that the hard drive was from ValueDisk. I find this a little frightening; in my closed universe of hard drive manufacturers, there’s the usual big names: Seagate, WD, IBM, etc. There’s some exotica: Fujitsu/IBM. But Value Disk is something I’ve never heard of before, and the name evokes an image of Chinese laborers pulling disk platters from the scrapheap of rejects at the Western Digital factory, putting them together and slapping on the Value Disk label. The Value Disk website doesn’t have an MTBF figure for the drives, though there’s a handy “warranty” link.

Brad DeLong, an economist for the Clinton Administration, has this article about how Clintonites thought about American grand strategy prior to 9/11. Granted, he’s not from State or Defense, but it’s an interesting perspective.

Basically, the Administration thought:

Let’s do whatever we can at all costs to avoid the emergence of a Weimar Russia, or a National Socialist China. Let’s do whatever we can to maximize the rate of economic growth in the developing world, for it was the Great Depression that gave Hitler his chance in Germany and the militarist-fascists their chance in Japan. Let’s hope that in fifty years the process of industrialization in the emerging great powers of the developing world–Russia, Brazil, China, and India–will be completed, and it will be as unthinkable that one of them will embark on a fascist-nationalist campaign of conquest against its neighbors as a death struggle between France and Italy, or America and Canada, is unthinkable today. Let’s push for as much democratization as possible as fast as possible, not because democracies are never aggressive–consider France on the eve of World War I–but because your odds that societal goals will be peaceful are greater if they well up from the people than if they are imposed by a dictator.

So, the United States embarked on a campaign to increase world peace through trade, technology and law. Perhaps naive, but, as DeLong notes, the alternative of keeping, say, the Chinese as poor as possible would only result in “an aggressive, expansionist China with National Socialist characteristics.” And this strategy has been successful. A Weimar Russia would have been far worse than Al Qaeda.

The fundamental flaw of this strategy was that everyone forgot about religion, “forgot about the dangerously explosive interaction between (i) rapidly-rising literacy rates found in an urban middle class, and (ii) a religion based on a Holy Book that few in previous generations could read.” The wars of the Reformation are the analogy with Islam possibly going through its own Reformation. And the Reformation took four generations to burn out, before people “learned that reading ones private copy of the Holy Book did not make one the vessel of the will of God, and that waging Holy War was not a way to save the souls of others, but a way to lose ones own.”

So, what are we to do, now that we’re confronted with these cults of death? DeLong fundamentally proposes what the Clinton Administration had been doing, but more so: instead of writing simple trade treaties, we must engage in enfrancishing the disenfranchised of the world, so that more people will have a stake in this world.

When governments cannot provide the very basics–law and order, education, hospitals, famine relief, the promise of a job, the promise of a standard of living better than ones parents saw–false prophets who promise a Puritan paradise and the imminent arrival of the reign of God have an easy time finding followers for their message. Nation-building cannot be something we “don’t do.” Nation-building and economy-building must be something that we “do do”–at the very heart of the long-run enterprise.

The flaw, I think, is still there. Nation building should be a fundamental part of our grand strategy — Iraq should be built as an example of liberal ideals, though it may take decades — but the lure of the material world may not attract the fanatic from his apocalyptic goals. As has been observed many times, the bulk of the 9/11 hijackers were drawn from the middle class, from Saudi Arabia, not Somalia. Material enfranchisement into the stable world may not help reduce the number of possible foot soldiers who may be recruited into the cults of death, and the leaders of the cults won’t be seduced by the material. The material is in fact one of the things they’re rebelling against.

I’m reminded of this seminar exercise we had in one of the core political theory classes at SIPA a lifetime ago. I don’t recall what the theory topic was, but the exercise was to follow through on the Oslo Accords, since they had recently been signed. The seminar divided into Israeli, Palestinian and American groups; we were to negotiate a final settlement, which we did within half an hour and without friction. Clearly, this was wrong, but our secular liberalism, finely honed by our journey to graduate school, couldn’t quite understand why. We clearly couldn’t incorporate the totality of religious death cults into our world view, at least for this seminar exercise, at least until we had to confront it after 9/11.

Slate has an article on Wal-Mart that speculates whether Wal-Mart should be considered representative of the US economy, much as GM was thought to be in the 1950s.

Wal-Mart is scary big: it had almost $250bn in sales last year, an amount equal to nearly 2.5% of US GDP (no need to compare this figure to some collection of sub-Saharan countries and noting how large it is; why not compare it to, say, Hong Kong, which has a GDP of $180bn at PPP). It has 1.38 million employees, making the company the world’s largest private employer. Wal-Mart is the largest category seller of DVDs, groceries, toys, sporting goods, clothing, and so on. It has magnificently leveraged technology into retail services and logistics; through competitive pressure on other retailers, Wal-Mart’s best practices may account for a quarter of US productivity growth in the late 1990s.

The article doesn’t note this, but the logistical best practices of private companies such as Wal-Mart and FedEx have been adopted by the US military. Hey, if, in the 1950s, what’s good for GM is good for the US and vice-versa, certainly American commercial practices in the 21st Century have enhanced American power projection, and perhaps vice-versa.

The problems with using Wal-Mart’s sales figures as an index of overall economic health is that Wal-Mart isn’t that representative. While it has expanded and diversified greatly from its rural base since the early 1990s, the company still is concentrated in the great middle of America, with less representation on the affluent coasts. In terms of goods sold, Wal-Mart doesn’t sell cars, which can account for 10-20% of retail sales. And the Slate article focuses on retail sales; services are not included, naturally.

The article concludes with noting that Wal-Mart’s sales figures may best be used as a negative indicator: if its sales are declining, what’s happening to the rest of consumer spending?

Another interesting thing to think about (interesting at least to me) is how services productivity growth — retail productivity growth apparently tripling in the 1990s implicitly because of Wal-Mart — was historically used in Baumol’s Paradox: with a two-sector model, one sector accruing productivity gains (manufacturing) and the other not (services), you get relative price increases in the “services” sector. Maybe it’s not that interesting a thing to think about: there’s nothing conceptually wrong with retail productivity being affected by technological change. Look at Amazon.com, after all.

Just a few notes on the distribution of knowledge and information in this day and age, inspired by a couple of articles (Slate and Instapundit) I read recently.

The cliche is that there is now information swimming around libraries and databases than at any time in history. There is, however, more information being lost to the void than at any time in history. Quite possibly, hundreds years from now, the turn of the millennium may be regarded as a dark age of information and records, since very little documentation may survive till then.

Some examples: Slate has an article on the ephemerality of email, and how it will hurt historical research. There are copious documents detailing the decision making processes of World War 2, Vietnam, and so on. There are very few pertaining to the first Gulf War, and perhaps, in a few years, even fewer pertaining to the second Gulf War. Why? The transition from paper to email, and carelessness in saving the email. There’s a lot more email than paper, most of which consists of off-the-cuff thoughts on policy. The sender and recipient of the email may not think much of this correspondence, and won’t take much effort to save it. A historian trying to reconstruct Wolfowitz’s thought process in January 2003, however, may care about every little piece of email that gets sent to, say, Rumsfeld. It’s not clear if these emails will be saved. Similarly, there are no typewritten policy briefs anymore that get typed up by the typing pool (carcon copies and all) and sent out to various departments for comments. Instead, policy briefs are present in PowerPoint, usually with few archive copies. On a similar note and in particular example, one of the keys to modern military theory, the OODA loop proposed by John Boyd, was never put down on paper or into a book, like Clausewitz or Sun Tzu (even though literacy and printing have expanding dramatically), but exists only as a series of presentations remembered by audience.

This applies not only to newly generated knowledge and information. The transition from paper to electronic media may be painful, and may entail the loss of knowledge. In particular, we have Nicholson Baker’s argument about card catalogs being replaced by computerized catalogs. This may seem to be an unalloyed good: books can be looked up more quickly and efficiently. There is, however, information being lost: the penned notes of generations of librarians. There was also the story of a Norweigan museum, where the director died, and took with him the one password to his files on the archives. This sort of knowledge might be maintained, but it requires concentrated effort and resources that no one seems to want to devote to posterity.

And we won’t get into the issue of information being saved onto obsolete formats and decaying media.

On the optimistic, positive side, we have Glenn Reynolds article in Tech Central Station on “horizontal knowledge” and the advent of search engines, and how this would have defied predictions ten years ago. There are a few implications to something like Google: information may become very distributed, and therefore more difficult to lose. Information that’s widely distributed can now be searched. Information may be better preserved because a company now has financial incentive to maintain a vast library of general information and trivia (There was an old joke about doing backups to Google: encode your data, and post them to Usenet in a retrievable fashion. Google will go through the trouble of making backups of your stuff). The problem with this is that most of the contributors of this horizontal knowledge are hobbyists, not professionals, and what gets posted may not be the interesting details. Or it could be plainly wrong.

Widely disseminated information may also be unexpectedly persistent, even though it’s not immediately apparent that this information has been widely distributed. Enron and Arthur Anderson learned this leason: email may be deleted from your installation Outlook, but you have to delete it on the server, the server’s backup tapes, the recipients of the email’s Outlook, the recipient’s server, etc. And sufficiently persistent investigators will unearth these documents. Similarly, embarrassing photos posted on the Net may persist forever. This perhaps says more about distributed storage than anything else. If the email were sensitive, which I’m sure government email may be, then it may be limited to a small circle of recipients, and more likely to be inadvertently lost.

So, what do we do about the last case, where email may not be widely distributed, and only looked at decades later by historians? Are there technological solutions? For email, for organizations where archives are important, all email can be archived off at the SMTP server. This is trivial to do, but there’s a large cost in maintaining these archives, that usually isn’t obvious from the start. These archives will also have to be available in some readable format for future generations. Beyond that, I’m not sure.

While reading a review for 2 Fast 2 Furious, I came across this sentence:

And in the grand tradition of politically correct summer “event” movies, the two actors (one plays an ex-cop, the other an ex-con) are accessorized with an Asian driver, a Latino driver, and so on, as well as the requisite rapper, Ludacris.

And I thought, “Ludacris? That’s not how you spell the word. How do you spell the word?” Then it dawned on me that I had been using Google for light spell checking chores: if you type in a non-existent word into Google, the search engine will helpfully suggest alternative words to use, if the number of hits is low compared to the alternatives. I’m not sure how the metric works, but it’s very nice; I’m not the best speller. Doing this sort of light spell checking is even easier, since I have a Google toolbar installed on the browser.

“Ludacris” and any other hip misspellings defeats this tactic completely. Type in “ludacris” and you get gazillion hits for the rapper, his work and his fans. There’s no suggested alternative, since the found set is sufficiently large. Entertainingly, the first hit is presumably Ludacris’s home page, Word Of Mouf, but I know how to spell “mouth”.

Note that I’m not decrying playful misspellings: English spelling has been stuck in place since the days of Shakespeare, even though the spoken language has changed. And recognized, if not accepted, spelling may change even more quickly than in past centuries after the advent of electronic media and rapidly shifting fashions. I’m just noting that this minor trick with a search engine isn’t going to work anymore.

So, for now on, I’m going to have to go to a proper dictionary to find out how to spell ludicrous and other words.

Some quick notes on installing a PPP dial-in server on a RH7.3 box. This is based on the older instructions found in an old Linux Gazette article:

Make sure the following RPMs are installed:

Modify /etc/mgetty+sendfax files:

# For US Robotics Courier 56K with speaker off
port ttyS0
init-chat “” ATZ OK AT&F1M0E1Q0S0=0 OK
answer-chat “” ATA CONNECT \c \r

Modify /etc/inittab:
7:2345:respawn:/sbin/mgetty -x 3 ttyS0

Run “init q” after the modem is connected and powered (to avoid error messages).

Put the following in /etc/ppp/options:

-detach
crtscts
netmask 255.255.255.0
asyncmap 0
modem
proxyarp

Create a /etc/ppp/ppplogin file:

#!/bin/sh
mesg n
stty -echo
/usr/sbin/pppd silent auth -chap +pap login

The “+pap login” makes CHAP use /etc/passwd. Make the file executeable.

Make a file /etc/ppp/options.ttyS0 and put “myhost:ppp0” in it. myhost is the name of the dial-in server. ppp0 is the name of the process.

In /etc/ppp/pap-secrets, put in:

* * “” 10.0.0.4

This is the assigned IP of the dial-in client.

Setuid root on /usr/sbin/pppd.

In /etc/hosts, put the 10.0.0.4 entry in there.

Edit the firewall to allow 10.0.0.4 to get to the net.

That should be it. Well, of course, one needs a working modem at this point. Which I don’t have, because the old USR Courier I bought off of EBay came some cheap generic power adapter. I took a look at the adapter for the Courier at work, and it’s 20V, 750mA. The cheap adapter doesn’t do that. Nor do the ones at Radio Shack. I did find a source or two for these adapters, though, so I’ll probably order one shortly. In the meantime, I’ll see if I can take home the one at work, since, well, it’s my modem, which I brought to work a while ago to deal with a dial-out issue.

I should be able to give this a whirl over the weekend.

Raffi Krikorian is writing a book on Tivo hacks, to be published by ORA later this summer.

Personally, I have to get around to installing a TurboNet card in my Tivo, so I get it off the phone line as well as schedule recordings when I’m not in my apartment with TivoWeb.

One note about Raffi’s blog is that it’s running blosxom, and I can’t see the categories or go very far back in his archives. Is this a blosxom issue?