Month: February 2003

Winn Schwartau has an article on how “Microsoft Monopoly Threatens U.S. Security”:
\\It owns 95 percent of the Internet browser market (which includes
e-mail software) and more than 90 percent of the operating system and
office suite market. Also, 28 percent of Web servers on the Internet
are run by Microsoft software. See the problem?…
Now nearly all the world’s locks to the repositories of the Information
Age are made by the same company. Isn’t that the height of criminal
stupidity? Every time a weaknesses or vulnerability to a Microsoft
product is discovered, the details are instantly broadcast around the
globe, surely to be exploited by the nethermongers of the ‘Net.
The world’s economic engines run on Microsoft products waiting for the
next “It’s Always Something” to strike. The foundation of American
defense is Microsoft. Its products, which are used throughout the
federal government, including the Department of Defense, similarly
await the next debilitating cyberattack. Our national critical
infrastructures, including transportation, power, communication and
first-response emergency services, also sit in dire need of a workable
balance between security, privacy and efficiency. Whether it’s harmless
joyriding hackers gung-ho to help their country or terrorists targeting
an electronic Pearl Harbor, the results are the same.\\

Jim Henley’s been discussing how the Bloomberg Administration has been working against people trying to hold a protest rally this weekend.
He quotes an email from me stating “One note you may not be aware of:
NYC has been at Orange ever since the system was inaugurated, and has
never gone off it.” (a status that Jimmy Breslin also noted in his own article on the case) and goes on to state:
\\It would seem to mean that:
a) the City disapproved the UFPJ march under Code Orange;
b) the City approved the St. Paddy’s Day march under Code Orange.
That looks like game and set already if not game, set and match.\\
Jim understates the case. By my reckoning, match point is:
c) the City under Code Orange approved and previously allowed:
1. the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade (2001 & 2002)
2. the Times Square New Year’s Eve celebrations (2001 & 2002)
All four of thouse events had hundreds of thousands of attendees, plus
nationwide TV coverage. Perfect things for terrorists to hit, no?
The paranoid mind might think that this was Bloomberg’s payback to Bush for freeing up 9/11 recovery funds.

It will be if Patriot Act II: The Search For More Power becomes law:

Section 501, Expatriation of Terrorists: This provision, the
drafters say, would establish that an American citizen could be
expatriated if, with the intent to relinquish his nationality, he
becomes a member of, or provides material support to, a group that the
United Stated has designated as a terrorist organization. But
whereas a citizen formerly had to state his intent to relinquish his
citizenship, the new law affirms that his intent can be inferred from
conduct. Thus, engaging in the lawful activities of a group designated
as a terrorist organization by the Attorney General could be
presumptive grounds for expatriation.

Anybody want to place bets that the ACLU will considered a group that supports terrorists? Anybody want to join up anyway?

Seems there’s a movement
to try and get David Clennon fired from “The Agency” for going on Sean
Hannity’s radio show, criticizing Bush, and likening the current US
“moral climate” to Nazi Germany under Hitler.
The irony, of course, is that there’s a lot of yo-yos out there who are
try to get an actor fired from playing a CIA employee, but who are
curiously silent on wondering why no one has been fired from the real
CIA for missing 9/11. (by way of Tom Tomorrow.)

(Normally, I’d just provide a direct link, but the Globe And Mail
has one of the most link unfriendly sites I’ve seen, so I’m just going
to reprint it. If Spider has a problem with me widely disseminating
this one, he can have Jeanne beat me up in two months at Lunacon.)

Comet of grief and hope

Saturday’s terrible news reminded me and my wife of her
near-rendezvous with the Challenger — and why we believe that space
voyaging must go on
By Spider Robinson – Monday, February 3, 2003 Print Edition, Page A15
I was awake when it happened. I write all night, and retired at a
typical 7 a.m. All seven of them were dead by then, ashes scattered
across east Texas. But who listens to news as they go to bed?
When I finally woke, I knew something was terribly wrong the moment I
saw my wife’s face. “It’s not family or friends,” Jeanne said quickly.
“But it’s bad.” And she told me, and then we held each other, hard.
It has a special meaning for us: She was once supposed to ride one of
those suckers.
In the late 1970s and early 80s, NASA had a Civilian in Space Program.
The idea was that fading public interest in space travel might improve
if taxpayers ever got to see somebody other than jocks and scientists
go up. If they heard a poet or composer sing to them of the stunning
majesty of space, or saw a trained dancer in free fall, or even just an
ordinary person gaping out a porthole at the naked stars, then perhaps
more of them might finally Get It. They would realize that going to
space is going to be like leaving the womb for our species, will make
it at least that much more beautiful and happy and productive and wise.
Jeanne and I won the 1977 Hugo and Nebula Awards for Stardance,a
novella we co-wrote about the first zero-gravity dancers. She’s a
modern dancer and choreographer, and was then the founder/artistic
director of Halifax’s Nova Dance Theatre.
At the 1980 World Science Fiction Convention, in the Boston Sheraton’s
Grand Ballroom, she premiered a dance called Higher Ground,about the
interior mental and spiritual evolution she had undergone in the course
of inventing zero-gee dance for our story. It depicted space travel as
the natural end result of the first monkey that ever stood upright, as
a dancer’s highest leap: the one from which, as they used to say of
Nijinski, you don’t come down again until you feel like it. The dance
incorporated some zero-gee special effects by technomedia wizard Bob
Atkinson toward the end, so that Jeanne seemed to actually go
weightless on stage, while a film backdrop put the starry universe
behind her.
Her performance elicited an eight-minute standing ovation. Backstage,
Ben Bova, then editor of Omni and well-connected at NASA, asked her if
she would be interested in dancing in zero gee for real. Jeanne became
a Civilian in Space candidate… along with singer John Denver and a
number of others.
Then they sent up the first one, great-hearted teacher Christa
McAuliffe, on the Challenger.
When that O-ring seal in the right booster rocket let go, seven
remarkable lives ended, and so did the Civilian in Space Program for
our lifetimes. It was very nearly the end of the entire U.S. space
effort.
Our phone rang off the hook that day, and for days thereafter.
Reporters all around the globe had found Jeanne’s name in the list of
finalists for a shuttle seat. That could have been you, each one
pointed out, in case she’d missed it. Now what do you think of all this
rocket nonsense, Ms. Robinson?
Jeanne spent days saying, over and over, “I’d take the next flight.”
When they expressed disbelief — and they all did, politely or
otherwise — she cited figures for number of fatalities per billion
passenger miles, proving that space travel is the safest form of
transportation ever devised, hundreds of times safer than riding a
tricycle in a living room. Not one journalist quoted that part.
Many will spin this new disaster to support their political agenda.
Within minutes of the shuttle’s destruction, a CBC newstwit was asking
my colleague, novelist Rob Sawyer, on the air if he didn’t agree that
the tragedy was caused by American arrogance in the Middle East? He was
so stunned by the question he answered it.
Back when Richard Nixon chatted with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin
across a quarter of a million miles, he was cutting NASA’s budget with
his other hand. Nobody since has ever raised it. After the Challenger
tragedy, NASA was ordered to become safer, but given no more money to
do it with. Remarkably, they succeeded way beyond any reasonable hope
— about 80 missions have flown safely since Challenger. A space
station is well begun, and until now not one construction worker had
had a fatal accident.
Ask any engineer: you can’t throw a two-lane bridge over a 50-cent
river without planning for at least a few deaths. There are always
accidents when something big is built. The tunnels from Manhattan
Island each had a sandhog casualty rate comparable with combat in a
holy war… and all those projects accomplished was to get you to
Brooklyn, or worse, New Jersey. The space station may one day get us to
the stars.
There are only three buses left in North America that go to that stop,
now. Columbia was the oldest. There are way fewer spare parts around
than there used to be, and fewer technicians trained in their
installation. Just to stand still, to maintain its present bare-bones
agenda, NASA is going to need a huge whack of money. Right away — just
as America is preparing to spend every spare dollar building the kind
of rockets that are supposed to explode and kill people, and to aim
them down instead of up.
Columbia needs replacing, today. It needed replacing last week. We need
to put people on Mars, and in orbit, and keep them there. As the world
simmers and stews in its own madness, the one thing we cannot afford to
cut is our only means to rise above it.
Robert Heinlein said this planet is too fragile a basket for humanity
to keep all its eggs in. We’re easily dumb and quarrelsome enough to
drop the basket one of these days. If that happens, it would be nice if
there were grandchildren somewhere to whom the cautionary tale might be
told.
We all looked up on Saturday. This is a good time to look up. Maybe the
universe is trying to get our attention.
B.C. writer Spider Robinson’s latest book is The Free Lunch. He can be contacted at http://www.spiderrobinson.com.

Copyright � 2003 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

From Mark Evanier:

As you can see, I have posted a picture of a can of Campbell’s Cream
of Mushroom soup. This is the traditional Internet symbol indicating
that the proprietor of the weblog is too busy with pressing deadlines
to update his site. Whenever you see it, you know that though he’s
swamped, he’ll be back in a day or three — or sooner, if events
warrant — and that he’ll resume posting, just as soon as he gets his
work schedule under control.

As you can see, I have one up too. Here I go again…

H-t-t-p colon,

Forward slash, Forward slash,

Double-u, Double-u,

Double-u, Dot

Nielsen Hayden Dot-com,

M-A-K-I-N-G

L-I-G-H-T slash

Now, your turn, wot?