Au Revoir Charley
This is my farewell column to readers of the Orlando Sentinel. I'm not very good at this kind of thing. Thanks and goodbye.
Now to fill the rest of the space.
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For those of you interested, my mailing address is P.O. Box 2446, Orlando, FL 32802, and my e-mail address is briarl@earthlink.net. Eventually you'll be able to find my columns on the Net, but at the moment I can't give you an address.
I have to tell you, however, that my one regret about the column business is that the volume of mail, both snail and electronic, has grown so great I can't answer it all. I read it, but there simply isn't time to answer every one, and I regret that.
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Some people have thought me too much of a pessimist, but I think of myself as a realist. I can't help that I've seen far too much evil, cruelty, brutality, death, dishonesty and hypocrisy to be a happy optimist. On the other hand, I've seen too much goodness, kindness, honesty, integrity and bravery to be a pessimist. The Chinese Taoists have it right. There is always light and darkness, good and evil, cowardice and courage, good times and bad times. Life is never all one or the other. It's always a mix, and we have to be strong enough to accept that. As an Asian sage put it, life is as it is whether we understand it or not.
So, Sentinel readers, adieu. Thanks for all your kind thoughts and letters. To those of you who sent unkind thoughts, go to hell.
Charley Reese at the Orlando Sentinel - In 1947-48, Palestinians became victims - Charley tells the unpopular truth about Palestine.
Pretend you live in Miami-Dade County, Fla., and you evacuate the area because a bad storm is bearing down on it.
After the storm passes, you drive back but are met by military roadblocks. "You can't come back," you're told
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Well, this is exactly what happened to 700,000 Palestinians in 1947-48. By what one journalist called a "psychological warfare campaign punctuated with some well-timed massacres," the Israelis drove these people out of their homes and villages with nothing much but the clothes on their backs.
Then, at a peace conference, the Israelis said first off that no refugees would be allowed to return nor would they be compensated for any property lost. That was Israel's original sin. It was also our original sin because the United States government did nothing and it should have insisted on the refugees' return.
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So, for the same reason they drove them out in the first place, they could not let them back in. The Arab governments said if the refugees could not return, then they would not sign a peace treaty. This original sin -- the disposition of 700,000 Palestinians -- bred the conflict which rages to this day and will continue to rage until the Palestinians get justice or everybody on both sides are dead.
Charley Reese at the Orlando Sentinel - Liberals are making hell on Earth - what happens when you remove morality and religion from society? Communists and Nazis, that's what. However, IMHO, you can't legislate morality. It can only be taught by example. You can, however, legislate morally. And I think the only moral way to legislate is strict adherence to the libertarian principle of non-initiation of force.
Abortion and euthanasia place economics and convenience and productivity ahead of human life. You know, of course, that the Holocaust had its beginning in the euthanasia of the hopelessly insane and retarded.
I warn you, however, that it is not a far step from that to deciding that certain people are simply surplus, economically unproductive and, therefore, a drain on society's resources. Let's say that someone has been on welfare three decades. He or she will never be self-supporting, so why not execute them and free the productive members of society from the burden of supporting them? Why continue to arrest and imprison a chronic criminal? Kill him or her and be done with it. A bullet only costs 15 cents.
A society without religion and morality is a dangerous society. Who will become its ultimate victims depends entirely on who wields the power and what their eccentricities and prejudices happen to be. It may be ironic but it is not surprising that the Israelis learned from the Holocaust that it is better to be like the Germans than to be like the Jews. They are now the murdering bully boys to the Palestinians.
Charley Reese at the Orlando Sentinel - Let's reform schools and let's do it right - Charley has some ideas for fixing America's government schools. He realizes up front that there is no political will to make these changes. Hence, the only workable solution is to eliminate government-funded education altogether. I agree with everything he says except that I don't think school districts should be immune from lawsuits. Instead, we should move to a loser-pays tort system. If you initiate a lawsuit and lose, you pay the other guy's legal costs.
Home-school your children, and if you can't do that put them in a good private school. No public-school system, which employs armed guards, barbed wire fences and metal detectors can be called even an acceptable system, much less successful.
Michelle Malkin at TownHall.com - Kids, Condoms, and Guns - Sex ed good. Gun-safety ed bad. Nonsense. Knowledge good, when properly timed.
The liberal mindset never ceases to amaze. When it comes to teaching kids about sex, the more the better. The younger the better. Bring on the condoms and bananas, diaphragms and diagrams. Don't worry about the heightened interest and glorification of pre-marital sex that might result from young, impressionable children handling contraceptives. But when it comes to guns, Glendening and his ilk turn into tight-lipped prudes preaching absolute abstinence.
John R. Lott, Jr. at Wall Street Journal Europe via FreeRepublic - Small Arms Save Lives - Mr. Lott bangs his "more guns = less crime" drum once again in the light of the commU.N.ist conference on small arms. Thank you, sir. [lew]
Fewer than one out of 1,000 defensive gun uses results in the attacker's death. World-wide we hear about crimes like the public-school shootings, as we should, but we never even hear locally about the many more lives saved. Since the well-known public shootings started in the fall of 1997, 32 students and three teachers have been killed in any type of shooting at elementary or secondary schools, an annual rate of one death per four million students. This includes deaths from gang fights, robberies, accidents, as well as attacks such as the one at Columbine.
But some sense of proportion is needed. During that same period, 53 students died playing high school football.
Lawrence Lessig at the New York Times -
Jail Time in the Digital Age 
- a well-known cyber-lawyer comments
on the Dmitry Sklyarov kidnapping, making it crystal clear that the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act is an ass.
The D.M.C.A. outlaws technologies designed to circumvent other technologies that protect copyrighted material. It is law protecting software code protecting copyright. The trouble, however, is that technologies that protect copyrighted material are never as subtle as the law of copyright. Copyright law permits fair use of copyrighted material; technologies that protect copyrighted material need not. Copyright law protects for a limited time; technologies have no such limit.
Thus when the D.M.C.A. protects technology that in turn protects copyrighted material, it often protects much more broadly than copyright law does. It makes criminal what copyright law would forgive.
Jon Katz at Slashdot - Earth to Media: This kid is still in jail - Mr. Katz chimes in on the Dmitry Sklyarov kidnapping. If Sklyarov had been a U.S. reporter, the media would have been flaming about his imprisonment. That they're not bodes ill for the first amendment. [/.]
Andrew Orlowski at The Register - Adobe DMCA protests spread to UK - A protest is being planned outside the U.S. embassy in London on Friday, August 3. Free Sklyarov! Details here.
NanoXML "is a very small XML parser for Java. It is non-validating (the DTD is ignored in version 1.6) and the interface is optimized to easily pull data from and write back to XML data. There is also a SAX1-compliant adapter for release 1.6." I haven't tried it. [meat]
Martyn Williams at CNN - Computers of the future: Made of glass? - Engineers at Fujitsu have overcome the largest known barrier to putting a computer and its liquid-crystal display on a single glass panel. [newsforge]
"At the moment we can make some simple components on the glass," says Sasaki of the state of development of the technology. "Our objective is making a processor or memory on the glass substrate, so we are now developing some basic components of processors and memory on glass. We want to integrate those components on the glass and are planning to ship this in 2003."
Engineers want to mount components directly onto glass because of potentially large savings in manufacturing costs. "We can make both [display] pixels and integrated circuits in the same production process. If we can make many functions at the same time, the systems become cheaper," says Sasaki. "[Our goal is] to make it more than 50 percent cheaper than current production."
Joel Spolsky - Hard-assed Bug Fixin' - Some good analysis of when it's worth the effort to fix bugs, and, more importantly, when it is not. [joel]
You may not be able to figure out exactly how much it's worth to fix each bug, but there's something you can do: charge the "cost" of tech support back to the business unit. In the early nineties there was a financial reorganization at Microsoft under which each product unit was charged for the full cost of all tech support calls. So the product units started insisting that PSS (Microsoft's tech support) provide lists of Top Ten Bugs regularly. When the development team concentrated on those, product support costs plummeted.
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With all that said, I'm optimistic at heart, and I believe that there is a lot of hidden value to producing very high quality products that is not very easy to capture. Your employees will be prouder. Fewer of your customers will send you back your CD in the mail after microwaving it and chopping it to bits with an ax. So I tend to err on the side of quality (indeed, we fixed every known bug in FogBUGZ, not just the big bang ones) and take pride in that, and feel confident, by the complete elimination of errors from the demo server, that we have a rock-solid product.
