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Murphy’s Law 198§44: the more complete a backup/recovery solution becomes, the less likely it is to ever be used.

With nearly half a century of experience using computers to run their business, Chris M’s company knew that law all too well. Ever since that fateful Wednesday — still known throughout the company as The Crash of ‘68 — they swore, Never Again. And forty years later, they’ve kept their promise.

Over the years, Chris’s employer has come as close to a Perfect Technology Infrastructure as anyone. They hire the best network administrators money can buy and give them whatever resources they need to ensure that the infrastructure remains solid. And that they do.

The company’s backup and retention plan is nothing short of immaculate. Every system they’ve ever purchased — from that old payroll program on the System/360 to that bizarre parts database for OS/2 — can be brought back to life, if not physically than through virtualization. A walk through their “software archive�? was a treat for many; new technicians are often astonished to learn, not only of the existence of 8-inch floppy disks, but that the company still has the 8-inch install disks for CP/M. And a drive to run them on.

Naturally, thanks to the aforementioned Murphy’s Law, this elaborate backup and retention is rarely, if ever, called into use. The only excitement the network technicians ever get is that occasional, frantic, “Oh Crap! I accidentally deleted that critical PowerPoint presentation�? call. And even that is easily solved by walking the user through their self-service file restoration system.

But a little while back, the network technicians received a restoration request that actually sounded interesting. A production manager needed a report of the “old old�? part numbers for a long out-of-production assembly. “Old old�? referred an ancient mainframe system that had been replaced by the “old�? system over ten years go and finally shut down in 2001. Restoring the “old old�? system meant setting up a new emulation environment, mounting the old disk image, and praying that it boots up without a hitch.

This was the first time ever that an actual user had requested such a restoration, so the network technicians were naturally a bit nervous. But thanks to their meticulous planning and procedures, everything went fine. The system booted up without a hitch and the production manager was summoned to log in to the terminal they had set up for him. He sat down at the chair, keyed in his username, and then paused for a moment.

“Now, what was my password five years ago?�?

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Daniel Tammet sees numbers as shapes colour and textures and can perform extraordinary maths in his head. He can also learn to speak a language fluently from scratch in a week.
He has Savant Syndrome, a rare form of Asperger’s.

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When Carman died in Iraq three years ago at age 27, he had money saved for college, a fiancee and two kids – including a baby son he’d never met. Neighbors in Hawthorne’s mobile home park collected $400 and left it in an envelope in her door.

“When they came and told me he was gone, oh my God, it just crushed me,” Hawthorne said. “There was actual pain in my heart. It felt like someone was in there just ripping it apart.”

McKeesport is not alone in its mourning. Nearly half of the more than 3,100 U.S. military fatalities in Iraq have come from towns like McKeesport, where fewer than 25,000 people live, according to an analysis by The Associated Press. One in five hailed from hometowns of less than 5,000.

The Census Bureau said 56 percent of the population in 2005 lived in towns under 25,000 and in unincorporated areas, but it could not provide the number of people living only in communities of less than 25,000. The 2000 census showed 16 percent of the population lived in unicorporated rural areas.

Many of the hometowns of the war dead aren’t just small, they’re poor. The AP analysis found that nearly three quarters of those killed in Iraq came from towns where the per capita income was below the national average. More than half came from towns where the percentage of people living in poverty topped the national average.

Some are old factory towns like McKeesport, once home to U.S. Steel’s National Tube Works, which employed 8,000 people in its heyday. Now, residents’ average income is just 60 percent of the national average, and one in eight lives below the federal poverty line.

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Cheney said his brief visit to Japan was a gesture of appreciation for Tokyo, which has been one of Washington’s most valuable allies in the war on terror.

He was scheduled later Wednesday to have dinner with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and talk with Foreign Minister Taro Aso before departing early Thursday. Earlier in the day, he met with Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko.

Who will not be joining him on a hunting party, as he is afraid to lose face.

“Since the multitude is ever fickle, full of lawless desires, irrational passions and violence, there is no other way to keep them in order but by the fear and terror of the invisible world; on which account our ancestors seem to me to have acted judiciously, when they contrived to bring into the popular belief these notions of the gods, and of the infernal regions.”

(c. 203 BCE – 120 BCE, Greek Πολυβιος)

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In a post this morning, Glenn Reynolds repeated a talking point that I’ve been hearing a lot lately from neoconservatives:

He [Paul Campos] hurts his credibility up front by saying that Iran is not at war with us — when, in fact, it has been since 1979, with the deaths of many Americans, soldiers and otherwise, on its hands.

Have we really been “at war” with Iran since 1979? If so, there are a few events that historians may need to revisit.

First, and most obviously, if we’ve been at war with Iran since 1979, then President Reagan, then-Vice President Bush, and the rest of the Reagan administration are necessarily guilty of high treason. During the Iran-Contra affair, they illegally sold arms to Iran (via Israel), including thousands of BGM-71 TOW (Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wire-guided) anti-tank missiles. Iran subsequently reverse-engineered these missiles and now produces its own version, called the Toophan, which Hezbollah reportedly used against Israeli tanks in the recent conflict in Lebanon. If we were “at war” with Iran at the time of these arms sales, is there any non-treasonous interpretation of this conduct? I don’t think so.

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Not only does it make many of Bush’s tax cuts permanent, but it envisions a complete repeal of the Estate Tax, which mainly affects only those who are in the top two-tenths of the top one percent of the richest people in this country. The proposed savings from the cuts over the next decade are about $442 billion, or just slightly less than the amount of the annual defense budget (minus Iraq war expenses). But what’s interesting about these cuts are how Bush plans to pay for them.

Sanders’s office came up with some interesting numbers here. If the Estate Tax were to be repealed completely, the estimated savings to just one family — the Walton family, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune — would be about $32.7 billion dollars over the next ten years.

The proposed reductions to Medicaid over the same time frame? $28 billion.

Or how about this: if the Estate Tax goes, the heirs to the Mars candy corporation — some of the world’s evilest scumbags, incidentally, routinely ripped by human rights organizations for trafficking in child labor to work cocoa farms in places like Cote D’Ivoire — if the estate tax goes, those assholes will receive about $11.7 billion in tax breaks. That’s more than three times the amount Bush wants to cut from the VA budget ($3.4 billion) over the same time period.

Some other notable estimate estate tax breaks, versus corresponding cuts:

• Cox family (Cox cable TV) receives $9.7 billion tax break while education would get $1.5 billion in cuts
• Nordstrom family (Nordstrom dept. stores) receives $826.5 million tax break while Community Service Block Grants would be eliminated, a $630 million cut
• Ernest Gallo family (shitty wines) receives a $468.4 million cut while LIHEAP (heating oil to poor) would get a $420 million cut

And so on and so on. Sanders additionally pointed out that the family of former Exxon/Mobil CEO Lee Raymond, who received a $400 million retirement package, would receive about $164 million in tax breaks.

Compare that to the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, which Bush proposes be completely eliminated, at a savings of $108 million over ten years. The program sent one bag of groceries per month to 480,000 seniors, mothers and newborn children.

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Vice President Dick Cheney, in Japan to shore up support for the U.S. strategy in Iraq, said Americans won’t back down from the fight.

“The American people will not support a policy of retreat,” he said, standing aboard the USS Kitty Hawk in Yokosuka harbor. His speech came after the U.S. confirmed that the U.K., its closest ally, will withdraw some of its 7,000 soldiers in Iraq.

Meanwhile in the real world: Poll: 63% want all troops home by end of ’08

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In a victory for
President Bush, a divided federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that Guantanamo Bay detainees cannot use the U.S. court system to challenge their indefinite imprisonment. A Supreme Court appeal was promised.

The 2-1 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit dismisses hundreds of cases filed by foreign-born detainees in federal court and also threatens to strip away court access to millions of lawful permanent residents currently in the United States.

It upholds a key provision of the Military Commissions Act, which Bush pushed through Congress last year to set up a Defense Department system to prosecute terrorism suspects. Now, detainees must prove to three-officer military panels that they don’t pose a terror threat.

Guilty until proven innocent. I guess it will now go to the Supreme Court. I wonder what the political make-up of that institution is…

The two judges voting with the White House — Judge A. Raymond Randolph and Judge David B. Sentelle — were appointed by Republicans. President Reagan appointed Sentelle, and President George H.W. Bush appointed Randolph. The dissenter, Judge Judith W. Rogers, was appointed by President Clinton, a Democrat.

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Almost 450,000 requests were made to monitor people’s telephone calls, e-mails and post by secret agencies and other authorised bodies in just over a year, the spying watchdog said yesterday.

In the first report of its kind from the Interceptions of Communications Commissioner, it was also revealed that nearly 4,000 errors were reported in a 15-month period from 2005 to 2006. While most appeared to concern “lower-level data�? such as requests for telephone lists and individual e-mail addresses, 67 were mistakes concerning direct interception of communications.

Sir Swinton Thomas, the report’s author, described the figure as “unacceptably high�?.

The disclosures came as Tony Blair admitted that the fingerprints of everyone obtaining identity cards could be checked against nearly a million unsolved crimes.

[..]

David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, said of Mr Blair’s response to the petitioners: “This is a massive move away from the presumption in Britain that a man is innocent until proven guilty. Tony Blair has admitted that the authorities will go on a fishing expedition through the files of innocent people to try to match them up to unsolved crimes.

“This is completely contrary to undertakings given throughout the course of the Bill in the Houses of Parliament and would be a major invasion of privacy. Mr Blair clearly does not realise that fingerprint technology is not infallible. With the vast number of crimes involved it is virtually guaranteed there will be errors and massive miscarriages of justice in a number of cases.”

The figure seems particularly large when you consider that around 5,000,000 crimes were reported in England and Wales during the same period. Does one in twelve crimes require a wiretap?

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The consumer technology universe has evolved to a point where it is, in essence, a fully functioning, alternative IT department. Today, in effect, users can choose their technology provider. Your company’s employees may turn to you first, but an employee who’s given a tool by the corporate IT department that doesn’t meets his needs will find one that does on the Internet or at his neighborhood Best Buy.

The emergence of this second IT department—call it “the shadow IT department�?—is a natural product of the disconnect that has always existed between those who provide IT and those who use it.

And that disconnect is fundamental. Users want IT to be responsive to their individual needs and to make them more productive. CIOs want IT to be reliable, secure, scalable and compliant with an ever increasing number of government regulations. Consequently, when corporate IT designs and provides an IT system, manageability usually comes first, the user’s experience second. But the shadow IT department doesn’t give a hoot about manageability and provides its users with ways to end-run corporate IT when the interests of the two groups do not coincide.

“Employees are looking to enhance their efficiency,�? says André Gold, director of information security at Continental Airlines. “People are saying, ‘I need this to do my job.’�? But for all the reasons listed above, he says, corporate IT usually ends up saying no to what they want or, at best, promising to get to it…eventually. In the interim, users turn to the shadow IT department.

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European governments are preparing legislation to require companies to keep detailed data about people’s Internet and phone use that goes beyond what the countries will be required to do under a European Union directive.

In Germany, a proposal from the Ministry of Justice would essentially prohibit using false information to create an e-mail account, making the standard Internet practice of creating accounts with pseudonyms illegal.

A draft law in the Netherlands would likewise go further than the European Union requires, in this case by requiring phone companies to save records of a caller’s precise location during an entire mobile phone conversation.

Utterly unenforcable:

He said it was not clear that any European law would apply to e-mail providers based in the United States, like Google, so anyone who needed an unverified e-mail address — for political, commercial or philosophical reasons — could still use Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail addresses.

[..]

In the Netherlands, the proposed extension of the law on phone company records to all mobile location data “implies surveillance of the movement of large amounts of innocent citizens,�? the Dutch Data Protection Agency has said. The agency concluded in January that the draft disregarded privacy protections in the European Convention on Human Rights. Similarly, the German technology trade association Bitkom said the draft there violated the German Constitution.