Smartphone for the day

Jared Newman has a Time article about the latest phone (not) from Amazon:

Rumors of an Amazon smartphone are back, and once again there’s talk of 3D imagery and eye-tracking.
The latest details, originally appearing on Hacker News, and then partially corroborated by TechCrunch, claim that Amazon is working on two smartphones. One of them is inexpensive, with basic software, and while the Hacker News post claims that it’s coming this year, Amazon has already that it won’t release a phone in 2013. TechCrunch says the release date has been shifting around, and may have just been pushed back to early next year.
Amazon’s other phone is more interesting from a technical standpoint. It reportedly has a camera on each corner of the phone that can detect the user’s head and eye movement, while filtering out movement by surrounding people. The software on the screen then creates a 3D perspective that shifts as you move and look around the phone, although the display itself is not 3D.
What’s the point, aside from the coolness factor? According to TechCrunch, Amazon is experimenting with a way to scan real-world objects so users can then buy those products on Amazon’s website. If Amazon can expect users to buy more products while using the phone, it could help offset the price of the hardware. Whether people would want a phone centered on shopping is another question entirely.
The two reports are reminiscent of a Wall Street Journal story from May of 2013, which claimed that Amazon was building a pair of phones and an “audio-only streaming device”. One of those phones would have “a screen that allows for three-dimensional images without glasses,” the Journal reported, but details on the cheaper phone were scarce.
The standard crazy tech rumor disclaimer applies here: companies build and test prototypes all the time. You may recall that Apple was testing a smaller iPad years before launching the iPad Mini, and one of the first iPhone prototypes was more like a tablet. To that end, even TechCrunch acknowledges that the quad-camera feature is experimental and costly, and that “it’s tough to imagine that making it to market”.
As for the cheaper phone, it seems more likely to happen in near future, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions about it: how will Amazon bring the cost down? What will wireless carrier agreements look like? How will Amazon compete with advanced features like Google voice search on Android devices and Siri on the iPhone? And how would a low-cost Amazon phone gain traction in the United States, when the carrier subsidy model already allows for free and cheap phones? Neither of the new reports answer any of these questions.
Having said all that, the deeper Amazon gets into the tablet business, the stranger it gets that Amazon has no other devices to round out the experience. The Amazon phone– and set-top box, or game console– does seem like a matter of time, even if we don’t know what the final shape of the products will be.

Rico says it matters not a whit to him; he's sticking with his iPhone.

Idiot for the day

Rico says that 'idiot Congressman' is redundant, he knows, but Josh Voorhees has a small Slate article about the incident:

There are plenty of people you could blame for the fact that the World War Two memorial on the Washington Mall is currently closed to the public (although not to war veterans). If you ask most Americans, those responsible for the shutdown that's causing the closure are House Republicans who refuse to pass a clean continuing resolution to keep the government running. If you ask GOP Representative Randy Neugebauer, however, the answer is apparently the park rangers who have the unenviable task of keeping the public away from the monument, thanks to Congress' failure to keep the government running.

Wi-Fi on planes is safe

Matt Peckham has a Time article about flying:

Late last year, the FCC told the FAA to loosen up about mobile device use during flights, and, as my colleague Jared Newman noted last week, the FAA’s been expected to do just that.
Call this the almost-official unclenching, then: a special 28-member FAA advisory group created to examine the question of Wi-Fi safety during various stages of commercial flight is expected to say passengers can safely use wireless consumer electronics over Wi-Fi for the entirety of flights on most US planes, reports The Wall Street Journal.
Insert the Snoopy happy-dance here:

We’re still waiting for the official report, but the WSJ– which says it spoke to one of the committee’s leaders— notes the report contains “more than two dozen recommendations” and that it’ll be notably more relaxed about wireless device use during flights than previously thought.
According to the WSJ:

The panel determined that no matter what applications the devices are running or what wireless-transmission mode they are in, “the vast majority” of aircraft “are going to be just fine” from a safety standpoint, according to a senior Amazon.com Inc. official who headed the group’s technical subcommittee.

Let that sink in. The days of having to turn your handheld game devices and phones, laptops, and tablets off during departure or landing may well soon be over: the advisory panel will apparently say such devices should be considered safe for “gate-to-gate use”.
The only catch: it sounds like cellular communications (voice or data) still pose a risk, though only of interfering with air-to-ground communications and not the plane’s avionics. The report is expected to recommend letting existing restrictions on such communications stand while the FAA and FCC reexamine them.
What this means for you: the FAA as a whole still has to adopt its advisory committee’s recommendations for gate-to-gate wireless device use to be sanctioned, and then you’d still have to pay to use an in-flight Wi-Fi service, since cellular communication would remain verboten.
The trick, of course, would be ensuring passengers comply with such niceties, but then that’s been the challenge airlines have faced for years: ensuring cellular-capable devices are used with the cellular connection disabled. (If you’ve flown much over the past few decades, you know plenty of passengers flout this rule.)
Still paranoid? You’re in sympathetic company— I’m a nervous flier myself. Sometimes, sitting in my seat, tuned into every subtle vibration, I’ll imagine this or that sound is the plane getting ready to open up like a piñata. Never mind the hard-nosed science, we’re a superstitious species by nature. Stick us tens of thousand of feet in the air, jetting along at hundreds of miles an hour and with tiny radiation-spitting devices we’ve been told just might goof up our sky-coach’s avionics and it’s like that Stephen King line: give the brain a spoon and a hand to hold it, and it’ll eat itself.
Rest assured, the FAA report is expected to ameliorate such concerns, noting that today’s planes are insulated well enough from electromagnetic interference to make them sufficiently resilient.

Rico says finally, no more 'please turn off your electronic devices"...

Ballard Street for the day

Rico says his friend Kelley forwards this one (because everyone gets to be snotty about Rico playing cowboys):

Good idea

Sean Collins Walsh has an article in the Philadelphia Daily News about a good idea that turned out to be a bad thing:

With Philadelphia recently ranked as the number one city in the country for cellphone thefts, Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown is seeking to ban machines that dispense instant cash for electronic devices. A bill she is introducing would outlaw "automated purchasing machines", which many fear enable thieves to quickly unload their loot and pocket a handsome reward; newer iPhones can fetch hundreds on the spot.
"Cellphone robberies are the crime of today, and far too many of them are turning violent," Reynolds Brown said in a statement. "We as a city cannot allow further incentives to entice criminal activity."
Philly's only machine is in the Franklin Mills Mall.

Rico says yeah, it's not like the Franklin Mills Mall might not have a few young thugs (who do not look like the lady in the photo) in it...

Iran for the day

Fareed Zakaria has a Time article about the situation in Iran:

Watching the diplomatic dance between Iran and the US leading up to the unprecedented phone call from President Obama to President Hassan Rouhani, one had to ask: are we seeing a replay of 1972? That was the year when, after decades of estrangement, China and the US began a reconciliation that changed the world. Are Washington and Tehran, locked in their own decades-old state of antagonism, on the verge of a similar change of heart?
In a word, no. The US and China were pushed toward each other by the most powerful force in international relations: a common enemy. By the late 1960s, China had begun to view the Soviet Union as its principal national-security problem, and the US saw an opportunity to make common cause with Beijing. There is no such common enemy driving Washington and Tehran together.
There is, however, one similarity. China in the early 1970s was at its lowest point economically. Iran's economy has been devastated by tough US-backed sanctions, as well as the burden of providing arms and treasure to the unpopular, embattled regime in Syria. In addition, the mullahs in Tehran are aware that the deep discontent that bubbled to the surface in the shape of the pro-reform Green movement only four years ago still lurks within their society.
We now know that the change in US-China relations in 1972 led inexorably to China's becoming the economic power it is today: rich, market-based, and open to the world. But that path was not at all visible forty years ago, least of all to the Chinese. Even after 1972, the regime under Mao Zedong was thoroughly communist and largely hostile to the West. After Mao's death came years of internal struggle and chaos and then, unpredictably, the rise to power of China's real modernizer, Deng Xiaoping, who set his country on its great transformation. To make the parallel, Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, is Mao, not Deng. And, whatever Rouhani's views, he cannot change the nature of the regime.
In fact, the better analogy to consider for US-Iran relations is that of another 1972 meeting, between Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in Moscow. It was the first time an American President had paid a state visit to the USSR, and it resulted in the beginning of detente, a series of steps that de-escalated the Cold War and allowed for better contact. For now, that might be the most one can expect for relations between the US and Iran.
And yet detente with Iran is possible, and worth pursuing. Its outlines would look like this: Iran would agree to cap its enrichments of uranium at five percent; at that level, it would be difficult and time-consuming for it to move its nuclear program from a civilian to a military stage. Iran has already enriched some quantities of uranium up to twenty percent, making them easily and quickly convertible into weapons-grade fuel. This stockpile would have to be shipped out of the country. Iran has recently rejected this suggestion, but, in 2010, it accepted a similar deal. It might do so again, if it is allowed to keep the uranium it wants for medical purposes.

Rico says he still needs to get Armageddon written before they work this out...

Politics for the day

Rico says actual words are not required:

Another good one gone

Tom Clancy wrote what people wanted. He died, of course, as we all will, but Rico says he's always envied the guy his success.
Julie Bosman has his obituary in The New York Times:

Tom Clancy, whose complex, adrenaline-fueled military novels spawned a new genre of thrillers and made him one of the world’s best-known and best-selling authors, died on Tuesday in Baltimore. He was 66.
Clancy, who grew up in Baltimore, died at Johns Hopkins Hospital after a brief illness, his lawyer, J.W. Thompson Webb, said. Neither Webb nor Clancy’s longtime publisher, Ivan Held, president of G.P. Putnam’s Sons, said he knew the precise cause of death.
Clancy’s debut book, The Hunt for Red October, was frequently cited as one of the greatest genre novels ever written. With the book’s publication in 1984, Clancy introduced a new kind of potboiler: an espionage thriller dense with technical details about weaponry, submarines and intelligence agencies.
It found an eager readership. More than a hundred million copies of his novels are in print, and a remarkable seventeen have reached Number One on The New York Times’ best-seller list, including Threat Vector, released last December. Prolific until his death, Clancy had been awaiting publication of his next book, Command Authority, set for 3 December 2013.
The impact of his books has been felt far beyond the publishing world. Some were adapted by Hollywood and became blockbusters starring Harrison Ford, Alec Baldwin, and Ben Affleck as Clancy’s hero protagonist, Jack Ryan. Clancy arranged for his thrillers to be turned into video games that were so realistic, the military licensed them for training. And, on television, fast-paced espionage using high-tech tools in the Clancy mold found a place in popular shows like 24 and Homeland.
The enterprises made Clancy a millionaire many times over and a familiar figure on the pop-culture landscape, frequently seen in photographs wearing a baseball cap and aviator sunglasses and holding a cigarette. With his riches he acquired an eighty-acre farm on Chesapeake Bay. He became part-owner of the Baltimore Orioles. He even bought a tank.
It was all a far cry from his days as a Maryland insurance salesman writing on the side in pursuit of literary aspirations and submitting his manuscript for The Hunt for Red October to the Naval Institute Press in Annapolis, Maryland. An editor there, Deborah Grosvenor, became mesmerized by the book, a Cold War tale set on a Soviet submarine.
But she had a hard time persuading her boss to read it; Clancy was an unknown, and the publisher had no experience with fiction. She was also concerned that the novel had too many technical descriptions, and asked Clancy to make cuts. He complied, trimming at least a hundred pages while making revisions.
“I said, ‘I think we have a potential best seller here, and if we don’t grab this thing, somebody else would’,” Grosvenor, now a literary agent, said in a recent interview. “But he had this innate storytelling ability, and his characters had this very witty dialogue. The gift of the Irish, or whatever it was, the man could tell a story.”
The Press paid five thousand dollars for the book, publishing it in 1984.
The Hunt for Red October became a runaway best seller when President Ronald Reagan, who had been handed a copy, called it “my kind of yarn”, and said that he couldn’t put it down. But its details about Soviet submarines, weaponry, satellites, and fighter planes raised suspicions. Even high-ranking members of the military took notice of the book’s apparent inside knowledge. In a 1986 interview, Clancy said: “When I met Navy Secretary John Lehman last year, the first thing he asked me about the book was: ‘Who the hell cleared it?’ ”
No one did, Clancy insisted; all of his knowledge came from technical manuals, interviews with submarine experts, and books on military matters. While he spent time on military bases, visited the Pentagon, and dined with military leaders, he said, he did not want to know any classified information.
“I hang my hat on getting as many things right as I can,” Clancy once said in an interview. “I’ve made up stuff that’s turned out to be real— that’s the spooky part.”
Thomas Leo Clancy Jr. was born into a middle-class Baltimore family on 12 April 1947. As a boy, he skipped over children’s literature to read naval history, poring over journals and books intended for career military officers and engineering experts.
He attended Loyola College in Baltimore, where he majored in English, and graduated in 1969. While he harbored ambitions to serve in the military— he joined the Army ROTC— he was told he was too nearsighted. He began working instead at a small insurance agency founded by his wife’s grandfather in rural Maryland, a line of work he was happy to abandon after he found success as an author.
He followed The Hunt for Red October with Red Storm Rising in 1986, Patriot Games in 1987, The Cardinal of the Kremlin in 1988, and Clear and Present Danger in 1989.
The critical reception was warm from the start. Reviewing Red Storm Rising in The Times in 1986, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote that the book “far surpassed” Clancy’s debut novel. Red Storm Rising is a “superpower thriller”, Lehmann-Haupt wrote, “the verbal equivalent of a high-tech video game.”
Some critics questioned the unwavering virtuousness of many of Clancy’s heroes, particularly Jack Ryan. “All the Americans are paragons of courage, endurance, and devotion to service and country,” Robert Lekachman wrote in The Times in 1986. “Their officers are uniformly competent and occasionally inspired. Men of all ranks are faithful husbands and devoted fathers.”
Clancy is survived by his second wife, Alexandra Llewellyn Clancy, and their daughter, Alexis Jacqueline Page Clancy. He had four children from his first marriage: Michelle E. Bandy, Christine C. Blocksidge, Thomas L. Clancy III, and Kathleen W. Clancy.
Besides the planned publication of his next book, Command Authority, a movie prequel about Jack Ryan’s pre-CIA days, Jack Ryan, will be released on Christmas of 2013, and stars Chris Pine as Ryan.
Clancy said none of his success came easily, and he would remind aspiring writers of that when he spoke to them. “I tell them you learn to write the same way you learn to play golf,” he once said. “You do it, and keep doing it until you get it right. A lot of people think something mystical happens to you, that maybe the muse kisses you on the ear. But writing isn’t divinely inspired— it’s hard work.”

Rico says we share the same birthday and the same childhood obsession with militaria and history, you'd think the guy could share some of his success... (And, yes, it is hard work, and he will keep at it.)

Tesla for the day

Per Liljas has a Time article about problems with the new car:

A Tesla Model S electric car, touted as the safest car in America, caught fire recently, spurring new worries about the possible risks of lithium-ion batteries. In two recent incidents, involving Boeing’s new 787 plane and Chevrolet’s Volt hybrid car, fires have emanated from batteries of the same type.
Tesla spokeswoman Liz Jarvis-Shean said the fire was caused by a large metallic object hitting the battery pack, and pointed out that no one was injured. Company shares still dropped by more than six percent, following the appearance on the Internet of a video showing flames spewing out of the vehicle (warning: mild profanity can be heard).

Rico says he hopes they get this sorted out before they bring out the SUV model, because his father really wants one... (And 'mild' would not be what he, or Rico, would use if an expensive car burst into flames, either.)

History for the day

On 3 October 1990, West Germany and East Germany ended forty-five years of postwar division, declaring the creation of a new unified country.

Rico says that an old friend from the Claris days happened to be there that week, thus garnering Rico a tiny chunk of the wall.

Bad pun for the day

Rico says he wonders if Rubén Blades has a brother named Razor...
(And, yes, Rico knows full well that it's pronounced Blah-dez, but the joke doesn't work otherwise.)

General Lee

Fold3 (not cheap, but probably worthwhile) has an article about Robert E. Lee:

12 October 1870: General Robert E. Lee dies"The education of a man is never completed until he dies" is a statement attributed to Robert E. Lee, whose education was completed in 1870 as death reached him only five years after surviving the Civil War as the head of the Army of the Confederate States of America (CSA).
General Lee died in Lexington, Virginia, on 12 October 1870, at the age of 63. Mourners at his funeral stood on the steps of Arlington House, the residence of the Lee and Custis families for decades, now known as The Robert E. Lee Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery.
Lee was born on 19 January 1807, at his family's Stratford Hall plantation in Westmoreland County, Virginia. After attending West Point, he forged a promising military career, distinguishing himself in the Mexican-American War. Later, he would command the CSA and, in the last years of his life, serve as president of Washington College, now Washington and Lee University.
Many more documents relating to Lee and his family can be found in Fold3's Civil War Collection.
As a second-year student at West Point in 1827, Cadet Robert E. Lee appears on a list of assistant professors at the academy in Letters Received by the Adjutant General, 1822-1860. Lee's name and signature appear often within that title and in the later set of Letters Received by the Adjutant General, 1861-1870. In an 1855 document, Lee accepts an appointment of Lieutenant Colonel and swears allegiance to the United States of America. Later, he's recommended for promotion to brigadier general by J.M. Porter in a letter to President Buchanan. It was an appointment that didn't happen, despite Porter's effusive endorsement.
Prior to the Civil War, Lee headed a board of officers tasked with examining effective signal communications. His 1859 reports consists of 179 pages. When Virginia voted to secede from the Union on 17 April 1861, Lee felt obligated to fight for his home state and signed a resignation letter three days later. In his new position, he wrote a letter to General McClellan regarding an exchange of prisoners on 24 July 1862,
Confederate Amnesty Papers contain applications of former Confederates for presidential pardons and, while there are many post-war oaths of allegiance to the USA by former CSA officers like General George E. Pickett and Lee's nephew Fitzhugh Lee, General Lee's request and pardon are not among them. Learn the story behind it in the Spring 2005 issue of NARA's Prologue magazine.
After his death, Robert E. Lee's legacy strengthened in both the South and the North. He is remembered as a brilliant military leader, a devoted family man, and a great American.

 

Rico says that Lee is still God-like among many Southerners...

Prologue magazine has more on the man:

 

On a spring day 140 years ago, Union General Ulysses S. Grant and Confederate General Robert E. Lee met in the parlor (painting above) of Wilmer McLean's house in Appomattox Court House, Virginia. On that historic occasion, 9 April 1865, the two generals formalized the surrender of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, thus bringing an end to four years of fighting between North and South.
After agreeing upon terms of the armistice, the generals each selected three officers to oversee the surrender and parole of Lee's army. Later that day, Lee and six of his staff signed a document granting their parole.
On 29 May 1865, President Andrew Johnson issued a Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon to persons who had participated in the rebellion against the United States. There were fourteen excepted classes, though, and members of those classes had to make special application to the President.
Lee sent an application to Grant, and wrote to President Johnson on 13 June 1865:

Being excluded from the provisions of amnesty & pardon contained in the proclamation of the 29th Ulto; I hereby apply for the benefits, & full restoration of all rights & privileges extended to those included in its terms. I graduated at the Mil. Academy at West Point in June 1829. Resigned from the U.S. Army April '61. Was a General in the Confederate Army, & included in the surrender of the Army of N. Va. 9 April '65.

 

On 2 October 1865, the same day that Lee was inaugurated as president of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, he signed his Amnesty Oath (above), thereby complying fully with the provision of Johnson's proclamation. But Lee was not pardoned, nor was his citizenship restored. And the fact that he had submitted an amnesty oath at all was soon lost to history.
More than a hundred years later, in 1970, an archivist at the National Archives discovered Lee's Amnesty Oath among State Department records (reported in Prologue, Winter 1970). Apparently Secretary of State William H. Seward had given Lee's application to a friend as a souvenir, and the State Department had pigeonholed the oath.
In 1975, Lee's full rights of citizenship were posthumously restored by a joint congressional resolution, effective 13 June 1865.
At the 5 August 1975, signing ceremony, President Gerald R. Ford acknowledged the discovery of Lee's Oath of Allegiance in the National Archives and remarked: "General Lee's character has been an example to succeeding generations, making the restoration of his citizenship an event in which every American can take pride."

Water, water, everywhere...

...thanks to Coca-Cola.

Janet Fang has a SmartPlanet article about a joint project between the people who brought you Coke and the guy who brought you the Segway:

Coca-Cola has faced plenty of criticism over its bottled water business, and it’s been accused of creating water shortages in India because it uses so much to make its soft drinks. But, just last week, the company pledged to provide safe drinking water to twenty countries by the end of 2015. One of the ways Coke plans to do so is combine its know-how with Segway’s futurism, Businessweek reports.
Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, has actually worked with the drinking company before. His design group, DEKA Research and Development, created the Freestyle, Coke’s touch-screen soda fountain.
Now Kamen has Coke’s backing for a water purification technology, the Slingshot (photo).
The vapor-compression machine basically boils and condenses any kind of dirty water.
It can produce about thirty liters of water an hour, using as much energy as a hair dryer.
It’s about the size of a hotel mini-bar, and weighs three hundred pounds. The power source doesn’t have to be electric. It can run on solar power, batteries, and even methane from animal dung. But it took several hundred thousand dollars to make one.
Kamen didn’t have the infrastructure to manufacture and distribute the boxes cost-effectively. That’s where Coke comes in. It knows how to do those things with sometimes frightening efficiency. And just think what the soft-drink juggernaut knows about marketing.
They hope to bring Slingshot to communities in rural parts of Latin America and Africa.
In addition to DEKA R&D, Coke is also partnering with IBM, Inter-American Development Bank, McCann Health, NRG Energy, Qualcomm Technologies, and UPS. The global collaboration will also be utilizing Ekocenters (video). These “downtowns in a box” offer a locally-tailored mix of products, services, and resources, such as safe drinking water, wireless communications, and refrigerated vaccination storage.

Rico says every once in awhile, capitalism does something good for the planet...

Making Star Wars a reality

David Worthington has an article at SmartPlanet about the possibility of real light sabers:

Building a Death Star is impractical, but lightsabers are no longer out of the question. US scientists have happened upon how to make the venerable Star Wars weapon.
The Guardian’s Ben Child recently uncovered an article in the journal Nature, published in May of 2013, which outlines a way to bind photons together into a new form. That’s what is needed to make devices that behave like lightsabers a reality. Scientists from Harvard, MIT, and other US universities collaborated on the study.
“What we have done is create a special type of medium in which photons interact with each other so strongly that they act as though they have mass, and bind together to form molecules,” Harvard university physics professor Mikhail Lukin told the Guardian. “It’s not an in-apt analogy to compare this to lightsabers. When these photons interact with each other, they’re pushing against and deflect each other. The physics of what’s happening in these molecules is similar to what we see in the movies.”
Last year, a US military device called the Metal Vapor Torch created the appearance of a lightsaber with a fiery blade that can cut through metal. The device was more of a torch that produced a “flame” that travels 1,600 miles a second at 2,700 degrees Celsius and above. It only operates for a few seconds using a fuel pack.
Other scientists have also made inroads at producing technologies from the Star Trek universe. In 2011, physicists in China figured out how to draw objects closer with a laser powered “tractor beam”. They published a paper describing how objects can be pulled on a “wind of light” by deploying specialized lasers called Bessel beams.
Efforts to research a tractor beam-like effect date back to the 1960’s. Fringe physics theories have involved directing “anti-gravitational force” toward or away from an object, gravity beams, and floating objects above electromagnetically levitated superconducting disks.
23rd century technology functions very differently. In Star Trek, a starship’s tractor beam utilizes so-called attenuated linear graviton beam to move around other sub-warp objects such as asteroids or enemy vessels.
This may all sound fantastic, but science fiction has a tendency to become reality.

Rico says reality is strange enough...

The 'Next Big Thing' isn't, apparently

Jared Newman has a Time article about a not-so-smartwatch:

Reviews of Samsung‘s Galaxy Gear smartwatch are hitting the web today, and almost all of them are negative.
This isn’t a surprise. As soon as Samsung announced its first modern smartwatch last month, the flaws in the product were clear: battery life is weak, the charging process is inconvenient, the watch only works in tandem with a handful of Samsung devices, and the $300 price tag is rather steep.
Today’s reviews pile on even more criticism, calling out the Gear’s sluggish interface, unreliable touch gestures, and limitations in its small-screen apps. More importantly, it’s hard to find anyone who thinks the Galaxy Gear represents the future of smartwatches.
Gizmodo’s Brent Rose says the Galaxy Gear falls far short of smartwatches’ potential:
ultimately, though, this feels like a beta product. Apps feel unfinished, gestures are finicky, and very little about the whole experience is fluid or easy. It often takes a lot of scrolling around to finally find the app you want, and even then it’s easy to accidentally back out of it because it mistook your tap for a swipe. It seems like Samsung just wanted to put some feelers out there and try to get some feedback from consumers, while charging them $300 for the honor.
Vlad Savov at The Verge argues that it never should have been born:

The Gear’s camera and phone calls are both surprising and delightful, but they’re unfortunately isolated highlights. When all is said and done, I expect the Galaxy Gear will be looked back upon as a rough first draft that helped the Korean chaebol steer a better course en route to the goal of producing a real smartwatch. As it stands today, though— unintuitive, oversized, overpriced, and in constant need of a Galaxy guardian— the Galaxy Gear might have been better off staying on the drawing board.

A common thread is that the Galaxy Gear feels rushed, or incomplete, but that seems too kind. With the Galaxy Gear, Samsung has merely grafted smartphone features onto a smaller screen with a wrist strap. The fact that these features don’t work well is beside the point: it’s the wrong approach to begin with. You can’t really call it a rough draft if the whole thing needs to be tossed out.
On that note, Zach Epstein of Boy Genius Report has the most damning criticism:

Samsung’s first shot at the smartwatch category everyone is calling the future is hopelessly stuck in the past. It’s a tiny 1.63-inch window into a handful of basic smartphone functions. It brings nothing new to the table. It does not innovate or even try to. The Galaxy Gear is a “we were here first” device that feels like a half-baked response to an Apple product that doesn’t even exist.

If smartwatches are the future, they will be nothing like Samsung’s Galaxy Gear.
While we can only guess what the future of smartwatches will be, I like the idea of them acting as intelligent assistants, capable of deciding which information is important enough to display on the wrist–something akin to Google Now or Apple‘s Passbook, but with more awareness of where you are and what you’re doing, and better ways to prioritize incoming notifications. (I’ve written about this idea elsewhere, through I’m not the first one.)
Separately, smartwatches have health and fitness potential if they use low-power processors to monitor movement and heart rates. Apple’s M7 co-processor and Motorola’s X8 computing system are on the right track. Samsung, having shoehorned smartphone guts into a wristwatch, is not.
I suppose it’s no harm, no foul to consumers if Samsung wants to keep futzing around with ill-conceived smartwatches, but hopefully other companies are watching and learning from these missteps, figuring out how to make devices that people will want to wear, And when they do, any company that’s still trying to turn a watch into a smartphone will be caught flat-footed.

Rico says all Apple needs to do is put phone technology (relatively simple) into the iPad Mini, and end of story...

Apple for the day

Doug Aamoth has a Time article about the Mini:

Reuters is reporting that Apple may be having trouble securing enough high-resolution displays to produce a Retina-based iPad Mini this year.
The current version of the company’s $329-and-up 7.9-inch tablet sports a 1024×768 screen; Google’s $229-and-up latest Nexus 7 tablet features a 7-inch, 1920×1200 resolution display, as does Amazon’s just-released Kindle Fire HDX, which also starts at $229.
According to Reuters:

The reason behind the delays in manufacturing the Retina display screens for the iPad Mini were unclear. One source at a supplier said there were delays in Apple’s certification of panel producers, which were given strict power-saving requirements.

Reuters’ sources added that they “expected Apple to either wait until early next year for a full-fledged launch of a Retina display iPad Mini, or to make a Retina version only available in limited quantities before the end of the year.”
Apple has been expected to unveil the new iPad Mini model sometime this month, so it’ll be interesting to see what actually happens— Apple announcements are notoriously hard to nail down until shortly before they happen, if they even get spoiled beforehand at all. In other words, people can “expect” Apple to do things all they want; what Apple actually ends up doing can often end up being a different story altogether.
Whatever happens, I’d be mildly surprised if the company released a new iPad Mini with the same screen resolution as the old one. As my colleague Harry points out, the iPad Mini’s “low-resolution screen grows more anachronistic by the minute”. If these supply problems are indeed real, it’d behoove Apple to delay the new iPad Mini’s launch in order to get the screen right. It could mean missing the holiday shopping season, but last I checked, Apple seems to be able to sell stuff regardless of the time of year. And I say I’d only be “mildly surprised”, because I think, even if Apple released a new iPad Mini with the same 1024×768-resolution screen, people would still buy it. Tech writers would cackle about it, but regular people would still buy it.
As always, the requisite caveat: Reuters’ report comes from anonymous sources (aka “people who work in the company’s supply chain”) so take this news with a grain of salt.

Rico says they should be waiting to get the phone into it...

Vets plot revolt

Evan McMorris-Santoro, Jacob Fischler, and Benny Johnson have an article at BuzzFeed about veterans' response to the shutdown of the government:

Military veterans are declaring war on the government shutdown.
After a group of veterans broke down the barricades at the national World War Two Memorial, organizers of one Hero Flight Network group told BuzzFeed it wasn’t the last Washington would hear from them. Veterans are plotting another protest at the same place this week, and expressed interest in staging similar events at sites across the nation’s capital, including the Lincoln Memorial— an act of civil disobedience that would likely pour fuel on the already highly flammable politics of the government shutdown.
“We have people here that are eighty and ninety years old, and they closed down all the bathrooms?” said Tony Nussbaum, a 25-year veteran of the Air Force from Iowa and a leader of the state’s Hero Flight group. “I’m about to just start pissing on the trees.”
The World War Two Memorial on the National Mall became a political battlefield, with conservatives excoriating Democrats for the monument’s closure as they escorted busloads of war veterans past bewildered park rangers and into the shuttered monument.
The scene could repeat itself when groups from the Honor Flight Network— a national charity that brings aging World War Two veterans to visit the national monument to the conflict they fought in— are scheduled to arrive at the massive outdoor memorial. Meanwhile, veterans have pondered staging a similar protest at the Lincoln memorial, said Jamie Miller, a five-year veteran of the Marine Corps and another organizer of the Iowa group that stormed the World War Two memorial. “We are thinking about jumping the Lincoln memorial too,” he said. “If Lincoln was a war memorial, I would do it in a heartbeat.”
The rally at the World War Two memorial is set to become a political sideshow to the larger shutdown debate, with Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus urging Republicans to show up at the event with American flags to support the veterans and attack Democrats and President Barack Obama. Those RNC supporters that show up will find a lot of Republican lawmakers— and at least one Democrat, Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill— at the memorial waiting for them.
The abundance of lawmakers worries Jim McLaughlin, national chair of Honor Flights Network, who said he wishes those visiting the memorials would keep politics out of it. He said the flights are planned months in advance at great expense to commercial airlines, so it wasn’t feasible for Honor Flights to shut down the trips as the government closed. “I know some of the folks that showed up this morning are attempting to politicize it and I don’t want that to happen,” said McLaughlin. He also defended the rangers who initially tried to keep the veterans out of the memorials. “The Park Service is doing what they were instructed to do,” he said. McLaughlin called on members who come to the World War Two memorial to support veterans, and not to use the opportunity to score political points. “I don’t want it to be political at all,” he said. “That part of it I don’t like. The fact that the veterans got in? I’m delighted.”
But in the politically charged atmosphere of the shutdown— with public outrage growing as the country becomes more aware of its lawmakers’ incompetence— it will be tough to keep partisanship out of even routine war memorial visits.
Republicans used the World War Two memorial event to blame Obama and the Democrats for the shutdown. About a dozen Republican members were on hand, according to McLaughlin— including Tea Party favorites like Minnesota’s Michelle Bachmann and Iowa’s Steve King— and he credited them with cutting the tape and moving the mobile fences that kept the public away from the shuttered memorial. But the organizers on the ground said some politicians were there for their own benefit. “Bachmann was not doing jack. She was not in the memorial in any way, and didn’t even touch a barricade,” said Nussbaum. “She was just standing in the front with a microphone in her mouth.”
Though they publicly shied away from politics, it was the Honor Flight organizers who reached out to the Republican lawmakers in most cases, not the other way around.
“We got on the horn with the King office and he sent an entourage,” said Miller. “Kudos to Steve King. He did us right.”
Illinois Republican Senator Mark Kirk, who plans to escort the Chicago veterans to the World War Two memorial, was also contacted by organizers of the event and asked to come. He signed on to the political messaging in a brief interview outside the World War Two. “It’s the President’s fault” the memorial is closed, Kirk said. “He’s having a long temper tantrum. He thinks he can instruct the country that we should all spend money and raise taxes just like he thinks and I think he’s absolutely incorrect. He’s shaking in his boots that people actually experience Obamacare and they will never vote Democrat again.” Kirk said “some Republicans have misinterpreted our mandate” in the shutdown fight, saying they “won” on the fight to “not raise taxes”. “The President thinks you have too much money and he wants it in the government hands,” Kirk said.
The organizer of the Missouri delegation, Dave Hall of the Franklin County, Missouri, Honor Flight, reached out to Republican Senator Roy Blunt to join the veterans and got a “maybe”. He didn’t reach out to McCaskill, but she’s coming anyway. “She came one time and a couple of other times. She just always had one reason or another not to come so I didn’t bother calling this time,” he said. “It’s not a Republican or a Democrat thing.”
And while the politics of the shutdown has so far appeared to favor Democrats, the memorial protests could serve as a flashpoint that turns public opinion against the White House.
The Daily Caller reported that a Mississippi Republican representative attempted to get a special pass for the Hero Flight veterans from the Department of the Interior, but was denied. A White House official reportedly told organizers: “It’s a government shutdown, what do you expect?” when asked about opening the memorial to the veterans. (The White House did not respond to BuzzFeed’s request for comment.)
Meanwhile, the veterans themselves are unimpressed with everyone in Washington.
“People here need to be thinking about serving their country and not their own sorry butts,” said one Iowa veteran, on hand for the rally. “I wish more of them came down today so I could tell them to get their heads out of their asses.”

Rico says that it's the little folks who say the biggest truths...

Not a tourist

Morgan Zalot has an article about a (surprise! not) drug shooting in Philly:

Police sources have said that the victim in Tuesday morning's fatal shooting in Center City was not a tourist who was taking pictures in LOVE Park, as some news reports initially indicated.
Sources said the 38-year-old man, who police said suffered a single gunshot wound to the abdomen when an alleged robber fired at him eight times, was involved with dealing drugs in the area. The Daily News is withholding the victim's name until police officially release it, but a check of his court record showed previous arrests for drug and gun charges.
Police said it was unclear exactly why he was with a group of people at the corner of 15th Street and John F. Kennedy Boulevard shortly after 2:30 am when gunfire erupted, but said that the shooting appeared to stem from a robbery. The victim was wounded once and rushed to Hahnemann University Hospital, where he later died.
The fatal shooting remains under investigation by homicide detectives.

Rico says that makes more sense...

The weasels still get paid

Philly.com has an AP article about the bastards who're still getting their money:

There's at least one constant in a government shutdown: the 532 members of Congress continue to be paid, at a cost of $10,583.85 per hour to taxpayers.
Lawmakers get their pay, even as hundreds of congressional staffers are sent home, packs of tourists are turned away at the Capitol, and constituent services in many offices grind to a halt.
House members and senators can't withhold their own pay even if they want to. Under the Constitution's 27th Amendment, lawmakers can only change the pay of those in a future Congress. Senators and Representatives are paid $174,000 a year; a handful of leaders make up to $20,000 more.
Lawmakers aren't oblivious to how it looks. Republican Senator Ted Cruz and others are pledging to donate their salaries to charity during the shutdown.
While lawmakers' paychecks will continue, the same isn't true for their aides and some support staff. Thousands of workers on Capitol Hill were sent home Tuesday. Those who weren't will still see their paychecks delayed.

Rico says it's unlikely that Congress would vote to cut the pay of even future Congresses, alas. Maybe it is time for torches and pitchforks again...

Politics for the day

David Espo has an AP article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about the shutdown:

For the first time in nearly two decades, the Federal government staggered into a partial shutdown after congressional Republicans stubbornly demanded changes in the nation’s health care law as the price for essential federal funding and President Barack Obama and Democrats adamantly refused.
As Congress gridlocked, President Obama said a “shutdown will have a very real economic impact on real people, right away”. with hundreds of thousands of federal workers furloughed and veterans’ centers, national parks, most of the space agency and other government operations shuttered.
He laid the blame at the feet of House Republicans, whom he accused of seeking to tie government funding to ideological demands, “all to save face after making some impossible promises to the extreme right wing of their party”.
House Speaker John Boehner, a Republican from Ohio, responded a short while later on the House floor: “The American people don’t want a shutdown and neither do I,” he said. Yet, he added, the new health care law “is having a devastating impact. ... Something has to be done.”
The stock market dropped on fears that political deadlock between the White House and a Tea Party-heavy Republican Party would prevail, though analysts suggested significant damage to the national economy was unlikely unless a shutdown lasted more than a few days.
A few minutes before midnight, Budget Director Sylvia Burwell issued a directive to Federal agencies to “execute plans for an orderly shutdown”. While an estimated eight hundred thousand Federal workers faced furloughs, some critical parts of the government— from the military to air traffic controllers— would remain open.
Any interruption in Federal funding would send divided government into territory unexplored in nearly two decades. Then, Republicans suffered grievous political damage and President Bill Clinton benefitted from twin shutdowns. Now, some Republicans said they feared a similar outcome. If nothing else, some Republicans also conceded it was impossible to use funding legislation to squeeze concessions from the White House on health care. “We can’t win,” said Senator John McCain, a Republican from Arizona.
“We’re on the brink,” Senator Barbara Mikulski said shortly after midday as the two houses maneuvered for political advantage and the Obama administration’s budget office prepared for a partial shutdown, the first since the winter of 1995-1996.
On a long day and night in the Capitol, the Senate torpedoed one GOP attempt to tie government financing to changes in Obamacare. House Republicans countered with a second despite unmistakable signs their unity was fraying— and Senate Democrats promptly rejected it, as well.
Defiant still, House Republicans decided to re-pass their earlier measure and simultaneously request negotiations with the Senate on a compromise. Some aides conceded the move was largely designed to make sure that the formal paperwork was on the Senate’s doorstep as the day ended.
Whatever its intent, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada, rejected it. “That closes government. They want to close government,” he said of House Republicans.
As lawmakers squabbled, Obama spoke bluntly about House Republicans: “You don’t get to extract a ransom for doing your job, for doing what you’re supposed to be doing anyway, or just because there’s a law there that you don’t like,” he said. Speaking of the health care law, that undergoes a major expansion on Tuesday, he said emphatically, “That funding is already in place. You can’t shut it down.”
Some Republicans balked, moderates and conservatives alike.
Representative Phil Gingrey of Georgia said it felt as if Republicans were retreating, given their diminishing demands, and Representative Scott Rigell of Virginia said there was not unanimity when the rank and file met to discuss a next move.
Yet for the first time since the showdown began more than a week ago, there was also public dissent from the Republican strategy that has been carried out at the insistence of lawmakers working in tandem with GOP Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.
Representative Charles Dent, a Republican from Pennsylvania, said he was willing to vote for stand-alone legislation that would keep the government running and contained no health care-related provisions. “I would be supportive of it, and I believe the votes are there in the House to pass it at that point,” the fifth-term congressman said.
Other Republicans sought to blame Democrats for any shutdown, but Dent conceded that Republicans would bear the blame, whether or not they deserved it.
Hours before the possible shutdown, the Senate voted 54-46 to reject the House-passed measure that would have kept the government open, but would have delayed implementation of the health care law for a year and permanently repealed a medical device tax that helps finance it.
In response, House Republicans sought different concessions in exchange for allowing the government to remain open. They called for a one-year delay in a requirement in the health care law for individuals to purchase coverage. The same measure also would require members of Congress and their aides as well as the president, vice president, and the administration’s political appointees to bear the full cost of their own coverage by barring the government from making the customary employer contribution.
“This is a matter of funding the government and providing fairness to the American people,” said Boehner. “Why wouldn’t members of Congress vote for it?”
The vote was 228-201, with a dozen Republicans opposed and nine Democrats in favor.
Unimpressed, Senate Democrats swatted it on a 54-46 party line vote about an hour later.
Obama followed up his public remarks with phone calls to Boehner and the three other top leaders of Congress, telling Republicans he would continue to oppose attempts to delay or cut federal financing of the health care law.
The impact of a shutdown would be felt unevenly. Many low-to-moderate-income borrowers and first-time homebuyers seeking government-backed mortgages could face delays, and Obama said veterans’ centers would be closed.
About eight hundred thousand federal workers, many already reeling from the effect of automatic budget cuts, would be ordered to report to work Tuesday for about four hours, but only to carry out shutdown-related chores such as changing office voicemail messages and completing time cards.
Some critical services such as patrolling the borders and inspecting meat would continue. Social Security benefits would be sent, and the Medicare and Medicaid health care programs for the elderly and poor would continue to pay doctors and hospitals.
US troops were shielded from any damage to their wallets when Obama signed legislation assuring the military would be paid in the in the event of a shutdown.
That had no impact on those who labor at other agencies. “I know some other employees, if you don’t have money saved, it’s going to be difficult,” said Thelma Manley, who has spent seven years as a staff assistant with the Internal Revenue Service during a thirty-year career in government. As for herself, she said, “I’m a Christian, I trust in God wholeheartedly, and my needs will be met.” She added, “I do have savings, so I can go to the reserve, so to speak.”

Rico says he's not sure God's got a dog in this fight...

Oops is, yet again, a political term

Michaelle Bond has an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about local politics, race, and stupidity (not necessarily in that order):

With the highly offensive text messages in hand, the two employees of the Coatesville Area school board reached out to the one person they thought could be trusted to do the right thing: Tonya Thames Taylor (photo).
The choice made sense. Taylor was both president of the local chapter of the NAACP and a member of the school board. She would become a key figure in the drama that led to the resignations of Superintendent Richard Como and athletic director Donato.
Taylor, however, has not escaped unscathed. During a contentious meeting of the school board last week that culminated in the board's accepting Como's and Donato's resignations, Taylor faced criticism from some in the audience who accused her of not moving quickly enough once she had the texts in hand on 18 August 2013.
The board has said it acted as swiftly as possible, given the circumstances. Taylor said the fact that the two employees entrusted the sensitive information to her shows how well regarded she is in the community, as an activist and member of the school board.
"It was a reflection that, in the face of this enormous betrayal, I was the one person they could reach out to and talk to," Taylor, a history professor at West Chester University, said in an interview.
Still, some in Coatesville argue that Taylor cannot be both a civil rights activist and a member of a board that some say might have been inclined to cover up the texting scandal. "That's nonsense," Taylor said. "Then you can never work in America if you work in civil rights." She noted that she was already a member of the school board when the local NAACP chapter elected her president.
Sylvia Washington, a member of the local NAACP, disagreed with Taylor's detractors and said she acted appropriately. "It would have been a conflict if she had gone to the NAACP. From a legal point of view, she did the right thing," Washington said. "To use this as a platform to target her while the real issues aren't being addressed is a disservice to the community."
As to criticism that there was a delay in acting on the text messages, Taylor said the board first had to confirm that they were authentic and were exchanged between Como and Donato. Not doing so could have exposed the board to legal action.
Criticism of Taylor has also come from some members of the local chapter of the NAACP, whose executive board met last night at Taylor's request. Hank Hamilton, a vice president of the local chapter, said some members questioned Taylor's leadership and her decision to hold the meeting, given her role on the school board.
"I didn't want to jeopardize the local chapter's authenticity and reputation," Hamilton said. "The public has their eye on us... The right thing is not to have a conflict of interest."
Elwood Dixon, an executive board member of the NAACP's local branch, said Taylor should have told the local chapter about the text messages before members heard about them in the news media. In his view, Taylor put the good of the school board before the good of the NAACP and the community. "I, myself, would like to see her go," he said. "I really don't think we have any leadership. And it's because of the conflict of interest."
Taylor is vehement in her defense. "I know that my actions through this entire process show I operated with integrity and fidelity in a way that was best for the district," she said.
The local chapter last night voted to accept a role in an inquiry by the NAACP's Pennsylvania chapter. It will set up any public meetings and collect any complaints filed against the school district.

Rico says doing the right thing is hard at the best of times...

Saving Microsoft

Doron Levin has a Time article about a CEO who may or may not take the job:

The skills that helped Alan Mulally lead a historic turnaround at Ford Motor Company could translate powerfully at Microsoft. Don’t think an automotive CEO (and former Boeing chief) could tackle the immense challenges facing Microsoft, as some reports suggest?
Consider the scale of difficulties that the number two US automaker faced when Mulally arrived in 2006. Bill Ford Jr. hired Mulally to rescue an automaker beset with perilous financial, competitive, market, labor, and leadership troubles. Ford was, and continues to be, faced with navigating its declining power in a highly complex industry that is technology-driven, global, highly regulated, and dependent on a vast workforce. (Not unlike Boeing, for that matter, where Mulally spent most of his career.) Without his stewardship, Ford could easily have faced Chapter 11 bankruptcy, as did General Motors and Chrysler.
Particularly impressive was the fact that Mulally showed up for work at Ford without a retinue of allies from Boeing. Quite often a CEO recruit wants his or her own people and causes initial ripples by firing or retiring company veterans.
At Ford, Mulally swiftly analyzed and deciphered the automaker’s conflicts, proposed remedies that were simple enough for everyone to understand and drove their execution. He commenced mandatory weekly meetings for top Ford officials, retired those who couldn’t function on the team he built, and held executives personally responsible for results.
He wasn’t shy about getting down in the weeds. When Ford marketing executives decided to drop Taurus as the brand name for its large sedan he demanded to know why. When the answers he got were unsatisfying, the Taurus name was restored. On his watch, he suspended dividends to shareholders— including the powerful Ford family— and sold off underperforming brands Volvo, Aston Martin, Land Rover, and Jaguar.
Mulally is also an engineer. As such he’s analyzed technical debates for his entire career, from fuselage design to the relative merits of electric and internal-combustion propulsion for cars. He oversaw a massive expansion of in-vehicle electronics, known as SYNC, in collaboration with Microsoft. Corporate spreadsheet software and game consoles would hardly be a stretch.
Like Ford and General Motors, Microsoft has tumbled from leadership of its industry. Encroachment by Apple and Google, as well as advances in cloud and mobile technology, have swiftly transformed the computing environment in which Microsoft was once the dominant player across categories. Presumably, Microsoft remains filled with smart, able and energetic executives waiting for a leader that can decode problems quickly and then focus, organize and, yes, even inspire.
The only real question is, does Mulally have the energy? At age 68, trim and athletic, he appears to be brimming with vitality and maintains an active schedule of appearances at charitable and company events. He’s also been awarded pay packages as large as thirty million dollars. And then there’s ego. I’m sure he has one, which he keeps well hidden. I’ve been present dozens of times as Mulally fields questions, some quite probing. He seems to enjoy deflecting negativity, always with a smile, his answers circling back to new Ford vehicle models or to the dedication of Ford workers to their company. Never have I heard him pat himself on the back or defend his accomplishments, however obliquely.
Discipline and selflessness in the face of tough conditions— at least to the outside world— will be keys to maintaining morale and inspiring the kind of performance and creativity Microsoft will need. If Mulally gets the job, don’t be surprised to see Microsoft shares jump on the news.

Rico says the guy's probably arrogant enough to think he can do the job...

Ah, the French

John Grady, a former managing editor of Navy Times and retired communications director of the Association of the United States Army, has an article at the Civil War Monitor about a little-known aspect of the Civil War:

In October of 1862, during a wide-ranging meeting, the French Emperor Napoleon III asked Commissioner John Slidell why the Confederacy didn’t have a navy capable of breaking the blockade. The two discussed French advances in armoring ships, and Napoleon III dropped broad hints to look to private French yards.
At the same time, Commander James D. Bulloch, Confederate naval agent in Great Britain, found that Lord Palmerston’s government was under increasing pressure from Washington to crack down on Confederate ship-buying on the island and in Ireland.
Slidell told Bulloch and Commissioner James Murray Mason in London that the Emperor was very encouraging when their discussion turned to arms and ships. There were two private French shipyards close to Great Britain, where Bulloch and Commander Matthew Fontaine Maury (photo), the famed scientist and member of the Confederate Secret Service,  were, and Paris, where Confederate Navy Captain Samuel Barron headquartered in the Grand Hotel. The two shipyards were Arman’s in Bordeaux and Vorduz in Nantes, both with reputations for quality and capable technology. Like Emile Erlanger, the banker who put together the sale of cotton bonds on European exchanges, the owners were “solid with the Emperor” and members of his parliament.
Bulloch needed the French yards more than ever. The British had seized Alexandra, a suspected commerce raider, in a Liverpool yard, and pressure in Parliament on Laird Brothers in Birkenhead mounted over the rams they were building. Laird had earlier delivered its “290” ship to the a front for the Confederates, who then named it the Alabama, and Charles Francis Adams, the United States minister to Great Britain, delivered document after document to Whitehall showing how British neutrality was being violated. Foreign Minister John Russell told Palmerston privately that it was time for a public investigation of the ships’ ownership. Both understood that way their government’s hands would be “clean” in a demonstration of neutrality. Bulloch knew that any investigation meant the rams, designed as commerce raiders with enough punch to attack Northern ports, would be lost.
For Slidell, Bulloch, and Maury, dealing with the French, the rush was on. To speed the work at Arman's shipyard, Bulloch agreed in April of 1863 to an elaborate fee system that retained but a hair's breadth of difference from bribery. There were to be four ships, built ostensibly for private trading companies working in China and San Francisco, and they were to be armed “to ward off pirates".
Maury’s work with the French was patriotic and personal. As he told the mayor of Halifax in a stopover on his way to Great Britain, his mission was to command an oceangoing warship; and if he did, Maury would best elderly Franklin Buchanan, a  Plucking Board member who forced his retirement in the 1850s, and first commander of CSS Virginia, and the aged Josiah Tattnall, its last commander, as a sea-going warrior. This was his best chance to do that.
In late April and early May of 1863, drawings on the new class— called the Cupola rams— were exchanged among Bulloch, Maury, and Marin Jansen, a Dutch naval officer and longtime friend of Maury’s. The three wanted ships, drawing about fifteen feet, that could smash through the Union monitors, something the Birkenhead rams couldn't do. To make the vessels doubly deadly, Maury attached a spar torpedo on the bow, like the classic Athenian trimenes and CSS Virginia.
When Union diplomats got word from bribed shipyard employees, they were stunned. Arman’s ironclads “would have posed the gravest peril to which the American Union has ever been exposed”. They would be the naval complement to Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. The diplomats rolled up their sleeves to sabotage the Confederate scheme.
After Mallory gave the go-ahead to buy in France, Maury crossed the channel in early June of 1863 to meet Arman. The Confederates envisioned a ship with "two screws, of 1,280 tons displacement, with 220 h.p., and eight guns for sixty thousand pounds.” The two screws allowed the ship to turn in a river or harbor and direct fire at targets on water and ashore. Delivery was expected in seven months. An optimistic Slidell wrote Mason: “I have no doubt that he can build on as good terms as in England, but will have no difficulties in carrying his ship to sea”.
Because the money was to come from the Erlanger loan, Maury needed the Confederate commissioners’ permission to proceed. After listening to his plea, Mason and Slidell, joined by former Mississippi congressman L.Q.C. Lamar, now commissioner to Russia, put one condition on granting the money: that the Emperor openly acknowledge the ships were for the Confederacy. That acknowledgment left full diplomatic recognition a baby's step away. What the three diplomats did not grasp was how much the political situation in France pivoted yet again. Great Britain’s reluctance to recognize the Confederacy after the Emancipation Proclamation caused France’s position to change once more. The Emperor would not go it alone in the American war.
In the Tuilieries on 18 June 1863 with the victory at Chancellorsville known, the nephew of the original Napoleon listened to Slidell, who at last got around to the meeting’s real purpose: declaring the vessels on the ways in Bordeaux was to be built openly for the Confederacy. To Slidell’s amazement, Napoleon III insisted construction could go ahead only if “their destination be concealed”.
While this did not bar the door to construction, it put a guard by it. The commissioners’ conditions crippled what was the Confederacy’s last best chance to take the naval war to Union ports. For Maury, try as he might, could not get enough funds, even from sales of existing cotton certificates, to proceed.
By early 1864, the French Ministry of Marine declared Arman’s ironclads could not go to any belligerent in the American war. A furious Bulloch wrote: “There never was any pretense of concealing them from the Emperor’s government, because, they were undertaken at its instigation.”
Arman and the Confederacy had gone too far together to let the ironclad program expire. Bulloch patched together an installment payment plan, and the yard was back at work on newly named Cheops and Sphinx, supposedly for  the British viceroy of Egypt, a scam too similar to the one used for the rams. The ploy failed.
Union authorities in France prematurely breathed a sigh of relief after they heard the news that one ironclad was going to Prussia and the other to Denmark, two European nations at war with each other.
A frustrated Bulloch explained that, if money could be regularly appropriated, he could build twenty such ships. However, “our finances will not admit of my contract for more than two at this time”. That one sentence summed up Confederate arms buying and shipbuilding abroad. There was never enough money to prolong the war until the North became too weary to fight.
Yet the saga of the French ships for the Confederacy was not over.  
In the spring of 1865, Bulloch, Maury, and Barron labored to get the CSS Stonewall, one of Arman’s powerful warships, into Confederate hands and under way from Denmark.  They succeeded, but it was too late. The United States minister to France was amazed that the Confederate Navy continued to put guns on ships and get them to sea even when their cause was lost.

Rico says the Stonewall (photo, below) ended up surrendering to the Spanish in Havana harbor in May of 1865, and he's trying to organize a Civil War Gasm trip to commemorate the event.

Fair's fair, except in politics

Rico says we wonder why the Cubans are pissed, and Charlotte Alter has a Time article about it:

When Americans hijacked planes to Cuba, the US government requested they be prosecuted as criminals, and Cuba complied. But when Cubans hijacked planes to America and the Cuban government made the same request, the US rejected it, with unexpected consequences:

When Americans had hijacked airplanes to Havana, the US government called them criminals, urged the Cubans to prosecute them, and Castro complied. Now Castro turned the tables. He called on the American government to prosecute Cuban hijackers with the same vigor with which Cuba prosecuted American hijackers.
The Carter administration totally rejected Castro's arguments. Far from prosecuting the newly arrived Cubans, it welcomed the hijackers as heroic freedom fighters.
In early March of 1980, following another hijacking, Castro issued a public warning: if the Americans went on giving Cuban criminals a 'hero's welcome,' he would be delighted to send them other lawbreakers as well. A month later Cuban guards were withdrawn from the Peruvian embassy in Havana, which also had followed a policy of granting indiscriminate asylum to all Cubans who asked for it. Within three days nearly eleven thousand Cubans had invaded the embassy compound. If the Peruvians were so determined to take in political dissidents, Cuban officials said, then let them deal with the consequences.
This was only the dress rehearsal for a much bigger drama. At the end of April of 1980, the Cuban government opened the little fishing port of Mariel, just outside Havana, to unrestricted navigation between Cuba and the United States. For years Americans had accused Castro of turning his country into a jail, his people into prisoners. Now Castro called the Americans' bluff: anyone who wanted to leave Cuba could leave. But would the Americans accept them?
Within days, the Straits of Florida were the scene of a Dunkirk in reverse, as tens of thousands of Cubans invaded the United States in small boats. These newcomers had no passports, no visas, no more legal right to enter the United States than any of the other illegal aliens US forces constantly intercepted, arrested and deported. Yet the Navy, Coast Guard, and Immigration and Naturalization Service did nothing to stop them. Castro not only had sprung his trap, he had baited it well. US officials had no choice but to let wave after wave of undocumented Cubans land in Florida: to turn them back would have proven Castro's claims that the United States was applying a double standard, and given him an even greater propaganda victory.
Officials in Washington tried to conceal their embarrassment. Officials in Havana made no effort to hide their glee. 'This was a very erroneous policy of the Carter administration, to consider everyone who wanted to leave Cuba for the United States as a heroic dissident,' Cuban vice-president Carlos Rafael Rodriguez told reporters. 'The United States is now paying the consequences.'
Washington may have made the mistake, but it was Miami that paid the price. Over the next five months, more than 120,000 Cubans sailed north to Florida from Mariel. After landing at Key West, they headed straight for Miami. But these 'heroic dissidents' didn't consist only of Castro's political opponents. Good as his word, he was also getting rid of Cuba's misfits and most hardened criminals.
Soon the Orange Bowl was packed with penniless refugees, all sleeping on bleachers, and with no possessions other than the clothes they wore and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of weapons. Tent City, a collection of leaky canvas shelters and portable toilets that sprang up beneath I-95, the city's main freeway, housed thousands more Marielitos.
Miamians, initially at least, were more ashamed than frightened to find tens of thousands of jobless, homeless, rootless foreigners camping out under their freeway. Soon Marielitos were invading South Miami Beach's welfare hotels, mugging its elderly Jewish retirees, robbing its delicatessens, staging cockfights in erstwhile kosher dining rooms. Young male prostitutes now patrolled Lummus Park, where, hitherto, elderly men in yarmulkes and beards had read the Talmud aloud. Taking to the free-enterprise system with a vengeance, other Marielitos turned the Deco district into a drug peddlers' paradise. Still others quickly mastered the intricacies of the food stamp and welfare programs.
Not all Marielitos found Miami so congenial. Dozens, disenchanted with life in America, hijacked planes back to Cuba, giving Castro new support for his assertions that the promise of America was false. Of the twenty-seven US airliners hijacked to Cuba between the beginning of 1981 and the end of 1983, twenty-four were seized by Cuban 'refugees' so eager to escape the United States they didn't care if returning home meant going to prison:
Cuban officials pointedly informed the US government that twenty-six persons had been tried, and convicted, for such offenses.
The majority of the Marielitos were poor and unskilled. Almost none were the valiant 'freedom fighters' both officials in Washington and people in Miami had imagined all those who wished to leave Castro's Cuba, by definition, had to be. But more than a hundred thousand out of the 125,000 were basically law-abiding folk. Thousands more— drug addicts, prostitutes, drifters, flagrant homosexuals, unruly teenagers— were 'criminals' only by Castro's socialist-puritan standards.
That, however, couldn't change the fact that many were criminals. Even though more than a thousand convicted felons were arrested upon arrival in the United States, Cesar Odio estimated that, of those who got through to Miami, ten thousand were 'violent types' and two thousand more were hard-core criminals. This was an estimate subsequent events amply bore out. Following the arrival of these 'refugees', crime in the neighborhoods abutting Tent City increased four hundred percent. As the Marielitos learned to find their way around the city, crime statistics, in every category from rape and murder to petty larceny and auto theft, soared everywhere else as well."

Rico says, as ever, that life is full of unintended consequences... 

Government shutdown begins

Charlotte Alter has a Time article about the shutdown:

The gears of the Federal government began grinding to a stop for the first time in seventeen years after Republicans and Democrats failed to break through Washington gridlock to keep the government running.
About eight hundred thousand of the federal government’s 3.3 million workers will be furloughed without pay, and the cumulative effect could cost the still-fragile economy about a billion dollars a week, CNN reports. National parks, many offices, and the Library of Congress are closing, though military operations and other functions deemed “essential” will continue as usual. President Barack Obama and members of Congress, who couldn’t come to an agreement to avert the shutdown, will continue to get paid. Obama’s health care reform law, which Republicans, using the threat of a shutdown, had fought desperately to defund or delay, continues to go into effect with the opening of health insurance exchanges on Tuesday.
House Republicans had continued into Monday night their efforts to stop Obamacare. But the White House and Senate Democrats never blinked, saying it amounted to “extortion” for Republicans to use a government-funding bill to stop a law that was passed by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court. “They’ve lost their minds,” Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said of Republicans.
Speaker of the House John Boehner, whose conservative caucus pushed him not to accept any government funding bill that didn’t make changes to the health care law, said he and and fellow Republicans didn’t want a government shutdown. But after the administration recently delayed an employer mandate that is part of the law, Republicans used their last attempt before a shutdown to delay the individual mandate that people buy insurance, which is at the heart of the law. “We believe that we should fund the government, and we think there ought to be basic fairness for all Americans under Obamacare,” Boehner said.
The question now is how long a shutdown will last. Public opinion polls indicate Republicans will bear most of the blame for any economic impact. The previous shutdown in 1995 lasted 21 days, but some Republicans were predicting a quicker end.
“We can’t win,” Arizona Senator John McCain said, according to The Associated Press.
In a video message to American troops just before the shutdown, Obama ensured military personnel that they would still be paid. He had earlier signed a bill guaranteeing them pay in the event of a shutdown. “If you’re serving in harm's way, we’re going to make sure you have what you need to succeed in your missions,” Obama said.
Furloughed workers at various agencies were instructed not to check their email or phones during a shutdown, the AP reports. Some workers at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Labor Department, and the Housing and Urban Development Department are coming into work Tuesday morning to change voicemails and set up out-of-office emails, but most workers are expected to be gone by midday.
NASA will be almost completely shuttered except for Mission Control, and the Smithsonian and the National Zoo will close. The FAA safety inspectors and National Transportation Safety Board employees will suffer drastic furloughs, and most of the workers helping to rebuild in Colorado after last month’s devastating floods will be eliminated.

Rico says his only question is, how long will it be before anyone actually notices? (But if we cut off Congress' payroll, this would end fast.)

History for the day

On 1 October 1961, Roger Maris of the New York Yankees hit his 61st home run of the season, breaking Babe Ruth's record of 60, set in 1927.