Civil War for the day

Fort Clinch in northeastern Florida.

Scrutiny

Michelle Higgins has an article in The New York Times about the TSA and vigilance:

Airline passengers have been asked to remove their shoes, shrink their toiletries, and submit to full-body scans. Now one more thing must be inspected: their middle initials.
In an effort to beef up security, the job of matching passengers’ names against terrorist watch lists is being transferred from commercial airlines to the Transportation Security Administration. The government initiative, known as Secure Flight, seeks to reduce the number of times passengers are misidentified as possible terrorists, in part by standardizing how names are matched, but also by now including age and gender in a passenger’s profile.
In the first phase, which was instituted earlier this year, the security agency asked airlines to begin collecting passenger names as they appear exactly, letter for letter, on government-issued IDs like passports and driver’s licenses. The second phase, effective 15 August, requests airlines to ask passengers for their gender and date of birth. In theory, the new rules are designed to help the Transportation Security Administration distinguish between a John X. Doe who is a 9-year-old boy, and a John Z. Doe who is a 34-year-old man on a terrorist list. But the new rules are also creating a lot of confusion, and a lot of misinformation is spreading among travelers. In particular, the new name requirement is causing some passengers to worry that they will be barred from flying. For example, if a plane ticket reads “Pat Jones” instead of “Patricia X. Jones”— as it appears on her passport— will she be barred? Or what if someone goes by a middle name? Or what if the middle initial was mistyped? In an effort to clear things up, here are answers to some common concerns:
Will I be turned away at the airport if my passport reads “Jonathan M. Smith,” but my reservation is under “Jon Smith”?
Transportation Security Administration officials say no. Under Secure Flight, the security agency checks a person’s name against the terrorist watch list shortly after a reservation is made, and usually well before someone gets to the airport and a boarding pass is printed, said Paul Leyh, the program director of Secure Flight. Once a person is cleared, Mr. Leyh added, Secure Flight gives the airline permission to issue that passenger a boarding pass. In other words, anyone with a boarding pass has already cleared Secure Flight.
What if someone prefers to go by his or her middle name, or some other variation from the name printed on their government-issued ID? Do they have to change their ID now?
The security agency is not asking passengers to change their IDs. What passengers are being asked to do is to travel under the name that is on the government ID. Slight differences should not be an issue, but the Transportation Security Administration says that providing all the information accurately (name just as it appears on the ID, date of birth, and gender) will reduce delays and misidentifications by more than 99 percent. To keep things consistent, you might consider changing the name on your driver’s license to match your passport, unless you always carry a passport as your government-issued ID for all of your travel, domestic and international.
But I heard you can be turned away by security if your name doesn’t match your ID. Is that true?
Yes, but that is already the case and it has nothing to do with Secure Flight. The agents at the security gate already check that the name on your boarding pass matches your identification. If there are significant differences (for example, if your passport says “Michelle Rose Higgins,” but you hate your first name, so your boarding pass reads “Rose Higgins”), you may be delayed for additional screening. But Transportation Security Administration says that isn’t because of Secure Flight. As before, whether you are allowed through will ultimately be left to the security agent’s discretion, so being courteous might not be a bad idea. To help cut down on the confusion, the agency is offering a video explaining Secure Flight on its home page and its own list of frequently asked questions.
What about children who don’t have an ID card or a passport?
Though children need a passport to travel internationally, the Transportation Security Administration does not require minors (seventeen and under) to present a photo ID to pass through security. Agents may ask the minor or accompanying adult to state the individual’s full name and date of birth instead. While an ID may help the minor avoid secondary screening, it is not mandatory.
Will Secure Flight affect my frequent flier programs?
It may. As Mike Weingart, president of Travel Leaders, a travel agency based in Houston, explained, “If I am Michael Nat Weingart on my passport, Michael N. Weingart on my driver’s license, and Mike Weingart on my frequent flier program, it won’t work.” To receive mileage credits, he said, the names must match, so he is advising clients to make sure all their travel profiles and IDs agree. As a pre-emptive step, passengers with different names on their frequent flier accounts should change them to match their IDs. Airlines often require a fax or a letter to make that request. Meanwhile, keep your boarding passes in case you need to submit a request for miles retroactively.
What if I’m mistakenly identified as someone on the terrorist watch list?
You can apply for a redress number through the Traveler Redress Inquiry Program of the Department of Homeland Security; you will be required to provide additional verification to clear your identity. Under Secure Flight, passengers can enter their redress numbers at the time of booking to distinguish themselves from people on the list.
Why isn’t my airline asking for my full name, gender, or birth date yet?
The Transportation Security Administration set 15 August as a target date for the airlines to begin compliance, but many airlines and travel agencies are still updating their reservation systems to accept the new information. So instead of a hard deadline, Secure Flight is being rolled out, airline by airline, over the next year or so.
All domestic airlines are expected to be in compliance by the first quarter of 2010 and international carriers by the end of 2010. Of the larger airlines, Delta is expected to be ready this weekend, Southwest by 1 October, and American sometime this fall. Some smaller carriers, like Allegiant Air based in Las Vegas, are already collecting full passenger names, gender, and birth dates.
So, for now, what will be the biggest change?
For most passengers, nothing, except having to provide your birth date and gender when booking a flight.

Not enough bang

Kelly Phillips, a petty officer third class in the United States Coast Guard, has an column in The New York Times about the military in Mexico:

Last weekend President Barack Obama, the Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, and the Mexican president Felipe Calderón, met in Guadalajara to discuss the state of the continent and what to do about the drug war in Mexico. Plenty of policy makers agonize over the issue, but having lived on a military base in Mexico as the wife of a Mexican officer, I know that the biggest problem is simple: under-equipped, unsupported, and absurdly underpaid sailors and soldiers.
I met my husband, Juan Castillo, on a tall ship called the Cuauhtémoc. At the time, I was serving in the California Army National Guard. For a while we wrote each other polite, professional letters, but when I was honorably discharged, we pursued a different kind of relationship, and married. Before we moved to our new home— a naval base an hour south of Tijuana— I naïvely assumed that life in the service was relatively uniform from one country to the next. It didn’t take long for me to find out how wrong I was.
In November 2005, we moved into a house on base infested with cockroaches. They spilled out of holes in the walls and watched us from the tops of the door frames. We paid for the fumigation ourselves and then for curtains for the bare windows. The kitchen had only a sink and one counter, so we bought our own stove and refrigerator. We paid for utilities— which included space heaters in the winter and gas tanks that lasted a month and ran out midshower, and we spent a fortune on phone cards for the pay phone down the street. In the summer, we just opened the windows for a breeze. A green mold grew all over our clothing in the closets, and a black mold grew on the concrete walls.
Members of the Mexican military do not receive the housing allowance that troops get in the United States, where electricity, water, and heat in military housing are also mostly paid for by the government. Even health care is unreliable in the Mexican military. When our base’s medical clinic ran short on medicine or services, which happened often, families had to pay to get treated off-base. When I was pregnant, I had to go elsewhere just for an ultrasound. The clinic equipment looked thirty years old, and we held monthly fund-raisers to help buy supplies like sheets.
As an officer, my husband earned about $1,000 a month. Although our family of four struggled financially, the sailors suffered much more. Their salaries, which despite recent increases are frequently under $600 a month, often have to support a wife, children, and the occasional elderly parent. Many of them make extra cash sending their children door to door selling tamales and cookies that their wives make. Some take on second and third jobs.
In the spring of 2007, a Mexican Marine walked up to my husband and said, forcefully, “Lieutenant Castillo, look at me!” Juan was surprised that the soldier had spoken so disrespectfully, until he noticed that something about the man’s bulletproof vest looked odd. Upon closer inspection, he saw that the Marine was not wearing a bulletproof vest at all, but instead had been given a life jacket that had been painted black to look like one. Juan was livid, and the next day he saw to it that the man was given real body armor, but he couldn’t have been the only soldier whose life was put at risk.
The M16s the sailors and marines were given weren’t much better. I’d spent enough days carrying one around in basic training to recognize that many of them were so badly maintained that they’d probably misfire if they were ever used. I had seen weapons in the same shape filled with concrete and used as dummies in training exercises in the United States.
This was the force that President Calderón deployed at the end of 2006 and early 2007 to rid the states of Michoacán and Baja California of corrupt police officers and fight the drug dealers directly. I thought it was the right move, despite the military’s shortcomings. The police force is notoriously corrupt, but the Navy and the Army are relatively free of infiltration by the cartels.
Still, a Navy official once told my horrified husband that two men had offered him a large sum of money in exchange for information about the Navy’s boat movements and patrol schedule. He told the men he didn’t have that information and that if they wanted it, they should go and ask the commandant of the base. When Juan tried to find out more, the official said, “The less involved you are, the safer you’ll be.”
A navy lieutenant had been kidnapped and murdered outside Acapulco not long before, and we were already frightened. He had worked in intelligence, which we’d all assumed made him untouchable. Eventually, Juan and I decided to move to the United States, where we now live.
What would make us all safer is higher salaries and better weapons for the Mexican military. After all, the cartels already have money and weapons, which they use against those who stand in their way— to buy the ones who can be corrupted and brutally murder the rest.

More bang you're dead

The New York Times has an article by Christine Haughney with more on the righteous shoot in Harlem:

Charles Augusto Jr. was more than busy when he started working at Kaplan Brothers Blue Flame in 1960 for $75 a week, shuttling between the kitchens of hotels like the Plaza and the sprawling apartments of Astors and Rockefellers to repair their stoves. But lately, restaurants have been closing more than opening. On Thursday, Mr. Augusto sold only one item, a deep fryer, and by 3 p.m. he and his two workers were settling into a sluggish afternoon in Harlem.
Four men broke the silence by pushing their way past the scrawled sign that states Abandon all hope ye who enter here. Ignoring Mr. Augusto’s pleas that there was no money around— the one customer had paid by check— the men, one armed with a gun, began to struggle with one of his workers and apparently wrote off Mr. Augusto as an old man not worth their trouble. Left alone, he grabbed a Winchester pump-action shotgun he had kept around since the store was robbed twenty years ago. He was not sure it would even work. It worked, three times. Seconds later, two of the robbers were dead, the other two seriously hurt, and Mr. Augusto was being hailed as a neighborhood hero.
He is one of the thousands of workers and residents who stayed put in Harlem through the neighborhood’s most troubled days, its sputtering revival, and the latest downturn. Just two years ago, Mr. Augusto, who became an owner of the company in 1978, and his partner turned down offers to sell their two buildings on West 125th Street, including the one that houses the store, for $9 million, an amount it would be unlikely to fetch today.
But Mr. Augusto, who is 72, was back at the store on Friday, in his navy blue work clothes. “I’ve been here fifty years,” he said. “I don’t really want to go nowhere. What do I do then?” he asked. “I’m not going to let these hoodlums run me out of here.”
The news of the shootings alarmed many of the business owners, workers, and residents who believed that Harlem had left its feeling of constant danger behind. A Citarella gourmet supermarket now does business a block away from Blue Flame. In 2007, Steven Buckwald, owner of Surroundings Flowers and Events, moved his commercial operations from 79th Street to a building around the corner from Mr. Augusto’s store because he thought the neighborhood had become safer. On Friday, he found himself handing over surveillance footage to the police. “It was just developing this safe, changed image,” he said. “I do hope that it’s a very temporary setback.”
Adrienne Knox, a 55-year-old school lunch helper, echoed the feeling of many residents— not to mention hundreds of comments on local blogs and newspaper websites— when she said that Mr. Augusto’s actions might give some criminals pause. “Even before the recession, there’s always been altercations in Harlem,” she said. “But what he did out there, nobody’s going to come around messing with nobody around here.”
While Mr. Augusto, who was born in Yonkers to parents of Dutch, Irish, English, and Italian descent, is by no means troubled financially, he described himself as a person whose life had dealt him his share of blows. About twelve years ago, his son committed suicide. Mr. Augusto called his years as a young man in the Coast Guard “the only time I had any fun in my whole life.” He said he has not been able to pay himself since January.
Mr. Augusto bought out half of the store in 1978 and kept its name— the actual Kaplan brothers had not owned it for years— to make sure he retained its longtime customers. Twenty years ago, the store was robbed at gunpoint, so his partner, Michael Gluck, got a license for a shotgun and had a gate added in front of the shop entrance. There were other events: a burglar broke in and burned through the safe, the store’s truck was hijacked, an employee was held up on the way to the bank. But Mr. Augusto stayed because he thought the neighborhood was improving. “It’s safer than it used to be during the ’60s,” he said. “Then, there were riots.”
He never made the business look desirable to robbers. The untiled floors are littered with cigarette butts. Some of the drawers of Mr. Augusto’s wooden desk are broken. The shelves are filled with dust-covered stove parts like burners, knobs, springs and deep fryers. He keeps a can of Raid and a fly swatter close.
Neighbors said Mr. Augusto was known to give young men temporary work loading and unloading trucks. About seventeen years ago, he hired a teenager named J. B. Now 35, J. B., who declined to give his full name, earns $25 an hour though, because business is slow, neighbors said, he spends much of his time sitting in front of the shop reading the Bible.
On Thursday afternoon, Mr. Augusto said, the four men set upon J. B. after Mr. Augusto told them there was nothing worth stealing. J. B., too, came to work on Friday, fielding calls from friends and from his sister, who asked if he would still move her to Virginia this weekend.
“If it weren’t for Gus… ” said J. B. He paused, then alluded to one of the men who had attacked him. “Better him with a tag on his toe than my mother planning a funeral for me.”
People from the neighborhood walked by Friday to study the blood and the bullet holes in the glass of the front door. Mr. Augusto received calls from a niece, a Garland Stove company executive and a stranger saying the city should have a parade for him. His wife also called from their home in Irvington, New York, in Westchester County, still worried about him. The news of the shooting did not bring him any new business.
On Friday, the police identified the two men who died as James Morgan, 29, and Raylin Footmon, 21, both of East Harlem. Bernard Witherspoon, 22, of East Harlem, and Shamel McCloud, 21, of East Elmhurst, Queens, were in stable condition at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center. The police said they would be charged with robbery.
Despite all the congratulations, Mr. Augusto said he wished that the men had left when he urged them to, and that he would not have had to use the shotgun. “I know the pain these people must feel,” he said, referring to the families of the two who were killed. “I don’t know what feels worse, now or when my only son died.”

Rico says the guy had a sign, dammit; they should've read it. But, in the end, it proved that, even in New York, the Second Amendment works...

History for the day

On 15 August 1947, India and Pakistan became independent after some two hundred years of British rule.

Too much reality

Rico says that, what with his upcoming trip to see his father and step-mother, this is all too relevant. (Click the image to make it readable.)

Woodstock, forty years on

USAToday.com has an article by John Barry of The Poughkeepsie Journal about Richie Havens, still alive and playing:
Nearly forty years to the day that he christened the crowning achievement of the 60s counterculture, Richie Havens returned to an open field in Sullivan County, New York on Friday to sing about a primal human condition, the pursuit of which binds us all.
"Freedom," Havens bellowed from the top of the hill upon which hundreds of thousands descended in August of 1969, for the Woodstock Music and Art Fair. "Freedom," he repeated.
At about noon, Havens reprised the song he famously performed as the opening act at Woodstock, on 15 August 1969. His performance— for the media and invited guests— of the song he improvised at one of the world's most famous festivals took place at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, which now sits on the site, and kicked off a weekend of fortieth anniversary festivities.

Civil War for the day

The 96th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment drilling at Camp Northumberland in 1861.

Bang, you're dead

NY1.com has an article about a righteous shoot, a rare thing in New York City:

A Harlem store owner is speaking out today, saying he feels sick about opening fire on four would-be robbers yesterday, killing two of them.
Police say Charles Augusto Junior, 72, pulled out his twelve-gauge shotgun and fired three blasts after one of the four suspects entered his restaurant supply store on 125th Street yesterday, announced a robbery, and began pistol whipping an employee. Two of the suspects were killed, and two others were injured, as they tried to leave the scene.
Investigators say Augusto, known as "Gus" to neighbors, will not be charged and is being treated as a witness. Police say Augusto told them he bought the gun after a robbery twenty years ago and had never fired it before. He says last night's incident could have been prevented. "How would you feel? This is terrible. This is really awful," said Augusto, who was back at work today. "I can't imagine it. Some young kids are dead because they're stupid."
"He saved our lives. He saved our lives, man," said store clerk J.B. "That's all I could say."
The two injured suspects were arrested and taken to the hospital. Charges against them are pending.

Scary woo-woos

Nadine Shubailat has an article on ABCNews.com about the new movie, District 9:

The movie trailer for District 9 is ominous and thrilling. Twenty-eight years ago, an alien spaceship arrived over Johannesburg, South Africa, and never left. In the movie, aliens and humans have been living side by side ever since, although not necessarily harmoniously. Aliens and South Africa made perfect sense to director Neill Blomkamp and star Sharlto Copley. "Being a sci-fi nut and being from Johannesburg, it is one of the most interesting cities in the world," said Blomkamp, who, like Copley, is South African. "There are levels of it that are science fiction. Rich, gated communities with impoverished masses living around them."
The aliens are refugees. 'Prawns' is the nickname given to them because of their physical resemblance to giant two-legged shrimp. They're set up in a make-shift ghetto called District 9. They're not allowed to leave because humans, so far, have not been able to figure out how to use their highly advanced weaponry. But the world's nations are arguing over what to do with them.
The aliens' welfare is subcontracted to the Multi-National United (MNU), whose objective is to figure out the devices. Their South African field operative, Wikus Van De Merwe (played by Copley), while going door to door evicting the aliens to an even smaller ghetto, contracts an alien virus, which changes his DNA, making him the missing link to unlocking alien technology.
Wikus, unlike the MNU, has a redemptive side, much like the Afrikaans in South African politics. Copley says, "The Afrikaner is usually very much typecast as a villain, people tend to forget that the majority of Afrikaners voted to make it happen [the change in government]."
The racial tension between humans and the alien refugees mirrors the racial tension in South Africa, most recently with the collapse of neighboring Zimbabwe, which resulted in the influx of illegal Zimbabwean refugees. "The blacks in South Africa living in poverty now have to contend with poor immigrants resulting in black on black xenophobia," Blomkamp said.
When Blomkamp and his team arrived in South Africa to film District 9, the racial tension exploded. "We woke up to news headlines of a rampaging murderous group, who had lynched and clubbed to death Zimbabwean immigrants," he said, describing it as a "live grenade" tossed into South Africa.
The refugee aliens of District 9 are insect-like humanoids, who create termite-like hives. "They have a different structure to their society than we do, which is engrained in them biologically," Blomkamp said.
He said he gave them some human characteristics because they "need to have a facial structure that the human psyche could empathize with."
Despite the political undertones, District 9 is not a movie that lectures. Action sequences are fast paced and exciting. Explosions are plentiful. But District 9 does not look like a typical sci-fi movie. "We presented most of the footage as news documentary or security camera footage," Blomkamp said. adding, "As Copley's character started to go through character arcs, we incorporated film." Blomkamp has high praise for his childhood friend, whom he cast as the star despite his lack of acting experience: "He's relentless. He'll do take after take after take. If we get the one I want, he'll still go, 'What about this? What about this?'" Copley said Blomkamp made the experience easy for him as a director.
District 9 was born from the demise of Halo, which was based on a sci-fi futuristic video game published by Microsoft Game Studios. Renowned Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson asked Blomkamp to direct Halo for him. But the project collapsed because of fights between Universal and Fox.
"It wasn't Microsoft's fault," Blomkamp said. He was devastated by the film's collapse, but rallied when Jackson told him to "take all the momentum of this and make 'District 9,'" which Jackson would then produce. "It worked well for me," Copley said.
District 9 was the hit of Comic-Con, to the relief of Blomkamp. "I went straight from making the film to Comic-Con," he said of the annual pop culture convention in San Diego. "You reach a point when you have no context. You don't know if it's good or not. Going to Comic-Con and being received well was a giant sign of relief because they're the most important audience. I felt good."
Copley agreed. "It was the first time I watched the whole film together with fans who would kill you if it's wrong. I survived the experience. People went crazy. You knew they were liking it. We kind of got swamped by people who wanted autographs." This was particularly gratifying for Copley, who had to endure exhausting and gross scenes while filming the movie. "As I was lying in a sewer with real feces, I asked Neill 'when does the fame part start?" Copley said. The fame part begins now. District 9 opens today in theaters nationwide.

Rico says he'll go see it. Might well be another Alien...

The big bucks

Rico says that, when he worked at Claris, we always said the way to make the big bucks was to site-license the People's Republic of China. This, from an article by Iris Hong at BusinessWeek.com, is even better:

Insiders at China Unicom's Guangdong subsidiary revealed that the operator has purchased five million iPhone W-CDMA handsets for 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) and the customized iPhones will debut in China next month. Analysts believe that the iPhone would become a powerful tool for China Unicom to attract young mobile users from China Mobile, the market leader.
Zhou Youmeng, deputy general manager of Guangdong Unicom, told China Business News that the first batch of iPhones will be unveiled in China Unicom's 3G kiosks in Carrefour supermarkets as well as other key service outlets in September.
Yu Zhaonan, manager of Guangdong Unicom's consumer customers department, said that China Unicom purchased the iPhones from Apple at 2,000 yuan ($292.60) per unit. The carrier would sell the iPhones at slightly more than the purchasing price, with the 8GB version at about 2,400 yuan ($351) per unit and the 16GB version at 4,800 yuan ($702), he said.
The monthly rate for iPhones would be similar to the other 3G mobile phones available on the market, but China Unicom may also provide free iPhones to customers that prepay certain amount of calling fees, Yu said.
About two weeks ago, Shanghai Securities News reported that China Unicom has signed a three-year agreement with Apple for distributing iPhones exclusively in China, citing an informed source. However, China Unicom dismissed the rumor right away, saying that the two parties were still in negotiation.
Greg Joswiak, Apple's VP of iPhone and iPod product marketing, reportedly conducted a final round of negotiation with China Unicom over the iPhone on 4 August.
Market researcher iSuppli claimed earlier this year that Apple spends just around $173 to manufacture a unit of the 3G iPhone. The 8GB 3G iPhone is now priced at only $99 in the US with a two-year AT&T contract.

Hee, hee, hee...

Paul McDougall has an article at InformationWeek.com about more legal problems for Microsoft:

The judge who banned Microsoft from selling its Word document program in the U.S. due to a patent violation tacked an additional $40 million onto a jury's $200 million verdict because the software maker's lawyers engaged in trial misconduct, court records reveal.
In a written ruling, Judge Leonard Davis, of the United States District Court for Eastern Texas, chastised Microsoft's attorneys for repeatedly misrepresenting the law in presentations to jurors. "Throughout the course of trial Microsoft's trial counsel persisted in arguing that it was somehow improper for a non-practicing patent owner to sue for money damages," Davis wrote. The judge cited a particular incident in which a Microsoft lawyer compared plaintiff i4i, Inc. to banks that sought bailout money from the federal government under the Troubled Asset Relief Program. "He further persisted in improperly trying to equate i4i's infringement case with the current national banking crisis, implying that i4i was a banker seeking a 'bailout'," Davis said.
The jury earlier this year found that Microsoft Word violates an XML editing patent held by Toronto-based i4i. On Tuesday, Davis increased jurors' $200 million verdict against Microsoft to $240 million due to the trial misconduct and other factors.
"All these arguments were persistent, legally improper, and in direct violation of the Court's instructions," Davis said. "Therefore, Microsoft's trial misconduct also supports enhancement," the judge wrote. Davis also imposed roughly $50 million in additional costs to the verdict, bringing the total that Microsoft must pay to i4i to about $290 million. Davis also enjoined Microsoft from selling or supporting new copies of Word 2003 or Word 2007 in the United States. The ban takes effect in 60 days unless Microsoft wins an appeal or reaches a settlement with i4i.
A Microsoft spokesman insisted that the i4i patent is invalid and vowed that the company would appeal the ban on Microsoft Word sales.

Rico says it couldn't happen to a nicer company...

Rico has seen the future, and it's beautiful

Michael Scalisi has an article in PCWorld.com about the upcoming Apple tablet:
According to Gizmodo, an insider has revealed that the Apple tablet is indeed real, and mostly what people are expecting: A 10-inch touch-screen tablet running the iPhone OS, priced somewhere between $700-$900. However, there's a twist. The tablet can act as a secondary screen/touchpad for Apple computers. This makes it different from and more appealing than every tablet that has come before. Multiple monitors have gained tremendous appeal over the years, and it's not hard to see why. Having a secondary monitor allows you to reference one thing while manipulating data on another. The more screens the better I say. A lightweight tablet that can act as a secondary monitor is perfect for mobile professionals that need the extra real estate. Because it's based on the iPhone, its hardware will be lighter and thinner than if it were based on the Intel Core 2 platform. The overall device should be about as portable as existing portable usb monitors like those by Mimo. By making the tablet thin and light, mobile users won't mind slipping in their notebook case with their laptop. By further capitalizing on the tablet by using it as an input device, the Apple tablet becomes even more appealing. I'm a fan of the multi-touch input device used on MacBook pro laptops, and having a multi-touch display as an input device opens up a whole realm of possibilities, especially for graphic artists.
While the leaked information specifies that the screen/touchpad functionality works with Macintosh computers, I think Apple would be foolish to not market the device to the PC crowd as well. A stand-alone tablet is a hard sell at $700-$900, and the real value comes when it's mated with a computer. Since the PC market is much bigger than the Mac market, Apple stands to sell many more devices by appealing to the broader audience.
Since one of the rumors that has been thrown about is a potential subsidy deal with Verizon for 3G data, I can't help but wonder if the tablet can be used as a tethering device for a laptop. For lots of people, this might seal the deal. I find it hard to justify signing another wireless contract for web-surfing on a tablet or netbook; it becomes a better value proposition if internet access is also extended to a laptop. While I originally thought that an Apple tablet would be on overpriced toy, it sounds like Apple might be intent on making the tablet a valuable asset for the mobile professional.

Rico says he'll have one, thank you, even at that price; he'll just have to sell some more of his gubs.

Another non-surprise

According to an article by Jared Newman on MSNBC.com, Palm is being really stupid:

Is your Palm Pre spying on you and sending your GPS coordinates and more back to the Palm mothership on a daily basis? According to mobile application developer Joey Hess, that's exactly what is happening. He asserts on his personal blog that data on the location and app used on the Palm's Pre smartphone is being sent to Palm. The reports of Palm snooping on its customers are growing in volume within the blogosphere, with many taking the allegations seriously. To be clear, the allegation can not be confirmed.
Palm responded to our request for comment with this statement:

"Palm takes privacy very seriously, and offers users ways to turn data collecting services on and off. Our privacy policy is like many policies in the industry and includes very detailed language about potential scenarios in which we might use a customer's information, all toward a goal of offering a great user experience. For instance, when location based services are used, we collect their information to give them relevant local results in Google Maps. We appreciate the trust that users give us with their information, and have no intention to violate that trust."

Hess says he took a close look at the code in his Pre's WebOS and found that the phone was periodically sending information to Palm. Some of this data is fairly benign, such as information on WebOS crashes. Things get a little freakier, however, if you believe Hess when he asserts Palm is gathering users' GPS information, along with data on every app used, and for how long you used it. This information gets uploaded to Palm on a daily basis, Hess claims.
Without the capability to hack into WebOS, there doesn't seem to be a way to disable this alleged communication, Hess says. According toPalm's terms and conditions for the WebOS, there is nothing that mentions this exact type of data collection and reporting. However, a section of Palm's terms does say it has the right to "collect, store, access, disclose, transmit, process, and otherwise use your Registration Data, account, or Device information," and may also do the same with your location data to provide location services.
The terms also note that Palm can disclose "any information" to law enforcement authorities, so keep that in mind if you're on the run from the law. Compared to the iPhone, which allows users to block location tracking by switching off the phone's Location Services, Palm seems to be prying from the moment you turn on the phone's map service.
Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility, said he's still collecting information and didn't want to comment on Hess' report until he could confirm it. But Weinstein says he's generally wary of usage terms and conditions that allow data collection, especially if the user can't opt out through the device. He said location data is particularly sensitive, because it can be requested or subpoenaed. "Any time there's automatic reporting that includes what users are doing, and there hasn't been some kind of affirmative acknowledgment... that opens up some questions," he said.

Rico says he'll stick with his iPhone, thank you very much...

So long ago, now

Rico says this was his first post on this blog; it seems like a whole 'nuther life ago:

20 January 2006
First word
Blogging virgin that I am (though hardly that in almost any other respect), this one will be short. I've had monthly columns before, and they're hard because you have to write enough words to fill the space. We shall see how this experiment turns out. As Bette put it, fasten your seatbelt; it's going to be a bumpy night.

Tough times require tough men

Carlotta Gall has an article in The New York Times about the campaign, the one in Afghanistan:

Whether wrapped in a shawl for a televised debate, sitting on a dirt floor with a shopkeeper, or thundering over speakers in a dust storm, Ashraf Ghani, the most educated and Westernized of Afghanistan’s presidential candidates, is shaking up the campaign before Thursday’s election in unusual ways. A former finance minister with a background in American academia and at the World Bank, Mr. Ghani, 60, says he is trying to change politics in Afghanistan. Using television and radio, Internet donations, and student volunteers, as well as traditional networks like religious councils, he is seeking to reach out to young people, women, and the poor, and do the unexpected: defeat President Hamid Karzai.
Mr. Ghani’s national support is hard to gauge— one recent poll put it at four percent— and he probably remains an outsider in the race, trailing Hamid Karzai and his main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, both of whom have larger power bases. Yet Mr. Ghani is elevating the debate with a focus on policy and a detailed plan for reform, challenging the Afghan electorate to think beyond the status quo. “The people, the nature of mobilization, the talk has changed, anyplace I go,” he said in an early morning interview at his home in Kabul, before setting off by helicopter to campaign in the provinces. “Afghans have a different expectation of leadership today than they ever had.”
A two-hour live television and radio debate between Mr. Ghani and Mr. Abdullah on 23 July, watched and heard by over ten million people, has created a huge change in thinking, Mr. Ghani said. Mr. Karzai declined to participate, something his two opponents have used against him. Since the debate, a flow of student volunteers has come forward to work for his campaign, Mr. Ghani said, and people from all walks of life— pilots, merchants, professors— have engaged him in detailed discussion of his ideas.
Articulate in several languages, Mr. Ghani has written two books, one titled Fixing Failed States, and the other a detailed plan on how to lift Afghanistan out of poverty and instability within ten years, which is essentially his election manifesto.
Mr. Ghani has been one of the most influential figures involved in building the current Afghan state. Appointed finance minister in 2002, he instituted a centralized revenue collection scheme, and oversaw the flow of billions of dollars of foreign assistance into the war-torn country. Yet his scrupulousness made him enemies and, disillusioned with official corruption and Mr. Karzai’s leadership, he left the cabinet in 2004. Such is his experience, and his support in Washington, that Mr. Ghani is among the contenders mentioned to fill a strong executive position under the president that is being proposed by American officials to strengthen the government’s performance should Mr. Karzai win another term.
Mr. Ghani, whose campaign has hired the political strategist James Carville as a consultant, says it is too early to discuss post-election scenarios. He was once a close adviser to the president, but his distaste for Mr. Karzai’s way of running things is deep-seated, and he has been an outspoken critic of the way politics have been conducted in Afghanistan. He has been the most vociferous of any candidate in challenging Mr. Karzai’s overstaying his constitutional mandate, which was extended in order to hold the election on 20 August, and also in accusing the president of using government resources and officials to promote his campaign. And he has castigated the election organizers, both foreign and Afghan, for allowing fraud and manipulation to occur unchecked. He has also rejected the backroom deal-making for which Mr. Karzai has been strongly criticized, and has refused overtures from Mr. Karzai to give up his candidacy and join his campaign, something a number of other prospective candidates have done.
At election rallies, he vows to curb government corruption and so find the revenue to create a million jobs and a million houses. He promises better education for the young, by increasing the number of mosques and madrasas to provide a general education at the village level. He also proposes adding universities and women’s colleges, as there are thousands more students than universities can accommodate. And he lays out how to develop Afghanistan’s natural resources and create economic growth with Afghan labor, and bring justice and peace through local structures. He makes gibes that Mr. Karzai has to block streets when he travels through the city, or hide behind the palace walls, and suggested at one rally that Mr. Karzai and his entire cabinet go to live in the Pul-i-Charki jail. He accuses him of losing the trust of the people by lying to them.
He also promises to return sovereignty to Afghanistan, by closing the detention center at Bagram, the United States air base outside Kabul, within three years. And he advocates negotiating a cease-fire with the Taliban, prior to a process of reconciliation. “Afghan blood is being spilt,” he said at a rally in a Kabul suburb. “We want to stop it and douse the fire.”
His main drawback is his aloofness. When serving in the cabinet, he came under criticism that, after living away from Afghanistan for nearly half his life, he was out of touch with the people and abrasive in his dealings with his fellow Afghans.
He left the country in the 1970s to study at the American University of Beirut, went on to earn a doctorate in anthropology at Columbia in 1982, and taught at Johns Hopkins University. In 1991, he joined the World Bank. Like other Western-educated technocrats, he encountered on his return the resentment of those Afghans who had had no chance to leave and had suffered thirty years of war and privation. But he says that is changing. He has sought to get closer to the Afghan people by holding an open house for the last eighteen months and says he has received over 100,000 people from all over the country, which has informed the development of his policies. “It has been the largest seminar in my life and I have been the sole student,” he said. “I connect back to the people because I have heard them, and I have heard very harsh things. It’s been a relationship.”
Critically, ethnic Pashtuns who make up the largest ethnic group and have traditionally ruled Afghanistan, now see that there is a strong alternative to Mr. Karzai, he said. Mr. Ghani, like Mr. Karzai, is Pashtun. “Pashtuns in the north have reassessed and I think they are going to abandon Karzai,” Mr. Ghani said. He claimed, too, that groups in the western province of Herat and in the southern provinces, where the Taliban insurgency is strongest, were also moving away from the president. “There’s a swing,” Mr. Ghani predicted, with election day fast approaching. “There’s a massive swing.”
Dawoud Ahmadi, a spokesman for the Helmand provincial authorities, said a roadside bomb exploded next to a van carrying civilians, killing eleven, including two women, in the province’s Gereshk district. “The Taliban have planted mines everywhere,” Mr. Ahmadi said. “That’s why, most of the time, civilians are the targets.” The Taliban offered no immediate comment on that explosion or another in Mirwais Mina, near Kandahar, that killed the three children. Some reports said the children, ages eight to twelve, were playing with a bomb they had found on the side of a road. Abdul Ahmad, a police official, said that it seemed that the bomb had been planted recently “in an area where children and people are walking freely.” An American serving with NATO forces in the south was also killed Thursday, The Associated Press reported, quoting a military news release that attributed the death to “a direct fire attack.”

Georgia on my mind

The New York Times has an article by Thom Shanker about the latest in-your-face-Ivan deal to use Georgian troops in Afghanstan:

The United States is resuming a combat training mission in the former Soviet republic of Georgia to prepare its army for counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan, despite the risks of angering Russia, senior Defense Department officials said Thursday. The training effort is intended to prepare Georgian troops to fight at NATO standards alongside American and allied forces in Afghanistan, the Pentagon officials said. Russian officials have been informed, American officials said. The training should not worry the Kremlin, they said, because it would not involve skills that would be useful against a large conventional force like Russia’s. “This training mission is not about internal defenses or any capabilities that the Georgians would use at home,” said Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary. “This is about the United States supporting Georgia’s contribution to the war in Afghanistan, which everybody can recognize is needed and valued and appreciated.” At the same time, officials in Washington said, the Georgians should not see the new training mission as a military counterweight to Russian influence along Georgia’s borders and within the separatist regions they fought over.
A year ago, the republic’s brief, disastrous war with Russia froze a similar American training operation that prepared Georgian troops for deployments to Iraq. The new training mission is scheduled to begin 1 September. The first members of a Marine Corps training and advising team are to arrive in Georgia on Sunday or Monday, and the number of trainers will fluctuate between 10 and 69 over the next six months. Georgia has pledged an army battalion— about 750 troops— to Afghanistan, and it should be ready to deploy next spring, perhaps by March.
It is unlikely that Kremlin officials could offer a convincing argument that training a single Georgian Army battalion amounted to a threat to Russian security. But the new training could be seen as a launching pad for increased military relations among Washington, NATO members, and a former Soviet republic that aspires to NATO membership.
The Kremlin vehemently opposes any extension of NATO’s defensive umbrella over former Soviet republics, in particular Georgia and the Ukraine. At the same time, some NATO officials view Georgia’s behavior before the war last year as needlessly provocative, and have said it harmed the country’s chances for alliance membership.
Shortly after taking office, President Obama ordered the doubling of American forces in Afghanistan, to about 68,000, and the administration has sought, with little success, to persuade NATO allies to add to their combat forces. In contrast to some NATO allies that impose restrictions on where their forces can go and what they can do in Afghanistan, the Georgian military will send its troops with none of these so-called caveats, a decision viewed by American officials as intended to indicate Georgia’s worthiness for potential alliance membership.
Officials said Georgia’s troops would probably be assigned to operations in areas of Afghanistan under Marine command, so the training mission begins that partnership. The United States has so far rebuffed requests from Georgia to rearm its military after its humiliating defeat by Russia. When the war began, Georgia recalled a brigade serving in Iraq and never sent it back, and the Americans training the Georgians returned home.
Georgian troops that join the Afghan mission will bring their own small-caliber weapons, but the United States and other allies will supply vehicles, including armored transports, as well as logistical support and daily supplies, according to senior Defense Department officials. Any weapons provided to the Georgians would stay in Afghanistan, the officials said.
Some military ties between the United States and Georgia resumed after the war with Russia, but they focused on officer development, improvement of command-and-control systems, and other such areas, officials said. There have been visits by senior American military officers and government leaders — most recently Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. — and NATO has conducted some military exchanges.
Administration officials familiar with discussions with Russia said American officials emphasized that Russia had endorsed the international security assistance mission in Afghanistan. For example, Russia allows overflight rights and land access for the coalition supply mission for Afghanistan.
A senior Pentagon official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to describe the diplomatic communications with Russia, acknowledged that “this is delicate for us— because while we want to be supportive of the Georgians, and look forward to their contribution in Afghanistan, we don’t want to be perceived incorrectly as supplying lethal capabilities that would elicit a Russian response.”

Quote for the day

Words you though you'd never hear, from an article in The New York Times:

China has tried to separate its push into the business arena from domestic politics, but lately when politics and business have collided, business has won.

Crashes aren't good

Alan Baker, Russell's son, has an article in The New York Times about the war between the FAA and the NTSB over airline safety. Go read it by clicking the post title.

History for the day

On 14 August 1945, President Truman announced that Japan had surrendered unconditionally, ending World War Two.

Civil War for the day

Captain Edmund Bainbridge's Battery A, 1st U.S. Artillery, at the siege of Port Hudson, Louisiana, in 1863.

Pirates for the day

In honor of the resurgence of piracy in the world, a blog about pirates (or you can buy my book on the subject).

Wacky people with gubs in their hands

Wacky people with too much time on their hands

Performed in the Central Station of Antwerp, Belgium, for reasons known only to the Belgian television station that commissioned it.

Civil War for the day

Lieutenant General Ambrose P. Hill, CSA

Civil War for the day

Cannon at Fort Clinch, Florida

Still no Gates OS, sorry

Rico says he's pissed at Apple of late, what with MobileMe eating all his contacts (he knows, he knows, he should've made a backup more recently than 2006) and Mail still refusing to receive new messages (though it will send them, go figure). But it's still better than that Windows crap, no matter what the ladyfriend says...

More Civil War for the day

Rico says he finally found a scan of this illustration for the George Byram story, The Chronicle of the 656th, originally published in Playboy magazine in March of 1968. If you've never read it, find a copy and read it. (Or find a copy of the out-of-print book The Fantastic Civil War, published by Baen Books in 1991 and distributed by Simon & Schuster.) The story's great (especially if you like science fiction and the Civil War, like Rico), but the photo's the kicker; look close and you'll see why... (Yes, the anachronisms are explained in the story.)

Civil War for the day

Rico says it's what he and a group of his friends will be doing between 12 April 2011 and 12 April 2015 and later, as events permit. (With apologies to Mr. Hodge, who created the concept, as described in Tony Horwitz' splendid book .)

Another good one gone

CNN has the story of the death of Eunice Kennedy Shriver:

Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the sister of President John F. Kennedy and a champion of the disabled who founded the Special Olympics, died Tuesday, the Special Olympics said. She was 88. Born on 10 July 1921 in Brookline, Massachusetts, Shriver was the fifth of nine children to Joseph P. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. She emerged from the long shadow of siblings John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Senator Edward M. Kennedy as the founder of the Special Olympics, which started as a summer day camp in her backyard in 1962. Today, 3.1 million people with mental disabilities participate in 228 programs in in 170 nations, according to the Special Olympics.
Shriver's husband, R. Sargent Shriver, and her five children and their spouses and all of her nineteen grandchildren were with her when she died, the Special Olympics said in a statement. "We are tremendously grateful for the extreme outpouring of support and prayer from the public as we honor our beloved founder," Special Olympics President and Chief Operation Officer Brady Lum said Tuesday in a statement. "Today we celebrate the life of a woman who had the vision to create our movement. It is an enormous loss, but I know we can rest assured that her legacy will live on through her family, friends, and the millions of people around the world who she touched and transformed."
Even before launching the Special Olympics in 1968, Shriver had established a reputation as an advocate for the disenfranchised and a trailblazer for the rights of the disabled through a variety of roles in the private and public sector.
She also persuaded the Kennedy family to go public with one of its most guarded secrets. In September 1962, Shriver wrote an article about her mentally disabled sister, Rosemary, which was published in The Saturday Evening Post.
At an event honoring her in 2007, Shriver spoke of her life: "Most people believe I spent my whole life really interested in only one thing and that one thing is working to make the world a better place for people with intellectual disabilities. As important as it has been, it is not the whole story of my life. My life is about being lucky as a child to be raised by parents who loved me and made me believe in possibilities. It is also about being lucky to have had these extraordinary children. ...It is also about being especially lucky to have a wonderful husband." At the same event, Edward Kennedy paid tribute to his sister, saying she had inherited the best qualities from his parents, including compassion. "She had that sense no one should be left out or left behind. She picked this up, obviously, at a very early age. All of us could see that special relationship that Eunice had with Rosemary."
After receiving a degree in sociology from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, Shriver worked for the U.S. State Department in the Special War Problems Division from 1943 to 1945, helping former prisoners of war readjust to civilian life.
From 1947 to 1948, she worked for $1 at the Department of Justice as executive secretary for the National Conference on Prevention and Control of Juvenile Delinquency. In the early 1950s, she was a social worker at a federal prison for women in West Virginia and in juvenile court in Chicago, Illinois.
She married Robert Sargent Shriver Jr., a World War Two veteran who was building his career as a lawyer and lifelong public servant, in 1953. The couple had five children, including California's first lady, Maria Shriver.
Sargent Shriver had roles in many top government initiatives of the 1960s, including Head Start and the Peace Corps. He also worked with his wife on the Special Olympics. He ran President Johnson's War on Poverty and was U.S. ambassador to France from 1968 to 1970. He was Democrat George McGovern's running mate in the 1972 presidential election.
In 1957, Eunice Shriver became executive vice president of the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, which was established in 1946 to honor the family's eldest son, killed in World War Two, to research the causes of disabilities and to improve the treatment of disabled people.
Her work with the foundation paved the way for a number of initiatives furthering the cause of disability advocacy. In 1962 she helped establish the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, a government agency that conducts research on topics related to the health of children, adults and families that was named after Shriver in 2008.
Disturbed by the treatment of disabled people in institutions across the country in the 1950s and 1960s, Shriver began inviting disabled children to a summer day camp, called Camp Shriver, on her farm in Maryland. Her vision expanded over the years, and in July 1968 the first International Special Olympics Games were held in Chicago. She also assisted in the establishment of a network of university-affiliated facilities and intellectual disabilities research centers at major medical schools across the United States, including centers for the study of medical ethics at Harvard and Georgetown universities in 1971.
In 1981, Shriver began the Community of Caring program to reduce disabilities among babies of teenagers. That led to the establishment of Community of Caring programs in 1,200 public and private schools from 1990 to 2006.
Along the way, Shriver earned worldwide accolades and awards, including the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, the World Sports Humanitarian Hall of Fame's Founder's Award and nine honorary degrees. In 1995, the U.S. Mint issued a commemorative coin with her portrait. The Mint says that made her the first living woman to be depicted on an American coin. In 2009, a painting of Shriver with several Special Olympians was added to the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery.
Her health began to fail in recent years, landing her in the hospital in 2005 after a minor stroke and hip fracture. She was hospitalized again in 2007 for an undisclosed ailment.
In addition to her husband and daughter, Shriver is survived by her sons, Robert Sargent Shriver III, Timothy Perry Shriver, Mark Kennedy Shriver, and Anthony Paul Kennedy Shriver.

History for the day

Rico says he's got history of his own, and this is an interesting part of it: Friday Night in Grants, New Mexico, circa his sabbatical in 1995:

I ambled across the width of the four lane business loop off Route 40 a little after nine, looking for what the skinny, bucktoothed girl at the front desk of the freshly remodeled Days Inn had described as the ‘honkytonk across the street’.
It was called Harry’s, off the lobby of the freshly remodeled Best Western, and you got your coupon at the door that entitled you to some sort of prize drawing held, according to the short fat guy who tore the red pasteboards apart, ‘at ten-thirty, eleven-thirty, and twelve-thirty’.
The place was still pretty empty when I went in, but the duded-up couples were flocking through the doors behind me. The women were the usual Big Hair crowd, with slightly garish makeup and pants too tight across butts too big, but it was the men who stood out.
The West is the last refuge, for white men at least, of the American Dandy. Here, in the Big Hat and Buckle belt, they can still display all the stereotypical dress and behavior they so often deride, in urban areas, in black or Hispanic men—
• the strut, first of all, made more dangerous by boot heels and levels of alcohol not made for walking
• the flashy clothes (bright colors in improbable patterns, and neckerchiefs, for God’s sake) that would inspire fistfights, amid choruses of ‘faggot’, if worn in nearly any other milieu
• the expensive and outsized headgear, from classic white straws to full-bore Garth Brooks big black hats with fancy bands
• the gaudy jewelry, on the hats, at the neck, and around the waist
• the tight pants (tucked into, in the case of the women, and pulled over, in the case of the men)
• the gigolo-toed leather shoes. Sorry, boots, though few of them have ever seen a horse up close

The women are present in nearly equal numbers, and they didn’t seem to refuse to dance with anyone who asked politely. And politeness, along with the simmering undercurrent of incipient violence, as in ‘oh, please, give me an excuse to get it on’ violence, is the order of the evening.
The good-ol’-boy ambiance to the contrary, there seemed to be a live-and-let-live attitude between the Anglos, Indians, and Hispanics in the crowd. Though Alex, the big Navajo that I traded bottles of Miller’s with, did seem to carefully pick who he asked to dance.
The women ranged from ‘just a slip of a thang’ petite to fireplug stocky, with nary a bikini-prone body in the mix. The best of them inspired this: “nothing better than a big ol’ sweaty gal on a Friday night”, so you begin to see the problem… Though there were several of whom it might be said, and was, “Yes, I would”. One even had an impeccable concho belt, with large plain-silver conchos wall-to-wall on her thick waist.
The best that can be said for the evening was that I made it out alive.

Civil War for the day

The execution of Mary E. Surratt, Lewis T. Powell, David E. Herold, and George A. Atzerodt on 7 July 1865, photographed by Alexander Gardner.

Basterds, indeed

Quentin Tarantino has done it again, and Rico says he can hardly wait to see Inglorious Bastards, aka Inglourious Basterds. (Seems some basterd already poached the URL without the extra 'U' and the 'E'...)

Life imitating art, yet again

Rico says you can read Bloomberg on reality:

Somali pirates have released sixteen sailors, including ten Italians, from a tugboat that was hijacked in April, the Italian Foreign Ministry said.
No ransom was paid and Italian naval commandos are aboard the boat that is heading for Djibouti, Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said in an interview today with Sky24 television. “Strong political work with the local authorities as well as an Italian warship that was standing by with special forces finally made the pirates understand there was no other solution than to release the ship,” Frattini said. He thanked officials from the Somali breakaway region of Puntland for their help.
The ship’s release was first announced in a statement last night from the Foreign Ministry.
The Italian-owned Buccaneer was seized on 11 April in the Gulf of Aden with a crew of ten Italians, five Romanians, and one Croatian. It’s been shadowed by the Italian frigate San Giorgio with a contingent of naval commandos from the San Marco regiment.
Somali pirates have seized 28 ships so far this year, the U.S. Navy says. With the release of the Buccaneer, pirates are still holding eight ships and at least 163 seamen, according to Ecoterra, an environmental group that also monitors Somali piracy.
Ransoms to release ships held by Somali pirates have tended to range from $500,000 to $2 million, though $3 million was paid for the Saudi oil tanker Sirius Star last year, the U.S. Congressional Research Service said in a February report.
“At the beginning, the chief pirate called me and said that if I wanted my boat back, I had to pay thirty million dollars,” Silvio Bartolotti, president of Ravenna, Italy-based Micoperi Srl, which owns and operates the boat, said in a telephone interview. “I can assure you that nothing was paid. There was a lot of pressure on the pirates, above all from local tribal leaders who didn’t want this happening on their territory.”
Micoperi recently bought the Buccaneer in Singapore and it was on its way to Italy without cargo to be refitted, Bartolotti said.

or you can buy his novel about piracy:

Civil War for the day

Alexander Gardner's famous image of the Confederate sharpshooter at Gettysburg in July of 1863.

Sixteen billion a year? You'd think they'd've noticed

The Wall Street Journal has a MarketWatch column about a little difference in opinion between the Chinese and Rio Tinto:

A watchdog group for China's Communist Party has accused Anglo-Australian mining company Rio Tinto Plc of overcharging Chinese steelmakers by $100 billion for its iron ore over six years. The accusations were made in reports published on a Chinese-language website called China Secret Protect Online, which claims to be affiliated with the Communist Party's State Secrets Bureau, The Wall Street Journal reported in its online edition. The website's reports said Rio Tinto, the Anglo-Australian mining giant, used deceptive tactics to obtain information about the Chinese steel industry over a six-year period, resulting in Chinese steelmakers being overcharged about $100 billion for iron ore.
The reports claimed the Chinese economy has been seriously damaged by the company's practices. The Chinese monetary claim varies considerably from what the company has reported to have taken in from its iron ore business, of which China is its largest client. In its 2008 annual report, Rio Tinto reported revenues of $16.5 billion from the unit, according to the Journal.
Last month, Chinese authorities detained four Rio Tinto employees on suspicion of stealing state secrets. The employees haven't been formally charged.
The Chinese website reports could be a harbinger of how Chinese authorities might proceed with a case against the employees, The Journal said. On 17 July, Rio Tinto issued a statement denying any wrongdoing by the employees. The Journal said Sunday that a Rio Tinto spokesman declined to comment on the Chinese website reports.

Thirty four thousand

The round number was in the middle of the night, as usual...

Civil War for the day

Petersburg, Virginia in 1865.

Not even close

This isn't the end of Rico.

Edward G. Robinson

Gay and mecca don't belong in the same phrase

Patrick Healy has an article in The New York Times about the latest hot spot in the Middle East:

The pre-party began at 9 p.m. in Bertho Makso’s room at the Bella Riva Suite Hotel, and by 9:05 p.m. the air was awash in cologne, hair spray, cigarette smoke and gossip about the night ahead. Would a certain 20-something from West Beirut be at the beach party? Had the two men from Cairo arrived yet? Was the cute D.J. from Bardo, a gay bar here, going to be spinning? And did anyone need condoms?
The last question came from Bertho, a 28-year-old Lebanese tour operator who was the host of the main event that Thursday night in June: the Bear Arabia Mega Party, at the Oceana resort about thirty minutes south of Beirut. Scores of gay men— most of them “bears”, a term used the world over for heavyset, hairy guys usually older than thirty— were coming from across Lebanon and the Arab world, as well as Argentina, Italy, Mexico, the United States and elsewhere. Bertho had been picking them up at the Beirut airport since morning, and he looked exhausted as he handed out fistfuls of condoms to the dozen men in the room. “So many questions today about what ‘gay Beirut’ is like,” he told me. “I’m just like, ‘Wait and see, you’ll like it, you’ll like it!’”
Tipping back a Red Bull on the sofa was Roberto Boccia, who was in from Rome for the event. In his forties, wearing a white tee shirt and khaki shorts, Roberto said he was surprised by the brio of Beirut compared with gay life in Rome, and said he was going to spread the word back home. “Some of my friends are still scared to come here, because of the wars, and because it’s harder to be gay here than in Europe,” he said. “But I say, we have to win this. We’re gay, we overcome things.” At that moment Bertho’s boyfriend, Rob, a very young Justin Timberlake look-alike, stumbled in from a side bedroom. He lifted his tee shirt, which read Maniac 65, to show off a sliver of his toned, tanned torso, and flashed a dazzling smile. The room went quiet. “Okay,” Bertho said to no one in particular, “we should probably leave soon.”
While homosexual activity (technically, sexual relations that officials deem “unnatural”) is illegal in Lebanon, as in most of the Arab world, Beirut’s vitality as a Mediterranean capital of night life has fueled a flourishing gay scene— albeit one where men can be nervous about public displays of affection and where security guards at clubs can intercede if the good times turn too frisky on the dance floor. But even more than the partying, Beirut represents a different Middle East for some gay and lesbian Arabs: the only place in the region where they can openly enjoy a social life denied them at home.
Asu, a 35-year-old gay man visiting from Damascus— who, like many men interviewed in Beirut, asked that his surname not be published— said that only two close friends in Syria knew that he was gay and that there were no bars, clubs, or cafes in Damascus where gay Syrians felt at ease. “I thought I would meet other gay men at university in Syria, but it didn’t happen, and then I thought as an adult man living in Damascus that it would happen, but it hasn’t,” said Asu, who was nursing a club soda at Wolf, a gay-friendly bar near the American University in Beirut. “I’m 35 years old. I feel very lonely at home. There’s only the Internet for me, to e-mail with other gay men. The Internet, and Beirut. I try to come here every year now, because it is a relief.”
While homophobia is not a rampant problem in Jordan, according to Abdul-Azeem, a gay man from Amman, he has not found enough openness to start a relationship with a man. Instead, he said, he has been dating a Beirut man long-distance for the last nine months. “We met on my last trip here,” said Abdul-Azeem, who is 25, and spoke during a visit to the new Beirut Arts Center on a 90-degree afternoon in June. “I hope we will be in love in the future. But I had to travel here to find a man who maybe I will love. I wish we were together every day.”
Gay life in this city is still inching out of the shadows, to be sure, but it seems to have developed a steady forward momentum since the end of Lebanon’s fifteen-year civil war in 1990— and especially in the calm that has followed the brief 2006 war between Hezbollah forces and Israel.
Bars have opened, and old ones are into their fifth or sixth year of sponsoring annual parties and music festivals. Some yacht clubs and hotel pools have gained a reputation as popular spots for gay men to hang out and flirt. Internet chat sites like Manjam, self-described as “a gay social network for dating, work and travel,” have taken off; several gay men here had no inhibitions telling me their Manjam profile screen names. And, by anecdotal accounts, gay men and women from other Arab countries and the West are increasingly vacationing here— a choice that is all the more sexy and thrilling for some because they feel they are living on the edge and discovering a gay culture that is freshly evolving.
During the mid-1990s, a few small cafes in Beirut became popular gathering places for gay men— not only for groups of friends, but also for men who had chatted on the Internet and wanted to arrange a safe place to meet. One such spot, Café Sheikh Mankoush in the Hamra district, also installed computers that gay men used to chat online with others in Beirut, Bertho said.
In the years since, Lebanon has become one of the most liberal Arab counties when it comes to sexuality and sexual behavior, according to Michael Luongo, the editor of the 2007 book Gay Travels in the Muslim World, which was translated and printed in Arabic this summer by a Beirut publishing house, Arab Diffusion. (Travel guides to Beirut are not plentiful, particularly ones that might be helpful for gay and lesbian travelers, but one useful publication is A Hedonist’s Guide to Beirut, published by Hg2 Guides. It can be bought on Amazon for $14.78.)
“What’s interesting is that the Arab areas that were once controlled by the French, like Lebanon, are the ones with laws against homosexuality, because the French felt comfortable talking about sex,” Mr. Luongo said, “while the areas controlled by the British didn’t have those laws because they didn’t talk about sex. As a result, flowing from that French history is a relative familiarity with homosexuality in places like Lebanon. You have more gay life where the laws exist against it.”

Rico says there's a lot more, if you care; click the post title to go read it. But, lest there be any doubt, it's purely a fucking coincidence that Rico's nickname is Kuma (Japanese for Bear) and that he's a heavyset, hairy guy over thirty...

No surprise there

Leo Standora has an article in The New York Times about the death of the ever-irritating Billy Mays:

Infomercial king Billy Mays' wife lashed out on Friday after Florida authorities released autopsy results showing cocaine helped kill him. The medical examiner said Mays last used cocaine a few days before his 28 June death, but wasn't high when he died in his sleep at his Tampa condo. However, an autopsy found "cocaine use caused or contributed to the development of heart disease," the official cause of death. Mays also had powerful prescription painkillers and anti-anxiety drugs in his system, along with a few drinks, officials said.
Mays' angry family called the announcement "speculative... and frankly unnecessary." His widow, Deborah, who found her husband dead in bed, said she may hire an independent expert to review the findings. She said she was unaware of any drug use by her husband, beyond prescription pills for a hip problem. "Billy suffered from chronic, untreated hypertension," she said in a statement. "Given the hectic nature and pace of Billy's life, especially during the past ten months of his exhaustive travel across the country, it was not surprising to hear that hypertension was the cause of his death."
Longtime friend and colleague AJ Khubani, founder and CEO of the As Seen on TV product company Telebrands, said he never saw any sign Mays was on drugs. "I'm just shocked," Khubani said. "He was the model of a responsible citizen."
Mays was famous for hawking OxiClean, Orange Glo, and dozens of other products, instantly recognizable by his blue shirt, thick beard and booming voice.

Rico says that, given his hyperactive style on television, is it any wonder that it was cocaine that got him?