Lunch at the Labs

Howard L. Berman, congressman from California, is the guy who is sponsoring the bill that makes it legal for music and movie companies to remotely hack into your computer if they suspect you are part of a file-sharing network (news story).

Here are Berman's top contributors for 2002 found at Opensecrets.org a site devoted to money in politics.

        Walt Disney Co                           $ 31,000
        AOL Time Warner                          $ 28,050
        Vivendi Universal                        $ 27,591
        Viacom Inc                               $ 13,000
        News Corp                                $ 11,750
        American Fedn of St/Cnty/Munic Employee  $ 10,000
        DreamWorks SKG                           $ 10,000
        William Morris Agency                    $ 10,000

What a coincidence :-). One thing I find amazing is how little money it takes to get a congressman to sponsor legislation for you.

Last Friday (July 26, 2002) Dow Jones Business News reported that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a lawsuit against AT&T's Florham Park, NJ facility. I saw the story at Yahoo! Finance. The article mentions complaints by two prospective employees who claim they were denied employment because of their age.

I find this particularly interesting in light of my (only partially successful) attempts to find out the age statistics of those in my job universe who were layed off in March versus those who were retained. I and others were put in separate "universes" of just one and thus (in effect) were given no age statistics at all. Although I do not have hard evidence, my guess is the March layoffs at AT& Labs were done in a two step process:

• First, people who happened to be working on matters that were no longer essential to a stripped down and troubled AT&T were let go.
• Second, older people who were working on projects that were retained, but who have higher salaries and higher pension costs, were let go.

As the oldest person with the greatest number of years of service working on Natural Voices, one of the most successful projects in AT& Labs, I fell into the second category. The only question in my mind is are there enough young people in the first category to cover up the age discrimination in the second category, statistically speaking.

The Long Bets web site allows participants to post bets on (very) long-term future technology developments and trends. Bet money is a tax-deductible donation to the The Long Now Foundation which invests it; half of the growth of the money goes to support the foundation and half accrues to the winner's specified charity.

What I like about this is it maintains a record of what people say will happen in the future. The public media is full of people predicting this and that, but I (almost) never see these same people held accountable for their wrong predictions (although you sure hear about it when they are right). Some TV programs like Louis Rukeyser's Wall Street actually compound the problem by just having back those who guess right, giving a distorted view of the overall accuracy of their guests. I would like to see a web site which maintains a record of who said what and when, giving an accuracy grade for those pundits who you see time and again on all those news and business shows. There are some stock market pundits who have been completely wrong in predicting the stock market for the past two years and they are are still constantly hawking their views to the public.

AT&T announced their quarterly results today (bad as expected) and this evening on The Nightly Business Report on PBS, Susie Gharib interviewed AT&T President and chief executive officer-designate David Dorman. It was the usually lame television interview with the expected questions like "how do you plan to grow your revenues?" and "how will Worldcom's bankruptcy effect AT&T?" I'm sure Dorman answered the same questions numerous times throughout the day. Here are some of my questions for Mr. Dorman:

• Before assuming your current position you were at AT&T Concert. For how long were you President of Concert?
• When AT&T recently closed down Concert they claimed a loss of over 5 billion dollars. How much of that money are you personally responsible for?
• How did you parlay that performance into becoming President of AT&T?

Why are questions like this just asked after a scandal breaks rather than as matter of course? Are radio and television interviewers just too dumb to think of good questions. Or are they afraid that nobody will appear on their show if they do? I think the TV program 60 Minutes proves the latter wrong. My guess is the media, the politicians, and the business people are all in this together and each is just doing the other favors and the public gets screwed. Anyway, I want a job where I get to ask such questions.

The first visual editor I used was vi in the late 1970's. (I even ported it to AT&T's 3B20 computer in the early 80's when AT&T was trying to get into the computer business and I was working in Unix Development and the only editor available was ed.) Several years later I learned emacs and became fairly proficient using it, even writing my own elisp macros. In terms of capabilities emacs appeared to me to be the better editor, but it was always my "second language" and I always thought more clearly using vi commands. (Now vi clones like vim have closed the feature gap, but that's beside the point.)

I'm reminded of this whenever I read a review by a Windows user comparing a Linux desktop distribution to Windows. They usually mention things like "the fonts are ugly" or "it did not display my word document as Word does on Windows". However they never mention things that are better on Linux or things that do not even exist under Windows. The problem is their first language is Windows and they are not even aware of things available in Linux that don't have counterparts under Windows.

For example, Microsoft's support for Postscript is notoriously bad (Adobe is a competitor) but you never hear Windows users complain about it because they are totally unaware of its existence, much less its advantages. Similarly for writing some things (usually small) a WYSIWYG word processor is just fine, but for others (usually large documents) a formatting language like LaTex is preferable. Why do you never hear complaints about not being able to read or write LaTex documents under Windows? (I know you can install LaTex under windows but it's not there by default and thus generally not available.) And of course there's the command line versus menus. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, but if you've never used a command line interface or written a shell script you don't even know what you are missing.

I think when a Windows user tries a Linux desktop distribution that is trying to emulate Windows, it's a bit like me using vi mode in emacs to emulate vi. It's like being in a foreign land where you are struggling with the native language and you say my native language is better.

As a teenager I listened to this guy Jean Shepherd on WOR-AM radio in New York City for 45 minutes each weekday night throughout the 1960's. Now there is a very nice web site (not mine) devoted to him and his radio program at Flick Lives. It has old Jean Shepherd radios shows available for downloading in Realaudio format. These shows are also being rebroadcast (with the original commercials) on WBAI 99.5 FM New York City at 5:15am Tuesday mornings and on WFMU 91.1 Jersey City NJ at 5:15pm Wednesday evenings.

Some time in the mid-70's I saw a blurb in the back of the Village Voice by someone who was writing a book entitled "The Woodstock Census". It was to be about those who were part of the 60's generation and they wanted people of a certain age range to fill out a questionnaire. Upon receiving it, I discovered that most of the questions did not apply to me. For although I was a child of the sixties, I was an undergraduate and graduate student in physics at the time. My friends and I were aware of the events going on, but we were busy studying and doing such things as learning how to juggle and playing Go.

How does this relate to Jean Shepherd? One of the questions listed all the important people of that era and asked how much you admired and were influenced by them. There were about 100 names, ranging from Joan Baez and Elridge Cleaver to Ayn Rand and Barry Goldwater. Then at the bottom they asked if you did not admire or were not influenced by any of the above, write in the name of someone who did fill that role. I wrote in Jean Shepherd and to this day I think he had more to do with the way I look at the world than anyone else.

Dear Judge Kollar-Kotally:

While you are considering the appropriate punishment for Microsoft who was found guilty of being a monopolist and breaking the law, you may want to consider this.

I've been reading pretty good reviews about OpenOffice the open source version of Sun's StarOffice It seems that for basic use it is upward compatible with Microsoft's Office.

So why has not a single major PC manufacturer arranged to bundle it with computers sold to individuals (or companies for that matter)? It seems to me it would cost the manufacturer very little and would be a huge selling point as Microsoft Office costs several hundred dollars. Do you suppose the reason might be that Microsoft's monopoly power is still in place and the PC manufacturers are afraid to do anything that might upset them?

Last night on TV on the CBS Evening News they did a story about Jewish families from the US emigrating to Israel. The kicker to the story was that they were being financed by an evangelical Christian group to emigrate. They interviewed someone from the Christian group and they said they were doing it because the bible says Jesus the messiah will return when the Jews return to Israel. One of the Jews emigrating said that Bush was supporting Israel because of his beliefs and upon the urging of evangelical Christians in his administration. This is confirmation of what I claimed a couple of weeks ago in this blog July 1, 2002.

Here's a suggestion for working toward a settlement in the mid-east conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Both Arafat and Sharon should agree to step down if the other does also. It's pretty clear to me that each is an impediment to the peace process and both would probably be convicted by a war-crimes tribunal. If either one refuses this proposal, they will have to explain why their personal ego gratification is more important than peace. If they agree, then fresh minds without the personal animosity these two have for each other, can try to do what is best for their constituencies. Just as it took a change of administrations to get us out of Vietnam, eventually there will be new leaders in the Mideast. But why not speed up the process?

So why does George Bush just call for the removal of Arafat? Perhaps he should read Ronald Reagan's autobiography where he details diplomatic events when Sharon went on one of his killing sprees in 1982.

Despite our appeals for restraint, the Israelis on August 12 opened a new and even more brutal attack on civilian neighborhoods in Beirut that sickened me and many others in the White House. This provoked me into an angry demand for an end to the bloodletting. Here are excerpts from my diary:

Aug. 12
Met with the news the Israelis delivered the most devastating bomb and artillery attack Israel (sic) on West Beirut lasting 14 hours. Habib cabled - desperate - has basic agreement from all parties but can't arrange details of P.L.O. withdrawal because of the barrage. King Fahd [of Saudia Arabia] called begging me to do something. I told him I was calling P.M. Begin immediately. And I did. I was angry. I told him [Begin] it had to stop or our entire relationship was endangered. I used the word "Holocaust" deliberately and said the symbol of his country was becoming "a picture of a seven month old baby with its arms blown off". ...

(Ronald Reagan / An American Life (The Autobiography), pp. 427-28)

Remember, Sharon was censured by his own government for his actions, so this is not exactly a secret. Why is none of this discussed in the popular media? I've heard Sharon being interviewed and he is never asked about this. Since no one else is doing it, I want a job where I get to ask him these questions.

Mixed in with the news about the downfall of WorldCom and the collapse of its stock, are some stories about how this will help AT&T. Although there may be some short term benefit to AT&T, I think the ultimate winner(s) will be the so-called local phone companies.

The problem for AT&T is that due to technological and legislative forces, stand-alone long distance phone service is a dying business. And anyone who still thinks AT&T can successfully get into new businesses should check their track record. AT&T's real competition is the Baby Bells and their local monopoly and not WorldCom.

If the Telecommunications Act of 1996 were enforced as intended, AT&T might have a chance. But what I see happening is that Congress and the current administration will allow one of the baby bells to "save" WorldCom and this will make it possible for another baby bell to buy/merge with AT&T. Congress and the administration will permit this as a way to effectively repeal the Telecommunications Act without having to admit that it didn't work and they screwed up.

The television show Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher has ended its run. A repeat of the final show from the previous week just occurred. Too bad -- it and Nightline just before it were the only two network television shows I made a point to watch regularly.

I've been a fan of the show from the days when it aired on Comedy Central and even went to see the show in person when it was taped in New York City. It's amusing to me that apparently it got canned for being too controversial. Although it did present some viewpoints not usually mentioned elsewhere in the mass media, I still thought Bill and his guests were quite mainstream. Hopefully the thoughts I write about in these pages will be a bit more politically incorrect.

As an example, in my opinion probably the most politically correct viewpoint put forth by Mr. Maher on his show was that the Vietnam war was necessary because it stopped the spread of communism. First of all Vietnam was a civil war and had little to do with global communism. But more importantly, we lost that war and it weakened us for fighting future wars; if anything it made it easier for communism to spread. The fact that it didn't proves that at that time global communism wasn't the threat it was made out to be.

Ever wonder why the United States is so pro Israel in its conflict with Palestinians? The standard reason given is that Israel is the only democracy in the mid-east and they share our political and social values. Other reasons sometimes mentioned are that Israel has a better lobbying effort than the Arabs or that some Palestinians are terrorists. Although these things are at least partially true, I believe there is a more fundamental reason (especially under the current administration) which is hardly ever mentioned.

The real reason why the U.S. so strongly supports Israel is the religious right which is the base of support for the Bush administration. They believe Israel is God's way of preparing for the Messiah's return and the current struggle is fulfilling the biblical prophecy for God to regather the Jews in Zion for that purpose as stated in Ezekiel 37:21:

"I will take the people of Israel from the nations among which they have gone, and will gather them from every quarter, and bring them to their own land."

Basically this is a religious war and the notion that one side is right and just and the other wrong and evil doesn't make sense in that context.