White House to push Privacy Bill

Headline in the Wall St Journal today. The proposed bill would require that companies ask an individual's permission to use personal data for a purpose other than that for which it was collected. Plus some other equally toothless proposals.
Total waste of time. Your personal data, including which websites you visit, is recorded by spyware secretly loaded onto your computer. This is the fault of both web browsers and Windows. We ought to demand a web browser that will NEVER load and execute code off the internet. And make the same demand upon Microsoft. Windows must NEVER load and execute code off the internet. Do this and the problem is solved.
If Microsoft and the browser makers don't want to co-operate? Find a vendor who will. Linux is much less porous than Windows. There are about 6 browser makers now. One of them can gain industry dominance by offering an air tight browser.
This is not an issue that laws can deal with. We need decent software instead.

The family car is faster than High Speed Rail

Don't get me wrong, I love trains, I'm a train buff from way back. But, it's hard for any kind of train to compete with the car. Acela takes 4 hours on the Boston-New York run. I can drive it in that time. If I drive, I have the car at the far end, I don't have to rent one. Even with $4 a gallon gas, I can get my Mercury LE down and back for less than an Acela round trip ticket. If I have to pay Hertz or Avis as well as Amtrak, no contest.
And this is on the densely populated BosWash corridor, the one location in the US where high speed rail might be able to compete with cars. Once you talk about long trips (coast to coast) everybody is going to fly. You can fly Boston to LA and arrive LA by noon LA time. A one day trip. By train or car, it's a five day trip (one way). Nobody is going to mess around with trains, no matter how fast and how plush for coast to coast.
So why is Obama so into high speed rail? Does he really think it makes any kind of economic or ecological sense? Surely he isn't that dumb? Or is he?

Nuclear phobia

To hear the media tell it, the only things damaged in the terrible Japanese earthquake were a few power reactors. That's all the TV talks about. With tens of thousands dead, incalculable damage to homes, businesses, cultural treasures, bridges, and infrastructure, all the TV talks about is damaged power reactors. Even Fox who I had hoped for better from joined into the "nuclear power is the only story" line.
Could I be hearing anti-nuclear axes being ground?

Libya, liberation thereof

News reports indicate that Quadaffi's army is holding it's ground and pushing the rebels back. Not surprising. The army doesn't have to be all that well trained, or all that loyal, to defeat civilian militias. Especially Arab militias where the troops expend more ammunition firing into the air (celebratory fire it's called) than they do shooting at the enemy.
Question for Obama. How bad do you want Quadaffi gone? If he wins, he executes all the rebels, and spends the rest of his rule sticking it to the United States.
You gotta make up your mind before it's too late. Things will be all over in a matter of weeks.
Another question: Can we influence the outcome short of invasion? Will recognizing the rebel government, giving them Stinger missiles, sending food and supplies do any good? Will a no-fly zone really work? Even without air support, a half way competent army, (which Quadaffi has) should be able to push Arab civilian militia back.
Note to Obama: Try and find someone besides that clueless Clapper to fill you in on the situation. Like someone who speaks Arabic, has been in country, has met Quadaffi, and knows a few other Libyans currently in Libya, not refugees who fled ten years ago.

My condolences to the Japanese

Japan has suffered a terrible earthquake followed by a tsunami. Damage is fearsome and casualties are heavy. My best wishes to all in Japan in this time of natural disaster.

Windows is lousy at multitasking

So here I am burning a DVD. The DVD burn program is taking less than 5% of my CPU time, and yet my computer is so bogged down as to delay keyboard echo. (Keyboard echo is the printing on the monitor of each character struck on the keyboard). It is so bad as to make the my computer into a single task machine. Which is something of a waste.
Windows got this way from a design decision made way back at the beginning of Windows. Microsoft decided not to use the timer to give control to the operating system every tenth of a second. At the time they feared that interrupting the application programs 10 times a second would confuse them and cause crashes. They also feared that the operating system could fail if control passed from one program to another too rapidly.
These are fears of novice programmers. It is quite possible to write programs and operating systems that work reliably with a 10 per second timer interrupt. This was known at the time, various minicomputer operating systems (RSX-11 and VMS for two examples) used a timer interrupt and could give excellent performance to dozens of timesharing users simultaneously.
Microsoft decided to use "co-operative" multitasking instead. Each program is expected to return control to the operating system at frequent intervals. The reason it doesn't work is simple, there is always an application program that fails to play by the rules and hogs CPU time. There is nothing Windows can do about such a program, short of Ctl-Alt-Delete to kill it dead.
And it's too late to change it now. Doing so would undoubtedly break a bunch of programs and nobody wants to do that. This poor design decision was set in concrete and the concrete has hardened.

Obama talking about energy today

He is on TV right now saying "domestic oil production is the highest it's been since 2003. So let's not have any Republican carping about lack of oil exploration." Might be that existing wells are pumping hard, but Obama didn't say a word about the shut down of drilling permits since the Deepwater Horizon disaster, despite a court order to resume permitting.
He also said that new wells won't come on line for many years. What he didn't say is that oil prices will drop as soon as the market hears that the Americans are bringing new fields to market.
Question: How can you tell when a politician is lying?
Answer: When his lips are moving.