Month: May 2004

Resign Mr. President

I know I'll get a lot of flack for this, but I am of the mind that Bush should resign as a sincere gesture of apology to the world and to Americans.  Ultimately, he is responsible for the humiliation, rape and murder that occurred in Iraq by American soldiers and no mere words will make up for the damage the acts have caused.

Whether Bush really deserves to be forced to resign or not is irrelevant.  Whether his resignation serves this country better than not doing so is.  I have always wondered what 'Bucks Stop Here' meant if words of apologies is the best the President can offer.  I think now is time to show exactly what that means.

Admittedly, I don't like Bush and I don't think he is fit to be the President of United States, but that's beside the point…I think.  Resignation will take much courage and sacrifices, but I don't think I am asking for anything less than what this country is asking from its soldiers.  This will send a shocking message to the world that will put right much of the damages to our reputation and our soul.

If you are a Bush supporter and this post offends you, my apologies.  I am just saying what I think is best for this country.

New Kind of Conferences

Check out Dave's rant on conference and his prototype design of a new kind of conferences: BloggerCon II.  Damn.  Now I regret I didn't make it to BloggerCon II.  First BloggerCon wasn't that attractive to me and the second one left me scratching my head.  Now I know I should have been knocking my head instead to let the idea of a totally open conference in.

Kudos, Dave (someday I'll find out what the hell that means precisely).

Encrypted G-Spot

Dang.  Gmail account name must be at least 6 characters which means I can't have cool e-mail addresses like gspot@gmail.com.

Hmm, I don't see anything in their terms and conditions that prevents filling that 1G with encrypted messages.  I wonder what kind of ads Google will attach to encrypted messages?  Crypto software?

Lunch at Buck’s

I had lunch at Buck's today.  Believe it or not, it was my first time.  Despite countless lunches with VCs, I somehow never had lunch there.  Joining me were Bill Harris and Louie Gasparini, respectively Chairman and CTO of PassMark Security.  Although I didn't eat much as usual, I really enjoyed the lunch.

Bill, who was CEO of PayPal and Intuit, had great stories to tell.  The ability to tell stories well is a valuable skill I wish I had but don't.  All I can manage is react intelligently or project voice to forcefully pound in a message or two.  That's second class IMHO compared to the ability to paint and animate a picture with voice.

Anyhow, I'll have to try the artichoke next time.  Robert, remember that lunch you owe me?

What’s wrong with Sem@code

When I posted about Semacode yesterday, I had a vague feeling something was missing and bugged me rest of the day until I realized it while in the ZZ land.  It's that a Semacode maps to a URL which is a silly thing to do in the post-Google era.  Websites, particularly small websites likely to be pointed to by Semacode, tend to disappear over time and it's mostly read-only, meaning only those who own the website or are members of the website can add information to it.

Semacode should be just be a string (it could be a set of keywords or even just numbers) unique enough to be used as a reliable coordinate in the online search space so that looking it up at a search engine will return only the links directly and deliberately mapped to the coordinate.  This way people can add information about the object at the coordinate without restrictions.  If it happens to be a restaurant, they can even post a bad review on their own blogs and it will still show up on cellphones after Semacode is scanned.

The Big Idea here is that you don't really need a URL if you have good search engines.  For wiki-fans, it's like turning the entire web into a wiki of sort by using search services like Google to weave a wiki page out of pages across the Net.

Think different people.  It's all right if it has been done before as long as it hasn't been done by you.

MP3 Phone Battle in Korea Heating Up

While the patent fight over MP3 phones in Korea is ongoing, the conflict between the Korean music industry and cellphone makers is about to reach the boiling point (Korean).  While the Korean music industry is trying to ban MP3 phones in Korea, LG Telecom wants LG phone users to be able to download and play any MP3 files.  As in most such conflicts in Korea, neither side is prepared to lose.

Whether MP3 phones are banned in Korea or not, both sides have to worry about downloadable third-party software capable of accessing other music networks and playing other formats.  If they cripple the device so that downloaded software can't access the cellphone's audio, then Korean phonemakers will lose the competitive edge over models from other phone makers.

Only possibly workable solution I see is Play Tax.  The idea is to charge music listeners using audio devices by the minute and compensate the music industry.  Differentiating music and conversations can be done by a chip on every device that can output hi-quality sound.

Tired

I am getting tired of making execuses for our troops in Iraq.  I know it's just a few among hundreds of thousands there who were responsible for the ugly deeds.  I also know that it was the zealots in the military intelligence willing to do anything to get information and irresponsible army commanders more interested in avoiding political conflicts than doing the right thing.

But the road to understanding how those soldiers can do what they did, even if coerced, leaves rest of the hundreds of thousands American soldiers in Iraq naked.  Could other groups of them have behaved better under the same circumstances?  Sadly, my answer is no.  Only consolation is that armies of other countries would not have done any better if they were traumatized through the same tragic events as US have.  Some consolation.

I am not sure which is worse.  Death of thousands of American citizens and Destruction of a famous American landmark or stunning blows to our pride like this.  The former enraged me, the later left me hollow.  I know that most of the pride was more wishful thinking reinforced by the hero-worshiping media, but it's shocking still to be stripped of it.

Update:

I thought this Washington Post editorial titled Mr. Rumsfeld's Responsibility was a good read although it didn't say what I was hoping it would say.

The lawlessness began in January 2002 when Mr. Rumsfeld publicly declared that hundreds of people detained by U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan "do not have any rights" under the Geneva Conventions.

This was what I was hoping the editorial should have said:

Regardless of law and origin, people are not born with basic human rights nor are they deserved, earned, or gained by agreement, but they are given by those who value their sanity and the risk they face in absense of such gift to their enemy.

Yes, it goes back to my Selfish Pig philosophy.  We must give these rights out of our own selfish need to preserve of our sorry ass morals.

Sem@code

Semacode is an interesting implementation of an old idea reborn yet again (remember the Cat fiasco?) to take advantage of increasing number of camera phones to link real world to the cyberspace.  Check it out.