Read Billmon post on forewarnings we had about the Iraq invasion. The quote he ends with, in particular, hit me squarely:

The [Unified Quest] experience left a few, such as Adm. Bien, believing that the best course of action would have been not intervening at all. "We're developing a force that makes it almost too easy to intervene," says Adm. Bien. "I am concerned about America pounding herself out."

If we have to intervene, then the wisest thing to do might be to hit and run instead of staying around to fix what we destroyed. In other words, don't mix national security with politic, ideology, religion, economy, nor conscience.

While most of my collegues will disagree with today's P2P supreme court ruling and I fear the ruling will lead to abusive litigations by record labels, I can't bring myself to disagree with the judges in principle.

Most people used P2P services for illegal file-sharing. It would be silly to suggest that P2P tool vendors and service providers did not know about the ongoing illegal use of their tools and services. They were aware and turned the other way. Some of them even went further by introducing features that interfered with efforts record label companies made to directly prevent file sharing.

This doesn't mean that you are liable for every abuse of some well-intended software you released to the world. But you will be liable if you become aware and did not take reasonable steps to prevent abuse.

In the end, the choice is between destroying the music industry or stiffling a promising sector of the technology industry. Musicians have the power to create wonders for our ears. We the engineers have the power to turn their economic world upside down.

All the talk about how P2P can revolutionize the music industry and fairly reward musicians are just that, talk, because it's not their basket of eggs that is being threatened. If they are so sure, why don't they prove their wishful economic theory themselves instead of sitting on the sideline and yelling at record labels to jump across the chasm of uncertainty?

It is true that DRM solutions out there are terrible but IMHO that's OUR problem. We failed to come up with a more reasonable solution and commerical online music services failed to properly inform their customers on the limitations of the service they are providing. Frankly, I think they intentionally misrepresented the service they sold and profitted unfairly. Otherwise, people wouldn't have bought hundreds of songs through iTunes and they would have gotten upset when they switched machines.

We engineers cannot and should not escape our responsibilities with a few paragraphs of AS IS and IN NO EVENT SHALL [we] BE LIABLE. Power to create is not a license to unleash anything we can imagine into the world. Yes it will be stiffling, sometimes unbearably so. Can we prevail in the end? I think so. We are engineers after all.

BTW, here is the best interpretation of today's ruling I found.

Where is the order cancellation link on Dell's order status page? I haven't been able to locate it anywhere. While I can understand why the link isn't there, I think they should be straight forward like most Texans are and put the link there for all to see instead of hiding it in some unautomated support forum or making people wait on the phone line.

If you need to cancel your Dell order, go to Dell order cancellation forum and post your order number.

Another gripe I have is that they make buyers cancel and reorder to change order. At the very least, they should have a box where buyers can enter the number of the order the new order is replacing.

I played around with .NET 2.0 Beta 2 today, building a custom browser of sort. It was easy going at first but ran into a series of odd misbehaviors, incomprehensible features, and shortcomings. When I first ran into the Win32 API, more than a decade ago, it worked as I expected and the sea parted like butter at my command. Sweet. It was not so for this beta. VS 2005 was missing what I thought were crucial features too like being able to add an event handler by picking an event out of a list. Maybe I overlooked something or got too spoiled with Eclipse.

In short, it was promising but execution sucked and I am concerned that they just don't have their sh*t together. But then I realize that I have no business worrying about a closed IDE which will cost me an elbow.

Hey, Bill! I know it's crazy but I am already spoiled by a top quality FREE IDE. So why don't you just act crazy as well and forget about charging money for VS 2005? It's going to be shipping half-baked anyway. BTW, I've written a few IDEs before so I think I know what I am talking about. If you are having problem understanding what I am saying, just think of IDEs as browsers. It's the road into developer's heart. They'll choose .NET over Java if they are given a FREE developement environment that enables them to snap together what they have in their head faster than they can with notepad.

Dell is having a $500 off sale on notebooks so I ordered an Inspiron 6000 with 1.86GHz Pentium M and DDR2 533FSB. I went max on the drive size but barebone on memory because memory is much cheaper elsewhere. Total price tag including tax and shipping came to $1087. Not a bad deal I must say. BTW, the sale ends Sunday.

Update:

I've been browsing around for the ideal 2G (2x1G) DDR2 533MHz 4200 DIMMs for the notebook but haven't yet figured out which brand offers the best price/performance ratio. Corsair is the cheapest, followed by pqi. OCZ DIMMs received good review but there were some concerns about voltage requirements in some versions. Price range for 2G was rather wide too: $160-$320. But then even $320 is cheap when compared to how much Dell was asking for 2G ($1000). Crazy.

There were some conflicting posts about whether the latest Inspiron 6000's memory controller operates at 400MHz or 533MHz. I think the currently shipping Inspiron is running at 533MHz though.

Update:

For some reason, I overlooked the fact that 6000 came with a wide-screen which meant that I am getting 1280x800, not 1280x1024. So I cancelled my order (a saga in itself) and reordered one with 1680×1050. I briefly thought about getting the 128MB version of the GPU, RADIEON X300x16, for Longhorn but after reading Longhorn's long list of hardware requirements for optimal performance, I dropped the thought. I  also dialed back the CPU speed to 1.6GHz to get the same price. With 2G, the speed difference should be insignificant for the kind of work I do. Now I just hope my other order does get cancelled.

Why am I getting a boring configuration? Just like cars, I've lost interest in the latest and the most powerful gadgets a while back because I realized that, given the rate of change in feature and price, it's like coveting disposable lighters. Now I just use computers or drive cars as what they really are: tools and rides.

First we had Mobile Monday. Now we have Tag Tuesday. Why don't we just fast forward to Fart Friday? To join in, all you have to do is share your emissions with people around you on Friday. OK? What I like about Fart Friday is that there are no i18n issues to deal with. BTW, next Sex Saturday meeting has been put on hold due to a back problem but the Shopping Sunday meeting, organized by my wife, is on track.

CardSystems data theft incident shows that security standard compliance must be policed in the same way hackers choose their victims. Visa and MasterCard should have organized roaming security teams and let them loose at the card issuers, processors, and merchants. Each team would be financed with collected penalties so that only the best teams will survive.

After using Thunderbird for more than a year, I switched back to Outlook. Why? It was the little inconveniences like inability to step through emails which I overlooked until now.

Anyhow, I ran though hoops trying to move messages from Thunderbird to Outlook, all of them partially successful but always droping something. In the end, I just bought Aid4Mail. It's ironical that I spent $50 to stop using a free email client.

Between the Cathedral and the Bazaar are the Twisted Alleys.

Incidents like the one Dan Gillmor points to reminds me that I need to put more thought into noise control. Let see…

One idea is cookie sharing combined with cookie persistence. Cookie persistence works by allow people to download and save their cookies so they can restore valuable cookies after cookie wipeout or if they change machines. Cookie sharing is one cookie holder giving part of the rating they earned to another. It's like giving some of your voice to another person whose opinions you agree with or appreciate.

A lot of room for creativity in this area.

Update:

Flip-side of the Cookie sharing is mutual destruction which requires giving up part of your rating to degrade another person's rating. I am still clueless as to whether such small set of rules will lead to a stable world instead of something that will blow up. Still, I enjoy working with combining simple rules to build complex systems, probably because of my physics background.

Another thought I had was that, for systems like Wikipedia, unbiased views are sometimes either not possible or premature. In such cases, I think the right thing to od is to record multiple biased/opposing views to capture the conflict in its raw form instead.