Hmm. Am I the only one who sees nothing wrong with seeing 'Internet' as a series of tubes? At each network layer, there are features (cables, queues) that can be explained as 'tubes' after all. Does every US senator, like Ted Stevens, need to know exactly what and how Internet works or is metaphoric understanding enough? Isn't his understanding of the Internet at least better than those who sees Internet Explorer icon as the Internet?

I think Ted probably just asked an aid for explanations of how the Internet worked and the aid probably resorted to using tubes to explain. If your 80 year old grandmother asked you what the Internet was, how would you answer her? Bring up the OSI network model diagram? How would you explain when a message to her took 24 hours to arrive?

Maybe all this is because Ted is against net neutrality and a republican. Ridiculing seems to be a social grouping ritual of sort. Even at kindergarten, ridiculing and echos in agreement defines the outline of a group. Natural or not, I don't like such behaviors although I might have done my share of ridiculing in the past.

Oy. It's so hard to be objective.

Sometimes inconvenience can be productized as a valuable service. The prime example is online banking. Although phishing is still rampant, online banking service rarely offer their customers the option to turn off online banking features that could lead to finacial ruin. Who do I have to kill to require a pain-in-the-ass F2F procedure to transer 5+ digit fund out of my banking and brokerage accounts?

If I happened to move that kind of money regularly (I don't), I want to to require a phone call to a real live person before such transfer can be made. My relationship with that 'person' over time via sequences of brief casual chats is a much better protection than anything current technology can offer IMHO because I can easily instruct the person that if I don't say 'waka waka' each time out of the blue means someone is holding a gun against my head. How much would I be willing to pay to say 'waka waka'? 3 digits per year is not unreasonable I think.

Waka Waka.

My wife told me over the phone that Sean, my son who is currently in South Korea with my wife, recently discovered my blog and is going through my old posts. LOL. So this one is for him.

Hello Sean. This is daddy. I know you are hurting alot now but think of this experience as the landmark between your boyhood and manhood. I went through the same 7 days of unworldy hurt when I was at your age so we have at least one more thing in common.

You may walk like a duck for a while but know that I think of you as a man now, son. Leave a comment like a good blog reader, ok? 😉

I gave some thought to the click fraud problem tonight. While I agree with Bruce Schneier that pay-per-action is the right solution, a solution is needed now, not years later, and pay-per-view/click model needs to be shored up even if pay-per-action business gets traction.

This is the solution I arrived at using two glasses of red lube ;-):

1. seed each clicker with a cookie to identify the computer.
2. void clicks originating from machines without the cookie.
3. void clicks originating from machines exhibiting suspicious activities detected by offline analysis.

While this solution requires pay-per-click ad vendors (i.e. Google) to cut into their profit for now, I think it's worth implementing in the long run.

I just read that FIFA ranking for South Korea dropped to 56th. Even I'll admit that South Korean soccer are not good enough consistently to belong in the top 15 but, hell, 56?

If I was running FIFA, I would replace World Cup with annual FIFA Challenge Season during which:

1. any country can challenge another country.
2. if the challenger loses or ties without any goals, ranking stays the same for both.
3. if the challenger wins, the challenge takes the rank of the loser and ranks of the loser and every country below it drops by one (up to the challenger's former rank).
4. if the game is tied with one or more goals, the two shares the ranking, pushing ranks of every country below them by one (up to the challenger's former rank).
5. the challenged country has the right to choose the time and location for the match (within reasonable limits).
6. Schedule conflicts are settled by FIFA.

This way, if a country has some beef with another, they can play ball instead of firing missiles at each other!

Eric Schmidt's comment on click fraud is like saying glass is liquid. Also, Google has no incentive to stop click fraud, provide true up to date picture of ongoing click fraud, nor discount per-click fee proactively.

TypeMock looks like a useful .NET tool and, as usual, base version is free. The new generation of mocking tools use AOP or AOP-like mechanisms to modify beaviors of concrete classes to fabricate interesting unit test conditions without having to jump through POJO mock hoops which is tedious to the extreme even with smart IDEs like Eclipse.

Since Derby will be bundled with JDK 6 (aka Mustang), I went looking for information on Derby performance and found this slideshow presentation (PDF) from Sun comparing Derby with MySQL and PostgresSQL. Hmm. Not bad at all.

Enough people have asked me what I think North Korea is doing by firing off an ICBM-wannabe toward Hawaii and 6 Scud-like missiles, so here is my answer:

Think of Kim Jong-Il as a tough little street thug. When his neighbors give him things, he thinks they are giving him gifts because they are afraid of him. When he wants something, he knows that the best way to get what he wants is to make his victim nervous. Now the richest guy in his neighborhood is not showing him the respect he thinks he deserve. So he pulls out a knife and waves it about in broad daylight. That's what he was doing when he ordered those missiles fired.

To him, diplomacy just means it's time for the other guy to hand over the wallet. That's respect. But let's not forget that he is a street thug. He is not afraid of fighting nor getting hurt. Even worse, he is not afraid to go beyond waving his knife. Yes, I think he will drop a missile loaded with conventional bomb on US soil if he is cornered and is able. More likely, he'll drop a couple on Japan with his medium range missiles. What can US do if he does that? US can't respond to a conventional attack with a nuke. That leaves air or ground attack.

Ground attack on NK won't be easy like Iraq or Afganistan. Expected casualty will be in tens of thousands within first few weeks and keep rising as the fight transitions into guerrilla warfare at a scale never seen before. Also, ground attack requires support from South Korea but I don't think that'll happen unless NK bombs Seoul. Air attack can and will hurt NK but that's the kind of hurt Kim Jong-Il and his father has been preparing for the past 50 years, digging tunnels and reinforced bunkers.

Anyway, this is what I think about why Kim Jong-Il ordered those missiles fired.

At first, I thought EuDock was just another poor attempt to implement cool UI gadgets using javascript and DHTML. But, wow, check out how smooth it's animation is (wait for animation resources to load).