The "Carl Rove" Defense for all future Investigations

The main benefit that will derive from the conviction of Carl Rove is that all future people when being investigated and are asked about what happened when will always state " I cannot remember."

Mr Rove was convicted due to his inability to remember what happened on a certain day three years prior to being questioned. Thus he stated one day, someone else came up with a written record stating it was another day, and thus the perjury conviction was "valid" since he was off by a day from what he remembered and told them versus what someone else wrote down as to when it happened.

If someone came up and asked YOU what your were doing three years ago on day X could you remember it? Like any job one day seems like the next and if you stated yes you did, and someone then came up with a record that it was the wrong day YOU would be guilty of perjury - knowingly lying about the date since the date you gave was wrong and someone else showed it to be wrong thus YOU purposely stated it wrong (according to how the laws are written).

Thus, when someone comes before Congress, before any questioning person, it is best always to state "I cannot remember" even if you do since if you are wrong just ONE time you will be convicted of perjury, lying to an investigator, obstructing justice - for a single memory failure.

A prosecutor can - and does - pick laws to charge people with based solely on the chance of convicting people - does not matter if it is appropriate or note - since he is RATED on his ability to gain convictions - not justice. Justice has no bearing in a court of law - it is the ability to convict people of any crime on the books which is important to any prosecuting attorney.

 

 

Sponsors -- Is the writing on the Vest?

In a BLOG post from CNet (http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9748139-7.html?tag=bl) it was revealed that the latest contract REQUIRES all photographers to wear vests advertising Canon and Reebok.

Why stop at the photographers?

Make every reporter type person (even even radio announcers) wear them who are at the NFL game. If a Radio or TV wants to talk about it require them to mention Canon and Reebok (NFL is sponsored by Canon and Reebok. The Cowboys won again . . .).

Why stop there? Any private venue can write into the terms of attendance that all reporters wear only their approved vests.

I can see it now come next year: Republican Convention would require all reporters within the hall to wear vests with "Republicans Never Truncate the Ship of State" with an elephant standing on its hind legs on the back of the vest while on the front the saying would be "Trust your Elephant: They never Forget".

Not to be outdone the Democratic Party would make all reporters who attend their convention wear one too with a Donkey on the back packed with saddlebags each having one of their main programs they want to pass and the saying would be "Democrats: We don't leave anyone behind;"  and on the front they would have a braying Donkey with the saying "If you say it loud enough they will hear."

Don't ya think?

Erosion in Nature and of US Citizens Rights are really the Same

The parable / story of the turtle and the hare is applicable to many situations - one reason that makes it an oft repeated example. Going fast as a jack-rabbit can cause you to lose while going slow and steady wins the long term race.

 

Erosion is a matter of scale. On a small creek right after a flash flood you can see the effects immediately as the banks give way. On the bottom of a river bottom as it empties into an ocean the individual sand particles that builds up over time it undetectable on a daily basis but wait a few years and the channel is now 6 deep instead of 16 feet deep.

 

When it comes to rights of citizens and what they can - and mostly cannot - do is also being eroded away on a daily basis but is seldom detectable. Laws are constantly being put onto the "books" prescribing punishment, or elimination of rights, for a very specific crime or situation. Sounds good. This would be fine but the sheer number of variations on a "crime" in some cases amounts to dozens of items - often things that have to occur even for a crime to even be committed - that a single crime performed spawns from five to several hundred charges against a person. The idea is of course to ensure that the person is convicted of something - and the sheer number of charges levied against them will ensure that. The same logic is true as they add in incremental restrictions on what people can do, can go, with what, how long, who they must tell etc. Miss any one item and you could face dozens of charges on one "instance" but with many variations.

 

This is the method that gun restriction advocates are taking, propose little things that “make sense” in isolation and they rack up so many restrictions and rules for every possible situation over a period of time so that eventually they will achieve their goal that no individual will be able to own a weapon of any kind for sport or defense except Government law enforcement and military personnel. Who of course will follow without question orders given to them since they have their OWN rules. This is the way Attorney General Gonzales is trying to permanently ban people from ever owning a firearm with some of his proposed rules to ban people from owning guns, ammo, having it even in a place where they reside based on his whim (or any AG that follows) - forever - with no oversight, no appeal, no review, and no right to even find out who recommended you be denied rights to own a weapon. And this could then easily be used to ban people forever from flying, traveling on a plane, bus, train etc - with no appeal. It would follow a logical progression that is someone is banned from owning a weapon - they are "dangerous" - then they should be banned from the public transportation system for the same extended reasons. Then they should be banned from being around the public at all since they are dangerous.

 

Every dictatorship bans guns, bans gathering, restricts what people can say or do, travel, and there is never an appeal of what is ordered. The US is going down this same path legally, just like what NAZI Germany did in the 1930s. Passing laws, legally, denying rights to people. NAZI elected government representatives all properly voted upon these laws in a democratic method, then changed the laws to restrict more, legally, then voted away rights of people, legally, and so on down the path to where in a true legal sense everything that Germany did to Germans and others during WW II were technically LEGAL under their system. If you had tried to prosecute any German under their laws for war crimes you could not. Everything they did was LEGAL under their system. Shooting hostages - perfectly legal and with lots of legal and historical precedence to do so. When the war was won we created new laws - crimes - and then tried them using them and of course there was no challenge since as prisoners they had no rights to challenge the laws passed which were used to punish them!

 

When you hear people vehemently rally against gun restrictions is due to the long term effect each new "sounds good" law has as each builds upon the previous to erode away the rights.

 

In Oregon there is a law that no firearms can be within 1000 feet of a school. With the way schools overlap and are spread throughout an area a person having a weapon in their own house could be charged with a few thousand crimes since they could count every schoolchild as a possible victim if you took your weapon out on your front porch and wanted to clean it in the sunshine. Portland Oregon now considers your front porch and yard the same as "public property" for all laws and you have all the rules / laws / ordinances / permits that any public street, park, stream does for use - and mainly non-use - on your own property - and all the crimes. You have no free speech rights on your front porch - nor you roof (they ban any advertising, banners, campaign statements any speech, drawings, diagrams, anything on all building roofs too!)

 

You may elect a person, but the people who write the RULES that are used to enforce a single line in a bill report is not responsible to the electorate. The person in charge of a department is appointed, held accountable to no one, create the rules based on what they are told, and there is NO APPEAL to the rules they publish. They cite the law and the you have to overturn the law and they may remove just 1 rule that affected you leaving the rest all in place. Then they create new rules (which are created to prescribe how to enforce the law) to still do the same thing using different words and procedures.

 

When you start seeing how a 1 line "law" passed by any governing body evolves into a few thousand pages of codes created to enforce that law you can see why people become passionate about stopping the very start of any idea.

 

A common example of rule / code / ordinance bloat that anyone can relate to concerns building codes. Cities did not enact building codes on their own, insurance companies pressured them to do so since they had started selling lots of life insurance and wanted to collect premiums but never want to pay out. The easiest way to ensure that insurance is never paid out to victims is to prevent fire and building collapses from occurring killing people. So they got buildings codes to be passed that keep upping the "safety" requirements for all buildings so that insurance sold to people / companies lowers the risk to insurance companies thus making the possibility of fire and other items from occurring to such a low state that they can make even larger profits. The same is true for insuring buildings, and even the everyday car. Note: It was the insurance industry that tested cars for crashes so they could figure out how much premium to charge. Getting cities to raise the code on buildings allows them to collect insurance with little chance of ever having to pay anything out.

 

The basic mantra that you have to watch out for is:  "it is for your own safety" and when they state it is for the "safety of children" really watch out - it means that you just lost another freedom in the USSA - United Socialist States of America.

Open Formats, Archiving, and Retrievability in the Future of Electronic Documents

ISO, ECMA, IEE, ITU, W3C et al are all "standards" organizations that exist solely to publish - and enforce - a set of agreed methods of communication in order to ensure what is sent by "A" is received by "B" the same every time. A defined translator for any given function.
OpenXML, OpenDOC, ASCII, EBCDIC, Hollerith are all standards in that they tell others how to encode human speech and symbols into a machine readable form.
All is well and good!
Wrong.
The problems with any machine readable encoding methods is not how they are coded but WHAT it is encoded (stored) on.
A Hollerith card takes up lots of room but if stored properly 200 years from now you could STILL read the card - maybe not by machine but with your eyes. Data stored on a magnetic tape may still be readable but if there are no machines to read the tape it is as good as never being saved. The problem of storing data is not very hard - use the latest and greatest item you have at the time - but storing it so that hundreds - or even 10 years from now - that  you can still read the data is the real problem.
The fight over OpenDoc vs ms OpenXML never addresses the REAL long term problem nor problems that THESE items will create. They sound very good - open standard that anyone can write to and anyone can create programs that anyone can read from - but the problem comes down to that you need a PROGRAM to read them AND a method to STORE and RETRIEVE them from a repository!
NARA - National Archives and Records Administration (USA) - has been dealing with this problem since the 1950s - data given to them on tapes, cards, etc can no longer be accessed since there are no machines left to read them!
During WWII all Americans captured the by Germans had a punch card created about them by the US Army that tracked them in the various POW camps - all the information about a single POW was on a single card. The machine that read these cards were no longer around, and even the meanings of the card locations was not known when the boxes were discovered in NARA. However, being physical, and access to known data about specific POWs being around to match against THEIR card, a researcher was able to reverse engineer the card and now all those records are online at NARA - in a database.
Accessible yes, but now being in a database you MUST have an application to read it, you MUST have a storage method, you MUST update the application and back end software continuously plus all the data is likely in a relational database which means you MUST document the relationships of all the fields and if you EVER lose that bit of relationship  document showing the relationships of the fields and tables all the information is LOST FOREVER. It becomes a meaningless mass of data. And of course all this recovery information is ALSO stored electronically! In this case since the physical cards are still around you can always reconstruct the information.
The problems with these "open" document standards being created is that they MUST be stored in a machine readable format which places them into solely an electronic realm where everything is programmatically driven to even get at the stored document. You can bet that governments will not store them in a single file folder but in a relational database so that means you have another layer of abstraction, certainly not stored in a local drive but on a massive storage repository (SAN or whatever will follow-up to a SAN) and then you are dependant upon a private company (or if open source kindness of others) to ensure that you can even get at that data.
The US Patent Office has been scanning all their paper documents submitted with patents and then throwing them away to cut down on storage costs. Sounds great, now everything is online and accessible. However now they are solely dependant on that electronic storage method they implemented forever, or converting it again and again as technology moves on into a new storage medium or format but any single document will NEVER be better than the initial scan of it that was done using today's technology. And no one will ever be able to look at the true original document anymore (except for dumpster divers who have been picking through dumpsters behind the Patent Office to find originals to save and later sell if and when deemed worth parting with it.)
The "open doc movement" heavyweights are using the "shaver" method of selling open doc idea to the Government. Give the format away free then sell them the ways of reading them via storage and front end programs which allows them to find the "open" documents.
The open document format sounds good, but the back end is still very closed and locked.

Statistics and Polls - The numbers and assumptions they do not reveal

Political campaign season is upon us - a year earlier than normal - and all sorts of polls will be published, brandished or banished for each and every possible person and topic.

These are always treated and presented as "facts" with a margin of error attached of often 3%. Given that the vast majority  of the US population (I'd say at least 70%) have never taken a college level statistics class these error margins numbers really have no meaning to them. And given the fact that without knowing how a statistical average is calculated and how standard deviation is used to arrive at 97% accuracy leaving the 3% margin of error the polls are widely used as a pure propaganda tool by all political parties.

The newscasters when using these polls also state the number of people polled - with the count of 1003 people being cited often along with the margin of error "fact."

What a "scientific" poll is trying to say is that if they poll 1003 people, get these results, poll another group of 1003 people they should get the same set of results. However, the accuracy is only within +- 3 so if 74% people liked something it really could be 71 or 77 but they are fairly certain that 97% of the time that it will be between 71 and 77.

Polling just 1003 out of 301 million people in the US (June 2007) to state as fact as to what percentage everyone believes is a stretch to most people. Statistics is just that, a stretch by mathematical means that polling 1003 people would give the same results as polling 100,300,000 adults. The formulas behind all of this is based on probability - confidence - that as you approach X number of people the accuracy increases to a point that polling more people does not significantly change (which means a standard deviation from what was observed) the percentage based on the smaller sample.

This 1003 sounds good, and thinking that 1003 people would be enough of a sample "universe" but this sample can hide lots. What pollsters do not tell often is that where these 1003 people come from. With 50 states that means just 20 people from each state would be answering the poll. Is it a telephone, paper, web based poll? Each of those in turn have their own unique sets of universes of views, abilities, and outlooks. A Web based poll is not going to get poverty people who have no web system access. 20 registered voters from Boston to represent all of Mass compared to 20 registered voters from Harvard? It still is 20 people but those 20 from Harvard have way different outlooks than 20 from Boston. Separate out teenage voters, 20,30,40, 50 year old or WW II era retirees and each have their own outlook you soon see that having just 20 from a single state to reflect all of those age years then add in gender and that 1003 people to reflect a NATIONAL view of anything is really false.

The math people will trot out formulas stating that it is valid, but unless they actually DO each of those subgroups - they are really GUESSING using effective propaganda wrapped around a trust in science to present how large groups of people believe.

One of the basic principles that a statistician learns is how the question is asked, sequence presented, also will influence the outcome. Do these polls mix up the question sequence, reword them, have word bias built into them (motive of the pollster) and other hidden items that affect answers? To account for these you would have to start asking even more people to ensure that the mere act of asking and how asked will not affect the answers received.

If you polled a 1003 people in a national poll and the answer came back that drinking age should be lowered back to 18 would you believe it when reported by a news organization? If others repeated the poll and got the same result many times? Now what if you found out that they only polled 18 to 20 year olds to get that statistically valid answer? It is perfectly valid, repeatable, and represents the view of people nationwide - in that universe of people polled.

So the next time you see any statistic being presented as "fact" think about these (and other) requisites that must occur to accomplish polling before you decide to believe these "facts" on how people think - or ANY fact stated by anyone or any government.

Ongoing Copyright Changes - Real and Proposed

As a photographer who posts pictures onto my web site I know that people will "lift" them and use them without asking first. If you post some people will just use them for making money regardless of what you want - there always will be some people who will do that. Others will use them due to lack of money to pay for them, philosophy (people oppressed me, I will steal to get back at them), ignorance (its posted, it must be free to use) or numerous other reasons. I actually allow people to use my images for commentary, school, and other non-fee uses (if they charge others in any manner then it is commercial and they must pay to use images, and I give them at 300 DPI or higher than the 72 DPI on the web site) for both web sites, papers, presentations etc.

The web broadcast industry will be hit with lots of new fees on July 15, 2007 - unless a judge intervenes - requiring them to pay for songs being "broadcast" over the internet - at least in the US based businesses. Those hosted outside will, of course, ignore paying any fees since the US has no control over them. Since the fees is based on statistics - which anyone knows can be skewed to present any view based on the universe that was polled - of use many will have to shut down since the hobby / business they pursue is not designed to make them any real money. This is due to administrative degree stating that people will pay a percentage based on the total possible viewing audience of that radio internet station. Numbers matter. Paying .015 cents per song does not sound like much - until you are faced that someone else has determined that 150,000 POSSIBLE listeners could hear it so you get to pay $2,250 a month to the "artist" for the privilege of playing it online. Play 1080 songs a day (15 per hour if each are 3 minutes long) and your bill becomes 2 million 430 thousand dollars a month!

People would likely have to cut down to 7 to 9 songs an hour, advertise more, in order to break even (less songs to play due to fees) and the actual "artist" will see only 5 to 7 % of the fees collected - most will just go to the record labels who REALLY own the songs via contract to the artist.

And the music industry is the only one getting this special treatment.

What if they applied the same logic to photographs seen on the web so that every time a photo is viewed the photographer got .015 cents? It is not the same? You hear the song and it is gone, visual looking then gone is no difference.

Why not apply the same logic to a billboard - 60,000 cars go by one every day so the photographer should get 60,000 x .015 cents every day for that image?

In this manner you see that the Copyright Board made a big mistake in singling out this - at the insistence of the Music Industry - vs the old (reasonable) system of a flat fee per year into a fund to distribute to artists.

Add onto this new fee structure the May 2007 proposal to alter laws of infringement by Attorney General Roberto Gonzales so that just thinking about using software, music, images etc would land you in jail - you do not even have to actually distribute anything just have it in your possession and they THINK you are going to share with others - plus whole lot of other changes  (http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9719339-7.html) so that you have to worry about every item for the next 70 years (length of basic copyright AFTER a person dies, a corporation has rights from 70 to 105 years) and you could live your whole life with the threat of going to jail for using something was was created WHEN YOU WERE BORN.