China To Its Children: Life is Hell

Kristof via NYT:

Last month, the Asia Society published an excellent report, "Math and Science Education in a Global Age: What the U.S. Can Learn from China." It notes that China educates 20 percent of the world's students with 2 percent of the world's education resources. And the report finds many potential lessons in China's rigorous math and science programs.

Yet, there isn't any magic to it. One reason Chinese students learn more math and science than Americans is that they work harder at it. They spend twice as many hours studying, in school and out, as Americans.

Chinese students, for example, must do several hours of homework each day during their summer vacation, which lasts just two months. In contrast, American students have to spend each September relearning what they forgot over the summer.

China's government has developed a solid national curriculum, so that nearly all high school students study advanced biology and calculus. In contrast, only 13 percent of American high school pupils study calculus, and fewer than 18 percent take advanced biology.

Yet if the Chinese government takes math and science seriously, children and parents do so even more. At Cao Guangbiao elementary school in Shanghai, I asked a third-grade girl, Li Shuyan, her daily schedule. She gets up at 6:30 a.m. and spends the rest of the day studying or practicing her two musical instruments.

So if she gets her work done and has time in the evening, does she watch TV or hang out with friends? "No," she said, "then I review my work and do extra exercises."

China, Education

Scaring The People

Cohen via The Post:

Naturally, cable news was all over the story since it provided pictures . These included shots of the Sears Tower, the FBI bureau, the seven alleged terrorists and, of course, Gonzales dutifully playing his assigned role of the dummy. He noted that the suspects wanted to wage a "full ground war" against the United States and "kill all the devils" they could -- this despite a clear lack of materiel and sidewalk-level IQs. Still, as Gonzales pointed out, if "left unchecked, these homegrown terrorists may prove to be as dangerous as groups like al-Qaeda." A presidential medal for the man, please.

It is not now and never has been my intention to belittle terrorism. Clearly, if what the government alleges turns out to be the truth -- look, that sometimes happens -- then these guys deserve punishment. But theirs was such a preposterous, crackpot plot that the only reason it rose to the level of a televised news conference by the nation's chief law enforcement officer was the Bush administration's compulsive need to hype everything. For this, Gonzales, like a good Boy Scout, is always prepared.

Terrorism

War: Just Another Get-Rich-Quick Scheme

Frank Rich via NYT:

In this favor-driven world of fat contracts awarded to the well-connected, Mr. Safavian was only an aspiring consigliere. He was not powerful enough or in government long enough to do much beyond petty reconnaissance for Mr. Abramoff and his lobbying clients. But the Bush brand of competitive sourcing, with its get-rich-quick schemes and do-little jobs for administration pals, spread like a cancer throughout the executive branch. It explains . . . why American troops are more likely to be slaughtered than greeted with flowers more than three years after the American invasion of Iraq.
* * *
[T]he most lethal impact of competitive sourcing, as measured in human cost, is playing out in Iraq. In the standard narrative of American failure in the war, the pivotal early error was Donald Rumsfeld's decision to ignore the advice of Gen. Eric Shinseki and others, who warned that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to secure the country once we inherited it. But equally reckless, we can now see, was the administration's lax privatization of the country's reconstruction, often with pet companies and campaign contributors and without safeguards or accountability to guarantee results.
* * *
Of the favored companies put in charge of our supposed good works in Iraq, Halliburton is the most notorious. But it is hardly unique. As The Los Angeles Times reported in April, it is the Parsons Corporation that is responsible for the "wholesale failure in two of the most crucial areas of the Iraq reconstruction — health and safety — which were supposed to win Iraqi good will and reduce the threat to American soldiers."

Parsons finished only 20 of 150 planned Iraq health clinics, somehow spending $60 million of the budgeted $186 million for its own management and administration. It failed to build walls around 7 of the 17 security forts it constructed to supposedly stop the flow of terrorists across the Iran border. Last week, reported James Glanz of The New York Times, the Army Corps of Engineers ordered Parsons to abandon construction on a hopeless $99.1 million prison that was two years behind schedule. By the calculation of Representative Waxman, some $30 billion in American taxpayers' money has been squandered on these and other Iraq boondoggles botched by a government adhering to the principle of competitive sourcing.
* * *
Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, the very model of big government that the current administration vilifies, never would have trusted private contractors to run the show. Somehow that unwieldy, bloated government took less time to win World War II than George W. Bush's privatized government is taking to blow this one.

Iraq, Corruption

I Guess Using The Soldiers In Iraq As Pawns In Republican Electoral Strategy Is An Acceptable Way To "Support Our Troops"

Herbert via NYT:

"Withdrawal is not an option," declared the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, who sounded like an actor trying on personas that ranged from Barry Goldwater to General Patton. "Surrender," said the bellicose Mr. Frist, "is not a solution."

Any talk about bringing home the troops, in the Senate majority leader's view, was "dangerous, reckless and shameless."

But then on Sunday we learned that the president's own point man in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, had fashioned the very thing that ol' blood-and-guts Frist and his C-Span brigade had ranted against: a withdrawal plan.

Are Karl Rove and his liege lord, the bait-and-switch king, trying to have it both ways? You bet. And that ought to be a crime, because there are real lives at stake.

The first significant cut under General Casey's plan, according to an article by Michael Gordon in yesterday's Times, would occur in September. That, of course, would be perfect timing for Republicans campaigning for re-election in November. How's that for a coincidence?
* * *
I wonder whether Americans will ever become fed up with the loathsome politicking, the fear-mongering, the dissembling and the gruesome incompetence of this crowd. From the Bush-Rove perspective, General Casey's plan is not a serious strategic proposal. It's a straw in the political wind.

How many casualties will be enough? More than 2,500 American troops who dutifully answered President Bush's call to wage war in Iraq have already perished, and thousands more are struggling in agony with bodies that have been torn or blown apart and psyches that have been permanently wounded.

Has the war been worth their sacrifice?

How many still have to die before we reach a consensus that we've overpaid for Mr. Bush's mad adventure? Will 5,000 American deaths be enough? Ten thousand?
* * *
Americans need to understand that Mr. Bush's invasion of Iraq was a strategic blunder of the highest magnitude. It has resulted in mind-boggling levels of bloodshed, chaos and misery in Iraq, and it certainly hasn't made the U.S. any safer.

We've had enough clownish debates on the Senate floor and elsewhere. We've had enough muscle-flexing in the White House and on Capitol Hill by guys who ran and hid when they were young and their country was at war. And it's time to stop using generals and their forces under fire in the field for cheap partisan political purposes.

Iraq

The Erosion of Privacy Continues: Episode - Banks

via NYT editorial:

In the heightened state of emergency after 9/11, the government began examining the Swift records with the help of general administrative subpoenas, through which one part of the executive branch basically grants permission to another. Now it is nearly five years later, and nothing has changed. Investigators have examined the international money transfers of thousands of Americans and others, apparently without ever trying to get a court order or warrant to do the searches. And Congress, as usual, has never exercised any oversight.

A few members were briefed on the program, and a few more were told about it once it became clear that newspapers were preparing an article. But briefings tend to become a trap in which those who are informed about what is going on are required under security rules not to talk about what they know even after it becomes public. Armed with some knowledge, they become more impotent than when they were completely in the dark.
* * *
Investigators will probably need to monitor the flow of money to and from suspected terrorists and listen in on their phone conversations for decades to come. No one wants that to stop, but if America is going to continue to be America, these efforts need to be done under a clear and coherent set of rules, with the oversight of Congress and the courts.

Privacy

Shamelessly Stoking Fears

Robinson via washpost.com:

In the past I've noted how Bush regularly stokes and exploits our fears to get Americans to accept the previously unacceptable -- not just intrusive domestic surveillance but also secret CIA prisons, abandonment of due process for terrorism suspects and mistreatment of detainees that international accords describe as torture. The most tragic example, of course, is how he planted and fertilized the idea that the war in Iraq had something to do with Sept. 11, which it did not.

But while Bush takes every advantage of this sour and apprehensive mood, he didn't conjure it out of thin air. And sometimes it spins out of his control -- as evidenced by the immigration debate, in which he is having to scramble to keep the House Republican leadership, running scared in an election year, from insisting on a program of mass deportation that would resemble a latter-day Trail of Tears. The acceptance of domestic electronic surveillance and the fear of an influx of undocumented immigrants seem like disparate issues, but I believe they have the same origin -- a kind of generalized anxiety that stems in part from the Sept. 11 attacks but that has other components as well.

If a psychiatrist were to put the nation on the couch, the shrink's notes would read something like this: "Patient feels vulnerable to attack; cannot remember having experienced similar feeling before. Patient accustomed to being in control; now feels buffeted by outside forces beyond grasp. Patient believes livelihood and prosperity being usurped by others (repeatedly mentions China). Patient seeks scapegoats for personal failings (immigrants, Muslims, civil libertarians). Patient is by far most powerful nation in world, yet feels powerless. Patient is full of unfocused anger."

It's shameful to watch Bush and his minions take advantage of these acute symptoms. And if the immigration issue didn't threaten to disrupt so many people's lives, it would be amusing to witness Bush's attempts to calm the irrational fears he has so often encouraged. It's at least somewhat comforting, in a way, to know that with the president's approval ratings so low and Congress in a state of dysfunction, we may be entering a phase of one-party gridlock in which nothing much gets done -- which means there's a chance that things might not get much worse.

Bush, Fear

Who Are You Calling Crazy?

Krugman on the right wing loon labelers:

But now those harsh critics have been vindicated. And it turns out that many of the administration supporters can't handle the truth. They won't admit that they built a personality cult around a man who has proved almost pathetically unequal to the job. Nor will they admit that opponents of the Iraq war, whom they called traitors for warning that invading Iraq was a mistake, have been proved right. So they have taken refuge in the belief that a vast conspiracy of America-haters in the media is hiding the good news from the public.

Unlike the crazy conspiracy theories of the left -- which do exist, but are supported only by a tiny fringe -- the crazy conspiracy theories of the right are supported by important people: powerful politicians, television personalities with large audiences. And we can safely predict that these people will never concede that they were wrong. When the Iraq venture comes to a bad end, they won't blame those who led us into the quagmire; they'll claim that it was all the fault of the liberal media, which stabbed our troops in the back.

Iraq, You're Wrong

Flimflam of Voodoo Economics

Dionne on Rove via washpost.com:

Most astonishingly, Rove tried to make the case that Bush's tax cuts actually left the rich paying more. Everyone knows the Bush cuts in levies on dividends, capital gains and inheritances overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy. But here was Rove playing class politics by arguing that the wealthy now pay a larger share of total income taxes than they did before Bush.

This is statistical flimflam, of course. It leaves out payroll taxes, which hit most Americans the hardest. And the wealthy are paying more of the total share of income taxes, even though their rates are much lower, because their share of national income has gone up. Rove's numbers actually prove the rich are getting richer. But the fact that Rove tried to sound like William Jennings Bryan is the surest indicator that the administration is worried about its image as protector of the privileged.

And in today's NYT Letters:

To the Editor:

Re "Senate Approves 2-Year Extension of Bush Tax Cuts" (front page, May 12):

Let me see if I have this straight. Under the extended Bush tax cut plan, a person with income over $1 million a year will save about $42,700, close to my total yearly salary. A working stiff like me, making between $40,000 to $50,000 a year, will save $47, the cost of a tank of gas.

I think that I can now really appreciate just how important the average American is to this Republican Congress and president.

John Scalise
Mount Pleasant, Mich., May 12, 2006

•

To the Editor:

The entire Democratic leadership should stand up as a united group and say that these tax cuts that largely benefit the country's wealthiest taxpayers are morally indefensible.

That empty slogan "a rising tide lifts all boats" is still an empty phrase.

Irwin Levine
Highland Park, N.J., May 12, 2006

Taxes, Politics

Spy v Spy

Not really. MPAA v Torrentspy. Via infoworld:

In its filing Monday seeking to dismiss the case, Torrentspy argued that the MPAA might as well have sued Google, since Google does what Torrentspy does, only better. Torrentspy is a search engine that helps visitors find torrent files, which are often music or movie files stored in an easily shared file format.

"There is nothing alleged to distinguish defendants' website from that maintained by Google," Torrentspy said in its filing. "Everything alleged about defendants' website is true about Google, and even more so, because Google outperforms the allegations in the complaint," the filing reads.

Copyright

Another Keyword Trademark Dispute Makes It Past Summary Judgment

via CNET:

A court has ruled that a lawsuit over a company purchasing a rival's trademark as a search keyword should go to trial, in what could be the first case to scrutinize the trademark infringement liability of keyword purchasers.

Edina Realty sued rival real estate company TheMLSonline.com, accusing it of false advertising, trademark infringement and trademark dilution. According to the suit, MLS used "Edina Realty" in search terms purchased on Google and Yahoo, in the text of the MLS ads that appeared on the two search sites, and in hidden links and text on the MLS Web site.

* * *

A ruling issued last week by the U.S. District Court in Minnesota said evidence of actual trademark dilution had not been provided in the case but that the case could go to trial because there were disputes on material facts with regard to whether the use of the trademark was causing confusion among consumers.

Trademark

Swedish Pirate Bay Thrives As BitTorrent Sites Are Targeted

Via wired.com:

According to "Anakata," one of the site's operators, subsequent MPAA lawsuits have continued to drive more users to The Pirate Bay, which today boasts 1 million unique visitors a day. The Pirate Bay's legal adviser, law student Mikael Viborg, said the site receives 1,000 to 2,000 HTTP requests per second on each of its four servers.

That's bad news for the content industries, which have fired off letter after menacing letter to the site, only to see their threats posted on The Pirate Bay, together with mocking replies. Viborg said that no one has successfully indicted The Pirate Bay or sued its operators in Swedish courts. Attorneys for DreamWorks and Warner Bros., two companies among those that have issued take-down demands to the site, did not return calls for comment.

Viborg credits The Pirate Bay's seeming immunity to the basic structure of the BitTorrent protocol. The site's Stockholm-based servers provide only torrent files, which by themselves contain no copyright data -- merely pointers to sources of the content. That makes The Pirate Bay's activities perfectly legal under Swedish statutory and case law, Viborg claims. "Until the law is changed so that it is clear that the trackers are illegal, or until the Swedish Supreme Court rules that current Swedish copyright law actually outlaws trackers, we'll continue our activities. Relentlessly," wrote Viborg in an e-mail.

P2P

The GPL and Sarbanes-Oxley

The Software Freedom Law Center just published a white paper dismissing accusations (particularly from Wasabi Systems) that distributers of open source code licensed under the GPL are at greater risk of violating the corporate compliance provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act:

Some have recently argued that corporate executives face increased risk of criminal liability under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) if their companies develop and distribute code licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The argument, as it has been made, raises significant concerns about SOX compliance, but it fails to clarify the scope and context of these points. We have reviewed these issues and, as discussed more fully below, there is in fact no special risk for developing GPL'd code under SOX. Under most circumstances, the risk posed to a company by SOX is not affected by whether they use GPL'd or any other type of software. Arguments to the contrary are pure anti-GPL FUD.

Open Source

Update on GPL Update

via CNET:

A major revamp of the General Public License is scheduled for public release next week, a move that's expected to kick off a long and vocal debate over the key foundation of open-source programming.

The Free Software Foundation will release and describe the first public draft of version 3 of the document on Jan. 16, at the First International Conference on GPLv3 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the organization said.

And other recent news on the open source front, "Open source battens the hatches."

And a review on a recently book from O'Reilly entitled Producing Open Source Software:

Throughout Producing Open Source Software, Fogel hits the reader with the stark reality of software development. He then follows up with easy and clear pointers, as well as some detailed instructions, as to how to avoid such pitfalls. The book begins with a concise history of free and open source software. This, in itself, will be useful to a great number of people who, like me, may be well aware of most of the concepts, but were not there at the time and will have gaps in their knowledge. It is great to be reading and think - Oh, that's what GNU stands for - when you would usually be too embarrassed to ask. It's also good to get a feel for where the soft (and hard) politics of the free and open source software community have come from.

Open Source

OUR BHOY KEANO!

"I have not come up here on an ego trip or to unwind. I am here to win matches."

A few thoughts on RK16's arrival at Parkhead:

Tosh McKinley via Evening Times: "ROY KEANE has to be one of the best signings Celtic have ever made. You can't underestimate what a lift his arrival will do for everyone at the club.

It isn't just the players in the dressing room who will be delighted to see a player of genuine world-class ability come through the doors. Everyone, from the fans who go every week to those working in and around the club, will have a spring in their step today."

Ronnie Cully in the Evening Times: "ROY KEANE has revealed he elected to sign for Celtic, foregoing all other offers, because he wants a new challenge.

His much-heralded arrival in Paradise provided that immense challenge - but not just for the controversial 34-year-old.

Gordon Strachan, the man charged with integrating this unique talent into a game plan which was going along nicely, recognises that he, too, has had a gauntlet thrown down to him."

Jungle G via eTims: "Personally, I have to admit to being fairly impressed by how plain-speaking and realistic Keane was about the situation he finds himself in at Celtic. Of course, there is little doubt that sheer untold reserves of self-belief wash over this particular player to begin with, but even still this was an impressive performance. Keane is an extremely intelligent individual - relative to standards within his profession - and is surely aware that there is a sizeable chunk of the Parkhead support who harbour reservations over his signing, and will also know fine well that at a club like Celtic, a player such as he is only ever a few hiccups away from a media storm. Given all that, he was wise in steering clear of the 'boyhood dream' angle as he faced his latest public, or at least those weak and venal enough to constitute his latest public's media."

Tom via Sporting Almanac: "It is rather more likely that Keane sees in Celtic (and has done for some time) embodiments of values that he holds dear. Anyone visiting Parkhead must be struck by the fundamentally
proletarian passion still pervades and defines the nature of the club. It has often been mentioned how Keane's background in working class Cork provided him with the steel and backbone which coloured his career. It has also been well documented how it pained him to see the soft, apathetic culture which developed at Old Trafford as affluence sated his colleagues' hunger.

And, indeed, that of United's supporters.

Perhaps Keane wants to taste again that feeling of a success that means something. A success that provides supporters with meaning to the very fibre of their being. Success that makes men walk tall for a week. If he stays fit and capable to take his place in a Celtic team in next year's Champions League, he will know a fulfillment of his ideals that he was never going to retrieve at Old Trafford."

The Medical Industrial Complex

Krugman via NYT:

The past quarter-century has seen the emergence of a vast medical-industrial complex, in which doctors, hospitals and research institutions have deep financial links with drug companies and equipment makers. Conflicts of interest aren't the exception - they're the norm.

The economic logic of the medical-industrial complex is straightforward. Prescription drugs and high-technology medical devices account for a growing share of medical spending. Both are products that are expensive to develop but relatively cheap to make. So the profit from each additional unit sold is large, giving their makers a strong incentive to do whatever it takes to persuade doctors and hospitals to choose their products.

healthcare

Implied-In-Fact Claim Against EA Gamemaker

via CNET:

In his lawsuit filed Nov. 28 with the California Superior Court in San Mateo County, Calif., Virtual Jam owner Pernell Harris said he met with EA in late 2003 to discuss "Heart of a Champion," a football game he was developing in which players guide an athlete from high school to professional football.

Among other things, players pick the athlete's parents and handle all kinds of daily experiences from sports practice to school homework.

Harris said features from that game appeared in "Madden NFL 2006" when it was released earlier this year. He accused EA of breaching an "implied in fact contract" when it used those features without compensating him and said EA had violated a confidentiality agreement.

Harris is seeking unspecified damages, attorney's fees and restitution.

IP

UK Rethink on IP Laws

via CNET:

The British government has launched a review of the laws protecting intellectual property, an issue of growing importance to the technology industry.

Chancellor Gordon Brown has asked Andrew Gowers, former editor of The Financial Times, to lead an independent review into intellectual-property, or IP, rights in the United Kingdom. The Labour Party manifesto in the last election included a commitment to "modernize copyright and other forms of IP so that they are appropriate for the digital age."

According to the U.K. Treasury, this review will consider how well businesses are able to negotiate the complexity and expense of the copyright and patent system, including copyright and patent-licensing arrangements, litigation and enforcement. It will also look at whether the current technical and legal IP infringement framework reflects the digital environment and whether provisions for "fair use" by citizens are reasonable.

IP

Drug Benefit Disaster

via washingtonpost.com: "Good policy can make for good politics, and bad policy can make for bad politics. Republicans may be about to discover this truism with their Medicare drug benefit, passed by Congress in 2003 and scheduled to take effect in January. As policy, the drug benefit is a calamity. It worsens one of the nation's major problems (paying baby boomers' retirement costs) while addressing a nonexistent 'crisis' (allegedly oppressive drug costs for retirees). Its purpose was mostly political: to bribe the elderly or soon-to-be-elderly to vote for Republicans in 2004. Now it may backfire on Republicans."

Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2005

via Technology News Daily: "If enacted, the proposed Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2005 would enhance the Department’s ability to pursue crimes and protect the intellectual property rights of citizens and industries. The Act includes provisions to: Implement broad forfeiture reforms to ensure the ability to forfeit property, including illicit proceeds, derived from or used in the commission of criminal intellectual property offenses; Criminalize intellectual property theft motivated by any type of commercial advantage or private financial gain; and Strengthen restitution provisions for victim companies and rights holders in order to maximize protection for those who suffer most from these crimes."

Courting Spyware

via Traceroutes: "Cyberlaw Clinic, we’ll have no shortage of claims to pursue against our chosen defendants. However, focusing on the data gathered will allow us the unique chance to establish some precedent for interpretation of the California Consumer Protection Against Computer Spyware Act, the California Online Privacy Protection Act of 2003, and the federal Wiretap Act (part of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986). Click to read more about the claims that Sasha might enable us to make regarding these statutes….."