Now I do not like Specter. I am from Pennsylvania, and I want him out of office because he has a done a number of things I disagree with, but as far as Republicans go I tend to agree with his general views more than most. If the religious right feels that someone who I may occasionally agree with is so incredibly awful, they must hate actual progressives.

Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Lincoln Chafee, they are all being attacked as too moderate. I can see why Jeffords left the Republicans. The fact that Arlen Specter is being given the Chairmanship of the Judiciary committee is not a guaranteed thing. Basically committee chairs are determined by majority in such a way that all the committee chairs end up being from the majority party. Past that the parties determine their policies internally. The Republicans have seniority mechanism with term limits. What does that mean? It means that other Republican Senators, under pressure, could withhold their votes (its actually not so public, but essentially if a majority of Republicans did not want him to have the seat he would not). They could also offer him a seat on some other committee, but I doubt he would take it willingly.

Personally, I hope he gets it, is the best thing for us. He believes in keeping the court balanced, which is the best we can hope for in the present. But the way I see it either the moderate Republican senators will be alienated, or the religious right will be. It will be interesting to watch this play out.

I come from a fairly political family. My brother has been both a politician and a political strategist. During this campaign cycle I stuffed envelopes, made phone calls, put literature on doorsteps, wrote data mining software for a get out the vote effort. I gave $3500 to various candidates. I won’t detail whom, suffice it to say, they were all Democrats, and they all lost. I wasn’t alone. Democrats showed record volunteerism and donations. We rivaled the Republicans in fundraising, which is something that was impossible according to all conventional wisdom. We should but be proud of what we accomplished. But we still lost…

What am I trying to say here? Am I discouraged? Yes. Am I depressed? Yes, Am I tired? Yes. Am I going to take a few days to relax and lick my wounds? Yes. Am I going to give up? NO!

We started something. We started a reformation, and revitalization of the Democratic Party. We started to turn it into a modern, progressive party. It will take time, and effort, and maybe some more lost elections. But we need to do it. Both of the major parties have major endemic problems that have to be addressed, and we are addressing ours. Every time we lose it delays our progress, and increases the burden we will have to bear, but one day we will be victorious, and we will bear that burden, and we will turn America into the kind of country and culture we want it to be.

It may take years, or decades, but until then I will be giving my time and money to candidates who represent my ideals, and who want to remake America into a progressive culture that welcomes all who can contribute. We may have lost this battle, but the campaign is far from over, and I will be dead and rotting before I give up the fight.

In 11th grade I had a history teacher who felt very strongly that using history books anything more than a supplemental reference did not give one a grasp of history. We have all heard the anecdotes about inaccurate history books. So in my 11th grade American History course I spent a lot of time reading speeches, legislation, and court rulings. I think it was a great thing. In college history courses I was much better prepared, and I often knew where to look for some great quote for a paper, or what to analyze to prove my point. I think that easy availability of audio of various political speeches going forward is a wonderful thing, since it will make a lot of historic speeches more easily accessible, and more exciting.

I was immediately interested in the Niro 1.1 Pro. The problem with it was that it had a DVD player I did not need, and it had no digital inputs, which meant that it could only do 5.1 off of the internal DVD player. Since the internal DVD player does not have a DVI or HDMI port it will not fit in with my eventual HDTV upgrade plans.

Niro demoed two new products at CES, the Niro 1.1 Reference and Niro 1.1 Movie Mouse. I assumed there were improvements to the receiver, and hoped they would would add digital audio in. Unfortunately no one examined one up close, and in retrospect it looks like they were actually demoing the new speaker arrays on the old receiver platform (probably with modifications). The announced release date came and went, and they released the Movie Mouse with some adapter for the old systems, but it was clearly suboptimal (you had to manual switch the cables every time you wanted to use it), which made me fairly optimistic the new receiver was going to do what I wanted (if they were minor changes they would probably not be delayed).

I was checking their Japanese site earlier this week (when I want something I get a little obsessive about keeping track of release dates) and saw a whole new line up that looked truly awesome. I managed to find the translations on their english sites staging page. They had specs for the new Niro REFERENCE system, and they are exactly what I want. They ditched the CD player, improved the speakers, added multiple digital inputs, and added support for simultaneously connecting the Movie Mouse and the regular speaker. They also added flashrom support so that the receivers will work with new speakers, and they can improve their spacial effects algorithms. There are also two lower end designs, the Niro 400 and Niro 600 They officially rolled them out today, shipping August 6th!!

• Main cast
• Batman
• Superman
• Green Lantern
• Green Arrow
• Martian Manhunter
• Flash
• Wonderwoman
• Captain Atom
• Supergirl
• Additional Heros
• Hawk
• Dove
• Zatanna
• Booster Gold
• The Atom
• Villians
• Mongul
• Lex Luthor
• Ares
• Mordred
• Solomon Grundy
• Other highlights
• One episode looks like it will be a Braniac episode
• One episode looks like it will crossover with Batman Beyond and the future JLU!!

So here are some facts that I just find truly terrifying. Apparently 83% of Fox’s guests on one their high profile shows are Republicans. One might be able to make argument that since the Republican's currently hold a majority in both houses of congress as well as possessing the presidency that there is a legitimate reason for there to be an imbalance, but that seems extreme. What was much more disturbing was the fact that on a number of purely factual issues (“Has the US found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?”) people who watched Fox News were 5 to 10 times more likely to get the answer wrong. I think that any news outlet that has that sort of statistic needs to look at their methods if their intention is really to present the news. Of course the evidence seems to be against that...

The Mortgage deduction is a load of shit. Its serves two purposes. One is to encourage the concept of home ownership. Its not actually clear to me that home ownership is really a "good thing" in the general case. I am not saying there aren't benefits. What I am saying is that for many people renting makes more sense, and giving a tax incentive just entices people to try to buy a house when they really shouldn't. Second, its a token deduction for middle class Americans. It makes them think they are getting an advantage, that they are higher up on the scale than they are. It is one of the only major deduction most middle class American's can get.

Okay, so lets look at why buying a home often doesn't make sense. Housing serves two purposes. One is to provide shelter. Renting also serves that purpose. Two it allows someone to invest in the real-estate growth of an area. But houses are a very complicated investment tool. Most people have to struggle to come up with the down payment, which means they are very leveraged investment tool.

By comparison, in the stock market the standard leverage tools people use are margin accounts and options trading. Margin accounts are very safe for lender, they are secured by the investor's other stocks. Its very hard to "go upside down" on margin accounts (owe more than the intrinsic value of the current assets you hold). Most brokerages will start selling your stocks for you when you start approaching that point. Options trading allows for relatively unsecured transactions. If you have ever setup an options trading account that allows you to do perform uncovered shorts or more risky options strategies you know the pages and pages of disclosures you need to go through. Its risky, you can make a lot of money, but you can lose your shirt. Despite what people say, housing is not guaranteed to go up. And if you want to invest in Real-estate you can always buy REITs. The returns may not be as good as home appreciation, but they are tremendously more liquid, and they are not leveraged, so your investment can never go upside down.

Now housing may not be as dangerous as options trading, but most options traders have significant assets and place a small portion of their money into this highly leveraged mechanism. Many new homeowners put almost all of their assets into a highly leveraged situation. Now call me crazy, but it seems very strange to me to give a tax incentive for that.

The second kind of freaky thing about the tax credit is it purely encourages people to buy homes. It only allows you to deduct the interest. The part that your "throwing away." It seems to me people should be allowed to deduct rent. That would help the poor who can't afford to buy, as well as get rid of the incentive to do what can be a fairly risky investment. Of course, if your going to allow people to deduct both mortgage interest and rent you might as well just get rid of the mortgage deduction and somehow lower taxes on people below a certain income bracket (either through rate reductions, or better yet, payroll tax reductions).

DISCLAIMER: I am not an economist. I have never had any formal training in macro or micro economics. The only formal study I have ever had on the subject is some highly theoretical mathematics work on derivatives trading about 7 years ago.

First, lets discuss some basic principles. During the course of normal economic transactions wealth does not disappear. Ii is mostly zero sum transactions (I buy something from you, you give me some money, a bit is taken by the government, and I give you an item which I had a specific value for). The amount of wealth in existence has not changed. You and I may differ in what the intrinsic value of the purchased item is, but from either point of view the amount of money in existence is constant. The second fact worth mentioning is that in an economy whose currency is not directly backed by a fixed commodity printing more currency does not increase the amount of wealth in existence, though it does implicitly devalue the existing stock of currency, and therefore redistributes wealth from everyone to the printer (in my case the United States Government). Wealth is created in very specific ways, either invention of new ideas, the exploitation of natural resources, etc.

Now some history. A lot of things people say are pure conjecture. It is hard to experiment with economic policies. But we can examine what has happened in the past. Given the fact that wealth transactions or generally zero sum, and in the absence of wealth creation or inflation money can be used as a proxy for wealth, we can say that generally when there is a depression the amount of money (and by proxy wealth) does not drop (all you screaming about the stock market and unearned gains quiet down, I will deal with that in a future post). So what happens. In the great depression basically all the wealth stored in the market ended up gathered in a few people's hands. So there were a few very rich people, and the rest of the country suffered massively. Taxes were almost non-existent compared to today.

Now what can we draw from this. First, having the wealth of the nation being highly consolidated seems to be empirically bad. We can probably make the claim that the more times a piece of currency exchanges hands the better it is for the economy as a whole. We can also can also note that the worse economic drops in the history of the country have tended to happen during periods of low taxes. It also means that rich people are bad for the economy. The more money that they someone has the more consolidated they make the economy, and the more money that is not being actively used in standard economic transactions throughout the country. Likewise, people living month to month are great for the economy, since the money the get quickly goes through several economic transactions before getting either recycled into someone else's pay, or unfortunately consolidated into some large pool of wealth

Now, I am not arguing people should live month to month. It may be good for the economy, but it is bad for for personal security. The point is that there should be a happy medium. The other point to take home is that if any tax cuts really do have a relatively short term effect on the economy than it would be tax cuts on people who are immediately turning over the money, people living month to month. As the case is that means payroll taxes in the United States, which is how the majority of Americans pay most of their taxes, and is interestingly the sort of taxes that the current administration has been loathe to cut.

Between laptop computers, wireless internet, and cordless phones it is apparently possible to buy high tech gadgetry without even lifting ones head off the pillow. I feel like I should have an opinion about that, but mostly I am just tired.

Anyway, I have been waiting for it to come out, because I have recommend it to several friends. It was supposed to come out in April, but it apparently was released early. I highly recommend it. In fact, if I need to give someone a gift this is likely what they are getting. I have bunch of copies on the way from Amazon. If you want to read it and I owe you a gift (forgotten birthday, whatever) stop by my office sometime after next week and I will give you a copy.

These guys did some really novel things with a remote. First off, they determined that people do not control a component, they perform an activity. So instead of selecting the DVD player to control playback, and then switching the remote to stereo receiver to fiddle with the sound, it knows that during my DVD playback activity that the sound buttons need to send signals to the stereo receiver, and the other buttons have to send things to the DVD player.

They also have a remarkably sophisticated state engine. High end AV gear uses what are known as discrete codes. In other words, there is a separate infrared signal for "On" and for "Off" . Lower end gear is simpler, it just sends a "Toggle" signal which changes it. The problem with that is that in order to switch it to a fixed setting you need to know what the current settings are. This is especially bad when switching video inputs. The harmony remote understands all these states, and it keeps a state table inside of itself, so that even if you do not have discrete codes it can make all the transitions seamlessly.

Finally the absolute best thing about it is how it is programmed. Instead of some arcane manual or being a standard learning remote, it is programmed online. You go to their website and select your peripherals from their database. It automatically builds activity profiles and all the state information for you. Then you download it to your remote via USB. If you have a device it has never seen you can simply plug record the events and their uploaded into the online DB for everyone else. It had my TV, DVD player, VCR, and stereo receiver in the online DB, as well as several highend AV switches (Zektor) I have been looking at buying. Its so much eaiser to configure than any other remote I have dealt with and way more flexible. A bit pricey, but definitely worth it.

The conventional solution that is given for this problem is to move to Cyrus imap. The problem for me is that the migration path is not pleasant, and building it on my system was also not entirely fun. Once I got the thing built I was not entirely sure I could migrate everything in a satisfactory manner. So I went looking for other options, and I found one

It turns out UW imap supports several formats, and they recommend a binary file format that includes some indexing and tables, and results in much higher performance. Redhat does not use it. Now this where the trouble starts. UW has a set of migration tools, and a local mailer that supports their format so that you can deliver mail in the new format through sendmail. Except Redhat does not include any of those binaries. It turns out they are part of the UW imap-utils release.

So I go to see if Redhat has a package, and I find this bug. So I decide what the heck, I will build it. UW imap-utils has this kind of incestuous build process where it needs to use static intermediary objects and headers built as part of the UW imap build. Which means I have to build a copy of UW imap. Its build process is pretty much a circa '92 style multiplatform Makefile, but not to bad. I build it, I turn off sendmail, a convert everything, I change my local mailer in my sendmail.mc, I rebuild my sendmail.cf, I start the server back up, and everything works, a whole lot faster. Sure cyrus would have netted me a slightly higher performance server, but given the fact that my server only vends imap for one user, this was definitely the least disruptive, and thus best option.

I would like to say this is the first time I have seen anything from Redhat that I thought was really stupid/amateurish. They ship a low performance, non-scalable imap solution, and despite the fact that the server has options to deal with it they do not include the extra tools because they don't like the devel process. Well quite frankly, end users don't give a Rat's Ass about the devel process. They should either go all the way include the imap-utils so UW imap is usable, or migrate to another server.