Rants

I haven’t been following the fallout from Katrina that closely. Most of what I know comes from BoingBoing and the highlights on the 5 o’clock news.
The picture that I see developing is very troubling. Here are the highlights of the clusterfucks that is The Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (from various BoingBoing articles):

• Thirty elderly who died in the nursing home were simply forgotten. They were supposed to be rescued but someone dropped the ball and they died.
• Under Homeland Security, FEMA is supposed to be in charge, but they have been marginalized due to their obvious screw ups. The National Guard is now in charge in the region and they have no experience in these matters. This is aggravating a bad situation.
• The plan going forward for New Orleans is to demolish all the houses and burn them. There is nowhere to bury the waste in the region so they will incinerate it all. Before that can go on, they will have to search every house for chemical hazards.
• The EPA ordered 40 satellite phones to get their people in contact. Those phones have arrived, but no one ordered SIM cards and these phones are currently useless.
• This contractor has been organizing reverse osmosis (RO) water purification units from all over the country since last Tuesday. He has over 100 units of various sizes available to move into the region, but no one will give the go ahead. No one will sign their name to a piece of paper for fear recriminations later. He says that over 80 million pint bottles of water have been purchased at $0.75 each. The RO units can produce a gallon of water from contaminated water for $0.01 and they can produce thousands of gallons a day. Two are staged near the zone and these alone can produce 250,000 gallons per day. The Army has RO units, but every functional one, and every operator trained to use them, is in Iraq or Afghanistan.
• Houston Independent media organizers, who have been working in concert with local community organizations, relief groups, the Federal Communications Commission, a major electronics manufacturer, and the City of Houston, have been denied permission to build a 30-watt radio station inside the Astrodome by R.W. Royall Jr., Incident Commander of the JIC (Joint Information Committee) at the Astrodome. When they asked why they were being turned down, they were told that the Astrodome could not provide them with electricity. When the Austin Airwaves team offered to run on battery backup, they were still denied. Did I mention that A) also have a license in hand from the FCC, B) have not one, but two sources of 10,000 radios [including Sony, which I applaud – despite the fact that I don’t like their technology tactics].
• There are reported rapes, beatings, and murders. And while unsubstantiated at this point, I have no reason to disbelieve it.
  NOLA evacuee Clara Barthelemy, “A six year old girl was raped in here [the Astrodome].. 9 year old boy killed. A man in the shower beaten.” another evacuee says, “Over 20 rapes per night happening inside this place. They bring in national guard for media purposes. Bush wants us to stay here to raise his ratings.”
• “We have requested that no photographs of the deceased be made by the media,” a [FEMA] spokeswoman said in an e-mailed response to a Reuters inquiry. The Bush administration also has prevented the news media from photographing flag-draped caskets of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, which has sparked criticism that the government is trying to block images that put the war in a bad light.
• “The media censorship here runs high. It was not easy to actually enter the dome as media. I am working with the group ‘Austin Airwaves’ and our badge says ‘PRESS’ in huge white letters on a red background. This has caused unending red tape. I have been the subject of removal a few times, bordering on a dozen. My camera draws the most fire.”
• An article in the Army Times is referring to American citizens in New Orleans as “the insurgency”.

Despite all this, I am still ready and willing to go to help setup a technology infrastructure. And in case you don’t know what a clusterfuck is, here’s the Oxford English Dictionary definition:

clusterfuck, n.
A bungled or botched undertaking; (also) a situation, state of affairs, or gathering (esp. a military operation) that is disorganized or chaotic.

Yup…we got ourselves a genuine American clusterfuck.

It’s things like this that make me sick (and almost convinced the world is going to end):

Accompanying ex-prez husband George H.W. Bush on la tour de hurricane relief, Marie Antoinette Barbara Bush today commented on the poor who’d been displaced by Katrina:

This is working very well for them. (…)Almost everyone I’ve talked to says we’re going to move to Houston.

"What I’m hearing which is sort of scary is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is
so overwhelmed by the hospitality.

"And so many of the people in the arena
here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this–this (she
chuckles slightly) is working very well for them."

By these standards, 40 acres and a mule would have been too generous. Link to Editor and Publisher story; the remarks originally aired on American Public Media’s "Marketplace" program (Thanks, Pesco; Bernard Ouellette)

Reader comment: Cowicide says, Here is an audio file. Link.

Via BoingBoing

And it begins… Creative Technology, a maker of portable music players, has accused Apple Computer of violating a newly granted software patent covering the way users navigate music selections.” From the NYT article: “Creative Technology, which is based in Singapore and has United States operations in Milpitas, Calif., said it would consider every option available to defend the patent, including possible legal action. Apple declined to comment on the patent. The patent, which the company calls the Zen Patent, covers Creative’s interface for portable players, which allows users to select a song, album or track by navigating a succession of menus. The patent office awarded the patent on Aug. 9.”

I’m sitting here shaking my head and trying to figure out what poor soul at the USPTO sits in a seculed booth all by himself, with no interaction with world, and authorized these patents. I went to the USPTO website and looked up the requirements for granting a patent and Creative’s patent is crap. It should have never been granted.

In particular, I would like to draw your attention to 35 U.S.C. 102 Conditions for patentability; novelty and loss of right to patent. The first part of this states

A person shall be entitled to a patent unless –

(a) the invention was known or used by others in this country, or patented or described in a printed publication in this or a foreign country, before the invention thereof by the applicant for patent, or

(emphesis added)

US Patent #6,928,433

From Slashdot via Outz

Lawrence Lessig, in an article on the Foreign Policy site, predicts that the public domain will die a slow death at the hands of anti-piracy efforts. From the article: ‘The danger remains invisible to most, hidden by the zeal of a war on piracy. And that is how the public domain may die a quiet death, extinguished by self-righteous extremism, long before many even recognize it is gone.’

I couldn’t agree more and you’ll hear me say this time and time again. Our patent and copyright system is broken, perhaps even beyond repair. Without quick intervention, the US (and the rest of the world) will be doomed to a life dictacted by corporations greed for money and power.

From Slashdot via Lost Brain