TCS Daily : February 2002 Archives
Springtime for Satellite
Talk about a turnaround that's good for consumers, take a look at the new environment surrounding the EchoStar-Hughes Electronics merger. Just a few weeks ago the proposed $28 billion merger uniting the nation's two largest satellite video services, Dish...
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They're Animals
A Congressional hearing earlier this month chaired by Congressman Scott McInnis (R-Colo.) focused attention on the growing problem of terrorism committed by environmental and animal rights extremist groups around the United States. Actions by these groups clearly
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Pearl Harbor It Wasn't
It is not difficult to imagine the course the upcoming Congressional hearings on how September 11 could have happened will take. The consensus among the Senators, Congressmen and foreign policy luminaries who have already chimed in is that the investigation...
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From Hong Kong to Brussels
Almost no one has noticed, but the chap who is leading the barrage of petty European criticism of the United States' unilateral military action against terrorist outfits and the states that sponsor them is none other than Christopher Patten....
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Power Failure
George W. Bush ran for President on two major "restoration" themes. He promised to restore dignity to the White House. And he promised to restore dignity to domestic energy exploration and production efforts. In other words, he promised to reverse...
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Teaching Hate
Can it be true? That Islamic schools in the United States teach hatred towards American Christians and Jews? The Washington Post on Monday revealed that one such school outside Washington D.C. uses textbooks teaching 11th graders that "the Day...
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Cracking the Shell
Stephen Hawking says that humanity won't survive the next thousand years unless we colonize space. I think that Hawking is an optimist. We've seen a certain amount of worry about smallpox, anthrax, and various other bioweapons since 9/11. At the...
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Settle Down
Next week Microsoft and the Department of Justice will go before a federal judge to try to win final approval of the settlement that was reached last November in the antitrust suit against Microsoft. While the two parties have...
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Something for Nothing
Want a glimpse at the future if the Bells get there way on a major rewriting of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 this week? Proponents of HR 1542, the Tauzin-Dingell Bill, as it is called, for its co-sponsors, Commerce Committee...
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Something Wild
A company called PayPal, which makes it easy to make purchases and transfer money online, went public on Feb. 15 and jumped 55 percent the first day. The press, predictably, greeted this success with snickers. Typical was a report...
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NASA Goes Nuclear
Do you remember the tragedy of August 1999, when the Cassini space probe veered off course on its way to Saturn, crashed into Earth and scattered plutonium over millions of terrified people? You probably don't remember, because it never happened....
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Olympic Lessons
Australia just won its first Olympic medal -- a gold at that -- in the unlikely sport of ice-skating. And the thrill of that victory has to do with a lot more than just sweat, effort, pluck, or fate. First,...
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It's the Treatment, Stupid
Not long ago, many biologists could get by on two rules of thumb. On the one hand, it was said, "the first time your experiment works, it's a mistake; the second time, it's an artifact; the third time, it's a...
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Stock Market Blues
The data have continued to buttress the view that there is a new economy out there, but the stock market has not celebrated. What's going on? First, to the new economy story. Amazingly, productivity jumped at an annual rate of...
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Dubious Data Awards
Editor's Note: With this installment, Tech Central Station is pleased to present a new feature called "The Data Dump," an occasional look at the use, abuse, and misuse of numbers and statistics in journalism. Every year there is a...
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Trusting Monopolists
The Federal Communications Commission last Thursday proposed exempting high-speed Internet access services from the rules that foster competition in basic telephone services. "If adopted," reported the Washington Post the next day, "the rules would hand large regio
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Bad for Broadband
A new study by telecommunications' economists Robert Hall of Stanford University, author of The Flat Tax, and William Lehr of Columbia University warns that implementation of the so-called Tauzin-Dingell bill would "return us to the days of one-company control...
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Blame It On Rio
It was ten years ago this spring that President George H.W. Bush took a step that began a slide down the long path toward energy rationing. It was barely ten days ago that his son, President George W. Bush,...
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The Politics of Electoral Destruction
When the President's brilliant Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, R. Glenn Hubbard, took to the pages of the New York Times to argue for the administration's new proposal on climate change, he wrote of an initiative he...
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No More Near Misses
Editor's Note: This article is the third of three parts. In the two parts of this series than ran in January, I considered, first, the continuing terrorist threat to America and, second, the prophetic value of science fiction as...
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Whither the Wagon?
Ever wonder why the family station wagon vanished? At a recent family reunion, we were fondly recalling our Chicago-to-Colorado summer trips in our station wagon. Dad would lovingly wax it weekly and replace the wood along the side seemingly monthly....
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Green with Rage
Sheer panic. That's the only way to describe the reaction of green activists to a fact-filled 515-page book by a young Danish statistician, published in English late last year by Cambridge University Press. The statistician, a slim, laid-back former Greenpeace...
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Triangulator in Chief
Is the Bush administration in its Clear Skies and climate change proposals practicing that old Clinton administration trick, triangulation? You remember triangulation, don't you? It was the name Democratic pollster and political strategist Dick Morris gave to a ta
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Beast of Burden
If we don't subsidize wheat and corn production, the terrorists will have already won. At least that's the line President Bush pushed at the National Cattlemen's Beef Association in Denver earlier this month. Doing his best imitation of a...
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The Commander's Distractions
President Bush's bright reputation abroad was only diminished by his misguided -- indeed counterproductive -- stab at appeasing radical environmentalists on the day before heading to Asia. It makes little foreign policy, economic, political, or scientific sense. Un
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Little Things
I've spent a lot of time thinking about the Big Things that new technologies mean, and I promise that I'll get around to some columns on everything from immortality to mind uploading. But lately I've been noticing the little things...
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Beware Beijing
Given the warmth that's emanating from the North Pacific as George W. Bush visits Beijing this week, it's hard to believe that the United States' leading foreign-policy concerns before Sept. 11 were China's downing of a U.S. military surveillance plane,...
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The 'Incredible' Bells
"You can't come to Congress, take the oath to tell the truth, and then not tell the truth," House Commerce Committee Chairman Billy Tauzin said in response to Enron's former CEO Jeffrey Skilling's testimony that he was ignorant of many...
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The Cash Register
Could the typical small investor have discovered a year ago that Enron Corp. was on the brink of disaster? It's highly unlikely. Still, if you looked for the right thing, you never would have bought Enron stock in the first...
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Independent Streak
Will Rogers once admitted, "All I know is what I read in the papers." Add my mea culpa to ol' Will's. Each day I digest a barrage of blather issuing from various Washington eminences that (1) we must reduce our...
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GI Joe College
Some students pay extra for a Semester Abroad or Semester Afloat program. Others get paid to take college classes while they hike through exotic countries or cruise the seas. We call them . . . Well, we used to call...
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Word War I
Ever since George W. Bush spoke the words "axis of evil" in his State of the Union address, Washington's chattering classes have busied themselves with their favorite pastime - slicing and dicing the meaning of a phrase as well as...
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Mr. Bush, Trust the Science
Is science necessary anymore for defining and solving true environmental problems? President Bush's plan to semi-combat carbon dioxide is unworthy of his principled stand taken last year against the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement to limit emissions by
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Iraq Isn't a Hard Place
Even before President Bush had placed Iraq on his "axis of evil," dire warnings were being sounded about the danger of acting against Saddam Hussein's regime. Two knowledgeable Brookings Institution analysts, Philip H. Gordon and Michael E. O'Hanlon, concluded that
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Baby Steps On the Road to Serfdom
President Bush has crafted a political compromise on global warming designed to placate Europeans and greens fretting over the effects of CO2 emissions on climate change. The proposal calls for "voluntary" (albeit with heavy incentives) CO2 emissions reductions an
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Voluntary = Mandatory
If George Orwell were alive today to sum up the Bush global warming plan, he might boil it down to three words: Voluntary Is Mandatory. That's the message that is readily apparent to free marketers concerned that George W. is...
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Bush Turns Green
On Aug. 4, 1997, Kenneth L. Lay, the chairman of Enron Corp., met with Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin to discuss the global-warming conference coming up in Kyoto. Mr. Lay was an enthusiastic advocate of the...
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DDT Saves Lives
Mozambique is one of the poorest countries in the world. It is reliant on aid and desperate to attract foreign investment - a forlorn hope since 17 years of war and periodic flooding have left the country with a terrible...
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Read My Lips: No Mini-Kyoto
"Though it is in the power of human institutions to make everybody poor, they cannot make everybody rich." (Nassau William Senior, 1790-1864). Speaking as a European, I am deeply concerned that Mr. Bush's newly announced alternative to the Kyoto Protocol...
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Read My Lips: No Mini-Kyoto
"Though it is in the power of human institutions to make everybody poor, they cannot make everybody rich." (Nassau William Senior, 1790-1864). Speaking as a European, I am deeply concerned that Mr. Bush's newly announced alternative to the Kyoto Protocol...
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In Rx, Who's To Blame For Abuse?
What should be done about the spike in emergency room visits and deaths in the Appalachian region due to overdoses of the narcotic oxycodone? Your answer may rest on whom you blame for the problem to begin with. OxyContin's time-release...
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DDT Saves Lives
Mozambique is one of the poorest countries in the world. It is reliant on aid and desperate to attract foreign investment - a forlorn hope since 17 years of war and periodic flooding have left the country with a terrible...
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Danes Cut Back on Hot Air
We think of Denmark as a peaceable land, with lots of windmills dotting the horizon, and greens everywhere. But as far as environmental groups are concerned, there is now something rotten in the kingdom. A recent news story trumpeted the...
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Show Me the Money
To many investors, the lesson of the Enron scandal is never to trust a company's earnings reports and balance sheets again. But that's nonsense. Yes, there are unscrupulous corporate managers and auditors out there, but the best way to protect...
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Danes Cut Back on Hot Air
We think of Denmark as a peaceable land, with lots of windmills dotting the horizon, and greens everywhere. But as far as environmental groups are concerned, there is now something rotten in the kingdom. A recent news story trumpeted the...
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"Don't Go Wobbly"
Staunch in his stance against terrorism, President Bush now faces strong pressure to cave on another principled position he has taken. Before departing for Asia this weekend, he will be hammered to "go the extra mile" on global climate change....
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Changing the World, Below the Radar
Polish software engineers are making me very happy. I know, I know: This sounds like some sort of punchline. But it's not. My brother and I, along with another friend, have a small record label. It's not organized as...
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Deregulation and Its Discontents
By pure coincidence, two major stories in the news - the collapse of Enron and the economic troubles of Argentina - have a similar nexus. Both are blamed, by at least some commentators, on deregulation. In an article titled...
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After Saddam
Now that it appears the U.S. is serious about removing Saddam from power, it's time to think seriously about what sort of regime will replace him. To that end, many in and around Washington have begun talking with the Iraqi...
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Factor This
Signs are increasing that the recession has bottomed. Home sales are surging, new unemployment claims are dropping, consumer confidence is rising. The typical recession lasts about a year, and the worst one since World War II lasted 16 months. So,...
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Booboo Economics
Editors Note: This article was originally published in The American Enterprise At last, we're headed for an honest debate between two different approaches to tax policy. The question on the table: Are higher taxes good or bad for an...
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Thanks, But No Thanks
Jim Rogers, CEO of electric and gas supplier Cinergy, is a hell of a guy. He cares about the environment - so much so, in fact, that he's willing to help environmentalists take your money and his competitors' money and...
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Bjorn's Long March
In politics, there are no final victories. But there are gradual defeats. Almost a year ago, the Bush Administration kiboshed the Kyoto Treaty, calling it "fatally flawed." But now, the issue is back. The Washington Post and The Wall Street...
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Fools Rush In
The Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) just issued its annual "Economic Report of the President," including a chapter on environmental policy. The report's language sent mixed signals on how the Bush administration plans to address questions of economic growth and.
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Rainy Daze
Mark Twain once said, "It's not the things you don't know that fool you. It's the things you do know that ain't so." Nowhere is that sagebrush aphorism more appropriate than in the realm of climate science. Consider a couple...
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Rainy Daze
Mark Twain once said, "It's not the things you don't know that fool you. It's the things you do know that ain't so." Nowhere is that sagebrush aphorism more appropriate than in the realm of climate science. Consider a couple...
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Think GIGABAND
Forget about broadband. Think gigaband. Or rather GIGABAND. That, at any rate, is what Douglas Van Houweling hopes policymakers will start doing. At a New America Foundation forum late last month, the CEO and president of Internet2, a consortium...
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Securing the Homeland
A little over two weeks after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld outlined the U.S. response in The New York Times. In a piece titled "A New Kind of War," Rumsfeld made the case that the war...
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Shell Game
Do retired oil executives go off the edge after they retire from their walnut-paneled board rooms and executive jets? How else to explain Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, the former head of Royal Dutch Shell, the world's second largest oil company,...
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Network to Nowhere
In a year of recession, unprecedented terror attacks, and the largest bankruptcy in history, there was good news from a surprising front. During 2001, the number of American homes and offices that hooked up to the Internet using fast...
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What To Do With Enron Field
The Argentine government has frozen the bank deposits of Argentines in order to prevent a run on the currency. One big problem is that the freeze comes at the very time most Argentines take their vacation. The summer months south...
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Commoner's Cause
In 1994, when I started graduate work in biology, PhD theses were still being awarded for the isolation and study of single genes. Today, it is now almost routine to analyze the activity of thousands of genes in a...
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Shell Game
Do retired oil executives go off the edge after they retire from their walnut-paneled board rooms and executive jets? How else to explain Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, the former head of Royal Dutch Shell, the world's second largest oil company, recently...
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Shortchanging Rummy's Vision
Troops greeting President Bush at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida Monday were right to cheer his announcement of a $48 billion increase in defense spending. Bush might have earned wider-spread hoo-ahs, though, if the increase were directed at the...
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Not So Candid Camera
This is the age of machinery, A mechanical nightmare, The wonderful world of technology... I was born in a welfare state Ruled by bureaucracy Controlled by civil servants And people dressed in grey Got no privacy, got no liberty Cos'...
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Rights and Wrongs
Larry Lessig opens his new book, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, with a strange-but-true story of moviemaking. Moviemakers, we learn, must now "clear" every image that appears in their films, obtaining...
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Axis Backlash
NEW YORK -- The after-effects of President Bush's "axis of evil" speech have hit. Europeans are pushing back hard -- fearful that Bush just might, once again, mean what he said. He's like that. Unlike many former presidents - including...
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Investing After 9/11
The Washington Post In the first week of trading after Sept. 11, stocks fell sharply. But, as investors began to realize that the terrorist attacks didn't really mean the end of economic life as we knew it, most of the...
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The Enron Witch Hunt Begins
"Man was conceived in sin and born in corruption. There is always something." So said Willie Stark, the cross between Louisiana's Kingfish, Huey Long, and Joseph McCarthy, in Robert Penn Warren's All the Kings Men. Such human frailty is...
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Globaloney Dying
Launched with a bang amidst the tear gas and rubber bullets of Seattle, the anti-globalization protest movement has now been reduced to an eminently ignorable whimper. The anti-globalistas' big attempt at a post-9/11 comeback flopped miserably in New York over...
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The Two Skepticisms
Who are "the skeptics" in America today - the defenders of science and rationality, the scrutinizers and debunkers of dubious and unwarranted claims? The above question, stated in deliberately broad terms, could generate diverse answers. A variety of intellectuals,
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Small Is Brutal
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recently said that it would not act to generate stricter fuel standards for automobiles and light trucks. This stirred dismay in some environmental circles, but joy for those who want to make up their...
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Wrong at the Core
Ice core records drilled from Antarctica and Greenland hold a treasure of information on the vicissitudes of ancient climate and the interaction between the air's carbon dioxide and its temperature. But contrary to popular belief, those records reaching back 400,00
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Fear and Loathing at Harvard
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- President George W. Bush's decision to put on notice what he described in his State of the Union address as the "Axis of Evil" - the regimes of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea - has been met...
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Whither Science?
Editor's note: we interrupt the three-part progression of Jim Pinkerton's column-series to bring you this bulletin on the state of science and space. We know from President Bush's State of the Union address that he's going to be tough...
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Alternative Universe
One can't help but shed a few crocodile tears for our friends on the Democratic left as they scramble to find political high ground in the wake of George Bush's tidal wave of approval following his State of the Union...
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