1: Hire a driver

Partly due to cost, partly due to the difficulty of scheduling occasional work, partly due to my own desire for control, I repeatedly shied away from hiring a driver. I’ve been aware for months that this decision, or failure to decide, was a mistake. My father drilled into us stories of how people would intentionally incite an accident with a western driver in the least developed nations out of desperation, hoping to hold the driver liable for far more than they could earn in their defunct economy. I ignored that lesson, as it didn’t seem immediately pertinent, but was foolish to ignore the frequent protests, burning of vehicles, and savage beatings of drivers when the idle crowds on Kathmandu streets decide to hold one accountable for an accident, often for reasons that so defy logic as to deeply offend any rational person. I’ve been lucky so far, but still made the wrong call. Even worse, every day the commute from home to work requires passing two to five vehicles, over a tiny 3km length of road, due to incompetent local bus drivers and their ilk constantly stopping in the middle of the road, to say nothing of the myriad pedestrians walking three abreast down the street, ignoring a perfectly good sidewalk to their left. In addition, this city stretches even the most highly tuned sense of direction to the snapping point due to the local’s failure to name their roads and post signs, instead navigating solely by unlabeled landmarks and poorly defined neighborhood boundaries. Between all of these factors, I feel as though my blood pressure drops 20 points every time I leave the Kathmandu valley and part with my trusty car for a few days. The stress, the absence of a Nepali-speaker in the car, and the incredible amount of time necessary to find any new destination should have been more than ample reason to deal with the stress of keeping a driver in my employ.

2: Buy an inverter or massive UPS, and a real phone

There is no moral way to run a generator enough to live a western lifestyle in Kathmandu during the dry season. The mere 8 hours of power accorded the city during this season, combined with the simply incredible pollution, makes contributing to the problem on the scale required to run a generator 16+ hours per day simply unfathomable. While I felt strongly that this was the case, my wife was far more insistent, pushing for a continued decline in usage throughout our tenure in country. We found that a 700VA UPS proved adequate to run a wireless router and a DSL modem for roughly an hour when fully charged, and that it would be fully charged after 4 hours on city power. Even so, living offline and in the dark proved difficult until I grabbed a Nintendo DS and a handful of lengthy RPGs for the platform. Were I to return to Kathmandu, I would not hesitate to build a far larger battery backup system to run a light or three, my data circuit, and intermittently charge a laptop enough to run for 4+ hours a day and, in addition to that, a 3G phone (or really any phone with a decent browser and long battery life – Perhaps a solar-powered, Webkit-enabled PUMA?) to take advantage of initially wretched but now much improved wireless data quality. Given that, living off the grid for 16 hours a day at the dust-choked peak of the dry season would seem much more an achievement than a burden.

3: Pick a freezer and cram it full

That thing I said about 16 hours a day of load-shedding? Turns out a freezer and fridge deals with the problem and holds its temperature remarkably well under those circumstances, assuming you’ve got sense enough not to open them more than once or twice per blackout. I did, however, lose a fair bit of food in the freezer over our fridge in the first year. Eventually moved everything, and I do mean everything, over to our freestanding freezer and made a conscious effort to keep it as full as possible, thanks to this Instructables piece. Between that, moving the ice cream off the door, and moving the refreezable Flavor-Ice to the door, I’ve saved hundreds of dollars in my second year. Definitely a lesson worth taking home, and definitely a lesson I wish I’d learned a year sooner.

4: Never, ever, ever transit through New Delhi (IATA: DEL), especially without a forced overnight

Once was enough to sear this one in. I’ve been through the patently insane process of connecting from Sheremetyevo-2 to Sheremetyevo-1 in Moscow, taking a 30 minute drive through town to get from the domestic airport to the international airport, which have adjoining runways. I’ve been through Siberian airports that looked like they had a staff similar in size to the old gas station I worked at during college. I’ve been through minor African airports, and I’ve been through four hour layovers outdoors in -20C, snow-covered train stops. Still, while I can think of plenty of reasons to do any of those again, I would never, ever transit through New Delhi again. I’d sooner walk to Dhaka than relive this experience:

Flying in, the apocalyptic desert landscape surrounding the massive city is mighty depressing, but I started to feel like the airport might be decent upon landing. Real skywalks, etc. Nope – No such luck. Among the last off our plane, we hopped on some old bus and rode into the terminal. Not the end of the world, but was wondering if I’d died and gone to hell 30 minutes later. Entering the terminal, we saw a crowd of hundreds in the slowest immigration line I’d ever seen. Unfortunately, however, we chose to tag along with the Jet Lite guy that wanted to walk us up to a mysterious “transit lounge” rather than leaving the airport and checking right back in again, going straight to a Subway Restaurant. No, we, like lemmings, were roped into a group and dragged from line to line to line. Finally, some 90 minutes after arriving in the terminal, we reached the “transit lounge.” We were then, upon arrival, told that we were unable to leave. Even with multiple entry, multiple exit visas, even standing not a 3 minute walk from immigration, and even standing not a full minute from the security check before the regular lounge, we were told it was impossible to leave the lounge until two hours before our next flight, meaning we were trapped there, in the transit lounge, for roughly 4 hours. Disallowed to reach multiple tantalizingly close ATM machines, only able to access one Nescafe-branded food stand with cold samosas and day old hamburgers, we were stuck selling a fistful of Nepali rupees for less than half their value to get just enough food to get us through. Bad as it all was, the worst part was the staff – Completely unwilling to help, and often unwilling to even talk to the customers, the staff at the airport were absolutely the most worthless people I’d ever had the displeasure of meeting. If we’d had children, I might well have snapped. Unfortunately, every story I’ve head of the airport from every friend I’ve asked was just as bad. Under no circumstances would I ever transit through Delhi again without an overnight, and even then…..

A couple other quick tips:

• Flying to or from Europe? This is the main way that folks flying from KTM get stuck flying through India, and the middle eastern routes generally don’t sound all that much better. One alternative that popped up before I left, but too late for me to benefit from it: Arkefly’s direct flights to Amsterdam.
• Flying out of KTM? They’re not kidding about the “three hours” warning, but don’t worry – All the flights are always late departing. Oh, and prepare to be groped – I was frisked no fewer than five times between the parking lot and a Jet Lite flight.
• That DS I mentioned? Felt a bit immature buying it, but thanks to Dragon Quest IV, myriad Final Fantasy titles, and numerous challenging strategy titles, I really don’t feel at all bad about owning it now. My Spanish Coach turns out to be pretty decent too.
• Speaking of the DS, the addition of passively powered speakers comme ça to a high battery life MP3 player was probably the most useful piece of tech I brought to Kathmandu, as well as being one of the cheapest. Remember those cheap, crappy, dollar store-style speakers that neither have a power adapter nor a battery slot? Those are made for Kathmandu’s 16 hour blackouts. Yes, slightly louder speakers like these might be a little better, but it was hard to imagine how quiet a house gets without power at the fridge, the whistle of the ventilation systems, etc, etc. Truly passive, unpowered speakers are plenty here, and dirt cheap.
• The Kantipur Post sucks. Gotta subscribe to a paper? Republica wont make you weep nearly as often with horribly written headlines. Heck, Im pretty sure they even have an editorial staff. That shows up at their offices on occasion. And speaks English. Still, these two Twitter feeds are a little more useful:
  • NewsFromNepal & NepalMonitor
• Dish breakage without a dish washer seems freakishly heavy. There’s never enough counter space to dry a post-party load, and with water like this, it’s not safe to towel dry. Plastic cups. Seriously: Plastic cups.
• That thing I said about UPSes? Hard to ship ‘em in, and sadly these guys are the only game in town: Mercantile Exchange on Durbar Marg have an exclusive monopoly on APC UPSes, and there really aren’t any other nice brands available in town. Mercantile’s nice and all, but there’s certainly a sizable markup. Might be easy enough to bring an inverter in from the west, though, as long as you wait and buy the batteries locally.

1: It doesn’t matter where you go to college, unless money is no issue. What does matter is carefully mitigating the insular experience at a liberal arts college through work off-campus and mitigating the lack of a compelling campus-wide social framework at a working man’s community college or satellite school through aggressively pursuing extra-curricular groups. Mitigation. Mmm…..

2: Partake in wine and beer, but never in the same night, and particularly not when shots are on the table.

3: You’re still too poor to experience amontillado and port in a way that won’t ruin it for the rest of your life. Save your money for $20-30/750cl scotch & liquors that you can afford to sip for a while, and save the others for later. Of course, this assumes that I might have eventually actually found an amontillado that doesn’t taste like ass if I’d waited until I actually had cash.

4: Lite beer is to be avoided, life’s too short, yada, yada, yada, but don’t be a jerk about it proselytizing for real beer. Save it for anti-DRM rants or something more productive. No sense giving people too much of a hard time about it, although I was of course correct to advise a poor, poor friend who decided his first legal drink at his 21st birthday should be a Miller Lite. Still, if stuck in a situation where you can only choose a lite beer, here’s the key guideline: To get a beer that’s more of a wheaty and bland alternative to Sprite, intentionally maximize the bland. Barring the presence of Michelob Lite (not Ultra), nothing on offer is actually going to prove an adequate substitute for real beer. Grab a Sprite-like malt beverage with beer flavoring, like, well, Michelob Ultra.

5: There’s a ton of stuff that lasts way too long on the shelf to let you to talk yourself into going with the cheap stuff. Doesn’t always matter, but for seasoned salt go with this: Tony Chachere’s Creole Seasoning – The Dollar Tree seasoned salt tastes like finely grated paper. Toilet paper isn’t, and life’s too short. Destroy some forests and buy a trunk full of Charmin Ultra when your folks are in town and can run you through Sams or Costco.

6: No, you can’t afford the “Will It Blend?” blender, but you should always have a couple nice things in the kitchen. Those things? I mentioned graters? Cheese graters kick ass. The cheap ones, especially the multi-sided dumbbell/tower/pyramid-type ones, are incredibly time consuming and often painful. These, though, are an absolute pleasure to use. Ditto a nice, heavy, chef’s knife – They don’t actually matter, but it’s fun. Other top priorities? Hard to beat a wok if you don’t know how to cook/make frequent mistakes. The extra space is really helpful.

• Amazon.com: No mention at all of the policy change on their website until checkout, and nary a word in their customer service help pages. Tested multiple tracks from multiple artists, freebies included, and not a one worked. The actual error message also implies that territories have been stripped of access as well:
  “We could not process your order. The sale of MP3 Downloads is currently available only to US customers located in the 48 contiguous states, Alaska, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia.“
• MP3.Rhapsody.com: Rhapsody tells you they won’t do business with international IP addresses on every page. These guys have always proven to be more expensive than the other vendors, so I’ve never had to make a purchase, but it sucks to lose the option.
  • Caveat: My wife’s subscription to Rhapsody’s DRM-encumbered streaming system is still working, for now.
• eMusic.com: Signups are forbidden from overseas, but they suggest they can make accomodations on their website. More than either of the above offer.
• AmieStreet.com: Hit or miss. Seems to depend on the band and the label. Sadly, that seems to be as good as it gets at the moment.

Still, nasty, brutish, and myopic as it is to cut off access to overseas users, I would encourage people to write in and complain, and on two key grounds:

1. The labels stand to gain next to nothing by blocking American users, or even users with American addresses and billing information. They can already bypass their half-hearted attempts to price fix between markets by shipping CDs across borders, but by blocking access to instant downloads for those same customers, they provide a quite compelling incentive to either not bother with an impulse buy or copy or to go to freer sources like YouTube or seedier places for instant access.
2. We currently have some 300,000-500,000 servicemen and women posted overseas (chart’s a bit vague vis a vis the warzones [via en Wikipedia]), which accounts for a quarter to a third of the entire military, not counting family. Even ignoring civilian USG employees overseas, blocking a quarter or half a million young men and women in the key demographics for their service is obviously far from wise. Regardless, even if they have, again, short-sighted, poorly thought out, blah, blah, blah contracts with the labels that prevent them from opening the service up to all Americans, surely opening up access to users with APO/FPO addresses and posted to civilian missions abroad with 20189 zip codes isn’t a hard sell while we simultaneously fight two and a half wars. (2.6 counting the narco-stuff, eh?) On that tact, sent the following to Amazon, but got only a wee little “thanks for the feedback” formletter. Still, this does seem like the sort of thing we can get around if more people are willing to give ‘em a poke:

“You recently blocked international downloads of your tracks which, though shortsighted and foolish on the face of it, is downright insulting when you include customers with APO/FPO addresses and 20189 zip codes. By doing so, you also block your country’s servicemen and women overseas, as well as the Foreign Service, from the only reliable, timely method of legally acquiring music available to them.
Please reconsider your policies and add exemptions for customers with APO/FPO and 20189 billing addresses post haste. Failure to do so can’t be wise: Given our mail-order heavy lifestyle abroad, we surely purchase far more per capita than any other class of customer.
Flip your patriotism bit back on and undo this, please.”

Will update if I ever get a human-written response.

The following was sent by a less guarded freshman-Senator Obama in 2006, prior to announcing his Presidential bid, in response to an email asking how he’d vote if a future President offered the Rome Statute for ratification. What’s happened since? Not much at all.

Thu, 13 Apr 2006 13:54:10 -0700 (PDT)

Dear Sean:

I want to both apologize for the delay in my response to your e-mail and encourage you to continue to give me the benefit of your thinking in the days ahead. While I have every intention of responding to my Illinois constituents in a timely manner, the reality is that I am still working on the challenge of how to efficiently answer as many as 2,000 letters, e-mails and calls a day from my Illinois constituents.

I appreciate hearing your views on the importance of the International Criminal Court.I share the objective of bringing to justice individuals who have committed war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. I am supportive of the ICC’s recent efforts to indict Congolese and Sudanese leaders responsible for atrocities in their countries and view this as an important step forward in promoting a strong system of international justice.  My hope is that ICC indictments and prosecutions will continue on in an aggressive, responsible manner.

Also, I regret President Bush’s decision to “unsign” the ICC treaty originally signed by President Clinton. While there are certainly areas in which the ICC can be improved, I feel that the best way to move forward on this issue is to remain engaged with the Court. Signing the treaty, and while simultaneously protecting American interests with respect to the ICC, is the correct approach. Although the Rome Statute will not come before the Senate until President Bush agrees to submit it for ratification, you may be sure that I will continue to discuss this issue with my colleagues on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Again, I apologize for the inordinate delay in my response. I hope it will not deter you from staying in touch.

Sincerely,

Barack Obama
United States Senator

The third, however, is a much bigger problem and present not only in my first generation device but in the second and the newly announced third generation, as well. This is more than a little bit disappointing. Given that some tests show up to a 45% performance hit at peak degredation, I understand that the Celeron & Atom class processors probably shouldn’t be expected to do this work and still manage to play SD video without stuttering (HD’s out of the question in the first and second generation, and most of the third). I do not, however, understand why no vendor has whipped out an enterprise-class netbook with hardware-based encryption.

As stated elsewhere, a netbook is a much greater security hazard due not only to configuration-related user behavior, but are designed to be moved about more and to be used in public more often than a normal laptop. Given the massive damage that can be done to a person that just loses control of an email account, much less cached banking passwords and information, this is just simply unacceptable.

Why hasn’t anyone jumped on the opportunity to utilize VIA’s Nano in an enterprise-class netbook for its hardware AES support? Why hasn’t anyone announced a single product incorporating disks with integrated encryption? Why hasn’t anyone linked the prior to options to facial recognition with a preexisting, standard-issue webcam? Why does even Lenovo, who makes it nearly impossible to buy a regular laptop without widely supported cross-platform, biometric full-disk encryption (and single sign-on in Windows – scan your finger once at boottime, and that’s it) refuse to ship even its high-end IdeaPads with biometric scanners, much less their netbooks? Why on earth haven’t the most travel-friendly class of real computers had this feature available, at least as an option, from the beginning?

Samsung and UPEK offer two slight glimmers of hope, but both are long shots. Neither company managed to bring a single vendor in at the initial announcement, and neither has made a single related announcement since. ASUS offers another, but misses the mark. Fujitsu hits it, but in an OS-specific manner and at an incredible cost.

• UPEK, the makers of the biometric scanners found in ThinkPads and a handful of ASUS products, recently announced a netbook-centric marketing push. Announced in February, it apparently missed any mention at all at CES 2009 et al.
• Samsung announced a new class of SSDs with integrated full-disk encryption,but announced it during CES 2009. They get a pass for now, but with no pricing data or announcements of OEM sales, it’s difficult to tell how much hope to pin on this one.
• ASUS’s high end Eee PC 1004DN actually has another vendor’s fingerprint scanner onboard, but they haven’t announced if they’ll half-ass its implementation like the OS authentication-only scanners in HP laptops or if they’ll use it to provide real data security. AuthenTec’s press release seems to imply that that will, sadly, be the case. Note their stress on “file and folder” encryption – Integrating biometric-backed Windows authentication with the per-file encryption already supported by the OS is nice, but doesn’t come close to cutting the mustard in an enterprise setting.
• Perhaps the only option that’s currently on the market is Fujitsu’s old pre-netbook-fad LifeBook P1630, but even its solution is just a fingerprint scanner that can communicate with a Micosoft Trusted Platform Module, only truly useful with high-dollar builds of Windows Vista and Windows 7. The product predates the Atom, and starts at an incredible $1800 USD.

(Quick side note to Fuji and other biometric-friendly OEMs: You people do realize that a thief can have access to all the data on a laptop that only has OS and BIOS level biometric or password authentication through a quick BIOS reset and possesing a LiveCD, right?)

This situation should improve at some point in the not too distant future, but the present outlook is a bit bleak. Until then, I honestly don’t see the point to picking up another netbook until a vendor-supported solution to this problem is made available, although home-partition encryption through DM-Crypt in Ubuntu might work as a stopgap. I will, however, be first in line to order a machine with Moblin or something similarly snappy at boot time that manages to allow for single a single authentication in the boot process, both for decryption and OS authentication ala my old ThinkPad. I’d give my left pinky for a device that pulled that off and gave me an Nvidia chipset or a VIA-compatible chipset with similar GPU performance. Lenovo, are you listening?

PS: One last thing to think about: Would one of the new Tegra smartbooks or other Nvidia-related products have enough of the work of video decoding shifted off of the CPU to allow for software full-disk encryption and HD video playback without a problem? Wouldn’t want to be the first to try and find out, but that’ll be interesting to see as well. Still not adequate for consumers at large, though. We shouldn’t expect a non-system admin to independently install TrueCrypt et al by default.

-Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul

It’s that time of year again. The Bullwer-Lytton Awards have been published, and, nice though the winner is, Jeff Eller the Louisianan was robbed.

1: Unlike most of their peers, they had a clear email address listed in the email invoice. Doubly nice, the email address was the reply address for the invoice itself. Beats the hell out of trying to get in contact with Buy.com, Amazon, or any number of others.

2: While I did receive one automated message acknowledging my message, everything else received was very clearly and professionally human-written. Not a single form letter or incoherent brush off from some outsourced, illiterate ticket monkey. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a ticket monkey – The devil’s in the “illiterate” detail. A refund was quickly offered and every message was written in a manner that demonstrated a complete grasp of a not at all common complaint.

3: Although it did take one additional poke to get to this point (rather than a half dozen emails to management), the customer service rep promptly and professionally acknowledged that the problem should be brought to the attention of their developers. Gotta love a customer service or tech support rep that’s not above pestering the people who built their systems.

Kudos, kudos, kudos.

PS:These things are great: Utili-Key 6-in-1 Tool — Bought a couple at the Spy Museum in DC before coming out here, as I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get them shipped to me in time. Regretted it ever since, though, as the newer model sold in shops has had its bottle opener filed down to a useless little stump. Granted, OSHA probably wouldn’t be a huge fan of a device where you have to hold firm to the saw blade to use the bottle opener, but you wouldn’t believe how annoying it is to lose that feature once you get used to working around the safety flaw.

Colonel: US Army has working electropulse grenades

From The Washington Post:

Lost U.S. Weapons May Be Going to Taliban, GAO Says

Is this what safety feels like? Brings to mind an awesome idea for a finale to Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles. Using time travel, future humans who were somehow affected by the events of the first three Terminator films (for continuity’s sake) return to the past and loot US Army munitions stores, feeding the Taliban and leading to an Afghan-led victory over the machines. Yay!

(To the overly pedantic: Yes, I’m aware that the latter is about lax controls over gifts of arms to tribal militias. Still, these stories make for one hell of a set of neighbors sitting one tab apart in Firefox.)

Ship stranded by the retreat of Kazakhstan's Aral Sea

NPR reports that a scientist at NOAA, Susan Solomon, says that the damage done by our CO2 emissions has already reached the stage that a considerable amount of future damage is unavoidable, going so far as to use the term “irreversible” to win some new and much needed press coverage. While the soundbite above hardly breaks new ground, one must wonder if Solomon studied active methods to combat this phenomenon. She seems to have a lot to say about the relative inadequacy of cutting emissions now, but I wonder what she’d say if queried about the possible role of devices like those used by the fictional teraformers of Mars in Kim Stanley Robinson’s award winning novels? What possible role should orbital mirrors and the like play in trying to mitigate the impact of these changes?  To tone things down to the realm of something not just possible and plausible but something that she might feel free to approach with more of a straight face, what role can solar radiation management in the broad, general sense play in mitigating the impact of global warming? These questions really need to be asked more often if the necessary but apparently grossly inadequate cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that currently drive international debate ain’t going to cut it.

Anyone know enough to simply dismiss those options out of hand? I’m not familiar enough with the topic to tell the crazy fringe from the unpopular fringe. They do seem to get some coverage in the pop-sci press, ala New Scientist. See Sunshade’ for global warming could cause drought by Catherine Brahic.

Via: Global Warming Irreversible, NOAA Scientist Finds on Slashdot.org

I’ve previously written (maybe not here, but *eh*) about my desire to pick up a Via Isaiah/Nano/C-Vapor processor-powered HTPC, to do the job of running my storage, media player, and firewall apps on a single box, isolated from my main desktop. Unfortunately, however, Tom’s Hardware reports that the dual-core version is still more than a year out (More details). Combine this with the simple fact that Via claimed to “ship” the product almost a year ago, but it’s still not available on the open market.

This sucks. The Atom is hardly as inspiring, lacking any real muscle but also lacking any sort of functional GPU component. Boxed into the crappy Intel graphic chipsets, and without any sort of hardware-level extensions for media decoding, encryption, or compression, it is an incredibly lackluster component in comparison. Yes, it may benchmark pretty well against the shipping-but-missing Nano, but noone buys a netbook to run Quake – People buy netbooks to run software that can be very, very heavily optimized for the right kind of processor. Tying in the gzip decompression of Firefox, full-disk encryption requirements for laptops, and hardware-assisted decoding of digital media with a processor designed to take the load would result in a much better product.

That said, though, I’ve reached the point where I’m willing to buy an Atom based mini-PC rather than wait 13-14 months for Via to finally make their parts available. An Eee w/HDMI would fit 2/3 of the needs outlined above and, in this particular case, have an incredibly compelling design. With integrated UPS, HDMI support with sound (thanks to a discrete AMD GPU), and a stylish design, this box is one of the most compelling devices I’ve seen in a long time. Now if only it was had the hardware-level instructions necessary to also run my VPN on this boring little processor.

*le sigh*

I’m 60 hours in to the 80 hour game, and I’ve already hit the level cap. While fan patches exist (http://www.fileplanet.com/194463/190000/fileinfo/Fallout-3—Skill-Level-Cap-100-Mod) they aren’t the right approach:
What the creators should do is:
1: Slow the development of all experience by 10-25% or drop the benefits from leveling by a similar amount.
2: Raise the level cap by two
3: Clearly warn the user when they’re hitting the level cap.

This last is extremely important, as the user currently isn’t warned anywhere about the impending level cap, but there are compelling multiple traits that can only be added at the final level-up. Warn the user and let them make an informed choice with their final choice.

The level cap is a valuable thing, keeping you reasonably in line with the rest of the world but at a high enough level that the game is quite a bit easier. If this can’t be done in a mod like the one linked above, it should be done by the developers. As it is, the game is out of balance, and far more so than….. say…. StarCraft or Company of Heroes, when they shipped and then got multiple patches that rewrote the stats of substantial numbers of character classes.

On a related note, Virginia’s 9th didn’t even have a race – Rick Boucher gets two more years, winning unopposed.

What happens when a lame duck president or veep kicks the bucket? In those cases where the Presidency is staying in the party or, even simpler, going straight to the current veep, it’s pretty obvious what you do. You appoint the President-elect VP to ensure a simpler succession in the event of a double whammy and to give ‘em even more OJT than they’d have gotten otherwise or, if he/she’s already movin’ on up, you appoint the VP-elect VP.

What happens, though, if the party in control of the oval office is scheduled to change? Do you just get the least controversial waste of space possible to fill the gap? Do you try to pick out a new hopeful for 4 years hence and cost him/her their current gig? Do you man up and appoint the President-elect VP anyway, hoping to effect a smoother transition in January?

Buy.com canceled a recent order I placed and sent me a form letter saying that it because:

Hello XXXXX,

We regret to inform you that your order #XXXXXXX has been cancelled for your protection for one of the following reasons:

* * * * Please scroll down to the payment method you selected on this order and read the instructions * * * *

PayPal Orders (Including Orders through PayPal Express Checkout)

Please contact PayPal directly regarding any questions that you may have regarding the cancellation of this order.  When you use PayPal or PayPal Express Checkout, only a very limited amount of information regarding you and/or your order is provided to us by PayPal.   Your order may have been cancelled for a variety of reasons, most of which we will not be able to determine or help you fix.  For example, your billing information may be incorrect and you may need to work with PayPal and your credit card company to determine and fix this.  For these reasons, we ask that you contact PayPal directly regarding the cancellation of this order, and sincerely hope that you are able to rectify any inaccurate information and place additional orders through Buy.com.

Google Checkout Orders

To ensure a safe shopping experience, Google and Buy.com rely on a variety of systems to evaluate the risk levels associated with transactions. It appears that your order may have failed one of our initial credit card checks and will require you to update your billing information. Please update the billing information in your Google Checkout account so that it matches the address on file with your credit card company.  Upon completing this, please visit Buy.com to place your order again.
Again, we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused for you.

Orders Through Buy.com Checkout without use of PayPal or Google Checkout

If your method of payment was a credit card you will not be billed for any unshipped items.  If your method of payment was something else such as a check or money order, please allow a few days for your refund to be processed.  If you have questions regarding a cancelled order through Buy.com’s Checkout without the use of PayPal, please contact us at www.buy.com/support and select “other comments or questions” from the drop down menu.

For information on loosening your spam filter, please visit our help section here:

https://secure.buy.com/corp/support/email/default.asp?what=anytimehelp

We regret having to cancel your order and we look forward to future business with you.

Sincerely,

Customer Support Team

Please do not reply to this message. It was sent from a notification-only address that cannot accept incoming email. Instead, please contact us via our webform at www.buy.com/support

Ie, they didn’t tell me why at all. Contacted customer service and requested a human-written message or, at the very least, an accurate form letter. Here’s what I got in return:

Thank you for contacting Buy.com regarding order number XXXXXXX.

We would like to inform you that we are no longer accepting orders placed outside the United States. Our record shows that you have placed your order in Kathmandu, this is the reason why your order has been cancelled. Please be advice to place your order using a computer within the United States location.

Our Sales Department is available via telephone 24 hours a day and seven days a week. Our toll-free phone number is 1-800-800-0800 (Option 1).

The company still ships to zip 20189 and to APO addresses, but it apparently refuses to take orders that are placed over a scary unamerican IP address. Now how much sense does that make? There does seem to be a simple workaround, though: I was apparently succesful in placing the same order via Paypal, and might have been succesful using Google Checkout. Just don’t use Buy.com’s own checkout as they are:

A: Too incompetent to refuse your order during checkout/before prompting you for credit card information on an IP address that they don’t trust.

B: Too uncaring to have a human tell you why.

and C: Too incompetent to automatically generate a form letter that tells you why, forcing you to waste even more of their resources by engaging in two way communications with their customer service reps.

I’d hate to have to stop using these people, but this will certainly make me think twice.

PS: From their site – Apparently they’re even less forgiving of our men and women in uniform: Why don’t you ship to APO/FPO mailboxes? There are certain restrictions on exporting certain kinds of technology outside of the United States. These restrictions complicate or prevent our suppliers from shipping products to APO/FPO mailboxes. We are working on finding ways to solve this fulfillment inconvenience and in the meantime we apologize and hope you understand.

• Number of sponsored bills: 8
• Number of co-sponsored bills 161
• Number of sponsored bills passed: 0
• Number of co-sponsored bills passed: 9

Our remarkably unsuccessful four-term Congressman in the fifteenth Congressional District in Illinois seems shockingly… well, unsuccessful this time around. If this fellow was a lawyer in any of our private employ he’d have found his ass on the street long ago. The man has done one redeeming act – Opposing the expansion of already adequate warrantless wiretapping programs and telecom immunity.

Nevertheless, he has still repeatedly voted against the interests of the people of his district on certain issues in which he does not specialize. Moving directly along with his party leadership, he has repeatedly supported bills like the PRO-IP act that would spend millions of taxpayer dollars doing the job of the MPAA and RIAA and undermining the independence criminal focus of the Department of Justice. To add insult to injury, he also backed it when it would have spent tens of millions of taxpayer dollars having the Department of Justice sue private individuals on behalf of the aforementioned trade groups, before the Senate struck that obligation prior to passage of the bill. Despite the lack of any sort of copyright-heavy industry in and around his district, the Congressman inexplicably backed the movie industry over consumers both in this instance and others, despite the lack of any of the former and an abundance of the latter in his district.

To put all this in perspective, the supposedly immoral acts that the PRO-IP Act dramatically raises penalties for and pushes for Federal enforcement of include:

1. Ripping a legally purchased an encrypted DVD to your iPod or home computer for portability and backup purposes
2. Ripping a segment of an encryped DVD to seamlessly embed the easily copied content within a student or teacher’s presentation
3. Bypassing digital rights management software embedded in a legally purchased video game when it breaks your system or prevents you from running it under emulation on an open source operating system
4. Distributing and developing open source media players (ala VLC, Media Player Classic, mplayer, xine, etc) that are capable of playing DRM protected media, even if they lack the capability of performing any sort of duplication or media storage

By voting for the PRO-IP act the Congressman directly worked against the best interests of essentially everyone in his district, including every Linux user and everyone that ever exercised their Fair Use rights with a video source medium in the past. Considering the nigh-universal level VCR adoption prior to the DVD era, this is likely not an inconsiderable number of voters.

This registered Republican doesn’t honestly believe that Steve Cox would be any better, given the incredible lack of effort and resources that the fellow seems to have put into developing his website, inability to garner any substantial press, and the lack of any clear policy statements that address consumer rights, privacy, and intellectual property concerns aside from echoing the same FISA concerns shared by Congressman Johnson. It’s a shame this Warfel kid didn’t make a bid for the job – He’d have apparently had energy and foresight enough to make for an interesting race.

Damn, but I wish my ballot had an Abstain option under “Congressional.”

*Update* Went ahead and did just that – Had it on good authority that leaving the question blank was equivalent to an abstention. I’d highly advise anyone trying to do the same thing to ask their local voting place staff.

PS: On a related note, check out the classy fella that Lawrenceville’s trying to get rid of by sending to Springfield against Jones.

The old hippy lady runnin’ on the Green ticket for the Senate seems a little, well, odd. Is the party dead in Illinois? Is the Libertarian party any more or less likely to lose ballot access than the Greens in the near future? Should I split the vote and go for a lib Presidential candidate and a Green in the Senate?

Please keep in mind that I don’t give the slightest bit of a hoot about any of the following when formulating a response:

• Abortion
• Gun ownership

And I do care rather a lot (obviously) about consumer, privacy, and fair use rights. I’d love to see the borders opened up to substantially higher numbers of immigrants, and I wish to see barriers to international trade continue to be chopped away. I’d like to see poverty abated in the third world, and feel that the problem in the United States is miniscule in comparison. Obviously neither the Greens nor the Libs are a good fit, but neither are the (D)s and (R)s. Any thoughts?

It seems patently obvious that there would be a market for an entirely self-contained, easy to use SOHO inventory management device. Call it “Library in a Pocket” or something like that, but all you need is a cheap little ARM based Linux handheld with a barcode and RFID scanner. There are people who have cludged together similar systems for PalmOS and Linux, but most commit a number of common sins:

A: Expect some other backend to be used alongside the handheld package.
B: Build it around add-ons to existing PDAs and PC hardware.
C: Lack of polished, focused design targeting the real potential users of these products.

When you eliminate any notion that another device or computer is a relevant part of this system and make it so obvious that no training is necessary to bring in and check out an item from the device itself (picture IN & OUT buttons that are as easy to use as the thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons on a Tivo), you create something simple enough that pack rats, small rental firms, small shops, etc. can reliably keep their entire inventory on that single, portable, easy-to-manage device. Add a numeric keypad to allow manual entry of barcode numbers and invoice numbers for associated POS systems, and you find yourself stripped of any need to maintain a seperate scanning device for it.

Obviously the user needs the ability to generate certain reports based on this data, but there’s no reason that can’t be done in the device: A little 200mhz ARM would be far more powerful than necessary to generate CSV data for manipulation in common database and spreadsheet applications and to turn it into one or two basic ODF or PDF reports.

/End of rant

———————————————————————–

The 1996 Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), passed a few years before you came into office, did a great deal of damage to the Fair Use rights of consumers in your district. I firmly believe that, as we play host to neither Nashville nor New York City nor Los Angeles, that it did far more harm to your constituents than good. It rendered it a criminal act to bypass the easily-bypassed encryption used in intellectual property management schemes known as “Digital Rights Management” or DRM. This is something that has caused me considerable trouble, given my interest in academic pursuits based around open source development.

More recently, though, the problems that the technical community predicted at the bills passage have come to fruition and begun to affect many voters in your district, including many people without a strong technical background. Yahoo, Microsoft, and Wal-Mart previously “sold” DRM-protected music through their online stores for several years prior to 2008. In 2008, however, they and stores like Amie Street and Amazon.com have led the way in hammering out licensing deals to allow the sale of DRM-free MP3 files with the music of major labels. Competing against the unrestrictive competition from the above, Yahoo and Wal-Mart have switched to selling DRM-free media as well. Microsoft has taken a different tact, ending sales of its older standard, PlaysForSure, through MSN.com in favor of selling a new format to owners of Microsoft-licensed Zune media players.

Unfortunately, but predictably, all three of the vendors listed above have either shut down or announced plans to shut down the servers that end user computers use to authenticate the media purchased from them. This ultimately strips the user of the ability to transfer the media to a new computer, new media player, etc, and leaves the consumer without any meaningful recourse, due largely to the aforementioned 1996 Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

Very, very soon the bipartisan Pro-IP bill will come up for a vote in the House. I would like to ask you to add a simple amendment granting an exemption to the DMCA to consumers affected by these issues, allowing them the legal right to remove the DRM protections from their legally purchased media files. This has happened before, with CircuitCity’s DivX program, and it could very well happen again (should Blu-Ray be superseded or otherwise begin to collapse). A broad exemption allowing those who legally purchase this media to legally unlock it would be greatly welcome. The precedent created would not only help consumers: Media producers would also benefit, insofar as this exemption would add another level of disincentive to piracy, eliminating one (of many) common complaints about DRM.

<s>Personal contact information that doesn’t need to be as open as the letter proper</s> The morning business hours in DC and our mutual home coincide with my evening, when I would be happy to speak with you or your staff. Please call me with any questions you may have about the common-sense proposal above.

Thank you for your time,
Sean Crago
Kathmandu, Nepal

———————————————————————–

Update: Went ahead and sent the below off to Rick Boucher of Virginia, too, as a result of this old Ars Technica article. Anyone else want to help?

———————————————————————–

My name is Sean Crago. I’m a member of the EFF and a longtime admirer of your work. <s>Personal job and contact information not intended for the blog</s>, and am unable to fight as strongly as I should to support you as a result. Please accept my apologies.

I’m writing to urge you to step up pressure to append some positive changes to the PRO-IP Act prior to its passage. If you can’t get the entire FAIR USE Act tacked on, would you please try to use the recent outrage over Wal-Mart’s plans to shut down their DRM authentication servers? This will prevent many legal purchases from being retained by their owners, encouraging piracy over DRM when those are the only available options. It would be very much in the best interests of consumers and media producers alike to have a DMCA exemption that allows for users to bypass DRM on files purchased from the now defunct DRM music services at Yahoo, Wal-Mart, and MSN Music rather than lose their purchases when they buy their next computer.

This low-lying fruit should, I hope, provide an easier target for you to hit.

I’ve written to my parents’ Congressman as well on this same subject, for lack of one I can truly call my own:
http://mrzaius.com/blog/?p=108

Thank you for your time,
Sean Crago
Kathmandu

PS: I’d love to answer any questions you may have, but please do not call after 1PM Washington DC time, due to the time difference between there and Nepal.

Click for the wiki article

It’s always (ie for the last 18 months [when I discovered these]) bugged the living hell out of me that there were no tablet netbooks on the market, though it could plainly be done. End user accessible kits even exist for the purpose. ASUS et al hadn’t announced a tablet and noone had shipped one, or an Atom-based machine, before I left the United States for Nepal. As such, I went ahead and bought the ASUS Eee PC900 with Xandros Linux. I’ve got a couple of gripes about the Linux setup, including the lack of adequate and properly protected security updates and a clunky wifi manager, but all in all it works quite well. Amazingly light and easy to use (for my wife as well) and with absolutely incredible boot times, it is hands down the coolest laptop I’ve ever owned. That said, though, the simple addition of a rotating tablet screen or even the OLPC’s cheap but marvelous display would make it far more useful, allowing it to replace my PDA as an ebook reader and do a number of other handy things.

Now, however, it seems to be possible to get a tablet for a netbook’s price through Gigabyte. It seems to lack the software that drives most tablets when you buy it with Windows, but there are promises of a Linux version which, though it would probably be far less useful, would scratch a certain itch of mine – I’ve always been utterly fascinated by projects like Dasher. (Check out their web-based implementation for a demo.) The biggest thing holding me back, of course, is the fact that the Linux build hasn’t shipped and the American retailer Dynamism wants damned near $800 for the Windows version.

The second biggest concern, though, is the incredibly murky picture surrounding its SDHC support, or lack thereof. Its official spec sheet only claims MMC and SD support and, when queried on the subject, their technical support responded that “it does not support SDHC.” Dynamism, however, ran a test for me with some random 16GB card, and it seemed to work just fine:

“I just tried the M912 we have in the office with a Patriot 16GB SDHC card we have (the same ones we offer for the Eee PC’s), and the system did recognize the card and was able to read the full formatted capacity. It very may well be able to read SDHC, but not support some of the faster transfer speeds that the format affords, and it could also depend on the brand as well. With the large number SD/SDHC cards out there it would be difficult to test each and every one available, but it could be possible that the system reads most available ones on the market.”   Dynamism sales support

This seems to be reflected in the drivers offered for the device as well – It ships with drivers for precisely the same series of SD controller that the MSI Wind (which does claim SDHC compatibility) ships with. Weird situation – Can any owners give a little more information on this subject, like an lsusb and lspci output and the boot log in Linux?

*Update http://www.dynamism.com/#Product=gigabyte_m912 - Dynamism’s knocked the price down to $700 for the HDD-laden Windows version, if pre-ordered prior to Oct 1. Still, though, there are some other tradeoffs for not waiting for the Linux build. See the Wikipedia link above.

The police respond here, but there are a number of incongruities in their response, including ignoring the execution of search warrants on non-anarchist groups. That, combined with the suspicious timing of some arrests (apparently designed to hold the prisoners without charge for far longer than the usual 36-hours) Though some (not all) of the raids seem warranted, the tactics used therein seem typically excessive and inconsistent with our basic democratic principles. Somewhat disturbing, I must say.

I see an increasing number of complaints from former and active law enforcement officers about the way this sort of thing undermines their civilian role, but it was interesting to see the way a former MP & witness to the raids responded, when asked if they seemed appropriate: “No, I’m a veteran,” he said, “I was in the army. I was a military police officer. I wouldn’t have done this.” (http://firedoglake.com/2008/08/30/inside-an-rnc-raid/ – fascinating live reports)

What can we do to stop this sort of aggression? Work against federal mandates to DoD that promote, train, and equip (now excessively-numbered and grotesquely overfunded) paramilitary-style police? Gripe and complain to the leadership of the specific cities involved? One easy thing: Support the nonpartisan (at least until there’s a Libertarian Party worth supporting) CATO Institute.

==See also==

• Posse Comitatus – Definition – Reality

Counterstrike and Jagermeister - Together forever

Hit five liquor stores this afternoon to finish my liquor cabinet. Already had a scotch-for-company and some red label Johnny Walker that I wouldn’t have to feel bad about using in mixed drinks. Already had my Kaluah and, though I could not find peppermint schnapps, I was able to find a non-alcoholic creme de menthe, so I can still mix up my minty White Russians. I’ve been here two months, now, and have only been missing a nice, clean Canadian or Irish whiskey and my Jagermeister. Today I found the former – Glory of glories, Bhatbateni had Bushmills (albeit just the white) and, for the less discerning, Jameson’s. Grabbed the former.

That is the end of the story: The story begins yesterday, hitting Namaste’s & Shuvam. Neither had either. Moved on to the AMA club, the liquor store over by it, and another down on Durbar Marg. Turns out none of the native shopkeeps have ever even heard of Jagermeister.

Are there any good deutche-volk or fellow Counterstrike players (gun-game without sugar-brickettes and Jagermeister might as well be My Little Pony Ranching) that have found a stock of it here? If not, I can probably make it two years on one bottle – Might have to resort to having it smuggled in.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080606/0136491330.shtml

The libs aren’t even running a libertarian (small L) this year? So which of these three folk who want to strip away my fair use rights am I supposed to vote for again? Bad year for IP counter-reform. Bad year for privacy rights. Bad year for consumer rights. Bad year for folk who’d like to survive doing business with the police. (By the way, here’s a good free read.)

Now both mainstream candidates want to break out everyone’s favorite dead horse, instead of dealing with timely national issues in which it’s possible to enact real, meaningful change? This when American workers and employers are already struggling to meet increasing demands for stringent privacy policies in the global marketplace?

Bad campaign year all around.

Not here, though: I, and probably most people in the third world, now have no choice but to use my ISP’s DNS servers for the bulk of my DNS requests, due to NATing and, more importantly, transparent proxies hardwired to keep DNS requests local. Even if I were able to use it, though, I’d be caught by parental filters that have configured so aggressively by other customers that it would prevent me from hitting many legitimate sites (this includes multiple news sites). OpenDNS authenticates users and saves preferences by IP address (often dynamically updated via ddclient or something of the sort), making it very, very easy for one ignorant sumbitch on a network like this to greatly limit the network’s utility to all users.

In other words, even without the proxy/even if we could reliably use 3rd party DNS servers for the bulk of our DNS requests, it still wouldn’t do the user much good on a small NAT’d ISP like this one.

As long as they’re secure, we’re probably much better off supporting the use of publicly accessible DNS servers like 4.2.2.2 and 4.2.2.3, as long as they remain as such and reasonably secure, or going straight to the root with secure, locally hosted DNS. That said, this is still only an option for users that aren’t trapped in this very, very common predicament. This hits numerous coffee shops, universities, 3rd world ISPs, 1st world free ISPs, anyone using ISP-side “accelerators” (ie caching proxies – can’t believe some ISPs have the gaul to make you pay for this), etc.

Death to the transparent proxy!

For the downtrodden:

• Flood relief: Nepal – Burma
• Fighting desertification and famine: 20 tips to reduce your carbon footprint and maybe axe the steak, not to mention the lovely, tasty, un-live-without-able Australian beef. Apparently cryogenics may not be the way to go either.
• Fighting racism in the Nepal: Colonialism ended 50 years ago, and Nepal was never actually colonized – Any chance we can talk the “champions of the proletariat” or whatever the Maoists call themselves into banning these crazy skin-whitening products? We know they’re bad for you, but I can’t imagine why a people would allow their stores to so actively denounce their own race. Check out the next video My folk are not some angelic race to be universally mimicked. Unlike ending the service of the proud gurkhas abroad, this would save Nepali money and have a net-positive impact on the people here.
• Fighting racism in the United States:

For the middle class:

For Americans who’d like to save some money and see the world:

I’m just a computer tech, so I don’t go out of my way to learn or promote the positions of my country’s government, but there’s some awesome jobs around for those who do or those who want to work to support ‘em:

• 40 overseas job listings from USAJobs.gov for American citizens that want to grab some free housing and a nice R&R package.
• Then there are more permanent moves in that same direction, but with a slightly higher chance of getting shot at. Interns get one of the best total benefit packages around, here, too.
  
• More of the same, with a lesser likelihood of getting sent overseas for a long tour. Although it has had by far the lowest number of Iraq casualties of any branch of the military, be warned that you are a touch more likely to be shot doing this one than when wearing a suit or polo. Marginally worse housing and lower pay, but presumably a touch easier to get your foot in the door.
• Of course, if you don’t like getting shot at, you could just volunteer to do good things. Doesn’t pay much, if it pays at all, but like any experience working abroad, it’ll help you get your foot into the door in the Foreign Service.
  • Warning – Like all work for the US government, these opportunities carry with them a risk of being left broke and dead in our nation’s capital. Still not as bad as having to live abroad and pay for housing, though.

Did anyone else notice how it turned from a concession speech to a self-serving 2012 campaign rally after the first 5 minutes? Did anyone else notice the frequency with which she strayed off topic? Did anyone else notice how she was bringing up tiny little tidbits about a fellow who died in Alabama without any real context, expecting everyone to be fully versed in Alabamian party maneuvering?

With the frequent topic changes and the incoherent language (how did the incoherent “No way, no how, No McCain” get a standing ovation?), this speech was structured in a way that one must imagine only an intern’s first draft of a State of the Union can best.

Transcript: NYTimes

Update: Saw the second half of the speech again, and, though the language was still rather jilted and infantile, it was a great deal more focused than the introduction. Guess I oughta make a partial redaction.

“Russia says the West badly undermined its own arguments for the sanctity of Georgia’s borders by supporting Kosovo’s declaration of independence from traditional Russian ally Serbia in February.”

Makes ya feel all chuckly, don’ it? It would be ever so much more cool now to spend time in Kosovo or Abkahzia than Serbia or Georgia.

On a rather fascinating side note: Why hasn’t Algeria recognized Kosovo?

Update: On an equally fascinating note, read Medvedev’s editorial/open letter/whatever published by the Financial Times. Almost as interesting for its ommissions as its inclusions, it strangely mentions Kosovo twice, but never Russia’s own long war to hold Chechnya.

I’ll be shocked if this news breaks outside of technical circles, but at least there’s some vibrant discussion on CNet, /., et al about this man’s frequent attempts to do substantial damage to our basic fundamental human right to privacy. Any chance at all that the Republicans might do less damage?

I’m not normally a huge hip-hop person, but I was introduced to a new scene with several creative, original lyricists that are well worth your attention. What did the trick was having the track “45″ by The Saturday Knights, bundled on an old 512MB RCA MP3 player w/free eMusic subscription. That track and several others are free on this release of their new full-length album Mingle. Considering the price, this is well, well worth a quick download. Every track on their self-titled EP appears to be present here as well.

Related link:
Indie Study: The Saturday Knights’ hip-hop – MSNBC

The competition:

As a longtime eMusic subscriber and regular user of Amie Street (popularity-based pricing for indie groups) I’ve been quite happy – Never a drop of DRM in sight, no restrictions as to what application or device or operating system I use to play their product. I don’t think I’ve bought a music CD for a couple of years, outside of concert venues. I’ve been a customer of Amazon since the late nineties, too, so it was fairly natural for me to give them a shot. I haven’t wanted much that wasn’t available through the thriving indie scenes on the other two sites, but I recently spotted that some rare older Desaperacidos was available on Amazon, so I gave it a shot. The downloader worked just fine in Ubuntu Hardy Heron, although it was apparently intended for users of Gutsy Gibbon.

Bitrates, id3 tags, et al:

All three of these firms publish reasonably complete id3 files on their tracks. Oddly eMusic doesn’t note that the files were pulled down from them, but the other two do. More interestingly, I’ve selected one file from each provider, and there was a rather radical gap in bit rates:

Amie Street test file from Blue Scholars – Bayani:
128kbps CBR

eMusic test file from Blue Scholar – The Long March:
256kbps CBR (Second test: Common Market – Connect For was encoded at ~168kbps VBR)

Amazon, from A Fine Frenzy – One Cell In The Sea:
320kbps CBR ***See second update below – Inconsistent***

Now isn’t that odd? This is one place I would expect very little variation – 192kbps or higher, ABR is what I’d have predicted, but there seems to be a tendency to stick to CBR and quite a bit of a difference in the quality level of these tracks.

That said, most users won’t be able to hear the difference anyway. Lossy compression is lossy compression. If you wanted quality more than convenience, you’d shell out the extra $2-3 to get it lasered onto plastic.
Price comparison:

In to hip-hop at all? I tend to enjoy any genre when brilliant lyricists are involved – The Blue Scholars are definitely that. Check out “The Long March” or one of their free podcasts at KEXP. Regardless, this nine-track album can be had for just $5.07 on Amie Street. On Amazon it runs $7.99, or $8.01 on a per/track basis ($0.89*9). eMusic, being subscription based, doesn’t make for an apples-apples comparison, but their subscription models run 30-40 cents per track for the normal subscriptions, bringing the price down to $2.70-3.60. Big caveat – eMusic has a use-it-or-lose-it subscription model. Hard to take into account the potential loss from failing to use it up completely. Blue Scholar’s Bayani is a touch more current and popular, the metrics used to automatically price media on Amie Street. There, it runs $8.98, compared to 8.99 at Amazon. Amazon’s pricing on all of these albums and every other one that I’ve looked at has been at a 2-3 dollar discount, compared to the CDs. Their pricing isn’t bad at all, though it isn’t always competitive.

Obviously availability for any of these services will vary from band to band, but in the case of the Blue Scholars, both Amie Street & Amazon offers MP3 downloads of all five albums, but eMusic has faltered, only offering the second and third oldest of the set. Amazon’s preexisting relationships with myriad labels (major and minor) puts them in a strong position here. Neither of the two independent services can match the total number of artists available to Amazon. The purportedly great ease of use of Amie Street from a producer’s perspective helps them keep up, with those bands that choose to participate. eMusic may sadly continue to fall behindin this changing environment.

But wait a second….

Both of the other MP3 downloading services that I mentioned allow future downloads of the tracks you bought and paid for. If you’re anything like me, you’d rip a CD the second you bought it, thereby automatically having a backup available. Clear enough corollary there, but that’s not the way Amazon does business. You buy it, you download it once and only once. This isn’t the end of the world/isn’t bad enough to prevent me from doing business with them, but it certainly does make me wary. What happens if a download fails? What happens if some borderline-incompetent person saves a file to a temporary location that gets purged before they hunt it down? What happens if the media you download it to fails before you back it up? You might be able to get the situation taken care of by customer service, but you shouldn’t have to.

Conclusion:

Pros:

• Highest quality tracks seen in this test
• Constant per-album, subscription free pricing at a substantial discount from CDs
• No DRM (like everyone else worth dealing with – there’s a reason I’m not using iTunes)
• The downloader’s not required on a per-track basis, and there doesn’t seem to be a big price difference

Cons:

• Seems to be a touch more expensive than Amie Street for most of the stuff I’d buy, but it’s hit or miss
• One download only
• As you’d expect, you also can’t stream the complete track  (Only Amie Street is willing to give you that)
• Why can’t they just generate a zip file with the tracks, instead of requiring a footprint on the PC to do full album downloads?

Good enough – I’ll keep pricing tracks at Amazon when eMusic doesn’t have what I’m looking for.

*UPDATE: Added screenshots. By the way, don’t take my word for their download working in Ubuntu Hardy Heron, or any other version of any other non-Windows OS. Try it for yourself: Free tracks.

The .deb installer properly creates menu items and MIME types for Amazon - Smooth integration.

Screenshot of Amazon's downloader in Linux

One point I missed, the installer is just a regular old Deb file. It’s not a full-blown apt repository with security updates, like it oughta be, but it beats the usual Linux “installers.”

*Second update* – My wife uses Rhapsody’s subscription service, and it works plenty well enough online and off, and is working just fine overseas from our Nepali IP address. That said, I didn’t compare their MP3 download service in this article, and I feel like I ought to. Check out this steal of an album from Amazon: two CD set of old Bob Newhart standup for $8.99 – It’s cheap enough on plastic, at $14.99, but that’s still substantial savings. Now check out this incredible insult from Rhapsody’s MP3 download site:

Rhapsody charges lazy suckers and the math-challenged an extra $2 for clicking on the buy-album link. Poor math-challenged Americans – First nationalized gambling, now this. Ain’t that teh suck?

SECOND UPDATE – INCONSISTENT PACKAGING:

I’ve purchased several more albums off of Amazon and Amie Street, and would like to point out two things:

1: The bitrate of the files on these sites is not standardized. I’ve seen both dip as low as 192kbps CBR, and I’ve seen Amazon go as high as 320kbps as noted above.

2: (This is the part that matters) All of the vendors above are inconsistent in their inclusion of ID3 tags. This sucks: Neglecting to have universally applied ID3v1/v1.1 tags makes it so that many MP3 players that base their playlists and menus on ID3 tag-based databases (such as my new Sansa Clip) are unable to properly sort these files. Unless you want to go through in Winamp and punch in the relevant data your self or use the open source command-line mp3info or id3info tags to do it en masse, you’re going to end up with a low quality product. This also raises issues about piracy and tracking these files: Common sense would dictate that, if they’re not shipping DRM, they would still embed a receipt or account number in the ID3 tag, allowing for users to demonstrate ownership and for media producers to track down pirates.

I’d like to point out at this time that it is TRIVIAL to apply these ID3 tags in a standardized format. The Linux command “id3tool -r $ARTIST -a $ALBUM *” is all it takes to make these files properly register in a Sansa Clip and many other players – The other stuff they’re perfectly happy to take from the filename. This could be done in bulk via a 20-30 minute script. Amazon, Amie, eMusic: Be a little less lazy and tag your products, please.

THIRD UPDATE – BLOCKED FOR OVERSEAS USERS, USG INCLUDED!

Much bigger problem: Three of the four services described here have recently (past 3-6 months) blocked access from my Nepali IP address, giving error messages that say that access to each is limited to American customers only. AmieStreet is the only exception, but even it is only partially open: The collected work of The M’s is available, but their front page “Pearl and the Beard” folks lost a potential impulse buy by restricting availability by region.

Regardless, Amazon & Rhapsody, the only two players deep enough in the mainstream to warrant a great deal of concern have both completely blocked access to their stores. While it seems unlikely that they can wiggle out of whatever poorly conceived, myopic, seemingly anti-trust & free trade violating contracts they’ve negotiated with the labels, we should at the very least demand that they reopen their stores to customers with APO, FPO, and diplomatic pouch (zip 20189) addresses. Surely we have clout enough and can make such an easy pitch mentioning patriotism and callous mistreatment of servicemen and women overseas that we can at least win that much.

The law could have conceivably outlawed or prevented development of any number of unendorsed/unsigned applications for a number of different devices:

• Rockbox – Open Source Jukebox – Firmware replacement for iPods et al
• All the iPhone/iPod Touch jailbreaks
• Ports of Linux to myriad architectures – Xboxes, Dreamcasts, Gamecubes, Wiis, etc, etc (to say nothing of XBMC)

Actively undermining consumer rights, creative fair use, and open source development sure as hell ain’t change I can believe in.

Now if only the Republicans were any better. *le sigh* – I guess I might just end up throwing my vote away on a third party candidate again – Biden’s worse than Bush, Kerry, and Gore combined in this respect. (Update: Lawrence Lessig might not write off McCain too quickly.)

Related articles:

• http://news.cnet.com/2010-1071-946732.html Pirate this, go to jail – CNET
• http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/08/obama-veep-wa-1.html Obama VP Pick Joe Biden: Good on Civil Liberties, Friendly to Hollywood

Donating to the Republicans or Democrats? Offset the damage done by donating an equal amount to the Electronic Frontier Foundation

The bug is a really nasty one – Attacks have already been published and redistributed in automated tools. Potential attacks include:

1: Pwning Windows based computers through the multitude of automatically updating utilities that are commonly installed on them – Dell, HP, Adobe, Mozilla, and myriad other freeware, shareware, and open source projects , and Microsoft themselves – It only takes one of the big ones to be replaced via a man in the middle attack (MITM) to compromise the computers hundreds or thousands of NTC subscribers. Mac OS X and Linux are no more immune, especially insecure operating systems like the Asus Eee’s default Xandros Linux install that doesn’t even bother signing their packages.

2: Intercepting mail – Intercepting internet mail, bound to or from any server, becomes almost trivial with this attack. Vulnerable DNS servers open up all of their users to having their MX record lookups (by which all mail servers but their own are located) compromised, redirecting their outbound traffic to a MITM. Likewise, the attacker can easily launch phishing attacks to seize total control of web-based email attacks and MITM attacks against the vast majority of public and corporate POP3 and IMAP servers, allowing them to compromise myriad other accounts held by the victim through insecurely designed password reset mechanisms.

See Kaminsky’s slides from the Black Hat conference for many, many more potential avenues of attack, but this is definitely one of the scarier issues to have hit recently, doubly so here, where your ISP doesn’t give you any sort of reasonable way around their equipment: http://www.doxpara.com/DMK_BO2K8.ppt

PS: NTC’s PPPoE server wouldn’t authenticate me for over 12 hours last night. Yayz, the 11-4 workday. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of an ISP that didn’t at least have someone on call to deal with this sort of outage, or an ISP of this size without 24 hour coverage.

At lunch today it reached its worst point yet in my two months here and week of driving. Traffic was completely stopped on both ends by the fuel line and the inability of the one policeman on scene to properly flag traffic through in the single “open” lane, where both north and south-bound traffic met. Poor fellow was doing his best, but to move the equivalent of two small city blocks in the west/to move 10-20 car lengths took a good 20 minutes. One small benefit, though – After breaking through the lines I managed to break my daytime speed record, hitting a whopping 37 miles an hour.Going back from lunch, the cops had done something pretty nice – They’d roped off the existing fuel line to prevent its expansion and had reserved the one open lane for northbound traffic. Unfortunately for me, work is south of home. They directed traffic off onto a hither-too-unexplored road that leads to the ring-road around the city (an unpainted four car, two-cow wide road that has only one or two traffic lights but no less than 10 major intersections – the highway goes almost as slow as the rest of the city, as a result). In this lucky instance following the advice of Douglas Adam’s Dirk Gently (follow someone who looks like they know where they’re going) worked just fine – Survived the unmarked detour 3-4 km west of where I wanted to be, and arrived back at work just 10-20 minutes late.

We read numerous reports about the cows, cyclists, myriad pedestrians, and bicycle rickshaws (most of which are actually cargo-carrying, outside of the most touristy region in the city), and we were a fair bit freaked out about it ourselves, when we first arrived. After having gotten behind the wheel, though, and dodged cows and bikers on my own, I can attest that it really isn’t that bad here. After riding around and developing some familiarity with the roads, naval-style right of way, and traffic flow, and getting some pointers on how the Nepalese use their turn signals (Hint: Parked cars on the left with their right turn signals are trying to say “go around me”), it’s really been quite easy. There are many, many more distractions and potential problems on the road here than in the west, but considering that I moved here from Seven Corners, VA, I’d say this really isn’t that bad. I feel safer here than I did there, although the grossly inadequate insurance and the apparent lack of any western supplemental policies do have me concerned about potential legal liabilities, should, say, two oblivious pedestrians weave around traffic in front of me in both directions, leaving me with no way to dodge them both.

PS: I haven’t been able to take any time off to really do anything with it, but I received my first big sea-carried shipment from the states yesterday. Got the TV hooked up, but haven’t had time (or money – paid cash for the car, which felt nice but still hurt) to pick up functional UPSes to hook my computer up to, yet.

If NTC can’t react more quickly to major security concerns like this, I’d advise all readers to steer clear. My technical staff at work have run the same test on Worldlink without errors. I’ll attempt to get similar data from friends on Subisu.

Please avoid NTC until this issue has been resolved. Users already on NTC should consider routing their traffic around this via VPNs, SSH tunnelling, whatever. Pretend you’re in China to work around this ISP’s compromised servers.

Update: Obviously I’ve had further issues with these guys in terms of reporting the security concern, but I’ve got one completely unrelated note to address: I signed up and pay through a proxy, as everything is in my landlord’s name, so I wasn’t immediately aware that the billing cycle goes by the Nepali calendar, the “Nepal Sambat.” Keep that in mind, because these guys are a lot quicker to turn off your prepaid service than they are to turn it back on. Welcome to 2065!

We recently got the Internet hooked up. We live a bit too far off the beaten track to get Subisu, the local cable company, but the local government monopoly telecom company panned out – We were able to get onto it fairly cheaply. NTC’s DSL service is alright. It’s not terribly quick, and I do see a fair bit of latency (to be expected) and some occasional packet loss (to be condemned) to American hosts, but the basic product isn’t too bad. The current prices quoted on their website as of this posting were accurate, but there was a trivial 500-1500 rps setup fee as well. It’s entirely month-to-month according to NTC and my local telephone technician, with no annual contracts. NTC doesn’t sell you a modem, but that’s a good thing – Decent modems with integrated routers only run between 1,500 and 3,000 rps in town, far cheaper than they would be in the US if the telecom company was selling you your modem. (For a review of the modem I purchased, see the “Planet ADSL Modem – Botched AJAX implementation, but runs Linux?” post. Coming soon.) Bandwidth tests to Calcutta show acceptable speeds – ~160-180kbps during peak hours on a 256kbps line. Like many things NTC-related (aside from their security practices), this is not great, but it works.  Compared to the local competition (the cable provider Subisu), these results are actually pretty decent.  NTC’s support hours leave a good deal to be desired compared to Subisu (religious nine-to-fivers), but when they’re in they’re perfectly responsive.

Ping times to MrZaius.com (kindly hosted by GSI in Kansas City, MO):

rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 411.108/413.637/427.965/3.478 ms

Times to 4.2.2.2, a stateside DNS server I tried to use (and failed – see below)

rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 306.678/308.429/311.119/1.180 ms

Though not particularly good, that’s to be expected. Where it gets really interesting is more local traffic:
sampark.chd.nic.in, located just across the border from Nepal, in the same country NTC gets its pipe from. First, here are the ping times from an NTC connection:

rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 387.071/391.247/401.643/5.381 ms

Here are the times to the same box, from Kansas City:

rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 264.617/264.841/265.255/0.702 ms

Remarkably, the latency is almost 50% worse in Nepal than Missouri, hitting this Indian site. This could, however, be a fluke – I didn’t investigate the path taken, so this could just as easily be a problem with NTC’s Indian ISP or the site above as it could be an NTC issue.

There are several major security and privacy concerns, though – Nepal Telecom currently runs a Squid caching proxy that there is no clear way to work around, so it’s presumably a transparent proxy. For home users with no every reasonable expectation of privacy, this is extremely worrisome. The way they do this also dramatically limits the usability of the network – They NAT all connections into a 10.x.x.x IP block, preventing you from using any service that authenticates by IP address, like OpenDNS. No major loss, though, as your web traffic (presumably the vast majority of your DNS requests) go through Squid proxy which uses the crappy, insecure DNS servers at NTC. The DNS bug made discovered and famous by Dan Kaminsky is still present on NTC’s DNS servers, after more than a month! Lord only knows how many third parties have access to the entire browsing histories of the NTC users, but I would be shocked to learn that they haven’t been compromised.

The following DNS server is at least one of the major culprits:

~$ dig -x 202.70.64.5|grep ntc.net.np
5.64.70.202.in-addr.arpa. 38999 IN PTR danphe.ntc.net.np.

The network works just fine if you ignore all the potential security and privacy concerns and aren’t geeky enough to really NEED an external IP address (although VOIP services like Vonage and many other applications will suffer as a result). That said, though, the security and privacy problems at NTC are the worst I have ever seen at an ISP, and are absolutely unforgivable. Tighten up your act, NTC!

NTC users – Don’t take my word for it. Check for yourself at http://www.doxpara.com/ Note that I have been able to get it to think I was using other DNS servers on some attempts, but the NTC ones are still being used by the proxy server, I’m sure.

Note to NTC – Act on this, and I swear I’ll chop this up and make sure your work is accurately reflected in this review.

More information on the extremely serious DNS issues:
* http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7496735.stm (Layman friendly)
* http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/800113 (For those with some understanding of DNS)

* Also of interest: http://ktm2day.wordpress.com/nepal-telecom-adsl-internet/
(I don’t really concur with everything on it, but there’s more than a fair bit of useful information on the page above.)