Greg Sanders

Information technology as a check on secret assassinations

Good article in the post by R. Jeffrey Smith and Peter Finn on how recent cases show that it’s harder to pull off secret assassinations these days. Notable examples include the Russians and Alexander Litvinenko, the Isrealis and Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, and the U.S. and the kidnapping of a Muslim Cleric in Italy. Obviously, the Predator drone strikes show that overt assassinations are still all the rage but that’s not really a big surprise.

I don’t think this really holds when talking about intra-country assassinations, in those cases suspicions will always be there but no investigation would be allowed. Similarly if the nation of the killing is willing to participate in a cover-up then the secret is likely to stay one.

On the whole, I do think this is a real positive for international relations. I still have mixed feelings about the use of targeting killings in Pakistan, but they seem to be both effective and comparatively low casualty. The implicit support and explicit condemnation from Pakistan seems like a risky situation, but is hardly unheard of and may be more tenable after the Taliban have exposed their own brutality.

However, use of assassination outside of war may take out bad guys with key knowledge or connections but on the whole seems more useful for killing political leaders and dissident threats. On the whole, when people want to hide violent acts from the eyes of the world, it isn’t typically to further world peace.

DnD thoughts: Can the game support all ranged parties without losing sophistication?

I think it is uncontroversial to say that melee combat is in many ways crucial to sophisticated DnD 4e combat. Shifts, attacks of opportunity, aiding another in combat, bull rushes, grabs, defenders (with the possible exception of swordmages), and to a lesser extent forced movement all provide an exciting mix of options for combat. Stealth and many classes do work well or even exclusively at range, but in many ways they work best in concert with melee allies.

This is of course a legitimate choice on 4e’s end. Dungeons and Dragons, as the name implies, is fantasy oriented. However, for those of us that like the system but prefer steampunk, pulp, modern, or sci-fi settings the melee orientation can be limiting. Dune and Lensmen both show that these settings can work in a melee oriented way, but it would be nice if that was an option, not a requirement.

So what would it take to get DnD as robust for a primarily ranged party as it is for a mixed or primarily melee party? First off, additional defender classes/alternate builds for existing ones), but this can’t just be about defenders, many of the melee options discussed above are viable for a range of classes. To really get there, I think cover-based fighting is the ranged equivalent of attacks of opportunity.

By this, I don’t mean cover as a technical term in DnD, I mean the general feel of cover based first person shooters and the like. Here’s a broad outline of what I’m thinking after the cut.

Google Buzz is making me wonder if I’m over-sharing

In this case, I mean sharing items in Google Reader. I reciprocated a few people who were following me and for a bit I felt drowned in pretty good shared content. By adapting my skim folder I seem to have dealt with that problem, but I’m now trying to figure out what the appropriate level of sharing is.

So, readers, any thoughts? I know for me, sharing can work best as a filter for blogs I enjoy but that aren’t quite good enough fits for me to follow. In addition, it can bring in unique items I wouldn’t have otherwise seen.

I figure I should aim for 5-10 shared items a day, but aim for the best stuff. It’d be nice to have some feedback stats for how many of one’s shared items get read, although obviously that should only be gathered with permission.

In any event, if you like, let me know what sharing works best for you, if you follow my buzz account that is, and I’ll try to accommodate.

Maryland recognizes other jurisdiction’s same sex marriages

While same sex marriage is not yet available directly in Maryland, Attorney General Gansler announced on Wednesday that” Maryland will recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere and that its agencies should immediately begin affording gay marriage couples the same rights as heterosexual ones.” See the quality Washington Post article by Aaron C. Davis and John Wagner for more details . This was in response to a legislative query and Gov. O’Malley says he’ll back it. This decision is particularly noteworthy given that the District now allows for same-sex marriages, so you don’t even have to go that far.

I have rarely been prouder to be a Marylander. I haven’t always been a supporter of Doug Gangsler in primaries, not so much because of any objection to him but because I’ve liked some of his other Democratic opponents. I still plan to base my choice of gubernatorial candidates on transportation issues first and foremost, but Gansler now has a serious leg up in my view for re-election and any future office he seeks. The Republicans are likely to go after him hard and when it comes to general elections I plan to exceed their zeal with my support.

Go Maryland! We’re not there yet but we’re much closer. There will likely be a court challenge but the logic seems sound, we recognize common law marriages from other areas even though we don’t do that ourselves.

Early reaction to Caprica

The prequel to Battlestar Gallactica had a good start although it hasn’t quite grabbed me in the past few episodes. As Marc Lynch commented once in his twitter feed, everyone is kind of annoying. Also, I’m a bit bugged by Ron Moore’s enjoyment of tweaking social mores on smoking and using it as a nervous tick for most of the characters. Unlike all the blather about violence in video games, I believe studies have linked smoking in film to great incidence of youth smoking. It’s his series, he can do what he wants, but at least get some bang for the buck if you’re going to use it.

However, those are fairly trifling points. So far me the series strong (spoilers through the intro movie) points are Zoe, the avatar of a dead girl in a robot body, her friend Lacy Rand, Zoe’s father Daniel Graystone, and possibly young Bill Adama’s maternal grandmother (I don’t yet know how to interpret her behavior in the last episode. Of the bunch Lacy is the most sympathetic although I think Daniel Graystone is more sympathetic than your average moral ambiguous mad scientist type. Zoe isn’t so much sympathetic as interesting, she was rather a spoiled child but the camera tricks contrasting her self-image with the reality of her robotic body work well and are a good hard sci fi angle. There’s still some characters to be developed, apparently next episode focuses on one of them, so we’ll see how that works out.

Here’s a few things that the series could do to interest me a bit more:

• The rich Capricans look down on Taurons, Adama’s ethnicity. This seems to be because every single one of them is either involved in organized crime or will look the other way because of Tauron ethnic ties. If this were a series about the Mafia the Italian-American community would be rightfully complaining. Part of this is that I’m just not that interested in gangsters, that’s on me, but how about showing some diversity within groups? Oddly enough, the outright gangster Sam Adama doesn’t bother me nearly as much as Bill’s father Joseph, a lawyer that’s completely compromised by his own choices.
• Amanda Graystone plays a bit too weak and soap opera-y. This is fixable I think, but just calling her Dr. Graystone all the time is telling, not showing. Her choice of behavior at a key public venue was just bizarre. She also does odd things like reacting with outrage that a global defense officer would follow obvious leads in a terrorism investigation. Her relationship with Zoe actually does work pretty well so I hope future episodes give her more to work with.
• Finally, the late night show isn’t really particularly funny. This isn’t to say that it’s a bad portrayal of how talk shows work, as Alyssa Rosenberg pointed out recently late night shows exist to fill available empty timeslots. I mean I like Conan, some of his bits are awesome, but he makes the best of an obsolete format. Doing a Daily Show, or a Colbert Robert if you want to risk taking the time to properly develop the character, would be funnier, teach us more about the world, and would also allow for much sharper commentary. I think the format of the show within a show could probably be switched up some, I’m okay with the host, but at present it just doesn’t work for me.

On the whole, I think its worth checking out for Battlestar fans. The universe is interesting and the appeal doesn’t rely on promises of revealed secrets that are likely to disappoint. I think it may just need more time to find its legs.

Finally, my wife notes that the names of Fins are fun to say, congrats to their victory over the Czech Republic.

And I have a working laptop again

I ended up going with a Dell 14”. The resolution is higher than my old 15.6” though so hopefully I won’t miss the old screen too much.

So far I’m liking Windows 7. We’ll see how well the Easy Transfer utility works. I had backed up my old files, but the old laptop does manage to barely work if I can manually turn on the fan before the CPU dies from the heat. So looks like I should be able to transfer my files over.

I’m going to be trying to improve my treatment of my laptops. I hope having a 14”er will make that a bit easier.

X-Box gaming is not why manned spaceflight is being suspended

Ross Douthat posts an elegy for what he calls the end of the space age. I think talk of an end or never returning to the moon is ridiculous; it’s as if the Vikings declared that after they didn’t follow up on visiting America, no one else would. In any event, here’s his diagnosis:

The administration wouldn’t be cutting the manned spaceflight program if Americans were still enthusiastic about going to the stars — if space exploration still occupied a privileged place in our imagination, if our jocks still wanted to be astronauts and our nerds still wanted to build rockets. Obama is simply bowing to our culture’s priorities: Our geeks want to build a better XBox, and our jocks want to buy it to play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Our technological energy is still immense, but it’s increasingly turned inward — toward communication, life-extension, and computer-generated adventure — rather than outward toward the stars.

The focus of our technological energy is driven by cost, not imagination. As described by Moore's law, the components that make up an X-Box have gotten dramatically cheaper since the Apollo program while the cost to launch things into orbit has remained roughly the same. Research priorities certainly have something to do with that, but a lot of it is just physics, miniaturization proved to be a dramatically easier problem to solve.

I am hopeful regarding the switch to commercially driven launch. That is classically an advantage of markets and perhaps they'll be able to crack that nut.

In the mean time, I'm certainly sympathetic with national greatness pursuits that are at times uneconomical. However, wounded at the dawn of this millennium the national greatness project we pursued was war. Setting aside Afghanistan, the costs of Iraq could easily have paid for moon colonies or trips to Mars, but we chose not go in that direction.

The fault is not in the jocks that play Modern Warfare on the X-Box but instead in the politicians and ideological allies that play it in real life.

Regardless, for hard science reporting on the Moon I tend to turn to Joel Achanbach, here’s his latest on who lost the Moon.

Obama’s tactic for reducing effectiveness of obstructionism

President Obama has finally laid out a vision for the last mile on health care. In short, big public debate then vote. I was initially quite worried about the alternate strategy after reading about it in the Washington Post. However, I think the Post story actually does get it wrong, I don’t see any indication that this is an alternate strategy, it  does seem to be consistent with passing the bill via reconciliation in the likely event that there’s no more Republican support. Jon Chait takes a stab at decoding the strategy:

I think Obama sees the perception that the process is broken -- that it's backroom deals and "ignoring the will of the people" -- to be the biggest impediment to passage of the bill. So he's proposing a remedy to that perception.

The most important part is what Obama says should happen first: Democrats should settle their differences and work out a final bill. That's crucial. Then he wants to sit down with both parties, and health care experts, and walk through the details in a methodical way. I'd guess he's imagining a process that might look a little like his back-and-forth with House Republicans -- they present him with wild claims about a government takeover, and he calmly responds…

He's [also] saying that Congress can't just ignore the issue and let it die in quiet. It needs to have a vote, relatively soon, and make a decision, rather than decide by default to keep the status quo.

Jon Cohn thinks that this manages to put the ball in the Republican’s courts, although he also notes that Obama will still need to help getting to a final bill. A friend, [Matt Lewis]m talking me down after the Post article similarly thought it [might] mean they’d have to defend the status quo. I think the inclusion of experts here is key, if the Republicans don’t show up the Democrats can discuss this with experts, that is to say that outright boycott is not as rewarding of a strategy.

An interesting feature of this strategy is that it in some ways riskier if the Republicans do participate. As Krugman has pointed out, the bill is a three legged stool and thus not especially agile. This is especially true because the reconciliation mechanism can only be used for budgetary matters thus any major regulatory style changes would make the bill again vulnerable to a filibuster. However, I think that gets to the feature of a public debate that wasn’t present in the Baucus gang of six affair, participating in the negotiations is high visibility and requires either effectively defending your ideas or being willing to make concessions.

On the whole, I’m fairly displeased with where we are and do feel on the whole let down by the leadership over the past year. This sort of approach might be a great idea for starting to go after the filibuster if used in conjunction with a popular set of proposals that weren’t complex and interlinked, like banking reforms. However, as Kevin Drum discusses, the Republicans are demonstrating a fair amount of hubris and are more likely to repeat their government shutdown mistakes than to actually participate in governing. I think Obama may just have managed to devise an approach where pure obstruction is an inferior tactical choice versus participation. It’s actually quite clever, hopefully not too clever.

On the whole, I’ve also been a bit moody over the past month as a result of this fight. I don’t like it. Maybe I should pick up meditation or something. Might be a downside of not blogging as much, Twitter really doesn’t cut it in terms of letting ideas air out.