Category Archives: Musings

Dennis posted a link to an AP story in which some random yahoo claims that the soldiers accused in the Abu Ghraib torture cases reflect “a broad lack of moral values in the culture at large”. Leaving aside the issue of relativism, what he should be saying is simple: “Our soldiers knew that what they were doing was wrong, but they chose to do it anyway.”
You’d have to be retarded (and I mean that literally) not to pick up on the Geneva Convention instruction given in Army and Marine Corps boot camp. I don’t know about the USAF and Navy, but I assume there’s similar instruction there. Back in ’86, those of us in the tender care of the 1st Recruit Training Battalion at Parris Island got a thorough drilling in the Law of Land Warfare, which covers what is and isn’t permissible in actual combat. Guess what? Torture isn’t on the “OK” list. The soldiers implicated in the Abu Ghraib torture cases may not have been schooled in the fine points of Geneva Convention requirements for the care of military prisoners, which are more detailed and quite different than the Law of Land Warfare.
I’m prepared to concede that they weren’t; that they should have been, and that the fact that they were not is an indictment of those given the responsibility of supervising and training the troops who run the prison. However, I’m with Stryker on this one:

Let me say it clearly for anyone who may be morally befuddled by such things as “right” and “wrong”: You don’t follow illegal orders. In fact, you have a moral and professional obligation to refuse an illegal order. That’s what these Nevada soldiers did:
“There was one incident when we were asked to keep detainees awake, to wake them up with metal drums. We said, `Absolutely not.’ I stopped them from doing it,” said Armstrong, a 37-year-old child protective services worker from Las Vegas.
She said no. Read the rest of that article to see how real soldiers conduct themselves.

There is no excuse or justification for what these troops did, and they are a stain on the military. Once the investigation concludes, I expect that those found guilty will be punished. One related question: why are the enlisted troops already being court-martialed, while the officers seem to be skating? They’re not skating, as this post explains clearly. This one also points out that there are several investigations underway, including one to identify how the Taguba report got loose before the senior DoD structure obtained it.

From today’s New York Times, an editorial by William Broyles. His closing paragraph:

If this war is truly worth fighting, then the burdens of doing so should fall on all Americans. If you support this war, but assume that Pat Tillman and Other People’s Children should fight it, then you are worse than a hypocrite. If it’s not worth your family fighting it, then it’s not worth it, period. The draft is the truest test of public support for the administration’s handling of the war, which is perhaps why the administration is so dead set against bringing it back.

I’ve long supported the idea of bringing back some form of compulsory service. It’s proved to work well in a wide range of cultural and social environments, and it provides a powerful counterbalance to exactly the kind of problem we’re having now: the people calling the shots don’t have any personal stake in the way the military is used. However, I think Broyles is too quick to dismiss the difference in quality between an all-volunteer force (where presumably everyone there wants to be there) and a force of conscripts. There’s no question that a volunteer force tends to build up a more experienced core of non-commissioned officers, which (as any officer will tell you) is the real backbone of the armed forces. Without that core, it’s not clear that the US military would be able to maintain the same level of professionalism and discipline. It’s also an open question whether a mixed force of volunteers and conscripts would suffer from the same kinds of friction we’ve been seeing between regular and reserve/National Guard units. Interestingly, one benefit to come from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is that regular units are getting to see that reserve and NG units are just as prepared and capable, in most cases, as their regular counterparts.

This is important news, at least among the kinds of people I hang out with. Buy one dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and get a dozen more free. All you need is this handy coupon (well, some milk would be good, too). Oddly, KK stores in Utah, Washington, and major NASCAR tracks (Bristol, Daytona) aren’t participating. Oh well.

This is really neat: some random guy on the Internet has produced a photo album chronicling his 35-year marriage (at least so far!) The captions are really sweet; it’s clear that they’ve had a happy and strong marriage. One of the comments made a good point, too: take lots of pictures now, because you might want them later.

From USA Today: the CEO of McDonald’s died this morning at a rally/conference for franchisees. The cause: a sudden heart attack.

Pancakes are good, but waffles are better.

Scoble links to a Microsoft Monitor article on Microsoft’s “thrift culture“:

I also see Microsoft’s thrifty culture as contributing to problems with product pricing. As noted in my report, “Microsoft’s Integrated Innovation: Weighing up Customer Benefits, Risks,” increased integration raises some Microsoft software acquisition costs. Microsoft employees use their own software–and that’s the latest stuff, too, which is another thrifty use of existing resources. I contend that given those modest salaries and use of Microsoft software, product managers are sometimes out of touch with real customer costs and their computing environment little resembles their customers’.

It’s true that Microsoft’s computing environment doesn’t resemble most of their customers’ environments, but I think Joe has the reasoning here backwards: Microsoft’s computing costs are quite possibly higher than they are for most customers, even when you factor in the happy coincidence that MS doesn’t have to buy licenses of its own software.
For example, Microsoft’s email architecture uses on seven-node active/passive Exchange 2003 clusters, with each cluster having its own dedicated SAN. That design offers superb availability and performance, but it’s also very expensive. I’m not aware of any customers who are using similar configurations (although some are using clusters with shared SANs)– it just costs too much. However, the uptime and performance benefits enable a critical part of Microsoft’s business operations, so they spent the money. The same is true of their network– they have a huge and powerful network backbone, with extensive health monitoring, spread all over the world. Why? They need it, so they bought it.
They’ve never been shy about spending money, when needed— that’s the key point IMO. (Another example: check the average age of laptop and desktop computers at MS, or the average time between desktop OS updates– I bet both are way shorter than they are “on the outside”.) It’s true that a penny saved is a penny earned; however, it’s also true that sometimes you have to spend money to make money. The key is that spending money wisely is deeply ingrained into the MS culture to an extent I’ve never seen anywhere else.
Another important difference in the environments has an influence, too. Microsoft is full of überusers. At a typical 50,000-seat enterprise, you might find 10 or 15% of users who match the baseline email usage profile at Microsoft, and I’m sure the percentage of people who use the advanced features of (say) InfoPath or SharePoint is much smaller. The constant flow of new technologies and tools is disruptive, but overall the increase in productivity these tools bring overwhelms their disrupting impact.
I think one of the key drivers behind MS’ aggressive dogfooding is that their users demand, and can gain productivity from, new products’ technology. That’s not always true elsewhere. In fact, when I show ordinary users some of the cool features in Office 2003, it’s clear to them how their productivity would improve, which makes me wonder why the press and analysts so often say that new upgrades don’t offer significant improvements.