Spinning of the wiretaps

There’s an interesting Washington Post article that provides some details into the current wiretapping controversy. Remember that the Bush camp is calling this terrorist surveillance and trying to give the impression that only those talking to Al Qaeda members would be monitored.

Let’s look at the process according to the above article and try to compare that to the claims:

1) First hundreds of thousands of calls, emails, etc. are automatically monitored by NSA computers.

2) Then intelligence analysts actually listen to or read the suspicious messages flagged by the computers. This reportedly numbers around 5000.

3) If the intelligence analyst also determines there is suspicious activity, then the message is passed on for further investigation. This reportedly was less than 10 per year.

So basically we have hundreds of thousands of innocent conversations monitored by computers, 5000 of these monitored by actual people, and out of this we get less than 10 per year (at best less than 45 since 9/11) that are suspicious enough to be investigated further. How many of these 45 actually turned out to be terrorists and not just a misunderstood conversation? We don’t know.

What we do know is that it took hundreds of thousands of warrantless taps to produce those 45 leads. That is what is called a fishing expedition. Such wholesale monitoring of communications in the vague hope of getting a few leads is the hallmark of a repressive police state. And it is so far from the president’s description of the surveillance that it would be laughable if it weren’t so serious.

Maxtor Sucks (Part 3)

You may recall that last year I had two Maxtor drives fail one after the other. Last week I started having one of my other Maxtor drives start locking up intermittently. I ran SpinRite on the two Maxtor drives in my desktop system and both of them came up with horrendous numbers of ECC errors. 2,681,123 on one, and 2,076,616 on the other. They both came with only a 1 year warranty, which ran out last May, so these end up in the junk pile. I think I have only one Maxtor drive left in operation at this point, the one that got replaced in warranty last year. I’ll have to run some tests on it too. It’s currently in a USB case.

Today I bought a couple of Western Digital drives to replace them. Since the problems with the other Maxtors last year, and the problems with the IBM/Hitachi drives a few years back, I’ve been buying Western Digital and Seagate drives and have been fairly pleased. I would have preferred to get Seagate since they sell all drives with a 5 year warranty, but Western Digitals come with at least a 3 year warranty in Taiwan which is not too bad. (In the US WD sells drives with as little as 1 year warranty, but you can extend the warranty coverage for a nominal fee on their website. This is one of the few times I would recommend getting an extended warranty.)

On liberty, hate and conscience

Since most of you don’t subscribe to the Taipei Times you probably didn’t see the editorial On liberty, hate and conscience in today’s paper.

“[W]henever people demand the silencing of others, it is a form of tyranny. And when a person calls for violence against another because of something they have said, ultimately it is an expression of fear, exposing facile beliefs and a deficiency of reason.”

Water Heater Repair

Our water heater has been flaking out for the last few months. You may recall from previous posts that like most Taiwanese houses, we have a tankless water heater, also known as an on-demand water heater. Most American homes have the big water heater tanks. With a tankless heater, it only runs when there is water flowing through the hot taps. With a tank heater it keeps a big ~40-60 gallon tank heated constantly.

Usually when our water heater flakes, it is because the battery is dying. We have a gas heater with electronic pilot light. The ignition is powered by a D size battery. When it runs down then the pilot light may not light all the time. This time the battery was fine. The problem was that the water flow wasn’t triggering the heater to turn on.

The tankless heater uses a water valve on the bottom of the unit. When water is flowing, it is supposed to raise up a plunger with closes the pilot light contact and starts the flow of gas. This plunger is also regulated by a thermocouple which raises and lowers the gas flow as the proper heat level is attained. The problem was that this plunger was barely moving up any more.

I’d been able to put off repairs by adjusting the heat and water pressure settings so that the plunger would rise up just enough to turn things on, but over time it got worse and worse. And if anyone turned on another tap while you were taking a shower, that’d be enough to trip it off again. Over the last few days it got especially painfully flaky.

So yesterday I decided to read up more about how these tankless heaters work. I couldn’t find an English manual for my particular model since it is a local brand, so I looked at some manuals for some Bosch models that were similar. I found out that the water valve innards have an expected service life of 2-5 years.

While I like to do repairs myself whenever possible (at least so I understand how things work if nothing else), this repair was getting a bit too complex, so we called the manufacturer’s service line yesterday and they sent out a service guy this morning. I showed the guy what was going on and he immediately pulled out a rubber diaphragm and said that’s what was broken.

I watched as he pulled out the water valve, disassembled it, and pulled out the old rubber diaphragm which had a nice 2 cm gash in it. He put it all back together with the new one, and reassembled the water heater. Went to turn on the hot water tap and the plunger shot straight up to the top immediately. Voila, it was fixed. After he left, I readjusted the temp and pressure settings so that the shower would run hot water for the entire upper half of the dial.

I was happy that I had mostly figured out the problem myself, happy that I could speak enough Chinese to describe the problem to the repairman, but most of all I was happy to be able to take a shower this morning without twiddling the hot water off and on to get it to turn on, and without it randomly turning off in the middle.

The estimated repair they told us on the phone was TWD1000 (about USD31.00), but it ended up being only TWD400 (about USD12.50). It’s really nice that repairs like this are so cheap here.

More Idolatry

There’s a very interesting Depictions of Mohammed Throughout History which provides an historical perspective to the current debate. It shows the various depictions of Mohammed made by various groups at various points in history.

(Also in my previous post I mentioned that one of the fake cartoons showed a Muslim being sodomized by a dog while praying. Other sites claim that this is meant to be Mohammed, so I have corrected that entry.)

Down With Creamy Danish Butter!

Why are Muslims staging violent protests against Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed? Would you be upset if the cartoons depicted Mohammed as a pedophile, or drawn as a pig, or being sodomized by a dog while praying? That’s what one group of Danish Muslims is showing to protesters in the Middle East to inflame the protests. Just one problem: these three cartoons are fakes that may even have been made by the Muslim group themselves.

The actual cartoons while they can be offensive are somewhat milder. Perhaps the most offensive one depicts Mohammed wearing a bomb as a turban. Many of them only run afoul of the prohibition of depicting Mohammed because it would promote idolatry. The original reason for the series was in response to the problems in making a children’s book about Mohammed, and the fears that such a book would result in complaints of idolatry. The cartoons were meant to satirize how a simple image of Mohammed could spark violent protests. It is ironic that some Muslim groups have reacted to cartoons about violent protests over drawings by staging violent protests over drawings.

So in case you were confused about the reasons for the protests, that’s it in a nutshell. For more:

Muhammed Caricatures by tailen

Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy on Wikipedia