There are numerous sites debating whether it was a left or right attack on a US federal politician this morning. The cowardly attack involved a semi-automatic weapon fired into a crowd standing and talking peacefully outside a grocery store. The main target, Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, was shot in the head from about four feet away. The bullet penetrated her brain; after neurosurgery she now fights for her life. Six so far are reported dead, including a young girl and a US federal judge.

Perhaps the best way we can look upon this event is not in terms of left or right persuasion but rather moderate to extreme. I realize this puts me in NRA support territory, as they often say criminals are the problem not guns. However, I can not help but ponder that the targeted politician is against gun regulation. She also is married to a NASA astronaut. This is not the sort of person that is consistently right or left but rather a moderate who has stood for genuine care towards the welfare of all others. That is why I suggest the attack is a symptom of radicalization and fear — an attack on moderation and reasoned thought.

The right to free speech

Take the Cleveland Leader report, for example. It highlights a disgusting campaign tactic by extremists who opposed her:

Palin endorsed Jesse Kelly, who ran against Giffords, who used the tagline:

“Get on Target for Victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.”

It might sound trivial but I noted a lack of punctuation in the actual ad that is highly disturbing.

Likewise Sarah Palin’s facebook page notoriously promoted the use of gun-sight imagery to indicate federal politicians she labelled “the problem”. Note the three placed near Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’ area in the State of Arizona :

Here is another version from Sarah Palin’s Facebook and PAC page:

When is a joke or satire not a joke? When is a command not a command? Language is imprecise, and motives are almost never known. With that in mind I suggest again, irregardless of the right or left issues, extremists who advocate violent imagery and harm should be condemned for careless use of high-risk language that has been known historically to incite violence.

The right to bear arms

This reminds me of a recent visit to Colorado that brought some worrying sights to me first hand. As I rode a mountain bike up a large mountain past signs that regulated the use of fire-arms, we suddenly heard gunfire and bullets whizzing through the trees nearby. We pulled off the trail and crouched down; two men and two women stood in a gully no more than 50 feet from the trail and fired towards the trees to knock off branches near the trail, in clear violation of Colorado gun use laws.

We very quickly exited the area by fast descent. As we reached the bottom and entrance to the trail a thin young man in camouflage with his young girlfriend came upwards towards us, both holding large semi-automatic or automatic rifles (AR-15). The woman complained “I can’t do it” as she handed her rifle to the man, at which point he held it with the barrel pointed directly up the trail at me to pound in a large (30+) magazine.

At that moment my thoughts were not on politics. I wondered about this young couples’ upbringing — their obvious lack of common sense and awareness and inability to properly gauge risk. Were they so unaware of history they would not realize when they are moving backwards, repeating past mistakes?

My riding partner, who only had recently retired from the armed forces, had nothing kind to say about the use of guns we saw that day. The moment reminded me of Pakistani and Egyptian students I knew at Macalester College who boasted to me of the weekends spent in the hills at the school Vice-President’s cabin firing AK-47s. What was the point, I asked them; why did they shoot automatic weapons as a hobby? They laughed and told me the freedoms in America were nice but insufficient — they missed their home countries, where they could force a marriage or perform executions without fear of the law. I did not laugh with them.

Speech about armed response

We allow extremism as a form of freedom but as a good friend of mine used to say “your right to punch ends at my nose”. What controls are in place to stop a fist when those who called for its use have set it in motion? Who is responsible to regulate among those who oppose regulations?

It is far less expensive and three times more effective than mammography technology that detects breast cancer. The MBI (molecular breast imaging) co-inventor and advocate says she will see no financial gain from its use; yet its low-cost seems to be exactly what stands in the way of it getting recognition, let alone adoption. Dr. Deborah Rhodes explains at TED how political and economic influences affect risk management and innovation in American health care:

Jim Getty, who was an inventor of the X Window System in the 80s, has a bone to pick about performance of his networks. He suspects there is a problem with TCP buffers related to network congestion and round trip time (RTT).

…you don’t see the full glory of TCP RTT confusion caused by buffering if you have a bad connection as it reset TCP’s timers and RTT estimation; packet loss is always considered possible congestion. This is a situation where the “cleaner” the network is, the more trouble you’ll get from bufferbloat. The cleaner the network, the worse it will behave. And I’d done so much work to make my cable as clean as possible&

At this point, I realized what I had stumbled into was serious and possibly widespread; but how widespread?

Very widespread. I hate to spoil the story, but here’s the conclusion:

By inserting such egregiously large buffers into the network, we have destroyed TCP’s congestion avoidance algorithms. TCP is used as a “touchstone” of congestion avoiding protocols: in general, there is very strong pushback against any protocol which is less conservative than TCP. This is really serious, as future blog entries will amplify.

What this means is that increasing the size of your network connection is not going to give you a performance boost. The Internet used to feel faster because, well, it was faster. The shift in traffic towards massive file sizes and streams of data appears to be incompatible with the network’s ability to regulate flow. Did you know that NetFlix alone is said to be “20 percent of all Internet traffic during the typical American evening”?

What this also means is that traffic shaping could be improved by using techniques already available, but product vendors and service providers first have to admit there is a problem with their progress model. Let’s hope that the providers do not try to use this as an excuse to take even more control of the network (e.g. anti-neutrality).

The home router situation is probably much grimmer, from what I’ve experienced. We have a very large amount of deployed home network kit (hundreds of millions of boxes) much of which is no longer maintained, even for security updates (which is why the home router problem is so painful, and dangerous in my opinion). It seems that within 6 months to a year, the engineers working on that firmware have moved on to new products (and/or new companies), and that kit with serious problems (like that which has inhibited deployment of ECN) never, ever gets fixed.

You can easily audit/measure your buffers and join the debate using tools like the ICSI Netalyzr from Berkeley.

The Car Talk guys explain why not to buy “organic pads” for brakes that squeal:

…in brake-speak, organic means “made of asbestos.” It’s the old style brake pads that worked perfectly well to stop your car, but have fallen out of favor because they were also causing lung cancer in factory workers and auto mechanics.

[W]e use ceramic pads, which are made of broken teacups or something. And the reason we’ve been using more ceramic pads lately is that (1) they’ve come way down in price and (2) they produce a lot less brake dust. Some customers with fancy alloy wheels objected to having metallic black brake dust pitting their $1,000 wheels.

They also point out that buying pads from a car manufacturer should have the benefit of special hardware to position the pads properly, which is what is actually needed to stop brake squeal.