The Vatican is a Cult

Here's an excerpt from BBC News story about its "Panorama" TV show entitled "What did the Pope know about abuse in the Church?"

... Father Kiesle then requested permission to leave the priesthood. His Bishop wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger's office in 1982, and several times after that, yet it took until 1987 for Kiesle to be laicised - or removed from the priesthood.

The reason for the delay, according to Father Tom Doyle, a church lawyer who campaigns for victims, was a ruling from Pope John Paul II that priests under 40 were not to be allowed to leave the church. Kiesle was 34 when he first applied.

Cell phones in jails & prisons
... a bit of a problem ...

Various approaches have been tried to deal with this, and it looks to me like there are a couple that would actually work. One of which might be a bit cumbersome ... shield the whole place. Wrap the whole place in copper screen (and ground it well). Naahhh. Let's blow that one off. It might be appropriate for a small cafe where you don't want people to sit and blab on their phones. Then the "no cell phones" would be a statement of fact rather than a request or demand.

The other thing would be having a cell site right there, so (by the nature of the cell phone system) any and all phones would be working off that site. Of course that would entail a multitude of equipment, although if the desire is to have no cellphones work at all, that would simplify matters a bit — all phones would connect to a site with no connectivity at all except to the front office. Then if any legitimate calls need to be made, they can be patched through manually to a landline.

Thirty-twelve, good buddy
(ten-four, ten-four, ten-four)

As so often happens the solution to a problem later becomes a problem itself. Witness then the utter chaos in the world of "ten codes". It would not be so if there were a single standard for what they mean. But there isn't, and "10-55" where I live means ambulance (though formally it's supposed to mean "send an ambulance"). Some places it means drunk driver. Some places it means officer down. Put people from all these places together on an incident and you got trouble. Which is why in the Incident Command System, which has lately become a part of a larger National Incident Management System, use of ten codes is strictly forbidden.

Then there's the awful slangy usage. One thing that is pretty well standard is "10-4", and it means "understood". But I hear things like "Is everything 10-4?" and the response "10-4." And the other day "the driver is 10-4" (meaning sober). None of these things mean "understood".

In the thus-far abortive effort to wean law enforcement off ten codes, in the interest of interoperability, pretty much all efforts have come to naught. So here's an idea ... but first a word from our sponsor.

"Hello."

OK, here's the idea. You can't just suddenly give everybody a brain transplant and have them speaking plain English. Start somewhere. I suggest the code with the absolute worst usage, the slangy 10-4. Give them a list of standard phrases, including "affirmative" and "understood", to use instead. Get them used to it that way. And assess a penalty of a quarter or a dollar every time they say "10-4". The money can go into a fund for steaks at the Christmas party.

Of course you'd want to provide the full list of what to say for all circumstances, and hopefully the program would actually go somewhere.

Blackberry Jam
Stockholders 1, Customers 0

Corporations don't have principles, as it again is shown. Privacy is a cornerstone of the global village, and various governments don't like it — well, of course. RIM has it seems yielded to the demands of at least one government to process messages in such a way as to make them "tappable". Oh well ... when I was a spook one of the things they taught me immediately is that all phones are tapped.

"We have met the enemy and he is us" — Walt Kelly

The internet, as a consequence of its design, regards censorship as damage to the net, and routes around it. And while I've been thinking about getting a smartphone, I'm not going to buy a Blackberry.

Wave Goodbye

Sorry to see Google Wave going out to pasture. It was fun. I hope various cool features get migrated into GMail. That's really the way to go.

On the other hand, Wave could stay as a test bed for anything they think of as a possible GMail enhancement.

Sonora part II
After Banamichi
Somewhere along the way we passed a mining town called Arizpe; the highway totally bypassed it. We were on the way to the hot spring by Aconchi, and fortunately we did not get there by way of the town. A few miles before the town I spied a little green "agua caliente" sign, about the size of a street sign, pointing the way; the road went into a village called San Felipe de Jesus. The whole route was dry; another Anglo arrived there by way of the town and said he had to ford streams four times (in his VW bus). It's a Sonora state park with very reasonable camping rates. We stayed several days, most of it weekdays, and the place was nearly deserted until Saturday, when lots and lots of families arrived.

The main focus of activity on the weekend was the swimming pool; there were campsites upstream and we had one of those, a nice quiet place. At one point on Saturday several teenagers strolled by on their way up to a good old fashioned swimming hole farther upstream, with at least one guitar, and paused by our camp to serenade us — just because they felt like it. Later we sauntered up to the swimming hole ourselves, and found it looking just like a swimming hole ought to.

At some point we met a middle-aged lady who had brought her mother to the springs; they had short-term rented a house in San Felipe de Jesus. After we pulled up and left the park we dropped in to visit them. We talked about how taken we were with Banamichi. The lady was a teacher, and she checked the place out and then went and got a job there. This we learned by way of her daughter who had email. Being indirect, we didn't stay in touch long term.

Eventually we rolled out and went to Aconchi and Baviacora and in one of them bought a big bag of peanuts from the local "Peanut King".

The remaining memories of this trip I have just realized belong to a different trip so I'll stop now.

BlackBerry Taboo
If RIM has both smarts and guts they will just say NO.
To do otherwise would be to betray their customers.

Copied from the DHS Daily
August 4, Reuters – (International) Saudi and RIM in last-ditch talks. The makers of the BlackBerry smartphone held last-ditch talks with Saudi Arabia August 4 to avert a threatened cut-off of a key service, while India took a tough line with the Canadian company. Research In Motion (RIM) is facing mounting demands from governments around the world for access to its vaunted encryption system on national security grounds. The spat, which has highlighted the access some states seem to have in comparison to others, threatens to cut off some 2 million BlackBerry users in the Gulf and India. Security officials in India, a giant growth market for mobile communications, warned the service would be halted if the company failed to meet its concerns, a newspaper reported. “We are very clear that any BlackBerry service that cannot be fully intercepted by our agencies must be discontinued,” The Economic Times quoted an unnamed security official as saying. “Offering access to data is part of the telecom licensing guidelines and has to be adhered to.” An Indian government source told Reuters that RIM had proposed to share some details of its BlackBerry services, but security agencies were demanding full access to a messaging service it fears could be misused by militants. RIM has said BlackBerry security is based on a system where customers create their own key and the company neither has a master key nor any “back door” to enable RIM or any third party to gain access to crucial corporate data. Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE67151F20100804

Trip to Sonora
Part I

(Mamacita is talking to Jane even as I start this write.)

We decide to take a little trip to Mexico, to Aconchi hot spring. This was maybe ten years ago. We thought it sounded pretty easy, and the state of Sonora had this "easy entry" program that they had just started — then we find out they had already blown it off by the time we got there. Oh. That's why we didn't see any signs about it when we crossed the border.

We get to the frontier checkpoint and we're way short on papers and stickers and all that. The guy was very nice but for sure turned us back. We went to the closest crossing, Naco. The place name on the other side is Naco. There is some kind of a "Dollar" store real close to the border and there's hardly anything else of note.

The next town up the road is Bisbee, and our friend Jane lives there. We stayed with her while we got our papers together, and this consisted of getting our voter registration forms faxed to us from our county clerk. This got us into Mexico. Nowadays we have passports and all of that. We had a nice visit to Bisbee, probably wouldn't have seen it any other way, and then we moved on.

We cross into Mexico and head west on Route 2 to Cananea, have a nice lunch and then head south on 89. While looking for 89 I missed it and turned around on the shoulder which is probably where I got something in the tire making a slow leak. We cruised down 89 and found a little motel (the motel) in Bacoachi. The next morning the proprietor said my llanta se falta aire, like my tire is low, so we found the local llantero and got it fixed. After that at the local gas station some young boys were pointing at a bumper sticker on our car "fearofwriting.com" and saying "internet! internet!"

The next town we came to (as opposed to passing by the outskirts) was Banamichi, utterly charming, with a grand total of one sign for a business, a little abarrotes (convenience store). There were other businesses, but everybody knew where they were. But we had no idea where to get anything to eat other than cacahuates and twinkies. After we looked around the church, undergoing some renovation or repairs, we walked on in some random direction and ran across a wonderful lady whom we asked where one might get lunch. She started to try to explain how to find it, but since that would be much more complex to a stranger than it was far away, she just led us to a hacienda a block or two away where some women were running a little cafe. After she got us introduced and settled in she kissed us both on the forehead and went on her way. That's just one of the reasons we really liked Banamichi. The thin and expansive tortillas, like tablecloths, and the local favorite hot sauce didn't detract at all.

Express Card
nice gizmo

I finally found a use for the Express Card slot in my MacBook Pro. I now have a serial port. I tried the dongle-type USB to serial converters -- blow that off. They worked fairly well for reading the programs of two-way radio equipment, but writing to the radio was a waste of time. Maybe one out of five tries would actually work. But this new thing has access to some non-wimpy voltages by way of the card slot, and I have tried it on several different models of radio with no problems.

It might be inferred that I am running Windows when I do this sort of thing. Guilty as charged. If the radio manufacturers would desist in their misguided efforts to protect intellectual property -- software, when they are hardware makers and the software is just supposed to support their product -- it would be feasible for someone to write a one-size-fits-all application, maybe even a Mac app, that would allow you (or me) to put in one @#$%&* program and dump it into all of the radios we have in our organization regardless of make and model.