Mokka mit Schlag

Prospect Park, July 24, 2006

This quote from today’s Washington Post explain really clearly why probable cause is necessary for competent, effective law enforcement:

Feeding the interrogation system was a major push by U.S. commanders to round up Iraqis. The key to actionable intelligence was seen by many as conducting huge sweeps to detain and question Iraqis. Sometimes units acted on tips, but sometimes they just detained all able-bodied males of combat age in areas known to be anti-American.
…
Senior U.S. intelligence officers in Iraq later estimated that about 85 percent of the tens of thousands rounded up were of no intelligence value. But as they were delivered to Abu Ghraib prison, they overwhelmed the system and often waited for weeks to be interrogated, during which time they could be recruited by hard-core insurgents, who weren’t isolated from the general prison population.

Bottom line: if you waste your time arresting the innocent, then you don’t find the truly guilty parties. Probable cause isn’t just about protecting the rights of the accused and innocent. It’s also a critical factor in making sure the guilty are caught.

Yesterday the U.S. Federal government arrested a British Internet gambling executive as he changed planes in Texas on his way to Costa Rica. I don’t know how the Dallas airport is laid out, but he may not even have tried to clear customs.

I can’t help but wonder how the U.S. government even knew he’d be on the plane. Might it have something to do with the U.S.’s insistence that any plane landing in the U.S. provide complete details on all passengers to the U.S. government? We were told this was necessary to prevent terrorists from entering U.S. soil. Why am I not surprised to find it instead being used to prosecute victimless crimes and enforce the Bush administration’s questionable morals? Perhaps the EU shouldn’t have been so fast to cave in to U.S. demands that violated their own laws.

Meanwhile, in a practical sense, to all my friends outside the U.S., I have to warn you to stay away. In particular, do not change planes in the United States, even if your eventual destination is elsewhere. This is not an isolated incident. The U.S. government is routinely pulling international travelers off of planes that land here and maltreating them.
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It sometimes amazing to me the products that don’t exist. All I’m looking for is a simple program that will allow me to bidirectionally sync my desktop Mac to my PowerBook over the network while excluding a few large folders. My PowerBook drive is quite a bit smaller than my desktop drive and I don’t want to carry around my entire music library. Near as I can tell there is nothing out there that will do this.
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I must be missing something obvious. Is there a method anywhere in the AWT (preferably in Java 1.4 but maybe 1.5) that allows me to determine the z-order, relative or absolute, of free-standing windows such as frames and dialogs? Specifically I need to know which of several dozen frames is on top among that group. To make this trickier:

1. There may be other frames and dialogs that do not count. For instance, if the preferences dialog is really on top, I still need to know which of my application’s document windows is on top among the document windows.
2. I need to know this even when the application is in the background, so that the top window may not be active.

Surely there’s a function for this somewhere? If not, it’s a pretty glaring hole. Do I really have to write code to watch each and every operation that can move a frame to the front, and track the front window manually?

God damn it. Roger Waters is coming to Madison Square Garden, will play Dark Side of the Moon, I actually noticed far enough in advance to get tickets, and I’m going to be out of town at SD Best Practices those two nights. :-(

Usually I don’t even notice a band I’d like to see is touring until they’ve come and gone, or at least until tickets are sold out. I think the last rock concert I saw was X in San Jose in 2001. Before that maybe Joan Jett at Central Park Summer Stage or Meatloaf at Radio City Music Hall a few years earlier. That concert was weird: a lot of thirty and forty-somethings with their preteens in tow. One of the backup singers was Meatloaf’s ~20 year old daughter. Could it really be 40 years ago that Roger Daltrey first sang “I hope I die before I get old”? Even 90’s icon Liz Phair is now singing about dating men too young to know who she is.

Surely somewhere there’s a service that will let me enter a list of my favorite bands and e-mail me when tickets are about to go on sale? Ideally one that doesn’t spam me with a lot of needless HTML e-mail, advertising, and other junk. Any suggestions?