Your doctor will spend one minute with you for every fifteen minutes you’ve waited.

An accounting of how President Bush has been spending his presidency, compiled by CBS News and mentioned in this Washington Post article:

This [Easter Weekend visit] is Bush’s 33rd visit to his ranch since becoming president. He has spent all or part of 233 days on his Texas ranch since taking office, according to a tally by CBS News. Adding his 78 visits to Camp David and his five visits to Kennebunkport, Maine, Bush has spent all or part of 500 days in office at one of his three retreats, or more than 40 percent of his presidency.

While April has provided Bush plenty of quality vacation time, it has become the deadliest month for Americans in Iraq, with 99 fatalities. Only the invasion itself in March 2003 has been deadlier.

Glad you can take time to get these folks off your mind, George.

Wonder why you’re paying so much money for mysterious fees on your phone bill? Here’s a nice breakdown of those charges (for the state of Colorado, in this example).

Also, check out this group who wants all these charges clearly identified. I think they should be labeled as charges that compensate the phone companies for being bloated, bureacratic, greedy monopolies.

The fee list:

Federal Excise Tax 3%

Tax mandated by the federal government imposed on all telecommunication services.

Federal Universal Service Fund 8.7%.

FUSF is assessed on your interstate and international charges not including taxes. This includes a portion of the monthly product fee that is allocated to interstate services for regulatory purposes. [This] is consistent with the FUSF rate of other large long
distance carriers. This surcharge is assessed on any monthly long distance plan fees/ minimums, Interstate and International Usage and the Network Access Charge.

Network Access Surcharge Primary Line – (EUCL) $6.50

Monthly charge assessed on each line within the household. This charge compensates for the Local Telephone Company’s cost of installation and maintenance of the components that link your home to the telephone network.

Network Access Surcharge Secondary Line – (EUCL) $7.00 (when applicable)

Monthly charge assessed on each line within the household. This charge compensates for the Local Telephone Company’s cost of installation and maintenance of the components that link your home to the telephone network.

Carrier Cost Recovery Charge (CCRC)* 1.4%

A monthly surcharge in order to recover costs the Company incurs with regard to Telecommunications Relay Service, national number portability, and federal regulatory fees. The surcharge is assessed on long distance (Dial-1, Card, P800 and SB T800) state-to-state and international charges.

Local 911 $0.00 – $0.70 per line

This fee provides the local governing body with a source of revenue for payment of the total costs of establishing or upgrading, operating and maintaining an emergency telephone system.

State and Local Taxes 2.900%

This is a state sales tax on the consumption of telecommunications services.

State and Local Taxes 0% – 5%

This is a local sales tax on the consumption of telecommunications services.

State and Local Taxes 0% – 0.8%

This is a special sales tax to pay for regional transportation projects, scientific and cultural projects, and sports stadium projects.

Federal, State and Local Surcharges $1.12

This is a surcharge of the City of Denver telecommunications business tax on telephone and telegraph companies.

High Cost Fund (Colorado) 2.300%

The Colorado High Cost Fund is used to ensure the availability of affordable basic telephone service in areas where costs to provide service are high.

Telecommunications Relay Service $0.10

A surcharge to fund the relay center that assists the hearing and speech impaired with communicating to other telephone providers.

Local Number Portability (LNP) $0.43

Covers the cost of providing residential customers with the ability to retain, at the same location, their existing local telephone numbers when switching from one local provider to another.

Headlines like this one really annoy me: “N.C. job growth surges in March,” proclaims the News and Observer. Its not that I am somehow against people finding jobs. Heck, I know quite a few who need one. My beef is that the article drawing conclusions against data which does not necessarily support them.

Herein lies the problem:

More than 32,000 North Carolinians dropped off the unemployment roster in March because they found work or exhausted their jobless benefits, the largest one-month decline in 26 years. (emphasis mine)

That’s a pretty big “or.” You can’t say “people found jobs,” if they have only given up on unemployment benefits. It’s like saying that since there are no elephants in your living room, elephants don’t exist.

I once had the misfortune of filling out unemployment forms and waiting at the employment security commission offices to find work. It was not fun, nor was it particularly productive. Time spent waiting around to be seen could better be spent knocking on doors or submitting resumes. I came to treat it as a joke.

And so do many others, from what I understand. They, too, may have been put off by the bureacracy of the ESC and found a better way. Or given up. No one knows.

That’s the real problem here: nobody knows why these people have dropped off the rolls. Did anyone call them to find out if they actually found work? The way the ESC is so overworked now, I’m sure there are no resources to do this.

I’d be the first to cheer if the ranks of the jobless are shrinking, believe me. But let’s have some data which supports this conclusion before we assume that these folks got jobs.

Don’t forget that the employment security commission’s mission is to drive people away.

The weekend weather is shaping up to be beautiful. Expect light blogging from me, as I plan to be outside as much as possible. Maybe I’ll even get some bike riding in, who knows?

I did a Google search to find out who pilfered the USS Elliot pages I pilfered from the official USS Elliot website (now defunct). That led me to the website of my old shipmate, OS2 David Bullock.

Glad to see Dave is into Linux. He’s also got some great pictures from the December Decommisioning ceremony. (And yes, I already pilfered them to put on my usselliot.org site.)

Dave and I were two of the resident computer geeks onboard the Elliot, tasked with fixing the occasional malfunctioning 80286 computer. Ah, good times.
Continue reading →

Some coworkers brought up my recent posts on the World Trade Center attacks. A few more interesting links include Flight 175: Too Hot To Handle and Operation 911: No Suicide Pilots.

The first link has one of the most detailed dissections of the second plane, including some evidence that the plane that hit the tower was not the United Airlines N612UA plane, a Boeing 767-200, but in fact the larger 767-300. Shown are some fuselage measurements which appear to back that claim up. If this is so, it may be more proof the planes were switched.

On the second page of that link, a very important point it brought up:
Modern planes are complicated creatures that incorporate a whole slew of sophisticated technology. First among them, flight computers that instantly override any accidental brusque manoeuvres; you don’t want your business-class customers slopping their Dom Perignon over their immaculate suits, just because the pilot sneezes at the wrong moment.

The banking manoeuvre we see here, just as flight 175 is about to slam into the South Tower, would have been overridden by the onboard flight computer. So somebody must have previously overridden the flight computers themselves.

In other words, you’ll never see a commercial aircraft make that kind of bank. The “fly by wire” flight computers would forbid it. So how did it happen?

The second link also shows how a remotely-controlled plane could have done the deed. It also has an interesting theory about the origin of the “Operation Northwoods” documents, featured in James Bamford’s book Body of Secrets. The author suggests that the Operation Northwoods documents are counterfeit, which makes sense to me now but did not then. She states that since convicted FBI spy Robert Hanssen was friends with Bamford, and that this was no coincidence in the “discovery” of the Northwoods document.

Thinking back on it, I can see how the Northwoods document is counterfeit. Outside of its outrageous subject, it does contain phrases strange to American speech. What is also strange is the talk of a small plane being replaced by a drone.

The technology of 1961 to create a drone would likely have required a vehicle much bigger than a small plane could hold. Also, unlike today, radar screens used by air traffic controllers were of the analog variety: they showed exactly what was in the air. Modern ATC radar is digitized, meaning blips can be selectively filtered out. This is done routinely for some military flights, I was told by an ATC watch supervisor on a tour of the local control tower a few years back.

So, in 1961, you couldn’t filter out planes from the radar, but now you can. You couldn’t fly drones as easily, now you can.

What if Hanssen (or someone else) tipped off Bamford to the planned WTC attacks through the planting of the Operation Northwoods document?

Follow the links. Make up your own mind.

I got my Sipura yesterday and spent the evening configuring it and my Asterisk server. I was in a high-fiving mood once I heard it ring. Woot!

One cool thing I experimented with was the ability to set the outgoing CallerID to anything I want. In essence, you can fake a call from anywhere. I assume it works for *69, too, meaning those prank calls just became much more fun.

On Metafilter today, I found a company that haqs found an interesting use for this, um “flexible” CallerID stuff. Dial-A-Cheater fakes a call from your suspected home-wrecker, allowing you to see how your significant-other reacts.