Posted 9:13 PM by Gerald Klaas
Getting ready for the 3-day weekend. Will be driving my beamer up the Northern California coast. It should be a nice break from the warmer Sacramento weather. Enjoy your independence day, and I'll catch up with y'all on Monday. Don't forget to thank a vet.

Posted 10:48 PM by Gerald Klaas
...and will end the day with a note to Doug. I agree with you, Doug, that Gene should have a digital camera for posting pictures to his blog. I like the camera you picked. If you want to arrange the purchase and delivery to Gene, I'll send you the cash by PayPal for the camera and shipping.

On another subject, since you brought up Filetopia and copyrights, I guess it's time I let you know what I do for a living. I'm an information systems security professional. In my professional opinion, Filetopia will be unable to mask a user's identity (IP address) from the government. Ever heard of Carnivore? How about Echelon? It's safe to assume that all network traffic is traceable back to its origin regardless of hops and bounces. You are still correct, however, that "the hackers" will always be a step ahead of enforcement. If it comes down to it, people will exchange copyrighted materials using personal encryption software directly through e-mail. There is absolutely no way to prevent that, and it's certainly not worth decrypting messages just to find out if you're distributing copyrighted material. And now that I've told you that you can ALWAYS beat the enforcement, I'll again ask you to reconsider your position on paying artists for their work. Respect for the Constitution demands respect for the exclusive rights afforded to creators as set out in the Constitution. 'Nuff said.

Posted 10:08 PM by Gerald Klaas
Today is the first day of the new State fiscal year. Since the California legislature has missed its Constitutionally imposed deadline for submitting a budget, all non-exempt state employees are earning minimum wage and all exempt (managerial) employees are earning nothing. As you might imagine, this displeases state employees. One incredulous item is that the State Controller says it'll take until September or October to set the payroll system to the minimum wage. Isn't that amazing? That perfectly aligns with the historical adoption date of late budgets. I'll bet it'd take 3 minutes to switch from minimum wage back to the full salaries, but it'll take 3 months to set all salaries equal to $5.75? What kind of database programmers do they have? Oh yeah, they're State employees, vested interest and all.

On the governor recall issue, the democrats have circled up the wagons so no one will agree to be on the ballot against whatever republicans decide to run. Enter Peter Camejo the last Green Party candidate. Non-Californians may not realize just how popular this candidate was during the last election. He only garnered 5% of the vote, but in my estimation, he was the more popular candidate than either Davis or Simon, it was just that people wouldn't vote for a third party......he had no chance of winning. So if all the democrats bow out and we're left with a Green versus a Republican, California just may get it's first third party governor.

Posted 7:09 PM by Gerald Klaas
As a California native, I'm somewhat accustomed to the peculiarities of California politics. However, the current effort to recall our governor leaves me scratching my head. I'm certainly no fan of Gray Davis, and I'll probably vote to recall when the election comes up, but only because I think it's the lesser of two evil scenarios put into play. I would not sign the petition to initiate the recall, as I think it's a bad precedent, and I think the final outcome will be damaging to the republicans. First, the recall could fail, in which case our egotistical, ineffective governor will be even more politically vindictive and egotistical as he tries to raise the phoenix of his political career from the ashes during his last years in office. The second possibility, I believe, is that the recall succeeds and we wind up with a republican trying to pick up the pieces of the $38 billion budget mess Davis caused, two years from now Californians won't remember that it was Davis who put us into this mess, we'll see the budget cuts and tax increases put in by the republican governor cleaning up Davis' mess, and blame the republicans.