Month: December 2004

Ready to try voice recognition software again?

From David Pogue’s weekly Email:

Last March, in this column, I described my fondness for Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the dictation software for Windows that lets me “write” at 120 words per minute. You wear a headset microphone, you speak normally (except that you speak the punctuation), and NatSpeak pumps the words into whatever program is frontmost.

Last week, the company (ScanSoft) unveiled its new version 8. The shocking twist: the best feature is improved accuracy. That’s it. Not bells, not whistles, just doing what it’s supposed to do, only 25 percent better. (The company calls it 99 percent accurate, but that’s hard for me to measure; I’ll generally dictate an entire column without a single mis-transcription. For that document, it’s 100 percent.)

When you get right down to it,
none of it is “reality” TV

David Pogue notes that 60 Minutes can’t even get it right when it comes to child prodigies:

I was a little disappointed with the voice-over line, “Talented composers might write five or six symphonies in a lifetime. [12-year-old Juilliard student] Jay’s written five at the age of twelve.” As a quick Google check could have ascertained, Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, Mozart wrote 41, Haydn wrote 104, Dittersdorf wrote 120, and so on.

Why is that?

It’s funny about Social Security, isn’t it? The only non-means-tested, universally-implemented social-welfare program in the country, and it’s paid for by the most regressive tax on the books– remember, not a single penny over the $87,900 income level is taxed– and conservatives still hate it.

Michael Bérubé

Social Insecurity

Kevin Drum sums up Social Security as well as anything I’ve seen. You should read this. Whether you agree with its underlying point of view or not, the facts are correct.

Social Security is funded by payroll taxes. In 1983, Alan Greenspan headed up a commission that recommended saving Social Security from imminent doom by raising those payroll taxes to cover expected increases in Social Security payouts. But there was a twist: Greenspan recommended raising payroll taxes above what was required to actually pay current benefits to retirees, with the resulting surplus used to buy treasury bonds that would be piled up each year in Social Security’s trust fund. And since these bonds were sold to the trust fund by the federal government, this means that the federal government got a big chunk of extra money every year for use in the general fund.

Under this scheme, payroll taxes were sufficient to cover payouts plus bond purchases until about 2018. Then, from 2018 to 2042, when payroll taxes would no longer be enough to cover payouts, the difference would be made up by cashing in the bonds in the trust fund. In other words, the feds would tap into the general fund to give back all the money that Social Security had handed over between 1983 and 2018. This money would come from the same place all general fund money comes from: income taxes.

Still with me? Here’s what this means:

  • Between 1983-2018, this plan calls for payroll taxes to be higher than they need to be to cover payouts to retirees. However, because the surplus payroll taxes are handed over to the feds, it means income taxes are lower than they would otherwise be.
  • Then, between 2018-2042, payroll taxes will be less than they need to be to pay benefits to retirees. However, the difference will be made up by higher income taxes, which will be used to pay off the trust fund bonds.

Payroll taxes are paid mostly by the middle class and the poor. Income taxes are paid mostly by the well off.

So: for 35 years the middle class and the poor pay excess payroll taxes and the well off get a break on their income taxes. However, for the following 24 years the middle class and the poor get a break on their payroll taxes and the well off finance it by paying higher income taxes.

Now, this may sound like a dumb idea to you, but that was the deal. The bottom 80% take it on the chin for a few decades, followed by a couple of decades in which the well off get socked.

But suppose — as conservatives are laying the groundwork for — that Bush decides the trust fund is a mirage, just a giant IOU from one part of the government to the other. And as part of his “reform” plan he proposes a complex scheme that, when stripped to its essentials, entails doing away with the flim flam of that illusionary trust fund and the higher income taxes it will require when 2018 finally rolls around. What would that mean?

It would mean that the middle class and the poor got suckered into overpaying their taxes for three decades, and then when the bill came due the well off ducked out of their end of the bargain.

SP2

From Ed Bott, news, reviews, tips & tricks about Windows, Office & other stuff…

The folks at Techweb claim that without SP2 or a third-party firewall, your computer will fall to hacker bots in just four minutes …

I’ll say it again: Tens of millions of computers are running SP2 successfully. If you try to install it and you have problems, that means you have an issue with your hardware or your software. In either case, it should be relatively easy to find and fix. That won’t be the case if your machine is compromised by a worm, a virus, or a virulent piece of spyware.

NewMexiKen spent umpteen hours this past weekend with a laptop infected with serious spyware. It was no fun I assure you. Get SP2, use Firefox, or get a Mac.

[Update: It wasn’t my computer that was infected!]

Announcements

1. NewMexiKen learned a few things during my self-imposed hiatus. One of those is that I want to keep doing this. Another is that Johnny Carson had the right idea — if you’re in it for the long haul, take lots of time off.

2. NewMexiKen, like Emerson, believes that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” I reserve the right to change my mind.

3. It’s time to upgrade the underlying blog software from MovableType to WordPress. Most of you won’t care, but while I fool around with the migration there may be some odd looks to the page(s) and possibly a few disruptions. Please bear with me.

4. Thanks primarily to Ken Jennings and Google (and to a lesser extent the other search engines), yesterday was by far the busiest day ever here — 1,494 visits. The previous best was 1,191.

Strong words

I’m sure everybody ever associated with Notre Dame will tell you color had nothing to do with letting Willingham go, that it’s totally a coincidence, which is like spitting in somebody’s face and telling him it’s a rain drop.

Michael Wilbon, in a column worth reading in full

The essential software

EggOn!, the egg timer add-on for Firefox.

Of course, there are issues with this (as with all) software:

  • Due to the ideological bias of some team members the soft egg setting is too hard
  • Timer does not currently calibrate to higher elevations [a major defect for NewMexiKen]

Link via Discourse.net

Word of the year

Based on your online lookups, the #1 Word of the Year for 2004 was:

Blog noun [short for Weblog] (1999): a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer.

Merriam-Webster Online

The other nine:

2. incumbent
3. electoral
4. insurgent
5. hurricane
6. cicada
7. peloton
8. partisan
9. sovereignty
10. defenestration

Finally, green means go

The always delightful Dan Neil of the Los Angeles Times reviews the new Honda Accord Hybrid. He begins:

Forget Ferrari and Lamborghini. For those of certain sympathies and convictions, the Honda Accord Hybrid may be the sexiest thing on four wheels.

Are you one of them? Take this simple test to find out:

Do you think Ralph Nader a villain or a secular saint? If the latter, give yourself one point (if you think Ralph is sexy, give yourself two points).

Do you believe global warming is pseudo-science trumped up by alarmist researchers enriching themselves on research grants, or do you believe it poses an imminent threat to life on Earth? If the latter, give yourself three points. Sports talk radio or NPR? If the latter, four points. Hummer hater? Five points. Do you know your Starbucks barista by name? Six points.

Do you believe the secret Cheney energy task force was not unduly influenced by oil and coal lobbyists? Deduct 10 points and check your watch. It might be time for your meds.

In some ways, the Accord Hybrid, which is available starting Friday, is extraordinary in its ordinariness.

Pogue’s Posts and Netflix

David Pogue of The New York Times has started a blog:

I’m the weekly Circuits columnist who reviews all things techie — computer stuff, personal electronics, cellphones, home theater gear, digital music and video — and I’ll be here each day with my musings on the state of consumer technology.

NewMexiKen is a fan of Pogue’s and has found the blog interesting in just its first few days. Here’s a taste:

As longtime readers know, I’m a big fan of Netflix. It’s mail-order DVD rental service, so brilliant in execution that it ought to win some kind of Genius Business Plan Award. You pay a flat monthly fee of $12 or $18 a month (the price recently dropped, if you can believe that). In exchange, you get to pick out two or three DVD’s from Netflix’s library of 25,000 titles. They arrive by mail; you watch ’em and send ’em back in a prepaid mailer. You can churn through a dozen or more movies a month, or you can keep the same three lying on your TV for six months. Either way, all you pay is that fixed monthly fee, with no return deadlines or late fees.

As a Netflix member, I’d had nothing but good experiences with Netflix. But the other day, I ran into a customer-service issue that demonstrates just how deeply the company’s cleverness runs in its DNA.

Basically, I lost a Netflix DVD on a trip. I grumpily logged onto Netflix.com, not looking forward to trying to find its lost DVD policy and discovering what kind of penalty they were going to whack me with.

It took me about two clicks to find the answer. It told me to choose the lost DVD’s name (you don’t even have to type it in; the Web site knows perfectly well which titles you still have checked out). They charged me $20. That was it.

Well, not quite it. If you ever find the disc, you send it back in to them, and they give your $20 back.

Isn’t that just an awesome, humane, sensible policy? May that particular Netflix gene make its way into other companies’ DNA.

Amen

Christian Engeldrum of Ladder Company 61 in Co-op City in the Bronx, was killed while serving with the New York National Guard on Monday when a roadside bomb exploded near his convoy outside Baghdad. He lived through the attacks of 9/11 that took the lives of many of his friends and comrades, which took place even though his government was repeatedly warned to be on the alert for just such an attack but took no measures whatever for the protection of the nation. (He even helped raise the first flag over Ground Zero after the attack.) He lived through the still-unknown health effects on his respiratory system, after breathing the air at Ground Zero when his government lied to him about its safety. What he didn’t live through, however, was a war, which his government lied to try to tie to the attacks, in order to win the support of people like Christian, who had every right to be furious at America’s assailants, but whose duty and courage was exploited to attack people who had nothing whatever to do with it. Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda couldn’t kill Christian Engledrum, but his own government’s dishonesty and incompetence could. His two sons have lost a father, his wife, a husband, his parents a son, and for what? Yes Saddam Hussein is in prison, but is anyone really better off for the unending chaos and catastrophe this bunch has unleashed in Iraq? Most Iraqis certainly don’t think they are and the rest of the world hates us more than ever. Isn’t it about time we had an anti-war movement in this country to honor the deaths of exploited heroes like Christian Engeldrum and do our damnedest to minimize the number of brave mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters, husbands and wives, must follow in his footsteps?

Eric Alterman

Ms. Rosa Parks

Forty-nine years ago, as told by the Library of Congress:

On the evening of December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, an African American, was arrested for disobeying an Alabama law requiring black passengers to relinquish seats to white passengers when the bus was full. Blacks were also required to sit at the back of the bus. Her arrest sparked a 381-day boycott of the Montgomery bus system and led to a 1956 Supreme Court decision banning segregation on public transportation.

Although her arrest was not “planned,” Park’s action was consistent with the NAACP’s desire to challenge segregated public transport in the courts. A one-day bus boycott coinciding with Parks’s December 5 court date resulted in an overwhelming African American boycott of the bus system. Since black people constituted seventy percent of the transit system’s riders, most busses carried few passengers that day.

Success demanded sustained action. Religious and political leaders met at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (later the Southern Christian Leadership Conference) and Dexter’s new pastor, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was appointed the group’s leader. For the next year, the Montgomery Improvement Association coordinated the bus boycott and the eloquent young preacher inspired those who refused to ride:

If we are wrong–the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong–God almighty is wrong! If we are wrong–Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer and never came down to earth. If we are wrong–justice is a lie. And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Montgomery, Alabama, 1955.

NewMexiKen

In November there were 21,256 visits to NewMexiKen from 12,906 different IP addresses in 85 countries, Guam and the European Union.

And I took ten days off.