"Mr. Vice President, I have to inform you: Your pants are on fire."

Via Geoff Arnold, Jon Stewart Nails Cheney In An Outright Lie.

Why is it that the "Daily Show" on Comedy Central seems to be the only "news" outlet that calls a spade a spade? Most of the traditional press chooses to continue to give the administration the benefit of doubt and rarely calls them on their mendacity.

"The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaeda," U.S. President George W. Bush told reporters last week, is "because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda."

While chasing this and other recent administration faux pas down on the web, I came across this link on the Harpers Magazine web site that provides a timeline of the administration's ongoing campaign on the truth.

The one that struck me in the context of recent news is the one from Feb 22

Health and Human Services officials admitted that a report on racial and ethnic disparities in health care was altered to make it seem more upbeat. "There was a mistake made," said Secretary Tommy Thompson.

Hold on, do I detect a pattern at play here? Only recently was the State Dept. called on its report on terrorism in which there was a "mistake made" as admitted by Colin Powell. Mere coincidence?

Or, how about the administration officials running around the country taking credit for programs when the president had actually reduced their funding or cut them altogether.

Is it just me or does this have the feel of Orwell's 1984? We are engaged in an ongoing war against a non-existant foe (how the hell can you engage in war against a tactic?!?). Even worse, the administration has and continues to justify the war in Iraq as being the centerpeice in the "war against terrorism" despite the increasinly overwhelming evidence that there were no ties between al Quaeda and Iraq. We have an administration that uses doublethink to name bills that it puts before congress (the Patriot Act, No Child Left Behind, Healthy Forest Initiative, etc.). We have an administration that "rectifies" news as did Winston in his job for the Ministry of Truth by telling us that they never said or did what they in fact said or did, repeatedly in the hope that by simply repeating a lie, that it will become the perceived truth.

I can only hope that a majority of americans will see through this administration's mendacity and vote them out of office.

Frank Rich: The Best Goebbels of All?

Frank Rich has a The New York Times > Arts >brilliant peice in today's NYT.

Argh!

Manageability blogs on The Imminent Rise of REST and Fall of SOAP. Yet, the author is either completely misinformed or intentionally making untrue assertions on the (non-existant) relationship between WS-I and the development of emerging standards relative to Web services.

Let me start with this quote:

"The sheer number of WS-I standards submissions is consuming the organization from within."

Huh? Which "standards submissions"? WS-I is working on 4 profiles: Basic Profile 1.1 (SOAP1.1, WSDL1.1, UDDI2.0 and a few related foundational specs and RFCs), Simple Soap Binding Profile 1.0 (SOAP1.1 and HTTP1.1), Attachments Profile 1.0 (SOAP Messages with Attachments and WSDL1.1 MIME Binding Extension), and the Basic Security Profile 1.0 (OASIS SOAP Message Security 1.0, and SSL/TLS).

It would seem that the author believes (incorrectly) that all of the WS-* specifications are "submitted" to, or being developed by WS-I. This is simply not the case. There is no relationship between WS-I and the development of proposed Web services standards. WS-I's mission is to improve the interoperability of Web services. It achieves this objective by developing profiles, testing tools and sample applications. The profiles provide interoperability guidance for the interoperable use/implementation of specifications/standards used in the context of Web services. The testing tools are used to test a deployed Web service and its artifacts for conformance with one or more profiles. Finally, the sample application implementations demonstrate the interoperability of implementations that conform to the profile guidelines. There is no standards development at WS-I, at least none to date.

The entry goes on to state:

Not only does WS-I have too many standards, what's worse, they have too many standards that have absoulutely no implementation. Implement first and then standardize on what you've learned, not the otherway around. History will record this endeavor as a classic case of a standards body going haywire.

There are so many things wrong with this statement it boggles my mind.

First, let me reiterate that WS-I does not have standards, much less too many. Second, WS-I only concerns itself with interoperability issues. Interoperability issues are by their very nature a function of multiple (two or more) implementations of a specification(s) which completely belies the suggestion that there are no implementations for the specifications for which WS-I is developing profiles.

Third, at least with regards to the set of specifications being developed by IBM, in collaboration with Microsoft and other partners, (IBM, Microsoft and other partners are only coincidentally also members of WS-I beause of our coproprate commitments to Web services) each of the specifications are being implemented and once a specification has been published, the authors conduct on-going interoperability testing of their implementations. The experience gained through both implementation and the interoperability workshops helps the authors refine and improve upon the specification. Hence, at least as far as IBM and its partners is concerned, we are pursuing exactly the course suggested (implement first and standardize what works).

Finally, as for the statement that "a classic case of a standards body going haywire" in reference to WS-I only serves to demonstrate that the author has no clue.

The reason that there are so many WS-* specifications is that there is no single source of these works. As a result, there are a number of competing initiatives covering similar or overlapping functional scope. Some of this is a function of the fact that there is no standard for (and much disagreement about) the standards development process; some believe that the way to develop a standard is by gathering 30-60 people around a conference table and developing by committee while others believe that standards should be based on proven implementation. In other cases, it is merely a function of people having differing technical beliefs or motivations. Finally, there are real and inescapable issues surrounding intellectual property which complicate and sometimes confound the community's ability to work together.

IESG approves 'application/soap xml' media type' as Informational RFC

Via Elliotte, application/soap+xml is now an IETF Informational RFC.

That's all well and good, but you'd think that they would have given some clue as to what RFC# they assigned it (since it isn't listed in the RFC index yet). [insert standard rant on when the IETF is going to join pull their collective heads out of the '80s].

You get what you pay for...

If you get something for free, you really can't complain about the service or lack there-of.

In Memoriam

I will miss Mario Jeckle who died an accidental death this past Friday.

This just in...

This just in from Wired. Dogs can understand human language.

This comes as little surprise to me. You can't speak the word "walk" in our house without the ankle-biter's ears perking up followed by a dash to the front door and incessant pestering if the word is not followed by the deed.

We have also played the same game with the fetching of toys as cited in the article and the response is about the same I would guess. She gets it right about six or seven times out of ten when you ask her to fetch a particular toy from her (overflowing) toy bin.

She also definitely understands the words "pepperoni" and "cheese" and will always do the right thing when asked to "go see [mommy|daddy]" when my wife and I try to pawn off a persistent request to go for a walk on eachother.

So, ask yourself "who is smarter, humans or dogs". How many humans can understand dogese?

Aaron Swartz on Brazil

Brazil is also one of my all-time favorite movies. Aaron points out that we're living it today. How true.