Day: May 22, 2002

Indian Agency Campaigns Against Child Marriages

The BBC reported this month that India’s National Commission for Women is trying to highlight he issue of child marriages in that country.

Thousands of children, including some infants, are married on Akha Teej, which is considered one of the most auspicious days in some Hindu communities. Despite official laws making it illegal for boys under 21 and girls under 18 from being married, child marriage is still widespread in some parts of India, especially in the rural areas of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal.

In 1998 The New York Times reported on a survey that interviewed 5,000 married women in Rajasthan and found 56 percent had married before the age of 15.

According to legend, the practice of child marriage began to protect girls against rape from Muslim invaders. The Muslim invaders would take any unmarried women, so Hindus responded by marrying their children at very early ages.

Today, the practice continues in part out of fear that girls not married by the time they reach puberty will fall prey to sexual licentiousness and in part as a means of creating an elaborate social network among people who are extremely poor and where the right arranged marriage can mean the difference between survival and starvation if there is unexpected flooding or drought.

Source:

Child Marriages, Though Illegal, Persist in India. John F. Burns, The New York Times, May 11, 1998.

Move to stop Indian child marriages. Jyotsna Singh, The BBC, May 14, 2002.

Why Do I Pay Taxes Again?

One last thought — I keep seeing these quotes from various government officials that future terrorist attacks are inevitable, etc. to which I have to wonder exactly why I am paying taxes.

Being a libertarian I don’t expect the government to do a whole heck of a lot, but I don’t think it is too unreasonable to expect the government to seek out and destroy terrorist who might threaten this country. Another Sept. 11 attack is not inevitable and if it should happen it represents an abject failure of leadership at the highest levels of government.

The plan should be simple. Cut the red tape, share information across agencies, find the terrorists, and kill them. Instead what we have — from the president who promised to dispense with politic-as-usual no less — is the same old interagency squabbles and nonsense.

Tackle Osama bin Laden? Hell, Tom Ridge is afraid to go to the Hill and testify in front of Democrats. If Ridge can’t stand the heat from Ted Kennedy, am I really supposed to believe he’s the man to take on Al Qaeda?

Same thing goes for the squabble over the Crusader artillery system. Hello, almost 3,000 Americans were killed in a terrorist attack a few months ago and the best thing these folks have to do with their time is to debate the fate of a long ago obsolete artillery system for the Army?

Rebuilding the WTC: The Liberty Square Plan

As I said on Sept. 12, the best revenge for the 9/11 attacks (aside from eliminating the Taliban and killing Osama bin Laden) would be to rebuild the World Trade Center. The best proposal I’ve seen so far for doing this is the Liberty Square Plan which would have as its cornerstone the tallest building in the world and a very elegant memorial in a building plan that is straight out of some Ayn Rand architectural porn fantasy.

The skyline just reeks of one big “F— You” to nutbag Muslim terrorists. I say build it just to show off that timeless American decadence that bin Laden and others seem to detest so much about America.

Joel on Real Names

While looking for something else, I happened across Joel Splosky’s commentary on the Real Names imbroglio. Quick scorecard: Microsoft recently dumped Real Names most unceremoniously and Real Names Chairman Keith Teare has been whining and moaning in public about the decision ever since.

Splosky writes,

RealNames is going out of business. They deserve it. It was just a dumb scam to try and establish yet another Verisign-like monopoly on everybody else’s trademarks. And it was a “boil the ocean” business plan, one which required everybody on earth to go along with their stupid scheme. And Keith Teare’s public crybabying is really quite unprofessional, albeit fun to read.

My take is similar though less elegant. The idea behind Real Names sucked, get over it already Mr. Teare. Does anybody believe Real Names would have lasted a day past the bursting of the Internet bubble if it had not had the dumb luck to sign a contract with Microsoft?

Teare thinks Microsoft killed Real Names, but the idea was faulty to begin with and then rendered completely irrelevant by Google.

And then Teare has the gall to cry on his website that the big bad monopoly treated him bad when his entire business model was predicated on that big bad monopoly dominating the browser market.

Support Your Neighborhood Developer

Dave Winer has been writing a lot this week about the importance of developer communities and of supporting developers. On the other hand, he has completely ignored the release of Conversant, which is an application that runs on top of Frontier/Radio.

Maybe I missed all of the other Frontier/Radio developers who released a content management/groupware package developed with Frontier, but it seems odd that Winer would not want to highlight just the sort of thing that can be done with Frontier/Radio.

Unless, of course, Winer no longer considers Frontier/Radio to be a developer platform. I suspect this is close to the truth.

Winer complains about how Apple ignored developers when it came to things like scripting in order to go with Apple’s own internal products. Similarly, it does not take a genius to note a problem when Manila costs $899 while Radio+Conversant can be had for $540. No, Manila and Conversant do not occupy the same space — Manila is more geared to people who want basic weblog/discussion group functionality, whereas Conversant is geared toward people and groups who want that, plus a whole host of other features such as the e-mail interface, metadata, the ability to mimic a traditional non-dynamic site, advanced templating options, etc.

Regardless of the reason, Winer’s silence is a bit puzzling from someone who relentlessly champions small developers. Microsoft buys a couple companies with “great developer communities” and that’s news, but someone releases an amazing piece of software built on top of Winer’s platform and it’s a non-event. What’s that about.