When I was younger, backpacking seemed like the obvious way to go about seeing what was worth seeing in the out of doors. Back east, where I grew up, as a generality backpacking was a requirement as well, if you wanted to thin the ranks of the hordes of co-eco-religionists seeking the same Appalachian, Adirondack or White Mountain High. But beyond this sort of practicality, there has long seemed to be a sort of macho charisma that attaches to backpacking, a sense that there is something inherently righteous about disappearing into the bush with naught to sustain you but what you lug in under your own steam.
As I've grown older, though, I've realized that lugging fifty pounds of food and equipment (or more) on my back may sometimes be a necessary evil to reach certain objectives, but it is hardly to be considered an end in itself by any sane person. As a result, car camping has held increasing appeal to me, and my last backpacking excursion is now four years in the past. At the same time, my time spent hiking has increased rather than diminished. Better yet, my enjoyment has increased significantly, as has the variety of what I have seen while trekking about in a state of only lightly encumbered bliss.
Is car camping some sort of modern, comfort driven cop out? Not withstanding the cachet that backpacking still enjoys, I don't think so. After all, the west was hardly opened by pioneers with ultralight backpacks and high tech tents, but by settlers perfectly happy to sit in Conestoga wagons and let the oxen do the walking, and by prospectors with their donkeys and their mules to tote their gear. Similarly, the way to move your stock up into high meadows in the early summer and back in the fall was on horseback (and in some places, still is), with a packhorse for gear. In short, until recently no self-respecting westerner would dream of walking if s/he could ride — so why should we, even if packhorses have now become a less available option?
Although a dozen miles at most separate the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument from the Kaibab National Forest to the south, the two environments are as different as can be imagined (my posts on the Kaibab can be found here , here and here). Several thousand feet lower and far dryer, the Escalante is a void of shattered rock, high mesas, endless canyons, and seemingly infinite aridity, but for the thunderstorms that hover motionless in the afternoons of summer over one part of the landscape or another for hours at a time. More often than not, these showy storms simply tease with thunder, lightning and a quick shower or a spattering of raindrops, but sometimes they unleash a deluge that leads (as yesterday) to flash floods.
This difference in climate makes accessing the Escalante a far different proposition for a visitor than the Kaibab. While the Kaibab Plateau supports an active lumbering and "wildlife management" economy for those that live around it, and therefore has hundreds of miles of well maintained dirt roads, the Escalante has no trees to harvest, and only marginal ranching opportunities through much of its range. Unlike almost all government land in the West (other than National Parks), there are large areas of the Escalante where there is no evidence (think hard what that might be) of any cattle at all.
As a result, no paved roads cross the sixty mile wide Monument, and huge areas of the Escalante have no dirt roads, or miracle of miracles, even jeep or ATV tracks at all. As I sit here typing today, I'm parked on a rock ledge next to one of the few rough dirt roads for many miles around, overlooking a dry canyon to the south, and overlooked in turn by a massive, unvegetated mesa to the north. The "road" I traveled for the last two hours simply follows the dry floor of a narrow wash for most of its length. I can know almost to a certainty that I will see neither another car nor a soul (bovine or human) for as long as I choose to stay somewhere along this road's length — or the next. For that matter, I am likely the only person within 10 to 25 miles in any direction. Only a single old ATV track is visible.
The law and simple justice require that people with disabilities have equal access to public sector information technology
- Louis Gutierrez, CIO, ITD
I now have a copy of the letter that Massachusetts CIO Louis Gutierrez has sent to representatives of the community of people with disabilities, and there are a number of details that I was very pleased to see. My biggest question has now been answered: the Information Technology Division (ITD) has delayed its planned date for full ODF implementation by all Executive Agency users by only six months, to June of 2007. Early adopter implementations of plugin software (including at the Massachusetts Office on Disability) will begin in January of next year.
These dates are still dependent on the activities of a number of third parties, but are presumably based upon best available information at this time. These dependencies include:
…the adoption by the OASIS standard setting organization of ODF Version 1.1 (which will address minor accessibility issues related to the format itself), the timely delivery of completed translators by one or more of the multiple vendors that are currently developing this technology, and the validated accessibility of the translators themselves. In order to meet our implementation timetable, the Commonwealth requires delivery of a translator suitable for use by early adopters by November of this year. At each stage of this implementation, accessibility will be our first priority.
Well, I know that you're not supposed to check your email while on vacation, but among other things, I had learned last week that the Mass ITD would be issuing its mid-year statement on accessibility about now, and wanted to check in to see what it said. What I didn't expect was to find that someone at ZDNet had run a fantasy piece like this, which not only inaccurately reports that the ITD has been mandating open source implementations of ODF, but for some reason decides that I'm to blame for any delay in implementing ODF. I suppose I should be complimented if I can change the course of history with my virtual pen, but for better or worse, that's simply not the case.
Based on my own sources, here is what is right and wrong about what's been reported so far:
Right: Massachusetts CIO Louis Gutierrez met with representatives of the community of the disabled last Friday to brief them on a letter that will be sent to community leaders today. It promises to use plugins in order to save documents in ODF form in order to alleviate accessibility concerns. The ITD has also now signed a long-awaited Memorandum of Understanding with the Massachusetts Office on Disability and the state's Department of Health and Human Service The ITD also signed a commitment with the Massachusetts Office on Disability and the state's Department of Health and Human Service to design, procure, certify and develop training for software that is accessible to people with disabilities, as well as to establish a unit devoted to accessible technology, expanding on its launch in May of an accessibility lab to a similar purpose.
I've learned that it's also true that use of ODF compliant applications will not be mandatory on January 1 by employees of the Executive Agencies.
The following blog entry was submitted to the Arizona Daily Sun by the
National Forest Service with my permission. It ran about ten days later.
Yesterday, I described the impact of the Warm Fire in summary terms. If you read that post, you'll find a description that sounds rather worse than what I saw on the ground when I visited the scene. In order to see what the reality behind the statistics might be, I drove and walked many miles through the burn area, and was surprised at how varied and hopeful the landscape appeared. Areas of total destruction bordered others of modest, or even no impact, and in many areas the scene changed from one state to the other rapidly and repeatedly.
The principal reasons, I expect, are because the terrain is very varied (rolling, and often steep), and because some areas affected had previously been burned. For example, a slope fifty feet high might be utterly destroyed where the wind swept flames and burning embers uphill, and yet green grass and trees would have survived right up to the break of the slope on top. In other situations, groves of aspen bore witness to the fires of not long ago. In contrast, the Yellowstone National Park burn areas seemed vastly and uniformly devastated when I visited them several years after their destruction.
On the Kaibab, the result has been the creation of what is called a "mosaic" landscape: a desirable, natural state that comprises many patches of different types of growth simultaneously existing at various stages of maturity. How that state is achieved once fire offers the opportunity makes for an interesting story, and the tale of the aspen features prominently in that process.
In much of the west, forests exist in three states: burned, recovering from being burned, and waiting to be burned. Until recently, the time between burns in northern Arizona was two to ten years. But as logging became both feasible as well as profitable, fire suppression became an article of faith in the management of national forests. Only in the last few years has that policy been reversed, with the recognition that naturally occurring fires are a necessary and important part of maintaining forest health. The difficult question necessarily arises, however, of how to make the transition safely back to a state of nature.
The Warm Fire on the Kaibab plateau provides an interesting example of how this transition is being addressed in practice.
On June 8 of this year, a lightning strike ignited a fire in the interior of Kaibab National Forest, near Warm Springs Canyon (hence the name, the "Warm Fire"). Consistent with the new policy of the National Forest Service, it was decided to manage rather than extinguish the blaze, and to therefore classify it as a "wildland fire use fire, managed for resource benefits" (this and other details are taken from a National Forest Service report available at the National Forest visitor centers). What this means principally is that conditions were deemed appropriate to allow a naturally occurring fire to clear out the "fuel load" (i.e., dead logs, branches, needles and so on) that had accumulated through the decades during which the preceding fire suppression policy was in force.
If the peaks of tall mountains are "sky islands," then the Kaibab Plateau of northern Arizona is a sky continent. A vast, tilted shelf of ancient seafloor, it stands proud above the surrounding desert, rising 9,200 feet beyond sea level at its highest point. 1,600,000 acres of the Kaibab — the greatest part - are designated as a National Forest of the same name, guarding it from some, but not all of the depredations of civilization (on which more below).
Like a continent, the Kaibab has its own mountains and canyons, cliffs and [dry] coasts, various weather zones, and commensurately varied ecological communities. Its climate ranges from verdant to arid, its ecological zones from towering Ponderosa Pine forests to alpine meadows to desert scrub. Due to its isolation by elevation, it also has unique species — including in one of the rarest categories of categories of unique species - its own mammal. That animal is the charcoal-grey Kaibab squirrel, a prankster that sports not only tall, tasseled ears, but a pure white tail to boot. Its overall appearance leads one to think it would be more at home in a Tolkien wood than in an Arizona forest — and with a speaking part at that.
It's not often that you see standards organizations sue each other, but two - the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) and the International Code Council (ICC) - have been going at it hammer and tongs for the last several years. Both are accredited "standards development organizations," (SDOs) and follow the same business model that almost all such organizations do to underwrite their activities: they sell their completed standards.
In the case of construction codes (the types of standards at issue here) and other long and detailed standard sets, the amounts at issue can be substantial, not only on a per-copy basis, but in volume, since compliance with building, safety, and other such codes is mandatory. Trademarks and copyrights can therefore be as important to non-profit SDOs as they are to any other business that relies on selling a product or service to keep the lights on.
Of course, as is also true for any type of business, litigation is expensive and wasteful of resources that can better be spent on furthering the SDO's mission. That reality appears to have won out in this case, with the two parties settling all three outstanding suits rather than taking any of them to a final decision in court.
Now that the dust has settled, it appears that the NFPA had the better hand over all, based upon a read of the detailed press release issued by the NFPA on August 14, as compared to the much shorter, terse notice released by the ICC two days later. The two releases offer predictably different spins on the settlement, as the following excerpts demonstrate:
As I've often noted before (see, for example, Microsoft, Adobe and the Murky World of "RAND" ), the exact meaning of the simple phrase "reasonable and non-discriminatory" is anything but universally acknowledged. This leaves plenty of room for game playing, and can even lead to litigation — as happened this week when Nokia filed the latest in a series of lawsuits ricocheting between it and Qualcomm. All of those suits relate to mobile handsets built by Nokia that implement a standard issued by ETSI, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute.
Qualcomm alleges that anyone implementing the ETSI standard will infringe Qualcomm's patents, and would therefore require Qualcomm license. Qualcomm is willing to offer such a license (and has already granted licenses to others) on what it says are "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory" (or FRAND, the European variant that means the same thing as RAND), as required by ETSI.
Nokia, however, has thus far refused to pay up, leading Qualcomm to bring three different actions against Nokia (in the US, the UK, and before the U.S. International Trade Commission), seeking injunctions that would prevent Nokia from selling any products based on the ETSI standard unless it rolls over and obtains a license from Qualcomm.
Now, Nokia has counterattacked, announcing last Wednesday that it has sued Qualcomm in the Delaware Court of Chancery (which exclusively hears business cases). Nokia admits in the press release that the suit is intended as a defensive measure, and seems to concede that its products do indeed infringe Qualcomm's patent. But it also asserts that Qualcomm is requiring license terms that are not in fact "FRANDly" (as it were).
As I noted last week, the Federal Trade Commission ruled unanimously that computer memory technology company Rambus, Inc. had violated the antitrust laws by "gaming" the standard setting process. After the Commissioners of the FTC review the pleadings of the FTC's own Complaint Counsel and Rambus's lawyers in the final phase of their deliberations, the Commissioners will decide what penalties Rambus will have to bear for its actions.
But what does the FTC's decision mean in the bigger picture of the technology industry? One clue comes from a complaint that was quietly filed in the US District Court for the District of Delaware on August 1 — the day before the FTC announced its decision. In what could not be better timing, this new complaint alleges a nearly identical course of conduct by French telecommunications giant Alcatel SA in an IEEE standard setting process. Or, as stated in the complaint filed by Santa Clara, California-based Foundry Networks, Inc. (Nasdaq: FDRY), Alcatel "duped" the IEEE into adopting a user authentication standard that would infringe Alcatel's patents pending, setting a classic "submarine patent" trap for the industry after it became "locked in" through adoption of that standard.
So far, the case doesn't seem to have caused so much as a ripple in the press; I only know about it through Alan McGrath, who spotted what is apparently the only article written to date about this action. The article appears at a subscription-based legal site, and summarizes the allegations contained in the complaint.
Alan was kind enough to send me a copy of that complaint, which reads like Son of Rambus, but with a few interesting twists. Here's what it says.