I experienced some catharsis last night reading Kevin Curry’s (is he a real person?) comments on the Vancouver startup scene over at TechVibes. You should really follow the link and participate in the discussion @ TechVibes, but I have pasted my thoughts and response below as well, for posterity:

I, too, had the opportunity to both work and raise capital in Silicon Valley. While I think every city has its fair share of bad, mediocre ideas (the Valley has lots too — see MC Hammer’s latest enterprise) I believe that the far more common theme here is ideas that are derivative, in which the best hope for success is a bunt, not a home-run.

Startups are supposed to swing for the fences, but there are too many startups here who fail to understand market limitations and try to boil the ocean. I spoke to a pair of entrepreneurs who honestly believed that they could replicate craigslist, zagat’s, epicurious, citysearch, and about half-a-dozen other best-in-class sites with a few hundred thousand dollars and no technical skills between them. I was embarassed for them.

The opposite problem is also true here: people looking at a technology sector and deciding they want to be in that space, without a clear idea of what the product will look like. That too is the wrong approach.

The best services and products solve problems. I’m not suggesting that RosterBot is the end-all be-all of web services, but it’s as successful as it is because it addresses a need, and I as an entrepreneur and athlete happened to experience that need so I was well-qualified to figure out how to solve it. It solves an obvious problem with some effectiveness, and it was built within the parameters, opportunities, and limitations that govern it.

Is it the next Google? Obviously not… but it was built entirely without outside funding and without defocusing me from other career obligations and objectives — and it’s beating other “Social gaming” sites because it is laser-focused on addressing the real needs that teams have.

I too have experienced major frustration with investors in Vancouver. I have always been comfortable saying “I don’t know” when, in fact, I don’t know something. This always played well south-of-the-border, when used in good measure, but here investors are looking for any sign of weakness to exploit in an entrepreneur and immediately go for the jugular.

There is a lack of respect between entrepreneurs and investors in this city. For the most part, I think that disgust is earned by both parties. To fix it, you’ve got to start from the top.

Vancouver has no successful mid-size (in U.S. terms) venture-backed technology startups. You can’t expect someone to go from junior individual contributor at a tiny aenemic startup to CEO of another aenemic startup in one step. With respect to many of the smart engineers I’ve met who are running small companies here, this is too often the case — and because they’ve never managed others or driven strategy and marketing, the results are predictable.

The lack of an informal apprenticeship system for information technology, such as exists within the medium to large technology companies in Silicon Valley, means there is little opportunity for workers to gracefully climb the ladder from junior engineer or marketer to senior management or company founder. Lots of folks have skipped this, and with some success — but I would submit that this is more due to happy accident and raw talent than anything else. So the catch-22 is that we need successful startups — who can stand on their own two feet, and not flip to the lowest bidder — in order to create more successful startups.

In the meantime, consider the following: we don’t need capital sources that are Canadian in order to nurture executives and companies on the Vancouver technology scene… and in fact doing so is putting the cart before the horse.

The Film and Video Game industries in this city are examples of technology-centric businesses that have developed and flourished within Vancouver, creating tens of thousands of jobs each, with capital from outside the city.

What we need to do is nurture programs that make it advantageous to invest, and remove the red tape from investing, in Canadian (and BC) venture startups for foreign VCs, and work to lure them to our city and province. This will attract capital from south-of-the-border, where investors are more seasoned and better-connected — and can bring more capital and greater exit opportunities to bear. These more seasoned investors will also act as a natural weeding mechanism to separate the wheat from the chaff in the local community, and they’ll force local investors to be more competitive and to bring more value to the table if they wish to participate in the upside opportunities. Honestly I think local VCs would appreciate and welcome the help and wisdom of their bigger cousins.

Solve the capital problem, and the other problems will fall into line over time. You’ll get mature, free-standing, profitable technology companies with seasoned entrepreneurs and middle management running them. We will all benefit.

Teleportation goes the distance February 12/19, 2003 By Eric Smalley, Technology Research News

You can’t get from one place to another without passing through every point in between. This is true for all matter and energy, whether planets, people or quantum particles.

You can, however, do the quantum equivalent of faxing particles from one place to another, if the particles in question are photons. Teleportation makes it possible to transmit the quantum states, or structural information, of photons from one place to another.

And making photons from one location materialize at another without traveling the distance between opens the way for sending perfectly secure messages long distances.

Researchers at the University of Geneva in Switzerland and the University of Aarhus in Denmark have teleported photons from one laboratory to another lab 55 meters away, and their setup simulated a distance of two kilometers. Previous teleportation experiments have been limited to short distances within laboratories.

Quantum states, which dictate the ultimate structure of objects, can be teleported, said Nicholas Gisin, a professor of physics at the University of Geneva. The key to teleportation is that only this information is transported. “Objects can be transferred from one place to another without ever existing anywhere in between. But only the structure is teleported. The original object is destroyed and reconstructed,” he said.

Teleportation relies on entanglement, a weird aspect of quantum physics. Entanglement links one or more physical properties of two or more particles, for example the polarizations, or orientations, of a pair of photons.

Particles become entangled when they are in superposition, which is a mixture of all possible quantum states. Superposition occurs when particles are isolated from their environments. A photon can be polarized in one of two opposite directions, for example, but in superposition it is polarized in some mix of both.

When a pair of particles in superposition come into contact with each other, they can become entangled. When one of the particles comes into contact with the environment and is knocked out of superposition, it is in one definite quantum state. At the same instant, regardless of the distance between them, the other particle is also knocked out of superposition and assumes the same quantum state.

Previous teleportation experiments have used photons whose polarizations are entangled. The Geneva researchers’ method relied on time bins, or short time windows, said Gisin. The researchers generated photons using ultra-short laser pulses, counted time in these small increments, or bins, and timed the pulses to occur in specific bins.

Photons in superposition reside in two time bins at once, Gisin said. And photons in superposition can be entangled. The key to the researchers’ teleportation experiment was entangling these photons based on time bins, because this allows them to survive transmission over fiber-optic lines better than polarization-entangled photons, he said. A pair of entangled particles can serve as transmitter and receiver to teleport a third particle.

The researchers entangled a pair of infrared photons and sent one to the second lab, then teleported a third photon by bringing it into contact with the entangled photon in the first lab. The third photon was destroyed and the entangled photon in the second lab became a replica of the third photon.

The researchers used photons of the same wavelengths used in ordinary optical communications, and they transmitted the entangled photon over a two-kilometer fiber-optic cable, proving that it is possible to teleport particles over distances.

Researchers are aiming to use teleportation to build quantum relays in order to extend the reach of quantum communications systems. Ordinary optical communications lines use repeaters to boost fading signals, but repeaters make copies of the fading photons and quantum states can’t be copied without being destroyed.

Quantum relays would be a big boost for quantum cryptography, which is by far the most advanced quantum communications application, said Gisin.

Quantum cryptography allows a sender and receiver to tell for sure whether the encryption key they are using has been compromised by an eavesdropper. An encryption key is a string of numbers used to lock and unlock messages.

Last year, the Geneva researchers demonstrated a quantum cryptography system that transported a secure key over ordinary phone lines spanning 67 kilometers between Geneva and Lausanne. However, the quantum states of photons can’t survive longer distances, making quantum relays necessary for long distance quantum cryptography.

The Geneva researchers are working on finding the limits for the distances between relays and determining the trade-offs between distance and performance for practical applications, said Gisin. They are also working on improving the stability of their experimental setup, he said.

Practical applications could be ready in five to ten years, said Gisin.

Gisin’s research colleagues were Ivan Marcikic, Hugues de Reidmatten and Hugo Zbinden of the University of Geneva, and Wolfgang Tittel of the University of Geneva and the University of Aarhus in Denmark. They published the research in the January 30, 2003 issue of the journal Nature. The research was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the European Community.

Timeline: 5-10 years Funding: Government TRN Categories: Quantum Computing and Communications Story Type: News Related Elements: Technical paper, “Long-Distance Teleportation of Qubits at Telecommunication Wavelengths,” Nature, January 30, 2003.

If the decline in the conventional capability of the Russian Military forces them to rely more heavily on their nuclear capability, how does that affect how an adversary would size them up in a political or military dispute?

How does this impact the Americans? Does the fact that they have such a strong conventional force and the ability to wage war without using nasty weapons make them a lot less scary? Does the fact that US Voters (even if you scared them a LOT) might revolt against their government if they used weapons of mass destruction make them totally useless?

-Ian.

—— http://tms.physics.lsa.umich.edu/214/other/news/071099russia- military.html

July 10, 1999

Maneuvers Show Russian Reliance on Nuclear Arms; Atomic Attack Simulated By MICHAEL R. GORDON

MOSCOW — Reflecting its growing dependence on nuclear weapons for defense, Russia’s military carried out mock nuclear strikes in a major exercise last month, the Defense Minister said Friday.

The exercise was the largest since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It involved 50,000 troops, bombers, tanks and warships from the Barents Sea to the Black Sea.

One of the scenarios for the exercise underscored the expanding role nuclear weapons have been playing in the Russian military’s strategy and plans in recent years.

According to the script for the military exercise, disclosed Friday at a news conference by Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev, Russia came under attack by an unspecified Western foe, which used non-nuclear forces.

At first, Russia also tried to limit its attacks to conventional forces. But its cash-starved non-nuclear forces failed to stop the enemy onslaught, forcing the leadership to turn to its still formidable nuclear arsenal.

“The exercise tested one of the provisions of Russia’s military doctrine concerning a possible use of nuclear weapons when all other measures are exhausted,” Marshal Sergeyev said. “We did pursue such an option. All measures were exhausted. Our defenses proved to be ineffective. An enemy continued to push into Russia. And that’s when the decision to use nuclear weapons was made.”

During Soviet times, Moscow and Washington piled up huge nuclear arsenals as they sought to best each other in the arms race.

Still, Russia’s conventional forces were enormous. In those years it was NATO, fearing that it was outnumbered, that openly threatened to initiate the use of nuclear weapons in response to a non-nuclear attack.

Now that the Soviet Union has collapsed, however, the tables have turned. The West has become less dependent on nuclear weapons. As the conflict with Yugoslavia showed, NATO fights its wars with with laser-guided and satellite-guided non-nuclear bombs and missiles.

But with Russia’s military spending projected this year at about $4 billion (compared with about $260 billion for the Pentagon), the once-mighty conventional forces have deteriorated.

Russia’s forces failed to defeat Chechnya’s rebels, and Russian generals are no longer confident that they can prevail over more serious threats. And with a faltering economy, nuclear forces are virtually the only way Russia can lay claim to being a world power.

“Russia’s military believes that it must rely more than ever on the first use of nuclear weapons,” said Bruce Blair, a specialist on Russian nuclear capabilities at the Brookings Institution. “It is part psychological and partly a planning assumption.”

The first sign of Russia’s increasing dependence on nuclear weapons came in 1993 when the Defense Ministry abandoned the Soviet-era pledge not to be the first to use nuclear weapons.

Then, as NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia reinforced the sense here that the West has a huge lead in conventional military technology, President Boris N. Yeltsin met with his top national security advisers to discuss plans to compensate for Russia’s faltering conventional capabilities by developing short-range, tactical nuclear weapons.

The projects and plans that were approved remain secret. But Vladim Putin, the secretary of the Security Council, said Yeltsin had approved a “blueprint for the development and use of non-strategic nuclear weapons.”

None of this means that NATO and Russia are necessarily on a collision course. The Yeltsin Government has pledged to cooperate on arms control, including seeking Parliament’s approval of the Start-2 treaty reducing strategic nuclear arms.

And on Thursday, Yeltsin enjoined a group of Russian generals to cooperate with NATO in enforcing the peace in Kosovo.

“The problem of our relations with NATO and the U.S.A. is very subtle, delicate and difficult,” Yeltsin said. “Every one of you must pursue the same line — the President’s line. We shall certainly not quarrel with NATO outright, but nor do we intend to flirt with it.”

Russia’s recent exercise, however, demonstrated the competitive nature of the relationship. The weeklong exercise, which was held in late June, was planned last year but adapted to take account of the Yugoslav conflict, including NATO’s ability to attack at long range with precision-guided bombs, Marshal Sergeyev said.

The military aim of the exercise was to test command procedures for defending western Russia and Belarus from an attack from the West.

“To verify the authenticity of the decisions and test procedures for troop control, more than 50 military units participated in the exercise,” Marshal Sergeyev said. “There have been extensive structural changes to the forces in recent years, and we have to practice their management and regain units’ operational skills.”

The political aim appeared to be to demonstrate to the world as well as to the Russian public that the military is still a credible fighting force.

During the exercise, two old turbo-prop Bear bombers approached Iceland while a couple of new Blackjack bombers approached Norway. Russian ships maneuvered under the watchful eyes of Western reconnaissance ships and aircraft.

Officially, the Defense Ministry declined to specify who the imaginary enemy was. The aim, Marshal Sergeyev told the Russian Itar-Tass news agency, was to rehearse the defeat of the enemy and the recapture of lost territory.

Some Russian observers were less diplomatic. The Defense Ministry, the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta noted, refuses to say who the adversary is. “But few doubt that the enemy is NATO’s armed forces in Europe,” it added.

Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company

Maj. Christopher Miller lay awake on a cot in a filthy room, no larger than a prison cell and cluttered with weapons and ammunition. He couldn’t sleep. It was a cold January night at the Special Forces base in Kandahar, and Miller was on the verge of commanding an assault against six Qaeda fighters barricaded inside a nearby Afghan hospital. So many things could go wrong, Miller realized, and it could be disastrous if any of them did. For the first time in his life, Miller would be engaging in C.Q.B. — a military abbreviation for ”close-quarters battle.” After years of training, he would finally become, as he told me recently, a ”manager of violence.” An eight-year veteran of the Special Forces, he had never killed before, had never given an order to kill, had not even seen a dead soldier. All that would change at dawn, because men would surely die in an attack he would initiate with a one-word command: execute.

”That was the first time when I really thought of the human dimension of it,” Miller recalled. ”At first, it’s an intellectual challenge. Then you go, ‘We’re really going to do this.’ All of a sudden it dawned on me, Those bastards are in there right now and they don’t have a clue what’s fixing to come their way. It was the oddest damn thing.”

I first met Miller last December in Kandahar. We had several conversations, but he was under strict orders not to discuss his job. Yet his job — that of a new kind of soldier — interested me. The Special Forces soldiers in Afghanistan looked different, with their thick beards, fleece jackets, wraparound sunglasses and high-tech weaponry. Did they think and feel differently than the traditional foot soldier? Earlier this fall, I caught up with Miller at Fort Campbell, Ky., where the Special Forces Fifth Group is based. Safely back from battle, Miller was allowed to discuss his brand of warfare — and how he was built to carry it out.

Miller’s dawn assault on the Qaeda fighters in Kandahar, I learned, was but one step away from hand-to-hand combat. It involved grenade exchanges from a distance of just a few feet, and it finished with Miller and his men standing amid their dead and bloodied foes. ”They fought to the last minute,” he recalled. ”For these guys, surrender was not an option.” He later added, ”It was amazing to see the carnage.”

The attack was the kind of urban warfare American soldiers will be engaged in should the United States have to shoot its way into Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. When the Cold War ended, many thought that C.Q.B. would become a thing of the past. Conflicts would be fewer, and any interventions undertaken would rely on overwhelming force and precision munitions, not house-to-house fighting. Yet since 9/11 we have begun a war that may draw our soldiers into many battles involving intimate killing. What will that mean for Miller and his men?

The last time this kind of fighting occurred on a grand scale, in Vietnam, 50,000 Americans died, and many survivors had injuries that were not just physical but emotional. The clunky phrase ”post-traumatic stress disorder” entered the national lexicon. Today, the military believes, the United States is fighting an intimate war in the right way, because soldiers have been prepared and equipped in a manner that increases the prospect of their victory and decreases the prospect of their injury — whether physical or psychological. Just as smart bombs are less likely to go astray, 21st-century warriors are more lethal than before, yet less likely to suffer P.T.S.D., according to military instructors and psychologists. Dave Grossman, a former Army Ranger and West Point professor of psychology, refers to this phenomenon as ”the bulletproof mind.”

Such confident assertions may seem surprising, considering what happened this summer at Fort Bragg, N.C. Four soldiers there murdered their wives; three of the soldiers had Special Forces training and had served in Afghanistan. The news media rushed to link the murders to post-combat stress, although there is little proof and investigations continue. Military officers, not surprisingly, doubt the idea that P.T.S.D. played a significant role, and they may have a point. Fatal spouse abuse, sadly, plagues the military even in peacetime. As they see it, the furor over this incident has obscured a broader truth. Today’s Special Forces soldiers, they claim, have been unusually well trained to succeed not only at war — but also after war.

Chris Miller, the son of an Iowa cop, joined the Army Reserve after high school in 1983. He attended George Washington University on an R.O.T.C. scholarship and became, after graduation, an infantry officer. But it wasn’t long before Miller became bored with his life in the Army.

”All you have to be is physically strong,” Miller, who is the size of a linebacker, told me, sitting in his ramshackle Fort Campbell office. ”Infantry’s brain-dead. It has nothing to do with mental agility. I wanted to try the Special Forces because I was driven by the challenge, man.”

The Special Forces are a highly trained elite within the Army, specializing in unconventional warfare, which is anything from operating behind enemy lines to fighting with guerrillas in the jungle. There are about 10,000 soldiers in the Special Forces, who are also known as Green Berets. They are the core of the military’s Special Operations community, which includes what are believed to be hundreds in Delta Force, a secretive unit that performs classified counterterrorism missions, as well as Navy Seals and Special Operations units in the Air Force.

Special Forces soldiers are trained principally in North Carolina, at the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg. Known informally as the Schoolhouse, it’s the nerve center for an arduous two- to three-year training course. Skills taught to Special Forces soldiers include how to survive in jungles and deserts, how to leap from a plane in the jet stream and wait until the last second to open your parachute, how to stage ambushes behind enemy lines, how to escape a P.O.W. camp, how to speak foreign languages and how to kill with rifles, grenade launchers, shoulder-fired rockets and your bare hands.

When I stopped by the Schoolhouse in September, about 200 soldiers were starting their third day of training. In a dirt pit, they were hoisting logs over their heads, then shifting the logs from one shoulder to the other, then crawling through the dirt, then carrying one another on their shoulders, then doing push-ups and cartwheels, then hoisting the logs again — over and over, until some began weeping.

It was boot-camp misery multiplied by 10. Yet there was a twist, because physical misery was not the end point, as it might be in the infantry, but the starting point. I realized this as I talked beside the pit with Captain Smith, who assesses aspiring Special Forces soldiers (and insisted that I not use his first name). Smith wants to find out who can endure pain and sleep deprivation and situational uncertainty — and still make the right choices. ”We never inform them what they’re going to do, how long it’s going to go on,” he said. ”We set the conditions for ambiguity from the start. A lot of these guys are not comfortable not knowing what they’re going to do next. But a lot of times on our operations, there’s no way that you can know exactly what you’ll be doing. Strength must be combined with intelligence.”

Miller recalls his experience at the Schoolhouse vividly. ”It was the most outrageous thing,” he said, laughing loudly. ”You’re smoked, you’re physically and mentally drained, and then, boom, there’s a decision you have to make. Do I go left or right? And there’s only one right answer.”

Because Special Forces work requires nerves of steel, training never really ends. After graduating from the Schoolhouse, active soldiers on operational teams train regularly in urban environments. Every 18 months they must complete a course established at Fort Bragg called Advanced Urban Combat — that is, the storming of buildings. Of course, all Army units train for battle, but the Special Forces say they do it with far greater frequency and under conditions that are a good deal more realistic. They use live ammunition much more often. And instead of being shown once or twice how to, say, clear a room without firing guns, the Special Forces do it again and again and again, firing real bullets, until every move they might need to make in a Baghdad-type scenario becomes a reflex.

”It’s so instantaneous,” explained Master Sgt. Danny Leonard, who joined the Special Forces in 1989 and engaged in urban warfare in the Gulf War and in Afghanistan. ”You don’t even realize you did it.”

American soldiers have not always pulled the trigger with such reliability. During World War II, according to the military historian S.L.A. Marshall, as many as 80 percent of the American infantrymen he interviewed failed to fire their weapons in combat. Marshall attributed the low ”fire ratio” to a mixture of poor training and a natural reluctance to kill. Even though his methodology has come under attack — critics say his numbers are exaggerated — his premise is generally accepted, and his book, ”Men Against Fire,” is read throughout the military establishment. After it was published in 1947, the military revamped its training to make G.I.’s more comfortable firing at humans; soldiers shot at targets shaped like people rather than at bull’s-eyes, for example. Today, Special Forces units make their training as realistic as possible, using pop-up targets with human faces, and setting off smoke bombs and small explosions to simulate the battlefield experience.

Dave Grossman, who spoke to me about ”the bulletproof mind,” has written about the hidden logic behind military training. In his controversial book ”On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society,” he writes: ”It is entirely possible that no one intentionally sat down to use operant conditioning or behavior modification techniques to train soldiers in this area. But from the standpoint of a psychologist who is also a historian and a career soldier, it has become increasingly obvious to me that this is exactly what has been achieved.” Grossman interprets the process of a target popping up, a soldier’s shooting the target and the soldier being praised or criticized for accuracy, as a classic conditioning model. ”What makes this training process work is the same thing that made Pavlov’s dogs salivate and B. F. Skinner’s rats push their bars,” he writes. ”What makes it work is the single most powerful and reliable behavior modification process yet discovered by the field of psychology, and now applied to the field of warfare: operant conditioning.”

Indeed, Special Forces officers openly discuss the use of ”stress inoculation” — in which they are exposed to heartbeat-racing drills that raise their threshold for staying calm. It doesn’t mean Special Forces soldiers are immune to stress or the mistakes that stress causes, but it takes a lot more to rattle one of them than an old-time draftee.

An important dose of stress inoculation occurs during a three-week training nightmare that comes at the end of the Schoolhouse course. It goes by the acronym SERE, which stands for survival, evasion, resistance and escape. SERE teaches Special Forces soldiers how to avoid and endure capture by the enemy. The exercise places them in a ”resistance-training laboratory” that is, essentially, a prisoner-of-war camp, with guard towers, barbed-wire fences, blindfolds, putrid food, irregular sleep intervals, abusive guards and brutal interrogations. Details about SERE, such as the types of punishment inflicted on the ”prisoners,” are classified; Special Forces officers told me that torture is not practiced, though they did not deny that physical pressure is applied. The unpleasantness apparently includes being buried in wood barrels. When I asked Miller about SERE, he shook his head and said, ”It is imprinted on my brain.”

Making a soldier stronger and better through stress inoculation and operant conditioning seems a bit Kubrickian — and unsettling. I wasn’t sure what to think when Col. Charles King, who commands the First Special Warfare Training Group at Fort Bragg, told me that he trains his soldiers in negotiation and combat — and that they can turn from one to the other in a split second. ”These guys have got to be able not only to work with you but to shoot you, if necessary,” he said. We laughed awkwardly, and he quickly added that Special Forces soldiers would never shoot a journalist. We laughed again, awkwardly, and I chose not to mention that a U.S. military commander had threatened to shoot a Washington Post journalist who was trying to visit a site in Afghanistan where an American airstrike appeared to have killed civilians.

Of course, the commander hadn’t actually fired his weapon. Special Forces soldiers may develop cold-blooded reflexes, but they are also trained to know when not to kill. Targets that pop up during shooting drills include women and children who are not supposed to be shot. Being able to remain steady in combat doesn’t just mean you will be a quick draw; it also means that you will do a better job of deciding when to hold your fire. As Grossman writes of the calibration of aggression: ”This is a delicate and dangerous process. Too much, and you end up with a My Lai. . . . Too little, and your soldiers will be defeated and killed by someone who is more aggressively disposed.” Colonel King put it like this: ”Our guys have got to be confident in their ability to use lethal force. But they’ve got to be principled enough to know when not to use it. We’re not training pirates.”

In Kandahar last January, the Special Forces tried to avoid a head-on clash with the Qaeda holdouts at Mirwais Hospital. A small group of Qaeda soldiers, wounded before the city fell to American-backed forces, were left behind when their fellow fighters headed for the hills. The men barricaded themselves inside a wing of the hospital and vowed a fight to the death if challenged. For more than a month, the Special Forces detachment, of which Miller was third in command, patiently waited for them to surrender.

Then one night in mid-January, one of the Qaeda fighters slipped out of the hospital, only to be surrounded by Afghan guards. He blew himself up with a grenade. Soon after, senior officers decided that any members of Al Qaeda who were in Kandahar should be in custody or dead. The Special Forces contingent was ordered to attack the six men who remained.

The Americans didn’t consider an airstrike on the building or using rocket-propelled grenades; those would have been loud and messy solutions, which the Special Forces, who refer to themselves as ”the quiet professionals,” disdain. Miller, who has a master’s degree in national security studies from the Naval War College, relishes devising fresh solutions.

During a meeting at their base in Kandahar, the Special Forces brain trust, which was led by Lt. Col. Dave Fox and included Miller and several other officers, didn’t consider a brute American assault on an Afghan hospital. Instead, the decision was made to train a squad of local Afghan soldiers to do the job, backed by the Special Forces. Miller would be the ”ground tactical commander” — that is, the manager of violence.

On the outskirts of Kandahar, at the former residence of Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader, an ”A team” — a 12-man group that is the core fighting unit of the Special Forces — began training 25 Afghan soldiers in the finer points of storming a hostile building. A mock-up of the hospital wing was built, and the Afghans were taught to rush through the hole — the fatal funnel” — that would be blasted through a wall. They were taught to stay away from doors and windows, to clear rooms one by one before moving down a corridor and so on. Language was a problem, but translators were used and the Americans picked up essential Pashto words, such as ”shoot,” ”stop shooting” and ”grenade.”

Just before dawn on Jan. 28, everything was set. Capt. Matthew Peaks, leader of the A team that trained the Afghans, was ready. Using his code name, Python 33, he got on the radio to Miller, code-named Rambo 70, who was at a command post 150 feet away. Miller gave the order to execute the assault. The explosives blasted a hole in the wall, and a wave of Afghan soldiers rushed inside, tossing grenades down a corridor leading to the Qaeda room. The Afghans were promptly halted by an explosion, most likely of their own doing; in their eagerness to attack, they had run over their own grenades. The injured men were dragged out.

”We’ve got a bit of a problem,” Peaks radioed to Miller. ”We’ve got six guys down. The assault has stalled.”

One of Miller’s favorite words is ”knucklehead,” which he applies to most anyone he is talking about — the Taliban, his commanders, himself. When the assault stalled, Miller said he felt like the knucklehead of the moment.

A military axiom says a plan of attack rarely survives its first contact with the enemy, and it is particularly true for unconventional warfare. This is what the Special Forces are taught to expect, as I learned from Colonel King. ”You can sit people down and teach them that in situation A you do B, but what do you do when you get into a situation you never anticipated?” he said. That pretty much describes the predicament Miller was in. The first assault had failed. The Qaeda soldiers were riled up. Moreover, the grenade explosions had inadvertently started a fire inside the building. This was a problem because a building that was torched courtesy of the Special Forces would not look good on CNN.

Then something unexpected happened. Smoke prompted two Qaeda fighters to stand next to a window for fresh air. Miller had placed snipers at nearby vantage points, and one of them, just a few feet away from him, leaned over and said, ”Sir, I’ve got a guy who keeps poking his head up.”

Miller immediately told him to fire. He got on the radio and told the other sniper to shoot. One Qaeda soldier was dropped, then another. Miller gave the order for smoke grenades to be thrown inside the building, to encourage window visits by the others. But the remaining Qaeda men realized the cost of fresh air and stayed put.

They were given a final warning. ”We can end this right now!” a Special Forces soldier shouted to them in Arabic. ”We promise you won’t be mistreated.” Arabic curses were shouted back.

Miller ordered another Afghan assault. A squad of Afghans rushed inside the building but rushed out after a small explosion was heard. Peaks, who enjoys an absurd moment as much as Miller, told me, with a good laugh, what happened: ”These Afghan guys come running back to us with big wide eyes going, ‘They got grenades!’ We said, ‘Well, yes.’ ”

That’s when the decision was made for the Special Forces to go inside. This would be the real thing, C.Q.B., against an enemy eager to kill Americans. Three Special Forces fighters moved down the main corridor with three Afghans, closing in on the room where the Qaeda fighters were barricaded. The Special Forces tossed several grenades into the room, but the Qaeda men scooped them up and tossed them back. It was a lethal game of hot potato. The American team dove for cover. Staff Sgt. Joe Haralson was one of the grenade dodgers. I met him at Fort Campbell, and we talked under a gazebo as he calmly cleaned an M-4 assault rifle. He explained that before throwing the next grenade, he held onto it after releasing the pin, so that the enemy wouldn’t have time to toss it back.

”We started cookin’ them off,” Haralson said. ”Pop the pin, wait a second or two, then throw them in.”

I asked, ”The delay is how long on the grenade?”

”About three or four seconds.”

”Not much margin for error.”

”Yeah,” he replied.

Haralson’s training — or, as Grossman might describe it, his operant conditioning — helps explain why he had the presence of mind to instantly fling himself to the ground when his grenades were thrown back at him. Ordinary soldiers might freeze for a split second, and this could cost them their lives. Then Haralson, amid the violence, was able to calmly figure out, as though fine-tuning a tennis stroke, that he needed to hold a live grenade in his hand for a couple of seconds before throwing it, and then do just that.

The battle was won and months later I asked Haralson how he felt about the mission. ”Nobody is acting out of anger,” he said. ”He’s the bad guy, we’re the good guy. It’s just the way it is.”

As Sergeant Leonard told me, ”We understand the importance of what we’re doing, so if we’ve got to cap a guy, we’ll do it.” He continued: ”You’re in a zone. You’re trying to keep your people safe. So there’s a sense of elation: ‘I got him before he got me.’ I never felt sad for any of those guys. It doesn’t bother me a bit.”

It’s possible that these men were more disturbed by the killing than they let on; then again, if they were haunted by what they did, they probably would not have talked so openly about the violence they engaged in. And in general, the soldiers did not hide the after-effects of spending time in combat zones. Leonard told me that upon returning from the Gulf War, he woke up one night and noticed a red beam; thinking it was a laser, he rolled out of bed and reached for a weapon. The beam was his stereo’s power light.

The issue of post-combat stress was widely discussed after the three Special Operations soldiers returned from Afghanistan to Fort Bragg and killed their wives last summer. Those killings, and our military’s latest involvement in C.Q.B., have resurrected an old debate: is it possible to be an efficient killer one day and a good citizen the next?

”The theory that interspecies homicide is unnatural — go watch ‘Animal Planet’ for a while,” said Maj. Gary Hazlett, a psychologist at Fort Bragg. ”It’s common. We sent millions of people into combat situations in World War II and we didn’t have busloads of Charlie Mansons coming back. We had people who had gone out and done this grisly job, done it extremely well and then came back and now we’re calling them the greatest generation.” That may be true, but Vietnam veterans are a different story. It was a nastier conflict than World War II or Afghanistan: G.I.’s were killed in grisly ways by men, women and even children who did not wear uniforms, and at the same time, many Vietnamese who didn’t wear uniforms were killed. Psychologists believe that the likelihood of being haunted by killing is greatly increased when the carnage a soldier sees or engages in is hard to justify.

A recent article in Military Review, a magazine published every other month by the Army, warned that reflex-quick killing can be a psychological time bomb. ”Training soldiers to kill efficiently is good for them because it helps them survive on the battlefield,” wrote Maj. Peter Kilner, who teaches philosophy at West Point. ”However, training soldiers to kill without explaining to them why it is morally permissible to kill in combat is harmful. . . . When soldiers kill reflexively — when military training has effectively undermined their moral autonomy — they morally deliberate their actions only after the fact. If they are unable to justify what they have done, they often suffer guilt and psychological trauma.”

Miller says his sleepless night before the assault in Kandahar was his way of confronting the ethics of his actions. He zeroed in on two things — the targets were terrorists, and they had been given ample opportunity to surrender. Killing them, if it came to that, was justified. ”I needed to go through the moral calculus,” he told me. ”Once I did, I was steeled for combat. But I felt I owed it to myself to consider the implications of what was about to happen.”

Miller let out a knucklehead laugh as he said this; for him, it was a foolishly obvious point. Indeed, when the Kandahar assault was completed and he left his command post to survey the carnage he had managed, he said he did not feel horror or regret — just a grim awareness that there will be a lot more C.Q.B. for American soldiers in coming years. ”We’re going to have to hunt ’em down,” Miller said.

Miller remained in Afghanistan for almost four months and did everything he trained for: combat, patrols, surveillance, negotiations. For several crucial days, he was even in charge of security for the new leader of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai. He completed his duties and returned home in March to his wife and three children.

That said, the experience has left its marks on Miller. North of Kandahar, before the Taliban fled, a Special Forces team was hit accidentally by a misguided smart bomb. Three men were killed, and two of them were good friends of his. ”If I could have those guys back, I would gladly give it all up,” Miller said as we sat in a planning room at his battalion headquarters, which is a surprisingly unimpressive place, with leaking pipes and mold growing on the ceiling tiles. The United States military is a $355-billion-a-year outfit, but few of those dollars are lavished on the aged cinder block buildings housing the Fifth Group. Miller continued: ”There’s probably a little guilt, like, Jesus, I wanted to see action so bad. . . . ”

Suddenly he stopped talking. He took several deep breaths, looking down at the floor. Then he hurriedly got up and headed for the bathroom. Through tears, he said, ”I promised I wasn’t going to do this.”

Several minutes elapsed. I poured myself some coffee as I waited for him to return. I was not terribly surprised by his lapse into sadness. I spent three days with him at Fort Campbell, grabbing meals with him and his Special Forces colleagues, going on a five-mile run with him in the Kentucky backwoods. I heard him laugh at himself and his commanders and the absurdity of the world around him. But I also heard him turn cold serious when the phone rang in his office and he answered with his usual greeting, ”Hello, this is not a secure line.” His temperament was adaptive, exquisitely calibrated to the moment. And here was a moment where Miller was allowing himself to be reflective.

In Special Forces training, flexibility is sought out and reinforced in recruits. Respond to the situation, they are taught; don’t be rigid, stay aware of your environment. In the model Special Forces soldier — and not all of them are, not by a long shot — those maxims apply to emotions too. Block them out in combat, but don’t ignore them afterward.

Miller emerged from the bathroom and said: ”I don’t feel guilty for wanting to do something. We wanted to go, hell, yeah. Everybody wanted to. The big lesson I took was, Be careful what you ask for, because it’s a horribly costly business. I don’t have any doubt about the value of the sacrifice. I’m not sitting here gnashing my teeth like Vietnam or something, going, ‘God, it’s such a waste, the flower of our youth.’ I mean, it was necessary. A friendly-fire accident — that happens. It’s the nature of war.” Miller had a logical argument, but emotions don’t always respond to logic.

Miller talked about other difficulties he had faced in Afghanistan. In January, Special Forces soldiers discovered a series of Taliban ammunition depots. The decision was made to blow up the dumps so that fugitive Taliban or Qaeda fighters could not sneak back and re-arm. Two ordnance experts and a medic were assigned to the job. They were all blown up doing it; either they mishandled the explosives or were killed by a booby trap.

”The most wonderful guys in the world,” Miller told me. ”We could have waited and handed it off to an engineer unit and said, ‘It’s your problem.’ We made the decision to do it ourselves right away. It was the wrong thing to do. We should have just left it. Two guys I knew really well. It shows the seriousness of the business, which I had never fully internalized. I would just laugh when my bosses would say, ‘This is a serious business.’ Well, guess what? Now I’m the moron going, ‘This is serious business.’ ”

The Special Forces are well trained, but that does not mean they will come back alive or sound, especially if they fight a war that should not be fought or embark on missions that are poorly planned. Their bodies are not bulletproof, nor are their minds. The discipline that is driven into them in training and at their bases can wear down if a war is long enough or murky enough or if they see too many of their comrades killed or injured. The ousting of the Taliban (though not what followed it) had the merit of being well executed and mercifully brief, yet still there was a price to pay.

I stayed in touch with Miller after my visit to Fort Campbell. We had developed a running joke, because he couldn’t talk to me about his next mission, which I knew was Iraq, and which he knew I knew was Iraq. The soldiers of the Fifth Group specialize in the Middle East, and they wear desert fatigues even at Fort Campbell, with their names printed above their breast pockets in Arabic. I would ask, when I called Miller, how things were going, and as September became October and Congress passed a resolution authorizing war, his responses went from ”not doing much” to ”it’s getting busier” to ”real busy.”

”If there’s going to be a fight, we want to be in it,” he said last month. ”But it’s more deliberate this time. Last time, it really was naivete.” He mentioned that the widows and children of his fallen friends still live in his close community; he is reminded of their sacrifice every day. ”The cost is huge and it requires serious deliberation. I’m privileged and truly want to be a part of it, but it’s not cheap. It’s not a big laugh.”

Peter Maass is the author of ”Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War,” his memoir of the conflict in Bosnia. He is a contributing writer for the magazine.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/10/magazine/ 10SPECIAL.html?ex37967029&ei=1&enb40f3dd2e6d3e11 .

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

———–

One thought does occur though… with the disemboweling of places like General Magic, Xerox PARC, Bell Labs and HP R&D, where will newer, long-lead technology innovation come from?

-Ian.

——- http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?Story_id24685 Spitting image Sep 19th 2002 From The Economist print edition

Engineering insight, dogged determination and a dash of serendipity have made the lowly inkjet imaging device the king of computer printers

IN THE annals of computing, nothing has caused as much disappointment as putting ideas on paper. For decades, printing computer files was a thankless task for users who were seeking to reproduce precisely what they saw on the computer screen. Then along came the inkjet printer that sprayed tiny dots of ink on to the paper—and so started a revolution in the printing of high-quality images that was more important than anything since photogravure.

Thermal inkjets, first commercialised by Hewlett-Packard and Canon in the 1980s, began as slow, messy machines that were no match for the costlier laser printers that had just been introduced. But eventually, the scrappy little inkjet printers got better and better. Today, an inkjet printer costing less than $50 will spit out crisp colour pictures, sharp text and brilliant graphics as good as any laser printer costing 30-40 times more. No wonder inkjets outsell laser models twelvefold. Inkjet cartridges alone now account for $19 billion of annual sales, according to Lyra Research, a consultancy in Newtonville, Massachusetts.

For all its originality, the idea behind the inkjet is far from new. As long ago as 1867, William Thomson (later known as Lord Kelvin) was granted a patent for “Receiving or Recording Instruments for Electrical Telegraphers” which used electrostatic forces to control the release of ink drops on to paper. In 1951, Siemens produced the first continuous inkjet printer. And throughout the 1960s, other manufacturers unveiled improvements on the same idea—all with little success. Inkjets proved expensive, messy and unreliable, with pumps, bladders and other moving parts that simply could not deliver an affordable machine capable of producing high-quality prints.

The modern inkjet solved these problems with a self-contained print head, complete with inkwell, spraying mechanism and nozzles that could be controlled accurately. Throughout the 1970s, research into the technology focused onpiezoelectric methods. These use special crystals that vibrate when charged to squeeze out controlled amounts of ink. The most compelling innovation, however, came when engineers turned to heat instead of vibration.

The thermal inkjet printer was invented not once, but twice. The idea was conceived simultaneously, and unbeknown to one another, by two competing teams on either side of the Pacific. In Japan, Ichiro Endo, an engineer at Canon, noticed ink squirting from the neck of a syringe when a hot soldering iron touched it. Thousands of miles away at Hewlett-Packard’s laboratories in Silicon Valley, a researcher called John Vaught dreamed up his version of the thermal inkjet by borrowing from the mechanism of the coffee percolator.

Hewlett-Packard’s efforts began on Christmas eve, 1978. Together with David Donald and a group of other engineers, Mr Vaught began idly to discuss concepts for an ideal printer. The team had just delivered the engine for HP’s first laser printer and was working on a gravure printer for the commercial-publishing world. Despite this, the team wanted more—especially colour, speed and, most important of all, low cost.

That was a tough combination. At the time, printers fell into two categories: impact and non-impact. Typewriters aside, the most common impact printers were dot-matrix devices, which used an array of pins to strike an ink ribbon to form characters or other images. Non-impact printers, by contrast, offered more hope. By not touching the paper when making an image, they promised to be more accurate and efficient.

Although far from mature, no fewer than five non-impact technologies were vying for success. There were inkjets that sprayed microscopic dots of ink through hundreds of tiny nozzles on to paper; laser printers that used a laser beam and the xerography process to affix toner to paper; solid-ink printers that employed a similar technique to melt sticks of a coloured wax-like ink on to paper; dye-sublimation printers that relied on long rolls of film, heated to embed dyes into special paper; and thermal autochrome printers that applied heat to a special type of paper already impregnated with dyes to produce colour prints.

In 1978, the inkjet concept caught Mr Vaught’s imagination, because it promised to yield a simple, low-cost and high-performance printer. Despite its shortcomings, the technology was considered to have far greater potential for improvement than its rivals. That afternoon, before departing for the Christmas holiday, Mr Vaught and his colleagues concluded that the ideal printer was an inkjet machine that could deliver 200 dots per inch and be capable of printing in full colour. Over the holiday, Mr Vaught set the ground rules: the new type of printer would have an array of ink nozzles spaced a two-hundredth of an inch apart and be able to feed ink fast enough to print one page per second.

Returning to the laboratory after Christmas, Mr Vaught focused on building a solid-state print head that would experience less wear and no clogging, but still be able to spit ink out fast enough for the job. As he watched a coffee percolator, he realised the answer was to use the ink itself to shoot dots on to paper.

“The race to develop the inkjet printer had a profound cultural impact on both companies.”

To do so, he tried using a pair of electrodes with the ink between them acting as a resistor. The idea was to get the heat to vaporise a small portion of ink very near a nozzle, causing it to spit out a droplet. Unfortunately, the ink did not have high enough resistivity to create the necessary heat. Worse, the process electrolised some water in the ink into hydrogen and oxygen, which interfered with the operation.

Mr Vaught then tried harnessing the hydrogen and oxygen to produce a micro-explosion capable of firing the ink out of the nozzle. A small spark could be induced across the electrodes to ignite the hydrogen bubbles and spit out a drop of ink, but the process was nowhere near fast enough. In a third attempt, Hewlett-Packard engineers opted to put all the energy into the spark itself, in order to boil a bubble of ink. That succeeded, but the electrodes quickly deteriorated.

The breakthrough came when Mr Vaught and his colleagues seized on thin-film resistors. These were found to be able to produce enough heat to boil a bubble of ink and spit a dot out rapidly with a high degree of control. The resistors were mounted inside small tubes that were etched with grooves to create the nozzles, and switched on and off rapidly to spit out microscopic dots of ink. Within three months, the Hewlett-Packard team had concocted a workable version of a thermal inkjet mechanism.

Surprisingly, for all their engineering insight, the team could not explain exactly why their printer worked. And although it worked well, and was patentable without an underlying theory, Hewlett-Packard’s middle managers were reluctant to invest in the idea. Some top HP managers dismissed the invention altogether. As it turned out, the physics of Mr Vaught’s process—known as “phreatic reaction”—would not be understood fully for another year.

But Mr Vaught doggedly pursued his interest in the inkjet printer. He demonstrated his work to anybody who took an interest, eventually catching the eye of, among others, Larry La Barre, an HP old-timer who was able to persuade the company’s management to take the technology more seriously. Thereafter, Hewlett-Packard started showeringR&D funds on inkjet technology, and the programme became a critical part of its future.

Canon ball

Meanwhile, Mr Endo had already started work on a broadly similar effort. Canon’s goal was to create better xerographic technology, inkjets being just one of several options. Back in 1977, Mr Endo and his team focused on fabricating a piezoelectric system that could send electronic pulses through a nozzle, creating enough force to shoot ink from the chamber. But when a researcher accidentally touched the tip of an ink-filled syringe with a soldering iron, the squirt of ink changed the course of Canon’s research and subsequent fortunes.

Within days, Mr Endo and his team used the discovery to build a simple inkjet printer that would come to be known as the Bubblejet. The main difference between this and HP’s invention lay in how the ink was fired: Canon’s shot ink out sideways, while HP’s print heads released their ink from the top.

Two years later, Hewlett-Packard found out about Canon’s work. The patents for many of the key inventions in both research efforts had been filed within months of one another. The result was a relationship between Canon and HP that continues to this day. Hewlett-Packard has borrowed some of Canon’s designs for extending the life of the print head, while Canon has borrowed from HP’s ideas for print-head configuration. Despite brief disagreements over rights to the technology, Hewlett-Packard insists that the co-operation has developed into a healthy competitive relationship between the two companies, and moved the state of the art further than it would otherwise have gone.

Following the two initial inventions, the development of inkjet technology became a multidisciplinary effort. New quick-drying and light-fast inks had to be developed. Improvements in the print jets continued apace. Better mechanisms for feeding the paper, and new software to improve image quality, were added. To raise speed still further, engineers on both sides developed faster motors and lightened their print-head mechanisms, while increasing the number of nozzles on their heads. More features were added to the inkjets, and soon hybrids of the technology that turned printers into fax machines and copiers emerged. Today, multifunction machines are the fastest-growing bit of the printer market.

The race to develop the inkjet printer had a profound cultural impact on both companies. For instance, disposable print heads, developed in 1984, are said to have caused no end of grief at Hewlett-Packard. The very thought of disposing of the little plastic units that contained the printers’ intellectual property was anathema to some of HP’s executives.

Other competitors entered the market with designs of their own. Epson introduced its inkjet line based on piezoelectric technology first investigated in the 1970s. Lexmark and Agfa also jumped in, focusing on specialised applications such as digital photography and graphic arts. But for all the interest, the growth of the inkjet market got off to a poor start. Compared with Hewlett-Packard’s Laserjets, which were seeing healthy sales growth, the inkjet market appeared to languish after the company created its first Deskjet range in the late 1980s. At one point in the mid-1990s, HP even pondered pulling the plug.

Colour to the rescue

The widespread use of colour in computing during the mid-1990s changed everything. Just as Mr Vaught had planned, adding colour capability to inkjets was the next logical step. Print heads with complementary colours of magenta, cyan and yellow were added to black ink, enabling printers to create a full range of colours. More specialised photo printers have also added various shades of the primary colours to produce ever more faithful reproductions. “We essentially took all the work of craftsmen in a printshop and put it in algorithms,” says John Meyer, a director at HP’s laboratories. As computers became ever faster, those algorithms allowed prints to become sharper and ever more vibrant.

Today, the inkjet is no longer a cheap substitute for a laser printer, but a graphics machine in its own right. The average print head now contains more than 300 nozzles and is capable of producing images with a resolution of at least 1,200 by 1,200 dots per inch—more than the eye can resolve. The average machine can now fire ink at a blinding 14,000 dots per second, depositing more than 1m drops of ink on a square inch of paper. Most of the development work is now going into creating durable, light-fast inks to prevent pictures from fading. Meanwhile, new software is helping to produce clearer pictures by controlling the printing pixel by pixel.

Ultimately, the development of the inkjet printer underscores how lateral thinking can yield remarkably simple solutions to complex problems. Both Mr Endo and Mr Vaught, who have shared numerous industry awards in recognition of their accomplishments, displayed dogged determination and belief in their inventions, despite much internal resistance. But in doing so, they revolutionised the computer business and brought colour to people’s lives.

Copyright © 2002 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

———–

‘Ultimate supplier’ Nortel may be out of demand By DAVID AKIN Monday, September 30, 2002 – Print Edition, Page B1

In 1885, just four years before American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson noted that the world beats a path to the doors of inventors of better mousetraps, Bell Telephone Co. of Canada spun out its manufacturing operations, creating a company called the Northern Electric and Manufacturing Co.

Emerson’s famous phrase seemed to have been a guiding light at Northern Electric, later to be Northern Telecom and, most recently in 1998, Nortel Networks Corp. of Brampton, Ont.

For most of its history, Nortel made its shareholders tremendously wealthy by building better mousetraps in the form of whatever passed for advanced technology of the day. In the 1880s it was sleigh bells, fire alarms and telephone switchboards. In the 20th century it was radios, telephones, TV sets and, during both world wars, ammunition.

“Nortel has always been a technology company that took advantage of opportunities. It’s the ultimate supplier,” said Elliot Schreiber, who now teaches at the business school at McMaster University in Hamilton, but was Nortel’s senior vice-president of corporate marketing and communications, from 1995 to 1999.

For the past few years, Nortel excelled at building and selling fabulously complex machines built out of laser generators, mirrors and hundreds of microprocessors.

These are the optical switches that are at the heart of the all-optical Internet, the network that would ring the globe and that could carry digitized voice traffic, data bits, videos, sound files and much more at fabulous speeds and in mind-bending quantities.

And the world did indeed beat a path to its door for these machines. Sales at Nortel ballooned to more than $30-billion (U.S.) in 2000. But in 2001, the world stopped buying these fabulous machines as abruptly as it had started. Revenue for 2001 was just more than $17-billion. For the first six months this year, revenue has climbed to only $5.5-billion.

“What does an opportunistic company do when there’s no more opportunities?” Mr. Schreiber said. “What do you do when no one needs anything supplied?”

All three main segments of Nortel’s business — metro and enterprise networks, wireless, and optical — have slowed. Metro and enterprise networks are typically geographically concentrated computer networks within metropolitan urban areas or at large enterprises or companies, respectively.

But slow is one thing — bleeding buckets of money is another.

Nortel said its metro and enterprise segment contributed $739-million to the company’s profit margin in the first half of 2002. The wireless segment was good for $173-million of margin. The optical sector’s margin, though, was a negative $1.02-billion. In other words, the cost of selling whatever the optical segment sold exceeded the revenue it earned by more than $1-billion.

And so, just as it was once time for Nortel to stop making sleigh bells and TV sets, it may now be time for Nortel to shut down — or at least suspend — that part of its business involved in the next-generation all-optical Internet.

There’s one simple reason for this: What Mr. Emerson said is not true. A better mousetrap does not necessarily result in customers beating a path to your door. No one wants to buy what Nortel became so good at making.

“You have to build the business case now for your customers. They won’t buy it just on faith,” Mr. Schreiber said.

In Nortel’s glory days in 1999 and 2000, telecom customers were buying the big fancy optical components because their competitor was. No one ran the numbers to see if the equipment would pay off for the service providers. It was purchased on faith, a build-it-and-they-will-come attitude that has sunk companies such as Teleglobe Inc., Global Crossing Ltd., 360networks Inc., and others.

There is now enough capacity on the world’s Internet backbones, some experts say, to last 50 years. Nortel’s equipment was used to build 75 per of those backbones. Demand is just not going to catch up to supply for a very long time.

But in an interview Friday, Nortel chief executive officer Frank Dunn said optical network equipment is central to the company’s product portfolio, particularly when it comes to the metro and enterprise category.

There is rough consensus among analysts and some of Nortel’s institutional investors that the company must shutter at least one of its business divisions. But there is less agreement about which one. Some say Nortel should get out of the metro market and avoid competing with Cisco Systems Inc.; others say wireless won’t pay off fast enough as Nortel must finance the purchases made by cash-poor countries such as China, and those in Latin America. Still, optical seems to come up as the likeliest candidate for pruning.

“I think now is the time to be more aggressive than less aggressive and more focused,” said Steve Levy, managing director and telecom analyst at Lehman Brothers Inc. of New York. “Businesses that are not likely to be profitable in the next year, you should be getting out of. New products like [Nortel’s] HDX, the optical cross-connect, I think they’ve given it a shot. Shut the thing down.”

Mr. Levy also said there are some optical gear products aimed at the metro and enterprise market (Nortel recently started accounting for these products in its optical segment) that are showing little signs of life.

“Unless they’ve got businesses we’re not aware of, that’s a key candidate,” Mr. Levy said.

As a percentage of the firm’s overall revenue, optical made up 11.7 per cent of the company’s sales in 2001, down from 26.3 per cent in 2000. Wireless, though, grew to 29.3 per cent in 2001 from about 18 per cent the year before. The metro and enterprise portion has stayed at about 45 per cent through 2000 and 2001.

As far as this year goes, wireless continues to grow as a portion of Nortel’s overall sales while metro/enterprise and optical have formed a smaller share of sales.

Nortel’s customers are no longer thinking about a bright shiny future of an all-optical Internet. Analysts say they want gear that will cut their costs right now on the kind of networks they already operate.

“Unless they are going to get a 12-month payback, they’re not buying the equipment. That is a very short payback for these carriers historically,” Mr. Levy said.

Mr. Dunn, though, says the optical gear is at the centre of the company’s product strategy.

“Having [optical] in the network is critical and Nortel’s the leader. What I need to do in optical is get the business that does not lose money at this kind of sustaining level. That business is a business that’s viable, that’s important, and that is fundamental to transform networks. I just can’t afford to have a huge infrastructure when no one’s buying that.”

Nortel once had 1,000 customers for its optical gear and the average size of a deal was, well, monstrously huge. Now, Mr. Dunn says, he’s got 60 customers who buy optical gear. Analysts say the deal size is also getting smaller.

“So how we were organized to do what we did in the past has to be adapted to what’s coming in the future,” Mr. Dunn said. “Some of our development programs we’ve adjusted as well. We were bringing out new technologies that no one was going to put in the network for a while. So we’ve managed those profiles.”

That “profile management” led, last week, to the company’s decision to quietly — that is to say, without a press release — shut down its CoreTek business, a unit it acquired in 2000 for $1.16-billion (U.S.) in stock.

The 160 employees in the Boston-based unit made — and here we must rely on the company’s description — “very advanced tunable products, including lasers, filters and optical performance monitoring products for use by Nortel Networks in its own products and for sale to the external market.”

In other words, CoreTek was on the bleeding edge of research into products for the all-optical Internet, the very thing that Nortel and others can no longer afford to sell any longer for the simple reason that no one is buying. David Akin is national business and technology correspondent for CTV News and a contributing writer to The Globe and Mail.

———–

In Artist’s Freeway Prank, Form Followed Function

Transit: Unauthorized addition to sign went unnoticed for months. No charges planned. By HUGO MARTÍN LA Times Staff Writer

May 9 2002

What more could an artist want?

An unusual medium. A chance to take a jab at the establishment. An almost endless audience, speeding to see the work.

Richard Ankrom created that enviable milieu above an unlikely canvas–the Harbor Freeway in downtown Los Angeles.

For two years, the rail-thin artist planned and prepared for his most ambitious project, a piece that would be seen by more than 150,000 motorists per day on the freeway, near 3rd Street.

With friends documenting his every move on camera, Ankrom clandestinely installed the finished product on a gray August morning. For nine months, no one noticed. It even failed to catch the eye of California Department of Transportation officials

And that is exactly what Ankrom hoped for.

The 46-year-old Los Angeles artist designed, built and installed an addition to an overhead freeway sign–to exact state specifications–to help guide motorists on the sometimes confusing transition to the northbound Golden State Freeway a couple miles farther north.

He installed his handiwork in broad daylight, dressed in a hard hat and orange reflective vest to avoid raising suspicion. He even chopped off his shoulder-length blond hair to fit the role of a blue-collar freeway worker.

The point of the project, said Ankrom, was to show that art has a place in modern society–even on a busy, impersonal freeway. He also wanted to prove that one highly disciplined individual can make a difference.

Embarrassed Caltrans officials, who learned of the bogus sign from a local newspaper column, concede that the sign could be a help. They will leave it in place, for now. The transportation agency doesn’t plan to press charges, for trespassing or tampering with state property.

Why didn’t the counterfeit sign get noticed?

“The experts are saying that Mr. Ankrom did a fantastic job,” conceded Caltrans spokeswoman Jeanne Bonfilio. “They thought it was an internal job.”

Ankrom’s work has also won praise from some in the art world.

Mat Gleason, publisher of the Los Angeles art magazine Coagula, learned about the project a few months ago. He calls it “terrific” because it shows that art can “benefit people and at the same time tweak the bureaucracy a little.”

The idea for the sign came to Ankrom back in 1999, when he found himself repeatedly getting lost trying to find the ramp to the north Golden State after the Harbor becomes the Pasadena Freeway. (The sharp left-lane exit sneaks up on drivers at the end of a series of four tunnels.)

He thought about complaining to Caltrans. But he figured his suggestion would get lost in the huge state bureaucracy. Instead, Ankrom decided to take matters into his own hands by adding a simple “North 5” to an existing sign.

“It needed to be done,” he said from his downtown loft. “It’s not like it was something that was intentionally wrong.”

It didn’t hurt that his work is displayed before 150,000 people daily. On an average day, even the Louvre gets only one-tenth that many visitors. He also didn’t mind that his “guerrilla public service” made Caltrans look a bit foolish. “They are left with egg on their faces,” he said.

Ankrom had planned to wait until August–a year after the installation–to reveal his forgery via video at an art show. But a photographer friend leaked the story.

>From his tiny Brewery Art Complex loft, Ankrom said he tries to use his work
to comment on current trends. The Seattle native fabricates hatchets embedded with roses and produces neon-illuminated laser guns. To pay the bills, he is also a freelance sign maker.

The expertise he gained in both fields helped him pull off the perfect counterfeit job.

He closely studied existing freeway signs, matching color swatches and downloading specifications from the Federal Highway Administration’s Web site.

His biggest challenge was finding reflective buttons resembling those on Interstate signs–a dilemma finally resolved when he discovered a replica sold by a company in Tacoma, Wash.

The video he made of the entire process shows Ankrom snapping digital photos of existing Golden State Freeway signs and projecting the images onto paper, before tracing them onto a sheet of aluminum. He cut and painted the aluminum sign and even “aged” it with a layer of gray.

Ankrom affixed a contractor-style logo on the side of his pickup truck to add authenticity during the project. But closer examination might have raised suspicions. It read: Aesthetic De Construction.

He even printed up a bogus work order, just in case he was stopped by police.”I tried to make this airtight, because I didn’t want anything to go wrong,” he said.

In early August, Ankrom launched the final phase of his project. After friends were in place with video and still cameras, one gave the all-clear signal via walkie-talkie: “Move in rubber ducky.”

He made short work of the final installation–climbing up the sign and hanging over speeding traffic to install his addition. The main challenge was avoiding the razor wire on the way up.

Ankrom said he’s not surprised that Caltrans isn’t pressing charges, adding, “It wasn’t straight-out vandalism.”

For now, department officials say they will merely inspect the elements of Ankrom’s sign to make sure they are securely fastened. They may be replaced in a few months as part of a program to retrofit all freeway signs with new, highly reflective models.

Caltrans officials had discussed adding more directional signs, but the agency spokeswoman said she is not sure why the department never followed through.

Ankrom said he would like Caltrans to return the work. “If they want to keep it up there, that is fine too,” he said. “Hopefully it will help people out, which was the whole point.”

In fact, most of the US Government’s efforts have been focused on the assignment of blame. Like silly schoolchildren the President (Dick Cheney) and his sidekick George Bush have laid blame upon the lineup of usual suspects which conveniently avail themselves to every republican cause: liberals, democrats, and environmentalists.

But I, your humble list master, have identified the real culprits that are responsible for our current troubles: China.

The US Economy is dependent upon continuing expansion of the business world for growth. The business world depends on email. California, where most email is sent or received (according to the Bush administration) depends on reliable electricity to power the business world. California’s power grid used to rely on a surplus from Nevada which, thanks to the growth of Las Vegas, is no longer available. Las Vegas is crawling with Chinese travelers gambling, engaging in lecherous and debaucherous acts, and generally consuming power for frivolous purposes.

You see how it all ties together? It’s those sneaky Chinese undermining the US economy and enjoying our free cocktails and all-you-can-eat buffets while they’re at it.

They must be made to pay.

Look at all of those other devilish things they’ve been doing lately: they stole our airplane, for god’s sake, and they won’t give it back! They’ve been asserting their own territorial waters with naval exercises, scaring our cowering friends in Taiwan. They even won the contract to manufacture the green berets for our very own Green Berets, those sneaky bastards. Now they’re talking about a space program?

They can have only one intent and that is war.

So fine. Let’s give it to ’em. Let’s call the British (they’re always up for a good fight) and the Canadians — heck, let’s call the Australians — and get them to buy a bunch of our stuff from us to drop on good ol’ Shanghai.

We’ll call it “Operation Hong Kong POW!”. We’ll execute a long and expensive aerial bombing campaign, build and launch a quickly thrown-together system of laser satellites to protect us from incoming nukes, and we’ll ship 43,000 Hummers to our friends in Taiwan. It will take at least a year of solid warfare to beat our way up to an inconclusive and totally ineffective result which we can claim as victory.

Next we’ll force the UN to embargo all trade between China and the rest of the world. This means no giveaway rubber balls at Pizza Hut, no fortune cookies, no Mu-Shu Pork, no Rice… and none of those tasty little Mandarin Oranges that the Florida Orange Growers’ Association is always complaining about.

Really, it’s a win-win for everybody. Just think of the benefits!

Much as Desert Storm pulled the US Economy from the doldrums of the late 1980s and allowed oil prices to re-stabilize under US control as the Arab World cowered in the face of the evil and maniacal Sunni Muslims of Iraq; so a war with China could revitalize the aerospace and technology sectors, increase exports from American-owned Mexican sweat shops as Chinese exports are embargoed, and allow oil prices to re-stabilize under US control as the Arab World cowers in the face of the evil and maniacal Communists of China.

Apart from killing a few hundred thousand Chinese there’s not much wrong with this plan… And even so, what’s the big deal? Hey, they’ve proven they can procreate… It’d hardly take them any time at all to rebuild that sort of a scratch on their population.

Plus, getting rid of some of them increases the chances of the upcoming biography of Ronald Reagan knocking “The Little Red Book” off of the #2 spot on the all-time Best Sellers list.

Oh, wait. What? You say those guys in Las Vegas gambling and drinking are Japanese?

Well, OK… Bomb them too.

-Ian. (Honorary Redneck)

Tamiya took the targeting and kill confirmation systems that NATO uses in their ground warfare exercises and made it smaller. If you’ve never seen it before, it’s bullet-free carnage. Essentially the same as Laser Tag, reflectors mounted on each unit (soldiers, tanks, trucks, etc.) count hits from lasers connected to various weapons on each unit. Pressing “FIRE” shoots a beam at the target and, if you hit it, the vehicle is disabled to a degree appropriate to the size of your weapon.

Anyway, now you can run NATO tank battle exercises in your back yard.

-Ian.

—- http://www.tamiya.com/english/products/53447battle_system/battle_system.htm

Tamiya is proud to release Battle System-a revolution in tank-to-tank fighting. This system incorporates infrared light and realistic sound, eliminating the difficulty in judging, often found with other tank-to-tank games. Furthermore, infrared light is totally harmless and prevents damage to details of the tank body. The system is comprised of the GFS (Gun Fire Simulator) Unit and the Infrared LED Unit, for the respective detection and emission of infrared beams. A wide range of sound effects and actions are reproduced with Battle System including: damage blast, engine trouble sound, loss of speed, blast reaction, limited operation state, and finally inoperative state. Battle System provides a maximum shooting range of 30m and can be easily installed to your tank even after assembly and painting. Battle System lets you bring out the true roar of your 1/16 RC Tank!

“>http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd”> date-sent 978976266 flags 570686593 original-mailbox local:///Import/foib sender Ian Andrew Bell <hey [at] ianbell [dot] com> subject @F: Okay, I’m a Geek to foib [at] egroups [dot] com ]]> 3430