Dictatorship emerging / FEMA, DHS, and flu pandemic / Finland, education, and future /…

Dictatorship emerging

According to New York Times, the president of USA has the right to detain US citizens indefinitely without court orders. I consider it very scare. I used to think, that such powers are not compatible with the principles of democratic Western societies, that such powers belong only to dictators. I see no reason to trust the government in this issue: they are bound to make mistakes and detain totally innocent persons. And even criminal should have right to get their case decided by a real court.

FEMA, DHS, and flu pandemic

After following the sad story of total incompetence of the current US administrations in dealing with the situation in New Orleans, I am really worried about the eventual flu pandemic. If the current administration has it way, no poor people will get any medical treatment during the pandemic. Most likely rich people will not get any either. This country is likely to be totally unprepared - anyway it is not the task of the government to defend the life of citizens, it seems. It is everyone for himself! Please, tell me where to buy some Tamiflu!

Finland, education, and future

The Finnish government has decided to see to it, that the quality of life, the standard of living, and the international competitiveness of Finland is going to deteriorate fast in the very near future. First, they cannot take care of the critical transportation infrastructure, and then they decide to cut 6000 jobs from the university system. I just cannot figure how they imagine Finland to compete, when the quality of education goes down. What do they think they are doing? How shortsighted can they be? The only thing Finland can do is to work smarter, not harder in the future. There is no way Finland can compete with China and other such countries in the amount or price of workforce. But we can well try to compete in cleverness, in general level of education. However, our current government is totally shortsighted. So sad! I think I need to go back to Finland and fix some things!

Daily crono

S gave me some good advice in the morning. I got very energetic and started to search material for my thesis. After some hard work I have now more than 20 good references on complexity. I have also skimmed through all of them. I think I will have something original to say on measuring the complexity of system architecture models. All existing studies are rather simple and mostly concern only SW architectures.
In addition, I had the regular Saturday lunch and walk with Kumar. We had lunch in Pho Pasteur and walked around Back Bay. Later, I took my bicycle to Community bicycle supply to get the back wheel trued.
Great day!

Alun perin julkaistu kuukausikoosteessa "Blogs from July to September 2005".