When uncertain, when in doubt...

I was the early interpreter today, and ran around quite a bit before returning to the hotel for lunch and a nap. This time, I enforced my rest period with the alarm on my Siemens cell phone, and was able to get up and resume my personal tasks. Yesterday, with no alarm, I was aroused from a 3-hour nap by a phone call at 6 pm from Viktor, who invited me up to his room to join him and a couple of other interpreters for a few drinks. In retrospect, despite the fact I like the guy, going upstairs was not a real good idea.

After returning to my room, I received a call on my radio asking if I was interested in joining some folks in the minibar downstairs for a friendly card game, which I accepted and at which, to my amazement, I did fairly well. Luck has a way of turning, don't you know.

The place was abuzz with the news that the Dniepr launch last night fizzled somewhere around 74 seconds into the flight, resulting in a loss of the launch vehicle and the 18 satellites on board. Fortunately, the rocket came down in an uninhabited part of Kazakhstan. That makes for two unsuccessful launches (one delayed, one fizzled) since we've arrived. Given the caliber of the folks we're working with, though, I am confident that the third time - our launch - will be a charm.

* * *For the paranoid out there, the news is that the 9th Circuit Court has ruled that searching the contents of your laptop when crossing the border into the US is fair game, requiring no suspicion or probable cause and no warrants or other bothersome paperwork. Aside from the "usual" privacy questions (questions that most, including the media, feel are unimportant, it seems), there is a tremendous potential discussion here regarding the "protection" of vital national economic interests, including those of software publishers, recording companies, etc..

As I understand it, the customs service of a country exists to implement policies that protect and benefit said country. For example, it makes sense to keep out unvetted plants and animals to protect native wildlife from disease or upsets to the ecology (as occurred, for example, when someone introduced a couple of rabbits to Australia back in the early days). The customs service also implements policy that protects local industry by making sure entering items have appropriate tariffs levied against them.

Aside from implementing what largely amount to economic policies, there are also some police functions involved, say, to make sure nobody is bringing in drugs or arms or excessive quantities of money, physical objects that are prohibited or regulated by law.

In all of this, the generally accepted rule of law has been that basically anything and everything you bring with you as you enter the country is subject to inspection without any need for a reason. And I suppose that makes a certain sense, as long as we're talking about intercepting contraband or keeping the soy crop safe.

But now, if you let your imagination run wild - or maybe even not so wild - just imagine what the ability to search laptops crossing the border could accomplish, especially if you could make the process reasonably fast, so that it could be applied to virtually everyone entering the country. The mind boggles.

Your hard disk could be scanned for "illegal" programs such as DeCSS, or for unlicensed copyrighted material. Installed software could be automatically hooked up to something like the Windows Genuine Advantage program, except applicable to a much broader range of products: imagine a WGA program on steroids.

Illegal, hacked versions of software could be detected and erased, and fines could be imposed the same way as if you had attempted to import, say, a box of Cuban stogies.

Any files whose content appears to be random data could flag the owner of the machine for an in-depth interview where a passphrase (or darned good reason) would have to be provided. Any and all files could be copied for later analysis, data mining, and - who knows - disclosure to private parties for any of a number of reasons. Your local law enforcement agency may be notified that, say, you have a program installed that will allow you to play poker online (which would be bad news, for example, for residents of Oregon, if memory serves, owing to a recent law banning online gambling, one outcome of which has been legal action against a site that merely published a link to an online gambling site).

I mean, there are really no limits, are there? Given enough budget, you could try to scrub every laptop passing into the country free of "improper" content (however you define "improper") . And if carrying out such searches is okay to do at the border today, then why not at your home tomorrow? I mean, if you've nothing to hide, you have nothing to be afraid of, right?

One of the notable aspects of Baikonur city is the fact the place is surrounded - or appears to be from the road we drive - by a concrete wall. The way in and out is guarded and people routinely submit their documents to the police when they stop. They also must get out and open their trunks for inspection. Police open doors and rummage under seats. Very low tech.

In one transaction, I noticed a man had prepared a folder with some paperwork - receipts undoubtedly - to show to the police when the trunk was opened, revealing some boxes. The cop carefully examined the documents and checked them against the contents of the trunk. At that moment, a little light went on in a dim recess of my mind, as I thought that such an approach to law enforcement may help explain why any purchase of significance is accompanied by a receipt that is stamped with the seal of the selling company.

In fact, during this most recent trip into town, it turned out the driver of the car immediately in front of our bus could not adequately explain something in his car, and he was directed to move his car over to the side for additional attention. So it turns out such a system is not unworkable, as it has been implemented here. Further, I would expect it might well have a deleterious effect on petty crime and drunk driving. I then wonder if a system like this is what is envisioned by the "I'm in favor of any measure as long as it increases security" crowd.

Anyway, if having The Powers That Be scan your hard drive at will doesn't raise your hackles, then maybe this will.

But I have been standing on this soapbox for too long. Time to put it away and continue with my outside work.

Cheers...

Catching up...

The latest wrinkle in movie piracy in Russia is the sale of DVDs containing something like 8-10 movies. I saw one being played the other day, and the video quality was pretty bad (some kind of extreme compression that degrades the image any time anything moves on the screen), not to mention the interpretation was laid on top of the English soundtrack, which made the whole thing unintelligble for the brief period I stopped to watch. The cost of these disks is somewhere around 180 rubles, or about $7, which works out to less than a buck a feature.

I picked up an interesting book in Moscow during the stopover en route here. It's a copy of Camus' L'étranger prepared using "Ilya Frank's Reading Method."

The essence of the method is the presentation of text a paragraph at a time with the entire text translated, clause by clause, with a spare set of notes on idioms at the end of each translated segment. The paragraph is then repeated, without the "interruptions."

The theory behind this presentation is that the reader never has to refer to a dictionary (unless, in my case, it's a word unknown to me in both French and Russian!). There's a certain logic about this that makes sense, as the ability to deduce the meanings of words from context alone only develops as does one's facility in reading. Over the past couple of weeks, reading snippets here and there, I've noticed it's become easier to read the original (and I've even begun to skip the Russian or to look at it to find out what the proper Russian word might be for an expression).

Speaking of French, my stock appears to have improved with the French team after my performance at the Gagarin museum. Stock aside, I've noticed over the past few days that my comprehension has taken a leap (meaning I don't have to ask people to repeat themselves as often), as has my ability to express myself. There are still some humps, though, as when today I didn't know the term for "insect bite" (piqûre) and "scratch" (gratter) when someone complained of a rash on his back.

On the mundane side of life, the bag for the day - besides having worked on assignment here in Baikonur - is about 2500 words, which represents work made up for yesterday's zero production, so that my average for the past three days is back where it ought to be, with a slight leg up on tomorrow's quota.

Time to get some shuteye.

Cheers...