The New York Times has the article Lost Jet’s Path Seen as Altered via Computer.

The fact that the turn away from Beijing was programmed into the computer has reinforced the belief of investigators — first voiced by Malaysian officials — that the plane was deliberately diverted and that foul play was involved. It has also increased their focus on the plane’s captain and first officer.

This is all very interesting, but I have been waiting for someone to publish a large enough map for me to draw on.

Whoever publishes one of these maps always shows you two red arcs where the plane could have been when it lasted contacted a satellite.

I was thinking that one could be a lot more precise about where the plane could be if you drew a circle of how far it could have flown between the last time it was sighted by radar and the time it contacted the satellite.

I have drawn that circle.

The thick green arcs are from the circle I drew of how far the plane could have flown at full speed in the 6.5 hours between its last radar sighting and the time it last contacted the satellite. From that point, I drew an thin green circle for where it could have flown in the hour after the contact with the satellite.  Unless the plane slowed down from its full speed or its ground speed was slower or faster than its air speed due to winds, it would not have intersected the red arcs anyplace else other than where I estimated.

So I assume that the agencies that are searching for the plane have a heck of a better idea where it is than what they have said in public.  Of course, there are lots of assumptions in the arc that I drew, so there is no guarantee that the plane is located within the small green circle, but I bet it is likely.

The plane most likely would have flown over Afghanistan.  Are we expected to believe that our military operation in Afghanistan would not have noticed?

By my estimation the plane is probably in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kurgyzstan, or Tajikistan.  I wonder if Russia still has much influence in these countries?

I have added a green line to show the flight path from the last known radar contact (before Thailand reported that they have a radar contact) to the intersection. That helps to visualize what countries the plane might have flown over, and how likely the country would have had the radar to detect the overflight.

Also bear in mind that if the plane had not been flying at full speed, drawing concentric circles inside the big one I drew would give you the intersection with the satellite arc for these slower speeds. The radius from that point of intersection to where it could have flown in one hour at the slower speed would also be smaller.

Although, also consider that the last contact with military radar at the 1 hour and 34 minute mark must not have been a single blip. There was probably a flight path detected. Is it a coincidence that the line I drew to the intersection of the satellite detection is right through the section of ocean to which the search was shifted in the first week?

The Real News Network has the article Crimea Referendum: Self Determination or Big Power Manipulation? (1/2).

Professors Nicolai Petro & Tarik Cyril Amar give their reactions to Crimea voting overwhelmingly to join the Russian federation

What I like about this video is that it does admit of more ambiguity in the situation than TRNN’s previous offerings on this topic. This situation is definitely ambiguous if nothing else.

The Daily Kos has the article Bill Maher attacks Noah’s Ark story. It featuers the video below:

These ideas kind of makes some of us wonder. Knowing a Jehovah Witness or two, I know there is an answer to every question Bill Maher raises. They make as much sense to me as the claim that finding the preferences of 95% of the Crimean population is anti-democratic. Is this what is meant by “Don’t ask, don’t tell”? Why bother having a dictionary or WikiPedia if words don’t mean anything?

Naked Capitalism has the article Jeffrey Sommers/Michael Hudson: Russia, Crimea and the Consequences of NATO Policy.

Russia today has watched covert attempts from the US State Department to the National Endowment for Democracy and other NGOs to break up their country as part of what is becoming a triumphalist global pattern. This threatens to remake their “near abroad” into a neoliberal periphery. Today’s confrontation has taken on an existential character for Russia since it saw NATO’s moves toward Georgia as cutting too close to the bone. The prospects of NATO assimilating Ukraine (Kiev) represents a seizure of Russia’s “heart”: the very ancestral home where Russia was founded and on which it repelled the fascist invasion in the Great Patriotic War–as it had a millennium earlier against the German Crusading Knights pledged to exterminate the Russian-Greek Orthodox population.

Most Russians never forgave Gorbachev for the deal he made with NATO. Russian diplomats have stated clearly that Ukraine is a line that cannot be crossed regarding potential NATO expansion. It is as if foreign agents worked in Texas to mobilize a violent ethnic minority to rejoin Mexico and then place a hostile military alliance on the US border.

My purpose in publishing the links to these articles is not an effort to condone what Russia is doing.  Instead it is an attempt to understand what may be behind their policies.  Whatever actions we decide to take in response to Russian actions, they are unlikely to work if we do not understand the Russians.  An action we might think should encourage the Russians to change course in a direction we prefer, might just have the opposite effect if we do not understand Russian thinking.  In fact, I think this is exactly what is happening.  This is why I urge our own diplomats and leaders to try to understand what is happening from the other sides’ point of view.

The BBC has this article Crimea ballot paper: No option to keep things as they are.

James Reynolds shows us round a polling station in Simferopol, takes a closer look at one of the ballot papers, and explains the voting process.

“There’s no option on this ballot paper for people to keep things as they are,” he notes

What follows is my best attempt to quote the understanding of the two questions on the ballot as explained by the reporter in the video.

Do you want crimea to become part of the Russian Federation?

Do you want Crimea to get greater autonomy under the 1992 constitution

Thanks for Cedric Flower’s comment on my Facebook post about  my previous post, Crimea result makes “a mockery” of democracy says Hague.  The actual wording doesn’t seem to be quite as stark as Cedric said.  You can judge for yourself as to what you think of the voting procedure and the ballot wording.

It’s one thing to have an opinion as to whether or not you think this was the fairest way to vote on the subject, but deciding what we ought to do about that judgment is a wholly different matter.  At the very least, before taking any action on our judgment, we ought to know how this type of ballot wording would compare to other ballot wordings that have been used to get the Ukraine to the current political situation it is in. For instance what was the ballot wording for  the acceptance of the 1992 constitution?

There would still be the irony of taking action against a country based on what we thought of someone else’s democratic procedures.  Might we not be best served by letting the people themselves figure out what they want to do about the situation? (I can’t even figure out if the wording of the previous sentence makes any sense even though I invented that wording myself and it sounds kind of literary.)

The BBC has the story Crimea result makes “a mockery” of democracy says Hague.

The government says it rejects the result of Crimea’s referendum, which Foreign Secretary William Hague has denounced as a “mockery of proper democratic practice”.

A total of 95.5% of voters in Crimea supported joining Russia and leaving Ukraine, officials said.

Mr Hague said Russia must now face “economic and political consequences”.

A statement from Number 10 said that the UK did not “recognise” the referendum or its outcome.

There are similar stories coming from “Democracies” around the world including the USA.

To paraphrase Franklin Delano Roosevelt,  “This is a day that will live in irony.”  The gall of the Crimeans to undemocratically vote at over 95% to go with Russia.    They have not even satisfied our foreign definition of how they must implement their own democracy.  How undemocratic can that be?

Who is supposed to decide what is democratic in a democracy, the people involved, or some third party?

Yes, I know the situation may be somewhat more complex than that, but on the face of it, the world “democracies” seem to be somewhat idiotic to claim that the implementing the desires of an overwhelming majority expressed in a transparent ballot is undemocratic.  It was “transparent” in so far as the ballot boxes that I saw on TV were made out of transparently clear material as pointed out by the NBC reporter who showed the ballot box that was at the polling station where he filmed his report.

Remember that our Civil War was fought because the Southern action violated our Constitution, they shot first, and we decided that the rights of our citizens would be violated if we allowed it to go on.  We have no business telling other countries that they must abide by our rules that we use in our own country when their situation is so different from ours.  The boundaries we set up in our country were freely determined by us, as long as you discount the slaves and the native Americans (SARCASM, SARCASM).  There was no such self-determination in attaching the Crimea to the Ukraine.  Of course, I am not so sure that the Russians in Crimea got there by the free will of the people either.  That is reason in itself why we ought not be meddling in a situation so complex, that we do not even understand it the way the people who have to live with it do.

We might think that “we would never live with those conditions”, but it is not up to us to decide what conditions other people are willing to live with if they choose to do so.  We certainly don’t have the right to foment violence that kills those people because we don’t like the decision they made.

Now that I have installed a variant of Linux on my old computer, I could handle the format of the file on this tape.

The label says it is from 1983 and it is in TAR format.  This format is still a mainstay on Linux computers.  In this case, it is not a problem of software, but of hardware.  I wonder if there are still any mag tape readers for this kind of  tape. I also wonder if all the magnetized bits have faded into randomness.

If you are wondering who Elsie was, she was my μVax computer in my office at Digital Equipment Corporation.

Alternet has the story 7 Crazy (And Not So Crazy) Theories on What Happened to Flight 370.

As part of the terrorist hijack theory, some reports have suggested that terrorists hijacked the 100-ton plane and have hidden it somewhere intact with all radio devices turned off to avoid detection. The fact that the cell phones of passengers have rung, according to relatives, has only added fuel to that rumor.

They came close to the most worrisome theory possible, but then veered away from it, perhaps because of lack of imagination.

The worst case sceharion that I can imagine seems to even have escaped the thinking of the CIA, at least from what the CIA has said publicly.

Here it is, and I am sure I can’t be the only one to think of this. The plane has been hijacked by terrorist.  They are now setting it up for a mission even more shocking than the World Trade Center crashes.

The people who flew the planes into the World Trade Center had to depend on the fuel that was loaded in the plane to cause the collapse of the buildings.  Think of what people could load onto a plane if they had unlimited time and complete control of the plane.

Can they be loading the plane with tons of high explosives or even a nuclear bomb?  What about germ warfare?

What are they doing with the hundreds of passengers?  Are they going to use them as hostages by putting them back on the plane when it takes off for its mission?

What action will be taken when the plane is found to be in the air again?  We could shoot it down  to prevent it from completing its mission.  After that, we might find that it was not on a deadly mission at all.

Has a movie like this already come out, or will it be in theaters in a month or two?

To the certainty of death and taxes, we must add Murphy’s Law.

For those of you unfamiliar with that law it states, “If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong.”

Yesterday, I posted the article The Solution To The Windows-XP Conundrum. In that post, I noted  that Microsoft gives you two solutions to the problem of Windows-XP becoming unsupported in April. Both of Microsoft’s solutions wipe out your ability to run programs that you had on the old Windows-XP machine.  In that post, I also noted that there is another option that allows you to use another operating system, Linux, on your old machine while preserving the ability to run Windows-XP if you have to.

Being an extremely firm believer in Murphy’s Law, I chose the option that preserves Windows-XP.  I implemented that option yesterday instead of one of those Microsoft options.

Today, I received a letter from my sister asking me to find some old documents from 1993 and 1994.  I have some documents on file that are in Adobe FrameMaker format.  The only machine that I have that still has Adobe FrameMaker on it is the Windows-XP machine.  If I had wiped out the ability to run Windows-XP yesterday, I would not have been able to look at those files today.

You never need 20 year old documents until exactly the day after you eliminate the capability to read them.  Since I knew of that problem, I preserved my ability to read them.

I have two computers. The old one is running Windows-XP. Microsoft is discontinuing support for Windows-XP which accounts for about 30% of their installed base. Microsoft has two options for you. One is to just upgrade the operating system by buying either Windows 8 or Windows 7. You have to first check to see if those operating systems are compatible with your old hardware. After the upgrade, many of your old programs won’t run, but if you used the optional installation aid, at least your settings can be restored.

The other choice Microsoft offers you is to buy a new computer with the new software already on it, and just dispose of your old computer. You lose almost everything from your old computer unless you find some way to at least transfer the data from your old machine to the new one.

There is another alternative that Microsoft probably disparages. You can install a variant of Linux such as Ubuntu on your old machine.

You might ask if you will lose everything on your old machine if you install Ubuntu. Fortunately the answer is that you won’t lose anything. You won’t even lose what you would under Microsoft’s two options. The reason is that the default Ubuntu installation option is to turn your machine into a dual boot machine. This means you will be able to run Ubuntu or Windows-XP at any time on the old computer.

You won’t want to run Windows-XP if you can possibly avoid it because of the future vulnerability of that operating system after Microsoft stops fixing security problems in Windows-XP. However, if you find that there is something you absolutely need from the Windows-XP side, you can disconnect your machine from the internet for safety reasons, and then boot-up Windows-XP.

Prior to the discontinuance of Microsoft support for Windows-XP, you won’t have to disconnect your computer from the internet to retrieve something from the Windows-XP side of your machine.

Since Sharon is the one now using the old computer for browsing the internet, all I need to do is to get Firefox running under Ubuntu on the old machine.  Firefox even provides a facility to keep all of your Firefox installations in sync.  I am already using that to sync my Windows-7 machine, the Windows-XP machine, and my Samsung tablet.