to go live with the program. So welcome to CN Live, the resume coverage of Julian Assange's extradition hearing. I'm Joe Lawyer, the editor-in-chief of consortium News. It was a bad day for Julian Assange and his defense team at the Royal Courts of Justice in London. Two judges there sided with the United States to allow them to challenge findings on Julian Assange's mental health that led to his extradition being ejected by district judge the notes of the rates on January 4th. US said at that time that it would appeal. That was the Trump administration that made that decision to appeal. And here today, the lawyers in the courtroom for the United States are being directed by Department of Justice officials of the Biden administration, which is continuing their attempts to get Assange extradited to the United States. Now, while that January 4th decision was made seven months ago by Baraita to not extradite Assange, it took until July 5th for the high court to finally respond to that US application for appeal. And the US was granted leave for appeal on three of the five grounds that they had asked for, but crucially not on the health grounds. And that was the key issue that allowed Vanessa Baraita to lock the extradition of Julian Assange. The US asked for this hearing today to challenge that decision, that they were not allowed to appeal the health decision of Baraita. They specifically the US are seeking to throw out testimony by Professor Michael Koppelman, an expert on suicide, because they say the US that he concealed from Baraita some information that he should have revealed under his duty as an expert witness during the September 2020 extradition hearing. Baraita for her part in her ruling on January 4th agreed that Koppelman had concealed some information from her, but said that this information was understandable. It was understandable that he'd withheld that and that it was humanly understandable because of his desire to protect the interests and the safety of Stella Morris and the children that she's had with Julian Assange. We'll say more about that later. So the judges decided with the US today to allow the United States to challenge this health argument, which they had initially been denied. And the judge set to 27th of October and the 28th of October this year as the substantive hearing on Assange's extradition appeal by the United States. Now the US was represented by Claire Dobbin and Northern Irish barrister who appeared in the courtroom of September in that extradition hearing. She said that she started out by setting out and we're gonna hear more of this in the substantial hearing of course in October, but she already tried to undercut the idea that Assange has any mental health problems at all. She tried to say that he was able to negotiate his asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy and that he ran a chat show from there with Russia today. She didn't say RT, which is its current name. She made sure to say Russia today. He tried to help Snowden. He did help Snowden escape from Hong Kong and all of this proves she said that Assange is certainly not a man suffering from mental problems. Well, her argument is that Koppelman concealed this knowledge that he had at the time when he first testified in his first report to the extradition hearing that Julian Assange had had two children with Stella Morris. Now the US says they didn't know that and they only found out about that in a second report from Koppelman who argued that he sought legal advice from the Assange team in order to protect Stella Morris and the children and we'll get into that in a moment, what the threat was to them. Claire Dobbin said that the admission by Koppelman misses the mark, it doesn't get to the guts of why he was willing to subjugate his duty to the court to the interests of the Assange family who is willing to mislead in the first report to protect those interests. She said it was the US submission that Koppelman was willing to mislead Vanessa Barraza and signed the experts declaration of honesty when he ought not to have done. And Dobbin said that Barraza should have interrogated why she was being misled by Koppelman. But in her ruling on January 4th, Barraza wrote that she agreed that in fact, Koppelman did mislead her about concealing this information about Stella Morris and the children. But she said it was understandable given the predicament that Stella Morris was in and the children were in. She said it was a human decision to withhold that information. And she said Barraza that she found Koppelman to be an impartial witness in the end. But the US wants that testimony of Koppelman upon which the ruling not to extradite Assange was based. That and the conditions of US prisons, it was essentially the ruling of Koppelman's testimony was the strongest part of Barraza's decision not to extradite because of his high risk of suicide. Now, Dobbin says that saying it was human is inadequate. What does that mean? It should have led to more exacting examination of his evidence. How can it be said that he wasn't misleading on other points in his testimony? The overall impression is that the judge thought this was a relatively minor matter. It's the duty of expert witnesses that it does not mislead the court. Why is this important? Because the United States is saying that Assange told Koppelman at one point that he probably wouldn't commit suicide because of his children. So the United States not knowing about these other children or they knew that there were children they didn't know who the mother was. They didn't know when these children were born. It is in my view, and you'll hear from Fitzgerald, the defense attorney for Assange that it was in fact, could be seen very much as a minor issue. Fitzgerald said that Koppelman hadn't failed in his duty to the court, and that Barraza formulated that whether he was giving, that he was not giving an unbiased opinion in his expertise, that she fully accepted that he omitted to mention the relationship in the first report. She posed the question whether this is an objective and unbiased opinion, and Barraza says that she indeed, Koppelman did not fail to give an objective opinion. She wrote for a to that Koppelman's testimony was impartial. I was given no reason to doubt his evidence. Fitzgerald said that Barraza concluded that he was indeed an impartial and objective witness, and that Professor Koppelman explained he was very concerned that the exposure of the name of Julian Assange's partner would have an effect on the safety of the family. And he consulted with the defense whether it was appropriate to not disclose her name, and that was a decision that was deferred until after further advice was given to him. So he admits that he withheld that knowledge, the name of Stella Morris as the name of the partner and the mother of the children that she had with Assange, but that this was done to protect the safety of Stella Morris and that's where it's important to bring out the testimony of Gareth Pierce, that she referred to during the expedition here and Pierce told the court about how a US agency, probably the CIA, contracted with US, UC Global in Spain not only to spy on Assange in the embassy of Ecuador, but there was also a discussion of perhaps poisoning or kidnapping him and they actually stole some of the diapers or the nappies of the children to get the DNA to prove that it was in fact Assange's child. So given that knowledge that Koppelman had, that the defense had, it was completely understandable even in the eyes of Vanessa Barreza, that testimony of Koppelman, even when he excluded the name of Stella Morris was acceptable to protect her defense. Based on that, just the fact that he didn't name Stella Morris for these convincing reasons, convincing to Barreza, the US wants to throw out all of Koppelman's testimony which could collapse the health argument which would end the ban on extradition that Barreza put. So the High Court decided that the US could challenge the health issue. And this is why this was such a seriously bad day for Julian Assange because if this doesn't mean that there will win the US, it only means they're allowed to argue this obviously. So they still need to have this hearing on the 27th and 28th but the US will be able to try to chip away and undermine and defeat ultimately if they can. The testimony of Koppelman and the decision by Vanessa Barreza in the district court to not extradite Julian Assange. The judge, Holly Rood, said that Koppelman should have made it been aware that he could appeal to the court and he didn't decide to tell the court that he hadn't given the name of Stella Morris up. And he essentially said that there was an incorrect approach by Vanessa Barreza, the district judge and that she aired in the fact that she accepted Koppelman's behavior which was not in accordance with his duty. What Holly Rood did was read what every expert witness has to swear to that they will tell the truth. And yes, he did not tell the truth by cause of a very serious reason to protect the safety of Stella Morris and the children. And that apparently wasn't enough for the judge today and he allowed this argument to go forward. And again, that appeal will be on the 27 and 28 of October. Now something unusual happened at the end of the hearing. One other thing, Holly Rood would not allow the cross appeal. There's a lot of talk about cross appeal. That means that the defense would argue that even on the points of law that were not included as a reason for not extraditing the massage, that is all of the arguments about the Espionage Act and what it has done to journalism and whether journalism was being committed by Assange and why he was being charged with Espionage. On that Barreza agreed with the United States completely. So there had been talk amongst supporters of Assange that the defense would make a cross appeal so that even though that was not part of the final judgment, even though they'd lost basically that part of the judgment but won the case up to that point of not being extradited, they would try to challenge that. But Holly Rood said the judge today that he would not permit this. So if it goes to another court after the high court, which are most likely will, whichever side loses will probably appeal to the Supreme Court then that might come into play then. But at the very end, there was an open microphone and Fitzgerald was Assange's lawyer was very much aware of that but he wanted to speak to his client. They took Assange out of his room. We could see him on the screen, looking quite despondent, sitting on a couch watching these proceedings and seeing that the United States had won this battle today. Certainly there's a long way to go in this case but today the US did win and afterward Fitzgerald wanted to speak to Assange and we happen to hear it now. Of course, this is attorney Klein privilege. No one should listen in which is what the United States did with the Spanish company listened in to lawyers discussions with Assange but basically they said Fitzgerald told Assange basically tried to cheer him up saying that this is only one step and this road is a long way to go. At least he knows a lot of the US case was outlined today what their argument is gonna be and that'll help him to proceed to prepare his case. So this is how it ended today with Assange and his lawyers having to speak on an open mic with several journalists still online including me to listen to this conversation. It goes, it underscores how difficult it's been for his counsel to discuss with him his own case throughout this entire ordeal for Julian Assange. So to sum up, the United States has won a small step today they are being allowed to argue the health grounds on which the extradition to the United States of Julian Assange was denied on January 4th by district judge, Vanessa Baraitza. She had based on the fact of Assange's high risk of suicide and the conditions of US prisons. The US on July 5th was allowed to appeal but not allowed to appeal the health part of that decision. They appealed that decision and today they won they will be allowed to argue that. In court, the judge, the body language of the judge during the presentation where both sides indicated to me that he would side with the US now. Why do I say that? Because he was pretty much giving full attention to Claire Dobbin when she gave the US side of the story. But during Fitzgerald's presentation of Assange's case, why they should not argue the health issue in the appeal. He was tapping his pen and looking around the room and seemed very annoyed and distracted. Let's put it that way. And in fact, he clearly sided with the US today. And again, that doesn't mean any indication of how the hearing itself will take place but they have a broader argument now the United States, they can challenge compliments testimony, but it's only a two day hearing. And even the US side and the Assange side both wanted four days, it seemed like that's what they asked for. But this judge thought it could be done in Hollywood in two. So as Fitzgerald said, it's a lot to shoehorn into two days, especially if they're gonna have to go over the testimony again of both sides on the health issue. Of course the US had their own experts, psychiatrists. One of them was Nigel Blackwood and we republished on consortium news this morning an article about his ties to the US and British military. And he had said that Assange's mental disorder or suicidal feelings were manageable. And Lewis, the prosecutor went as far as saying Assange was a malingerer. So that whole issue of Assange's health will be reopened again in a two day hearing. And the other issue is the condition of US prisons and the US made assurances that they would not send him to Sam's, but they did put a caveat in there that in case Assange does something then they could put him in there. So it's not a very strong promise to believe in from the United States, but we are gonna look forward to bringing you coverage in October, on October 27th of the appeal of the extradition ruling, the appeal by the United States two days to determine whether the decision by Venetso Beres is upheld or not. In the meantime, of course, over the next couple of months we'll be bringing you continuous coverage of the Julian Assange case, both in print on consortium news website and on CN Live. So for CN Live and for my producer, Kathy Wogan, apologies again for the technical problems at the beginning. I'm signing off. This is Joe Laurier for consortium news. Good night.


How to solve these questions? Do you want to know some tips to solve physics questions easily? Understand the constraints, which directions can the objects move and which directions they can't. Draw the diagram. Visualization really helps in understanding the system. Convert words to equations. All the info in the equation can be written as a set of equations. Add to these equations by writing the basic equations of the chapter, like the force equation for NLM, torque equation for RBD or Faraday's law for reduction, for example. Make sure you have as many equations as unknowns, then solve the questions by eliminating the variables.


Okay, so welcome everybody to our Thursday community chat November 5th. Today we have brand new HR director or director of HR. Donna Ray can you Lee and joining your town manager Paul Bachman and I am Brianna. Normally we will then give Paula chance to give some updates and then we'll have Donna Ray introduce herself. Great. Thank you. Sorry to be late. So, the big news for us has been the university's reopening plans, which is good. We had a meeting with them this morning and they were, they will be presenting to the town council on Monday starting at 630. With a bevy of staff who will be there from all different aspects of the university so that will be a very important presentation that will again be recorded as Monday, November 9th at 630. For the university making presenting its plans and detail more detail about the reopening. And for the winter break and for in January when they seek to reopen. And then the other thing is just our case counts. We have we were in red we came we ticked down a little bit. You know, I think this is a type of thing that's going to yo yo up and down during the course of the next few weeks and we're not immune from what's going on in the rest of the state. So we expect to see some variability and the number of cases that we have. So that's it for the begin with. Thank you for those updates and I before I kick it off over to Donna Ray. I just want to remind those who are live when it comes to q amp a please use the q amp a function in zoom or raise your hand via zoom so we can hear from you live. We have questions that have already been submitted but we would like to hear from those who are in the room if you'd like. So Donna Ray, could you please go ahead and introduce yourself. Hi, I'm Donna Ray Keneally. I'm very happy to be here. I am the new director of HR and human resources. The skills and experience that bring me to the position are. I started my career in 1992 working at the pioneer health group which is a health insurance company. And I specialized in group and employee benefits and one of the plans that I made one of the group health plans I managed was the Western New England college then college health plan and then they were looking for a benefit specialist in 2003 and I went over to work for them in 2003 and I've grown in that area over the last 17 years and various positions in human resources. One of the attractions for that position for me was the tuition benefit. And so I was able to earn an associate's degree and a bachelor's degree in business and most recently, a Juris Doctor degree from the school of law. And I, to the extent possible I concentrated my coursework in employment law and labor law. And as of now to this minute I'm an adjunct faculty member teaching employee benefits at the law school. So those are some of the skills and things that I bring to the position here. So I was born and raised in Ludlow, Massachusetts, and I made a big move in 2009 over to Belcher town when I was remarried together with my husband Joe we have three beautiful children one is actually a student at UMass right down the street so I'm waiting to have lunch with him. We were waiting for a nice day and today is a very nice day so I hope to hear from him. And we also have three beautiful grandchildren the loves of my life. And so that's me on a personal level to I mean, just for my point, Donna Ray brings just relentless positive energy and a willingness to participate in things and I think it's jumping in with both feet she's only been here a few days but already taking on all kinds of things whether collective bargaining situations or working with looking to work with our diversity group or whatever and so it's just really great to have you here Donna Ray. Thank you I'm so happy to be here and I added this positive flower picture for my background so you know I was like I was looking at the background with free right before we you know came online and I said can I just put a picture there. It looks, it looks planned so you're like a two out of nine on room Raider I think she mobilized she grabbed some tax and was doing it for the viewer so real welcome. Thank you. So thank you I'm so happy to be here. Well I echo everything that Paul has said and just the short time you've been here I've jumped into a lot of our working groups and it's been great to have you on board. So we want to know what your first impressions are for working for the town even though you've been here for nine. Today is day nine eight complete days today's day nine. I also love my drive into work it's it's very nice. So my impression so far is very positive of course I've been able to so the town offer so many services and I've been able to meet with a lot of people from different departments the police department fire department the DPW libraries, different different departments with land use planning, and just very thoughtful people who wanted to take some time and really tell me what that you know the value that they their departments are adding to the town they they are very thoughtful and and seem to care a lot about what they do and how they do it and so it's been very interesting and now I'm looking forward to more tours of more more of our facilities, but I will say on my first day it was great. I met Winston, and it was perfect because of course first day of a new job after 17 years I was a little nervous and I got to meet the comfort puppy and and he was wonderful so very great first impressions. My first day was a snowstorm and town was closed so that was my first impression just to balance that with puppy. So the question we have here is, you know, as a human resources professional, what kind of approaches or initiatives are you thinking of introducing to the town of Amherst. Well, so first I want to learn everything about what you're already doing and I have to say some of the things that you're already doing are working and that's kind of reflected in the talent talented individuals I met that are, you know, leading a lot of your areas. I'm learning more about the culture here and then hopefully enhancing it is definitely a goal of mine I think workplace culture. I have interest in I have a background in it a little bit of human resources information technology I want to look at to make sure that, you know, we're providing the best services that are available to kind of, you know, all in the interest of serving the town and helping the employees to best serve the town. One of one of the, I think, I just joined the core equity group, and I'm very excited to know more about. And I think I have an understanding of the town's views but kind of to learn more about current practices and and I was just become, I just became a member of the government alliance on race and equity, and that's a national network for government workers and achieving racial equity and advancing opportunities for everyone working in government so I think that will be really helpful to me in terms of working for local government. So one of the first things I asked. We're talking she's like about her onboarding experience and Donna Ray said, it's a lot of paper here. Is there any way we can do something better than this I said that's your okay, you just assigned yourself the first task which is, look at our onboarding look at how we're doing things. And in the pandemic where we asked people to sign lots of things is there another way to do things electronically and so. So that's her first task is to sort of monitor how we've onboarded her and how can we do it better. And I think even in one week we learned to do things better with Emma dragon our new health director that we did with Donna Ray so. I think that's going to be interesting to see how you can bring your it background into some of the decisions and sort of. I mean, we're not going to get around that we need a lot of people to sign off on our, you know, sexual harassment policy sign off or acknowledge receipt of our it our technology use policy things like that but is there a better way than giving you a folder of paper that then yes there is. There's definitely a better way. Yes, we did that was our one of our first topics of conversation. And I think that approach is just really refreshing and welcome on when you come into an organization, you know we've done some work around making that process better for the public. But I love that perspective from especially a new hire, what a lot of us forget because you do it once. But yes there's so much room for growth there and I'm excited that Donna raise ready ready to roll on that. But but but I do think you know there were some things that I found that are, you know, standard the art top notch your application, your applicant management system you have some really wonderful things to so there's always room for improvement but you're in a good place to. That's a compliment to Brianna right there. Well actually me and the HR team that that work to implement that because they were they were pretty crucial so we're proud about that but that just means that we can expand on it. Now that Donna raise here so. Okay, so what do you see Donna Ray is the biggest challenges that the town faces in the human resources field right now whether that's coven related or, or otherwise. So and not, you know, I'm on day nine, so I'm not speaking really specifically to the town but just any organization this size, it's usually about promoting a positive workplace culture, especially you, you there are a lot of different areas we talked about the different buildings I've been to already so sometimes it's, you know, we're all on the same team we all have the same mission of you know of servicing the town, but sometimes just kind of having everyone together and promoting positive workplace culture and finding ways for constant communication and collaboration. I think is something that most organizations face challenges in so just promoting positive workplace culture so that's something I'm very interested in. I have not recognized any problems yet day nine but that's something I'll be looking at and there are so many things I see that are happening for example, you guys one already, or last year, an award for workplace wellness. So, and those are ways where you can show care and concern for your employees there's a lot of things that you can do to say hey we're really thankful that you're here and, and things like that. And I know you you dove right in and you now part of the wellness committee with myself and some others and that's been really great to have have you on board there, especially with your perspective from higher ed and some of the practices you can bring over from what's been working in that field. So we're really excited to expand upon that those wellness offerings that we can have for the town for town employees which then trickle down to how well they can serve, fill serve their function and serve the public so we're really excited right now to have you know years ago health insurance companies really didn't do much in terms of wellness and in terms of offering but you know a few years ago they started realizing that when you promote wellness that kind of, you know it helps everybody and so I think they, there's a lot of help from the insurance company that wasn't available before it's just now you got to know how to get them to give it to you so I can be helpful in that with you guys on that committee and I think maybe yoga in the comments and really cool stuff that we could do that would be great. What do you think employees need most right now. Maybe you can't say specifically an Amherst but just in general in light of the pandemic and just various current affairs going on. What's the focus. I think employers, you know so your, your best asset is your employees always that's my opinion and so you want to keep your employees engaged.  And so I think, and I see that here in town definitely there's people walking around with yellow shirts giving me masks there's all sorts of good stuff going on here but I think those are important things to help your employees to feel that your care and concern. I really like a movie star so I'm not on TV a lot so I hope I'm doing okay. You're doing great. You're doing great. If I do really well I'm going to make my grandkids watch tonight. Well after this we will share that link with you so you can kind of have a premiere. At home. And I think you'll get a chance. What were both Donna Ray, can you only and our new public health director Emma dragon who hopefully she'll be one of the next guests coming up in a community chat so you also get to meet with her. But they'll get to be introduced to staff on Friday which is really important and difficult when, like you mentioned Donna Ray some of us are remote or blended or hybrid so are you are you excited to get to connect with the staff on Friday even though it's going to be virtual. Definitely, definitely and I want to give the message that I am someone who spend my practice I'm, I want to, I'm very happy to be here and I want to build up credibility and know that they have a person that they can talk with and so I think any kind of introduction whether it's remote or in person is a good way to say hey I'm here and you know, please come to me if you need me. It's really a hard time of yours during the pandemic because we were talking yesterday about, you know, town hall would have potlucks potluck lunches at the drop of a hat almost in any any occasion we could think of flag day potluck brunch let's do it. We can't have those now. And it's, it's, I mean there's a lot of people still working in town hall but we're not sharing food we're creating social distancing and things like that so it's kind of. It's, it's, it's unfortunate that we're in that situation hopefully we get out of it sooner than later but that's kind of the informal contact that we always had with each other is sort of missing. And that's how you build relationships and you say, and people who might not otherwise have a reason to talk with about hopefully you don't have to talk to the parking enforcement officer but they stop by give it if it's food they're there. And so, so we miss those types of informal ways that we got together as a, as a, as a employee community, which was always very positive. But we're finding other ways and that's why we do these sort of group zoom calls with 80 hundred 80 or 100 employees on asking questions checking in on how everybody's doing. People are usually just really thrilled to see each other, you know, right. I miss you. Exactly. It's a chance to show off your best background or your best coffee mug to so there's that's right. There's all kinds of ways. This is my coffee mug for the day. Very nice. I want to remind the folks in the room we've got about 10 more 10 more minutes so if you do want to ask a question it does not have to be human resources related although you're welcome to ask questions about that. Feel free to raise your hand via zoom star nine from the phone or pop your q amp a your question into the q amp a box. We'd love to hear from you. One thing I will mention, while we wait quickly maybe for a couple questions to come in is the new, the town manager now has his an archive of his reports online on his web page. We also have created a new way for you to subscribe to those reports.  It's something that will encourage our employees to sign up for probably tomorrow but it's it's great for the public. You can get a text message or an email when the latest report has come out and look at all of the previous reports that Paul has prepared. And you can do that from Amherst m a dot gov slash town manager, or Amherst m a dot gov slash notify me to get access to all of our categories. So quick plug there. I don't see any hands in the room and at the at the moment so I would love to ask both of you if there's anything you didn't get asked yet or anything that you thought of while we were talking that you think is important to share. Yeah, so I would I'll take the liberty of jumping in. So, last weekend was Halloween we had 8080 registered parties that through our party registration system that the Amherst police department works with the university to do. There were no noise complaints from those the largest party I think was 12. There were noise complaints about other locations which we responded to and we give out citations that in a negative sense of the word for violation of the town bylaw. This week I think there are only two parties that have been registered so that's down I think people got partied out last weekend because of Halloween. I mean it was it was Halloween it was a, it was a, you know, the time was changing. You know, it was the full moon so we were anticipating the worst but it didn't turn out to be that bad actually, in terms of noise complaints and things like that. Going forward with the governor's order we will not be doing using the party party registration system with the university because we feel like that might encourage parties and that's not the message we want to be sending. There's only three weekends left in the two weekends actually left in the school year on their last day of classes November 20th. And so that's the Friday before Thanksgiving so they won't most people if they're on if they're in the area they tend to leave around that time anyway. I think we have survived the fall semester with the university we've learned a lot through the process and enough I think for the that the university felt comfortable moving forward. I think we're going to create a new level of concern for folks because it does limit the number of people who can be gathered indoors at to 10 is used but used to if you're not a member of the household you still have to socially distance yourselves from each other in in the house if you're in the house. We don't plan on knocking on doors and counting heads. The complaints of our COVID hotline has been really good at managing these things. So I think, you know, things keep changing we keep responding to those things. And so, I think that's sort of the biggest thing that impacts the public right now we've been interacting with our restaurant industry industry, the restaurants, as you know, we don't have that many. They want to know they were seeking clarification what does the governor's order mean doesn't mean we have to stop serving at 930 is 930 the last call tell us give us more guidance on how that works and so, you know, again, Amherst police department inspection services, our health director all working with the business community to provide clarification so everybody wants to do the right thing. They just want to know what are the rules for it and there isn't a lot of clarification coming from the state so we're trying to be in sync with the other other cities and towns that are around us. So, I mean, you know, as I'm talking I was realizing almost everything is about coven one way or the other, there's something about coven and it's just as dominating town operations, it seems like. That's absolutely and I will mention, you know, just as a general plug to get those local active case counts for Amherst you can visit our regular homepage Amherst may go where you can link out to our coven specific page. If you want to go directly there, it's Amherst coven 19.org. We have dates Monday through Friday with the current active case counts and we also reflect the cumulative cases for you to look at as well as other information that's pertinent, the governor, governor's orders and, and some various resources for folks related to coven. I think we're going to finish in one last thing. I know we can wrap we're going to wrap up some momentarily. So next Wednesday, November 11 is Veterans Day. And the town offices will be closed but we are, you know, I think town employees are are going to be going out to the veterans that we've identified in our community, and giving gift bags to folks. And we also, you know, the VFW in the American Legion are will be doing some very small ceremony because it can't be big it won't be advertised in advance they'll just do it as a to maintain the tradition of honoring the veterans who served the country. So, we aren't forgetting veterans day it's just we're not we just can't have large gatherings like we have had in the past. It's important to acknowledge that thank you Paul. Great. Any last parting words you want to leave for our viewers, they didn't get a chance to say yet. I just look forward to the meeting everybody and I'm very grateful to be here. That's it. Great that's perfect thank you thank you for joining us today I know it's only day nine. We usually give people a couple weeks to sell in but we figured you were up for the task so thank you for joining us today. Have a great day. And thank you all who are watching right now and from post, we will be back next Thursday at noon in the same the same link. Thank you all. Thank you. Bye bye.


Right, so I'm gonna get started, technical problems. So welcome to the infrastructure FDU for October. Today I'm gonna talk about focus and strategy, growing the infrastructure team, grouping center and design, which is something that we're doing at infrastructure to improve our communication, Q4OKRs and then looking to CI CD with an infrastructure and through engineering at large. Our focus and strategy continues to be a relentless focus on gitlab.com availability, except that as we head into the new quarter, we've added this observable. So we spent a lot of Q3, sexually duct-taking the environment to improve availability and address some blaring issues that we were having. And now on Q4, we're gonna focus on being able to have better visibility into the environment and to be able to better measure our availability and where we're running into issues. Our overall goal continues to be to get ready for mission critical customer workloads and that it really entails predictability when we're making changes in the environment. Lots of changes are on the infrastructure team. Amar joined us in August. Lots of us had a chance to meet him. So welcome Amar, we're super excited to have him on board. And then we're gonna be very, very busy in November onboarding new members in the infrastructure team. Three SREs have signed up and then a new DVRE will start sometime in October. But we're super excited to have them on board. Again, we're gonna be super busy in November onboarding but it's a great problem to have. I'm very excited. Also, we welcome Jose, who's been with us since very the last day of August, early September. He joined us as the engineer and manager for SAE. He's been ramping up and it has been working on Postgres and essentially managing the availability team. So welcome Jose. Three of the four people joining in November are reporting to Jose. So we'll lend him a hand with the onboarding process. I want to talk a little bit about blueprints and designs. One of the things we're trying to do is to over-communicate what we're working on and what we're thinking about infrastructure work. And so these are the two areas where we're focusing. We started this section in the infrastructure page called Blueprints. We do a quarterly update where we essentially try to set up the priorities and the work we're focusing on for the following quarter. And we also published some topics specific to flesh out specific things. So for instance, we recently put out one about CI CD. The URL here, you can find it in the infrastructure page of the handbook. We're also starting to produce design documents. So we're writing out our thinking process about the solutions that we're trying to implement to address specific problems or implement ideas. We want to get better at driving decisions methodically. A lot of this work was already happening on issues but we want to have the result of the conversations that we're having in issues as far as how we intend to solve problems in a more cohesive format. And we want to be able to frame some of the technical conversations that we're having about some issues. The biggest rival for this is that complexity in the environment is increasing as GitHub.com gets bigger. And some of the problems we're solving we're having to make a better estimate as to a little bit of a better estimate in terms of long-term effects for these solutions. So we're trying to be more disciplined around documenting these. Q4OKRs, we finished the process of Q4OKRs and we're essentially focused, again, as I mentioned, on observable availability. I'm not going to go through all of these because you can read them in the handbook. But I do want to highlight some of them because they follow from work that we did in Q3. Specifically, we continue to drive availability improvements in the database in terms of backup restore verification and replication because the database is a critical aspect of the infrastructure. And then we're getting better at managing the infrastructure queue. Also, we use DO2, do the GCP migration and do as an integral part of how we plan on doing DR for GitHub.com. And then we're trying to get better and we're working on getting better at essentially managing our workloads and being able, again, to get more predictable on the amount of work that we can take on. And then we have some specific projects that Andrew is working on in terms of alerting our budget dashboards. He's also going to be working on distributed tracing and then he had done some fantastic work to deal with DDoS attacks in July and we want to essentially take that to the next level and polish that tool because it ended up being very, very useful when we were under attack. Moving on, there are three access in which we're doing some of this work and you can see the fleshed out version of this in the handbook blueprint. Culturally, again, we want to adopt more disciplined engineering practices, get better at change management, predictability of changes in the environment and adopting design documents as a way to essentially produce the design work that we're doing on how we plan to make changes in the environment. And also we want to drive this cohesive identity for infrastructure. The teams in infrastructure are made up of SREs and BDREs and so we're not the SRE team or actually the infrastructure team and there's a number of functions inside this team. Working on workload, workflow, how we decide what we're going to be working on with implemented milestones for the team so that we have a two week split focus on the work that we have to tackle. You'll hear Dave and Jose sometimes when you approach them to say, we'll work on this on the next milestone and they prioritize that work. But once we enter the milestone, we really focus on that work. And then we want to start doing some reporting on that work as well. And functionally, finally, we have functional focus for the database storage and observability. I've already mentioned some of the work that's going on in the database. We also want to focus on the storage nodes because they really hold the true most valuable data I think that we have and we do have some work to do to protect that data a little better. And finally, observability. If we are flying blind, we really can't assess the state of the environment. So we're doing a fair amount of work on that as well. Finally, I want to talk about this initiative that has been discussed in engineering recently where we're doing a push to essentially move our development process towards CI-CD. The end goal is to allow auto DevOps to deploy to get that.com. And that's a long pole and a very ambitious goal, but it's achievable because our product supports it and we know that there are customers using this. So we should be able to do it as well. The first step in that goal is to adopt CI-CD in our development process. And that entails not just some technical solutions, but also a lot of changes that we need to drive across engineering. So there's been, again, a fair amount of discussion in engineering as to what do we need to do to get started here? How do we align the engineering departments to start moving towards this goal? It's a non-trivial problem, but we know we can get there. And part of what we need to do is to commit OKRs that are related to CI-CD and to reaching this objective. So still working on some of that. We did publish a blueprint on essentially what this problem entails and why we want to get there. So more coming up, hopefully, on the next FDU on progress on this area. And with that, this FDU is complete. I will take any questions. Let me make sure to add open the comments section. Yes, I will make the edits so that the links are clickable. I don't know why Googlebot didn't make them, but I will take care of that. Yes, lots of Germany. Very excited. The Berlin meetup will be growing. Actually, infrastructure already had a few members in Berlin, and I am looking forward to traveling up to Berlin to meet everyone there. I've actually been trying to make it to... I know there are several, I guess, or co-working Fridays that I would love to attend. Just scheduling has been difficult, but I now have a great excuse to go to Berlin. We do every Thursday. Yes, I did find the dates. Just scheduling has been crazy, but I will make it one way or another. I love Berlin. Anyway, if there are no more comments or questions, as always, I'm available on Slack. The whole team is in Slack, so please always feel free to reach out with suggestions, comments, or just a coffee call. Thank you so very much. Have a good one.


I want to say something about protests. There was a question about objectivists protesting in the street, but also there was a question raised about the protest in Charlottesville. And I think it's an important and interesting question, and I'm going to bring up about the appropriateness of protest period and of whether protests are protected by free speech. And so I think when I did my Charlottesville show a couple of weeks ago, I even said during the show, I said something like, well, you know, the neo-Nazis have a right to protest, they have a right to free speech, right? And I'll defend their right for speech, right? I said something like that. And then Ankar Gandhi said, that's wrong, Iran. That's not Iran's view. And of course, Ankar's almost always right. And he was right here. Let me just find, I'm just looking for Iran's. And I was wrong. So that happens. So here's, let me find the quote, free speech. It's not there. All right, I can't find it. So it was in the lexicon and it's from a letter she wrote. It used to be here. Okay, but this is the point. Marching, demonstrating, holding up signs, swinging those signs. None of that is speech. None of that is speech. Speech is speech. Words coming out of your mouth. Letters written down in a book. It is not marching. It is not action. There is a distinct and important fundamental difference between action and speech. And in the law, there's a distinction between action and speech, right? The definition of speech has been expanded over time. So now, I don't know, in order to protect the right of strippers to strip in a strip joint, instead of just saying, well, people have a right because it's not, you know, they have a right to pursue their values and whether we think their rational values are not, we're going to protect that right. And I'm not going to get into the whole argument, but no, then we have to say, because there's a no understanding of individual rights and what they mean, but we still want to protect the right of a strip at the strip. They kind of get that that's the state shouldn't be stopping strippers from stripping. Then they say stripping is a form of expression and therefore, under the protection of free speech, we're going to protect stripping. I mean, that's nuts. That's insane. And marching demonstrating is an action. It's not speech and you don't have a right to do it.  I mean, we shut down everything. So as it is, you need a license. But who gives the license? Well, the government does. Why does it give licenses to some and not others? What if everybody wants a license on the same day in the same place? How does the government get to decide who should march and who shouldn't march? Now the government is turning it into speech because they're not allowing some people to express through speech in the demonstration what they believe and what they don't believe. You cannot have a right to obstruct traffic. You cannot have a right to shut down a park. You cannot have a right to interfere with my ability to go from point A to point B. Now, a lot of this has to do with the fact that there's public property. And, you know, people say it's public property. Therefore, it's, it's, you know, people should have a right to do to speak on public property. No, public property to the extent that it's there. We have to tolerate it. It shouldn't be there. It should be all private. But to extent that it's there, it's to facilitate individuals movement from point A to point B from this part of town to that part of town. Not to facilitate demonstrations. That's not the purpose of the property. You want to have a demonstration. Rent a hall. Buy a plot of land. Rent a stadium. So, you can do it on your property. This is the right to assemble. You don't have a right to assemble on private property. This is the right to assembly, which is in the, in the Constitution. That is the right to assemble on your property. Just like you have a right to speak on your radio station or radio station. Invited you to speak on a radio station. You least time to speak on. But you can't just demonstrate on public fairways, block traffic, disrupt people's lives. And as such, I don't think anybody should be allowed to march in streets and parks. So anyway, and, and therefore I don't see how it makes sense for objectives to do it. Now I have other objections to objectives during demonstrations. I just don't see the point. I think it's bad marketing. I think it's too soon. Too few of us. So even if, if you can legitimately do it, let's do a big rally at the, like, like one of Donald Trump's rallies and 35 people show up. Right. I mean, if you're going to do a big rally in on private property to make a point, then you've got to, you know, make a point. And the only way to make a point is if you can be on numbers and do numbers reflect truth in any way, the numbers are numbers. They're meaningful. It could be a PR thing. It could be a PR thing. Yeah. I mean, tea party protests with demonstrations to the extent that they went into the streets, they blocked traffic. You could make the case. The demonstrations against the government in places like Washington DC are okay. Or in state capitals on a state issue are okay. In a sense, if you think about the mall in Washington DC, it's almost built for that. Right.  We did that in the big tea party demonstration in DC in 2009, where I was I was one of the speakers. So again, I don't think you have the right to demonstrate. I don't think people should be demonstrating. I don't think objectively should be demonstrating. I don't think the fundamental activity that is going to generate an objective is revolution is demonstration. I think the fundamental activity is education, education, education. How we educate, what we used to educate. You don't educate through sound bites. You do marketing. You don't educate through demonstrations. You don't educate through numbers. You have to make an argument. You write books. You write articles. You give speeches. You give talks. You, yeah, you do some social media, but the social media is primarily to get people to your talks and your books and your, and your intellectual content. We are an intellectual movement. Now, when the day comes when we have to have a physical revolution, when we have to take up arms against the government, then yeah, then you take up arms against the government and try stopping us. But that's not demonstration. And that's not there. So, you know, so I ran road about this when the Nazis wanted to march in in Skopje. And in the end, she came, her point was this, you shouldn't allow demonstrations. If you allow demonstrations, you have to allow the Nazis to demonstrate.  People you don't like to demonstrate as well. You can't discriminate once you allow it. So, so I think that once we allow demonstrations, and we do, then, you know, we should allow the Nazis to demonstrate as well. But the whole idea, I mean, think of the police. This is not what the police should be doing. This is a point Ankar emphasized to me, and I think he's absolutely right. This is not activity that police should be doing.  That's not their job. Again, the Nazis have a right to free speech on their private property in their radio shows, but they don't have a right to force themselves into my face when I'm going around shopping because it happens to be a public road. So think of the position you place the police in, and the police are being criticized, and I criticize the police. And I think you have to, because once you allow demonstrations, it's a police job to keep the peace. But now they have to defend Antifa. They have to defend Nazis. I mean, that's a horrible position to put police in. I love the police. And I don't want to put them in positions where they have to do this, like the drug war. You don't want to put, you know, you don't want to put police in a position where they are forced to enforce irrational laws, because only bad things are going to happen. And this is the case, this is the case in, now, it's true. Bookly, it's semi-private property. Bookly gets to decide what to do on its property. Assume it was a private university. They can allow demonstrations on private property. But then they have to be liable for the outcome, and they have to police it properly. And they have to be responsible. So it's campus police has to be engaged. So on-call enlightened me, and I wanted to enlighten you. I'm against protests. And suddenly, I'm against objectivist protests, even though I have to admit I participated in one, which was the Ilya protests. So at the end of the day, I just don't think they do much good. And again, the phenomena of protest is a phenomena of obstruction. It's a phenomena of rights violation. You know, you're violating my rights by blocking my ability to pass through, to go about my daily business. The quote about the Nazis is in, I think, the column. They end in column or it's in a letter. But it used to be in the lexicon, but for some reason right now it's not in the lexicon. I don't know how that happened. But it was in the lexicon. Let's shift topics. Let me take this question from Clifton. I am mostly objectivist, but is it okay to believe in a higher power? God, a non-interventionist God, kind of like deism. I was raised a milk toast presbyterian, not evangelical. So a moderate belief in divinity, but not an act of divinity. You were raised Jewish. So how do you reconcile your childhood religion with objectivism? I ask this in good faith and pondering. So look, you're asking me if it's okay to believe? Yeah, I mean, you have to answer that question on me. It's not compatible with objectivism. You cannot believe in a divinity and have a completely integrated, completely committed view of objectivism. Because objectivism rejects faith. It rejects that which there is no evidence for. And God can only be believed in through faith. There is no evidence for God. There certainly is no proof for God, but there's not even evidence for God. There's nothing. It requires sheer, blind faith. So we are advocates for reason. You can't reason God because, again, there's no evidence. Reason requires evidence. So to be an objectivist, fully integrated, fully committed with a complete understanding, you have to abandon religion in all its forms, even its deist form. Now, having said that, I still think you can hold a lot of good things from objectivism and still believe in God. And I know a lot of people who do. Again, I don't think it's right. I don't think it's good. I don't think it's objectivist, but it's better than nothing, right? It's better than just being religious. So whatever you can take from objectivism, whatever you can integrate from objectivism, whatever you can understand in objectivism, and if emotionally you can't give up on God or whatever, right? It's still going to make your life better at the margin. It's still going to make you better. Now, I think at some point you're going to have to resolve the contradiction. But I know a lot of people who sign the emails to me Christian objectivist. Now, I think that's a contradiction in terms that I don't think you can be a Christian objectivist. But I'd rather there be some people out there in the world who are Christian objectivists than everybody be a Christian Christian. That is a little bit of objectivism can go a long way. And partially is your kids are going to be more open to objectivism because your view of religion is going to be more mild and less significant and you're going to teach them more positive values from objectivism. So that's my view. But it's not. You cannot integrate God into objectivism as a system of philosophy where everything is integrated into everything else. And you're putting something in that is not integratable. So here's a question. So here's a question. Somebody I know from swing dancing has turned out to be not just a communist but a Stalin apologist. He once said the gulags I assume deserve the kulaks. The kulaks deserved worse. What if anything should I do? It's painful to even see him a dancer. But I don't want to give up this activity I love. I mean, I don't think you should give up the activity, but I think you should stay away from him. And you should shun him. And you should make it known to him and to anybody else you interact with that you shun him. You should just have nothing to do with a person like that. That's so evil. That's such an evasion.  Yeah, you can't have any kind of relationship with a person like that, in my view. Just one more point to Clifton's issue about my Judaism.  But I became an atheist at a very young age, somewhere between six and seven. I just, you know, in a sense woke up one morning and said, this is nonsense. And I'm not going to believe this anymore. And that was it. And it was gone. And never. I mean, really, honestly, because I've told you when I make mistakes and I acknowledge my errors and my ignorance and my stuff. Never have I questioned that fact. So never has religion ever been tempting in any kind of way for me. So that that is just I don't get it. I don't get the need for it. I don't get how you can integrate it with how you can be. I can be rational in so much of your life and yet need this in some way. It's just, it's just, I don't get it. Right. Psychologically, philosophically, I just don't understand it. Okay, let's look for some questions here. If somebody is able-bodied, young, depressed person, able-bodied, young, depressed, not in prison, determined, ill. Is it right to use force to restrain this person if he attempts suicide? Up to a point. Right. Up to a point. So because so many people change their mind about suicide and suicide is obviously irreversible in a way that nothing else in life is. I think just like you would use force on somebody.  You're using force on him, but that's not initiation of force. I would do the same thing to prevent a person from committing suicide the first time. But if somebody is committed to it, if somebody really wants to commit suicide, I would not stop them the second time. And I think people have a right to commit suicide. But certainly if you're an innocent bystander and somebody looks like to talk him out of it, but even use force to prevent him once. But if this is the second time somebody is really interested in ending their life, certainly you shouldn't prevent them from doing it. And yeah, you know, and I don't know if somebody said that 100% of survivors jumping off Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco say they regretted it on the way down. I didn't know anybody survived that jump or the cold water once they got down at the down into the ocean. Wow, to survive that jump. That's that's something is academia a feasible first career aspiration for young driven students. I definitely think it's feasible. You know, and I think it's desirable if you're so inclined. But you have to understand the work it entails the price that it takes on your psychology on your on your life on, you know, the kind of experiences you have. And you have to be willing to put up with it and you have to be willing to put up with a lot of irrationality, a lot of colleagues that are that are, you know, adherence to philosophies that you will abhor.  So it's hard. It's hard. But once you get 10 you can do what you want. And, and I think you'll learn a lot and if you go into it with the right attitude, then I think you have an opportunity really learn a lot and actually find colleagues who are decent. Find the things that you can actually learn, not focus on the negatives but focus on the positives and I think you can. I think you can benefit from it tremendously. So I don't know the people who go into academia that I know I don't think regretted it. And so I would ask this question to Greg Salamieri and Ben Bear and uncle God say, you know, and they're all doing a lot, a lot with what they studied, right? They might not be tenured track faculty members at some top university, but they're doing a lot with the knowledge that they gained and the skills that they gained by going through academia and you do learn things. You learn things from studying philosophers you don't agree with you have to study philosophers, you don't agree with if you're going to study philosophy. And confronting colleagues who you disagree with. So generally, absolutely, I think it's a it's a legitimate first career and and a valid first career and a possible first career and potentially an enjoy. I mean, I was an academic and it was it was tough.   But you know, I got through it. And at the end of the day, you know, but in any job in any profession, you have to tolerate people you don't like. And sometimes your boss is a joke. So OK, you said we should declare war on radical Islamic totalitarianism.  No, you don't declare war on a on somebody internally. This is not a police. This is not a military issue. This is a police issue. It's criminal to incite for violence. It's criminal to organize and and plan violent activities. And the police should take these threats seriously and, you know, infiltrate some of these movements and monitor them and do what it does. Like with other potentially violent things like I don't know, organized crime and other things. But this is a police action that, you know, internally you don't declare war. So if all the Muslims lived in the United States, then it wouldn't be a war with them. It would be a police action against those who are. I mean, unless there's a revolution and then and then the army gets involved, but it's not a revolution. These are just and it's a small group at this point. And the same is true on the left. These are relatively the ones that are using violence are relatively small groups. They have large groups of people who are apologists for them, particularly on the left. And unfortunately, on the right on the on the right, it's people in power, but that are often apologists for them. But it's a small group that is actually violent and the police can handle them. And it's not. I don't see it as a problem. I think the police are probably doing a lot. They might now need to do more. But I'm sure that I'm sure the police and the FBI are monitoring racist websites and alt-right chat groups and going to their meetings and collecting names and doing things like that. That's what these people do, right? What extent should websites that people that people like Dylan Roof read be censored or prosecuted unless they explicitly inciting for violence? They have free speech.  We have a communist, this guy from the dancing group who's a communist. The same that we have people who are Nazis or fascists. As long as they're not inciting for violence or committing violence, they have a right to hold and distribute those ideas. And, you know, some ideas I think are going to be regulated, if you will, by Google and YouTube. You might not like it when they do it because they might choose our ideas as well. But as long as they're going after Nazis, I don't have any problem with that. I think it's completely legitimate for a private company to say certain ideas are unacceptable to us. And as long as that's consistent with their shareholders, that's fine. And the idea that some people have, that the government should step in and force YouTube to monetize my videos is ridiculous.  It's not even YouTube's decision. It's the advertiser's decision. Now you want to tell advertisers they have to advertise on shows they disagree with? Really? Is that what we want to go in America? So I find people taking positions, people who call themselves objective, are taking positions that I find very strange. We should regulate these. We should nationalize them. We should force them to allow all points of view. I mean, I shouldn't say that completely because I, in Rand, believed that in radio and television at the time, there was legitimacy to having equal because everything was such a mess, right? I actually don't see the need today for that. If YouTube and Google don't allow me, then I will find venture capitalists to fund a competitor that will give us a voice. These are not the things that concern me.  And I would do a lot more to ban Islamists. I would do a lot more to ban Islamists to ban the Islamic totalitarians. I would do a lot more to ban them. Not, again, not from the government as much as from these private entities. If the government declared war, then it could do a lot of things. War on the Islamists, where it's organized, it's funded, there's governments behind it. There's no government behind the neo-Nazis in America or behind the KKK. There's no way to go to war against. You don't actually go to war against an ideology. You go to war against its representatives. And war is against countries. So you have to go to war with Saudi Arabia and Iran. You have to go to war against the representatives of this ideology. So you can't go to war against an ideology internal to your own country. Okay, let me just take these two last two questions.  People like those. Anthem was my first novel of Ayn Rand and I read at a young age. It is such a powerful short novel. Why is it not promoted? More often compared to Adler Shrugged and Founded. That's just not true. I mean, Anthem is heavily promoted. Primarily the young adults, primarily the high school kids. It's our biggest essay contest by far is the Anthem essay contest. We distribute more Anthem books. The high school teachers to teach through our books to teachers program than Fountain and Adler Shrugged combined. Now, we don't talk a lot about Anthem and we don't. Oh, by the way, there's a whole course on Anthem on ALI campus. So all of that is evidence that we actually emphasize Anthem a lot. I will say this. Anthem is less philosophical. There's this philosophical content in it. There's still a lot, but there's less. As compared to Adler Shrugged suddenly and even to the Fountain hit. Okay, last one. I've forgotten what or if Rand said anything specific about the demarcation between philosophy and science. She did. I mean, but I can't, but I'm not going to tell you exactly what it is. Let me find the answer to that and get back to you. But yeah, she absolutely did and there is a clear demarcation. And then there's of course the physical sciences and the human sciences. But philosophy is the science that studies the fundamentals. Studies the fundamentals that make science possible. The fundamentals that make everything else possible. So it asks the question of what is knowledge? Until you answer the question of what is knowledge, you can't do science. So philosophy studies the questions that needs to be answered so you can do the sciences across the room. But she had a, there is a better answer to that and a finer answer to that. Just a couple of recommendations. I'm going to make this quick. This has been a long session. I just noticed that in Orange County there's a play being put on and I don't know if this particular plays any good. This particular performance of it is any good. I'm going to try and go see it in October. But the play is excellent and the movie based on the play is brilliant. And it's called 12 Angry Men. It's an old movie. There are two versions. There are two versions. There's a newer version and an old movie. Definitely watch the old version. The version made in the 50s with Henry Fonda.  But Henry Fonda is in it. And if you want a movie about epistemology, if you want a movie about epistemology, this is it. I mean, it's about what is evidence? What is proof? How do we know what we know? What is certainty? How do we achieve certainty? How do you convince somebody else that they're wrong? Fascinating. And it integrates that with psychology because the movie is a jury. It's a play, really, because it's all filmed in one room. And it's a jury. And I think it's a motor case. And the kid is, I think, a Hispanic kid. And, yeah, it's... Greg mentions on the chat, Greg Salimieri mentions that he uses this movie to teach intro philosophy classes. And I can see why. I can see why. This is a great movie to show the importance of epistemology and the importance of evidence and facts and knowledge. But it's also really good psychologically. So what you have is a motor case. And the whole movie is in the courtroom, not in the courtroom, in the jury room. 12 angry men, 12 men, right? 12 men. And the first vote, I think, when they have to vote on innocence and guilty, 11 voting guilty and one innocent. And the guy who votes innocent kind of says, look, I'm not convincing he's innocent. But I think we should discuss it. I think we should think about it. I don't think we should... We shouldn't just jump to conclusions here. Let's think about it. Everybody else is convinced. They're absolutely convinced. Let's just do it. We're all convinced we want to get home. And each one has a different personality. And each one has a different psychology. And each one relates to the facts in a different way. So you can get their particular, if you will, psychopistemology. And the Henry Fonda character says, wait a minute. I'm not sure the kid is guilty. I'm not sure he's not. But I want to think about this. And I want to really look at the evidence. And I want us to discuss it. And I want it to integrate it. And I want to really think it through. And it's really terrific. And the conflicts and how the people come around to different positions. And how they argue and convince each other and so on. And how...  And maybe not even... Some of the... I think one of them is a racist, but others are more biased. So the kid's Hispanic. So that influences them somewhat. It's really, really, really a good drama. It's... Yeah, I'm really glad Greg teaches it in Intro to Philosophy class. It just fits perfectly. I used to use movies in some of my finance classes. I'll tell you which ones one day. There's another... There are very few movies. Very few movies whose theme is epistemological. Very few movies whose theme is epistemological. That's one. The only other one I can think of right now is The Miracle Worker. Which is one of my top five movies or top ten movies or whatever of all time. It's just a brilliant movie in so many respects because it's wonderful, beautifully acted. And it deals with what is... Concept formations, what is knowledge? How do we attain knowledge? The role of the senses. And it's so emotionally satisfying but wrenching. And I don't know if you know the story, but it's about a girl who can't see and can't hear. So she doesn't have the sense of sight or the sense of hearing. And she's formed really no concepts and she acts like an animal. And she has no ideas and she can't really get into it in any kind of sense. And then she gets a teacher, it's based on the true story. And on a play. And she gets a teacher and actually... I don't know, I heard an interview with the actress who plays the kid.  I just heard an interview with her which was fascinating because she also played her on stage. And she won the Oscar as a child actress. She won the Oscar for it. And it's a real story of Ellen Keller and it's just a terrific story. And it's a beautiful movie and the acting is just amazing. So one of my favorite movies. Those two are my favorite kind of epistemological movies. I think Inherit the Wind is also deals with epistemology but it deals more with the ridiculous nature of religion. I don't know, I just don't get the same... I love the movie. One of my favorites. One of my top movies. But it just doesn't jump to me as an epistemological movie in the same way as Miracle Work and 12 Agri Men do. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I should see it again. So I'd recommend those two. And I know some of you really like my classical music recommendations. I know a lot of you don't like it. I know that a lot of you don't like these positive value segments because a lot of you drop off on blog talking. You can tell when people drop off and everybody drops off once I start talking about this. So I thought I'd just recommend a composer who I think is pretty well known. But if you're just getting into classical music, then Brahms. Brahms is an amazing composer. A romantic composer. Just everything he wrote is good. Everything. Everything he wrote is good. And some of what he wrote is sublime. It's just out of this world. And he saw I would recommend his two piano concertos piano concerto one and two. I would recommend his violin concerto. He's got a double concerto for I can't show violin and cello something like that. And then he has a symphony is a fantastic my favorite symphony of his. If you really want to get into a real romantic symphony gets swept away is his fourth symphony. Symphony number four only wrote four. So his fourth but all of them are good. And his first is probably his most famous. My favorite is his fourth. I also love his chamber music. His chamber music is magnificent. His trios piano trios are just sublime is his sonatas for piano and violin. Amazing. So so Brahms, you know, expand your horizons. We've done Tchaikovsky. We've done Rachmaninoff Brahms. There's a lot. There's a lot of composers. I would just say this almost anything written in the 19th century, particularly middle. Right. Towards, you know, I don't know from 1820. From from Beethoven from Beethoven on up until, I don't know, Mahler, Wagner. So so Mahler is hard. I still like Mahler, but it's hard. Wagner is hard. I still like Wagner, but he's hard. But anything before Mahler and Wagner Brahms is in it. Brahms is anything between Beethoven and Brahms. Everything between Beethoven and Brahms is amazing. Anything between Beethoven and Brahms is enjoyable. I mean, there's just amazing music. And then in the late 19th century, early 20th century, there's a lot of really, really good stuff. A lot of really, really good, good music as well. But there you have to, there you're running a risk. You can't just automatically listen to something because it could be awful. And sometimes, and sometimes it is. But anything between Beethoven and Brahms is going to be enjoyable. Anything. Mark Twain once said, according to Josh points out, Mark Twain once said that Wagner is better than it sounds. And there's a sense in which that's, I mean, that's a pun, right? Sounds better. Whatever, right? Because Wagner is sound. It is better than it sounds. It better than it sounds the first time. There's certain composers that you have to listen to more than once to gain appreciation for. Wagner is one of them. Mahler is another one of them. You have to listen many times. The melodies are very complex and they're just hard to follow. But they are truly beautiful. A lot of their music is fantastic and sublime. All right. Thanks, everybody. I hope you enjoyed some of my ramblings on some of these issues. If I said anything wrong, then please don't blame I in Rand. It's all my fault. And those of you who know more than me, if I said anything wrong, please correct me. All right. Have a great day. Have a great week. I am off to Chicago tomorrow. And then actually the next, let me just say this, the next Living Objectivism podcast or show will be from Europe. So I will be leaving for Europe on Sunday and spending three weeks in Europe. So I expect to do shows from wonderful places like Tbilisi, Baku. That will be an interesting one. Baku, Paris, maybe, yeah, definitely Vienna, Copenhagen, and Kiev. So that'll be the list of my shows. And many of those will be Living Objectivism. And I'll tell you a little bit of my travels, what's going on, what I'm doing. I'm not sure those will be on Facebook. I might have to rely there on Blog Talk Radio. I don't want to see, but hopefully we'll do them with both platforms. All right. Thank you all. Thanks all for listening. Thanks for following me. Follow me on Twitter. Follow me on Facebook and share, share, share. The only thing that counts on social media is sharing. If you want the show to grow on social media and everywhere else, please share it. All right. Good night, everybody. I will talk to you soon.


Welcome everybody Today I'm going to talk about softcom, which is a collection of solutions and technologies That will drive the future of telecom in the next ten years So the title of the presentation is to reshape the future way of telco industry based on open stack I guess today every business is becoming a digital business Customer engagement models are changing all the time. We're now looking at more customer experience centric As opposed to KPI based in the past So where will things go operators are unsure of where things are going So they have to hedge their bets and basically adopting an anti-fragility model going moving away from stability so essentially In the past couple of years. We've seen saturated the market has been saturated and declining We're seeing declining our booze revenues We're seeing erosion of revenues from OTT players Voice being replaced by Skype and SMS by what's up and the like various OTT applications We're also seeing saturation of markets, particularly in developed countries in Western Europe So penetration levels are gone well over a hundred percent So there's not much more growth except when we talk about M2M And in the face of this traffic is increasing Which are which are leading to a lot more costs and capex to deal with this traffic going forward so this model is unsustainable and We now move into a future model So what role can the telco play in the future model in all of these various networks? We have here It can offer virtual networks. It can offer platforms for M2M markets. It can also partner with OTT players It's also offering services today and competing with the likes of Amazon and Google offering Various things on as a service platform as a service infrastructure as a service So Then we the bottom left hand corner here. We're looking at the own the cost structure the total TCO or total cost Total cost of operation which basically is the capex and the OPEX So for an operator that has built out his network Typically most of the cost is coming from OPEX and this is in has been increasing as we can see here It's not very clear but in 2002 the OPEX constituted 77 percent of The overall TCO and that's now moved up to 82 percent So this is increasing all the times and is unsustainable So needless to stay operators are now looking at ways to reduce the costs and they're looking at technologies like NFV etc Then we move over to the the future cost structure, which has to be more optimized more flexible And basically less cost We need to have much more efficient network management And we need to be offering more customer services more personalized services And this will drive innovation So we're looking to borrow technologies and adopt technologies from the cloud IT We're also adopting new methodologies of trying to reduce the time to market for new services and doing development and operations in parallel because DevOps and This is a model that's being used by OTT's So in the past we may have take is taken like a large tier one operator Maybe up to one to two years to develop and roll out a new service now. We're looking at a matter of months weeks and even days We even talk about the capability to offer say a more a mobile virtual network operator in the matter of five seconds five minutes Sorry, so that those capabilities are now there So here we look at where we have been in the past ten years and how we've moved on So in the past we've had all these legacy networks had siloed They were not layered with a dedicated network for a dedicated purpose and over the past ten years TDM ATM SDH networks have now been all replaced by IP Everything is becoming all IP or is all in most cases most networks are all IP today And we also see Single strategy so instead of having multiple layers and multiple boxes We have for example a single ran one one blade server can handle all technologies 2g 3g and LTE with a single core network single EPC of all packet core and Everything has been simplified What moving forward We're now adopting the technologies into the telco space from IT and cloud So we're looking at software defined virtualization automation distribution intelligence and so on and This is what will reach shape Next test ten years. So collectively all these technologies. We're calling softcom which is stands for software defined telecom So here again, we mentioned the challenges We know what the operator response needs to be he needs to simplify its network going forward It needs to become more operationally efficient and it needs to monetize new services and create new revenue in face of declining revenues on The right-hand side here. We see there are four main pillars within softcom in the last presentation I think we heard about SDN and NFE SDN software defined networks is basically Decoupling the control plane which controls the traffic from the user plane It's an abstraction of the transport layer and Basically allows for more programmability of the network and a more optimized Configuration in real-time to be able to deal with massive loads of traffic and you know, there are some challenges with this technology One of the main challenge I guess the moment is that it's still under standardization Not all the standards are there for it yet. Well, there are some initiatives like open daylight So this needs to move forward. There's a lack of expertise in this area There's also it's not completely Clear how Operators will evolve and migrate these technologies which which areas they should focus on should be service chaining first should it be the IP optical layer So obviously there's a cost-benefit trade-off which needs to be proven then we have Moving on then but of course the main driver here is to be able to have a more programmable network easier to provision and also be able to manage traffic flows better and Also to be able to monetize new services. This also gives us that capability The second technology here we're looking at we've mentioned in the last presentation was a network function Virtualization and here we're talking about decoupling hardware and software so, you know in traditional networks today whether it's the you know, the EPC or the various components of the network you have All of the functions are made by one vendor all the services of it is integrated It's a one-box solution Based on at car hardware now. We're looking at this obviously a way to reduce costs is to be able to use standard volume-based industry commodity hardware and servers storage and networking equipment So that's this basic the main advantage of course with NFV and this is getting a lot of momentum now Probably more so than SDN and there's a lot of trials and commercialization starting in this area is Is the is the cost savings and the cost savings mainly would be in The the operational side of things so you can have a more scalable more easy pool of resources And you can buy them and mix and match them the whatever way you want You don't have to buy everything from Hawaii. You can buy part of it or you can buy all from one vendor whatever way you like And we're looking at virtualizing mainly I guess Probably the core network. We're also looking at virtualizing the IT environment that an operator would have as well so that moves us on to the Top right-hand box of the right-hand corner the IT cloud So here we're looking at the third pillar of softcom which is basically Taking all the IT infrastructure business support systems the billing systems ERP You name it just maybe 10 15 front-end and back-end systems and basically Putting into a virtual environment virtual data center Again to get the economies of say scale the capacity and the scalability and be able to scale You will save a lot of money. This is a very obvious area for because it's already kind of like a data center And then the fourth pillar is what we look at is Internet like operations so and here we're looking at bringing more personalization more services where the user can create its own Services from a web-based platform It's becoming more like a Google or is Amazon. It's also being able to offer new types of services For example traditionally today, we have infrastructure service platform as a service software as a service now in the future We can offer a lot more types of Variants Here we have a network as a service. We can offer network as a service could be an MVNO. It could be VPNs Then we have data center as a service as well on the next slide. So these are the four pillars of softcom This is just some of the some of the solutions and basically the hardware of the data center portfolio from Hawaii and Basically, this is existing to Hawaii is an IT enterprise supplier today provides all these different solutions for network server storage and data center But in the telco environment, we'll be using for example, we can offer the fusion engine, which is a carrier grade The cloud engine and we also then have the the e9000 blade server, which is Also used a fusion cubes also used for for the softcom solutions Yeah, this is just more details in the hardware What what is required for the telco environment is you know, we need things enhancements over and above what we get from the IT world We need like for example more resilience more availability reliability 800 millimeters depth nebs compliancy something that's very important also then the ability to support both DC and AC Because if you're swapping out some many exchanges only support DC so you need to be able to support that as well as AC which is trick traditionally the IT type of power supply and different sizes of equipment as well So Engagements, this is for NFV. We have we've started engagements in 2012 and it's ongoing today So we're basically these are some some examples here where we're doing virtualize Virtualization of different functions. IMS sits in the service cloud IP multimedia system And this is one of the most popular things at the moment primarily for delivering the voice over LTE services We're actually running into commercial trials on that at the moment So cloud edge this is something specific to the carrier world Typically the The data center you're talking about consolidation and centralization of everything However, for the carrier world, we need to move into a more distributed environment In some cases we need to be closer to subscribers closer to the base stations to deliver the traffic So the cloud edge is is designed for deployment Distributed type of deployment As high resilience and high availability So we get carry great performance without sacrificing performance Right now in this particular environment, we have various functions that we've Virtualizing which is the valve packet core which is the core network for LTE Multi-service engine we have the mano which is the Management and network orchestration for the virtual machines. It's part of the Etsy Definition and here we can see fusion sphere, which is the cloud OS that for Hawaii on top of that sits the infrastructure so this high-level just overview of let's say How this will look like we have three let's say layers of clouds we have You know, there's the service cloud which is where all the applications will be hosted We have the operation cloud just taking care of OSS and mano and we have the control cloud which is networking The data center and data center interconnection And then as I mentioned before we had in the middle We have the cloud edge and on the far left-hand side We have the cloud baseband the cloud baseband unit So different levels of cloud here So this differs from the it cloud because the cloud edge for example is is not the endpoint traffic will will not end there So on the right-hand side here we have in the service cloud we have for example the video content delivery We have the IMS and the operation cloud we have the NFV Management and network orchestration and the cloud service broker and as I mentioned before Control cloud would be the data center SDN controller and the day center interconnection SDN controller in the middle then we have the What's called a software-defined edge? And this is where you have let's say the metro or the aggregation in the traditional network And we have different components here for example We would have what's called a single radio Network controller It's funny because in in in LT we got rid of the the radio network control controller the RNC Which was part of 3g but now we're bringing it back here Because we're trying to manage traffic flows through three different types of of of networks 2g 3g LT maybe LT advanced But also Different types of cells. We have small cells macro cells Wi-Fi Headnet so-called and to manage all that we need we need to have the single radio controller Another important area here, which we're doing quite a few trials with is is service chaining the color here the GI LAN chaining which is It's behind the packet gateway And here we're looking at You Optimizing and using resources only when they are needed so we don't need to you know have all resources for every single session for every single call whatever to give an example here we we If you have let's say a customer who has used up his his allowance for traffic for the month and you have to throttle them back Then there's no point in putting in video optimization video optimization equipment into that Service flow so you take that out so basically it simplifies things and it also It's quicker to develop to launch new services as well. It's actually becoming a very important feature And here also we have The content delivery network can be virtualized This can also actually Be also in the service cloud it can vary in time of day We can move this content delivery both backwards and forwards Or if there's faults in the network and the session border controller as well another another thing that's not mentioned here is Multiservice edge and this is basically Like making pushing the traffic further down towards a subscriber making the base stations more intelligent and being able to offer more personalized services for example, you do more Active device tracking location You could do augmented reality Content delivery You can do video analytics All sorts of new services and this is a new initiative that started Which Huawei is backing as well So then we have the software defined baseband, which is we're now in the access part of the network Here we have a combined 2g 3g LTE all in one we centralized control and we have a clustered network So typically before you'd have a base station would sit on One single site and now we split up the the RAU which is a radio resource unit This now sits on the antennas or the mast and then Baseband, you know would have been in a shelter for example But now this is all moving back to say to a transmission have been aggregated and the only problem with this is You need really need to have fiber out to your base stations Because of all the signaling and stuff Finally, we have the software to find radio frequency Here we're talking about multi-band different many many different bands that need to be supported Multi-mode multi-generation all in one blade and this exists today In terms of Migrating your networks typically what's happening today is usually we're starting on the right-hand side so most of the the interests and most of the Say let's say the virtualizations that are going on are happening in the In the service cloud on the right-hand side, but we're also having initiatives then in the in the In the cloud edge So this is the mobile broadband network and then it's quite similar in the in the fixed broadband network Again in the service cloud we have The IP policy stn controller. We have the DC interconnect stn controller In the cloud edge. We can virtualize The set top boxes the CPEs and the access routers access routers would be for For the enterprise and we've actually we're actually working with one major tier one operator in Europe at the moment and doing a Trial on this and also it's looking very positive from cost savings the ability to be able to instead of before you had to Manually update all the firmware or it now you can do it all centrally from the software to find edge You've also got the VDI, which is the virtual desktop infrastructure you can offer Again, you have the content network and the and the border network gateway Optical and IPS dn controller This this is a Basically something new where basically the there that the centralized controller will have a view of the network He will know which OTN box The routers are connected to will have a view of the traffic And he'd be able to create traffic engineering tunnels to route traffic at a particular time when there's a problem in the network or there's a Big demand he can create this to one particular destination But by controlling at the same time the MPLS routers the PPP and PE routers But also the the OTN WDM network, so it's basically a high-level view That you could not do today with today's network And then finally you have software to find access Which is basically the operation and maintenance automation of the optical line terminals In the case of fiber to the home or fiber and then MXU, which is also can be virtualized for DSL and Before we saw some NFV engagements now. I'm just looking at the soft-com engagements. So we have about 50 plus Joint innovation projects with 20 leading operators around the world So basically we're involved with every major operator at the moment and seven of those projects are already in commercial use as Most of these here would be Either NFV or SDN. I think you're looking at SDN. You're looking at The transport SDN TSDN the STIP ran the IP core traffic optimization and Yeah, that's a service chaining the rest of NFV But we're also doing trials on the other pillars of soft-com as well so bringing it back then to How it looks in terms of the various stacks and how it relates to open stack We have this is a cloud DC infrastructure So fusion sphere is the name of our cloud OS, which is based on open stack and It provides Extra in addition to open stack. We've got these APIs North northbound and we're also we have the standard ones then southbound so The different the add-on here again, we're talking about there's a carry enhancement where we We're looking at much more distributed environment than the IT world. We're looking at higher availability lower latency and migration in Terms of the overall portfolio within Hawaii. I think we've got about 120 deployments of this 500,000 virtual machines So we have support for SDN NFE initiatives about public and private cloud services and data center consolidation so what is How are we in a v proposition essentially Hawaii today can do a complete end-to-end solution As we saw before we have our own hardware We have our own cloud platform which is developed and based on open stack We have our own applications for the mobile for the fixed We have our own with the virtual infrastructure the network services and Also now we're positioning ourselves to move in as a system integrator We've actually got a project ongoing now at the moment for delivering a voice over LT where we're playing the role of a system integrator So essentially everything we can provide if required Again is another look at how it relates to open stack I'm only showing here three of the main Modules Nova for compute neutron for networking sender for storage There's obviously about five more different modules that we're using it at the moment So what you see here in in the orange color is what's being developed by By Hawaii, so we do have our own hypervisor, but we can also inter work with the standard hypervisor like KVM We're developing our own API extensions as well And then we have a thing called fusion manager, which is managing the life cycle and user management user authentication So some of the some of the additional things we're talking about with API's carry grade hypervisor We have an SCN overlay network and we've an ultra large storage pool for IO acceleration These are some of the initiatives we're working with in some of the standardization groups Obviously, we've been working with the open networking foundation for a while We are a chair of the migration work group and we're also engaging in harmonizing efforts with the IETF and the broadband forum In Etsy we act we have two major roles We have co-chair of the working group for architecture for virtualization infrastructure, and we're also acting as program manager Then of course on the right-hand side, we were a silver member of open daylight Which is involved with promoting and developing the STN controllers and last but not least We are a gold member of open stack. If not, I think we're one of the Top ten in the top ten contributors to open stack This is the last slide in my presentation. It's just basically again another initiative which was mentioned in the last Presentation as well where we're talking about the open platform for NFV, OP-NFV and Again, we're a platinum member in that There are 39 members in this and the object of this initiative is to accelerate NFV And I guess a part of the problem is that this is a very complicated Complicated architecture. There are lots of interfaces and lots of interfaces to be defined And what is the best way to manage and control that so the initial focus of open NFV? You can see there would be in the red box Basically dealing with the the virtual computing storage network the hardware and also the infrastructure management So that's it. It's quite short Thank you, and if you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them. No questions