First, going West from Ala Moana to Mapunapuna, Panos talked about the critical need to synchronize the traffic signals.  This is not high-tech.  He also showed us the path and capacity of the HOT lane he is proposing, which at some points in the downtown area is below the street, and that’s an interesting engineering and traffic management challenge. He is confident it can be done and that it will work.

But nothing compared to the engineering challenges we saw going East on the way back, where starting on Dillingham he gave us an engineering tour of the proposed rail line as it comes back into and through downtown and to Ala Moana Center and then terminates at the University.

We just followed the City’s map to see where the proposed line is supposed to be going, how high and wide it would be and where the stations were. It was a real eye-opener, a revelation for everyone on the tour. We had no idea of what is going to happen to our City.

Actually, you wouldn’t believe it. The rail is going to tear up and permanently reduce a number of streets and intersections. Where there are 4 lanes there will be two because of all the supporting structures and pilons they’ll have to build. You won’t be able to drive down those streets anymore – too narrow. Many of them will lose their sidewalks too.

Dillingham will be different and dark. Those stations are 200 feet long and 60 fee wide and over everything. The engineering will change those neighborhoods forever. The merchants at the stations will do fine, but those in the middle will be in no-man’s land. Lots of land will have to be condemned where the streets are less than 60 feet wide.

The rail, if you didn’t know it, doesn’t follow a straight path, it twists and turns in every direction. Since it is a railroad, these turns can’t be at 90 degrees, The train has to make large sweeping turns. The sharper the turn, the louder the squeal of the steel wheels. In any event, large areas will have to be condemned and demolished to accommodate the turns. It will cost a fortune – is this and the related litigation included in the price tag?

The line comes East on Nimitz, Halekawila, Queen and Waimanu Streets - these will have the rail overhead and will be forever lost in the shadows. I can only think of the elevated line in upper Manhattan, something that lower Manhattan would never tolerate these days. Depressing for retail, a magnet for crime. Are we going to love it?

The engineering really gets dicey around Ala Moana – the top of the station at Ala Moana climbs to 135 feet, a 13-storey building. The pilons will be frequent and formidable, and they will have to punch through all that concrete on the mauka side of Ala Moana Center on Kona Street. It will cost a fortune. Will General Growth agree or just say no?

To get to the Ala Moana station at 135 feet in the air, the train will have to climb at a 5 percent grade along Kona Street. That’s a very steep grade for a rail line – and as high as a roller coaster. Watch for vertigo. This will involve huge engineering issues. I suppose we’ll solve these problems as we go, and those lessons will be costly. I imagine we’ll have to import and pay for lots of engineering talent from the mainland.

Thence in a sharp left turn from Kona across Atkinson and then again right to pass over the all-ways intersection at the Convention Center, then down the middle of Kapiolani to University, then a left turn up University, past Date and ultimately across King to the University. All of this way above grade, dwarfing everything around it. The City will look like Frankenstein.

I haven’t gotten into exactly where the stations are, since looking at those locations as shown on the City map it was hard to imagine that the City would actually put them in the places shown. Sometimes they were way too far apart and sometimes much too bunched up. There were three within 1/2 mile, for example, near the University.

There’s more. I could go on, but never do the tour justice. Why don’t you contact honolulutraffic.com and see if you can get on the tour yourself and see what I mean.  Whatever your disposition, it’ll change the way you think.

This is changing.  The website for SIPO, China’s Intellectual Property Office (sipo.gov.cn) reports that patent filings in China have dramatically increased every year since 1985, when the Patent Law was enacted.  In 2006, 573,000 applications were filed and 268,000 were granted.

It’s no surprise that China’s leaders have been urging companies to be more innovative and to put more money into developing new IP.  That pitch must have worked, since China now generates the third highest number of patent applications, behind only Japan and the U.S.

Chinese inventors are also filing for international patents.  Of 156,000 patents filed with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) last year, 5,500 came from China.  This represents a 40% annual increase for China, now 7^th worldwide.  The U.S. is still on top with 52,000, but China is competing vigorously, just as in the Olympics.

It’s not like SQL injection attacks are new.

They go back to at least late 2004, when they appeared in Europe and Asia.  A German TV station was attacked, then a Taiwanese security magazine.  In 2006, Russian hackers broker into a Rhode Island government website and stole credit card data.

The attacks were proliferating.  In 2007, a hacker defaced the Microsoft UK web site.  Later on that year, the UN website was defaced with a SQL injunction attack.  Have they no shame?

In January 2008, tens of thousands of PC websites were defaced by automated SQL injection attacks that exploited the vulnerability of Microsoft SQL server.

In April 2008, the social security numbers of the sex offenders on the Sexual Offender Registry of Oklahoma were stolen by an injection attack.

In May 2008, a server farm in China used automated queries to Google’s search engine to identify SQL server websites that were vulnerable.

In July 2008, the Malaysian site for Kaspersky, a Russian computer security company, was hacked using a SQL injection.

From April 2008 to the present, there have been increasing SQL injection attacks exploiting the SQL injection vulnerability of Microsoft Internet Information Services and SQL server.

HOW THE INJECTION ATTACK WORKS

These attacks don’t require the hacker to have access to the server or, for that matter, the names of database fields.  The attack is on all text fields in all tables with a single hacked SQL request.  The attack attaches an html string to each field that activates a malware javascript file called from a remote location.  When that value is later displayed to a user of the hacked site, the script tries to gain control over the user’s system.

The number of exploited web pages is estimated at 500,000 so far, and growing daily.  These attacks are across the board, against government sites and well as commercial sites, and against open source SQL as well as Microsoft SQL.  The attacking mechanisms can be manual or by automated spiders or by modified versions of popular software such as QuickTime and RealPlayer.

SQL is a rich and complex language, so there are many techniques by which the attack can be accomplished.  The common approach is for the hacker to modify a variable being passed from the user’s browser URL address line or from a form on the browser to a SQL search string which is being processed on the website.

With this approach, hackers or their automated spiders can inject draconian instructions into the SQL commands written for the site, and these can do any number of awful things, like stealing all the data from the SQL database, destroying the database altogether or modifying the records by adding references to remote malware that spreads the attack through innocent visitors using the site, in a kind of Trojan horse virus.

HOW DO YOU KNOW YOU’VE BEEN HIT

Don’t think you’re somehow exempt.  If you’re using SQL in any form you’re vulnerable.  Most websites are data driven these days, and most of those use SQL in one form or another.  The hackers and their spiders may very well visit an attack on your site any time.

It goes without saying you need to back up your SQL database, all of it, every day and keep those backups for perhaps a longer period of time than before.  If you have 10 days of backup but you don’t watch your site and 10 days go by, you won’t have a useable backup and you’ll be SOL.

How do you know you’ve been attacked?  Well, the data on your screen is truncated and you get strange characters like hanging apostrophes and angle brackets on your screen where database information ought to be.  Sometimes you get wise guy jokes there too.  Don’t click on what appear to be links - that’ll get you in more trouble and infect your machine too.

HOW TO DEAL WITH THEM

If you’ve been attacked, you need to go to Internet Information Services (IIS) on your server and cut user connections, and stop the site.  Then you need to find a good backup file to restore your database.  For that, you need to figure out when the attack happened so you can use a backup from before it happened.  If you don’t have a good backup, you’ll probably have to clean the database manually to recover the data for your site

That means stripping out all the bad values and references that were injected.  You have to painstakingly go through every field, record and table.  In a big database, this can take forever, and it’s tedious and gut-wrenching work.  Worse, it may not be a complete solution.  The injection values are usually injected at the end of the existing values in the field, but if the injection values are longer than the field, they may write over the existing values, and that means the original data is lost.

When you’re done, you would turn IIS back on and see if you’ve done a good job, and whether there is some other gift they left for you.  You don’t know until you bring the site up again and watch it work.

There are some scripts out there that say they can reverse the attack and clean the injected values out of your database. Here’s an example:

http://hackademix.net/2008/04/26/mass-attack-faq/#webdev

Different hackers inject different values, so there’s no guarantee that this will work.

Even assuming you can restore your database, you could have another attack any time with similar result.  So if you have a good backup file of your database, make a protected copy of it for future use if necessary.

CLOSING THE VULNERABILITIES

Beyond that, you or your web designers need to close the vulnerabilities.  You can do that in a variety of ways, all of which involve new coding.  Go slowly and carefully, file by file, so you do it right and don’t miss anything.

When you recode, you need to write routines to clean all the parameters that are being fed into your SQL queries.  To do this, you need to strip out any questionable SQL commands that could be part of an injection attack, including DECLARE, SELECT, SET, CAST, DROP, EXEC,”;”, “–”, INSERT, DELETE, XP_, VARCHAR and CHAR, among others.

This is also quite tedious for a website of any size, but necessary if you want to avoid doing the whole thing again.  There are also other things you can do to make your code less vulnerable.  Here’s a couple of links that will help you understand what needs to be done.

www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00001427.html

www.sitepoint.com/article/794

www.wwwcoder.com/main/parentid/258/site/2966/68/default.aspx

www.imperva.com/application_defense_center/white_papers/sql_injection_signatures_evasion.html

There are some programs that claim to identify your vulnerability to SQL injection attacks.  One is the Acunetix Scanner, used by a great number of U.S. and foreign companies and government agencies.  I guess it must be of some value.  Check it at www.acunetix.com.

There are books that can help.  See O’Reilly’s SQL Hacks by Andrew Cumming and Gordon Russell available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

WILL WE EVER CATCH THESE GUYS

This global proliferation of SQL injection attacks is not only irritating, it’s scary in that it has the ability bring sites down all over the world.  It’s time for Microsoft to catch up.  It’s also time for world police authorities to catch up, and get serious.  This isn’t child’s play any more.

While we have certainly admired China’s remarkable tech and business success, the notions of personal freedom and representative government still seem tenuous, and recent Tiananmen tactics attempting to sterilize things for the Games show us that the government still doesn’t get it.

They may think they can beat off the real mood of China, but it looks like other forces are in play.  E-Democracy is on the rise and there’s not that much the repressors can do about it.  Given the way the Chinese have e-Connected with the world, and with themselves, I suggest that they are more likely to take new risks to achieve Western liberties these days.

China rising is also China rising in the rule of law.  Sure, the government can take steps to cauterize unpleasantness and head off bad press, but the genie is out of the bottle.  Given the e-Infrastructure already in place, the government cannot control, and is not exempt from, the will of the people.  After all, this is the 21^st Century and tech is everybody’s genie.

Watch what happens in August.  Through the Internet, Smart Mobs are also rising in China.

Enter Mongol, the story of Genghis Khan’s rise to power and Mongolia’s rise to empire.  Genghis Khan was one of the most powerful men that ever lived, and the movie is a study in that power.  It was directed by Russian Sergei Bodrov, who studied Genghis Khan and Mongolia in depth.  These are things we don’t know much about, and they are fertile ground for a movie this big.  Remember, the Mongols ruled Russia for 200 years.

An international Asian cast.  They went all over the world for casting.  They found Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano (who recently starred in a Zatoichi movie – the blind swordsman) to play the Temudgin, that is, Genghis Khan.

And sassy Khulan Chuluun, Temudgin’s wife, a complete knockout, in a love partnership that would be extraordinary in any age, much less the 12^th century.  This Mongolian actress was freshly discovered for the movie, and had never acted before.

Temudgin’s blood brother later turned blood enemy is Jamukha, played by a Chinese actor Honglei Sun, from The Road Home, a early Zhang Yimou, Ziyi Zhang movie.  A powerful and charming character.

Everyone else in the movie is played by a Mongolian, and they are a handsome people.

The crew was 600 and the cast was 1,000, since they had battles to do.  And you’ve never seen battles quite like this.  Don’t fool with the Mongols.  Shot in the most incredible scenery in really remote locations in China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan (like 12 hours by car on rudimentary roads from the nearest towns).  Similar to the scenery in Daggers, with open spaces as far as the eye can see, captured in eye-popping cinematography.

This is not an American movie, although I suspect there is some American money, technology and technical expertise in here.  Mongol has been nominated for an academy award.  The credits read something like Daggers, international but mostly Asian, and you can see that they spared no expense in their efforts.

Bodrov was culturally sensitive, as one should be for a movie like this.  He went to visit the chief shaman of Mongolia in Ulan Bator to ask permission to make the movie.  The shaman granted the request, and was appreciative that Bodrov had asked.  Good move.

You can touch the city scenes, the costumes, the textures.  This movie takes you back to that time, making you wonder how it would be to live among them, making you compare your life to theirs.  It’s transporting.  The music, filled out by musicians Bodrov found in Mongolia, is haunting and exotic, a huge factor in bringing you back there.

The movie is entirely in Mongolian (Temudgin says it’s the most beautiful language in the world) and there are subtitles. But that doesn’t slow it down for a minute.  It engages you completely from the onset and throughout.  I walked out wishing there was more – feeling cheated out of the further history that followed Temudgin’s rise to power.

Can you remember the last time you saw a Russian movie?  Not me.  And yet here it is bursting onto the international screen with everything you would want.  This is a movie that will keep you at the edge of your seat throughout, from Mongolian history to horrific violence to larger than life characters, and back again.  It’s fast, and it’s furious.

Movies are one of the great cultural experiences of our lives, and they are becoming completely global.  Distance and language aren’t barriers anymore.  What a great time to be alive, to be able to experience a movie like this.  It’s great to learn how these people lived in the 12^th century (life was tough and short), but it’s even better to be able to watch it all unfold with Dolby 900 years later.

This one will play everywhere.

I’ve been doing more video these days.  But rendering video files takes a long time, like maybe two hours for every hour of video.  So I decided to run my rendering operation like a dentist’s office, with multiple operatories.  That means multiple machines.

I have a Dell desktop and although it’s ok on editing (I use Adobe Premiere Pro CS 3.0), whenever I need to render I have to take a nap or go for a walk because it takes so long and you can’t edit the next video while you’re rendering the last.  This can’t be efficient.

So I decided to get a second machine, and keep it pure, with only Adobe video software, and use that when the first machine is tied up.  Ah, but what computer should I get?

First I went to Dell, but boy their high end video quality machines are really expensive.  Then I went to Best Buy, because, like the mountain, it was there.  They had a 64-bit HP that looked pretty good for a good price, but I started to wonder about the 64-bit thing.

I googled 64-bit and it wasn’t clear that Adobe can use all of the memory addressable by the 64-bit processor or whether it can use even the 4 megabytes of memory it uses on a 32-bit processor.  64-bit, like Vista, is probably something for later, but not now.

So I decided to call Adobe.  Luckily, I got a sales guy who would talk to me about this, and luckier still he was wiling to talk to me about his own personal setup.  He said he didn’t buy factory built machines, but was into hand built machines.  Although I’d seen components at places like CompUSA, I’d really gotten close to hand built machines.

He was high on hand built.  You can build it your way, like a hamburger.   With any kind of motherboard and chips and drives and video cards and everything.  And because it doesn’t come with all the creepy software the factory built machines come with, which invariably shows your machine down.  And for what you get, hand built is cheaper.

What price purity?  He told me what he had on his machine, from the name and manufacturer and model number of the motherboard to the chips and drives and video cards, and so forth.  Then the problem was for me to somehow recreate what he had.

Sure I could get on the web and order a case and all these components, and then try to put them together and configure them.  Daunting, I thought.  Why not just get someone here in Honolulu to do that for me?  A geek person, I thought.  But how many geek people do you actually know, ones you can actually talk to.

And then I remembered Supergeeks.  I had heard that they do hand built.  So I gave them a call in hopes that this would simple and quick, that I could tell them what I wanted and they could just build it and deliver it to me, and make me happier than I had ever been.

Lucky still again.  I called them and got Oliver, their parts man, and he laid out how this would all happen and what it would cost.  I ordered it right there and then, and he flew in the parts and set up the machine and delivered it me in one week. Just like Dell.

Had I ordered the parts and put them together myself I suppose I would have learned more about how to build and configure hand built machines like the guy from Adobe, but that would have involved more time and risk for me.  It was better to have them do this.

I had to a learn a few things about the machine after they delivered it but in one day’s time it was fully operational, just as I had dreamed it would be, and now I have exactly what I wanted with exactly the specs I wanted, and I’m as happy as clam.  You know that feeling of elation when you get a brand new high powered computer that actually works.

Kudos to Oliver and his friends Ryan and Ron at Supergeeks.  They did a great job.  My fingers are crossed that this will work swell and for a long time, better than factory built, and that I won’t need onsite maintenance, because that unfortunately is not in the deal.

Hand built is like hand coded, all transparent, all modular, all yours.  And all things considered, I might even make this the way I get my computers in the future. It’s not so much a geek thing as the fact that these parts and components are generic and modular.  In the 21^st Century they have become commodity, and for me that is a very good thing.

We’re tried silly things like parties, websites and clubby chat rooms.  But for the most part we’ve been unable to get them to come back, with all the damage that does to our demographic.

The longer they stay away, the less likely it is that they’ll return.  They finish school, get jobs, get married, have kids, and make a life.  Can you blame them?   Do you think they’re going to drop all that and come back midcourse?  Lots of luck.

But there is something we can do about it – that should come as no surprise – if you really want to do something about this sort of relentless brain drain loss, all you to do is bear down, spend some money and make some sacrifices and, lo and behold, you can.

A few years ago, an expatriate Chinese scientist in New Jersey was wooed back by the Chinese government.  They offered him what they knew would appeal to him most of all, the trappings of science itself – a laboratory and research money and laboratory staff galore in China.  He succumbed easily, and back to China he went to take the prize.

It’s not hard to do that, and certainly worth it – scientists, after all, come with high leverage.  No one knows what great things this guy will do for China now.  His work there could be, probably will be, worth far more than the cost of repatriating him.

So how about repatriating our departed boys and girls, the ones who left because they saw brighter future on the mainland than in Hawaii?  Because their teachers and parents and friends all inculcated in them the notion that the best thing they could to was to follow their peers and go to the mainland for a better life than they could have in Hawaii.

In fact, we have a good life here – it’s just hard to overcome the mainland sirens, as in Odysseus.  We can’t just ask them to plug their ears.  It takes a meaningful incentive to bring them back.  So why don’t we bite the bullet and pay the price of that incentive and bring our best and brightest back home to help us build a future for our state.  We need them more than we can say.  What are we waiting for?

How do we do this?  By the same kind of incentive you would always use – economics mixed with career satisfaction.  Just like the Chinese scientist.  You pay their way.  You give them a free ticket.  You get them a great job and salary, appropriate to their skill.  You help them buy or mortgage a house, or you rent one to/for them cheap for x years.  You excuse them from state income tax for x years.  You offer them free courses at the University to advance their professional training.  You tell them you love them, you make them feel good about themselves and their choice of returning.  Priceless.

You give them bus passes, and opera seats.  You give them memberships at the “Y”.  In short, you do everything you can.  You make them feel like returning heroes.  You target them singlely, expatriate by expatriate, or you do it in groups.  You can fix these incentives in concrete or you can change the benefits and quotas every year depending on the need for skilled workers in that sector.  It’s like the HOT lane – computer driven – you adjust things depending on the need, you adapt the supply to the market place.

Are we doing this now?  Not a chance, but we need to.

You can, in fact, for a controlled and predictable budget, bring back as many pau hana expatriates as you need.  You target them, you incentivize them, you make them offers they can’t refuse and, if they do refuse, you sweeten the deal until it’s completely irresistable.

They say providing a skilled workforce is the trick to building a tech industry.  If you want to build that industry, you have to provide the workforce, however difficult that may be.  Well, we can do it.  All we have to is design a system to focus on it.  This is the way to our future, and theirs, and their families.  Let’s not waste a minute – we can’t afford to keep on losing them, we need to stem the tide right now and get them back here post haste.

Those who would oppose this will say, “why spend our money on bringing these kids back – they’ll come back when they’re ready.  Why should we give them special treatment?  And if they don’t come back, that’s their problem”.  I don’t agree.  That kind of attitude will isolate us from our own children.  This problem is our problem and it’s serious.  We’re got to take charge or our collective destiny, or we will surely be the Sahara of the Beaux Arts (as from H.L. Mencken), and of the Sciences too.

Watch out. Most cable companies have official or secret caps on the amount of data they allow subscribers to download every month.  Three of the country’s largest internet providers are moving toward a new way to charge us for broadband - by imposing limits on our online accounts.

Time Warner Cable began a “trial” of “net metering” in a Beaumont, Texas, this month.  They want customers to sign up for “plans” that have limits and pay hefty surcharges when they exceed those limits.  Comcast said it would slow down the connections of its heaviest users in the markets of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania and Warrenton, Virginia.

Comcast continues to engage in “contact blocking” against its customers despite an investigation by the FCC and widespread public outrage over what it has been doing.  And AT&T said it would limit heavy users by basing prices on data volume.

Ben Scott, of the public interest group Free Press, says that the new strategy of the big providers reflects a decision to admit publicly what they have been doing secretly all along.  He adds that their new strategy will not provide the kind of relief that would result from larger investment in high-speed network.  Clearly, as national usage increases, we need a scaled up system, not scaled up prices overworking the existing system.

In Beaumont, Time Warner is “offering” plans with a 5 gig cap, a 20 gig cap and a 40 gig cap.  Prices run from $30 to $50.  If you exceed your cap, you get to pay $1 for each additional gig, so use it carefully.  An hour of TV quality video is about 200 megs, higher quality video 500 megs, and high definition is much more than that, say 5 gigs.  After one hour of high definition, the user with the 5 gig plan will be over his limit.

While these carriers want to return to a pre-1996 dial-up juke-box pay-phone standard of metered charges, most everyone you know is way beyond email and website surfing.  We, all of us, are using more bandwidth every day - video, movies, music, games, voice over and everything else.  Overall bandwidth use on the net is surging, doubling every year and a half.  The net is becoming a center of our culture and daily life.  Computers and TV are now finally coming together for the long-awaited convergence.

This new throwback pricing scheme runs counter to that trend, and to what we have come to love about the Net, its openness and vitality.  It is a huge step backward.  Just when we thought we were all on the road to a new world of Net nirvana, the change these guys want is a complete bummer.  Instead of surfing new heights of Internet delight, we will be tied down by this electronic ceiling.  It will be a constant psychological barrier on use and experimentation, one which will cast a shadow on every moment of our Net experience.

They tell us that net metering is the “fair” way to ensure access for “all” users.  Why does that sound so fishy?  I suggest they’ve noticed this sweeping trend to greater public use, and they want to cash in on it.  Time Warner, the parent of our own Oceanic Cable that provides Roadrunner to so many of us, is leading the charge, pun intended, and our days of Net freedom may be numbered.  Today Beaumont; tomorrow Hawaii.

Hawaii is sitting pretty for this kind of pricing scheme.  You need to vote to vote with your feet on this, to get off your duff, watch what happens and be prepared to go over to the competition without looking back.  That’s why the smart thing may be to squawk about it now, before we get sucked into our own “trial” and a whirlpool of escalating prices.

Why not write to Oceanic at oceanic.com and tell them that we don’t want no stinken usage based fees here, that we love the openness and global exchange of the Net, that their escalation plan flies in the face of the global trend, and that we know very well that they’re doing this only to make more money.

Nationally, the stakes and the resources in play are huge.  In Hawaii, the market is hundreds of millions.  Do the math.  We could wind up paying more, much more.  We can’t afford to be complacent.  Once the sliding scale begins, it’s so easy for them to migrate the data limits down and the charges and penalties up, hoping no one will notice.  We should notice.  We should tell them that if they want to raise the monthly price of broadband here, they’ll have to pay a price in market share, and that we and the PUC will be watching.

Things are also happening in Congress.  The push for net neutrality protection against content blocking has led to several bills.  The “Internet Freedom Preservation Act” co-sponsored by Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) would amend the Communications Act of 1934 to codify open access to the Internet. The “Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act” introduced by House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) would use antitrust regulations to prevent the price discrimination inherent in forcing some customers to pay more for higher bandwidth.

We should ask our delegation to support these two bills.  Failing that, maybe we should go out and buy Time Warner stock (symbol TMW) and vote against management to make the point.  As a last ditch effort, perhaps we should move to the mainland and sign up with the competition, assuming there are some other carriers out there who decide not to go along for the ride.

Their program was entitled “What Entrepreneurs Seeking Funding Should Expect When Choosing A Lawyer”. It was moderated by entrepreneurship luminary Rob Robinson. The panel was blue ribbon, and included attorneys Lori Hiraoka, Darren Nunn and Dick Sherman and entrepreneur David Watumull.

They talked about how to select attorneys to help you raise investment capital and how to deal with that attorney once you select them, and the discussion was helpful. But in my mind this raised another question - how these lawyers themselves can deal with the competition for Hawaii legal work from counsel on the mainland.

Knowing the business environment of Hawaii is undoubtedly an advantage in fund raising here. But many entrepreneurs of Hawaii companies don’t even look for counsel on Bishop Street. They go straight to the mainland on a knee jerk basis. From my observation, this is the case in many business areas, including but certainly not limited to areas involving investment capital and intellectual property.

I suppose there are a number of reasons for this, some real, some based on myth. Some clients believe mainland attorneys can read Hawaii law just as well as Hawaii lawyers – after all, the law of all American jurisdictions is freely available on the net. Some clients are not concerned with higher costs on the mainland on the notion that if it’s more expensive it must be better. And then there’s the mystique - some clients feel that if you’re a patent attorney and your office is across the street from the Patent Office, you must know something we don’t know in Hawaii.

Legally, yes the world is smaller and the mainland is closer now than it was before. So entrepreneurs are more comfortable in dealing with counsel on the mainland – what’s the difference between emailing across Bishop Street and emailing to San Francisco or New York? The long distance telephone call or fax is the same and costs the same. If you really feel you need to have a face to face, use a webcam.

And the lawyers on the mainland are increasingly bold in marketing away from their home states and all the way to Hawaii. They can contact and develop relations with local clients and prospects with very little effort and without opening an office here. The limitations on practicing law without a license do not pose the same barriers as they did before. Most mainland firms representing clients here feel free to advise those clients on Hawaii law and when they need a little local help, they’ll hire a local firm on local points but do all the heavy lifting themselves, from the mainland.

The natural progression is that the work available to the local bar is proportionately less than it was a decade or two ago, and promises to be still less going forward. But what are the underlying sea changes, for the clients, and for the local bar?

I suggest that if local clients do not use local counsel, the local bar will not be as robust as it has been during the years since Statehood. There will be fewer matters, fewer jobs, fewer lawyers and more generalists. Some people will say that’s a good thing, but it may rather be a downward spiral. There will be less incentive for local lawyers to develop specialization. Scary, since the law is more complex all the time.

If specialization is not available locally, more Hawaii businesses that need lawyers in those areas will have to get legal help from the mainland. Given the increased costs on the mainland, some, or many, of those local businesses simply won’t be able to afford the representation and the advice they need to thrive. Not a good thing.

What to do? I suppose we could encourage local clients to give preference to local lawyers, but remember this is a free market driven by business considerations. The akamai client will, and should, look for the best expertise he can find at any price he can afford, and geography is not an object. That usually translates into going to the mainland.

One approach that can address this phenomenon, and trend, is to affirmatively encourage local attorneys to greater specialization and greater expertise, so they can more effectively compete with counsel on the mainland. How do we do that?

The answer may come from our Law School. I am hoping, looking forward, to the possibility that the Law School, under Dean Avi Soifer, might include outreach programs to the downtown legal community. Programs that would go beyond traditional CLE (Continuing Legal Education) that would liberate lawyers to develop new or greater expertise to migrate their practices into the areas they like best.

In the old days, if you were a generalist and wanted to expert yourself, you would refuse all other work and put all your time into learning the new field. In the context of a law firm that has to make money, this could put your job at risk. With programs from the Law School, where law faculty come down to teach local lawyers new areas and specialties in downtown classes, that kind of learning would be much easier.

If I’m a real estate lawyer and I really want to be an investment capital lawyer, on the job training will probably not be available for me. I could learn this new area by candlelight, but that’s hard to do if you’re working every day. Wouldn’t it be great if I could learn it as in law school, from someone very knowledgeable and dedicated to opening that door for me and bringing me up to marketable competence. This would be a kindness not otherwise available to many lawyers in the community, and would improve their prospects, their careers and their professional quality of life.

So I’m hoping the Law School will do this, and that they will have an enthusiastic response from the bar. If you get a chance to support them on this, please do, not only for the educational ideal but also because over time this kind of program is likely to build greater expertise, greater legal infrastructure, and greater confidence by local clients in local lawyers. All good things for Hawaii.

What is it about bicycles that bothers people so much?  Years ago I recall a jury trial where the voir dire revealed early on that the panel did not think there was a place for cyclists on either the streets or sidewalks of Honolulu.  The injured cyclist settled at first opportunity.

In fairness, I would have to add that Frank Fasi built some marginal bike lanes on University Avenue and on Kalanianaole, but then lost interest and no mayor has done anything much since.  Tell me it isn’t so. 

In Fasi’s day, you could commute on Kapiolani or Beretania or even Ala Moana.  You could ride to Waimanalo or even to Waianae in reasonable safety.  Try that now.  They’d say you were crazy. And they’d be right. 

What is it that makes so many people reject cyclists and the use of bicycles as serious transportation.  They don’t use bicycles, they don’t give way for cyclists and in fact many of them want bicycles to go away, to disappear.  Some even shout epithets and run cyclists off the road. 

As far as I can see, the city doesn’t plan for cyclists in any way or do the slightest thing to encourage them or make room for them.  Au contraire, the city wants them off the road too.  Witness the recent contentions between HPD and groups of cyclists trying to popularize cycling. 

Beyond bad temper, isn’t this a huge squander of a perfect opportunity?  Aren’t we supposed to be a tropical outdoor sports paradise?  I guess not.  It’s not only my Neighborhood Board that’s conflicted about this issue.

If we had bikeways and bike lanes on the highways, thousands of people would ride bike.  They would have fun, they would be healthier, and they would enjoy life more.  They wouldn’t be on the freeway using fossil fuels.  But they’d get where they’re going, and given the traffic sometimes faster.

Cycling is certainly high tech, thrilling us with its leverage and near perfect efficiency, offering us the personal zen of bicycle maintenance.  What a fabulous statement to innovation – a machine that can take you anywhere, but requires no fuel or engine other than the human body. 

A couple of years ago the people voted for a charter amendment to make Honolulu more bike friendly.  A terrific idea, and well supported.  But not one thing has been done since then.  The amendment and the people were ignored and are being ignored on this issue.  Tell me I’m wrong.

Bikes - what could be a more obvious solution to so many issues, fossil fuel, traffic, public health and environment?  And what could be so easy.  We already have these magic carpets waiting in our garages and storage rooms.  All we need to do is pump them up and ride them.  Voila.

We could of course wait around in hopes the government will implement the charter amendment, but frankly that would be a miracle for which none of us can wait.  Instead, I’ll just suggest that everyone get out there and ride.  Ride, Sally, ride.  If we all do that, things will be better.