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Physics 20, Computational Physics. IBM gave us five million dollars of funny money, meaning we could spend it any way we wanted provide we spend it at the IBM Company Store.

Thus the Computational Physics lab was quite tastefully appointed with expensive computer desk, each computer had its own printer rather than a shared one, and there were a dozen or True-Blue 8086 ATs. I don't recall, but they were likely running MS-DOS 3.0 or so. I myself installed all the 8087s that the chair of Tech's computational physics program gave me.

It's not hard at all to simulate the capture of a planet by an invading star. It was my favorite lab exercise. I started with BASIC, later Pascal.

F = mA: Force equals Mass times Accelleration

F = Gm1m2/r^2: Force is proportional to the product of the masses, divided by the square of the distance. The proportional factor is known as the Gravitational Constant, upper case, not to be confused with lowercase g, the Earth's particular gravity.

You use something called the Runge-Kutta method. It's a stairstep approximation, but it adjusts its guesses both left and right so errors don't accumulate so much.

The origin of Dark Matter awareness came from an Institute professor who modeled spiral galaxies in FORTRAN the very same way, then animated a static computer display by snapping frames with an 8 mm movie camera and cable release.

He demonstrated that the stars we could see in other galaxies could not possibly be preventing them from flying apart due to their own rotation.

That movie was quite cool to watch. I expect he did the calculations on a DEC VAX 11/780 or 11/750 running VMS. Back in those days a 750 cost a quarter million dollars, despite being somewhat less powerful than an 80386 PC. Imagine my shock when a 750 turned up at the Weird Stuff Warehouse in Sunnyvale, apparently in brand new condition, for just three hundred bucks!

Michael D. Crawford, posting as AC because I can't be bothered to recover my password.

Human Machine Interface / Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition. That's the proper name for the central control of a distributed industrial control system. Just one of our licenses controlled a giant automobile assembly plant from a single PC, that if I understand correctly turned out a new pickup truck every fifteen seconds.

If you're going to attack a nation's power grid, you attack that power grid's HMI / SCADA installations. That's easier to do than you think, because remote installations are often controlled via dialup modem, and lots of installations are right on the internet. The people who install this stuff, while generally well-trained by the vendor, are usually industrial engineers who have little understanding of modern security practices.

This company didn't know how to do C++ memory management.

One day a colleague proudly announced that she had found the cause of a memory leak - leaks are disastrous in HMI/SCADA, because the software runs uninterrupted for years on end sometimes - to be a failure to delete a pointer. She checked in a fix that did an explicit call to delete, then reassigned the bug to QA to verify.

Well I filed a bug against her specific fix, then broadcast a short, stern, loud angry email about the importance of smart pointers, not just for memory management, but for all resource management - network sockets and the like. I've worked in a lot of C++ shops, but have been astounded that very few alleged C++ coders know what smart pointers or initialization lists are.

My boss ordered me to stop filing bug reports like that. I resigned not long after. I didn't even give them notice; I sent them a written resignation via email from home, then just stopped showing up to work, not even to pick up the personal possessions I'd brought there. Eventually they packed them up and mailed them to me in a box.

When I interviewed, my future boss told me it was a million-line program that was only half done - a half-million lines of code! - after twenty years of development. I didn't want to drive the company out of business, or tip off the terrorists as to how to crash our industrial economy, so I kept quiet about it for seven years. I figured that if they were going to fix their memory management, seven years ought to be enough. If they didn't, then that program would be riddled with exploits.

• Trihedral Engineering

Tell them Michael Crawford sent you. I'm posting as Anonymous Coward because I can't be bothered to recover my /. password.

October 28, 2005

I am working on a project with three young programmers and a manager. The oldest of the programmers is more than ten years younger than I. The manager is older, but does not know much about programming beyond how to check our code out of Subversion and type "make" to check our progress.

I was talking to my buddy Leo Baschy yesterday about it. Leo's around the same age I am. He is a Rocket Scientist: he wrote MacsBug 6.2 when he worked for Apple, and spent several years writing an access control application that he is just now bringing to market. Leo Does Things Right.
I told Leo I really enjoyed talking shop with someone who had a clue. But I said:

"When I talk to those guys about how to write better code I have the sense that their experience of me is like going to church.

"Many go to church. How many are without Sin?"

"But I didn't learn to preach because I studied at the seminary. It's because I was a derelict on Skid Row until I was saved by..."

"... smart pointers and automated testing."

Many - but definitely not all - security flaws that leave one's code or one's box vulnerable to exploits are nothing other than simple bugs.

Most insidiously, storing an input buffer on the runtime stack, then reading an element from a file or network connection without validating that the size of that element complies strictly with the file format or network protocol specification, enables one to prepare a "Specially Crafted Document" or Network Packet that overflows the buffer, overwrites the proper return address on the stack with one of its own, then when that subroutine returns, instead of control returning to the caller, control is passed to malware code that is included with that too-big file or network element.

It's a little tricky to actually craft these documents, but I assure you that if you read Learn Java in 21 Days, you will learn absolutely all you require to enable Stack Smashing Buffer Overflows for your users.

Don't think that Plain Text File Formats like HTML, or Text Network Protocols like HTTP or POP are any manner of protection!

Just now I had a look through the Failure Report produced by the Analog Web Server Log File Analyzer. Here are some choice tidbits:

$ grep ajax_create_folder access.log | sed 's+^.*"GET+GET+' | sed 's+HTTP/1\.1".*$+HTTP/1.1+' | wc
184 552 16980

$ grep ajax_create_folder access.log | sed 's+^.*"GET+GET+' | sed 's+HTTP/1\.1".*$+HTTP/1.1+' | sort | uniq | wc
102 306 9466

$ grep ajax_create_folder access.log | sed 's+^.*"GET+GET+' | sed 's+HTTP/1\.1".*$+HTTP/1.1+' | sort | uniq | head
GET //ajax_create_folder.php HTTP/1.1
GET /Gallery/zenphoto/zp-core/zp-extensions/tiny_mce/plugins/ajaxfilemanager/ajax_create_folder.php HTTP/1.1
GET /Gallery/zp-core/zp-extensions/tiny_mce/plugins/ajaxfilemanager/ajax_create_folder.php HTTP/1.1
GET /Photo/zp-core/zp-extensions/tiny_mce/plugins/ajaxfilemanager/ajax_create_folder.php HTTP/1.1
GET /Photos/zp-core/zp-extensions/tiny_mce/plugins/ajaxfilemanager/ajax_create_folder.php HTTP/1.1
GET /Pics/zp-core/plugins/tiny_mce/plugins/ajaxfilemanager/ajax_create_folder.php HTTP/1.1
GET /Scripts/tiny_mce/plugins/ajaxfilemanager/ajax_create_folder.php HTTP/1.1
GET /ZenPhoto/zp-core/zp-extensions/tiny_mce/plugins/ajaxfilemanager/ajax_create_folder.php HTTP/1.1
GET /Zenphoto/zp-core/zp-extensions/tiny_mce/plugins/ajaxfilemanager/ajax_creat

• libmdc: Mike Crawford's C++ Memory Management and Testing Library (Boost v1.0)
• Warp Life for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch (Affero GPLv3) - Coming Real Soon Now
• Manic Depressive Geeks
• Living with Schizoaffective Disorder
• Is There a Cause for Which You Would Give Your Life?
• My Deepest Fear
• Why I'm Proud to to be a Dirty GNU Hippy - Got me banned when I posted it to Webmasterworld

And your point is?

"Mania" is no joke. A symptom of my own Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder, Mania is a euphoric state of mind that, while it can feel good, is very very dangerous. Manic people are extremely creative, but when manic, have no way of distinguishing really good ideas from really bad ones.

For example, a man with Bipolar Affective Disorder - Manic Depression - drank eighteen beers one day then knocked over a bank. He carried his loot across the street, sat under a bush then quietly waited for the police to arrive.

I pull stunts like that myself from time to time, but fortunately for me Mania is quite rare. I'm the opposite kind, in that I spend much of my life contemplating suicide.

Good Day.

Michael David Crawford, who invites his critics to take a flying fuck at a rolling donut.

here's a start.

If all you write is C with Classes, you'll get a leaky mess full of crash bugs that you'll never be able to do away with.

But if you write C++ the way C++ wants to be written, it's actually a very easy language to write leak-free, bug free code with. Memory management in particular is very easy with RAII - Resource Allocation Is Initialization. Smart Pointers are RAII applied to heap blocks, but it should be applied to every allocated resource, such as database locks or file handles.

A while back I wrote a style guide that summarizes much of what I know about C++: Pointers, References and Values.

You want free videos:

http://www.tioti.com/
http://quicksilverscreen.com/
http://www.veoh.com/
http://www.hulu.com/
http://www.alluc.org/
http://www.sidereel.com/_home
http://alloftv.net/
http://www.4kidstv.com/

I haven't checked them all but most of them I checked were legal, and Quicksilverscreen and TIOTI are people that share their videos via the web site that may be grayware and not 100% legal but it is like them taping a VHS tape and sharing it with you.

here is a link to tens of thousands of free music links mostly by third party artists who don't have a distributor and share their music via the Internet.

If you are going to use BitTorrent why not find free and legal torrents to use with it and avoid the piracy.

Zoolib at Source Force under the MIT open source license. It has a flat file database format, exists for multiple platforms, has platform-independent thread and mutex classes, graphical user interface toolbox, thread-safe reference counted smart pointers, file access, TCP networking. You can ask the main developers Andy Green or Michael Crawford to port it to a new platform that isn't supported yet, but it supports all of the platforms listed on the source forge page.

The Zoolib Cookbook can help you get started.

The flat file database support is designed in Zoolib so that you can email someone the database file and they can click on it and open it up as an email attachment.

For all these years, I have held onto the Spellswell source code, and kept it safe, knowing that someday the Phoenix of Haiku would rise from the ashed of Be, Inc. (Or rather, I just don't like to ever throw anything away.)

I also still have all the protocol specification documents. I just gotta organize them and throw them up on the web again.

Word Services actually still works on Mac OS X, but not yet with Spellswell. We never did Carbonize it. Eventually Working Software was dissolved, and we all went our separate ways. But I expect I'll release an OS X-Native Spellswell at some point as well.

Some things never die... Spellswell was originally published by Green, Johnson Inc. before Mike Green and Dave Johnson split up into Cassady and Green and Working Software. My understanding is that it could check Microsoft Word 1.0 documents on the 128k Mac. It was a huge hit, before Microsoft added a built-in speller to Word.

A lot of that code from 1984 is still in there, for example an incredibly elaborate dictionary file format that provides compression while at the same time being editable.

It slipped my mind just now that I actually used to work for a quant myself, as a consultant. It was a futures hedge fund. That is, it would buy and sell pork belly and crude oil contracts in such a way as to... print money.

• Self-Employment: Even on a Good Day Things are Hard

The guy who owned the fund is the richest person I have ever met, or am ever likely to meet. Yet they tried to stiff me out of my last month's paycheck, and wouldn't pay me unless I removed from my homepage what their directory of research said of me: "Your code is by far the best in our codebase."

I just violated my termination contract by telling you that. Fuck 'em - I shouldn't have had to sign that contract just to get the paycheck they owed me anyway.

Because they own the rights to the songs, the songs aren't based on a commercial song, and have a different pattern than RIAA songs and also lack a DRM copyprotection scheme.

Legal Torrents

Torrent sites that serve only legal torrents

Michael David Crawford Music unlike any commercial music at all.

Links to tens of thousands of legal free music downloads listed by Michael David Crawford.

See for yourself, some music was meant to be free.

I don't pirate it either. I just do without. Why? Because I can't bring myself to give my hard earned money to the thieving cocksuckers that comprise the RIAA and contribute to their program of turning the internet into a police state.

Why don't you try to use the internet against the RIAA? You can legally download music from a number of websites. Some of them are:

• Creative Commons
• Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads
• Magnatune
• Podsafe music network
• 7digital

Now you may not find music you like but you might.

Falcon

• My Resume

For example, I was once able to give Microsoft the exact byte offset in Word's binary where their bug lay, that would cause a very rare, difficult to reproduce system crash - this was way before Mac OS X, so application faults would hang the whole machine.

I have Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder. Because it's just like being manic depressive and schizophrenic at the same time, it is one of the very worst mental illnesses that one can have.

It is very rare, poorly understood and notoriously difficult to treat. My symptoms include depression, which has been suicidal at times - I've attempted in a serious way twice - a profoundly euphoric state called mania, auditory hallucinations and, in my case, visual hallucinations that coordinate with a profound paranoia that leads me to believe that a shadowy, secret law enforcement agency I call The Thought Police are coming, not to arrest me, but to kill me.

I call them The Thought Police because they are The Police Inside My Head. You see, I know very well that they're not real. Unfortunately, just knowing that one is paranoid doesn't make the paranoia go away. When I look directly at my attackers, I can see that they're not there, but when I turn away I can feel their presence again.

But Wait, There's More!

There are Five Axes of psychiatric diagnosis. That is, one's Madness is a point in a sort of five-dimensional vector space.

Schizoaffective disorder, schizophrenia and manic depression are all biochemical axis diseases; they are caused by screwed up brain chemistry. They are thought to be genetic, although there is some evidence that schizophrenia can be caused by infectious disease when one is either in the womb or very young.

Biochemical axis illnesses are generally incurable, but their symptoms can often be relieved with medication. I know very well what would happen to me should I ever weary of my life on the run and decide to turn myself in to The Thought Police - and so I am very diligent at taking my daily dose of the powerful, expensive, mind-altering drug which gives me the comfort of staying a step - but just a step - ahead of Them.

There is also a neurotic axis. Neuroses are purely psychological in origin and are usually caused by some kind of unresolved trauma, usually experienced as a child such as sexual abuse, but it can arise in adults too, as with the war veteran's Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Ironically, many neurosis originate as adaptive strategies, that enable the neurotic to survive their terrible ordeal. Thus the soldier who learns to dive for cover at every sharp sound survives the war, but is unable to return to civilian life after returning home - because he still feels the need to dive for that safety.

The little girl who survives her pedophile by imagining his advances to be courtship by a handsome prince my not find her Castle in the Sky such a wonderful place to live when she grows up, gets married and has children of her own.

The neurotic axis illnesses can all be cured, and through "talk therapy" alone, without the use of any drugs - in fact, using drugs to relieve one's symptoms can actually relieve one of the need to ever get better.

Unfortunately, the cure generally takes many years and is collossally expensive. In my case I estimate that I paid just one therapist sixty thousand dollars for thirteen years of weekly psychotherapy sessions.

Agreed but the RIAA usually sues the teenage girls and grandmothers who get the IP after it is released from the music pirate that was using it to download over 12 MP3 files that are pirated versions and then reset their DSL modem to get a new IP.

It seems the RIAA doesn't care if someone downloads less than 12 songs in a row, but if they download 12 or move they get the Internet subpoena.

BitTorrent web sites are used for pirated music as well as free and open sourced music files from independent artists without a recording label or the RIAA or iTunes pushing their songs down our throats. But if the RIAA can get all BitTorrent sites down, they can screw the independent artists as well as their fans.

Just like file sharing is used to download Windows XP Pirate Edition, it also is used to download Linux, *BSD Unix, AROS, etc which are free and open source operating systems.

Until now, the only DRM-free option with a comprehensive catalog was Amazon.

There are other sources of DRM-free music. Some of them are:

• Magnatune
• 7digital
• Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads
• podsafe music network

Those are just ones I have bookmarked.

Falcon

• Repeal the Copyright Act! - Let's Keep FileSharing Safe and Legal

While I wrote that several years ago, the page has gotten about five million hits.

I have more such essays in the works - I'll make sure that my many Slashdot friends are the first to know when they are published.

The articles are:

• Sermon at the Soup Kitchen: On C++ Software Quality and Institutional Resistance to Change
• Pointers, References and Values: Passing Parameters, Returning Results, and Storing Member Variables with Musings on Good C++ Style
• On Refactoring C++ Code
• Pointers to C++ Member Functions

While I would very much like to publish dead-tree books, I provide all my material online, free at least as-in-beer, so more readers can benefit from it than would be the case if I charged money for it. Another reason is that most traditional publishers would require that I assign them the copyrights to my books, something that I'm loathe to do.

But a fellow Kuro5hin member named lonelyhobo said:

You tried to say crawford would be (and is) well known for "living with schizoaffective disorder," which is something so plainly ridiculous I wonder if you've received any sharp blows to the head recently. You tried to cite your own absolutely unknown works on the internet to bolster your argument. You honestly think that a little piece of shit software or writing on the internet will get you known for any length of time or in any depth?...

Let's boil it down to something very simple (and very contrary to your personal outlook too, I'm sure): PUTTING SHIT ON THE INTERNET IS NOT AN ACCOMPLISHMENT. Not yours or mine or crawford's. The reason I can and do post the garbage I do on the internet is that I know it's completely meaningless.

But is that what it really means for writing to be notable? I claim that it's not. For one thing, there are many, many books published every year, that even manage to earn their publishers and authors some good money, but that are in no way notable or memorable. At best they're a pleasant way to pass the time.

In my writing, I aim to make a positive difference in the lives of others, whether they are fellow software engineers or fellow mentally ill people. And I have plenty of reason to believe that I have accomplished just that, and many times over.

A little while ago someone attempted to write up a Wikipedia article about me. Of course my many troll friends from Kuro5hin jumped all over it, vandalizing it - it seems I attended "the Batman school of junk touching" - and recommending it for deletion. In the deletion discussion the case was made that I wasn't notable, because not many publications written by others could be found in which my writing was discussed.

I mostly stayed out of the debate, but I did jump in a couple times to point out how hard I work to educate the public about mental illness. I have receved literally thousands of grateful email messages as a result - but for reasons that must be obvious, I couldn't post them.

The consensus of the debaters is that, because few others have discussed my work, I must not be notable enough to merit a Wikipedia article. Considering the difference I know my essays and articles have made in the lives of others, I assert that that is just plain wrong.

They won't censor the Mohamed Cartoons that Muslims find offensive, but they'll go out of their way to censor a BitTorrent web site?

They support free speech when it mocks religion, but they don't support free speech when it comes to BitTorrent. Hypocrisy at its finest.

Don't give me that "they only block it because it violates copyright laws" because on The Pirate Bay there is open source materials and files in the public domain and shareware as well that are 100% legal. They are called legal torrents. Legal torrents are much more than just Linux ISOs, many music artists release open source OGG and MP3 files for free as well under an open source license. Michael David Crawford is one such musical artist that has had his works silenced by fascist laws and actions against BitTorrent sites. In fact he even lists many other music artists just like him who also share their music for free on BitTorrent and that is the real reason that recording companies are shutting down BitTorrent web sites, to silence the competition and sabotage their efforts to release free and alternative music by independent open source musical artists and force everyone to buy commercial CDs instead.

I'm squarely behind Richard Stallman, the GPL and Free Software. I explain why in Why I'm Proud To Be A Dirty GNU Hippy.

He started by discussing how electrons move about in silicon crystals, for example how "holes", or places where electrons were missing, effectively acted as positive charge carriers.

He went on to explain transistors, then how to make logic gates from transistor circuitry, and then the basic architecture of microprocessors and memory, machine code and assembly code.

With this grounding, he want on to teach the basics of Pascal - including pointers - and basic data structures like linked lists and binary trees, as well as recursion.

To cement our understanding, we used these concepts throughout the quarter to write simple vector graphic editors on 68000-based workstations made by HP.

That one quarter was the only computer science course I ever had - my degree is in Physics, not CS - but it was enough grounding in the fundaments to allow me to succeed as a software engineer for more than twenty years now, with a resume that looks like this.

If you still think you "need" the **IA, you're just not very resourceful -- or discriminating. Here's two I use all the time, there are of course others.

Music

Feature Films

Michael Crawford can help.

-mcgrew

... but I am as confident as I am that the Sun will rise tomorrow that it will be safe from terrorists. After all, we have the children to think about.

July 12, 2005

Copyright © 2005 Michael David Crawford.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

It seems that David Clark, who led the development of the Internet way back in the '70's - did you know there even was a '70's? - wants to create a whole new Internet that will fix many of the problems the current Internet is plagued with. The New Internet's engineers will be much more careful this time around to make sure it works better than the first one did.

I'm afraid, though, that the engineers are not the only ones who will be deciding how our New Internet will work.

If one is able to find any privacy or anonymity in this New Internet, it will be because of some undiscovered security hole, which will be quickly repaired, rather than any kind of conscious design decision. Probably one reason they are accepting proposals before rolling it out is to avoid the sort of accidental security holes that enable pr0n, peer-to-peer filesharing and left-wing political activism.

Microsoft, a leading contributor both to this nation's technology base and to the campaign coffers of its leaders, will embrace this new technology and extend it in such a way that the development and dissemination of Open Source software will be, if not mathematically and physically impossible, at least as intractible as factoring a 2048-bit public key.

Imagine, if you will, Trusted Computing implemented at the router level, in such a way that any packets that go farther than one hop are certified not only to support protocols whose patent licenses are fully paid-up and on file with the legal department in Redmond, but whose content is compliant with the Windows standard. The faintest whisp of a Public License, GNU or otherwise, will result in the dropping not only of the individual packet, not only in the cancellation of the entire file transmission, but, within microseconds, the reporting of the physical location of the offending server to responsible law enforcement personnel. The identities of its rogue administrators will be fetched instantly from the database maintained by the Department of Homeland Security. (You will have to submit fingerprints and DNA samples to obtain a Windows server license, as after all, Internet servers can be used to disseminate explosives r

... but I am as confident as I am that the Sun will rise tomorrow that it will be safe from terrorists. After all, we have the children to think about.

July 12, 2005

Copyright © 2005 Michael David Crawford.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

It seems that David Clark, who led the development of the Internet way back in the '70's - did you know there even was a '70's? - wants to create a whole new Internet that will fix many of the problems the current Internet is plagued with. The New Internet's engineers will be much more careful this time around to make sure it works better than the first one did.

I'm afraid, though, that the engineers are not the only ones who will be deciding how our New Internet will work.

If one is able to find any privacy or anonymity in this New Internet, it will be because of some undiscovered security hole, which will be quickly repaired, rather than any kind of conscious design decision. Probably one reason they are accepting proposals before rolling it out is to avoid the sort of accidental security holes that enable pr0n, peer-to-peer filesharing and left-wing political activism.

Microsoft, a leading contributor both to this nation's technology base and to the campaign coffers of its leaders, will embrace this new technology and extend it in such a way that the development and dissemination of Open Source software will be, if not mathematically and physically impossible, at least as intractible as factoring a 2048-bit public key.

Imagine, if you will, Trusted Computing implemented at the router level, in such a way that any packets that go farther than one hop are certified not only to support protocols whose patent licenses are fully paid-up and on file with the legal department in Redmond, but whose content is compliant with the Windows standard. The faintest whisp of a Public License, GNU or otherwise, will result in the dropping not only of the individual packet, not only in the cancellation of the entire file transmission, but, within microseconds, the reporting of the physical location of the offending server to responsible law enforcement personnel. The identities of its rogue administrators will be fetched instantly from the database maintained by the Department of Homeland Security. (You will have to submit fingerprints and DNA samples to obtain a Windows server license, as after all, Internet servers can be used to disseminate explosives r

You can find many other such artists, and free, legal music hosting sites in my article Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads.

• Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads

If you're a musician or music hosting site operator, and offer at least one COMPLETE track from your site, I'll be happy to give you a link. It's even OK if you charge for your music, as long as there are some complete tracks and not just samples. Email me at legaldownloads@gmail.com

But I have a profoundly debilitating and poorly understood mental illness called schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type. It's just like being schizophrenic and manic depressive at the same time. The symptoms including depression - sometimes suicidal depression - a profoundly euphoric state called mania, paranoia and other delusions, and visual and auditory hallucinations.

If you want to know what it's like to be paranoid, if you want to know what it's like to hallucinate, then I invite you to read my essay My Deepest Fear. It's about a shadowy and secret branch of law enforcement known as The Thought Police. They are so secret that they are visible only to the clinically insane - and to the regular beat cops who are now and then unwittingly pressed into the service of The Thought Police when it comes time for a fugitive from their lethal brand of justice - a fugitive such as myself - to turn himself in:

You see, The Thought Police aren't coming to arrest me. They never have been. They never arrest anyone. The Thought Police don't have jails and there is no arraignment because you can't get out on bail. There is no judge and there is no trial because there is no evidence to present. Not only is one not entitled to a defense attorney, there is no prosecutor either. There is no jury, no sentence, no prison, no parole.

One is not set free when one has paid one's debt to society because no one ever survives paying it. The currency with which The Thought Police collect society's money is denominated in human lives.

But when one has been caught by The Thought Police, one does have a choice: there is the gallows, the chair, the firing squad. One can even ask for a certain kind of mercy known as lethal injection.

It's long been out of fashion, but a long time ago, in France, The Thought Police also offered the guillotine. I understand it's still available upon request.

I never, ever once thought they were coming to arrest me. No:

I knew they were coming to kill me.

I explain in my piece that arrests by The Thought Police are better known as "officer-assisted suicides", and that at one time I was within days of turning myself in to them. It was only out of love for my wife that I sought legal advice from a special sort of attorney. These attorneys can't see The Thought Police themselves, but they are aware of their existence and can dispense valuable legal advice.

The first such attorney I saw was a psychiatrist in a hospital emergency room.

But all it takes is ten milligrams of Zyprexa to put any fears of The Thought Police out of my mind. While I'm still a fugitive from justice, Zyprexa enables me to pass as a law-abiding citizen.

Zyprexa works by manipulating the concentrations of various neurotransmitter chemicals in the neural synapses of my brain, notably dopamine. Excessive dopamine is the immediate cause of paranoia and hallucinations.

Antipsychotic drugs have been on the market for decades, but the older ones worked poorly and had debilitating side effects, such as the seizure I once experienced from Haldol. The "atypical" antipsychotics such as the Zyprexa I take, work much better.

The first such atypical antipsychotic, clozapine, was licensed only in the late '80's. The first one I took, Risperdal, was licensed in late '93. These drugs have enabled millions of schizophrenics and schizoaffectives to get out of the hospital, to get back t

...while I really do hate the RIAA and the music industry...

You could have fooled me.


She also feels a need to support the artists

Then she should forget Bryan Adams and listen to indie music, where the artist actually gets paid more than a pittance. Sure, megastars like Adams or Metallica or Ted "if Jimmy Buffet had my money he'd declare Chapter 11" Nugent get filthy rich, but most musicians live on subsistance wages. Very little money comes from sales of anything but concert tickets and merchandise.

Really, DRM free on iTunes is predicated on the fact that the recording industry must feel like it is getting some sort of handle on musical file sharing - that is, RIAA lawsuits to music downloaders must actually be working.

Don't believe everything you read. The lawsuits aren't what is getting people to switch to paid services; most people would have gladly paid at the start had there been a legal alternative. Now that there is iTunes and other legal venues, it doesn't make much sense to use P2P. If the lawsuits had anything to do with it, file sharing would have declined earlier and people would stop using illegal drugs. You can go to prison for marijuana, but millions of people smoke it anyway.

Were there REALLY no DMCA or copyright controls on music, though, someone would eventually make something with a really cool user interface, like iTunes, but where music would be genuinely free. Then, musicians would starve.

First, lets not confuse copyright, which COULD be a good thing if its term limits were what previous generations had (12-30 years) rather than the present calamity, and the DMCA.

Secondly, Roger McGuinn, an early '60s rocker (the Byrds) stated that the old, illegal Napster revitalized his career!

Many artists DO give music away. The link is to free recordings of live shows in lossless format of some friends of mine. They've released two CDs (the first one is their best) and play all over the midwest. here is a bluegrass version of a rap song(!!), while here is a cover of an Allman Brother's song. However, that's not their usual style. Links are lossless, but there are MP3 and Ogg versions available.

I link them because these are friends of mine, but there are literally thousands of artists who are giving it away, as the money isn't in selling recordings, but rather in performing. This is the megastars as well as the little guys. And the only ones who are starving are the ones that suck.

And if the CD you bought only has one good song, guess what? They suck!

-mcgrew

Magnatune.com

You may also want to checkout Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads.

And in the case of music, the vast majority of people are "landless". Or can you show me a way to tell whether my claim to "land" doesn't infringe someone else's claim to "land", given music cryptomnesia cases such as Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music and given the current patent minefield situation?

First, I don't know about Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music so I won't remark on it. Secondly just because the RIAA "controls" most of the music sold does not mean no one else can't produce music too. Otherwise Creative Commons, internet archives.org, Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads and others websites would never exist allowing legal music downloads, at least not in their current form. Also it does not prevent others from making their own music. I might even create music myself, I have a flute by David Nighteagle I'd like to learn to play, unfortunately I haven't found someone who could teach me and I no longer learn well on my own.

Artists will largely accept this turn of events, because in their view, they've already spent more than enough years starving.

Actually more and more artists, muscians in this case, are turning to the Creative Commons and are uploading their music to services like this one as well as Internet Archives, GoingWare, and Magnatunes amoung others.

This thread has inspired me to register the domain "publicpriorart.org" -- the intention is to build a database of ideas, thoughts, algorithms,etc in a public place, strictly for the purpose of preventing patents from being filed for them in the future. Anyone interested in helping? Or can point me to an existing effort, so I don't waste my time?

Though there's no one public place, other than the internet, there are a number of websites who share not just programs but other things like music. There are all of the open source website collections like Sourceforge and Freshmear. Here's Creative Commons, for legal music downloads there's Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads and MagnaTunes. More can be found on Wiki's Creative Commons License page.

talk about what's really at issue, which is brand new, current, and popular music and movies?

And interestingly, you can't ban the export of a book, because a book is a form of free speech, and free speech is protected by the first amendment to the United States Constitution. So when a new version of PGP becomes available in the United States, it's source code is simply published in book form and mailed overseas, where the source can be retrieved by scanning it and using inexpensive optical character recognition software to convert the printed pages back to machine-readable program text files.

And interestingly, you can't ban the export of a book, because a book is a form of free speech, and free speech is protected by the first amendment to the United States Constitution. So when a new version of PGP becomes available in the United States, it's source code is simply published in book form and mailed overseas, where the source can be retrieved by scanning it and using inexpensive optical character recognition software to convert the printed pages back to machine-readable program text files.

But when they're bad, they're really really bad, so bad, that I don't want to even think about it, as today is a day of rest, and not anger. :)

Anyways, I will refer everyone to a web page of a software developer who very adeptly describes his experiences with recruiters, and why he all but refuses to work with them.

Actually, no - the worst thing is not to hear anything. I find it rude when I spend a lot of time putting together an application (tailoring CV/resume) and I don't even get a rejection email.

Beware agencies. In addition to an article on recruiters that shows some of their less salubrious side, I've personally never been impressed with them. For example, in my current work (HCI/usability), I have a PhD and private consultancy experience), I cannot even get a reply from them; this applies even to specialist agencies. I'm not sure why but my guess is that their customers want MSc's and the agency is damned if they'll accept anything more. They seem to promise a lot but deliver with little. Some job adverts have unrealistic requirements - these often have little real knowledge of the job and know only buzz-words. Avoid them.

But if you can identify your needs, there is no reason that you cannot search for people yourself. Yeah, it's a long process but you know your requirements better than anyone else does. People working on FOSS have their work on public display. Find projects (and thus workers) that you admire and get in touch. Even if nobody wants the job, the offer is tremendously flattering and they may be able to recommend someone else with the skills.

I guess my point is that if you want people to do a specific job, make sure you talk to people who will understand what you needs are. Talk to techies, not to recruitment folks.

See Michael Crawford's Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads.

CTS knows Mike, I'm curious why he didn't link to this?

I'm also wondering when CTS started making sense (he was funnier when he didn't take his meds..;) ...and no, I'm not Mike. CTS can most likely guess my real ID from the "meds" joke tho.

Maybe this way?

C'mon, link whoring at slashdot isn't spamming. Everybody does it. It's even respectable.

My plan is to place a new kuro5hin text ad each day this month, and over the next couple weeks to get all my articles into Bonita's new XHTML/CSS design. I'm working on The Valley is a Harsh Mistress as I write this.

If I can somehow manage to draw more revenue from my website than I spend from advertising, I'll be reinvesting the proceeds back into promoting GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks, and later, once I get my first book review posted, Recommended Reading.

It's all part of my secret plan to get out of programming altogether and go to music school.

Care to download my MP3s?

Those recordings are ten years old though. I've come a long way since then. It's just a matter of getting the money for the equipment, and the time, to record my latest work, but I expect there will be new music there by the end of summer.

C'mon, link whoring at slashdot isn't spamming. Everybody does it. It's even respectable.

My plan is to place a new kuro5hin text ad each day this month, and over the next couple weeks to get all my articles into Bonita's new XHTML/CSS design. I'm working on The Valley is a Harsh Mistress as I write this.

If I can somehow manage to draw more revenue from my website than I spend from advertising, I'll be reinvesting the proceeds back into promoting GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks, and later, once I get my first book review posted, Recommended Reading.

It's all part of my secret plan to get out of programming altogether and go to music school.

Care to download my MP3s?

Those recordings are ten years old though. I've come a long way since then. It's just a matter of getting the money for the equipment, and the time, to record my latest work, but I expect there will be new music there by the end of summer.

Who will be next, to take the hopes and dreams of their employees and investors down with them?

• The Valley is a Harsh Mistress

I mentioned two companies that were still alive, but on the ropes at the time I wrote the essay - Be, Inc. and Working Software. Now both are gone, with not even a domain name to mark their graves anymore.

Who will be next, to take the hopes and dreams of their employees and investors down with them?

• The Valley is a Harsh Mistress

I mentioned two companies that were still alive, but on the ropes at the time I wrote the essay - Be, Inc. and Working Software. Now both are gone, with not even a domain name to mark their graves anymore.