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There is some commentary on the Oregon computer crime law at Remarks on Oregon vs. Schwartz

Software Tool and Die hosts web sites. In my experience, they are secure, reliable, and straightforward to deal with.

see How The Internet Will Make The Record Labels Evaporate

The service is great, the support people know what the hell they're talking about, and I can talk to them any time, day or night, with a local phone call. All this for $6 a month.

In short, it's too good; it can't last much longer. Every month when I get my statement I expect to find out that they've been bought out.

I don't know how much work he is actively putting into it. It seems to have some recent additions, there is a folder called Election2000, but it only has one realaudio file in it.

I don't know how much work he is actively putting into it. It seems to have some recent additions, there is a folder called Election2000, but it only has one realaudio file in it.

I don't know how much work he is actively putting into it. It seems to have some recent additions, there is a folder called Election2000, but it only has one realaudio file in it.

• Sends emails to your friends in a totally proprietary format, also encoded with CSS to protect it from the evil hackers who broke TNEF.
• In an email reply, it takes all your new text from where it should be (directly under the part replied to) and automatically moves it above the original message. This is to deliberately make you look like a newbie and thus make you more attractive to your preferred soulmate gender.
• Posts to newsgroups in Microsoft's extended RTF format. That'll teach them to complain about HTML.
• Automatically opens any executable attachments and runs them. You obviously wanted to do that, so this saves your valuable time.
• Includes a built in copy of Solitaire and Minesweeper for you to play while it sends and retrieves your mail.
• Sends me, err, 'performance data' of any *.jpg or *.mpg attachments you recieve.

In "What's in a Name?," Kent Pitman makes the case that the notions of identity and intent to extend are at the core of object-oriented programming, not some check-list of features. But read the paper, not just my poor paraphrasing, as Mr. Pitman always has an interesting point to make.

jim

The PKI movement has been riddled by ita own complexity ever since its beginning.

The problem with PKI is that it depends on a common trusted root, and a global namespace. It is also hampered by crude certificate revocation methods.

There is a movement towards a simpler PKI, SPKI, which addresses all those isues. Of course, there will be need for co-operation between about the both approaches.

See Carl Ellison's page for more great info, especially a thorough comparison of approaches.

The PKI movement has been riddled by ita own complexity ever since its beginning.

The problem with PKI is that it depends on a common trusted root, and a global namespace. It is also hampered by crude certificate revocation methods.

There is a movement towards a simpler PKI, SPKI, which addresses all those isues. Of course, there will be need for co-operation between about the both approaches.

See Carl Ellison's page for more great info, especially a thorough comparison of approaches.

Yes, the whole hierarchical X.509 approach was doomed from the start and needs to die. What the world really needs is the Simple Public Key Infrastructure, SPKI. This provides a way to generate certificates which transfer trust between keys in various sorts of highly flexible, controllable ways. Read the SPKI docs and you'll be converted to our religion; your whole view of naming, and of the role of a PKI, will change.

SPKI is the public key infrastructure that can actually achieve what it promises, because it doesn't have a root certificate that only God could properly hold. It's the ideas of PGP's Web of Trust taken to their logical conclusion. And it is simple, and neat, and easy to understand. Everyone interested in the problems with PKI should look into it.
--

First off, the Libertarians get very little press converage because no one is going to vote for them. You may see this as circular reasoning, but Nader is now getting at least some mass media coverage, and Buchanan is getting none. Buchanan was getting significantly more than Nader until everyone realized that Buchanan was polling under 1%, and Nader was polling at 4-7%. Browne will probably get a hell of a lot less votes than even Buchanan. If you're going to ask why Browne doesn't get coverage, at least be fair and ask why the Constitutional, Natural Law and Socialist parties don't get coverage either, since their candidates are probably doing at least as well as Browne.

And as to your second point, I have read and heard a lot of info from Nader, and I like almost all of it. He is very socially liberal, but his economic ideas aren't too nutty(at least not as bad as Browne), and he, unlike Browne, will do something to protect the environment. Stop telling me who I want to vote for when you have no idea where I stand on the issues.

And for a real Libertarian FAQ, check here:

Critiques of Libertarianism

Look at this .

The World gives me a unix shell which I can dial up in the Northeastern US or ssh in from anywhere.

A bit pricy but I personally trust owner/founder Barry Shein to do an upstanding job and do the Right Thing(TM). He is One Of Us and has been doing this for 11 years. I've been a customer for 6 years.

Like they say: The First and the Best.

As far as cold fusion goes, chemists and physicists have more or less ripped it a new one. The excess heat produced has been shown to be a result of a garden-variety exothermic reaction. Unfortunately, some quacks still think it'll solve the world's ills. The situation is a good lesson on why peer review is infinitely more preferable to popular literature review (ahem! cough, cough.. P=NP on /. ... cough :)

Oh sure, it seems like fun and games now, but that's how Gerald Bull started out. One day you're launching potatoes across the road, a few years later Saddam Hussein wants you to launch canned hams into Israel and the Mossad is breaking down your door...

I think it's available here:

http://world.std.com/~damned/software.ht ml

I have never actually used this though...

--8<--

http://world.std.com/~mhuben/libindex.ht ml
Just some helpful info for all...


"The road to hell is paved with good intentions"

"Central clearinghouse" PKI is what SSL uses. SSL certificates are signed by Certificate Authorities (CAs), such as VeriSign. CAs are trusted entities who verify an applicant's identity before issuing them a certificate. A certificate is the same as a public key except that it has more information about the owner - usually the x.509 Distinguished Name which consists of a "common name" (CN), "organizational unit" (OU), "organization" (O), "locality" (L), "state" (S), "country" (C), and sometimes email. For instance, Microsoft's DN is CN=www.microsoft.com/OU=mscom/O=Microsoft/L=Redmon d/S=Washington/C=US. How do you know which CAs to trust? Web browsers typically have a built-in list. Anyone can act as a CA, but when someone views a website which is using one of that CA's certificates, the user's web browser should (and most do) display a warning. Go to Fortify's SSL test page and my HTTPS website. Fortify's certificate was issued by Thawte (who I believe is now owned by VeriSign), a widely-known CA whose certificate is in most/all browsers. My certificate is signed by the "Zevils CA", which doesn't really exist. Your browser should display a warning when accessing the zevils site but not when accessing the Fortify site.

The other popular method of PKI is known as the "web of trust." This is what PGP and GPG use. If you know someone in real life, you have proof of their identity (such as a driver's license), and you both have GPG/PGP keys, you should sign each other's public keys and upload the signed keys to the keyserver. Here's how the web of trust works (with help from the GNU Privacy Guard Handbook):

Alice knows Bob in real life. They both use GPG. Alice knows with absolute certainty that a certain key is Bob's key, and that Bob is who he says he is, so she signs Bob's key with her key. Alice and Bob discuss PKI every day at lunch and Alice knows that Bob has excellent judgement on when to sign a key, so she tells GPG that she trusts Bob's signature on a key as much as her own (she can also give Bob marginal trust or no trust - see GPG documentation for details.) Bob has signed Charlie's key. Thus, Alice trusts Charlie's key. The web of trust, at least in the GPG implementation, is quite flexible and does extend to a depth of more than one. See the GPG handbook for more information.

Of course, PKI is not a magical security fairy that sprinkles security dust on your keys while you're asleep at night. Bruce Schneier and Carl Ellison have written an excellent paper, Ten Risks of PKI (Computer Security Journal, v 16, n 1, 2000, pp. 1-7)

Actually, as shown here, parallel potato processing is now standard.

On the other hand, detailed, comprehensive, and well-thought-out arguments against the arguments on that Web site can be found on this Web site or perhaps this other one.
/.

On the other hand, detailed, comprehensive, and well-thought-out arguments against the arguments on that Web site can be found on this Web site or perhaps this other one.
/.

There really are no compelling arguments against libertarianism that I''ve seen.

Sigh. Well this article is so old, noone will ever read this, but I cannot let you get away with saying this without challenge.

There are a great many arguments against libertarianism that hold some water, but if you reason entirely from libertarian principles its possible to condemn just about all of them as authoritarian. I recommened Mike Hubens excellent Site of critiques of libertarianism including his Non-libertarian FAQ for many different views.

The problem is that libertarianism reasoning is a hermetically closed loop of logic, which is in itself free of inconsistencies, but in itself that proves nothing. Nothin about consistency gaurantees good governance, and nothing about the way the principle of libertarianism are derived does either. This is why, to be completely blunt, libertarians are so dogmatic (the statement "there are no good arguments ..." is dogmatic, and arrogant. If you disagree, check a dictionary), and those who try to argue with them get so frustrated.

The logic goes like this: The highest value is freeedom. We must maximise everyone's freedom. This is meant in the negative sense of freedom: a man is free if noone prevents him doing as he pleases with himself and his property if he interferes with noone else. Thus the sole role of the state is the prevention of coercion and fraud.

The first thing to note is that this is a very unusal use of the word "freedom". In general usage people are happy to talk about their freedom at work, or in their families, or to change suppliers for some good. Libertarians, however, assert that if you sign a contract obliging you to do something you have acted freely, and thus if I complain about my lack of freedom to, say, take bathroom breaks at work, this is mere whinging and my freedom has not been affected. After all, I can quite, can't I ? and I signed the contract with my employer in the first place.

To see this, if its not sufficiently clear, consider an employer who sets up separate "whites only" and "blacks only" drinking fountains at work, and fires employess who disregard the separation. Most of us would consider such behaviour abhorent, and most people would not object to a law against it. Libertarians, however, assert that the employer is quite within his rights. I admit I'm pressing emotional buttons to make a point here. I don't imply that libertarianism implies racism, or that libertarians would condone such employment politicies. I do, however, assert that the libertarian idea of freedom is not very close to the common use of the word. IMHO this problem derives from treating property as an extension of the person and essentially absolute. It is better - in my view - to see property as a social phenomenon, a compromise, whose use must be regulated.

Secondly, and along similar lines, libertarianism is not an adequate moral system, as should be clear from the above. At best all it offers is a minimal framework for law. Nothing in fundamental libertarian philosophy prevents one from selling oneself into slavery, for instance.

The only possible justification for libertarianism other than that it is moral is that it is efficient - that it provides the greatest degree of social or economic good of any social system. The arguments here are economic, but they are at the very least inconclusive. You have to believe in the perfection of the unregulated free market to accept them.

There really are no compelling arguments against libertarianism that I''ve seen.

Sigh. Well this article is so old, noone will ever read this, but I cannot let you get away with saying this without challenge.

There are a great many arguments against libertarianism that hold some water, but if you reason entirely from libertarian principles its possible to condemn just about all of them as authoritarian. I recommened Mike Hubens excellent Site of critiques of libertarianism including his Non-libertarian FAQ for many different views.

The problem is that libertarianism reasoning is a hermetically closed loop of logic, which is in itself free of inconsistencies, but in itself that proves nothing. Nothin about consistency gaurantees good governance, and nothing about the way the principle of libertarianism are derived does either. This is why, to be completely blunt, libertarians are so dogmatic (the statement "there are no good arguments ..." is dogmatic, and arrogant. If you disagree, check a dictionary), and those who try to argue with them get so frustrated.

The logic goes like this: The highest value is freeedom. We must maximise everyone's freedom. This is meant in the negative sense of freedom: a man is free if noone prevents him doing as he pleases with himself and his property if he interferes with noone else. Thus the sole role of the state is the prevention of coercion and fraud.

The first thing to note is that this is a very unusal use of the word "freedom". In general usage people are happy to talk about their freedom at work, or in their families, or to change suppliers for some good. Libertarians, however, assert that if you sign a contract obliging you to do something you have acted freely, and thus if I complain about my lack of freedom to, say, take bathroom breaks at work, this is mere whinging and my freedom has not been affected. After all, I can quite, can't I ? and I signed the contract with my employer in the first place.

To see this, if its not sufficiently clear, consider an employer who sets up separate "whites only" and "blacks only" drinking fountains at work, and fires employess who disregard the separation. Most of us would consider such behaviour abhorent, and most people would not object to a law against it. Libertarians, however, assert that the employer is quite within his rights. I admit I'm pressing emotional buttons to make a point here. I don't imply that libertarianism implies racism, or that libertarians would condone such employment politicies. I do, however, assert that the libertarian idea of freedom is not very close to the common use of the word. IMHO this problem derives from treating property as an extension of the person and essentially absolute. It is better - in my view - to see property as a social phenomenon, a compromise, whose use must be regulated.

Secondly, and along similar lines, libertarianism is not an adequate moral system, as should be clear from the above. At best all it offers is a minimal framework for law. Nothing in fundamental libertarian philosophy prevents one from selling oneself into slavery, for instance.

The only possible justification for libertarianism other than that it is moral is that it is efficient - that it provides the greatest degree of social or economic good of any social system. The arguments here are economic, but they are at the very least inconclusive. You have to believe in the perfection of the unregulated free market to accept them.

If you're interested in detailed, comprehensive, and well-thought-out arguments against libertarianism, I recommend this Web site.
--

The Critiques Of Libertarianism site has a section devoted to critiques of Ayn Rand/Objectivism and a section devoted to critiques of Libertarianism by Objectivists.

The Critiques Of Libertarianism site has a section devoted to critiques of Ayn Rand/Objectivism and a section devoted to critiques of Libertarianism by Objectivists.

The Critiques Of Libertarianism site has a section devoted to critiques of Ayn Rand/Objectivism and a section devoted to critiques of Libertarianism by Objectivists.

Of course, I would argue that engineering a properly designed system cannot be DONE with open source. The whole premise of open source is not doing design, but hacking code without DOING design. This premise is very well documented by ESR in the Cathedral and the Bazaar and in the Unix Philospohy by Gancarz.

For a prooperly engineered system you need discipline, and you need rigid standards. You don't just hack code together, and if you do you'll just get another system just as bad as Unix. Good engineering is premised on good design, and the bazaar skips this step. Good engineering is a cathedral. It's not a matter of coding, it's a matter of discipline, design, and standards.

Your concerns would be more substantial if you'd stop confusing (as I've seen you do before) "open source" with "bazaar-style development", and "bazaar-style development" with "bad engineering".

They are each entirely orthagonal. Just as proprietary development, as such, never assures good engineering, neither open-source nor bazaar-style development, specifically, assures bad engineering.

After all, several highly visible open-source projects were developed cathedral-style, and are considered very good in terms of quality (perhaps "category-beaters"): GNU Emacs and GCC come to mind.

I used the "cathedral" approach to develop g77, also to assure quality, even before I understood it as a "cathedral" model, and after I did, I often resisted "bazaar-style" attempts to "improve" it when I felt they didn't, or wouldn't, meet the quality criteria I tried to uphold for it. (Failures being due to my own personal failings, at least mostly, not the fact that g77 was open-sourced! See my GNU Fortran (g95) page for more info.)

Certainly I agree with your implication that much open-source/bazaar-developed software, including some widely celebrated, is developed to a lower standard of engineering quality than should be the case for products of their ilk.

But the fault is not that they're open source, or developed bazaar-style. Those are "features" that allow many more developers to participate, with less up-front investment overall, for better or worse (depending on the quality of the developers, and especially their "developments", e.g. patches, as allowed by the project maintainers).

As far as these three concepts being entirely orthagonal, what I said above is not quite true...

...because I'm generally of the opinion that there's insufficient quality assurance of a public software product if that product is not open-sourced.

That is, without the public being able to view, modify, and try out the source code for a public software product (whether it's a distribution, like Windows or Linux, or the software running a public web site like slashdot.org or etrade.com), I don't see how anyone can claim their public quality assurance can reach the same high level that it (theoretically) could if it was open-sourced.

Of course, opponents of open-sourcing have long argued that without up-front investments of capital, quality is not affordable.

That may be true, but IMO the more pertinent issue is that only via open-sourcing can everyone determine for themselves whether the up-front investments that have been made have indeed resulted in a product of sufficient quality.

So it often amuses me to see people like yourself essentially (as you appear to do) prefer to blindly trust some corporation to produce quality software on the theory that they had the money to do it, instead of insisting on the product being open-sourced so you don't have to trust it, and can look at the code instead, discuss it with friends, muck around with it to see how robust, extensible, stable, etc. it is, and so on.

Because, in the end, as much as you liked VAX/VMS, in the short time I worked on that type of system, it crashed many more times than Linux has ever crashed on me (about 10 years using Linux versus maybe 3 using VAX/VMS).

And when I found a bug in the Linux kernel (long ago), I reported it and it got fixed very quickly. (Probably because I provided a patch.) I found it only because I happened to be looking through the source code, not because I actually ran into the bug! (It involved fouling up group-protections of files in one place, IIRC.)

But when I ran into a bug in VMS, it took a long time to demonstrate it sufficiently as a bug to my management so I could view the source on microfiche, track it down, and then send it to the Black Hole of DEC. To my knowledge, it was never fixed. (It involved random hangs while doing straightforward, but asynchronous, I/O to normal text files. That got me much better performance on a text-to-PostScript converter I'd written, but I had to back it down to using synch I/O, thanks to the bug.)

Had VMS been open-sourced, not only would I have been more easily able to find and fix that bug and get it out to others...

...but you would still be able to use VMS on many different kinds of hardware, today, instead of (presumably, as I do for TOPS-10 and especially ITS ;-) bemoaning its "loss" to the community.

Whereas those shops that committed to Unix in the early '70s on the basis that it was lean, mean, and came with source code are still able to preserve a substantial portion of that investment by using *BSD and Linux systems, which support a dizzying array of hardware (CPUs and other components), allowing people to pick the hardware that best suits their present needs.

So, open source is not a panacea, neither is bazaar-style development (despite ESR's tendency to write as if it is), but they aren't inherently going to do anything but improve quality over the long run, since quality includes viability of investment in technologies over time as a component.

I agree that this system is *far* from stopping piracy of streaming media, however, this probably will *not* affect keyspace...
IDEA is a pretty popular PK algo, right? A PGP attack FAQ &nbsp (I found trying to go to Fran Litterio's now-defunct PGP archive) which is fairly complete, albeit unconventional, has a statement that I would tend to agree with for just about any pk/hybrid cryptosystem based on large primes:

-- Brute Force of IDEA --
As we all know the keyspace of IDEA is 128-bits. In base 10 notation that is:
340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,45 6.
To recover a particular key, one must, on average, search half the keyspace. That is 127 bits:
170,141,183,460,469,231,731,687,303715,884,105,728 .
If you had 1,000,000,000 machines that could try 1,000,000,000 keys/sec, it would still take all these machines longer than the universe as we know it has existed and then some, to find the key.
IDEA, as far as present technology is concerned, is not vulnerable to brute-force attack, pure and simple.


Of course, the claim of vulnerability to brute force attack has lost validity, at least to some extent, since it's 'publication' in '96... The point is, that's a lot of keys. If I'm not mistaken, *any* primes in that range are potential keys. (any crypto experts out there?)

The voltage is still 240V in Britain and 220V on the Continent. The new European 'standard' is 230V, but with a wide enough tolerance to cover both. See this page.

Lots of people have email on boats now, it really is the best way to stay in touch at sea.

There are two ends to your problem, the boat end and the land end. You'll need to have radio gear on land, turned on 24/24, 7x7. Given how crowded the HF bands are these days, its not practical to set up your own landside transceiver. There is no way to connect to a dialup ISP these days by tunneling through a radio connection, so abandon that idea now. But there are many boater email services available, a few are linked below.

Satellite gear is expensive, ignore it if you can. It is all high-latency 1200 or 2400 baud packet transmissions, and you end up using the providers email service, and they aren't in the email business. You can't really use satellite phones to make modem calls to any ISP, but if you get desperate set up a 110/300 baud FSK modem on a phone line at home with UUCP on a linux box.

I would assume the boat is already equipped with a good HF radio. If not, then start shopping for a higher end radio with computer control designed to integrate with laptop computers and an SSB HF modem. Read a few boating mags, and a few amateur radio mags for reviews, and search deja for other reports.

In addition to a good HF rig, you'll need a good HF modem. Look at kantronics website for starters.

Get your mother trained up on HF radio operations. There is no easy shortcut when you are 1000 miles from the nearest land. It is as important as learning how to sail and basic emergency procedures.

No matter which route you go, it will be necessary to have a server landside to store the email and filter out spam whenever possible, and to intercept messages containing large attachments. Keep the email address off the internet, don't post it prominently on a web page, or post to usenet from it, or spam will follow. Give it out only to those who your mother wants to communicate with, and send out an explanitory email to her friends not to try to send pictures or big attachments.

The link will be between 300 and 1200 baud, so plan accordingly. But any modern HF gear can run in unattended mode, so picking up email can happen over a period of hours.

There are a bunch of commercial email gateway services to boaters.

Check out Message Center , Mobile Marine Radio , the HF on Board guys are cool for DIY, and globe wireless are expensive but reliable.

Disclaimer, I've used globe, they work but you'll still need to know what you are doing on the boat end. And they cost a lot of money. And they don't have any spam filtering, since they make about $2 to $5 per message transferred.

Test out the service for at least a month before heading off to sea. Try it on a shakedown voyage as well. No sense on spending all that money and time just to haul a bunch of useless equipment to hawaii.

the AC
[ I'm jealous as can be, now my day is shot thinking of sailing to hawaii :-]

Here's the text of their email to me:

TransOrbital Offers the 1st Commercial Spaceflight to the Moon

A Project Participation Opportunity with a For-Profit Space Venture

Solicitation of Interest

Not only will the 2001 TrailBlazer Project be the first commercial spaceflight to the Moon; it will also return the first video from the Moon in thirty years. The video will be of very high quality and digitally enhanced, showing the lunar surface details as has never been seen before.

The entire Project is intended to cost a small fraction of what it would cost NASA to complete a similar project.

TransOrbital Inc. has developed a low-cost, video spacecraft project for lunar orbit. TransOrbital's commercially funded robotic spacecraft, 2001 TrailBlazer, will return HDTV video from lunar orbit for use as Internet content and other commercial products. The privately held company has already arranged for a launch aboard the "Strela" launch vehicle. The 2001 TrailBlazer Project is a for-profit Space Venture and will produce high-quality video and other products such as:

• The first advertising opportunity in lunar orbit
• Video with lunar background showing corporate logos on a sub-spacecraft
• Earthrise 2001: A defining video image for the New Millennium
• Final de-orbit video, up to moment of impact
• An atlas of the entire lunar surface for students & planetary scientists
• High-resolution aerial photography of pre-targeted sites on the Moon
• Low-altitude, high-speed video, for Hollywood science-fiction movies footage
• The first deep space email service, from lunar orbit
• Interactive Lunar Flight CD-ROM game made from the photography

The photos from lunar orbit will be very high resolution, utilizing a telescope with an HDTV camera. "We expect to be able to see the tire tracks from the Apollo-era rovers."

Excellent Website and Portal Content

"We want to do for the Moon what Jacques Cousteau did for marine exploration, to go, to see, sell the images as content and repeat it again and again." The Project will provide exceptional long-term content for TransOrbital customers' Internet portals during construction of the spacecraft, the launch, and throughout the spaceflight to the Moon. This exciting Project can propel customers' portals to the forefront of the Web, as the premiere sites for content, education and news about space and the Moon. The spacecraft will also provide small cargo delivery service for relics and personal & business cards, to a hard landing on the lunar surface.

The Project will be fully insured against launch and technical failure, assuring the return of deposits in the event of disaster, a welcome feature incorporated into TransOrbital's business plan. TransOrbital is seeking additional associates and customers for products created during the 2001 TrailBlazer Project.

Point of Contact:
Gregory Nemitz
VP, TransOrbital, Inc.
3672-A Bancroft St.
San Diego, CA 92104
Tel: 619-528-0520
Fax: 619-693-3039
gnemitz@transorbital.net
http://www.transorbital.net

Mike Caprio, mikecap@nospamldbw.com

I'm as big a fan of satire as anyone, but in IDG's defense, one of the great satirists of all time, Ambrose Bierce, was badly bitten by a failure to protect his 'title theme'

Bierce's 'Devils Dictionary' (modern title) mocks society so trenchantly that it's hard to believe parts of it were published as early as 1881

His newspaper made him use the more reverent "Cynic's Word Book" as a title for his column and his wit became so famous and popular that by the time his book came out, the world had been flooded with The Cynic's This, The Cynic's That, and The Cynic's T'other. His book, swamped out by its own imitators, sold poorly.

It's public domain now (available at e-text sites -- alas, many also distribute stripped down demo versions of modern commercial e-packagings. Make sure you get the complete original). Though some of his quips suffer from over a century of unattributed borrowing, there are still gems on every page. It would have been a best seller, if people could find it among all the dross.

"... for Dummies" may not deserve the same accolades, but if IDG chooses to use this amusing (well, it was amusing in 1991) demarcation for its series, it's just as valid as SAMS, PhotoFacts or Chilton's. Half the reason people want to call themselves '... for dummies' is to steal a bit of (now tired) wit -- which pretty much tells you what to expect from the rest of their 'parody' or 'instructions'. The fact is, most '...for Dummies' like most "Cynic's Whatnot", are just capitalizing on the popularity of someone else's concept.

That's not to say that some of the parodies aren't quite good -- but it wouldn't be hard to change the title a bit, for *greater* parody effect. Stealing the trademarked element of the title is neither essential, nor particularly clever.
_____________

For those of use who say that Objectivism is a 'phase', to be grown out of it really seems like a waist of time to explain why. It would be like trying to explain evolution to a Creationist. Ayn Rand, and her beliefs just seem fundamentally stupid, and that's all there is to it.

Well, I think Sub^H^H^HObjectivism deserves a more thorough criticism than this, however, that's not going to happen in the space of a /. post. I suggest going to the Ayn Rand section of the Critiques Of Libertarianism web site.

For those of use who say that Objectivism is a 'phase', to be grown out of it really seems like a waist of time to explain why. It would be like trying to explain evolution to a Creationist. Ayn Rand, and her beliefs just seem fundamentally stupid, and that's all there is to it.

Well, I think Sub^H^H^HObjectivism deserves a more thorough criticism than this, however, that's not going to happen in the space of a /. post. I suggest going to the Ayn Rand section of the Critiques Of Libertarianism web site.

Yep, there was an episode by that name.

It wasn't what I first thought of when I read "Terminus" - my first thought was of the last story in Stanislaw Lem's book Tales of Pirx the Pilot.

I interviewed at a company yesterday.
My resume lists substantial open-source software and documentation.
All 4 interviewers had my resume in front of them.
Not one remarked on the open source stuff.

1. Google search on: cryptography
2. First link found: http://world.std.com/~franl/crypto.html
3. Click on "Crypto Papers, Writings, and Books" on that page.
4. Top of that page: "Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography is the crypto Bible for the professional engineer and interested layman. It's a good survey of the state of the art in crypto techniques and protocols."

Yeah, that advice was really hard to find.

Learning to do research is learning to use search tools. Asking others for sources is a last resort. If someone else does the searching, the student misses out on the experience.

If my intellectual high horse is unacceptably high, it'll just be more painful when I fall off.

I suppose this is a troll, but I'll reply anyway.

The Libertarians and Objectivists are properly classified as a non-religious right wing utopian movement. These philosophies are fundamentally flawed just like their left wing cousins (but it will probable take a while for these people to notice). You should check out the Critiques of Libertarianism page.

There are some pretty funny contradictions libertarianism, like supporting school vouchers, i.e. we don't like public funding of the schools via taxes, so lets publicly fund even more with taxes. It never crosses their minds to just require schools allow students to mix and match classes from diffrent public and private schools. The ideal outcome of the libertarian's proposed solution (school vouchers): more competitive education system where taxes pay for everything. The ideal outcome of my alternative libertarian proposal: an even more competitive education system where parents pay for everyhitng. Gee, I wonder which would be the more libertarian solution?

All this having been said, I'd be pretty surprised if the libertarians had much beef with the ACLU. I have heard argumentes from very concervative people that there is really no contraiction between being right wing and supporting the ACLU. I would be curious to read any specific account you can find about a conflict. Maybe the libertarians were just pissed about the ACLU actually getting the job done.. while they just lose ellections.

Actually, I'm pretty shure I know where the convlict lies. One of the things which makes the libertarian philosophy a failed utopian philosophy is it's idea that "only government can take away your rights," i.e. whatever the corperations want to do is fine so long as they do not hire gunmen. The ACLU takes the more realistic approach that corperations can abuse your rights too.

BTW> see who the ACLU has helped this year.

My ISP, The World, in Brookline, Massachusetts, which went live in 1989, bills itself as the "first publicly-accessible dialup Internet service provider." This is not contradicted by M-Net's statement that they got a full Internet connection sometime after 1990. Any other contenders?

WNT = VMS "done right"

...with carte blanche to do it.
...VMS+1 letter = WNT
Search for Cutler

Katz writes that libertarians have been guiding him to sites around the internet. Libertarianism is a powerful set of ideas that should be examined. One web site that provides criticism is the Critiques Of Libertarianism site. Libertarians and non-libertarians should check it out.

Most current distros don't include the driver, but it is in the 2.3 kernels, so eventually life will get easier. Meanwhile, it can be installed without too much trouble. Linux to Windows networking works like a charm... I'm typing this on a Win98 laptop connected via WebGear & ipchains through my linux desktop machine. (Of course both machines have Win98 and Linux-Mandrake 7.0, but at the moment...)

WebGear even provides the Linux driver on their Web site. I had better luck with the one on the author's web site, though.

> The idea that computers would not exist without
> government support is ludicrous. By the fifties,
> IBM and other companies were already pioneering
> commercial uses of computers, and private
> universities were engaging in research.

The naïveté of licensarians never ceases to amaze me. Just who do you think IBM's only customer for those "giant brains" was going to be?

That's right--the Government--you know, the people who funded the original research so we could beat the Nazis and the Japanese, then funded a *much* bigger effort so we could beat the Communists.

Read some history that wasn't written by that moron L. Neil Smith and his ilk. It'll do you good.

Bleh. Libertarians are full of simplistic nonsense. You might as well dig up Ayn Rand's decaying corpse and stick it in the oval office.

For a *real* perspective, see http://world.std.com/~mhuben/libindex.ht ml and figure out the truth for yourself.

It seems that most hackers are quite clueless about this stuff. I tried to post a fat response to slashdot but it killed my browser (oops). I fished the data out of the cache and stuck it in a web page. Here's some of the fruit of my experience with incentive stock options. I hope this helps.

what you're calling a common occurance strikes me as being fairly rare. May I suggest that you're used to forums where opposing viewpoints are normally screened out in subtle ways, and when you're actually forced to confront a disagreement you feel like someone is unfairly "shouting you down"?

I've been on unmoderated e-mail lists and newsgroups aplenty. I have zero problems with confronting disagreement. It's when disagreement consists of aggressive regurgitation of common evangelical propaganda, with a clear implication that anyone who disagrees with it is a moron, that I object. And that's happened to me plenty of times.

OTOH your experiences may differ, of course.

And by the way: "right-wing libertarian" is at least *supposed* to be something of an oxymoron (believe it or not, it's possible to be neither left nor right, which is how a lot of libertarians would classify themselves).

I use the term "right-wing libertarian" to distinguish them from "left-wing libertarians". Please see the following URL for a description of the latter:

http://world.std.com/~mhuben/leftlib.html

You are certainly correct, however, if you mean that many views held by right-wing libertarians overlap very little with right-wing traditionalists or conservatives.

~k.lee