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MIT's Stata Center Dedicated
AJL writes "On Friday, the long-in-coming, $280M Stata Center was dedicated at MIT. Featuring some pretty cool technology (including a row of Linux computers proclaiming 'Welcome to the William H. Gates Building' by Tux, the Linux Penguin), amazing design, and some pretty neat use of space, Stata is among the first of some high-budget, high-tech buildings being put on campuses these days. See some
Pictures
or go to the Main Stata Site for more details. Richard Stallman is now less than pleased that he has to work in the Gates Building, as well as having some other problems with his new office in general."
As RMS' RFID card is blocked from the security system after he was found eating cheetos under a cluster, the entire MIT technical staff breathes a collective sigh of relief as the nightmare of getting all that beard fluff out of keyboards ends.
...a row of Linux computers proclaiming 'Welcome to the William H. Gates Building' by Tux
Is this supposed to be an ironical joke, or have they been brainwashing penguins? Perhaps it's time to put on our tin foil hats.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
...and working as an architect.
All joking aside, how long must it have taken to a) design that and b) build the damn thing. I can imagine it being very complex to lay out...where would you start?
Kudos to the architect and the builders, they've done a great job.
I am NaN
Take a look at that building! It looks like its half falling down. It seriously looks like something from "The Nightmare Before Christmas".
This is what happens when you give case modders the job of designing a building!
I can't believe that he would complain about something like this! Oh wait, yes I can, because he's a fruit cake.
Seriously, I don't understand the privacy concerns with this. Do you need to scan in and out of the bathroom or something? Is he afraid they're going to track his bowel movements?
What I can understand is why they want this info. If there's equipment that goes missing.. it's quite usefull to know who is in the building, or who opened the door to the room.
Stallman says that MIT could have implemented a different system that protected the visitors' privacy. Instead, he says, the Institute chose only convenience, and he's ready to call it a day and take his research elsewhere. "The big sacrifice is leaving MIT," he says. "I am prepared to make that sacrifice."
I don't see any reason why the MIT wouldn't have the right, or wouldn't want to see who enters what building when. It's their premises, and if something gets stolen or damaged, RFID would help tracking down the culprit(s).
This thing is a security issue in this case. It's not the same privacy issue as tracking the general public in malls and K-Marts for no good reason. I Stallman should ease off the 1984 Orwellian paranoia a little and adapted his points of views to the environments he's in.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Now I think RMS jsut has his knickers in a twist, simply because people will listen.
Some quotes:
"There is no legitimate justification for keeping track of who opens these doors," Stallman says. "You can just leave these doors open, and the building would have the same amount of security as most of the rest of the campus." MIT says most buildings use the RFID cards.
Well, actually, there are legitimate justifications for keeping track of who opens the doors. If something gets nicked from the lab, you can find out who was in the building and from there you can start to investigate the theft (by that I mean, ask those people if theysaw anything or anyone suspicious etc). If someone props open the doors, as he also hints on, then you can see who the last person was to open those doors using the card and take matters from there.
We have a Proximity card solution at work, and its fine. Yes, you can get tracked, but then you are on private property, and tracking isnt always foolproof because you are not required to beep in if you are part of a group.
Stallman says that MIT could have implemented a different system that protected the visitors' privacy. Instead, he says, the Institute chose only convenience, and he's ready to call it a day and take his research elsewhere. "The big sacrifice is leaving MIT," he says. "I am prepared to make that sacrifice."
Well, MIT arent exactly making the visitors details public knowledge, now are they? From the situation with GNUs su program not supporting wheel (link), I think its clear that RMS has a dubious and somewhat iffy personal view on security, and that much alone makes me want to dismiss him out of hand when he talks about security related matters. If hes prepared to "make that sacrifice" instead of allowing MIT to implement a bit of security to protect their building and valuables inside said building, then good riddence is all I can say.
You do not just call people "babies" because their views conflict with yours. Nomatter how you look at it, Stallman is a great and important character, whose views should be taken into consideration, or at least not dismissed immediately as that of a "baby".
His fear of the Big Brother society is genuine, and if he feels that RFID technology like this one is turning our world into such a society, then he should raise his voice over it. This is exactly what he's doing. Be glad that someone is looking out for YOUR FREEDOM, since you obviously are not.
Ironically, Fox 25 in Boston just ran a report about how insecure college dorms are because even with the magnetic-stripe or RFID based ID cards, somebody with a hidden TV camera could on every attempt get in simply by walking behind another student. In most cases, that other student even holds the door...
This really isn't the strongest security measure, but at least its better than not having any at all.
They state proximity RFIDs...just how far does this proximity go? I have no problems keeping track of who opens what doors inside a building, etc. for security reasons if they're doing classified or confidential work. However, an RFID is a little more invasive.
So, what does MIT do with the data they could collect on how many trips to the watercooler I made?
"Sed Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?" -Juvenal
Bill Gates says the freakish buildings and twisted angles will be correctly aligned by the upcoming Stata Service Pack 1.
I've passed by the building a few times on my way back home from the MIT Swapfest. Not only is the architecture itself pretty ugly, but it's surrounded by typical buildings. It's incredibly annoying to be walking down a street full of brick and stone buildings, and then, out of nowhere, you come upon this thing with random chunks of metal coming out at all angles. The design may be "modern" and "chic" (or whatever you want to call it), but I wish they'd picked a design that fit in better. Hell, there are zoning restrictions on height that say you can't have a 40-story building right in the middle of 1-story ones, so why not restrictions on design? Luckily, I rarely have to pass buy it, but I'd hate to live or work right next to it. Frankly, it's the only MIT building I can think of that looks that out of place...
It does look remarkably like architecture done by the artists Hundertwasser,
here is an example of his house he did in Vienna
Hundertwasser House Vienna
"Nimis exaltatus rex sedet in vertice - caveat ruinam!"
Yes, but I've been to the Stata center. People (hell, maybe RMS) are propping doors open anyway.
Anyway, a lot of buildings at MIT don't have very good security at all. The main campus (buildings 1-10) are pretty much open to all visitors, and they connect, via halls and basements, to much of the campus.
I don't see why the CS/AI Lab and the Linguistics Departments need this much security anyway. I mean, I can understand the nuclear reactor or something having this kind of security, but why are they locking off people from here?
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
Do me a favor. Walk to any engineering school worth its salt, pay a girl 10 bucks to walk around and smile and say hello and watch the reactions while paying special attention to eyes. He works at MIT. Cut him some slack; eye candy cant be that prevalent.
RMS is in a position to make a difference. Privacy is obviously important to him as it should be to the rest of us. If we were forced to use an RFID, we would gladly do so because, normally, we dont have the power or the opportunity to "just say no". If he doesnt want to, he doesnt have to and neither do you. The difference is if he doesnt use it, people notice. If you or I refuse to use the device, we'd be easily replaced by someone who will. I, personally, would have no problem lugging a key for every door use to get to my office and maintain my privacy than have my boss or some evil entity monitoring what time I come and go or what time I usually get up to relieve myself. Privacy doesnt necessarily have to stop the moment you go to work.
He's one of the great modern archetects and now the Boston area is blessed with another fabtastic looking building. They have a really cool I.M. Pei building around there as well I believe and now they just need a Calatrava.
Gehry is rather unique in his designs as you can probably see. Let's see if form and function are one with this building, heh. Gehry actually paved his kitchen with asphault, to get an idea of this mans madness/greatness.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
I can imagine the crack parties going on at universities when their board of trustees decide that they want some hip and edgy building.
Trustee 1: "Hey, how can we waste a lot of money really fast?"
Trustee 2: "We can hire a famous postmodern architect. Their buildings always go overbudget and run into schedule delays"
Trustee 3: "A toast to postmodernism!"
All: "Huzzah!"
I've seen other pomo style buildings. MIT also has that weird dorm building that looks like a cross between a sponge and a retarded sponge. Harvard has some other dorm that looks a little more normal, but still not that appealing to me.
Postmodernism: a synonym for "We like to throw legos around and see what we can make"
www.google.com
> What fucking eye-sore! Who designed them anyway? What are they, are they supposed to induce creativity or something? And who approved the building plans? Was it Gates himself? He used to go to Harvard, maybe it's his trick of subtly saying "the dweebs go to this university."
More likely it was an architect trying to get even for his operating system falling down all the time.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
A lot of RMS' past is based in MIT... especially the MIT AI hacker lab. I suggest you read "Free as in Freedom"... it is an interesting book.
http://mediagoblin.org/
If the RFID chips they used could be easily read from a distance, then this might be more of a problem -- we joked about professors having real-time blips representing their students walking around, a la Harry Potter's Maurader's map :) However, the chips they installed are pretty short-range, so I don't see this as a viable problem: they won't even read from your pocket when you're standing in front of the reader; you have to wave it in front of the scanner.
Near as I can tell, there's nothing "magical" about using the new readers as opposed to the old ones; any privacy issues you might perceive are exactly the same as they've been on campus for years now.
I don't think he has a legitimate complaint. While there is a potential that someone might mine the access logs, and, for example, find out he hasn't actually come to work in the last five years, stuff goes missing from these labs late at night, and it would be totally sweet if the long suffering admin at least had a shortlist of who they could ask if they saw 'anything suspicious'.
Swipecards aren't a perfect solution to the building security problem. People prop doors, people let their friends in, people lose their cards in the quad and other people decide to see just how much access they had, but if they nuke the card program, the alternative proposed by security will probably be cameras, and let me tell you, they're a hell of a lot more intrusive than cards - a camera collects a lot more information than just whether you're there or not* - and they're a lot more labour intensive too.
I guess the bottom line is that he's free to leave if he wants ( as he's indicated ), but the U. should also be free to implement whatever measures it feels are necessary to provide a safe environment for equipment and students. If they can't come to a compromise ( and while Stallman might be a "great and important character", compromise is not seen as one of his strong suits ) then I guess it's splitsville. I ( and I suspect many others here ) would endure a lot worse than an RFID doorlock to be granted a research position at MIT.
B.D.
* - If they'd used cameras in our student labs instead of pin numbers, I probably would have been ejected several times for slovenly appearance unbecoming to the university.
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
I don't think they qualify as sheep. He may have made some significant impacts in the computing world, but that doesn't make his opinions infallible and correct for the rest of his life. He, as anyone else, has the right to be opinionated and be criticized for that opinionation.
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"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
RMS isn't in the Gates Building. He's in the "warehouse" section. I've a friend who works on His Majesty's floor. The place might be dramatic to look at, but it's a pain to work in. When I visited it there were way more bizarre problems than any other half-constructed building I've ever seen. And it's really, really easy to get lost in it. I haven't gotten really lost at MIT for over 20 years until I set foot on the main floor of the Stata Center. The building's denizens are hiring architects to help fix it. I think that's part of Gehry's plan for participatory design. Leave it so unfinished that the inhabitants have to make their own nests!
The architect is Frank Gehry. He's probably best known for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. You can see some of his other work at www.frank-gehry.com
Seriously, would RMS be bitching so much if, instead of RFID cards they use magstripe readers instead?
I'm sure if you asked him, he'd say they're no different, but let's be honest here. RFID is the current hot topic to bitch and complain about.
Fact: There are legitimate reasons for tracking who goes in and out of a building with a hell of a lot of expensive equipment in it.
Fact: How they track this information is largely immaterial, it's a "privacy invasion" just as much with a magstripe card as it is with a RFID card as it is with a hidden camera recording everybody going in the damn door.
Fact: I don't hear anybody bitching about magstripe card entry systems, and they've been around for 50+ years, no?
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
In the article it says RMS is willing to move his research elsewhere,
_ ________
just out of interest what is his research centered around? and why
does he think leaving MIT will be such a big sacrifice?
Arash Partow
_________________________________________
http://www.partow.net
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
GCC was possibly the most robust C compiler in the late 80's.
Of course, that's can't be *proven*, but consider this: The version of GCC that RMS wrote was good enough for the rest of the FSF staff to write GNU, and it was good enough for Torvalds use to write Linux.
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The building echoes the excitement, the lateral thinking, the bold strides into the unknown that characterise computing in the past, today and into the future. It is a challenge to try to come to grips with how the computing world has evolved and who can say where it is going next?
The odd angles and shapes are deliberately unsettling. The viewer, the visitor, the worker; all must set aside their conventional, predictable, boring views, and try to look at things in a new way. It is almost as if the buildings are the shape of the thoughts of the pioneers of computing, those who could think outside the square grey boxes of the past and lead us into exciting new areas.
Please don't criticise the building because it isn't the same as a million others. It's weird, different, stimulating and fun. Just like the wild ride that computing has given us over the past years and seems certain to keep on doing well into the future.
Instead, rejoice in the exuberance and try to open up your own thinking along unknown, unpredictable ways. Who knows where you might end up?
If it ever gets earthquake damaged, how will we know?
As someone who's partner is a planner, and who's learned to appreciate all kinds of architecture as a result, I have to say that I find your thinking rather blinkered.
Yes, you may not like it, and yes, it might not be a clone of every other building in the area but that doesn't make it a bad thing. If everyone thought as you do then we wouldn't have the Gugenheim Museums of New York and Bilbao, The Sydney Opera House, La Defense (in Paris), Swiss Re (in London) or the planned "Shard of Glass" (also in London).
And those are just modern examples. Virtually every noteworthy building in history has been on the receiving end of flak for being an eyesore at one time or another, yet today they are regarded as classic examples of their time.
What would you rather have architects do? Design drab, uninteresting buildings? Isn't physical architecture a valid artform? Why not? Because you say so? Why is the building "pretty ugly"? Because you say so? Ah, so you've studied architecture at length, have you? You're an expert on the aesthetics of the built environment? No? I didn't think so.
How would you feel about a world where everyone was required to dress the same way as people have always dressed, like the same art and music that people have always liked, and enjoy only the things that have been enjoyed for ages? Would you really want to live in a world that stood culturally still? Well, you might, but I don't.
Try and appreciate that things change, and that, just because you don't like it, that doesn't mean everyone agrees with you. I guarantee you that, in twenty years time, 90 percent of the people who feel that the building is "pretty ugly" now will be looking at the same building and calling it fantastic.
In fact, the building is beautiful right now. Anyone with a trained eye would rattle off a whole lot of reasons why, just as a good art student could tell you why Picasso's work is genius.
What you call an eyesore is actually anything but. That you don't see it is a real pity.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I find it amusing when I see comment after comment denigrating Richard Stallman, he made it through the math55 program. He has written more complex and well coded software than anyone I have met personally. He has strong opinions and sticks to his guns. Its almost like half the slashdot crowd wants lots of free software sans the opinions of the author. Be a good boy code me something I use every day but don't open your mouth. I am no stallman zealot but if most of the mental midgets who have such a problem with his insistence on precision in terminology, stopped and thought about where it stems from, the fact that he is a bigger math geek than practically and human walking this ball of mud today hence that type of mentality offers no lenience when it comes to imprecission. The man can be an asshole, and he is full of himself. To me he has earned the right to be full of himself. While most of you shooting your mouth off have never done anything for open source at all. As to being an asshole join the club most of us just dont get that kind of spotlight shown on our flaws. Ranting about the peanut gallery is useless I suppose goddamn hypocritical jackdaws.
Panel F, Relay #70
I was thinking about this when I was at the watercooler, so I took the RFID access card I use to open the server room in my workplace, and one of those small steel ( I think they're steel ) business card "wallets" from a managers desk, and to my not very great surprise, once inside it was unable to interact with any of the RFID sensors in my office, even when placed flush against the readers front plate.
This is a possible compromise if Stallman wants to be able to open the doors, but not be remotely scanned as he moves about the campus. You can open the "door" on the wallet to scan the card, and then latch it and slip it back into your jeans. I'm not a physics man, so I have no idea if this defense would be easily broken down by simply pouring more juice out of the reader, however.
One god, one market, one truth, one consumer.
RMS does not do any "computer science" research.
RMs does political activism. Without him research will become illegal (DMCA2), software development will become illegal (software patents), and collaborative software development would have died.
Unfortunately, computer science has been living under a central control regime for the last ~10 years (and now the central controller has been honoured with this building). In this time, innovation has been sucked out of the public to somewhere behind a lead door in Redmond. The legacy is that the most important thing happening in computer science today is politics!
I hope RMS never gives up his current line of research and work. (I condemn him to this - I'm sure he'd rather be hacking Emacs or some new GNU software for Guile or GNOME.)
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