>What is also not helping him are the web page >hackers that go around putting up "Free Kevin" on >NY Times and IdSoftware web sites as well as >others.
IMO, it's a valid form of protest, roughly equivalent to a picket or a sit-in. And you can understand why they'd pick the NYT as a target, after the quality of their reporting of the case.
And quite frankly I'm surprised there haven't been riots over this. Three-odd years without trial in the self-proclaimed leader of the Free World?
The Internet is the greatest tool for social control ever conceived. Eventually, records of everything you read, say, and buy will be easily harvested, searched, categorised, and analysed.
Meanwhile, the idiots among us will be wallowing happily in a cable-bandwidth trough of instantly digestible 'culture'. The Web will replace television as the new opiate. Fuckit, we must be free, we've got a million channels to choose from, 24 hours a day.
Intelligent agents will breed stupid people, every predilection will be on file, every sordid detail accounted for in the generation of the electronic clerks that ring up your latest video-on-demand purchase, smiling coyly as you strain to catch a glimpse of a rendered nipple through impossibly white cotton. As time goes by, your tastes will be moulded to the media standard, and the agents will have less and less to do as everyone sleeps, eats, and excretes on cue.
We'll produce, be silent, and die. And if we're not silent, it won't matter, as our voices will be lost in the ever-increasing white noise scream of a planet ringed with fibre optic chains.
The point is, as monitoring technologies develop, so do technologies to counter them. If you really care, you can pgp-scramble a phonecall. And automated personal systems that blind security cameras are not outside the realms of extreme possibility. You can still do business in cash. And there have been quite a few attempts to develop anonymized electronic payment systems.
Your argument is based on a faulty premise, that living beings create more order than they do entropy. As a living being, I create entropy - for instance, in the form of waste heat. This entropy outweighs any order created by or in me.
Furthermore, there isn't a single "powerful Evolutionary force" at work, but loads of little successes and failures, that follow a trend.
My last post on this, btw. You sound like a nutter and life's too short.
Other posters have already pointed out most of the fundamental problems with the predictions made in this book. I'd just like to add that in the event of such technologies being developed, we should all chip in and buy Jon Katz a critical thinking module.
...and you can do this already anyway. I've seen little devices for backing up onto VHS tapes in various consumer electronics chains. They hold a few GB AFAIK.
I remember a political cartoon on a similar theme- two scientists are staring out a window at a mushroom cloud, while a third angrily shouts at them:
"The end of the world doesn't concern us! It's a social issue!"
The point is, civil rights issues should be very important to people who could quite easily be involved in developing systems to either protect or abuse those issues.
Unless it's implemented in public domain software, it falls under one of Wassenaar's categories. So far as I remember, encryption software is explicitly mentioned in the government export control listings.
I could be wrong but hey! if that were so then the world would be a better place, so I'm probably not.
Well there's Joliet and Romeo as well as plain old iso9660. And you've got to make a distinction between 'PC' and Mac CD format CDs, as Mac users have an annying habit of using HFS instead.
The competition she won was a general science one, and one with a strong emphasis on observational sciences, so I wouldn't be surprised if the judges weren't able to understand her code.[1] It's still a very impressive achievement, especially considering the pretty weak amount of CS taught in our secondary schools.
But of course, it doesn't amount to much in the real world until hardcore crypto people have hammered at it for a while.
K. - [1]The cynical view is that since the sponsorship for the competition was recently taken over by a telecom company, there may be an element of "Anything But Biology" in their choice of winner.
A bug of unrivalled destructive power has been unearthed in the Unix rm command, industry sources revealed. Apparently, this bug has the potential to completely wipe a filesystem without alerting the user to the consequences of their actions. Simply by gaining root access and typing rm -rf/*, a life's work can be gutted like the salmon that nobody loved. One industry professional was quoted as saying: "Fsck me, I knew the CLI was powerful, but this is terrifying!".
Unix experts claim that the chances of accidentally issuing this catastrophic command by mashing your fist against the keyboard is quite low. One expert was heard to mutter that "if you're that much of an idiot you deserve what you get", but refused to be named.
Work on solving the "rm *" problem is proceeding. One group, the GNOME project, is developing a Unix GUI that they expect will block access to the CLI's more destructive features. Meanwhile, paranoid sysadmins are implementing safety precautions, such as not allowing all users to su to root, and global aliasing of the rm command to rm -i. Only time will tell if these measures are successful, or if they're too little, too late.
Whatever happened to that idea? (A sodium-cooled breeder that could use metallic fuel rods - it could eat waste products from other reactors, weapons-grade Pu, you name it).
Slashdot Mirror
Last I heard, that was 20-30mph, tops.
K.
-
>What is also not helping him are the web page
>hackers that go around putting up "Free Kevin" on
>NY Times and IdSoftware web sites as well as
>others.
IMO, it's a valid form of protest, roughly
equivalent to a picket or a sit-in. And you can
understand why they'd pick the NYT as a target,
after the quality of their reporting of the case.
And quite frankly I'm surprised there haven't
been riots over this. Three-odd years without
trial in the self-proclaimed leader of the Free
World?
K.
-
The Internet is the greatest tool for social
control ever conceived. Eventually, records of everything you read, say, and buy will be easily
harvested, searched, categorised, and analysed.
Meanwhile, the idiots among us will be wallowing
happily in a cable-bandwidth trough of instantly
digestible 'culture'. The Web will replace
television as the new opiate. Fuckit, we must be
free, we've got a million channels to choose
from, 24 hours a day.
Intelligent agents will breed stupid people,
every predilection will be on file, every sordid
detail accounted for in the generation of
the electronic clerks that ring up your latest
video-on-demand purchase, smiling coyly as you
strain to catch a glimpse of a rendered nipple
through impossibly white cotton. As time goes
by, your tastes will be moulded to the media standard, and the agents will have less and less
to do as everyone sleeps, eats, and excretes on
cue.
We'll produce, be silent, and die. And if we're
not silent, it won't matter, as our voices will
be lost in the ever-increasing white noise
scream of a planet ringed with fibre optic
chains.
Who needs walls when the whole world's a prison?
K.
-
P.S. Soylent Green is people!
Well, that's one way to get your site on slashdot.
K.
-
The point is, as monitoring technologies
develop, so do technologies to counter them.
If you really care, you can pgp-scramble
a phonecall. And automated personal
systems that blind security cameras are
not outside the realms of extreme possibility.
You can still do business in cash. And there
have been quite a few attempts to develop
anonymized electronic payment systems.
It's deja vu all over again.
K.
Do a search for (Compaq OR Digital) AND Galaxy.
Schweet.
K.
-
Congratulations.
/lib/modules/*/net
Check to see if your kernel has ppp support:
$ ls
(look for ppp.o)
and if you don't find anything there, do
$ dmesg | grep PPP
(this checks your startup
messages for the string PPP)
and if you still don't find anything, scream
bloody murder at whoever sold you the box.
If you do have ppp support, do a search for other
ppp configuration utilities, there are quite a
few out there.
K.
-
Your argument is based on a faulty premise, that living beings create more order than they do entropy. As a living being, I create entropy - for instance, in the form of waste heat. This entropy outweighs any order created by or in me.
Furthermore, there isn't a single "powerful Evolutionary force" at work, but loads of little successes and failures, that follow a trend.
My last post on this, btw. You sound like a nutter and life's too short.
K.
-
It's about time you got one.
Other posters have already pointed out most
of the fundamental problems with the predictions
made in this book. I'd just like to add that in
the event of such technologies being developed,
we should all chip in and buy Jon Katz a critical
thinking module.
K.
-
...and you can do this already anyway. I've seen
little devices for backing up onto VHS tapes in various consumer electronics chains. They hold a few GB AFAIK.
K.
-
"The end of the world doesn't concern us! It's a social issue!"
The point is, civil rights issues should be very important to people who could quite easily be involved in developing systems to either protect or abuse those issues.
Let's examine the evidence:
www.freedomforum.org:
Server: Microsoft-IIS/4.0
His home computer:
A Macintosh, which he seems to use only to
run MS Word.
His Linux story - Several months on, he's still finding any excuse to avoid running it.
Could someone in his locality make a housecall and install Linux for him? Anally? From floppies? With a sledgehammer? Please?
K.
-
Unless it's implemented in public domain software, it falls under one of Wassenaar's categories. So far as I remember, encryption software is explicitly mentioned in the government export control listings.
I could be wrong but hey! if that were so then the world would be a better place, so I'm probably not.
K.
-
Orion (reactive nuclear drive) - ~10% c - could be built tomorrow.
Daedalus (mother of all particle accelerators) - ~90%c - could be built in the next couple of hundred years
The Big Space Can - ~0.2c - could be built over the next 500 years if we start now?
I know which I'd choose.
K.
-
Well there's Joliet and Romeo as well as plain old iso9660. And you've got to make a distinction between 'PC' and Mac CD format CDs, as Mac users have an annying habit of using HFS instead.
K.
-
"VAX/VMS is actually still available if you ask for it, albeit mutated now to OpenVMS and more or less claiming to be Unix"
Rather less than more. If I had a large-budget project where reliability and stability were paramount, I'd choose VMS over any Unix flavour.
K.
-
I don't know about air, but water's definitely
a viable alternative.
K.
-
The competition she won was a general science one, and one with a strong emphasis on observational sciences, so I wouldn't be surprised if the judges weren't able to understand her code.[1] It's still a very impressive achievement, especially considering the pretty weak amount of CS taught in our secondary schools.
But of course, it doesn't amount to much in the real world until hardcore crypto people have hammered at it for a while.
K.
-
[1]The cynical view is that since the sponsorship for the competition was recently taken over by a telecom company, there may be an element of "Anything But Biology" in their choice of winner.
Unix experts claim that the chances of accidentally issuing this catastrophic command by mashing your fist against the keyboard is quite low. One expert was heard to mutter that "if you're that much of an idiot you deserve what you get", but refused to be named.
Work on solving the "rm *" problem is proceeding. One group, the GNOME project, is developing a Unix GUI that they expect will block access to the CLI's more destructive features. Meanwhile, paranoid sysadmins are implementing safety precautions, such as not allowing all users to su to root, and global aliasing of the rm command to rm -i. Only time will tell if these measures are successful, or if they're too little, too late.
K. -
So much for a fairytale beginning, or even an epic one.
Mind you, the girlf's both an economist and a star wars fan, so I'll probably end up seeing it anyway.
Whatever happened to that idea?
(A sodium-cooled breeder that could use
metallic fuel rods - it could eat waste
products from other reactors, weapons-grade
Pu, you name it).
K.
-