For example, if we showed a calculator to someone fifty years ago, they would have had no problem calling this device "intelligent" amazed at its problem solving ability (in math).
No, they wouldn't have called it intelligent. Have you forgotten that computers already existed fifty years ago, for precisely the purpose of doing mathematical operations? Now, there is some truth to your point that our views of what constitutes "intelligence" have changed. Being able to do calculus used to be considered a sign of intelligence; now you can buy software to solve calculus problems, which no one calls "intelligent" in any meaningful sense. Likewise with chess, but now Deep Blue stomps all over human competitors. And yet these systems can't do the simplest task outside their areas of expertise. Some of the change has to do with the fact that before the advent of "expert machines", our only experience with calculus-solving and chess-playing was with humans, and you do have to be a reasonably intelligent human to be pretty good at either one, so it was a reasonable assumption at the time that those things were in se signs of intelligence. But I think we've come to realize that the nature of intelligence is unclear. Maybe it is just being able to evaluate things according to a huge set of highly general rules, which would make Deep Blue "intelligent" in some sense - it applies what rules it has to what input it gets; it's hardly DB's fault it's not even as general as a sparrow.
the teachings of my faith seem to be quite clear that every planet has its creatures (not necessarily intelligent) (Unfortunately I don't have a good reference to this specific aspect of my faith).
I found a reference for you - unfortunately not terribly precise wrt location, but it's something:
"Know thou that every fixed star hath its own planets, and every planet its own creatures, whose number no man can compute." -- from The Writings of Bahá'u'lláh
I would tell my employer, if asked to come up with such a list or algorithm, "It's impossible."
The problem, sadly, is that employers usually know what answer they want. If you say it's impossible, then they'll just find someone who says it is possible, and proceeds to install Net Nanny or what-have-you. It doesn't matter that it won't do exactly what the employer wanted; it only matters that someone said it would and will deal with the consequences later.
I've seen this sort of thing happen before - manglement says "We want the web server to do XYZ!" and you say "That's neither easy nor wise...yes, it could be done, but web servers were not designed to do that, and it's going to cause problems a, b, and c..." and they ignore you and listen to the consultant or salesman or other team who says, "Why, our new software does exactly what you want!" so you get shoved aside and the crappy software gets installed and spreads its strangling grip, choking out intelligent design..
I'm not saying that you should abandon your standards and ideals - far from it. But unless you have exceptionally good management, you may not accomplish anything by it.
From the bottom of my heart, I thank you, tenzig_112.:-) Too often, if you question why Unix (or Linux) needs such-and-such, its proponents say, "But how will we take over the world if we don't have $TopicOfTheMoment?" And the right answer is what you said - who cares? I use Linux at work and at home because it does what I need. Whether grandma uses Unix or not makes absolutely no difference to me - or to anyone else, except in their heads.
Well, wait a minute. Let's look at something I don't think anyone has mentioned yet, apropos the "Strengths of Unix vs the Weaknesses of Windows" and vice versa. Miguel seems fond of taking specific examples from the Unix world and saying "this is bad" and then mentioning vague generalities from the Windows world and saying "this is good".
Part of the problem is that there is no "Unix", in a concrete sense. Unix is more of a Platonic ideal than a specific system. Solaris is a kind of Unix, HP-UX is a kind of Unix, Irix is a kind of Unix, Linux is a kind of Unix (OK, maybe not legally, but philosophically), but none of them is Unix. To say "Unix does foo" is misleading; Unix doesn't do anything - specific implementations do things.
Miguel uses examples like ssh, Samba, and Apache. Are those "Unix"? To my way of thinking, no; they're applications written for implementations of Unix. Bad applications do not make a bad OS - you can write a Windows application that doesn't use any reusable code and breaks every standard, but that doesn't change the strengths or weaknesses of Windows. Now, Miguel is right when he says (or implies, at least) that certain systems make it easy to write component-izable stuff, and Unix isn't one of them. But I think he's wrong in implying that a monolithic component architecture is the answer.
Unix applications don't use reusable code or talk to each other? Sure they do - and I'm not talking about pipes, either. Does your web browser care what network card you have? No, because it only talks to the layer of the stack directly below it, and each layer of the stack is a black box only providing a fixed set of services.
Part of the problem with Unix GUIs, I think, is that they've broken with the stack-oriented model to some degree. The application is responsible for too much, which is part of why X apps tend to look very different. Sure, you can link to Motif without worrying about Motif's internals, but that only exemplifies the problem - imagine if your web browser was "linked" to a specific network protocol!
I guess I'm partly agreeing with Miguel here, in that you should be able to code without worrying about how services are provided. The difference is that Miguel seems to think that centralization is the way to go, whereas I think that decentralization with proper understanding of responsibilities is the way to go. It looks to me like in Miguel's world, you'd be stuck with one model for everything, whereas in a protocol-layer world, you can change any layer without affecting others.
Hey, that's not the only one. The "E-mail devotees like to know whether they have new messages even when they are not online" baffled me. He got a patent for a system that lets you know when you get email? Great, he reinvented 'biff'. It flashes a light on the keyboard? OK, so he invented 'biff | xset led on'.
Using the paging infrastructure to do it is mildly cool, I guess, although this bit kind of puzzles me: "When an e-mail is received but the recipient is not online, the server matches the e-mail address to a dial-up paging service. A page is sent to a telephone number that results in an alert like a flashing light on the keyboard..." So if you're using what is effectively a pager, why don't you just send a page that says "You've got mail!" instead of hooking the pager to the computer, and then using the pager to flash a light? Hell, I could do that right now with nohup, biff, my pager company's email-to-pager gateway, and my ISP's shell machine.
Uh-huh...riiiight Unless you're using some definition of "fascism" that is extremely different from the dictionary or commonly accepted ones, then saying that is kind of like saying "Fatness is extremism in the defense of thinness." It's going to take a lot more than simply saying so to make that point to anybody.
Moderation...in all things is the only way we can move forward.
Some things cannot be done in moderation - choosing "moderation" between good and evil gives you evil, not an optimal mix of the two. As the old saying goes, when you mix shit and ice cream, you ruin the ice cream, and you don't improve the taste of the shit much.
Firstly, I think we need to draw a distinction between "black helicopters", meaning "helicopters which are colored black", and "Black Helicopters", meaning "helicopters which are colored black AND are unmarked, used by the government for covert operations within the US, etc."
Let's take black helicopters first. Yes, there are photos of these. IIRC, a few years ago, the feds got a bit of a black eye (Black Eye?) when they claimed, "Don't be silly, we don't even have any black helicopters" - and immediately photos of black helicopters with US government markings were produced by civilians. These seem to exist, but their existence doesn't necessarily mean anything sinister.
As for the case of Black Helicopters - it's hard to say. As I mentioned above, there are photos of black helicopters, but you can't tell much about their usage or intent from a photo. How would you be able to tell if a black helicopter is in fact a Black Helicopter, short of a government admission or witnessing its acts yourself? The first one is not going to happen, I think, and you've pretty much dismissed accounts of the second. I'm sure people do work on the [B|b]lack [H|h]elicopters, as you state, but again, working on an engine doesn't tell you what the helicopter is used for.
And let's not forget that people of good will can still have very different interpretations of the same events or make errors. A true story from my recent history: when I lived in Phoenix, Arizona, I had to drive past a National Guard air base on my way to and from work. (It's the one near Camelback, almost in Scottsdale, if I remember my commute correctly.) One morning I saw black helicopters at the base - apparently all-black, unmarked helicopters - and said, "Black Helicopters?! I have to get a photo of these!" So at my next opportunity, I brought my camera, parked near the base, and walked right up to the fence. Only when I got that good a look at them, both of us standing still and separated by maybe 200 feet, did I realize that they weren't actually black, but a very dark flat green with extremely subdued markings. And I'd seen them several times, in daylight, before finally perceiving their true appearance. It was a touch disappointing, but a good object lesson in how hard it is to positively identify something.
So the feds are going to break my door down and force me to use JohnDoe@usps.gov? I seriously doubt it.
No, of course not. But they won't have to, any more than they "force" you to use your postal address. No one will be breaking down your door. They might just deliver things - like summonses - to your "official" address and expect you to read and reply if necessary. Not using that account would not be considered a defense any more than "I don't read my snail-mail" is considered a defense when they ask you why you didn't answer a summons. This is not to say that they necessarily would do this, but they could.
Heck, even OpenBSD 2.7 (which is excellent overall), had a few remote-root exploits in things like DNS and FTP when it was first released in June, I believe.
Either you're incorrect in your belief or the OpenBSD guys are flatly lying. From http://www.openbsd.org : "Three years without a remote hole in the default install!" But I agree with your larger point - no OS is perfect. I also have to wonder about the counting of holes. If (for example) Red Hat ships with jove, which has a bug (and which Red Hat did not write), does that get counted as a Red Hat bug?
I love getting paid for downtime and to wear a pager that never goes off.:) I'm on beach now as a matter of fact...life is good....
But here I must break wind in your general direction! Maybe I just have a really crappy assignment, but my pager goes off every day. More like every hour when I'm on the oncall rotation. AND I HAVE BEEN WITH TAOS NINE MONTHS AND HAVE NEVER SPENT ONE SINGLE HOUR ON BEACH! THEY SENT ME OFF TO AN ASSIGNMENT THE VERY FIRST DAY AFTER MY ORIENTATION! AAAAAAAAA! I WANTED TO PLAY WITH THE IRIX BOX!
I am totally with you. Few PCs have LS120 SuperDisk drives, and not many more have Zip drives. But CD ROM drives are ubiquitous. Carry a single CD with you, drop it in any PC anywhere, and bam, you're running Linux.
There's a "bootable business card" Linux which sounds really cool - after all, the only problem with a regular CD is that it's a touch big to carry everywhere, but one the size of a business card can be in your wallet. Unfortunately, Linuxcare does not make them easily available.:-(
Here's their blurb, for those who are interested:
The Bootable Business Card is a complete miniature Linux system on a bootable CD-ROM disc in the size and shape of a business card. It is a bootable mini-CD which should work in almost any PC-compatible machine capable of booting CD-ROMs. Boot our Bootable Business Card and you have 108MB of usable software at your fingertips. It contains a full complement of recovery and rescue software. On the booted system are over 500 diagnostic programs, utilities, and networking clients.
We should state at the outset that we are devoted fans of the Macintosh human interface and frequent users of Macintosh computers. Our purpose is not to argue that the Macintosh human interface guidelines are bad principles, but rather to explore alternative approaches to computer interfaces. The Anti-Mac interface is not intended to be hostile to the Macintosh, only different. In fact, human interface designers at Apple and elsewhere have already incorporated some of the Anti-Mac features into the Macintosh desktop and applications. The Macintosh was designed to be "the computer for the rest of us" and succeeded well enough that it became, as Alan Kay once said, "the first personal computer good enough to be criticized."
and
In this article, we explore the types of interfaces that could result if we violate each of the Macintosh human interface design principles.
What would you give in trade for the disk space? Seriously, it's that large because people wanted very detailed, well lit levels, with good quality textures and good digital music. It all adds up very fast.
You're correct, in a technical sense, but I still think that there's too much focus on "very detailed, well lit levels, with good quality textures", etc., and not enough on gameplay. It's certainly easier to add one of them halfway through development...:-/ But then I have long been of the opinion that game developers should be forced to work on 5-year-old machines, so that us mere mortals aren't forced to wait two years for machines that make the game playable.:-)
Anyway, you can buy a 20gig drive for $150, so what's the big deal about 500megs?
I just _did_ buy a 15GB drive for $100, so I know it's not that expensive. I just think it's arrogant of developers to say "You can just buy a bigger drive." Until very recently I was still using a 3GB drive (and it was only two years old!) and 500MB means 1/6 of that drive. Even with 20GB, 500MB means about 2.5% of the drive (for one app!), and that's just to begin with.
Minimum System Requirements Hard drive : 500 MB uncompressed hard drive space
<SARCASM>Why yes, I _am_ made out of hard drive space, thank you very much.</sarcasm>
Seriously, someone needs to knock some sense into game designers - hell, all commercial programmers - and remind them that while _they_ may not have anything on their hard drives but the project they're working on, that's not what it's like out in the real world. I mean, you might want to have Star Office on there too...
What is the difficulty of people doing this with cash?
Using cash requires a physical transfer of the cash. That kind of puts a damper on paying some guy in Irkutsk from my desk in Manhattan. Yes, an invisible economy does exist to some degree with cash...and this is precisely why the government doesn't like cash either! They've stopped printing bills larger than $100, partly because most people don't carry larger amounts, and partly because large bills make it too easy to transfer large amounts anonymously. The government has required large deposits (and withdrawals, too? not sure) to be reported to the IRS, to track/discourage large cash-based transactions.
It will be far easier to carry around big bags of $20s than it will be attempt to hide your transactions online.
Even aside from the 'Irkutsk factor' I mentioned earlier, a bag of $20s might work if you want to transfer a few thousand dollars. A few million? More like a truck full of $20s. As for hiding transactions online, all that's needed is a bank/clearing house which I can instruct (through encrypted communications, of course) to release money from my account to someone else's; they do so and keep no permanent record of the transaction. Not that this is flawless - they'd probably need some records, and sometimes you do want accountability - but there's no technical reason it couldn't work today. The real thing stopping it is that the governments of the world would probably lean on the bank real hard...
Check out Qubit. They're still a little more vaporish than I'd like - they keep pushing the release date back and back, for one thing - but at least they provide some real specs instead of just buzzwords.
So WHAT if the desktop is the last thing to fall to us, rather than the first?
Man, I think this is the single most insightful post in the whole thread. Look at history: the current 800-pound desktop OS gorilla didn't get to be #1 because they had a fantastic desktop environment that was easy to write code for. They first rose to power with a crap environment that offered much less power than the worst currently available Un*x - MS DOS. DOS was confusing, ugly, and offered no reusable code at all; everything was written from scratch just like Miguel complains about X. But it became the standard by being cheap and ubiquitous. Only later did MS cement its dominance by releasing an OS/UI/environment with lots of that lovely reusable code, blah blah blah... If it were internal elegance that determined the winner, Mac OS would have stomped all over DOS. I think the message from history is: get good enough, get everywhere, then get good.
Privacy is vital for the evolution of individual personalities, and for the formation of intimate relationships. It permits communications between friends, lovers and families. It is essential to freedom of expression and to any form of individualism, to the development of intellect and values. It's even essential to creativity. The idea that our reflexive reactions, frustrations, mistakes and missteps -- especially those expressed so freely, impulsively and widely online -- can at any time be disseminated to the world is a very real impediment to free speech and thought.
Eh? So Katz is saying that when you "freely, impulsively" say something that is spread "widely online", it's bad when it gets "disseminated to the world"? Isn't that kind of the point of saying things online?
Slightly more seriously, I think there are two points here - one is that too many people treat things said on the internet as though the conversation was private, forgetting that they are, in fact, broadcasting to the world. The internet has nothing to do with privacy. The second is that there seems to be less of a general respect for the separation of private life and public life. It seems like there was a time when you could say what you wanted in private and not have reporters try to dig it out of your friends to see if it could be made into a story. But then again, I'm probably wrong about that - Oscar Wilde's homosexuality trial comes to mind as an example of someone's private life not being left alone...
Even with ssh (or scp for that matter), there's always a danger of a man-in-the-middle attack (as ssh itself calls it). A compromised machine between you and the host you're connecting to could easily pretend to be that host, sending you a fake ssh key, and forwarding your packets through another connection to the real host.
Yes and no. This is what the host key stuff is all about. The man-in-the-middle cannot perform the same host key negotiation as the real destination host, not having the same private key, so it can't pretend to be the real thing. This is specifically addressed in the ssh documentation: "The second (and primary) authentication method is the rhosts or hosts.equiv method combined with RSA-based host authentication...[t]his authentication method closes security holes due to IP spoofing, DNS spoofing and routing spoofing." and "Ssh automatically maintains and checks a database containing RSA-based identifications for all hosts it has ever been used with...this mechanism is to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks which could otherwise be used to circumvent the encryption."
Of course, this could be prevented if you know the key of the host you're connecting to beforehand. But how many of us actually verify the authenticity of the host's key the first time we connect to that host? And some hosts do change their keys once in a while (perhaps a reboot, an sshd upgrade, etc.) -- although we *could* verify the new key, I doubt in practice most people bother to.
Well, this is very true, but there's also a matter of the convenience/security tradeoff, and just plain old probability. For example, the likelihood that my ISP's shell machine has been compromised or is being subjected to a man-in-the-middle attack the very first time I connect is fairly small. The likelihood that a newly installed server at work has is infinitesimally small. And reboots do not change the host key!
But your overall point about security is well put. ssh will display the "host identification changed!" string, but a lot of people will probably just ignore it. And if the remote machine has already been compromised, ssh won't make a bit of difference. Everything's about awareness, tradeoffs, and awareness of tradeoffs.
I live in NYC, i ride the train to and from work every day...
Same here. 1/9 and 2/3 every morning and evening.
it's fast,
It is pretty quick for the most part.
cheap,
Cheap?! You call $1.50 one-way "cheap"? IIRC, it's the most expensive mass transit system in the world. And it still has to be subsidized.
and efficient, a marvel of engineering.
Eh, well...maybe, about the engineering. But it's not remotely efficient. Do you think it's efficient to drag an entire 50-ton train around for the sake of the maybe 10 passengers you'll have late at night? (much snippage)
Stop whining. Take the bus.
For some people, this is not an option. I lived in Phoenix for two years. Phoenix has a bus system, and I tried to use it. But what was a 45-minute commute by car took two hours by bus. (Admittedly, I don't think that Phoenix's bus system is very well designed anyway...) And it didn't run late at night, so if you stayed out past about 10pm, you were stuck. And on Sundays, you were stuck. And if you needed to move something large, like a piece of furniture, you were stuck.
This is without even addressing the point that cars contribute to the breakdown of neighborhoods, and that a quarter of a million americans are killed in car accidents a year. F cars. They suck. No sympathy from me. Gas should cost 6 bucks a gallon, given the harm it does.
ITYM "...the harm I think it does." If other people agreed with your harm assessment, they wouldn't be driving, would they? Here's a sad fact for you: most people don't give a pig fart about "neighborhoods". If they did, they'd live downtown. Instead, they buy cars precisely so that they can live out in the suburbs. People aren't stupid - they make their choices based on their perceived self-interest. And having had a car, let me tell you, the ability to jump in your car and be anywhere in town - or outside of town - in twenty minutes is pretty powerful.
Quit twisting around, Monnet - every time somebody catches you saying something ridiculous, you try and claim that it's not what you said, or you misquote them...
Most people who drink alcohol are not addicted. *Nobody* who uses heroin isn't.
Wow, all people who use heroin are addicted? Care to cite any evidence for that?
And alcohol is NOT a poison. That's utter bullshit.
It's not? You might want to go notify all the doctors, biologists, and pharmacologists of the world that you know more than they do. I don't suppose you'd like to explain how it's not a poison and yet only 0.4 BAC can cause coma and death. (http://www.brad21.org/effects_at_specific_bac.htm l)
...you're probably American, land of puritans.
I'm proudly American. Both sides of my family made alcohol illegally during Prohibition. I brew my own beer. Puritan? Not really.
My vote would go to "The Hut on Fowl's Legs" from Mussorgsky's "Pictures At an Exhibition". Heck, maybe all of PAaE...so much of it has a vast, brooding feel. (OK, I suppose it would actually be Ravel's version, not Mussorgsky's, but Mussorgsky's gives you a better idea of what it would be like.) Alternately, maybe Prokofiev's "Montagues and Capulets"?
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"Know thou that every fixed star hath its own planets, and every planet its own creatures, whose number no man can compute." -- from The Writings of Bahá'u'lláh
I've seen this sort of thing happen before - manglement says "We want the web server to do XYZ!" and you say "That's neither easy nor wise...yes, it could be done, but web servers were not designed to do that, and it's going to cause problems a, b, and c..." and they ignore you and listen to the consultant or salesman or other team who says, "Why, our new software does exactly what you want!" so you get shoved aside and the crappy software gets installed and spreads its strangling grip, choking out intelligent design..
I'm not saying that you should abandon your standards and ideals - far from it. But unless you have exceptionally good management, you may not accomplish anything by it.
From the bottom of my heart, I thank you, tenzig_112. :-) Too often, if you question why Unix (or Linux) needs such-and-such, its proponents say, "But how will we take over the world if we don't have $TopicOfTheMoment?" And the right answer is what you said - who cares? I use Linux at work and at home because it does what I need. Whether grandma uses Unix or not makes absolutely no difference to me - or to anyone else, except in their heads.
Part of the problem is that there is no "Unix", in a concrete sense. Unix is more of a Platonic ideal than a specific system. Solaris is a kind of Unix, HP-UX is a kind of Unix, Irix is a kind of Unix, Linux is a kind of Unix (OK, maybe not legally, but philosophically), but none of them is Unix. To say "Unix does foo" is misleading; Unix doesn't do anything - specific implementations do things.
Miguel uses examples like ssh, Samba, and Apache. Are those "Unix"? To my way of thinking, no; they're applications written for implementations of Unix. Bad applications do not make a bad OS - you can write a Windows application that doesn't use any reusable code and breaks every standard, but that doesn't change the strengths or weaknesses of Windows. Now, Miguel is right when he says (or implies, at least) that certain systems make it easy to write component-izable stuff, and Unix isn't one of them. But I think he's wrong in implying that a monolithic component architecture is the answer.
Unix applications don't use reusable code or talk to each other? Sure they do - and I'm not talking about pipes, either. Does your web browser care what network card you have? No, because it only talks to the layer of the stack directly below it, and each layer of the stack is a black box only providing a fixed set of services.
Part of the problem with Unix GUIs, I think, is that they've broken with the stack-oriented model to some degree. The application is responsible for too much, which is part of why X apps tend to look very different. Sure, you can link to Motif without worrying about Motif's internals, but that only exemplifies the problem - imagine if your web browser was "linked" to a specific network protocol!
I guess I'm partly agreeing with Miguel here, in that you should be able to code without worrying about how services are provided. The difference is that Miguel seems to think that centralization is the way to go, whereas I think that decentralization with proper understanding of responsibilities is the way to go. It looks to me like in Miguel's world, you'd be stuck with one model for everything, whereas in a protocol-layer world, you can change any layer without affecting others.
Using the paging infrastructure to do it is mildly cool, I guess, although this bit kind of puzzles me: "When an e-mail is received but the recipient is not online, the server matches the e-mail address to a dial-up paging service. A page is sent to a telephone number that results in an alert like a flashing light on the keyboard..." So if you're using what is effectively a pager, why don't you just send a page that says "You've got mail!" instead of hooking the pager to the computer, and then using the pager to flash a light? Hell, I could do that right now with nohup, biff, my pager company's email-to-pager gateway, and my ISP's shell machine.
Let's take black helicopters first. Yes, there are photos of these. IIRC, a few years ago, the feds got a bit of a black eye (Black Eye?) when they claimed, "Don't be silly, we don't even have any black helicopters" - and immediately photos of black helicopters with US government markings were produced by civilians. These seem to exist, but their existence doesn't necessarily mean anything sinister.
As for the case of Black Helicopters - it's hard to say. As I mentioned above, there are photos of black helicopters, but you can't tell much about their usage or intent from a photo. How would you be able to tell if a black helicopter is in fact a Black Helicopter, short of a government admission or witnessing its acts yourself? The first one is not going to happen, I think, and you've pretty much dismissed accounts of the second. I'm sure people do work on the [B|b]lack [H|h]elicopters, as you state, but again, working on an engine doesn't tell you what the helicopter is used for.
And let's not forget that people of good will can still have very different interpretations of the same events or make errors. A true story from my recent history: when I lived in Phoenix, Arizona, I had to drive past a National Guard air base on my way to and from work. (It's the one near Camelback, almost in Scottsdale, if I remember my commute correctly.) One morning I saw black helicopters at the base - apparently all-black, unmarked helicopters - and said, "Black Helicopters?! I have to get a photo of these!" So at my next opportunity, I brought my camera, parked near the base, and walked right up to the fence. Only when I got that good a look at them, both of us standing still and separated by maybe 200 feet, did I realize that they weren't actually black, but a very dark flat green with extremely subdued markings. And I'd seen them several times, in daylight, before finally perceiving their true appearance. It was a touch disappointing, but a good object lesson in how hard it is to positively identify something.
Here's their blurb, for those who are interested:
Minimum System Requirements
Hard drive : 500 MB uncompressed hard drive space
<SARCASM>Why yes, I _am_ made out of hard drive space, thank you very much.</sarcasm>
Seriously, someone needs to knock some sense into game designers - hell, all commercial programmers - and remind them that while _they_ may not have anything on their hard drives but the project they're working on, that's not what it's like out in the real world. I mean, you might want to have Star Office on there too...
Check out Qubit. They're still a little more vaporish than I'd like - they keep pushing the release date back and back, for one thing - but at least they provide some real specs instead of just buzzwords.
Slightly more seriously, I think there are two points here - one is that too many people treat things said on the internet as though the conversation was private, forgetting that they are, in fact, broadcasting to the world. The internet has nothing to do with privacy. The second is that there seems to be less of a general respect for the separation of private life and public life. It seems like there was a time when you could say what you wanted in private and not have reporters try to dig it out of your friends to see if it could be made into a story. But then again, I'm probably wrong about that - Oscar Wilde's homosexuality trial comes to mind as an example of someone's private life not being left alone...
You're probably thinking of Intel's Legacy Free PC. Some of the pictures are, well...strange.
But your overall point about security is well put. ssh will display the "host identification changed!" string, but a lot of people will probably just ignore it. And if the remote machine has already been compromised, ssh won't make a bit of difference. Everything's about awareness, tradeoffs, and awareness of tradeoffs.
My vote would go to "The Hut on Fowl's Legs" from Mussorgsky's "Pictures At an Exhibition". Heck, maybe all of PAaE...so much of it has a vast, brooding feel. (OK, I suppose it would actually be Ravel's version, not Mussorgsky's, but Mussorgsky's gives you a better idea of what it would be like.) Alternately, maybe Prokofiev's "Montagues and Capulets"?