A Sci-Fi author people tend to miss somehow who I really like is C.J. Cherryh, she's amazingly prolific and has quite a large body of interconnected work. Much like most of the works of McCaffrey, everything takes place in the same slice of reality, which is something I've always enjoyed in a sci-fi author
I've just finished the Foreigner series...
Foreigner, Invader, Inheritor, Precursor, Defender, Explorer
I'd characterise these as "space opera done right" - aliens, first contact, re-contact, but realistic, with things like learning languages, negotiations, and generally adult (in the good senses) behaviour.
Perhaps not quite in the same reality as the Downbelow station universe, but a related one. They center on Bren Cameron, the ambassador/interpreter between a lost human colony and the atevi, a race who had just invented the steam engine when the colony was left there. That was two centuries before, and everything has changed. Then the ship that left the colony comes back... and eveything changes again.
Indeed, exploiting this is not trivial. But consider if I repeatedly send the minimum length packet and get 46 bytes each time. Eventually I may get a recognizable cleartext password. And, given the vast number of times passwords do go over the net, eventually might not be too long.
If the padding bytes all come from other packets, then I'll see nothing that I wouldn't see with a sniffer on your local net. But it appears that I could see that remotely, which is indeed an issue for concern.
It is common, but bad, practice to assume that passwords on a corporate Intranet don't need to be protected as carefully as on the Internet. Now, we see that some of the data from those "safe" Intranet packets may get spewed outside.
I'd say it falls between the two extremes you suggest.
Countermeasures can be applied at routers, in theory, since the router (or firewall) could inspect the packet and null out the padding bytes. Of course, this would impact performance.
My wife and I have been using the Zone diet. There's an excellent online "open source" of Zone info at Zone Home.
The Zone is a balanced 40-30-30 diet - 40% of calories from carbs, 30 from fat, 30 from protein. Turns out that still involves reducing simple carbs and increasing the intake of veggies.
And one piece of easy to follow advice for fellow geeks with fast-food lunch options: Subway will make any sub as a salad, basically without the bread, in a plastic bowl. Hot sauce chicken salad, yum yum!
I'm down 15 pounds since January, and my wife has lost over 40.
I work on Web-based applications at Watchfire. One of our products is WebQA Interaction, which is a record-and-playback web client. While it is not intended primarily as a web application test tool, it does the job. And we do eat our own dogfood here. The focus is more on database-driven web sites.
Sorry, it runs only on Windows and is proprietary. Single seat licenses are $1495 US in the WebQA package. Free (as in beer) evaluation download available, registration required. You register and get the download location and keycode emailed to you.
I work for Watchfire a leading maker of website quality management software. One part of the suite is FeedbackXM, a user feedback survey system (of the survey button on the web page / pop-up survey kind.)
FeedbackXM uses Tomcat as an application server. This information is in the customer documentation.
When I was at the University of Toronto, 1977-1982, the Merrill Collection was known as the Spaced-Out Library. It was housed in Boys and Girls House, the central children's library - right in the middle of the U of T campus.
We called it the "Engineering Reading Room" and spent many study and a good few class hours there.
...technology sufficient to implement totalitarianism
In fact, we should remember that some of the great horrors of the twentieth century were commited with relatively little technology. The Holocaust may have had some IBM card equipment; but killing millions doesn't really require fancy control systems.
Totalitarianism in the Nazi Germany, Soviet Union and China is after all, the application of 19th century industrial methods to the Neolithic Ethic (See the stranger, fear the stranger, kill the stranger)
The tree of liberty must from time to time be refreshed with the blood of tyrants and patriots -- Jefferson
Very possibly. Cautionary tales should have some impact. I've often wondered if Larry Niven's "Gil the Arm" stories with execution by organ donation (and showing its horrid consequences) had anything to do with the fact that no one has proposed that (although China may be doing it anyway...)
In one of Heinlein's letters, he recounts that when John W. Campbell called him in August 1945 to tell him of the bombing of Hiroshima, his reaction was "Oh god, it's starting".
Alvin Toffler, in Future Shock called SF the "forward-view mirror".
-- "Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear"
Henry Troup, htroup@bigfoot.com
A few years from now, the same scientists have advanced to creating higher life forms. One of them gets carried away and claims he can perform the Genesis process - creating a human from dust.
"Poof" God appears in the lab.
"No so fast, sonny - that's my dust. You make your own dust first."
IANAL, but my understanding is that I can't validly commit my employer, unless I am a corporate officer or acting under direction of one.
This means, for example, that if I issue a purchase order, in the course of my proper duties, it is valid -- and the bill will be paid.
If it is outside my duties, e.g. a complete set of backissues of Astounding, delivered to my home, the bill won't be paid, no contract binds my employer, and the seller sues my ass. And likely my employer fires me.
So, when I click the infamous Accept button, where are we? In a grey area. If the company doesn't like those terms, the argument that they are not a contract with the company is fairly solid. My expertise is not in matters of law, but of software. I am not a corporate officer. Thus I could not bind the company. But the company bought the software -- without seeing the click-through agreement.
Incidentally, for non-shrinkwrap software, it's not uncommon for the license to go through corporate legal. Often it takes weeks and several iterations. It's why companies are often in law suits -- and rarely let that fact bother them.
Background followup. A list of other and related Canadian cases is here. Regrettably, many of the links in this document are broken. I'm quoting highlights here, all quotes from that web page.
The story is convoluted and long. In 1977 the Ontario Medical Association (OMA) alleged that Scientology was practicing medicine without a license. Scientology sued and lost. A Scientologist got a job at the OMA and stole documents - later pled guilty on that.
In 1983, the Ontario Provincial Police searched the Toronto Church of Scientology on a warrant for "tax fraud, criminal fraud and deceit in the sale of courses and E-Meters, and conspiracy to effect an unlawful purpose, i.e., the use of the Guardian Office to commit indictable offenses including theft and breaking and entering."
By 1992 "The theft charges were dismissed due to inadmissibility of documents; the Church of Scientology of Toronto was found guilty on charges of breach of trust, and several of the individual defendants were found guilty on various charges."
The case I cited above was related to this whole can of worms.
In Canada, they've lost all the way to the Supreme Court - One case is Hill v. Church of Scientology of Toronto, 1995. It was a libel case, and the details will look pretty familiar. Holysmokehas an extract and this is the full thing. Umontreal's archive is linked from the official Supreme Court of Canada page.
Great quote: "Every aspect of this case demonstrates the very real and persistent malice of Scientology." - from the Court itself.
I know that there have been many other rulings in Canada against Scientology, but only this one is easily available on-line.
If the "downrange" - horizontal distance travelled - is reasonable, there may be much better money-making opportunities. London (or Moscow) to New York or LA to Tokoyo express package deliveries - see The Suborbital Road to Space and this by Rick Kolker
Kolker suggests at $500 a pound, transplant organs are about the only thing with the economics, but at $50, legal documents will pay the freight.
If we assume the $100,000 a seat means a payload of 500 pounds, then they're starting around $200 a pound. But if you can rip the life support system out and have 2500 pounds payload, then we're talking high-end document delivery. And documents don't need to breathe.
Tons of space dust and comet debris fall to earth every day. Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramsinghespeculated that extra-terrestrial microbes routinely cause disease outbreaks.
The elaborate precautions are to keep earth life from contaminating the sample and messing up the science.
The SIT was applied over a period of 20 years to eradicate NWS from North America and Mexico, and efforts to eradicate it from all of Central America are now under way.
I support the extinction of the tsetse fly and the smallpox virus. And the sabretooth tiger - rendered extinct by early man with flint knives and wooden spears. Call me a speciesist if you like; I value humans over flies, every time.
There will still be billions of other flies in Africa. The predators (mostly birds and bats) are pretty casual about what they eat. If it flies, they'll eat it.
There is a common illusion that predators are very picky eaters. While there are a few such cases, far more are exactly as picky as the coyote - a century of coyote eradication has resulted in an increase in the range and population of coyotes.
And everywhere else. This is a standard technique for reducing (not eliminating) an insect population. It is not usually a one-shot. How is the Winnipeg mosquito population rebounding? Or are they still releasing sterile males? (Male mosquitos don't bite.)
How it works... essentially, we aim to reduce the probability that an insect's mating produces offspring. If that drops from say.9 to.1, the next generation is massively smaller. As someone else said, it's called the Sterile Insect Technique, and the Food and Agriculture Organization has a detail item here from 1998.
The SIT was applied over a period of 20 years to eradicate [New World Screwworm] from North America and Mexico, and efforts to eradicate it from all of Central America are now under way.
For the last ten years or so, I've rarely worked on a system that was monolithic. The typical modern project, in my world at least, looks like several classic client-server systems tangled together.
Some layers that we built in the current one:
HTML parsing
Spell Checking
Job Scheduling
Alerting Service (uses SMTP, SNPP, WCTP)
Database Repository with XML extraction
XSL transformation
ASP presentation layer
Job management
User privilege management
While I don't expect any book to deal with our architecture, I would like a really solid book that encompasses the wit and wisdom of building this kind of thing, in a repeatable fashion. I'm thinking of something like the patterns model, but applied to the making science out of the art of knowing where the right place to put a function is. Considerations like elegance and efficiency, and so on.
Is it unrealistic to think of a book on this? Are there no general principles learned yet?
Some of them are concept references - for example, Don Box's Essential COM which end-to-end explains what COM is about. It's not easy reading, it's not 21 lessons, and it's a good solid useful book.
Some of them are task-oriented getting started books - I have a fair number of Dummies(tm) books, because they are generally a pretty fair introduction, with enough easy-to-follow examples to get me started quickly.
What I find less useful is the book that pretends to be one while being the other. That's often a book where the advanced stuff is completely wrapped in the author's idiosyncratic framework. Granted, that framework is on the CD -- but I don't want to use it for my projects.
One thing that get me is the poor quality of the indexing in most technical books. I've grabbed one at random, and looking at 14 pages of index for 500 pages of text, I'd first think that the index was good. But let me quote an item:
Archie, 35, 171
access via email, 265
access via WWW, 265
across Telnet, 265
configuring, 264-266
protocol, 265
server, running, 266
A...
Notice those six references to three pages. The whole second level of this index entry is unnecessary. It bulks the index, but it's fluff.
Slashdot Mirror
I've just finished the Foreigner series ...
Foreigner, Invader, Inheritor, Precursor, Defender, Explorer
I'd characterise these as "space opera done right" - aliens, first contact, re-contact, but realistic, with things like learning languages, negotiations, and generally adult (in the good senses) behaviour.
Perhaps not quite in the same reality as the Downbelow station universe, but a related one. They center on Bren Cameron, the ambassador/interpreter between a lost human colony and the atevi, a race who had just invented the steam engine when the colony was left there. That was two centuries before, and everything has changed. Then the ship that left the colony comes back ... and eveything changes again.
Indeed, exploiting this is not trivial. But consider if I repeatedly send the minimum length packet and get 46 bytes each time. Eventually I may get a recognizable cleartext password. And, given the vast number of times passwords do go over the net, eventually might not be too long.
If the padding bytes all come from other packets, then I'll see nothing that I wouldn't see with a sniffer on your local net. But it appears that I could see that remotely, which is indeed an issue for concern.
It is common, but bad, practice to assume that passwords on a corporate Intranet don't need to be protected as carefully as on the Internet. Now, we see that some of the data from those "safe" Intranet packets may get spewed outside.
I'd say it falls between the two extremes you suggest.
Countermeasures can be applied at routers, in theory, since the router (or firewall) could inspect the packet and null out the padding bytes. Of course, this would impact performance.
My wife and I have been using the Zone diet. There's an excellent online "open source" of Zone info at Zone Home.
The Zone is a balanced 40-30-30 diet - 40% of calories from carbs, 30 from fat, 30 from protein. Turns out that still involves reducing simple carbs and increasing the intake of veggies.
And one piece of easy to follow advice for fellow geeks with fast-food lunch options: Subway will make any sub as a salad, basically without the bread, in a plastic bowl. Hot sauce chicken salad, yum yum!
I'm down 15 pounds since January, and my wife has lost over 40.
I work on Web-based applications at Watchfire. One of our products is WebQA Interaction, which is a record-and-playback web client. While it is not intended primarily as a web application test tool, it does the job. And we do eat our own dogfood here. The focus is more on database-driven web sites.
Sorry, it runs only on Windows and is proprietary. Single seat licenses are $1495 US in the WebQA package. Free (as in beer) evaluation download available, registration required. You register and get the download location and keycode emailed to you.
I work for Watchfire a leading maker of website quality management software. One part of the suite is FeedbackXM, a user feedback survey system (of the survey button on the web page / pop-up survey kind.)
FeedbackXM uses Tomcat as an application server. This information is in the customer documentation.
Intel used to claim a trademark on the lower case letter i(tm)
Dean Ing wrote about a similar machine in his 1976 story Malf
It's a good man-machine interface story, if you can hunt it up. No spoilers :-)
When I was at the University of Toronto, 1977-1982, the Merrill Collection was known as the Spaced-Out Library. It was housed in Boys and Girls House, the central children's library - right in the middle of the U of T campus.
We called it the "Engineering Reading Room" and spent many study and a good few class hours there.
In fact, we should remember that some of the great horrors of the twentieth century were commited with relatively little technology. The Holocaust may have had some IBM card equipment; but killing millions doesn't really require fancy control systems. Totalitarianism in the Nazi Germany, Soviet Union and China is after all, the application of 19th century industrial methods to the Neolithic Ethic (See the stranger, fear the stranger, kill the stranger)
Very possibly. Cautionary tales should have some impact. I've often wondered if Larry Niven's "Gil the Arm" stories with execution by organ donation (and showing its horrid consequences) had anything to do with the fact that no one has proposed that (although China may be doing it anyway...)
In one of Heinlein's letters, he recounts that when John W. Campbell called him in August 1945 to tell him of the bombing of Hiroshima, his reaction was "Oh god, it's starting".
Alvin Toffler, in Future Shock called SF the "forward-view mirror".
--
"Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear" Henry Troup, htroup@bigfoot.com
A few years from now, the same scientists have advanced to creating higher life forms. One of them gets carried away and claims he can perform the Genesis process - creating a human from dust.
"Poof" God appears in the lab.
"No so fast, sonny - that's my dust. You make your own dust first."
--
Henry Troup, htroup@bigfoot.com
IANAL, but my understanding is that I can't validly commit my employer, unless I am a corporate officer or acting under direction of one.
This means, for example, that if I issue a purchase order, in the course of my proper duties, it is valid -- and the bill will be paid.
If it is outside my duties, e.g. a complete set of backissues of Astounding, delivered to my home, the bill won't be paid, no contract binds my employer, and the seller sues my ass. And likely my employer fires me.
So, when I click the infamous Accept button, where are we? In a grey area. If the company doesn't like those terms, the argument that they are not a contract with the company is fairly solid. My expertise is not in matters of law, but of software. I am not a corporate officer. Thus I could not bind the company. But the company bought the software -- without seeing the click-through agreement.
Incidentally, for non-shrinkwrap software, it's not uncommon for the license to go through corporate legal. Often it takes weeks and several iterations. It's why companies are often in law suits -- and rarely let that fact bother them.
As far as I can tell, not a hoax, but hilarious is this Christian review of the South Park movie.
a small sample ...
...I'm a Christian, and I think this stuff is way over the top.
Henry Troup, hwt@igs.net
The paperless office is no more comfortable than the paperless bathroom
I read this a long time ago, and I think it's true. A google search for this phrase gets over 300 hits. Some attribute this to Steve Jobs, 1984.
Background followup. A list of other and related Canadian cases is here. Regrettably, many of the links in this document are broken. I'm quoting highlights here, all quotes from that web page.
The story is convoluted and long. In 1977 the Ontario Medical Association (OMA) alleged that Scientology was practicing medicine without a license. Scientology sued and lost. A Scientologist got a job at the OMA and stole documents - later pled guilty on that.
In 1983, the Ontario Provincial Police searched the Toronto Church of Scientology on a warrant for "tax fraud, criminal fraud and deceit in the sale of courses and E-Meters, and conspiracy to effect an unlawful purpose, i.e., the use of the Guardian Office to commit indictable offenses including theft and breaking and entering."
By 1992 "The theft charges were dismissed due to inadmissibility of documents; the Church of Scientology of Toronto was found guilty on charges of breach of trust, and several of the individual defendants were found guilty on various charges."
The case I cited above was related to this whole can of worms.
Henry Troup - hwt@igs.net
In Canada, they've lost all the way to the Supreme Court - One case is Hill v. Church of Scientology of Toronto, 1995. It was a libel case, and the details will look pretty familiar. Holysmokehas an extract and this is the full thing. Umontreal's archive is linked from the official Supreme Court of Canada page.
Great quote: "Every aspect of this case demonstrates the very real and persistent malice of Scientology." - from the Court itself.
I know that there have been many other rulings in Canada against Scientology, but only this one is easily available on-line.
Henry Troup - hwt@igs.net
Could not resist pointing out that the judge is Judge Ware!
My other .sig is funny hwt@igs.net
If the "downrange" - horizontal distance travelled - is reasonable, there may be much better money-making opportunities. London (or Moscow) to New York or LA to Tokoyo express package deliveries - see The Suborbital Road to Space and this by Rick Kolker
Kolker suggests at $500 a pound, transplant organs are about the only thing with the economics, but at $50, legal documents will pay the freight.
If we assume the $100,000 a seat means a payload of 500 pounds, then they're starting around $200 a pound. But if you can rip the life support system out and have 2500 pounds payload, then we're talking high-end document delivery. And documents don't need to breathe.
Tons of space dust and comet debris fall to earth every day. Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramsinghe speculated that extra-terrestrial microbes routinely cause disease outbreaks.
The elaborate precautions are to keep earth life from contaminating the sample and messing up the science.
Takes time and work, not a one-shot.
[FAO.org}I support the extinction of the tsetse fly and the smallpox virus. And the sabretooth tiger - rendered extinct by early man with flint knives and wooden spears. Call me a speciesist if you like; I value humans over flies, every time.
There will still be billions of other flies in Africa. The predators (mostly birds and bats) are pretty casual about what they eat. If it flies, they'll eat it.
There is a common illusion that predators are very picky eaters. While there are a few such cases, far more are exactly as picky as the coyote - a century of coyote eradication has resulted in an increase in the range and population of coyotes.
And everywhere else. This is a standard technique for reducing (not eliminating) an insect population. It is not usually a one-shot. How is the Winnipeg mosquito population rebounding? Or are they still releasing sterile males? (Male mosquitos don't bite.)
How it works... essentially, we aim to reduce the probability that an insect's mating produces offspring. If that drops from say .9 to .1, the next generation is massively smaller. As someone else said, it's called the Sterile Insect Technique, and the Food and Agriculture Organization has a detail item here from 1998.
For the last ten years or so, I've rarely worked on a system that was monolithic. The typical modern project, in my world at least, looks like several classic client-server systems tangled together.
Some layers that we built in the current one:
While I don't expect any book to deal with our architecture, I would like a really solid book that encompasses the wit and wisdom of building this kind of thing, in a repeatable fashion. I'm thinking of something like the patterns model, but applied to the making science out of the art of knowing where the right place to put a function is. Considerations like elegance and efficiency, and so on.
Is it unrealistic to think of a book on this? Are there no general principles learned yet?
I have a whole lot of books near at hand.
Some of them are concept references - for example, Don Box's Essential COM which end-to-end explains what COM is about. It's not easy reading, it's not 21 lessons, and it's a good solid useful book.
Some of them are task-oriented getting started books - I have a fair number of Dummies(tm) books, because they are generally a pretty fair introduction, with enough easy-to-follow examples to get me started quickly.
What I find less useful is the book that pretends to be one while being the other. That's often a book where the advanced stuff is completely wrapped in the author's idiosyncratic framework. Granted, that framework is on the CD -- but I don't want to use it for my projects.
One thing that get me is the poor quality of the indexing in most technical books. I've grabbed one at random, and looking at 14 pages of index for 500 pages of text, I'd first think that the index was good. But let me quote an item:
Notice those six references to three pages. The whole second level of this index entry is unnecessary. It bulks the index, but it's fluff.