More information about what used to go on in there... some history...
Rosman Research Station Rosman, NC
The Rosman Research Station is located in the Pisgah National Forest of North Carolina's Smoky Mountains, near Balsam Grove, NC, off Route 215 approximately 11 kilometers north of Route 64. The station, which closed in 1994, was operated by approximately 250 NSA, Bendix Field Engineering and TRW employees.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration began operations at the Rosman Spaceflight Tracking Station in 1963, and ceased activities there in January 1981. During NASA's tenure the station supported a number of space projects, including the Apollo and Apollo-Soyuz missions. The station at Rosman was turned over to the General Services Administration by NASA on 1 February 1981. The facility was converted by the Department of Defense for use as a Communications Research Station, a process which was completed in early July 1981. Initially there were approximately 35 contract personnel living in the area, but when the project became operational in July, this number increased to approximately 75 employees. The NSA role at Rosman apparently began almost immediately thereafter. By 1985 this number was reported to have grown to 250 employees, with annual payroll at $5 million, an average of $20,000 a year [The Asheville Citizen 20 June 1985]. For FY85 NSA requested $500,000 for construction of an electric substation to provide additional electric transformer capacity that is required to support station operations. It is difficult to ascertain the total number of satellite receiving antenna at the facility. These at least include two very large dishes, approximately 27.5 feet in diameter (the size of the biggest dish left by NASA), and a smaller 6.2 meter radome.
The Rosman Station was used to intercept telephone and other communications traffic carried by commercial and other communications satellites in geostationary orbit over the Western hemisphere. Potential targets of interest could include Latin American military, diplomatic and commercial traffic as well as domestic US traffic and drug traffickers in the Caribbean.
The average news story always dumbs down to talk to the people. It is an insult to our collective intelligence, but it keeps us dumb, fat, and happy, ya know?
Plus there may be security issues here, and they are forbidden from telling more. Then again, what more could they say? You can tell to what audience a given article is intended by the title.
"Report on Gaming-Related US Exports to Foreign Countries in Violation of Operation Exodus"
is intended for a different audience than
"War Games" (snort! snort!)
Puns, the lowest form of humor is all too often the device of choice for headline editors.
Anyway, the customs dept may have to revise its guidelines contained in its Gemini literature contained here
http://www.customs.gov/enforcem/gemini/pdf/gemin i. pdf#xml=http://search.atomz.com/search/pdfhelper.t k?sp-o=3,100000,0
Someday I'm a gonna learn me how to make that there linky thing blue and clickable...
Well, now that the tally is up to about 250 replies, I can address this specifically to you since no one else with a life has time to read them all. But you asked, so you have to read them all, right?
The paranoia you feel is based on the claustrophobic feeling that corporations are taking away people's rights with the government's permission, and by interpolation, the permission of the American people. We all have that same apprehension, I think, to a degree. Our civil rights, the ones that 'made this country great' are being taken away there is no doubt. This is due to two things, I think:
1. We gleefully allow our rights to be taken away, because;
2. since losing a sense of cohesiveness in our American society, we have lost our bearings, some of us have abused our civil liberties and others are reacting to that.
In short, there is an internal war being fought in the US along ideological lines. Closely tied in with that is the fact that there is money to be made on each side and so what should be a clear distinction between right and wrong gets skewed. The word "morale" is close to the word "moral" because once you drop your morals in exchange for whatever profit margin you obtain, once you become Machiavellian, once you sell out, your morale must suffer. That's part of it. We are smoking more and enjoying it less, so to speak. We have lost touch with whatever in our lives made it worth living. We are filled with angst, paranoia, a sense of detachment, a sense of 'is that all there is?'. We can all relate to that feeling (just read today's www.suck.com and see if you don't relate).
The other answer is that corporations are defining the new world order, so it doesn't really matter which country you want to migrate to. You are going to be and remain driftless until you anchor your own self to a creed that has meaning and that you can live by. Personally, I like to backpack around this beautiful country and lose some of the massive overstimulation that I allow myself to experience. Then, when I have calmed down some of my inner turmoil through meditation in the wilderness, I can examine these feelings of angst without distraction. Then I can cope with this crazy world a little bit better, and find meaning of my own.
Trust me, country-hopping is not the answer. Just like the swami sez, "You must find it within yourself."
But, for more answers, I suggest you read some of the writings of Gore Vidal (an ex-patriate) and see if you don't resonate with his thoughts. Another suggestion is Cultural Creatives. In the movie "My Dinner with Andre", Andre speaks in hopeful terms of a coming together of a people in an underground fashion, a spiritual gathering. This, to my mind has not happened, and inasmuch as it usurps power from those in power today, may not be encouraged by the powers-that-be. But it would be a much better world if that counter culture were preeminent. It just wouldn't be this one.
There is an argument made in today's (er, tuesday, 02 Jan 01) Suck.com that monopolies are the only way to provide certain services, i.e., the railroad needed a guy like J. Pierpoint Morgan to build a transcontinental line. Almost like a Gaia hypothesis for capitalists. I am pretty sure it wasn't called out in the article (a good read, highly recommended), but it made me think of M$ and how they dominated the computer industry. I actually am changing my thoughts on their role in the industry and beginning to Try to percieve them as a necessary Evil. Just to see if it makes sense. But companies like Standard Oil, Ford (in the beginning), and the TVA (well, maybe not such commoditized utilities as electricity and the phone) peak, see their day, and must move on.
To stay OT, and wrap this up:
The whole 'digital convergence' movement may require high-level integration of the sort that Gates once adopted for the Windows environment. But unless we include gaming, movies, and all other entertainment as part of the core of that convergence (which I think would be a mistake), then Bill Gates is barking up the wrong tree, and ignoring the critical parts of digital convergence movement (net appliances? wireless? something we haven't thought of yet?) while playing games and gobbling up the.NET...
But we need a new J.P. Morgan or perhaps none at all... Gates can afford to be wrong a hundred times and muscle in to a hundred different niche markets, but the guy who succeeds Bill as hated capitalist/monopolist won't be playing games. MSFT was trading at 44 last time I checked, and there aren't any rumors coming from the DoJ.
The thing is, it may be standard physics that any student could figure out. But it is what the government thinks the bad guy is doing, and it is what the government is doing about it. That, of course, should be classified properly, even if it is "F=ma". The government has reason to be concerned about all sorts of things that may be pedestrian to you. But you aren't to know that; you are to wonder if they have thought of it, and of course, if you are the bad guy, you should be kept in the dark about just how much they (we, the People of the US) can bust you (the - oh, I don't know - lackey of Saddam?) for it.
BTW, I don't know if anyone caught this yet, but the document appears to have been scanned, and poorly at that.
I am surprised that the govt released this information. It's good news, IMO, a sign of the times, and a healthy trend if the information is clearly not vital to US security interests.
I like this line, from the ToC:
xxxxxxxxxxxxx (C)
where the "C" is lined out, as if it no longer confidential. Doesn't sound like it was successfully downgraded, does it?
Plus, Lots o' stuff has been redacted. I imagine (hope) John Young talks about all the redactions.
Perhaps in the future, if they can create DNA that can detect all the water-borne nasties like nitrogen, tri-chloroethylene (TCE), etc... you could attach an array of these to your drinking fountain and get a real-time measure of the quality of the water you just poured yourself from the tap? Cadmium is one of the known bad guys in water, so you can already catch that.
In industrial workplaces I am sure they have a need for this. I think they subject workers to periodic testing for exposure; by then it is a little later than you would prefer, you would rather catch it before it entered your system; perhaps with a device like this you could.
And canaries around the world are rejoicing at the news.
Here's what my aerospace comrades tell me about the early days of NASA:
When NASA was proposing to go to the moon and actually planning it, they instituted the second and perhaps one of the best examples of the triumph of Systems Engineering as a development tool. One of the interesting features of it was that inventions had to be put on the schedule and were critical to the timely success of the mission.
So they are old hands at planning for things like the sail.
Oh, the first instance of Systems Engineering? Nuclear-tipped ICBMs. It was invented for just that purpose.
This reminds me of that scene in "Pirates of Silicon Valley" (I know you watched it, so just 'fess up) where Bill and his pal are late for a flight and he says something to the ticket agent like "Do you realize what I'm carrying here? Critical software just like the software that runs your planes? That runs this building? yadayadayada..." Basically a threat, you recall it got the plane turned around and Bill made his flight after all.
What was cute and probably apocryphal in the TV movie is frightening and possibly apocalyptical if we think of that brand of arrogance as posessed by the man who supplies the pentagon with their 'critical' software.
And, judging by the responses to the DoJ (Justice Department. Don't mention it, Fantastic Lad...:) from Redmond, that is one singular sort of arrogance there.
The government still put gas in their car when they broke up Standard Oil, and probably still made phone calls when the broke up Ma Bell. That's why it's a de facto Monopoly. You, me, and the government really have no choice but to use MicroCrap.
>>The "ASCII text" restriction isn't exactly an ideal protection.
That's true, of course! But the government doesn't rely on pure technology to solve the security problem. They also screen and train people so that they can trust them with security.
There are no ideal protections, but there are 'cleared' and 'uncleared' people.
True. There are specific procedures for creating a document on a classified system and then producing an unclassified version of it. And for the reasons mentioned above (pieces of the document remain in the doc long after they are deleted), no unclass MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint documents are allowed to be created on a class machine (it is a security infraction / violation). Only pure ascii text and binary pictures.
I don't get this part: how can this be a Cracking (as opposed to hacking as CNN inaccurately refers to it) problem? No secure system is permitted to be on the Internet without proper encryption, which is supposed to secure the information independent of what OS is being used. So no one can get sensitive information if it is handled properly, i.e., according to the rules.
My first thought is "Why is this posted under AC? maybe there are other valid reasons, but I can only think of two.
1) You believe in personal integrity and the intrinsic value of your words and as such eschew the obvious benefit of the karma bonuses such a well-written essay would bring as a basic part of your philosophy. A variation on this might be: "I don't need no stinking karma".
2) You would rather not have to deal with the realities associated with having a firm opinion. You wrote this and then realized that it could get you fired, in other words. Or hunted by the FBI who owes Bill Gates a favor.
It made me think of the original Open Source model. The one I was taught in grade school. The Scientific Method. I learned in school that there existed a transcendent philosophy among the community of scientists that realized that the way to ensure maximum technological progress and scientific advancement is to share ideas freely. You mention the medical community: I count them as part of the larger whole of Scientists. Of course in my youthful inexperience I idealized the relationship among Scientists and truly imagined them above petty dollar-mongering. Now I know that scientists can be bought; some are even Science whores. Some of the Global Warming 'experts' come to mind. And they besmirch the once good name of Science.
Now, the Open Source community is a lot like the Science community of my idealized vision. It is my opinion that in this post-cold-war, corporate power structure of the present, Open Source people may be viewed as heretical to the Business Model that is beginning to predominate in the Internet world, or at least annoying and not very profitable or as a consequence useful to the new power brokers, the Companies. Witness how the open Scientific Community is becoming Closed, with patents arriving before discoveries. I am thinking particularly of the genetics industry.
Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of Open Source. But does Big Business? It's clear from the referenced article that they don't understand or have an appreciation for idealists. None at all. There is no room for Idealism in the Corporate BoardRoom.
Finally, users don't care about operating systems until they crash. Or, as in the case of M$, annoy. Much to Bill Gates' grief, the best OS is a Commoditized OS. Your comment about 'who controls the OS controls the industry' rings very true, indeed.
The next US administration would do well to heed that point!
Unfortunately, that party maintains as its philosophy that what is good for business is good for the country, as so will not press hard on the Department of Justice to break up the current 800-pound gorilla that is sitting on all Open Source projects and squeezing the life out of them.
Imagine the Taft administration allowing Standard Oil and Ford Motor to merge, producing a proprietary gasoline that only Ford cars could operate on.
Um, that's the best analogy I could come up with tonight, but I hope you get my point-...
And Unisys keeps it up, too, acting as if they are perfectly in their right (which unfortunately they are).
http://www.unisys.com/unisys/lzw/
Of course, they did spend their precious time and hard-earned money on developing GIFs.
Here is FSF's philosophy on GIFs (and why we should all boycott GIFs, or at least "DeCSS it" somehow, or just continue doing whatever it is we were gonna do anyway before we knew it was wrong).
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html
But e-bay hasn't even come up with an original idea, here.
Patent electricity, indeed!
So what is it we can do to fix this problem? It's like I always say... (to paraphrase Wired.com) Generate "Thousands and Thousands of Posts". Other than that, an Internet Tea Party might work.
You know, I posted the other day (in response to "Humorously Bad Web Hosting Polcies" about Page Creators) on why I felt that, say, calling an 800 number that a spammer sent you 500 times to help him go out of business was short-sighted and not really helpful. But I am changing my mind on that. I think that that may be the Only resort left to Americans who really care about the way things are going. It is sad, but as long as there is no other viable recourse to change the Patent Office policy on Stupid Patents, then go ahead, civil-disobedience 'til the cows come home...
It never surprises me that there is a mentality always out there, and especially among computer types, phreaks, and such that gets excited about 'beating the system' by thinking 'radically'; that is, the best way to retaliate is to spam / make massive calls to 800 number / crack the offending organization.
These tactics are pretty short-lived, and although they may be fun while you're doing it, it almost is guaranteed to backfire and cause negative repercussions.
The modern equivalent of prank phone calls. But of course, prank phone calls brought about Caller ID.
I think I missed the point of the book, too. I think all the food was blue because they couldn't tell what food was supposed to look like? And it tasted just like what Bowman expected.
And the 'monolith' was sitting in his cube contemplating the beauty of the ratio of the sides 1:4:9... as if when we understood that it would be revealed to us just how advanced the monoliths were.
There seemed to have been some major disconnects btwn the book and the movie. Of course Kubrick has a great imagination, dwarfed only by his ego, so I am told.
Of course its a lot harder to read the book on LSD, so I'm told.:)
But as for the long, drawn-out parts. It truly is a different mindset today than it was then. Has anyone seen THX1138? Now there is another good example of beauty in vapid and rambling serial seeming non-sequiturs.
Wow... when I worked in AI in college my thesis was "Heuristic Reasoning for Stress-Strain Finite Element Generation" (hey, if I don't toot my own horn...), and when I briefed my findings to one of my proctors he started grumbling and the other teacher said "Marvin, what's wrong. He's describing fuzzy logic." To which he replied, "Fuzzy Logic I understand, it's fuzzy explanations I don't get!"
I guess it's hard to explain the field of AI to outsiders, because even though I (used to) understand neural networks, I feel that I need some sort of a diagram to 'get it' here. But what I think I heard is that "learning is the big problem in NN, or maybe a better word would be teaching"... "we have reduced the learning time by coming up with a new conceptual way of classifying data"... "the new way is more 'biologically valid'"...
Okay, I do have a question for the experts out there. Help would be greatly appreciated 'cuz we may be able some day to apply this to National Missile Defence to help discriminate balloons from nukes, currently a big problem.
Question: Seeing the words 'biologically valid' conjures up an image of scientists pursuing pure science rather than concentrating on the applications of it. Is the goal of NN today more theoretical (we want to get something to behave more like a smart being) than practical (we want something that will specifically put names to faces/discriminate balloons from weapons/identify handwriting like an expert).
I suspect that this field has narrowed in the last decade (but I may be wrong), and so I fear that it may be getting wayyy esoteric. As a practical engineer who needs solutions today, should I devote more energies to this or less? What is happening elsewhere in the field?
All of this bs results from people unwilling to take the heat and responsibility for their actions.
The teacher needs to admit that he was wrong even if he thought it was a joke at the time. Teachers are supposed to Know that some students will try to trip them up at any opportunity. Sounds like this Colombo guy Was serious, but that might become immaterial in a court of law. He is responsible for what he said, but won't own up to it, saying it's silly.
The father should counsel his son to appeal the process fairly and if necessary, take the suspension and learn from it. This line:
>>>"My son had lots of plans for living the good life (from the reward money)," said Aaron Lutes' father, Mike. "I can see an adult questioning what the teacher said, but not a bunch of 15-year-old kids."
points to a real problem some parents have: the inability to raise their children with a sense of responsibility. Plus it implies that there is a damage lawsuit in the offing. Great, that'll teach the kid a lesson.
And lawyers who are indirectly responsible for this rush to put spin on everything for fear of lawsuits, rather than approaching the whole issue rationally and with maturity, need to die. hehheh, j/k.
Because, VC's, like television became (for me) just another reconfirmation in the shallowness of people. TV was probably envisioned as this marvelous media that would transform humanity by distributing information far and wide to the masses. A hyper Gutenburg press, so to speak.
What did we get? Charlie's Angels.
Likewise BBSes failed to meet any of my hopeful expectations. I thought - seriously - I could engage in discussions that would be meaningful because they would be real-time and information was finally free. I was let down when all that the chat BBSes (the prototype VC's?) could offer was what for lack of a better word I'll call 'competitive flirting' and blatant adolescent flaming.
You can't Create a Community. It has to build itself.
Slashdot may be the "McDonalds" of VC's, but it has a strong foundation and great appeal to those of us who really want to communicate, so it will prevail as a robust model of the way things are becoming. And one of the strengths of its architecture is that it is a lot like the one-user-at-a-time BBSes of old with their message forums. The genius of/. is moderation.
Put a bunch of ananoymous strangers in a room and you're not gonna get a Virtual Community.
What you seem to get is cacophony. The only use of the real-time features of seems to be along the lines of "did you hear Steve Allen died?" and "is it snowing where you are?"
Another thing: I have noticed that in many of these topic-related forums conversation often devolves into a dialogue between two or three people who are lonely. You know the type:
FORUM: Modern Physics
Msg 22: From: Cassandra
Hi again Bob. Yes, it snowed a lot here yesterday, too. I had a heck of a time getting out of the driveway this morning to drop my kids off at school. I hope it melts today!!
Hugs...
Of course, your mileage may vary. But in social situations it seems like everyone willingly behaves like they are 21, blonde, and with a severe case of ADD.
Re:some censorship is inevitable with corporate ru
on
Nazis on Napster
·
· Score: 1
IANAL, but jurisdictionally, I believe that the German government can order BMG around, and you can imagine that it flows downhill to Napster. All these international disputes arising from the free sharing of Information! I maintain that this sharing will prove to be the ultimate equalizer and must be protected in the States as elsewhere by progressive and enlightened governments. We are experiencing all the growing pains now. A world of newbies disoriented.
But I am pretty sure that the more homogeneous a people are, the less inclined are they to be tolerant of different cultures. At least they will be less inclined to allow for the easy assimilation of another culture into their own. The free information resulting from the Amazing Internet, however demands that some sort of accomodations be made for other possibly objectionable material from outside sources. Germany, being more socially homogeneous than America, has decreed that this particular brand of hate be banned. America, of course, is having its own xenophobia of sorts, but it is related to pr0n.
The only way for Germany to stop this sort of information from crossing its borders, ultimately, is to ban the Internet itself.
That it may be, but under the Law you were protected from being stopped in just such a situation. Now you are not. My point is not that it doesn't look bad. My point is that is shouldn't be, and wasn't until last year, illegal to see a cop, stop, and walk the other way. Same thing with sobriety checkpoints (unconstitutional); you can legally make a U-Turn when you see one. Used to be a cop wasn't allowed to chase you, now I suppose he can.
Did you know that you are not required to give a cop your ID if stopped on the street? Pisses 'em off to no end, but you have the right to refuse to prove you are who you say you are if the officer asks you for your name. Anyway...
You can't bust people for a guilty conscience; but now you can frisk them. And soon you will be able to wiretap them because they are encrypting their email.
That is the way erosion of rights starts. In California, recent legislation authorizes a police officer to assume probable cause if you, upon seeing an officer, turn and run. Turning and running from a cop was never a crime before, but now it allows a cop to search you bodily.
Likewise, encryption is a hair's breadth away from being the thing that designates you a criminal.
Between this and Carnivore, encryption may soon be determined to be an evasion of the long arm of the law.
This might mean that if you encrypt your email, the FBI can get authorization to tap your phone.
Now how could the FBI determine that you encrypted an email message? Wouldn't that be illegal? Soon it will become legal, trust me...
Power. The magic word. Money is a means to power, the real objective. People (the "stupid", non-libertarian heartland type who don't read/.) seem to be perfectly willing to give over their rights so that the guy they perceive is on their side can gain power. It is happening every day. Hell, it seems to happen every day on/.
Now why would people willingly give up their rights? My theory is that they really don't exercise their rights anyway, but they see how they can 'stick it' to people who do, and since we have a lack of a galvanizing event (my term for something that unites our countrymen) such as the Apollo moon shot or the VietNam War, we are, in the immortal words of Firesign Theater, "Bringing the War Back Home", and fighting among ourselves through legislature, lawyers, and radio talk shows. In the process, power is being gathered at the top, and taken away from the people. It's funny: those with power (of the press, the media, the legislature...) gather power, or rather Hoard power in increments, slowly ratcheting it up. A little legalization of search and seizure here, a little expanded wiretapping there, and soon a great advantage accrues.
But how do the citizens regain their power? No, not through thousands and thousands of posts. But by storming the Bastille. Or Declaring Independence.
Well, you are catching someone who is snooping around your organization, who can crack a system like yours, before he goes after the real server.
I don't think it has any direct benefit to your company, when I do think about it. It does have benefit to the community at large.
For that reason maybe it is more of a law enforcement sting than a legitimate company enterprise. Kind of like the child porn stings, ya know?
Then again, for it to have any benefit, it is Vital to catch and prosecute the criminal before he goes out there and cracks into another (your) system.
Slashdot Mirror
More information about what used to go on in there... some history...
Rosman Research Station Rosman, NC
The Rosman Research Station is located in the Pisgah National Forest of North Carolina's Smoky Mountains, near Balsam Grove, NC, off Route 215 approximately 11 kilometers north of Route 64. The station, which closed in 1994, was operated by approximately 250 NSA, Bendix Field Engineering and TRW employees.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration began operations at the Rosman Spaceflight Tracking Station in 1963, and ceased activities there in January 1981. During NASA's tenure the station supported a number of space projects, including the Apollo and Apollo-Soyuz missions. The station at Rosman was turned over to the General Services Administration by NASA on 1 February 1981. The facility was converted by the Department of Defense for use as a Communications Research Station, a process which was completed in early July 1981. Initially there were approximately 35 contract personnel living in the area, but when the project became operational in July, this number increased to approximately 75 employees. The NSA role at Rosman apparently began almost immediately thereafter. By 1985 this number was reported to have grown to 250 employees, with annual payroll at $5 million, an average of $20,000 a year [The Asheville Citizen 20 June 1985]. For FY85 NSA requested $500,000 for construction of an electric substation to provide additional electric transformer capacity that is required to support station operations. It is difficult to ascertain the total number of satellite receiving antenna at the facility. These at least include two very large dishes, approximately 27.5 feet in diameter (the size of the biggest dish left by NASA), and a smaller 6.2 meter radome.
The Rosman Station was used to intercept telephone and other communications traffic carried by commercial and other communications satellites in geostationary orbit over the Western hemisphere. Potential targets of interest could include Latin American military, diplomatic and commercial traffic as well as domestic US traffic and drug traffickers in the Caribbean.
Right... its called a Faraday cage. Emanations check in, but they don't check out.
I like this line:
"I've never had someone come here that wasn't blown away."
...and neither has the NSA! ba-dum cha!
But seriously, folks...
The average news story always dumbs down to talk to the people. It is an insult to our collective intelligence, but it keeps us dumb, fat, and happy, ya know?
n i. pdf#xml=http://search.atomz.com/search/pdfhelper.t k?sp-o=3,100000,0
Plus there may be security issues here, and they are forbidden from telling more. Then again, what more could they say? You can tell to what audience a given article is intended by the title.
"Report on Gaming-Related US Exports to Foreign Countries in Violation of Operation Exodus"
is intended for a different audience than
"War Games" (snort! snort!)
Puns, the lowest form of humor is all too often the device of choice for headline editors.
Anyway, the customs dept may have to revise its guidelines contained in its Gemini literature contained here
http://www.customs.gov/enforcem/gemini/pdf/gemi
Someday I'm a gonna learn me how to make that there linky thing blue and clickable...
Well, now that the tally is up to about 250 replies, I can address this specifically to you since no one else with a life has time to read them all. But you asked, so you have to read them all, right?
The paranoia you feel is based on the claustrophobic feeling that corporations are taking away people's rights with the government's permission, and by interpolation, the permission of the American people. We all have that same apprehension, I think, to a degree. Our civil rights, the ones that 'made this country great' are being taken away there is no doubt. This is due to two things, I think:
1. We gleefully allow our rights to be taken away, because;
2. since losing a sense of cohesiveness in our American society, we have lost our bearings, some of us have abused our civil liberties and others are reacting to that.
In short, there is an internal war being fought in the US along ideological lines. Closely tied in with that is the fact that there is money to be made on each side and so what should be a clear distinction between right and wrong gets skewed. The word "morale" is close to the word "moral" because once you drop your morals in exchange for whatever profit margin you obtain, once you become Machiavellian, once you sell out, your morale must suffer. That's part of it. We are smoking more and enjoying it less, so to speak. We have lost touch with whatever in our lives made it worth living. We are filled with angst, paranoia, a sense of detachment, a sense of 'is that all there is?'. We can all relate to that feeling (just read today's www.suck.com and see if you don't relate).
The other answer is that corporations are defining the new world order, so it doesn't really matter which country you want to migrate to. You are going to be and remain driftless until you anchor your own self to a creed that has meaning and that you can live by. Personally, I like to backpack around this beautiful country and lose some of the massive overstimulation that I allow myself to experience. Then, when I have calmed down some of my inner turmoil through meditation in the wilderness, I can examine these feelings of angst without distraction. Then I can cope with this crazy world a little bit better, and find meaning of my own.
Trust me, country-hopping is not the answer. Just like the swami sez, "You must find it within yourself."
But, for more answers, I suggest you read some of the writings of Gore Vidal (an ex-patriate) and see if you don't resonate with his thoughts. Another suggestion is Cultural Creatives. In the movie "My Dinner with Andre", Andre speaks in hopeful terms of a coming together of a people in an underground fashion, a spiritual gathering. This, to my mind has not happened, and inasmuch as it usurps power from those in power today, may not be encouraged by the powers-that-be. But it would be a much better world if that counter culture were preeminent. It just wouldn't be this one.
There is an argument made in today's (er, tuesday, 02 Jan 01) Suck.com that monopolies are the only way to provide certain services, i.e., the railroad needed a guy like J. Pierpoint Morgan to build a transcontinental line. Almost like a Gaia hypothesis for capitalists. I am pretty sure it wasn't called out in the article (a good read, highly recommended), but it made me think of M$ and how they dominated the computer industry. I actually am changing my thoughts on their role in the industry and beginning to Try to percieve them as a necessary Evil. Just to see if it makes sense. But companies like Standard Oil, Ford (in the beginning), and the TVA (well, maybe not such commoditized utilities as electricity and the phone) peak, see their day, and must move on.
.NET...
To stay OT, and wrap this up:
The whole 'digital convergence' movement may require high-level integration of the sort that Gates once adopted for the Windows environment. But unless we include gaming, movies, and all other entertainment as part of the core of that convergence (which I think would be a mistake), then Bill Gates is barking up the wrong tree, and ignoring the critical parts of digital convergence movement (net appliances? wireless? something we haven't thought of yet?) while playing games and gobbling up the
But we need a new J.P. Morgan or perhaps none at all... Gates can afford to be wrong a hundred times and muscle in to a hundred different niche markets, but the guy who succeeds Bill as hated capitalist/monopolist won't be playing games. MSFT was trading at 44 last time I checked, and there aren't any rumors coming from the DoJ.
The thing is, it may be standard physics that any student could figure out. But it is what the government thinks the bad guy is doing, and it is what the government is doing about it. That, of course, should be classified properly, even if it is "F=ma". The government has reason to be concerned about all sorts of things that may be pedestrian to you. But you aren't to know that; you are to wonder if they have thought of it, and of course, if you are the bad guy, you should be kept in the dark about just how much they (we, the People of the US) can bust you (the - oh, I don't know - lackey of Saddam?) for it.
BTW, I don't know if anyone caught this yet, but the document appears to have been scanned, and poorly at that.
I am surprised that the govt released this information. It's good news, IMO, a sign of the times, and a healthy trend if the information is clearly not vital to US security interests.
I like this line, from the ToC:
xxxxxxxxxxxxx (C)
where the "C" is lined out, as if it no longer confidential. Doesn't sound like it was successfully downgraded, does it?
Plus, Lots o' stuff has been redacted. I imagine (hope) John Young talks about all the redactions.
Perhaps in the future, if they can create DNA that can detect all the water-borne nasties like nitrogen, tri-chloroethylene (TCE), etc... you could attach an array of these to your drinking fountain and get a real-time measure of the quality of the water you just poured yourself from the tap? Cadmium is one of the known bad guys in water, so you can already catch that.
In industrial workplaces I am sure they have a need for this. I think they subject workers to periodic testing for exposure; by then it is a little later than you would prefer, you would rather catch it before it entered your system; perhaps with a device like this you could.
And canaries around the world are rejoicing at the news.
Here's what my aerospace comrades tell me about the early days of NASA:
When NASA was proposing to go to the moon and actually planning it, they instituted the second and perhaps one of the best examples of the triumph of Systems Engineering as a development tool. One of the interesting features of it was that inventions had to be put on the schedule and were critical to the timely success of the mission.
So they are old hands at planning for things like the sail.
Oh, the first instance of Systems Engineering? Nuclear-tipped ICBMs. It was invented for just that purpose.
This reminds me of that scene in "Pirates of Silicon Valley" (I know you watched it, so just 'fess up) where Bill and his pal are late for a flight and he says something to the ticket agent like "Do you realize what I'm carrying here? Critical software just like the software that runs your planes? That runs this building? yadayadayada..." Basically a threat, you recall it got the plane turned around and Bill made his flight after all.
:) from Redmond, that is one singular sort of arrogance there.
What was cute and probably apocryphal in the TV movie is frightening and possibly apocalyptical if we think of that brand of arrogance as posessed by the man who supplies the pentagon with their 'critical' software.
And, judging by the responses to the DoJ (Justice Department. Don't mention it, Fantastic Lad...
The government still put gas in their car when they broke up Standard Oil, and probably still made phone calls when the broke up Ma Bell. That's why it's a de facto Monopoly. You, me, and the government really have no choice but to use MicroCrap.
>>The "ASCII text" restriction isn't exactly an ideal protection.
That's true, of course! But the government doesn't rely on pure technology to solve the security problem. They also screen and train people so that they can trust them with security.
There are no ideal protections, but there are 'cleared' and 'uncleared' people.
True. There are specific procedures for creating a document on a classified system and then producing an unclassified version of it. And for the reasons mentioned above (pieces of the document remain in the doc long after they are deleted), no unclass MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint documents are allowed to be created on a class machine (it is a security infraction / violation). Only pure ascii text and binary pictures.
I don't get this part: how can this be a Cracking (as opposed to hacking as CNN inaccurately refers to it) problem? No secure system is permitted to be on the Internet without proper encryption, which is supposed to secure the information independent of what OS is being used. So no one can get sensitive information if it is handled properly, i.e., according to the rules.
Very good post. Made me think about a few things.
My first thought is "Why is this posted under AC? maybe there are other valid reasons, but I can only think of two.
1) You believe in personal integrity and the intrinsic value of your words and as such eschew the obvious benefit of the karma bonuses such a well-written essay would bring as a basic part of your philosophy. A variation on this might be: "I don't need no stinking karma".
2) You would rather not have to deal with the realities associated with having a firm opinion. You wrote this and then realized that it could get you fired, in other words. Or hunted by the FBI who owes Bill Gates a favor.
It made me think of the original Open Source model. The one I was taught in grade school. The Scientific Method. I learned in school that there existed a transcendent philosophy among the community of scientists that realized that the way to ensure maximum technological progress and scientific advancement is to share ideas freely. You mention the medical community: I count them as part of the larger whole of Scientists. Of course in my youthful inexperience I idealized the relationship among Scientists and truly imagined them above petty dollar-mongering. Now I know that scientists can be bought; some are even Science whores. Some of the Global Warming 'experts' come to mind. And they besmirch the once good name of Science.
Now, the Open Source community is a lot like the Science community of my idealized vision. It is my opinion that in this post-cold-war, corporate power structure of the present, Open Source people may be viewed as heretical to the Business Model that is beginning to predominate in the Internet world, or at least annoying and not very profitable or as a consequence useful to the new power brokers, the Companies. Witness how the open Scientific Community is becoming Closed, with patents arriving before discoveries. I am thinking particularly of the genetics industry.
Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of Open Source. But does Big Business? It's clear from the referenced article that they don't understand or have an appreciation for idealists. None at all. There is no room for Idealism in the Corporate BoardRoom.
Finally, users don't care about operating systems until they crash. Or, as in the case of M$, annoy. Much to Bill Gates' grief, the best OS is a Commoditized OS. Your comment about 'who controls the OS controls the industry' rings very true, indeed.
The next US administration would do well to heed that point!
Unfortunately, that party maintains as its philosophy that what is good for business is good for the country, as so will not press hard on the Department of Justice to break up the current 800-pound gorilla that is sitting on all Open Source projects and squeezing the life out of them.
Imagine the Taft administration allowing Standard Oil and Ford Motor to merge, producing a proprietary gasoline that only Ford cars could operate on.
Um, that's the best analogy I could come up with tonight, but I hope you get my point-...
Oh my God, that's right! I remember that!
And Unisys keeps it up, too, acting as if they are perfectly in their right (which unfortunately they are).
http://www.unisys.com/unisys/lzw/
Of course, they did spend their precious time and hard-earned money on developing GIFs.
Here is FSF's philosophy on GIFs (and why we should all boycott GIFs, or at least "DeCSS it" somehow, or just continue doing whatever it is we were gonna do anyway before we knew it was wrong).
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html
But e-bay hasn't even come up with an original idea, here.
Patent electricity, indeed!
So what is it we can do to fix this problem? It's like I always say... (to paraphrase Wired.com) Generate "Thousands and Thousands of Posts". Other than that, an Internet Tea Party might work.
You know, I posted the other day (in response to "Humorously Bad Web Hosting Polcies" about Page Creators) on why I felt that, say, calling an 800 number that a spammer sent you 500 times to help him go out of business was short-sighted and not really helpful. But I am changing my mind on that. I think that that may be the Only resort left to Americans who really care about the way things are going. It is sad, but as long as there is no other viable recourse to change the Patent Office policy on Stupid Patents, then go ahead, civil-disobedience 'til the cows come home...
It never surprises me that there is a mentality always out there, and especially among computer types, phreaks, and such that gets excited about 'beating the system' by thinking 'radically'; that is, the best way to retaliate is to spam / make massive calls to 800 number / crack the offending organization.
These tactics are pretty short-lived, and although they may be fun while you're doing it, it almost is guaranteed to backfire and cause negative repercussions.
The modern equivalent of prank phone calls. But of course, prank phone calls brought about Caller ID.
I think I missed the point of the book, too. I think all the food was blue because they couldn't tell what food was supposed to look like? And it tasted just like what Bowman expected.
:)
And the 'monolith' was sitting in his cube contemplating the beauty of the ratio of the sides 1:4:9... as if when we understood that it would be revealed to us just how advanced the monoliths were.
There seemed to have been some major disconnects btwn the book and the movie. Of course Kubrick has a great imagination, dwarfed only by his ego, so I am told.
Of course its a lot harder to read the book on LSD, so I'm told.
But as for the long, drawn-out parts. It truly is a different mindset today than it was then. Has anyone seen THX1138? Now there is another good example of beauty in vapid and rambling serial seeming non-sequiturs.
Wow... when I worked in AI in college my thesis was "Heuristic Reasoning for Stress-Strain Finite Element Generation" (hey, if I don't toot my own horn...), and when I briefed my findings to one of my proctors he started grumbling and the other teacher said "Marvin, what's wrong. He's describing fuzzy logic." To which he replied, "Fuzzy Logic I understand, it's fuzzy explanations I don't get!"
... "we have reduced the learning time by coming up with a new conceptual way of classifying data" ... "the new way is more 'biologically valid'"...
I guess it's hard to explain the field of AI to outsiders, because even though I (used to) understand neural networks, I feel that I need some sort of a diagram to 'get it' here. But what I think I heard is that "learning is the big problem in NN, or maybe a better word would be teaching"
Okay, I do have a question for the experts out there. Help would be greatly appreciated 'cuz we may be able some day to apply this to National Missile Defence to help discriminate balloons from nukes, currently a big problem.
Question: Seeing the words 'biologically valid' conjures up an image of scientists pursuing pure science rather than concentrating on the applications of it. Is the goal of NN today more theoretical (we want to get something to behave more like a smart being) than practical (we want something that will specifically put names to faces/discriminate balloons from weapons/identify handwriting like an expert).
I suspect that this field has narrowed in the last decade (but I may be wrong), and so I fear that it may be getting wayyy esoteric. As a practical engineer who needs solutions today, should I devote more energies to this or less? What is happening elsewhere in the field?
All of this bs results from people unwilling to take the heat and responsibility for their actions.
The teacher needs to admit that he was wrong even if he thought it was a joke at the time. Teachers are supposed to Know that some students will try to trip them up at any opportunity. Sounds like this Colombo guy Was serious, but that might become immaterial in a court of law. He is responsible for what he said, but won't own up to it, saying it's silly.
The father should counsel his son to appeal the process fairly and if necessary, take the suspension and learn from it. This line:
>>>"My son had lots of plans for living the good life (from the reward money)," said Aaron Lutes' father, Mike. "I can see an adult questioning what the teacher said, but not a bunch of 15-year-old kids."
points to a real problem some parents have: the inability to raise their children with a sense of responsibility. Plus it implies that there is a damage lawsuit in the offing. Great, that'll teach the kid a lesson.
And lawyers who are indirectly responsible for this rush to put spin on everything for fear of lawsuits, rather than approaching the whole issue rationally and with maturity, need to die. hehheh, j/k.
Why am I bored with even the discussion of VC's?
/. is moderation.
Because, VC's, like television became (for me) just another reconfirmation in the shallowness of people. TV was probably envisioned as this marvelous media that would transform humanity by distributing information far and wide to the masses. A hyper Gutenburg press, so to speak.
What did we get? Charlie's Angels.
Likewise BBSes failed to meet any of my hopeful expectations. I thought - seriously - I could engage in discussions that would be meaningful because they would be real-time and information was finally free. I was let down when all that the chat BBSes (the prototype VC's?) could offer was what for lack of a better word I'll call 'competitive flirting' and blatant adolescent flaming.
You can't Create a Community. It has to build itself.
Slashdot may be the "McDonalds" of VC's, but it has a strong foundation and great appeal to those of us who really want to communicate, so it will prevail as a robust model of the way things are becoming. And one of the strengths of its architecture is that it is a lot like the one-user-at-a-time BBSes of old with their message forums. The genius of
Put a bunch of ananoymous strangers in a room and you're not gonna get a Virtual Community.
What you seem to get is cacophony. The only use of the real-time features of seems to be along the lines of "did you hear Steve Allen died?" and "is it snowing where you are?"
Another thing: I have noticed that in many of these topic-related forums conversation often devolves into a dialogue between two or three people who are lonely. You know the type:
FORUM: Modern Physics
Msg 22: From: Cassandra
Hi again Bob. Yes, it snowed a lot here yesterday, too. I had a heck of a time getting out of the driveway this morning to drop my kids off at school. I hope it melts today!!
Hugs...
Of course, your mileage may vary. But in social situations it seems like everyone willingly behaves like they are 21, blonde, and with a severe case of ADD.
IANAL, but jurisdictionally, I believe that the German government can order BMG around, and you can imagine that it flows downhill to Napster. All these international disputes arising from the free sharing of Information! I maintain that this sharing will prove to be the ultimate equalizer and must be protected in the States as elsewhere by progressive and enlightened governments. We are experiencing all the growing pains now. A world of newbies disoriented.
But I am pretty sure that the more homogeneous a people are, the less inclined are they to be tolerant of different cultures. At least they will be less inclined to allow for the easy assimilation of another culture into their own. The free information resulting from the Amazing Internet, however demands that some sort of accomodations be made for other possibly objectionable material from outside sources. Germany, being more socially homogeneous than America, has decreed that this particular brand of hate be banned. America, of course, is having its own xenophobia of sorts, but it is related to pr0n.
The only way for Germany to stop this sort of information from crossing its borders, ultimately, is to ban the Internet itself.
That it may be, but under the Law you were protected from being stopped in just such a situation. Now you are not. My point is not that it doesn't look bad. My point is that is shouldn't be, and wasn't until last year, illegal to see a cop, stop, and walk the other way. Same thing with sobriety checkpoints (unconstitutional); you can legally make a U-Turn when you see one. Used to be a cop wasn't allowed to chase you, now I suppose he can.
Did you know that you are not required to give a cop your ID if stopped on the street? Pisses 'em off to no end, but you have the right to refuse to prove you are who you say you are if the officer asks you for your name. Anyway...
You can't bust people for a guilty conscience; but now you can frisk them. And soon you will be able to wiretap them because they are encrypting their email.
When Nostradamus refers to the millenium, he's talking about the thousandth year.
When we count together and get to one hundred, do me a favor; recognize that one hundred is not 101, okay?
That is the way erosion of rights starts. In California, recent legislation authorizes a police officer to assume probable cause if you, upon seeing an officer, turn and run. Turning and running from a cop was never a crime before, but now it allows a cop to search you bodily.
Likewise, encryption is a hair's breadth away from being the thing that designates you a criminal.
Between this and Carnivore, encryption may soon be determined to be an evasion of the long arm of the law.
This might mean that if you encrypt your email, the FBI can get authorization to tap your phone.
Now how could the FBI determine that you encrypted an email message? Wouldn't that be illegal? Soon it will become legal, trust me...
Power. The magic word. Money is a means to power, the real objective. People (the "stupid", non-libertarian heartland type who don't read /.) seem to be perfectly willing to give over their rights so that the guy they perceive is on their side can gain power. It is happening every day. Hell, it seems to happen every day on /.
Now why would people willingly give up their rights? My theory is that they really don't exercise their rights anyway, but they see how they can 'stick it' to people who do, and since we have a lack of a galvanizing event (my term for something that unites our countrymen) such as the Apollo moon shot or the VietNam War, we are, in the immortal words of Firesign Theater, "Bringing the War Back Home", and fighting among ourselves through legislature, lawyers, and radio talk shows. In the process, power is being gathered at the top, and taken away from the people. It's funny: those with power (of the press, the media, the legislature...) gather power, or rather Hoard power in increments, slowly ratcheting it up. A little legalization of search and seizure here, a little expanded wiretapping there, and soon a great advantage accrues.
But how do the citizens regain their power? No, not through thousands and thousands of posts. But by storming the Bastille. Or Declaring Independence.
Well, you are catching someone who is snooping around your organization, who can crack a system like yours, before he goes after the real server.
I don't think it has any direct benefit to your company, when I do think about it. It does have benefit to the community at large.
For that reason maybe it is more of a law enforcement sting than a legitimate company enterprise. Kind of like the child porn stings, ya know?
Then again, for it to have any benefit, it is Vital to catch and prosecute the criminal before he goes out there and cracks into another (your) system.