It was ages ago that I did a report on a number of different kinds of fuel, and the information could have been out of date by that point, for all I know. Somebody mod Mista Blue Informative.:>
The WTC towers were constructed with, essentially, redundant substructures. The exterior supporting beams, placed only 1 meter apart rather than the normal 6, could support the entire weight of the building without the internal supporting structure (which, of course, could support the full weight itself). While tower number 2 may have collapsed from the hit it received (it fell rather quicly after being hit), the prevailing theory is that at least tower 1 required the intense heat of the fire to weaken the remaining support before falling. Even if the hydrogen tanks ruptured and the Hydrogen ignited, you'd only have one hell of a flash fire, leaving only normal combustables in the building and on the plane burning after a few seconds. This could have allowed at least one of the buildings to have remained standing, and very possibly allowed those trapped above the impact point to make their way down.
Just how easily aircraft can be retrofitted with Hydrogen engines or electric/fuel-cell based power I've no idea.
Apparantly that's Katz's rule. Qwest "Tossed" 4000 workers? Hardly. I work in Qwest IT, and no one I know of is aware of a single non-management employee (in the generally used sense of the word, not in the sense that Qwest uses them to categorize employees) who has been released involuntarily from their position. Some contractors have been shuffled around and out, but, frankly, that's the risk of working for a contracting company, and that's why I don't do it any more.
What Qwest DID do was reaffirm its nearly inviolable hiring freeze with the goal of having 4000 fewer workers by the end of March, 2002. Perhaps there will be some layoffs next year, it's hard to say. No one, however, has been "tossed".
Unlike skyscrapers, Nuclear Containment Vessels are designed to survive a jumbo jet impact at upwards of 500mph without loss of containment.
Apparantly, the NRC doesn't agree that they're that safe. At least, as of last Friday. Of course, terrorists would probably be better off with a ground assault, given the rent-a-cops on dope some facilities seem to be using.
I'd been snookered. I'm rather disappointed in myself for that. So, the question then remains: In what situation is it easier to overcome a small number (3-5) of people? When they and some of the 80 other people are armed with firearms, or when they and some of the 80 other people (or even none of them) are armed with small knives at best? Flight 93 had a judo champion and a 6'5" rugby player participating in the counterattack. I'm thinking they stood a better chance unarmed against knives than they would have stood armed against guns that were drawn and ready.
One of the comments was dead on. This was a psychological problem. We'd been conditioned not to resist terrorists; frankly, because they'd never pulled anything like this before. It took, however, less than a half hour for that conditioning to reverse. We have the resistance on flight 93. We have the co-pilot of another trans-continental flight getting up and standing by the cabin door to fight off anyone who tried to break in. We've learned a hard lesson, but we've learned; and even if we do start letting knives and corkscrews and sissors on planes again, they won't be usable for a hijacking. It's very unfortunate that this wasn't figured out 30 minutes earlier, but we're creatures of habit, after all.
2.2 million conversations intercepted. And this is supposed to give the impression of being a large number? Say the average adult has 5 telephone conversations a day. With roughly 200 million adults, that's 500 million conversations per day (assuming they were all with another person), or around 180 billion per year. So, given purly random phone tapping, any of my conversations have a.0012% chance of being intercepted. I feel pretty comfortable that my conversations are private.
As far as the currently proposed electronic monitoring solutions are concerned, you're worried that a non-senscient machine will be listening to you? Guess what? They already do. Your email passes through dozens of non-senscient machines. They don't seem to bother you all that much. This new one just happens to selectively report some of what it listens to to the FBI, while throwing out the rest of it. Will this be likely to affect you? Nope! Let's remember: as we've been reminded of recently, there are all of 4,000 FBI agents. They don't have time to review email of you telling your girlfriend you love her. Your email will get tossed. Mine will get tossed. I'm no more worried about it than I'm worried that my chats with my parents are being listened to by secret government gumbas.
I can't speak personally to whether this will help the FBI or not. All I know is that they are damned good at their jobs. We just don't hear about it, and, for the country's sanity, it's a good thing we don't. Occasionally we'll see interesting stories, like the man who decided, on his own with no help, that he wanted to blow himself up in Philadelpha (he was in New Mexico). So he got in his truck, and he stopped along the way to get individual componants for his bomb. A week later he was stopped outside of Philly by the local FBI and taken into custody. Happens all the time. For a very brief period of my life I heard about this sort of thing. I'm really glad I don't anymore. Having to think about the number of near catastrophies that are averted every year without being able to personally do anything about them would be hell.
Aside from your assessment of the extent of the problem as you see it, however, you do a very respectable job outlining the problem as it exists from an authorial intention standpoint. Two problems with your analysis exist, however. First, the 1967 court didn't care one whit about authorial intention. This was roughly the same court out of which Earl Warren's quote (I think it was him.. correct me if I'm wrong) "The Constitution means what the Justices say it means" comes. Second, "the right to be let alone" is nowhere to be found in the Constitution or in the writings of the founders. Indeed, it's nowhere to be found prior to around 1880. It arises out of a conception of the Constitution as a living document, adjustable to the times in which it is being applied and to the understandings of the people of those times. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but Brandeis' account is not of the intentions of the framers, but rather of a late 19th century redaction of the document they came up with.
The abridgment of our rights is in no way a "win" for terrorists. Yes, it is a loss for us, but I have trouble with the idea that a bunch of l33t h4x0rs not being able to sit around chatting about their latest music swaps in total anonymity is anywhere near the loss of, say, containment around the Monticello Nuclear Power plant, just NW of Minneapolis (leading to 7 figure death tolls in the Minneapolis area and the forced evacuation of everything between here and around South Bend). A light plane loaded down with fuel could break through quite easily, with a clean hit. That, however, requires organization and planning. They need schematics of the plant, they need access to a plane (which will either be registered or suspiciously unregistered), they need to make use of a legitimate airport to avoid blowing up on take-off with all the bouncing barrels of gas, etc. The FBI has had remarkable success preventing this sort of thing by knowing what to look for. But over the last few years, they've increasingly lost the ability to look.
And there's the big hole in the "Oh no! We're losing our freedoms!" position. Let's say that we give every single government emplyee the right to read everyone's email and access everyone's web habits and everything else. We STILL haven't lost any "privacy" that we had 20 years ago. Human's have never had anything like the ability for anonymous, private communications that we've developed in the last 3-5 years. It's NOT something inherant in the human condition. It's something we allot to ourselves, and, as such, needs to be alloted reasonably. Now, when you've aquired a controling interested in every internet backbone in the country, you can make everything private and anonymous. Until then, you have NO RIGHTS not allocated you by contract or law. You're using an artificial communications system owned and maintained by other people, for which you're not even playing close to enough to cover the costs incurred by your usage.
Having a gun on an airplane doesn't protect you from another person with a gun on the same plane. All he needs to do is shoot at any of the windows and you're in a virtually uncontrollable 28,000 foot free-fall. Of course, he probably won't have to cause Mr "I live to blow away prairie dawgs with my AK47" would have already shot through the window trying to "protect" his redneck self.
Meanwhile, Congress hurried to pass a resolution giving Bush unlimited power to use military force in retaliation for the attacks. Retaliation may be justified, if the perpetrators can be identified and carefully targeted, but Congress has a duty to scrutinize specific measures as they are proposed. Handing the president carte blanche in a moment of anger is exactly the mistake that led the United States into the Vietnam War.
Congress worked very hard to pass a resolution that wasn't the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Indeed, the thing that most impressed me about Congress during this whole thing was that vote. They said, in effect, "We support our President and the leadership he is giving, but we will not abandon our duty to the American people or to the Constitution by handing off our responsibilities to him."
I haven't been following the actions of the supposed control conspiracy too closely in the last week, but if Stallman can't even get it right on a major, out in the open, published and discussed on every major news outlet in the world Congressional resolution, I dare say I feel rather safe assuming for the time being that he's got no clue about anything else that's happened in the last week either.
Indeed. If they're going to brush aside the positions of self-identified "Open-Sourcers" they should definitely exclude the opinion of any lawyers, especially those familiar with patent law. Lawyers are good at knowing the laws, helping to craft the laws so they say what they are desired to say and, occasionally, explaining the laws. They are the least qualified people on the planet (at least, merely by virtue of being lawyers) to actually contribute to the direction of public policy on every issue with the exception of the organization of laws and the processes and proceedures of courts, arbiters and the other ways in which the laws are effected. They've no more business commenting on what should and should not be patentable and under what circumstances than they have dictating how bridges should be built or how food should be labled. Just like no one would presume an accountant to be able to run a 100 billion dollar multi-national corporation because he can read its books, no presumption should be made that a lawyer has even a half-assed clue what a country's (or region's) patent policy should be merely because he is able to explain what it happens to be.
How do you spell FUD? This is just silly. Microsoft have added code-signing (which I thought had been around a while) - which they could use to scare people away? How? I suppose they could do something by only allowing MS code to get signed or something, but that's pretty damn unlikely. The idea is that you can be certain where the code has come from, and then it is up to you to decide whether you trust it. Microsoft add *no* commentary on whether they think you should trust it or not, and to assume they will do is just paranoia.
This isn't anything like verisign. Apparantly you haven't run into unsupported code, but I have on numerous drivers in Win2K. They pop up a nice message box with text to the effect of "Microsoft tests drivers to ensure compatability with Windows 2000. The driver you are installing has not been certified by Microsoft. Installing this driver may damage your Windows installation. Are you sure you want to proceed?" As I understand it, in WinXP, they'll be doing this with apps as well. The message's wording could certainly frighten someone away from using a competative product. In order for this to be at all a good thing, we have to trust that Microsoft will a: fairly evaluate both it's own and it's competitors' products, b: do so in a timely fashion for both and c: not lie, ever. I have every reason in the world not to trust them in the least, and so do you.
Re:Does business always have to be this way ?
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Dan Gillmor on WinXP
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The case isn't really about trying to help another OS establish itself in the market. Indeed, Microsoft has every right to have a monopoly position in any particular market. What they don't have the right to do is to use that monopoly position to aquire market share in another market. While the fact remains that MS has a desktop OS monopoly, they have the ability to prevent other companies from fighting it out in the marketplace, and from their claims to manufactorers that DRDOS wouldn't work with Windows to their refusal to license Windows95 to IBM unless IBM stopped putting their own OS on machines as well (with the actual phrase "who else are you going to go to? We're the only game in town." being used in one communication submitted as evidence during the trial) to using preditory pricing on their Internet browser and then bundling it as an included application in their os to the current efforts to include everything from firewall software to video editing software, that (using their desktop monopoly to prevent other companies from fighting it out in the marketplace) is exactly what they've done and continue to do.
That's what the case is about, and why even an appeals court that has shown itself to be very pro-marketplace upheld the full verdict of guilty.
While I agree with the article's author that Microsoft's motives are specifically to damage Java's hold on the market, I agree with your underlying point that they have every right *not* to include anything they don't care to include. I think I remember correctly, however, that the Sun-Microsoft settlement only required that any MS Java runtime system conform to the definitions Sun has set out, something MS's early attempts did not do. MS has chosen to produce such a Java Runtime for the last couple years, and has now chosen to stop doing so.
While this is, of course, designed to harm Java, I rather agree with the position of... umm... maybe it was Stallman, but I forget exactly, that this could actually be good for Java if machine makers take the very reasonable step of installing Sun's JRE for Windows with all of their units. It would be a nice value add (like including all of the other stuff that's often included on PCs these days) that would cost nothing and actually be more useful to their customers than the 3 different photo-album programs typically included on a new retail machine. This way, every shipment of XP would either a: come with a standardized Java runtime from Sun or b: be purchaced by someone comfortable installing or upgrading an OS, who won't mind downloading it herself.
Yes, the Katz bashing gets out of hand, but it is often quite deserved. If Katz didn't try to present himself as a mouthpiece for and expert on "the geek culture" (a concept about as meaningful as "the homosexual lifestyle"), we'd have much less reason to bash, but frankly, he makes all of us look like whiney, uneducated morons who think the world started in 1960.
A large and growing number of "geeks" - particularly those in more senior positions - aren't former high school computer whizzes or tech school grads with honors. They're - we're - very highly and broadly educated people who've found an enjoyable way to make money and support our interest in music, history, theology, philosophy, sociology, public health, and the myriad of other fields we have graduate degrees in and are competent to work in, but have tired of the 1000 qualified candidates for each halfway decent position that working in such fields requires one to get past. In other words, we are FAR smarter and have a far broader perspective on the world than Katz gives us credit for, or than Katz himself has.
The myopic cultural and historical perspective that Katz has, and consistantly projects on us all, is insulting and degrading. For this reason, I find it perfectly justifiable to insult and degrade him when he writes in such a manner, as he almost always does.
That said, this was not an entirely poorly written artical. The topic is, indeed, important. Of course, it's also something WE all know about - both the case itself, and the lack of outside media attention. And I do, as I did with his last piece, take serious issue with his attempts to frame this as an issue of obstructing the press. Dmitri is NOT a journalist. He was in the country to give a paper directly promoting his company's products. He's a hacker and a salesman. And his treatment has been just as wrong as it would have been if he were a journalist. And the lack of US press coverage is just as obscene - not because he is one of "their own", but because he's a foreign national visiting our country and being held without bail or even a bail hearing. Our treatment of him is exactly what one would expect of some generic dictatorship that we would suspend aid to over said treatment.
But Katz seems way too interested in trying to play up the "he was acting as a journalist" thing. I don't know if he thinks that only journalists should have such protections, or that anything that informs anyone of anything is journalism, or if he's just trying to get "journalist" defined broadly enough that he can actually be one. I'm not a journalist, and I expect to be treated with dignity, even if I do break a law, and I find it yet again insulting that Katz thinks that I would need to be redefined as a journalist to merit news coverage of my questionable arrest and denial of due process. And I'm more than willing to call Katz a butt-head for implying it.
He just goes out of his way to watch movies that a: are quite obviously not the least bit intellegent and b: have already been reviewed by everyone else on the planet. If they happen to require any sort of historical perspective, he predictably sounds like an typical 15 year old (The guy's what, 40 or 45?). I seem to recall "It made me think 'Gee, the world was really different back in the 30s'" from one of his recent ones.
I may have just missed it, but I'd find it really amusing to see him review something like Memento. That's probably the best-done movie to hit his lilly-white suburban multi-plex lately. If he ever ventured into the parts of the world where a lot of the geeks he claims mouthpiece status for live (the *gasp* CITIES), he could try his hand at discussing the sucesses and failures of something like "The Luzhin Defence", the film adaptation of V. Nabokov's brilliant work on obsession "The Defense". That would be fun to see. (Although it would be much more fun to see the confused looks on his face all the way through either movie.)
Alas, he stays true to going to bad movies with pretty pictures and lots of shiney things and then panning them because everyone else has as well.
It's not just the reliability of your DSL/Cable provider, and "last mile" fibre isn't the problem. My DSL's connection to the DSLAM has been, to my knowledge, uninterrupted (except, of course, at my end). But then you have the DNS servers and every hop between you and your call's recipient, and the reliability starts to drop. Not to levels that make home internet too difficult, but to levels that would make phone service unbearable.
Of course, that doesn't even count the biggest reliability problem of all (which the initial reply misses). How stable is your electricity? I'm in Minneapolis, and even though we're supposedly not having any problems this year, it was out twice last week for an hour at a time. Unless you've got your own generator or some serious UPS time, if your electricity goes down, your IP telephony goes down (for that matter, if the only phones you have require electricity on your end to function, your SOL too). I've nowhere near enough trust in our power grids to abandon the 47 milliampres or so that the phone company is sending to me to power my POTS.
The Aids Quilt was even public and toured the country.
Maybe he means that it's something that couldn't have been done over the net before the net. That would make sense. Not very useful sense, but sense nonetheless.
Oh... and how is it more accesable? I haven't been able to get to the page yet....
I've heard one-time boxers positively gloat over the fact that they got crushed by the world champion. I've heard a local Chess IM fondly recall when he got trounced by Mikhail Tal. People pay good money for the chance to get beaten by Grandmasters they've not even heard of.
Getting beaten in a test of skill by a person who is much better than you - even repeatedly and without sign of end - is an honor (well... except maybe in the boxing thing, where it'd probably involve death eventually). Getting beaten by a twirp with a computer isn't. I don't need to know who my opponant is - I've played hundereds of people I don't know on ICC. I just need reasonable assurances that I'm playing another person when that is what I'm choosing to do. If I want to play a computer, I can (and do) do that as well.
And the trust model doesn't work at all. If only people you had past experience with or reliable sources vouching for were allowed to play you, that's not really all that anonymous, is it? You know them possibly better than I know the guys I played at the Chicago open a few weeks ago. If you don't require that, it's not at all difficult to keep coming back as a different random string of characters.
I do agree that there are strong possiblities for the technology. Chess is not one of them. I can think of no non-masochistic reason why any tournement player would take part - and while that's far from the majority of people who play the game, it's the vast majority of people who are at all decent at it.
And you enforce "The point" how? Are Freenet users going to somehow be more honorable than everyone else? Is this like Marxism's "point" that absolute power, if just in the hands of a different group of people, would be a wonderful thing?
Games are, by the nature of most of them, competative. The more anonymous they get, the more they get dominated by those who don't wish to play fairly by the rules - because on the one hand you have lusers who just want to feel the momentary thrill of having "won" (even if, in the case of Chess, it's Fritz or Crafty or Junior who won) and on the other hand you have people actually interested in the game who don't want to deal with the former, so the only one's left are the lusers and the naive.
In RL situations, cheating is rarely a viable option - the ways to cheat are fewer and the chance of getting caught are higher. Go into a digital world - be it the equivilant of Chess or Paintball - and all of a sudden it's both easier to cheat and harder to get caught. You can't have your laptop next to you in over the board chess, and you can't use a dupe bug on your pellets in paintball. You can on ICC or in any of the myriad of FPSs and the like. And you're much less likely to get caught with much less effort to hide yourself. And what happens? People cheat more. Golly, what a surprise.
So this is somehow going to get better in a totally anonymous environment? Never happen. Well, barely ever happen. What will happen is the owner of the freesite will make it known that he wants to play chess and dozens of adolescents (maturity-wise) will flock to his site and test out CM8000 against him.
Or, for a slight decrease in anonymity - the operaters of the site know who you are, but none of the other players do - the owner of the freesite can play on ICC or USChess live or any of a number of other sites, and have reasonable cause to believe that the people who just beat the crap out of him were, in fact, better than him, and not just fronts for a chess engine he could play without logging on at all.
Complete anonymity and playing competative games that require a LOT of work to become even marginally skilled at for real just don't go together well.
Someone else mentioned the idea of proof of concept - and, indeed, the people behind this don't seem to see it as a particularly serious endeavour. As a way to see what can be done on Freenet, great. Looks cool, and maybe there are some games that will fit nicely on it (turn based strategy-war games spring to mind). As a way to play a game like Chess online, however, it's a complete wash.
There is absolutely no way I would ever play chess online on a truly anonymous system. Cheating (the use of chess programs to boost a fragile ego - yes, some people view online chess as a "get the highest score by whatever means" type of game and, like they're UO/Diablo/Whathaveyou counterparts, are utterly baffled that there are people who don't) is already a problem on systems like ICC and USChessLive with registrations and moderation and sophisitcated detection systems. The only people I'd play over freenet are people I know in real life and then... what's the point?
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NSA uses Linux, as is reported here quite regularly. They're about as secretive as you can get.
It was ages ago that I did a report on a number of different kinds of fuel, and the information could have been out of date by that point, for all I know. Somebody mod Mista Blue Informative. :>
Jet fuel is a far cry from diesel. Relative to jet fuel, diesel may as well be crude oil.
The WTC towers were constructed with, essentially, redundant substructures. The exterior supporting beams, placed only 1 meter apart rather than the normal 6, could support the entire weight of the building without the internal supporting structure (which, of course, could support the full weight itself). While tower number 2 may have collapsed from the hit it received (it fell rather quicly after being hit), the prevailing theory is that at least tower 1 required the intense heat of the fire to weaken the remaining support before falling. Even if the hydrogen tanks ruptured and the Hydrogen ignited, you'd only have one hell of a flash fire, leaving only normal combustables in the building and on the plane burning after a few seconds. This could have allowed at least one of the buildings to have remained standing, and very possibly allowed those trapped above the impact point to make their way down.
Just how easily aircraft can be retrofitted with Hydrogen engines or electric/fuel-cell based power I've no idea.
Apparantly that's Katz's rule. Qwest "Tossed" 4000 workers? Hardly. I work in Qwest IT, and no one I know of is aware of a single non-management employee (in the generally used sense of the word, not in the sense that Qwest uses them to categorize employees) who has been released involuntarily from their position. Some contractors have been shuffled around and out, but, frankly, that's the risk of working for a contracting company, and that's why I don't do it any more.
What Qwest DID do was reaffirm its nearly inviolable hiring freeze with the goal of having 4000 fewer workers by the end of March, 2002. Perhaps there will be some layoffs next year, it's hard to say. No one, however, has been "tossed".
Unlike skyscrapers, Nuclear Containment Vessels are designed to survive a jumbo jet impact at upwards of 500mph without loss of containment.
Apparantly, the NRC doesn't agree that they're that safe. At least, as of last Friday. Of course, terrorists would probably be better off with a ground assault, given the rent-a-cops on dope some facilities seem to be using.
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=special&c=1&I'd been snookered. I'm rather disappointed in myself for that. So, the question then remains: In what situation is it easier to overcome a small number (3-5) of people? When they and some of the 80 other people are armed with firearms, or when they and some of the 80 other people (or even none of them) are armed with small knives at best? Flight 93 had a judo champion and a 6'5" rugby player participating in the counterattack. I'm thinking they stood a better chance unarmed against knives than they would have stood armed against guns that were drawn and ready.
One of the comments was dead on. This was a psychological problem. We'd been conditioned not to resist terrorists; frankly, because they'd never pulled anything like this before. It took, however, less than a half hour for that conditioning to reverse. We have the resistance on flight 93. We have the co-pilot of another trans-continental flight getting up and standing by the cabin door to fight off anyone who tried to break in. We've learned a hard lesson, but we've learned; and even if we do start letting knives and corkscrews and sissors on planes again, they won't be usable for a hijacking. It's very unfortunate that this wasn't figured out 30 minutes earlier, but we're creatures of habit, after all.
2.2 million conversations intercepted. And this is supposed to give the impression of being a large number? Say the average adult has 5 telephone conversations a day. With roughly 200 million adults, that's 500 million conversations per day (assuming they were all with another person), or around 180 billion per year. So, given purly random phone tapping, any of my conversations have a .0012% chance of being intercepted. I feel pretty comfortable that my conversations are private.
As far as the currently proposed electronic monitoring solutions are concerned, you're worried that a non-senscient machine will be listening to you? Guess what? They already do. Your email passes through dozens of non-senscient machines. They don't seem to bother you all that much. This new one just happens to selectively report some of what it listens to to the FBI, while throwing out the rest of it. Will this be likely to affect you? Nope! Let's remember: as we've been reminded of recently, there are all of 4,000 FBI agents. They don't have time to review email of you telling your girlfriend you love her. Your email will get tossed. Mine will get tossed. I'm no more worried about it than I'm worried that my chats with my parents are being listened to by secret government gumbas.
I can't speak personally to whether this will help the FBI or not. All I know is that they are damned good at their jobs. We just don't hear about it, and, for the country's sanity, it's a good thing we don't. Occasionally we'll see interesting stories, like the man who decided, on his own with no help, that he wanted to blow himself up in Philadelpha (he was in New Mexico). So he got in his truck, and he stopped along the way to get individual componants for his bomb. A week later he was stopped outside of Philly by the local FBI and taken into custody. Happens all the time. For a very brief period of my life I heard about this sort of thing. I'm really glad I don't anymore. Having to think about the number of near catastrophies that are averted every year without being able to personally do anything about them would be hell.
Aside from your assessment of the extent of the problem as you see it, however, you do a very respectable job outlining the problem as it exists from an authorial intention standpoint. Two problems with your analysis exist, however. First, the 1967 court didn't care one whit about authorial intention. This was roughly the same court out of which Earl Warren's quote (I think it was him.. correct me if I'm wrong) "The Constitution means what the Justices say it means" comes. Second, "the right to be let alone" is nowhere to be found in the Constitution or in the writings of the founders. Indeed, it's nowhere to be found prior to around 1880. It arises out of a conception of the Constitution as a living document, adjustable to the times in which it is being applied and to the understandings of the people of those times. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but Brandeis' account is not of the intentions of the framers, but rather of a late 19th century redaction of the document they came up with.
The abridgment of our rights is in no way a "win" for terrorists. Yes, it is a loss for us, but I have trouble with the idea that a bunch of l33t h4x0rs not being able to sit around chatting about their latest music swaps in total anonymity is anywhere near the loss of, say, containment around the Monticello Nuclear Power plant, just NW of Minneapolis (leading to 7 figure death tolls in the Minneapolis area and the forced evacuation of everything between here and around South Bend). A light plane loaded down with fuel could break through quite easily, with a clean hit. That, however, requires organization and planning. They need schematics of the plant, they need access to a plane (which will either be registered or suspiciously unregistered), they need to make use of a legitimate airport to avoid blowing up on take-off with all the bouncing barrels of gas, etc. The FBI has had remarkable success preventing this sort of thing by knowing what to look for. But over the last few years, they've increasingly lost the ability to look.
And there's the big hole in the "Oh no! We're losing our freedoms!" position. Let's say that we give every single government emplyee the right to read everyone's email and access everyone's web habits and everything else. We STILL haven't lost any "privacy" that we had 20 years ago. Human's have never had anything like the ability for anonymous, private communications that we've developed in the last 3-5 years. It's NOT something inherant in the human condition. It's something we allot to ourselves, and, as such, needs to be alloted reasonably. Now, when you've aquired a controling interested in every internet backbone in the country, you can make everything private and anonymous. Until then, you have NO RIGHTS not allocated you by contract or law. You're using an artificial communications system owned and maintained by other people, for which you're not even playing close to enough to cover the costs incurred by your usage.
Having a gun on an airplane doesn't protect you from another person with a gun on the same plane. All he needs to do is shoot at any of the windows and you're in a virtually uncontrollable 28,000 foot free-fall. Of course, he probably won't have to cause Mr "I live to blow away prairie dawgs with my AK47" would have already shot through the window trying to "protect" his redneck self.
Meanwhile, Congress hurried to pass a resolution giving Bush unlimited power to use military force in retaliation for the attacks. Retaliation may be justified, if the perpetrators can be identified and carefully targeted, but Congress has a duty to scrutinize specific measures as they are proposed. Handing the president carte blanche in a moment of anger is exactly the mistake that led the United States into the Vietnam War.
Congress worked very hard to pass a resolution that wasn't the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Indeed, the thing that most impressed me about Congress during this whole thing was that vote. They said, in effect, "We support our President and the leadership he is giving, but we will not abandon our duty to the American people or to the Constitution by handing off our responsibilities to him."
I haven't been following the actions of the supposed control conspiracy too closely in the last week, but if Stallman can't even get it right on a major, out in the open, published and discussed on every major news outlet in the world Congressional resolution, I dare say I feel rather safe assuming for the time being that he's got no clue about anything else that's happened in the last week either.
Wasn't the 5X86 Cyrix? AMD went from the 486 to the K5 if I recall.
I believe they still have the rights to Infocom's "A Mind Forever Voyaging", of which this project summarizes the plot.
Indeed. If they're going to brush aside the positions of self-identified "Open-Sourcers" they should definitely exclude the opinion of any lawyers, especially those familiar with patent law. Lawyers are good at knowing the laws, helping to craft the laws so they say what they are desired to say and, occasionally, explaining the laws. They are the least qualified people on the planet (at least, merely by virtue of being lawyers) to actually contribute to the direction of public policy on every issue with the exception of the organization of laws and the processes and proceedures of courts, arbiters and the other ways in which the laws are effected. They've no more business commenting on what should and should not be patentable and under what circumstances than they have dictating how bridges should be built or how food should be labled. Just like no one would presume an accountant to be able to run a 100 billion dollar multi-national corporation because he can read its books, no presumption should be made that a lawyer has even a half-assed clue what a country's (or region's) patent policy should be merely because he is able to explain what it happens to be.
How do you spell FUD? This is just silly. Microsoft have added code-signing (which I thought had been around a while) - which they could use to scare people away? How? I suppose they could do something by only allowing MS code to get signed or something, but that's pretty damn unlikely. The idea is that you can be certain where the code has come from, and then it is up to you to decide whether you trust it. Microsoft add *no* commentary on whether they think you should trust it or not, and to assume they will do is just paranoia.
This isn't anything like verisign. Apparantly you haven't run into unsupported code, but I have on numerous drivers in Win2K. They pop up a nice message box with text to the effect of "Microsoft tests drivers to ensure compatability with Windows 2000. The driver you are installing has not been certified by Microsoft. Installing this driver may damage your Windows installation. Are you sure you want to proceed?" As I understand it, in WinXP, they'll be doing this with apps as well. The message's wording could certainly frighten someone away from using a competative product. In order for this to be at all a good thing, we have to trust that Microsoft will a: fairly evaluate both it's own and it's competitors' products, b: do so in a timely fashion for both and c: not lie, ever. I have every reason in the world not to trust them in the least, and so do you.
The case isn't really about trying to help another OS establish itself in the market. Indeed, Microsoft has every right to have a monopoly position in any particular market. What they don't have the right to do is to use that monopoly position to aquire market share in another market. While the fact remains that MS has a desktop OS monopoly, they have the ability to prevent other companies from fighting it out in the marketplace, and from their claims to manufactorers that DRDOS wouldn't work with Windows to their refusal to license Windows95 to IBM unless IBM stopped putting their own OS on machines as well (with the actual phrase "who else are you going to go to? We're the only game in town." being used in one communication submitted as evidence during the trial) to using preditory pricing on their Internet browser and then bundling it as an included application in their os to the current efforts to include everything from firewall software to video editing software, that (using their desktop monopoly to prevent other companies from fighting it out in the marketplace) is exactly what they've done and continue to do.
That's what the case is about, and why even an appeals court that has shown itself to be very pro-marketplace upheld the full verdict of guilty.
While I agree with the article's author that Microsoft's motives are specifically to damage Java's hold on the market, I agree with your underlying point that they have every right *not* to include anything they don't care to include. I think I remember correctly, however, that the Sun-Microsoft settlement only required that any MS Java runtime system conform to the definitions Sun has set out, something MS's early attempts did not do. MS has chosen to produce such a Java Runtime for the last couple years, and has now chosen to stop doing so.
While this is, of course, designed to harm Java, I rather agree with the position of... umm... maybe it was Stallman, but I forget exactly, that this could actually be good for Java if machine makers take the very reasonable step of installing Sun's JRE for Windows with all of their units. It would be a nice value add (like including all of the other stuff that's often included on PCs these days) that would cost nothing and actually be more useful to their customers than the 3 different photo-album programs typically included on a new retail machine. This way, every shipment of XP would either a: come with a standardized Java runtime from Sun or b: be purchaced by someone comfortable installing or upgrading an OS, who won't mind downloading it herself.
Yes, the Katz bashing gets out of hand, but it is often quite deserved. If Katz didn't try to present himself as a mouthpiece for and expert on "the geek culture" (a concept about as meaningful as "the homosexual lifestyle"), we'd have much less reason to bash, but frankly, he makes all of us look like whiney, uneducated morons who think the world started in 1960.
A large and growing number of "geeks" - particularly those in more senior positions - aren't former high school computer whizzes or tech school grads with honors. They're - we're - very highly and broadly educated people who've found an enjoyable way to make money and support our interest in music, history, theology, philosophy, sociology, public health, and the myriad of other fields we have graduate degrees in and are competent to work in, but have tired of the 1000 qualified candidates for each halfway decent position that working in such fields requires one to get past. In other words, we are FAR smarter and have a far broader perspective on the world than Katz gives us credit for, or than Katz himself has.
The myopic cultural and historical perspective that Katz has, and consistantly projects on us all, is insulting and degrading. For this reason, I find it perfectly justifiable to insult and degrade him when he writes in such a manner, as he almost always does.
That said, this was not an entirely poorly written artical. The topic is, indeed, important. Of course, it's also something WE all know about - both the case itself, and the lack of outside media attention. And I do, as I did with his last piece, take serious issue with his attempts to frame this as an issue of obstructing the press. Dmitri is NOT a journalist. He was in the country to give a paper directly promoting his company's products. He's a hacker and a salesman. And his treatment has been just as wrong as it would have been if he were a journalist. And the lack of US press coverage is just as obscene - not because he is one of "their own", but because he's a foreign national visiting our country and being held without bail or even a bail hearing. Our treatment of him is exactly what one would expect of some generic dictatorship that we would suspend aid to over said treatment.
But Katz seems way too interested in trying to play up the "he was acting as a journalist" thing. I don't know if he thinks that only journalists should have such protections, or that anything that informs anyone of anything is journalism, or if he's just trying to get "journalist" defined broadly enough that he can actually be one. I'm not a journalist, and I expect to be treated with dignity, even if I do break a law, and I find it yet again insulting that Katz thinks that I would need to be redefined as a journalist to merit news coverage of my questionable arrest and denial of due process. And I'm more than willing to call Katz a butt-head for implying it.
He just goes out of his way to watch movies that a: are quite obviously not the least bit intellegent and b: have already been reviewed by everyone else on the planet. If they happen to require any sort of historical perspective, he predictably sounds like an typical 15 year old (The guy's what, 40 or 45?). I seem to recall "It made me think 'Gee, the world was really different back in the 30s'" from one of his recent ones.
I may have just missed it, but I'd find it really amusing to see him review something like Memento. That's probably the best-done movie to hit his lilly-white suburban multi-plex lately. If he ever ventured into the parts of the world where a lot of the geeks he claims mouthpiece status for live (the *gasp* CITIES), he could try his hand at discussing the sucesses and failures of something like "The Luzhin Defence", the film adaptation of V. Nabokov's brilliant work on obsession "The Defense". That would be fun to see. (Although it would be much more fun to see the confused looks on his face all the way through either movie.)
Alas, he stays true to going to bad movies with pretty pictures and lots of shiney things and then panning them because everyone else has as well.
It's not just the reliability of your DSL/Cable provider, and "last mile" fibre isn't the problem. My DSL's connection to the DSLAM has been, to my knowledge, uninterrupted (except, of course, at my end). But then you have the DNS servers and every hop between you and your call's recipient, and the reliability starts to drop. Not to levels that make home internet too difficult, but to levels that would make phone service unbearable.
Of course, that doesn't even count the biggest reliability problem of all (which the initial reply misses). How stable is your electricity? I'm in Minneapolis, and even though we're supposedly not having any problems this year, it was out twice last week for an hour at a time. Unless you've got your own generator or some serious UPS time, if your electricity goes down, your IP telephony goes down (for that matter, if the only phones you have require electricity on your end to function, your SOL too). I've nowhere near enough trust in our power grids to abandon the 47 milliampres or so that the phone company is sending to me to power my POTS.The Aids Quilt was even public and toured the country.
Maybe he means that it's something that couldn't have been done over the net before the net. That would make sense. Not very useful sense, but sense nonetheless.
Oh... and how is it more accesable? I haven't been able to get to the page yet....
I've heard one-time boxers positively gloat over the fact that they got crushed by the world champion. I've heard a local Chess IM fondly recall when he got trounced by Mikhail Tal. People pay good money for the chance to get beaten by Grandmasters they've not even heard of.
Getting beaten in a test of skill by a person who is much better than you - even repeatedly and without sign of end - is an honor (well... except maybe in the boxing thing, where it'd probably involve death eventually). Getting beaten by a twirp with a computer isn't. I don't need to know who my opponant is - I've played hundereds of people I don't know on ICC. I just need reasonable assurances that I'm playing another person when that is what I'm choosing to do. If I want to play a computer, I can (and do) do that as well.
And the trust model doesn't work at all. If only people you had past experience with or reliable sources vouching for were allowed to play you, that's not really all that anonymous, is it? You know them possibly better than I know the guys I played at the Chicago open a few weeks ago. If you don't require that, it's not at all difficult to keep coming back as a different random string of characters.
I do agree that there are strong possiblities for the technology. Chess is not one of them. I can think of no non-masochistic reason why any tournement player would take part - and while that's far from the majority of people who play the game, it's the vast majority of people who are at all decent at it.
And you enforce "The point" how? Are Freenet users going to somehow be more honorable than everyone else? Is this like Marxism's "point" that absolute power, if just in the hands of a different group of people, would be a wonderful thing?
Games are, by the nature of most of them, competative. The more anonymous they get, the more they get dominated by those who don't wish to play fairly by the rules - because on the one hand you have lusers who just want to feel the momentary thrill of having "won" (even if, in the case of Chess, it's Fritz or Crafty or Junior who won) and on the other hand you have people actually interested in the game who don't want to deal with the former, so the only one's left are the lusers and the naive.
In RL situations, cheating is rarely a viable option - the ways to cheat are fewer and the chance of getting caught are higher. Go into a digital world - be it the equivilant of Chess or Paintball - and all of a sudden it's both easier to cheat and harder to get caught. You can't have your laptop next to you in over the board chess, and you can't use a dupe bug on your pellets in paintball. You can on ICC or in any of the myriad of FPSs and the like. And you're much less likely to get caught with much less effort to hide yourself. And what happens? People cheat more. Golly, what a surprise.
So this is somehow going to get better in a totally anonymous environment? Never happen. Well, barely ever happen. What will happen is the owner of the freesite will make it known that he wants to play chess and dozens of adolescents (maturity-wise) will flock to his site and test out CM8000 against him.
Or, for a slight decrease in anonymity - the operaters of the site know who you are, but none of the other players do - the owner of the freesite can play on ICC or USChess live or any of a number of other sites, and have reasonable cause to believe that the people who just beat the crap out of him were, in fact, better than him, and not just fronts for a chess engine he could play without logging on at all.
Complete anonymity and playing competative games that require a LOT of work to become even marginally skilled at for real just don't go together well.
Someone else mentioned the idea of proof of concept - and, indeed, the people behind this don't seem to see it as a particularly serious endeavour. As a way to see what can be done on Freenet, great. Looks cool, and maybe there are some games that will fit nicely on it (turn based strategy-war games spring to mind). As a way to play a game like Chess online, however, it's a complete wash.
There is absolutely no way I would ever play chess online on a truly anonymous system. Cheating (the use of chess programs to boost a fragile ego - yes, some people view online chess as a "get the highest score by whatever means" type of game and, like they're UO/Diablo/Whathaveyou counterparts, are utterly baffled that there are people who don't) is already a problem on systems like ICC and USChessLive with registrations and moderation and sophisitcated detection systems. The only people I'd play over freenet are people I know in real life and then... what's the point?
US Small claims courts handle up to around $5000 and do not allow attorneys to represent the parties.