By not being afraid to test and try new things, a network was created that now serves as the foundation for commerce and communications.
[...]
[T]he reality is the Internet itself, the infrastructure that serves as the foundation, has not significantly benefited from innovation.
He neglects to say that in almost all cases, innovation concerning vital infrastructure had better be deployed and tested in a lab environment, not in the wild as in the SiteFinder case. This goes before all contractual, legal, practical and commercial questions.
There has to be a good bricks-and-mortar analogy for this -- I just can't find it!
A number of regular contributors to Heise's Telepolis web magazine seem to come from the what I like to call "I always knew it" camp. Alarmism, conspiracies, mindless misinterpretations of current research results, and lack of knowledge about economics are a mark of their writing. Usually, you can recognize them after a couple of paragraphs; after that, the articles retain some entertainment value, but only seldom offer food for thought or original analysis.
A large part of Telepolis' articles, however, is excellent journalism with important subjects that most print publications would not touch with a ten-foot pole.
In the center of Berlin, there are a number of civil engineering projects.
Several government sites are still under construction after the Bundeskanzleramt (seat of the chancellor) and parliament office buildings were completed. Until recently, there was the Potsdamer Platz, a huge-scale city square renovation which is finished now. I think now it is the turn of the Leipziger Platz to be renovated.
And not to forget the Lehrter Stadtbahnhof, a new huge railway station. It includes
a couple of tracks in a tunnel, crossed by several others on a dam, and the whole thing is covered with one of Europe's largest glass roofs. Really impressive.
Most of the sites have some kind of viewing platform. The Potsdamer Platz and the government sites used to have visitor centers proper, with models, guides, video, coffeeshops and souvenirs to boot! If you expend some effort to establish local contacts to one of the engineering firms, you may get more access than a regular visitor. Maybe www.berlin.de has more information on the engineering projects.
> Remember the famous quote:
>
> "Judge not, lest thou be judged"
That is basically the problem. Why should one refrain
from the act of judging something, or even someone,
based on the knowledge one possesses at the moment
of judgement? Not to judge at all would only play
into the hands of the pathetically, uh, politically
correct.
What is important is that one remains open to new
knowledge, and to the possibility of being wrong in
one's judgement. Not judging at all doesn't solve
problems, it only perpetuates them.
The NYT author is not completely right on that.
Some people I know bond deeply with their computers.
And no, they are not your typical hard-core geek/nerd/techie,
but mild-mannered grade school teachers. I have
the suspicion that this is a pretty widespread
phenomenon, if only enacted in secret... or, if you
will, in the closet.
With the new BMW and iDrive, people will finally be
able to combine their passion for automobiles with
their passion for computing machines. The only question
that remains to be answered is: does a 7 series
BMW get one name or two?
The chinese pavillon at the Expo 2000 in Hanover, Germany
(held at the same fairground as CeBIT) displayed,
among other strange things, a model scene of a
chinese moon lander, complete with little figures
planting the red flag into the moon dust. At
least chinese PR folks must be serious about this.
To put this into context, the whole pavillon had
a somewhat strange atmosphere -- the interior was
all-metal, very futuristic, like something from a
1960s low-budget science fiction movie. In little
booths at the side of one room you could play around
with interactive presentations dealing with all
kinds of subjects concerning China. I remember
that the presentation emphasised China's power and
potential compared to the rest of the world. It
was all about big, hero-type projects like the
Three Gorges dam and other huge engineering feats.
Compared to this, there was a display featuring
a large amount of green bottle glass shards arranged
to look like a forest, if I remember correctly. I
could not figure out what it was about -- probably
because some of the labels, even though notionally
in a language that I should be able to understand
(like German or English) must have been written by
the people who wrote consumer electronics manuals
for asian products a couple of years ago.
Strange feelings abounded in that place, and we
left it right away to look at friendlier venues
like the Finnish pavillon.
I think it is high time for all ISPs to
switch their home customer accounts to
usage-based billing. Not for time, of course:
Pay for the bytes!! That is what everybody who
wants to use backbones/long distance lines has
to do, so why shouldn't the end user?
My guess is that all the "total" flat rates will
be replaced over time by usage-limited rates
(say, 500 MB to 1 GB per month) that are fine for
the majority of customers, with extra charges for
extra usage. This will eliminate the "ticking
meter" effect for the majority, and make the
minority of power users think somewhat more
about their usage.
On the other hand, if wholesale prices for bandwidth come down still
further, there is no reason why this pattern
should not be reversed again in the future.
Well, in this neck of the global wood, several constitutional bodies have the right to challenge any and all laws before the local version of the Supreme Court. This would be Germany, and a construct called "Normenklage" allows at least members of parliament (I forgot the other, probably the president and the executive, as well as lower courts) to put a law up in front of the Bundesverfassungsgericht, which is the supreme court tending to constitutional questions, and basically ask "Is this constitutional?" No need for a case or anything.
Wonder why the U.S. doesn't have something like that...?
I remember reading about some Russians who wanted to re-task their old ICBMs into a global SAM system (this would be "surface to asteroid", not "to air"). We don't need expensive, unreliable moon lasers to shoot down incoming rocks! We have enough expensive, unreliable missiles sitting in holes all over Siberia...
German computer magazin c't ran an article on a related project a while ago (issue 21/2001). This is the web page accompanying the article; the article itself is not online.
From memory: it was a moderately fast PC base (not P4 or Gigahertz), with emphasis being put on good A/V components (surround sound, TV tuner, DVD drive, AV-capable and sizeable hard disk, remote control,...) and proper software. All this was put into a case that looked almost, but not quite like a generic living room AV component until they put a layer of black paint on it. Oh, and to round it off, they inserted an 8" or so colour LCD into the front of the case.
Looked mighty good. I think the price tag for the fully-fledged model was around DM 5500, or USD 2600. This was for parts only; you still have to put it together yourself.
The only thing I am missing when people talk about this is an apartment- or house-area personal broadcasting system: putting all those nice channels coming in over satellite and cable TV, high-speed Internet and other communication links on a nice, uniform 802.11 (or so), and getting small, cheap "receivers" so I can listen to, e.g., cable radio in the bathroom without having to drag a wire in there.
The above is a quote from an article about experiences trying to get one of these Gateway monsters to do something useful. The time was 1998, the name was "Destination XTV", the price $4000, and the use was...
... minimal. "Horrible" DVD player software, crashing Windows 98, unreliable input devices.
If the article describes the general case, it is no wonder these things did not catch on.
You can experience the distinctly other-worldy feeling of the last-century long-distance radio transmission business on the Point Reyes peninsula, a couple of miles north of San Francisco. On the peninsula, near Abbot's Lagoon, there is a big radio transmission installation with several antenna masts. Looking at the masts in fog and mist brings pictures from another time to mind of ships at sea, men in wireless offices and cabins, hunched over morse keys, tapping out important business telegrams to receivers overseas and life-saving messages to ships at sea.
The station started as a Marconi installation, and ceased operation as an MCI maritime radio site in 1997. On the other side of the peninsula, AT&T operates another shore-to-ship station. There is not too much to see at the stations themselves, but visiting Point Reyes is interesting enought in its own right -- so go and marvel at the radio masts if the weather is bad, which is just too likely most of the time.
This story has so many errors in it that it isn't even funny to put right...
B-52 bombers do not drop "tens of HARMs"
HARM does not mean "Homing Anti-Radar Missile"
HARM does not "hang from special parachutes" (mixup with a British anti-radar missile)
Most anti-radar weapons are programmable to react to certain, specified threat signatures (frequencies, pulse repetition freqs, modulation,...), which would be hard to simulate with a MW oven
Oh well, why bother?
But mainly, using Venik's Aviation page as a source disqualifies the story. Venik is well-known in Usenet aviation groups as a conspiracy theorist who likes to give events his own spin. Current claim (called a "theory"): AA587, the Airbus that crashed in NYC, may have been shot down by a surface-to-air missile.
It looks like the initiators of this project already thought about vested interests. These, rather than technical issues, are most often the biggest obstacles to overcome when trying to establish a totally new technology.
The quote by an energy industry manager, "It won't work", is typical of the process:
At first, technical issues are put forward: "It won't work. If it would work, we would have done it before."
Then come economic issues. "It will be too expensive. Nobody will buy it."
If that doesn't work, and the project in question looks like it might succeed, political lobby work is started. "If it goes forward, we will fire so-and-so many workers. It must be forbidden."
Usually, that is the end of things for revolutionary technologies... I hope it won't be in this case.
Well, checking facts before posting would have helped in this case. I do live in Germany, and used to live in the US for a while. No other qualifications, sorry.
Internet connectivity is not "ten times more" expensive than in the US anymore. A flat-rate DSL is around EUR 50/USD 45, available at least in many urban areas from a number of companies. This is comparable to what I paid for cable internet in California. Modem/ISDN access is still metered by time for most users, though, but can be bought at around 1ct/min. AOL monthly cost is around EUR 20, if I remember correctly.
The government still has a major stake in Deutsche Telekom, which in turn is majority owner of T-Online, which is the largest ISP in Germany. On the other hand, both Telekom and T-Online have their stock traded in NY, I think. Other ISPs have no connections to the government at all.
"No red LEDs on the front of equipment"? This sounds like an urban legend. It's not true; you can buy home appliances like cooking ranges that blink a number of red LEDs and 7seg displays at you, looking like the bridge on the "Enterprise", and I happen to have 1) a compact stereo system, 2) a portable tape player, 3) a stationary tape player, 4) a TV (around ten years old) and 5) a camera all sporting red LEDs somewhere around their bodies.
Of course all this doesn't invalidate the previous posters comments about other countries' lawmaking abilities in the tech sector...
Most of the stupid things about the internet emanating from Germany these days seems to be the result of people in certain positions trying to apply the laws and rules for which these positions are responsible to the "new" medium "Internet". An example other than the porn time limitation is the debate over a regional agency trying to single-handedly block access to extreme-right and neo-nazi web sites.
The originators of these, to/. readers obviously hare-brained, ideas usually have a pretty narrow outlook on all this, because they try to enforce a single law or set of laws. The would-be porn banners (p.i.) see that it is forbidden to broadcast certain types of content, including porn/nudity/etc., at certain times over old-style media like TV. They see the Internet as "something like TV, because pictures appear on a screen", and try to regulate using the old rules.
The fact that this might not work doesn't even enter their bureaucrat heads until the moment when they wonder why they are the target of much ridicule and laughter.
Right. I forgot that they a) don't care about what others say, because they are right anyway; and b) they are unlikely to hear the laughter anyway.
Re:Will we have to revise unicode?
on
XML for Ancients
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The main reason seems to be that in East Asia, there are reduced character sets in daily use which contain only a couple of hundred or thousand glyphs, but to read and study classical texts, the number required quickly goes up into the tens of thousands, for each of a number of languages. Not having these glyphs in the Unicode set would be like asking English-speakers to use alphabets reduced by five or six characters (M and N are similar, X, Q, C and Z could be replaced by one character as well) and dictionaries from which three out of four words have been deleted due to redundancy or age.
The reason for this mis-design, the article argues, is political: the nationalities in question have never been asked how many characters they would need together -- for each single language, Chinese, Korean, or Japanese, a scholar would say "Sure! 50,000 characters is enough for us!"
I concur with the assessment that in the end, armed conflict will almost always be decided by people walking (or, mostly, crawling) around carrying a rifle. This has been publicly forgotten through over-reporting by the media on cruise missile strikes and laser-guided bombs, and over-reliance on the part of the U.S. politicians on these relatively safe (for own troops) weapons systems. The reason for this has been, of course, fear of public opinion in case of casualties.
This time around, however, it may turn out to be different. I do not believe that casualties suffered by ground forces in Afghanistan will immediately turn U.S. public opinion against this operation. There will be no broad-based "Bring our poor boys home!" campaign, since it seems that in this conflict, the U.S. public understands that there is no gain to be had without some pain.
At this time, 08:33 GMT, on Thursday, 2001-09-27, these are some of the top slashdot stories, along with the number of comments to each. The relative importance to the readership of different classes of issues seems obvious...
Your Rights Online: Browsing Privacy - Off With Your Headers! -- 102 comments
Star Trek: Enterprise Reactions? -- 736 comments
Brian West Update -- 212 comments
British Colleges Selling Screen Saver Ad Space -- 190 comments
If technology is advanced as a solution or part of a solution in pulic security and law enforcement applications, then by all means let us see to it that the technology is under proper control! There are two steps to achieve:
Set clear limits on the use and storage of personal information gathered by technical means.
Create credible methods of verification that these limits are actually being observed.
One possible way to achieve this last point might be to create legislation that demands software for, e.g. airport check-in face scanners (or, for that matter, stadium entrance face scanners) to be publicly accessible so that tech-savvy individuals or organizations like the EFF can check them for compliance. This would not only encompass software as delivered by the system manufacturer, but also deployed software.
One would have to think carefully about if and how to allow companies to keep trade secrets (e.g. the face recognition algorithm) at the same time.
Thinking about this now, the problem seems to have parallels to international arms control and verification. Same problem there: show the other guys how many missiles you have, and that you don't cheat on the treaties, but don't show them how the warheads are constructed in detail. Maybe some methods could be copied.
Well, I saw some footage of a journalist showing emotions.
A reporter for PRO7 [www.pro7.de, in german], a private German TV channel, was on her way with a camera crew to south Manhattan. I think the film started after the aircrafts' impacts in the WTC towers. The reporter was in a car on one of the north-south streets, the WTC was clearly visible, and when it started to disintegrate they got out of their car (massive traffic jam, of course), and she can be seen on the side of the picture, her hands holding the microphone fluttering, in tears. She tried to compose a few coherent sentences into the camera a few moments later, but was unable to do so.
Granted, she probably wasn't in the same league payscale-wise and experience-wise, as Peter Arnett was 1990 in Baghdad, or Christiane Amanpour is today. And what, I asked myself on seeing her, should we expect from professional reporters? Especially today, in the age of multiple 24-hour TV news channels. It wouldn't be helpful at all if the anchors in the studio or the reporters on the scene broke down in tears all the time. Of course, most of them come down on the other side of cool by asking obviously stupid questions at the most inappropriate moments -- but that, I believe, is a question of personal qualification. There are some better ones, and some worse. You can usually tell which is which. (Personal preference for TV and online news reporting: the BBC of Great Britain. Unbiased to a fault, and good language, too.)
Even though I'm living on the other side of this big pond of water called the Atlantic ocean, since DMCA I've been thinking of laying in a big stockpile of non-DRM hardware, just in case. This should mainly include hard disks and long-distance networking equipment (modems). Any other pieces of computing infrastructure that I missed?
Are we too paranoid, or are we not paranoid enough?
The Java API for java.rmi.server.UID specifies that this "UID is unique under the following conditions: a) the machine takes more than one second to reboot [...]".
Yes, I can just imagine a horde of blobby, shapeless geeks storming the local prison, brandishing their home-made Damascus-style swords. My guess would be: not all parts of all geeks will arrive at the gate...
The real crux, according to French depictions in actual Maginot line museum bunkers, was that Belgium was supposed to fortify their border with Germany in the same manner as France did. This was even put down in a treaty, but Belgium decided they didn't have enough money to do it, leaving the hole in the line which the German army could storm through.
Maginot, namesake of the fortified line, was French building minister in the 20s and 30s. Apparently, the Maginot line was mainly his personal get-rich-quick scheme, with orders and contracts parceled out to his family and friends. According to the museum exhibits, he didn't actually care too much about military effectiveness, only about the economics (of his own bank account).
Slashdot Mirror
He neglects to say that in almost all cases, innovation concerning vital infrastructure had better be deployed and tested in a lab environment, not in the wild as in the SiteFinder case. This goes before all contractual, legal, practical and commercial questions.
There has to be a good bricks-and-mortar analogy for this -- I just can't find it!
A number of regular contributors to Heise's Telepolis web magazine seem to come from the what I like to call "I always knew it" camp. Alarmism, conspiracies, mindless misinterpretations of current research results, and lack of knowledge about economics are a mark of their writing. Usually, you can recognize them after a couple of paragraphs; after that, the articles retain some entertainment value, but only seldom offer food for thought or original analysis.
A large part of Telepolis' articles, however, is excellent journalism with important subjects that most print publications would not touch with a ten-foot pole.
And not to forget the Lehrter Stadtbahnhof, a new huge railway station. It includes a couple of tracks in a tunnel, crossed by several others on a dam, and the whole thing is covered with one of Europe's largest glass roofs. Really impressive.
Most of the sites have some kind of viewing platform. The Potsdamer Platz and the government sites used to have visitor centers proper, with models, guides, video, coffeeshops and souvenirs to boot! If you expend some effort to establish local contacts to one of the engineering firms, you may get more access than a regular visitor. Maybe www.berlin.de has more information on the engineering projects.
>
> "Judge not, lest thou be judged"
That is basically the problem. Why should one refrain from the act of judging something, or even someone, based on the knowledge one possesses at the moment of judgement? Not to judge at all would only play into the hands of the pathetically, uh, politically correct.
What is important is that one remains open to new knowledge, and to the possibility of being wrong in one's judgement. Not judging at all doesn't solve problems, it only perpetuates them.
The NYT author is not completely right on that. Some people I know bond deeply with their computers. And no, they are not your typical hard-core geek/nerd/techie, but mild-mannered grade school teachers. I have the suspicion that this is a pretty widespread phenomenon, if only enacted in secret... or, if you will, in the closet.
With the new BMW and iDrive, people will finally be able to combine their passion for automobiles with their passion for computing machines. The only question that remains to be answered is: does a 7 series BMW get one name or two?
The chinese pavillon at the Expo 2000 in Hanover, Germany (held at the same fairground as CeBIT) displayed, among other strange things, a model scene of a chinese moon lander, complete with little figures planting the red flag into the moon dust. At least chinese PR folks must be serious about this.
To put this into context, the whole pavillon had a somewhat strange atmosphere -- the interior was all-metal, very futuristic, like something from a 1960s low-budget science fiction movie. In little booths at the side of one room you could play around with interactive presentations dealing with all kinds of subjects concerning China. I remember that the presentation emphasised China's power and potential compared to the rest of the world. It was all about big, hero-type projects like the Three Gorges dam and other huge engineering feats.
Compared to this, there was a display featuring a large amount of green bottle glass shards arranged to look like a forest, if I remember correctly. I could not figure out what it was about -- probably because some of the labels, even though notionally in a language that I should be able to understand (like German or English) must have been written by the people who wrote consumer electronics manuals for asian products a couple of years ago.
Strange feelings abounded in that place, and we left it right away to look at friendlier venues like the Finnish pavillon.
I think it is high time for all ISPs to switch their home customer accounts to usage-based billing. Not for time, of course: Pay for the bytes!! That is what everybody who wants to use backbones/long distance lines has to do, so why shouldn't the end user?
My guess is that all the "total" flat rates will be replaced over time by usage-limited rates (say, 500 MB to 1 GB per month) that are fine for the majority of customers, with extra charges for extra usage. This will eliminate the "ticking meter" effect for the majority, and make the minority of power users think somewhat more about their usage.
On the other hand, if wholesale prices for bandwidth come down still further, there is no reason why this pattern should not be reversed again in the future.
Wonder why the U.S. doesn't have something like that...?
I remember reading about some Russians who wanted to re-task their old ICBMs into a global SAM system (this would be "surface to asteroid", not "to air"). We don't need expensive, unreliable moon lasers to shoot down incoming rocks! We have enough expensive, unreliable missiles sitting in holes all over Siberia...
From memory: it was a moderately fast PC base (not P4 or Gigahertz), with emphasis being put on good A/V components (surround sound, TV tuner, DVD drive, AV-capable and sizeable hard disk, remote control, ...) and proper software. All this was put into a case that looked almost, but not quite like a generic living room AV component until they put a layer of black paint on it. Oh, and to round it off, they inserted an 8" or so colour LCD into the front of the case.
Looked mighty good. I think the price tag for the fully-fledged model was around DM 5500, or USD 2600. This was for parts only; you still have to put it together yourself.
The only thing I am missing when people talk about this is an apartment- or house-area personal broadcasting system: putting all those nice channels coming in over satellite and cable TV, high-speed Internet and other communication links on a nice, uniform 802.11 (or so), and getting small, cheap "receivers" so I can listen to, e.g., cable radio in the bathroom without having to drag a wire in there.
... minimal. "Horrible" DVD player software, crashing Windows 98, unreliable input devices.
If the article describes the general case, it is no wonder these things did not catch on.
You can experience the distinctly other-worldy feeling of the last-century long-distance radio transmission business on the Point Reyes peninsula, a couple of miles north of San Francisco. On the peninsula, near Abbot's Lagoon, there is a big radio transmission installation with several antenna masts. Looking at the masts in fog and mist brings pictures from another time to mind of ships at sea, men in wireless offices and cabins, hunched over morse keys, tapping out important business telegrams to receivers overseas and life-saving messages to ships at sea.
The station started as a Marconi installation, and ceased operation as an MCI maritime radio site in 1997. On the other side of the peninsula, AT&T operates another shore-to-ship station. There is not too much to see at the stations themselves, but visiting Point Reyes is interesting enought in its own right -- so go and marvel at the radio masts if the weather is bad, which is just too likely most of the time.
But mainly, using Venik's Aviation page as a source disqualifies the story. Venik is well-known in Usenet aviation groups as a conspiracy theorist who likes to give events his own spin. Current claim (called a "theory"): AA587, the Airbus that crashed in NYC, may have been shot down by a surface-to-air missile.
The quote by an energy industry manager, "It won't work", is typical of the process:
Usually, that is the end of things for revolutionary technologies... I hope it won't be in this case.
Of course all this doesn't invalidate the previous posters comments about other countries' lawmaking abilities in the tech sector...
The originators of these, to /. readers obviously hare-brained, ideas usually have a pretty narrow outlook on all this, because they try to enforce a single law or set of laws. The would-be porn banners (p.i.) see that it is forbidden to broadcast certain types of content, including porn/nudity/etc., at certain times over old-style media like TV. They see the Internet as "something like TV, because pictures appear on a screen", and try to regulate using the old rules.
The fact that this might not work doesn't even enter their bureaucrat heads until the moment when they wonder why they are the target of much ridicule and laughter.
Right. I forgot that they a) don't care about what others say, because they are right anyway; and b) they are unlikely to hear the laughter anyway.
The main reason seems to be that in East Asia, there are reduced character sets in daily use which contain only a couple of hundred or thousand glyphs, but to read and study classical texts, the number required quickly goes up into the tens of thousands, for each of a number of languages. Not having these glyphs in the Unicode set would be like asking English-speakers to use alphabets reduced by five or six characters (M and N are similar, X, Q, C and Z could be replaced by one character as well) and dictionaries from which three out of four words have been deleted due to redundancy or age.
The reason for this mis-design, the article argues, is political: the nationalities in question have never been asked how many characters they would need together -- for each single language, Chinese, Korean, or Japanese, a scholar would say "Sure! 50,000 characters is enough for us!"
This time around, however, it may turn out to be different. I do not believe that casualties suffered by ground forces in Afghanistan will immediately turn U.S. public opinion against this operation. There will be no broad-based "Bring our poor boys home!" campaign, since it seems that in this conflict, the U.S. public understands that there is no gain to be had without some pain.
At this time, 08:33 GMT, on Thursday, 2001-09-27, these are some of the top slashdot stories, along with the number of comments to each. The relative importance to the readership of different classes of issues seems obvious...
One possible way to achieve this last point might be to create legislation that demands software for, e.g. airport check-in face scanners (or, for that matter, stadium entrance face scanners) to be publicly accessible so that tech-savvy individuals or organizations like the EFF can check them for compliance. This would not only encompass software as delivered by the system manufacturer, but also deployed software.
One would have to think carefully about if and how to allow companies to keep trade secrets (e.g. the face recognition algorithm) at the same time.
Thinking about this now, the problem seems to have parallels to international arms control and verification. Same problem there: show the other guys how many missiles you have, and that you don't cheat on the treaties, but don't show them how the warheads are constructed in detail. Maybe some methods could be copied.
A reporter for PRO7 [www.pro7.de, in german], a private German TV channel, was on her way with a camera crew to south Manhattan. I think the film started after the aircrafts' impacts in the WTC towers. The reporter was in a car on one of the north-south streets, the WTC was clearly visible, and when it started to disintegrate they got out of their car (massive traffic jam, of course), and she can be seen on the side of the picture, her hands holding the microphone fluttering, in tears. She tried to compose a few coherent sentences into the camera a few moments later, but was unable to do so.
Granted, she probably wasn't in the same league payscale-wise and experience-wise, as Peter Arnett was 1990 in Baghdad, or Christiane Amanpour is today. And what, I asked myself on seeing her, should we expect from professional reporters? Especially today, in the age of multiple 24-hour TV news channels. It wouldn't be helpful at all if the anchors in the studio or the reporters on the scene broke down in tears all the time. Of course, most of them come down on the other side of cool by asking obviously stupid questions at the most inappropriate moments -- but that, I believe, is a question of personal qualification. There are some better ones, and some worse. You can usually tell which is which. (Personal preference for TV and online news reporting: the BBC of Great Britain. Unbiased to a fault, and good language, too.)
Are we too paranoid, or are we not paranoid enough?
The Java API for java.rmi.server.UID specifies that this "UID is unique under the following conditions: a) the machine takes more than one second to reboot [...]".
Now what?
Yes, I can just imagine a horde of blobby, shapeless geeks storming the local prison, brandishing their home-made Damascus-style swords. My guess would be: not all parts of all geeks will arrive at the gate...
Maginot, namesake of the fortified line, was French building minister in the 20s and 30s. Apparently, the Maginot line was mainly his personal get-rich-quick scheme, with orders and contracts parceled out to his family and friends. According to the museum exhibits, he didn't actually care too much about military effectiveness, only about the economics (of his own bank account).