I once had a summer job where I had to transcribe data collected on a paper strip from a chart recorder. The data that was collected include wind direction and the radiation level in events/second.
Normally the ratiation level showed a random fluctuation around the average background level. Ho hum. But when ever the wind was blowing from a certain direction the radiation level spiked up and stayed at a new level that was 10 to 100 times the normal background level. It would stay that way until the wind shifted.
I processed tapes like that from a number of those recorders. They were on ration monitors set up all over the place. They all showed the same kind of behavior, but with different directions.
We had a map that showed the location of each monitor, so it was easy to draw a line from the monitor in the direction the wind was blowing from. Do that for a couple or five monitors and you find that the lines cross at spedific locations.
Each place the lines crossed was the location of a big coal burning power plant. Coal contains radioactive elements. Burning coal puts those elements in the air where you and I can breath it. IIRC coal plants put out more radioactive pollution than all the nuclear plants combined. And they do it every day, year in and year out.
Last report I read showed that SBC is losing 2% of their customers every quarter. Thats 8% per year, and the rate may be increasing. Their growth was all coming from wireless, but when they started to lose that battle they merged their wireless company with another one to form Cingular. They spent a bunch of money trying to get into broadband Internet and when it didn't grow as fast as they wanted, they backed away from broadband and don't seem to have a clue what they are doing, so they are not getting the ROI the expected on broadband and don't have the buts or vision to move forward.
All in all, their stock price is down about 50% over the last 4 years and they are doing anything they can to scrape up a few dollars. Recently it dawned on them that they had a huge number of patents that they hadn't really looked at so....
Expect them to do this more an more and more. The word I hear from friends at SBC is they have formed and entire business unit dedicated to mining their patent portfolio. And, the person in charges is a hungry young executive trying to add to her reputation.
Download speed isn't the only thing that is important in picking a broadband service.
I have had both AOLTimeWarner Road Runner cable modem service and SBC DSL service. There is no question that Road Runner gave me faster download speed. But, even though my DSL upload speed is capped at 256Mbps. It is actually faster than the upload speed I got out of Road Runner.
Upload speed is important to me because I run a website, and several other servers, out of my loft. Which brings us to other important differences. The ability to get a static IP address and the ability to connect mulitple computers to a single broadband connection.
In my area, SBC sells a static IP service with no limit to the number of computers I can have on my LAN for $78.95/month. While the equivalent service from Road Runner costs $200/month. So, DSL can be a much better deal if you have more than one computer or ever want to run a server. As the number of computers in the home goes up from one per home to more than one per person, the ability to connect mulitple computers become very important.
Customer service is also important. In all the years I have been a customer of Time Warner, both for cable service and broadband, I have only ever had one serious complaint about their service, and they apologized, fixed the problem, apologized again, sent me a letter of apology, and gave me a couple of months of service for free. In other words, they made me feel like a respected and valued customer.
OTOH, In the first month I had SBC DSL service, I was been hung up on by 3 customer service representatives, been promised call backs that never happened, and been billed for a service that has never been fully delivered. In fact, I have filed a PUC complaint over the problem. All I can say is that it only took a week to get them to stop blocking inbound port 80 and outbound port 25. But, to this day they refuse to admit that it ever happened.
I also can not access any of the Yahoo! services they promise because the license for using the Yahoo! service bars you from running servers over your DSL line. Which is exactly what the Deluxe S package is advertised for doing. So, to use the Yahoo! part of the service I have to agree not to use the static IP capabilities of the service. Since I can not access the Yahoo! services I also can not access any of the SBC online help because access to online help is based on your SBC Yahoo! userid/pasword.
I guess that to save $120/month I can live without the Yahoo! part of the deal, but it the way SBC has treated me has really pissed me off. ASAP the ONLY SBC service I have will be DSL.
According to the article, Microsoft's responce to stolen activation codes is to make it impossible to apply service packs to software activated with those codes. That won't keep people from using the stolen software, but it will keep them from applying bug fixes and patching security holes in the stolen software.
Let me say that again. It will stop people from applying security patches to the stolen software. That means that the next big MS worm will have a large installed base of unpatched, and unpatchable, MS servers to exploit.
This situation hurts every person who uses the Internet.
It is the fact that he MOVED TO THE US to do what he wanted to do that makes him an American icon. All he did in the UK was go to school. He came to the US to do cool stuff. THAT makes him an American heart and soul.
Reminds me of the people who claim that Einstien wasn't an American. Sheesh, they just don't understand the power of personal choice.
And yes, he can be a Brit, and an Indian, and a Thai and STILL be an American. In fact, that just makes hime MORE American.
Xfree86 is the fork,
on
XFree86 Politics
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· Score: 4, Informative
I haven't talked to Keith for more than 10 years and I haven't been involved with X development for at least that long. But, I remember him from when he worked for the X consortium in the '80s and I represented a member of the consortium.
Keith has been actively working on X for longer than many X users have been alive. He knows more about the original design decisions, the history and politics, and the problems with X than just about anyone currently living. I would trust his opinion over any other member of the XFree86 "team". And, let's get the facts straight on the idea of forking the XFree86 code base. XFree86 is a fork of the original X code base. X was designed to be forked by each group that used it. That is why it is under the X license.
If Keith has concerns they are valid concerns.
Personally I think a lot of what has been going on in XFree86 is misguided. Especially the way 3D has been implemented. Not to mention that the lack of a high performance local binding for X is criminal considering that several ways to implement it have been known for at least 10 years. It was IN commercial implementations of X 10 years ago.
A benchmark tests what it is designed to test. It gives almost no information about how *your* application is going to run. I've seen many examples where a particular graphics system had impressive benchmark scores, but ran actual applications at less than half the speed of graphic systems with much lower benchmark scores.
Then there is the price/performance trade off, also known as bang for the buck. Sure, some new card may run Quake at 7,000 frames per second, but your monitor only updates 80 times per second so why pay for a graphics card that gives you more than that many frames per second? It's like buying a car with a top seed of 300 MPH and driving it on city streets with a speed limit of 30. I guess it is fun to brag about owning it, but it is still a complete waste of money.
A long time ago a friend of mine and I came up with what we thought would be the perfect graphic benchmark: Teapot Revolutions per Second (TPS). (Hi Smitty!) The idea is to draw the Utah Teapot at various sizes and animate it by rotating it one degree per frame. How fast it spins with various rendering options turned on and off is your benchmark value. We figured it was at least as valid as any other benchmark we had seen and it was close enough to the canonical demo that people who don't understand graphics could brag about their hot new box with the super high TPS rating.
The moral of the story is that only idiots buy hardware based on benchmarks. You buy hardware based on testing your application on the hardware and seeing which hardware gives you the most bang for the buck.
About every 10 years or so Intel produces a politically correct processor. That is, a processor that would make any academic proud, but that is totally useless. In 1980 they built the 432. Google on it to find out how twisted this thing was. Later, they did the i860 (academically perfect, practically useless). Now, they have produced the Itanium.
It won't kill them. And, in 10 years someone will post a message like this on/. pointing to the 432, the 860, the Itanium, and some new politically correct processor that has slipped out of Intel
Who owns the tooling required to build a space shuttle? Who decided that the space shuttle had to have a 1500 mile cross range hypersonic glide capability? Who decided the space shuttle had to have a 30 ton payload capacity? The answer will surprise most of you. It is the US Department of Defense. The space shuttle as built is a military space plane, it is not and never was designed to civilian specifications. Don't beleive me, go back and look at the history.
The history of the shuttle design is a long one. The last shuttle that NASA designed had a 10 ton payload and didn't start gliding until it had slowed to sub-sonic speeds. It didn't need complex ceramic tiles for heat protection because it was designed to shed the head in the shockwave in front of the ship and could have used high temperature metal alloys for heat protection just like the X-15 and SR-71 use.
But, there was no political support for a small, practical, civilian shuttle. The sentiment in congress was that the Apollo space craft and the Saturn rockets could do everything that NASA wanted to do, so why bother with building a shuttle? So, NASA made a deal with the DOD for support. But, to do what the DOD wanted the Shuttle had to be a very different vehicle. A vehicle that pushed the limits of technology way beyond anything we had at the time.
The result was the Enterprise class space shuttles that we have now. The truth is that every one of them should be considered an experimental aircraft. They never met their goals for payload or cost. To get such a large ship flying with the technology available at the time required too many compromises. Solid fuel boosters that killed the Challenger and an astonishinly complex thermal protection system that killed the Columbia. Good politics, bad engineering.
Then there is the question of the cost of the shuttles. You can count on NASA to ask for a few billion to build a replacement for Columbia. Why in the world does it cost billions to build a Shuttle, but only a few hundred millions for a 747? (Under the tiles a Shuttle isn't that much different from a small airliner.)
The answer is that there is a production line for the 747, but each shuttle is hand built. When congress was deciding to build the shuttles they looked at the cost of building a production line for space shuttles versus the cost of building the minimal amount of tooling and doing the work by hand. The numbers showed that if they had build a production line the incremental cost of building a shuttle would be around $450 million. About twice the cost of a 747, and well withing the price range of the Air Force and many commercial companies. In fact, it was stated that space shuttles would be sold to commercial operators.
For some reason congress decided to cap the number of space shuttles that could legally be built at a number one less than the number needed to justify building a production line. So, there are only 4 shuttles and no production facility to make spare parts or build new vehicles. No production facility to create commercial versions of the vehicle. And, no follow on improved vehicles. While the 747 has continued to evolve and improve over the last 20 years, the space shuttles have gone on nearly unchanged and unimproved.
The history of the shuttle is recorded in places like Aviation Week and the AIAA journal. Find a good library and read the coverage from the late '60s and early '70s while these decisions were being made.
Believe it or not, everything you just said, except for the "load of..." part is covered and descriped by personality type theory. Over time, the normal progression of a personality is to learn to mimic, or actually develop, the skills of the opposite types. So, with age and experience techies start to understand feelies and vice versa. But it isn't ever perfect. It only gets better with age and experience. And not all people ever get past their original orientation. No matter how well I can act like a extrovert, and I do a good job of it, I still find it tiring and need time alone to recover from over exposure to people. I, of course, am and introvert.
In our current techie world, one in which you are considered to be over the hill at 35, the majority of technies never really have a chance to develop the skills demanded by the majority feelies. By the time you have a chance to develop the skills, you're having to learn to work as a fry cook.
A study I read recently measured the MBTIs of a large number of engineers in all fields. Then cross compared their yearly evaluations to their MBTI scores. They found a better than 90% correlation beteen an engineer being rated excellent, and having an MBTI of INTJ. INTJs make up roughly 1% of the population. Most people will go their entire lives without ever meeting one. And when they do they will find the person to be very odd. And yet, they are the population of top engineers in all fields.
The greatness of humanity is not in our sameness, but in our variety. It is through recognizing and appreciating the differences that we gain. But, if we don't recognize the differences we can't embrace them. If we belittle people for being different, we can never embrace the differences. The first step is admitting that the differences exist. The second is learning to value and respect the differences.
I have found MBTI to be a very valuable tool in dealing with people. Once I understood that the other preferences existed and what they meant, I found I could deal with people more effectively and understand where they were coming from. I'm an INTP, one of my dearest friends is an ESFJ. Before I learned to understand the differences and the value of the different preferences I would have considered her to be odd and annoying. Now, I have some understanding of her point of view and can communicate with her easily. And it works the other way too, now she understands what it means when I don't say anything, or just ask questions.
Pretending that everyone is the same, is as bad as belittling people for being different.
The author got it almost exactly right. When you study the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) for techies you find that they are made up almost entirely of 4 types INTP, INTJ, ISTP, and ISTJ. nearly all the core software that runs the Internet was written by INTP and INTJ people. (In general INTs are more likely to like python or lisp while ISTs are more likely to like Perl.) NTs are concept oriented with STs are detail oriented.
INT*s make up about 2% of the population and IST*s make up about 10% of the population. The key is the IT in the type. "I" stands for Introverted and "T" stands for Thinking. The ITs make up only 12% of the population. The opposite types, the EF Extroverted Feeling folks, make up 36% of the population. The EF folks like to talk to people and make friends. The IT people like to learn things and make systems that work.
The result is that the people writing the code have a point of view that is shared by only a small minority of the population. While the largest subgroup of the population has a point of view that is exactly opposite of the techies.
Obviously the techies can not design for the "feelies". And, the "feelies" will not take the time to communicate with the techies. They write us off as "geeks" and "nerds" and belittle us every chance they get. While we tend to call them "air heads" and ignore them.
There really are two cultures. Until people on both sides of the divide understand that the divide exists and work to bridge it, we will keep seeing articles like this one.
Stonewolf
Some things to remember about Columbia
on
Columbia Coverage
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· Score: 2, Informative
Columbia was the first shuttle to fly in space. The first shuttle to fly was the Enterprise, but it was used only for drop testing and was not capable of flying under rocket power or operating in space.
Because Columbia was the first fully operational shuttle it is by far the heaviest shuttle with the lowest payload. For that reason it was not flown much after the later shuttles were built. IIRC Columbia could not reach the altitude of the space station with any useful payload.
Columbia was originally built with ejection seats on the flight deck that were later removed.
During the first few flights of the Columbia NASA was very worried about the tiles coming off. They had developed a thing a lot like a caulking gun that could be used by an astronaut to fill in the gaps left by a lost tile. But, IIRC it was never flown. So, this is a problem that NASA has considered, and one for which they already had a potential solution more than 20 years ago.
On a personal note, I can think of no better way to die than to do it while following a dream. And not just a personal dream, but a dream that benefits all of humanity. They are heros not because they died, but because they dared.
"NASA is the only agency that lies" that is a direct quotation from one of the many reports on the Challenger disaster. Now they have lost Columbia, and they still lie. They lied about what the shuttle could do and they lied about what it would cost. They even lied about how long it would take to build it. Since they built the shuttles they have lied about every new spacecraft project they have started. They gave specific costs and capability estimates for everyone and then failed to deliver EACH AND EVERY ONE OF THEM. And they used their lies to destroy every commercial attempt to build a competing system.
In the '60 when IBM took actions like that back in destroy their competition they were sued for antitrust violations and forced to change their behavior. But, NASA is a government agency that is hugely popular, even though it has wasted 100 of billions of dollars and lied about the waste.
When the US federal government wanted to help develop the aviation industry in the US they did two things. They create NACA, the forerunner of NASA to do research that private companies couldn't afford to do. The research was in part guided by the companies and the results of the research were made available to all companies equally. They also started offering competitive contracts to deliver mail by air. So, they created a way to research aeronautical problems so we could build better aircraft and they created an economic motivation for developing better and better aircraft. They did NOT develop their own air transport system. They build experimental planes, never production aircraft.
NASA was supposed to do research, they do some, but mostly they have built and jealously guard, a space transport monopoly. They actively work to create an economic disincentive to private space craft development. And, they guide their own research. They no long take guidance from industry on the problems that need to be solved because they have destroyed the industry they were meant to serve.
If we want space travel the first thing to do is shut down NASA now. Or, at least get them out of the business of building and operating a space transport system. I tell you this, they will use this disaster to try to take back the partial privatization that has already occurred. That must be stopped.
After NASA is out of the business then go back to using private companies to build and operate space ships. Put out a set of specs and let companies compete to meet the specs. You want a safe reliable way to get to and from the space station? Offer a transport contract and buy from whomever can fill the contract. The price will drop and the reliability will improve.
The X-prize is another model to follow. It has created more useful activity in a few years than we have seen from NASA since 1975. If we want to go to Mars, offer a Mars prize. Offer a billion dollar prize to the first group who reaches Mars with a crewed space ship and returns safely to earth. It might take 20 years, but someone will collect that prize.
If you are in favor of space travel, then NASA is not your friend NASA is your worst enemy. The saddest part is that they people at NASA are good well meaning well intentioned people who have no idea that they have as a group destroyed space travel. But, then "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". The road to space is over around or through NASA, not with NASA.
Nice to see that this bothers people who have detailed understanding of the physics.
Seems there are several problems unresolved questions here.
Is the black hole moving with a campanion star? Or, just skimming off some mass as it passes by? If it is actually moving *with* the companion star, what kept them together? Assuming a SN explosion accelerated the black hole to 400,00 kph, how did it drag along another star? Even if they were a close binary pair before the SN explosion, wouldn't the black hole now have system escape velocity?
Another question, how off balance does the explosion have to be to generate this kind of speed? If the explosion is 1% of balance, how much mass energy was released in the total explosion to get this speed? How do you get a SN explosion that is that off balance?
Could this pair have been accelerated by another mechanism such as a close pass to a tight binary star system? How tight would it have to be? What kind of stars (neutron, black holes...) to get a pair with enough energy to speed something up like that?
Or are you telling us that you make so little and have so few deductions that you can file using 1040EZ?
I used to do that, then one year I was having a lot of trouble figuring out my taxes. So I took them to an accountant. After examining everything we filed ammended tax returns for as far back as we were legally able to and got back several thousand dollars that I had paid, but didn't owe.
I used the account for about 15 years until I tested some tax software and found that it was doing as well as the accountant. So, I swithched.
Only an idiot would do their taxes with pencil and paper. It takes an expert to file a US tax return.
My desktop and my laptop all run GNU/Linux. But, I keep around one old machine with Windows 98. Why? Because once a year I need to do my taxes and the choice is to either have them done by an accountant, or have one machine that can run Windows. I can not find tax preperation software for Linux.
Oh, I suppose I might be able to find tax prep software for the Mac. And, when I'm rich enough to need the accountant I'll be rich enough to buy a Mac and that Rolls I've been wanting...:-)
No, really, the Mac is not an option for me. Way to expensive. I can build 3 good PCs for the price of one Mac.
Seriously, Have have nothing against Macs, they're great. I just won't pay that much for a computer.
But, the thing is that UNIX/Linux can no more afford to junk the X APIs than Microsoft can afford to junk the Window GUI APIs. All the software depends on them.
OTOH, over the last 15 years there have been several implementations of X that make the X server either part of OS or a special shared library that is directly callable. Both of the approaches give you a blazingly fast desktop, while preserving the X APIs. All this without having to give up the X protocol and the ability to run remote applications.
What I'm taking about is NOT the same as putting a GUI in the OS as Windows has done. The window manager, the desktop look and feel, the font server, these are stay out in user space. It *IS* the same as having a file system that lets you access your hardrive as files and directories rather than as tracks and sectors. It *IS* the same as using a file system to let many applications share the diskdrives. Only in this case you have a graphics system that lets you use and share the graphics hardware in a nice way. It is also similar to "tux" in the kernel. It was put in the kernel to proved a blazingly fast HTTP server, not because anyone thinks that every kernel needs an HTTP server built into it!
Make the X server a loadable module or add the hooks needed to create a multi-threaded, thread safe shared library, and get on with it. Kill this stupid problem now.
30 years of programming experience. Worked on international standards body (X consortium). Two degrees in CS. Web services experience. Network architectures. Corporate R&D. Business analysis. Long range forecasting.
In my last job as the company shrunk I was moved from a pure R&D/technical analysis job, to an architecture job, to a design job, to a coding job. And then they laid off all the coders and hired a company in India to do the coding work.
I can't even get a job at the local Junior College. They went broke because of the decline of the "tech sector" in this dear town. Best I've been able to find is the occasional testing job that pay about half what I made in the '80s.
The truth is that there are some very good people in India and China who will do the low level coding work work for very little money. And, in this market, no one is hiring people to do the kind of high level work I used to do. That is life, I have adapted to it. And I am.
I just spent half an hour waiting on hold calling linksys tech support to be told that: No, they do not support Linux. There router will not work if you connect a computer to it running anything but Windows. And no, they will not tell me the commands needed to tftp the firmware to the router.
If you are a tired of this kind of treatment as I am... Please *call* Linksys and complain: http://www.linksys.com/contact/contact.asp
1) A great programmer can make a bad game playable, a poor programmer will make a great game suck. Too many gameprogrammer suck. But, then what do you expect from people who will put up with being treated the way producers treat game programmers? (Yeah, I used to be a game programmer so I know what I am talking about. I still have the scars.)
2) No planning. Everyone seems to think that the rules of normal project planning don't apply to games, so they change them and change them and finally ship something. You could save half the cost of all games by firing the designer after the game is designed and firing ANYONE who tries to change the design after production has started.
3) Design for you market. Game designers mostly design for other game designers. Real people mostly don't want them.
4) Make games that cost less. Me pay $50 for a game? Are you nuts?
5) Design for computers that people have. I will not buy a new computer to play a game, neither will most people.
6) You want me to spend how much time learning to play this game? I game is a diversion, like watching TV. I will not spend 2 hours learning to play the game and then spend 80 hours playing it.
7) No, I can't hit that combination of buttons in that order that fast. Which means I can't play your game, doesn't it. This is another case of game designers designing for other designers. Real people won't spend hours learning to do that and we don't brag about it at work.
8) Real people have lives. We like to spend some time playing games. But, games are not our life.
9) The computer game market would be 100 times bigger if games cost $10, took less than 5 minutes to learn, and could be replayed a few times. Think Tetras and Sim City, not Quake III.
There is no technical reason to send an installer to install either DSL or a cable modem. It costs the cable company between $200 and $500 to send a truck to your house. Therefore, you have to conclude that the ONLY reason they sent him was so that he would install that software on your computer.
Most cable and DSL companies are doing everything they can to keep from having to roll a truck to do an install. So, you must conclude that getting that software on your machine is worth at least $300 a year to your cable company.
You have to assume that it is spyware of the worst sort.
During the 1960s when there was no trade or diplomatic contact between the US and China and the Soviet Union, you could walk into a book store and by a copy of Mao's "Little Red Book." "On People's War," and everything ever written by Lenin... You could do that because in the US you have the right to read and talk about anything, even if it is offensive to someone.
It would be better to break off diplomatic relations and stop all trade with Germany and France, even the whole of the EU, than to allow even one page of material to be censored by those governments.
I would much prefer to see Google shut down their.de and.fr sites than knuckle under to those fascist bastards.
"Why are the Bells forced to lease out their DSL connectivity to other companies at below cost? Does this really spur investment? The reason that most people do not have access to DSL is that the Bells will NOT invest until they are allowed to compete against cable companies DIRECTLY"
The real question is why do YOU believe anything the Baby Bells say? They are not being required to lease lines below their costs. Never have been never will. The original rates were set so the Bells would make a profit. The Bells then cooked the accounting to make it look like they were losing money.
The Bells complain about their unfair treatment under the telecom act of 1996. Bull. They wrote the telecom act of 1996 and they agreed to everything in it before it was passed. The telecom act of 1996 was referred to in the press as the Telecom Welfare Act of 1996. It has many clauses in it that make it nearly impossible for anyone to compete with the Bells on traditional telephone and gives the Bells the opportunity to make huge profits. BUT, the world changed, the Internet happened, and those clauses started to hurt the Bells, so they started crying about it and lying about it and went back on the deal they negotiated.
Go back and look at what was being said in the middle '90s if you don't believe me.
Four years ago I had the experience of trying to explain Moore's law to a Bell executive. He was amazed by it. He was in charge of R&D for SBC and had never heard of Moore's law. He later got fired for destroying Prodigy.
On the anniversary of September, 11 2001, I want to talk about the difference between the victims onboard the first three airliners and the heroes onboard flight 93. What was the difference? Why did the people on flight 93 fight back? Why did the people on the other planes just sit and die?
The answer comes down to communication and how knowledge forced the passengers to change their survival strategy. Everyone wants to live. Until 9/11/01 the best known strategy for surviving an airline hijacking was to sit in your seat, cooperate with the hijackers, and wait it out. That strategy worked because until 9/11/01 hijackers were trying to get hostages to trade for concessions and publicity. But, that changed on 9/11/01. On that day the hijackers wanted airliners to use as weapons. And, they counted on the passengers sitting in their seats and being cooperative to allow the plan to work.
On flight 93, the passengers fought back. Why? Because they knew that three other hijacked airliners had been used as weapons and everyone on board them had died. When they knew they were onboard a weapon their survival strategy changed and the scope of their survival strategy also changed. Their choices no longer affected only their own lives. Now, theei actions also affected the lives of hundreds or thousands of people on the ground.
Given the choice of sitting quietly in their seats and waiting for death or fighting and having a chance to live, they chose to fight for their lives and the lives of the people on the ground. They knew that if they won they would live and so would an unknown number of people on the ground who were targeted by the weapon they were flying on. They also knew that they could die and still save people on the ground. At that point the correct thing to do, the moral thing to do, the action that saved the most lives, was to fight. They fought.
We that given the same choice many people through out history chose to do nothing and died as cowards and victims. Those who chose to fight we deservedly call heroes.
But all that misses the whole point. The reason that the heroes of flight 93 fought is that they knew they had to fight or die. They knew because there was an air to ground phone on the back of the chair in front of them and they used them to find out what was going on. It was free, unregulated, communication that made the difference. It was that basic freedom to communicate that let them know they needed to fight. It was that same that let us know they did fight. It was their right to be informed that let them become heroes.
As people who use the Internet, the most free and open communication media every developed, we are honor bound to fight. To fight any attempt to reduce the freedom to communicate. To fight to spread the right of freedom of information and communication to everyone in the world.
Flight 93 proved to the world that free people given accurate knowledge of their situation will make heroic choices and take heroic actions. Are we heroes who can make the same choices? Will we fight to protect and extend the right to communicate that allowed the heroes of flight 93 to become heroes?
Slashdot Mirror
I once had a summer job where I had to transcribe data collected on a paper strip from a chart recorder. The data that was collected include wind direction and the radiation level in events/second.
Normally the ratiation level showed a random fluctuation around the average background level. Ho hum. But when ever the wind was blowing from a certain direction the radiation level spiked up and stayed at a new level that was 10 to 100 times the normal background level. It would stay that way until the wind shifted.
I processed tapes like that from a number of those recorders. They were on ration monitors set up all over the place. They all showed the same kind of behavior, but with different directions.
We had a map that showed the location of each monitor, so it was easy to draw a line from the monitor in the direction the wind was blowing from. Do that for a couple or five monitors and you find that the lines cross at spedific locations.
Each place the lines crossed was the location of a big coal burning power plant. Coal contains radioactive elements. Burning coal puts those elements in the air where you and I can breath it. IIRC coal plants put out more radioactive pollution than all the nuclear plants combined. And they do it every day, year in and year out.
Stonewolf
Last report I read showed that SBC is losing 2% of their customers every quarter. Thats 8% per year, and the rate may be increasing. Their growth was all coming from wireless, but when they started to lose that battle they merged their wireless company with another one to form Cingular. They spent a bunch of money trying to get into broadband Internet and when it didn't grow as fast as they wanted, they backed away from broadband and don't seem to have a clue what they are doing, so they are not getting the ROI the expected on broadband and don't have the buts or vision to move forward.
....
All in all, their stock price is down about 50% over the last 4 years and they are doing anything they can to scrape up a few dollars. Recently it dawned on them that they had a huge number of patents that they hadn't really looked at so....
Expect them to do this more an more and more. The word I hear from friends at SBC is they have formed and entire business unit dedicated to mining their patent portfolio. And, the person in charges is a hungry young executive trying to add to her reputation.
Of course, I *could* be completely full of
Stonewolf
Download speed isn't the only thing that is important in picking a broadband service.
I have had both AOLTimeWarner Road Runner cable modem service and SBC DSL service. There is no question that Road Runner gave me faster download speed. But, even though my DSL upload speed is capped at 256Mbps. It is actually faster than the upload speed I got out of Road Runner.
Upload speed is important to me because I run a website, and several other servers, out of my loft. Which brings us to other important differences. The ability to get a static IP address and the ability to connect mulitple computers to a single broadband connection.
In my area, SBC sells a static IP service with no limit to the number of computers I can have on my LAN for $78.95/month. While the equivalent service from Road Runner costs $200/month. So, DSL can be a much better deal if you have more than one computer or ever want to run a server. As the number of computers in the home goes up from one per home to more than one per person, the ability to connect mulitple computers become very important.
Customer service is also important. In all the years I have been a customer of Time Warner, both for cable service and broadband, I have only ever had one serious complaint about their service, and they apologized, fixed the problem, apologized again, sent me a letter of apology, and gave me a couple of months of service for free. In other words, they made me feel like a respected and valued customer.
OTOH, In the first month I had SBC DSL service, I was been hung up on by 3 customer service representatives, been promised call backs that never happened, and been billed for a service that has never been fully delivered. In fact, I have filed a PUC complaint over the problem. All I can say is that it only took a week to get them to stop blocking inbound port 80 and outbound port 25. But, to this day they refuse to admit that it ever happened.
I also can not access any of the Yahoo! services they promise because the license for using the Yahoo! service bars you from running servers over your DSL line. Which is exactly what the Deluxe S package is advertised for doing. So, to use the Yahoo! part of the service I have to agree not to use the static IP capabilities of the service. Since I can not access the Yahoo! services I also can not access any of the SBC online help because access to online help is based on your SBC Yahoo! userid/pasword.
I guess that to save $120/month I can live without the Yahoo! part of the deal, but it the way SBC has treated me has really pissed me off. ASAP the ONLY SBC service I have will be DSL.
Stonewolf
According to the article, Microsoft's responce to stolen activation codes is to make it impossible to apply service packs to software activated with those codes. That won't keep people from using the stolen software, but it will keep them from applying bug fixes and patching security holes in the stolen software.
Let me say that again. It will stop people from applying security patches to the stolen software. That means that the next big MS worm will have a large installed base of unpatched, and unpatchable, MS servers to exploit.
This situation hurts every person who uses the Internet.
Stonewolf
You just don't get it do you?
It is the fact that he MOVED TO THE US to do what he wanted to do that makes him an American icon. All he did in the UK was go to school. He came to the US to do cool stuff. THAT makes him an American heart and soul.
Reminds me of the people who claim that Einstien wasn't an American. Sheesh, they just don't understand the power of personal choice.
And yes, he can be a Brit, and an Indian, and a Thai and STILL be an American. In fact, that just makes hime MORE American.
I haven't talked to Keith for more than 10 years and I haven't been involved with X development for at least that long. But, I remember him from when he worked for the X consortium in the '80s and I represented a member of the consortium.
Keith has been actively working on X for longer than many X users have been alive. He knows more about the original design decisions, the history and politics, and the problems with X than just about anyone currently living. I would trust his opinion over any other member of the XFree86 "team". And, let's get the facts straight on the idea of forking the XFree86 code base. XFree86 is a fork of the original X code base. X was designed to be forked by each group that used it. That is why it is under the X license.
If Keith has concerns they are valid concerns.
Personally I think a lot of what has been going on in XFree86 is misguided. Especially the way 3D has been implemented. Not to mention that the lack of a high performance local binding for X is criminal considering that several ways to implement it have been known for at least 10 years. It was IN commercial implementations of X 10 years ago.
Stonewolf
A benchmark tests what it is designed to test. It gives almost no information about how *your* application is going to run. I've seen many examples where a particular graphics system had impressive benchmark scores, but ran actual applications at less than half the speed of graphic systems with much lower benchmark scores.
Then there is the price/performance trade off, also known as bang for the buck. Sure, some new card may run Quake at 7,000 frames per second, but your monitor only updates 80 times per second so why pay for a graphics card that gives you more than that many frames per second? It's like buying a car with a top seed of 300 MPH and driving it on city streets with a speed limit of 30. I guess it is fun to brag about owning it, but it is still a complete waste of money.
A long time ago a friend of mine and I came up with what we thought would be the perfect graphic benchmark: Teapot Revolutions per Second (TPS). (Hi Smitty!) The idea is to draw the Utah Teapot at various sizes and animate it by rotating it one degree per frame. How fast it spins with various rendering options turned on and off is your benchmark value. We figured it was at least as valid as any other benchmark we had seen and it was close enough to the canonical demo that people who don't understand graphics could brag about their hot new box with the super high TPS rating.
The moral of the story is that only idiots buy hardware based on benchmarks. You buy hardware based on testing your application on the hardware and seeing which hardware gives you the most bang for the buck.
Stonewolf
About every 10 years or so Intel produces a politically correct processor. That is, a processor that would make any academic proud, but that is totally useless. In 1980 they built the 432. Google on it to find out how twisted this thing was. Later, they did the i860 (academically perfect, practically useless). Now, they have produced the Itanium.
It won't kill them. And, in 10 years someone will post a message like this on
Stonewolf
Who owns the tooling required to build a space shuttle? Who decided that the space shuttle had to have a 1500 mile cross range hypersonic glide capability? Who decided the space shuttle had to have a 30 ton payload capacity? The answer will surprise most of you. It is the US Department of Defense. The space shuttle as built is a military space plane, it is not and never was designed to civilian specifications. Don't beleive me, go back and look at the history.
The history of the shuttle design is a long one. The last shuttle that NASA designed had a 10 ton payload and didn't start gliding until it had slowed to sub-sonic speeds. It didn't need complex ceramic tiles for heat protection because it was designed to shed the head in the shockwave in front of the ship and could have used high temperature metal alloys for heat protection just like the X-15 and SR-71 use.
But, there was no political support for a small, practical, civilian shuttle. The sentiment in congress was that the Apollo space craft and the Saturn rockets could do everything that NASA wanted to do, so why bother with building a shuttle? So, NASA made a deal with the DOD for support. But, to do what the DOD wanted the Shuttle had to be a very different vehicle. A vehicle that pushed the limits of technology way beyond anything we had at the time.
The result was the Enterprise class space shuttles that we have now. The truth is that every one of them should be considered an experimental aircraft. They never met their goals for payload or cost. To get such a large ship flying with the technology available at the time required too many compromises. Solid fuel boosters that killed the Challenger and an astonishinly complex thermal protection system that killed the Columbia. Good politics, bad engineering.
Then there is the question of the cost of the shuttles. You can count on NASA to ask for a few billion to build a replacement for Columbia. Why in the world does it cost billions to build a Shuttle, but only a few hundred millions for a 747? (Under the tiles a Shuttle isn't that much different from a small airliner.)
The answer is that there is a production line for the 747, but each shuttle is hand built. When congress was deciding to build the shuttles they looked at the cost of building a production line for space shuttles versus the cost of building the minimal amount of tooling and doing the work by hand. The numbers showed that if they had build a production line the incremental cost of building a shuttle would be around $450 million. About twice the cost of a 747, and well withing the price range of the Air Force and many commercial companies. In fact, it was stated that space shuttles would be sold to commercial operators.
For some reason congress decided to cap the number of space shuttles that could legally be built at a number one less than the number needed to justify building a production line. So, there are only 4 shuttles and no production facility to make spare parts or build new vehicles. No production facility to create commercial versions of the vehicle. And, no follow on improved vehicles. While the 747 has continued to evolve and improve over the last 20 years, the space shuttles have gone on nearly unchanged and unimproved.
The history of the shuttle is recorded in places like Aviation Week and the AIAA journal. Find a good library and read the coverage from the late '60s and early '70s while these decisions were being made.
Stonewolf
Believe it or not, everything you just said, except for the "load of..." part is covered and descriped by personality type theory. Over time, the normal progression of a personality is to learn to mimic, or actually develop, the skills of the opposite types. So, with age and experience techies start to understand feelies and vice versa. But it isn't ever perfect. It only gets better with age and experience. And not all people ever get past their original orientation. No matter how well I can act like a extrovert, and I do a good job of it, I still find it tiring and need time alone to recover from over exposure to people. I, of course, am and introvert.
In our current techie world, one in which you are considered to be over the hill at 35, the majority of technies never really have a chance to develop the skills demanded by the majority feelies. By the time you have a chance to develop the skills, you're having to learn to work as a fry cook.
A study I read recently measured the MBTIs of a large number of engineers in all fields. Then cross compared their yearly evaluations to their MBTI scores. They found a better than 90% correlation beteen an engineer being rated excellent, and having an MBTI of INTJ. INTJs make up roughly 1% of the population. Most people will go their entire lives without ever meeting one. And when they do they will find the person to be very odd. And yet, they are the population of top engineers in all fields.
The greatness of humanity is not in our sameness, but in our variety. It is through recognizing and appreciating the differences that we gain. But, if we don't recognize the differences we can't embrace them. If we belittle people for being different, we can never embrace the differences. The first step is admitting that the differences exist. The second is learning to value and respect the differences.
I have found MBTI to be a very valuable tool in dealing with people. Once I understood that the other preferences existed and what they meant, I found I could deal with people more effectively and understand where they were coming from. I'm an INTP, one of my dearest friends is an ESFJ. Before I learned to understand the differences and the value of the different preferences I would have considered her to be odd and annoying. Now, I have some understanding of her point of view and can communicate with her easily. And it works the other way too, now she understands what it means when I don't say anything, or just ask questions.
Pretending that everyone is the same, is as bad as belittling people for being different.
Stonewolf
The author got it almost exactly right. When you study the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) for techies you find that they are made up almost entirely of 4 types INTP, INTJ, ISTP, and ISTJ. nearly all the core software that runs the Internet was written by INTP and INTJ people. (In general INTs are more likely to like python or lisp while ISTs are more likely to like Perl.) NTs are concept oriented with STs are detail oriented.
INT*s make up about 2% of the population and IST*s make up about 10% of the population. The key is the IT in the type. "I" stands for Introverted and "T" stands for Thinking. The ITs make up only 12% of the population. The opposite types, the EF Extroverted Feeling folks, make up 36% of the population. The EF folks like to talk to people and make friends. The IT people like to learn things and make systems that work.
The result is that the people writing the code have a point of view that is shared by only a small minority of the population. While the largest subgroup of the population has a point of view that is exactly opposite of the techies.
Obviously the techies can not design for the "feelies". And, the "feelies" will not take the time to communicate with the techies. They write us off as "geeks" and "nerds" and belittle us every chance they get. While we tend to call them "air heads" and ignore them.
There really are two cultures. Until people on both sides of the divide understand that the divide exists and work to bridge it, we will keep seeing articles like this one.
Stonewolf
Columbia was the first shuttle to fly in space. The first shuttle to fly was the Enterprise, but it was used only for drop testing and was not capable of flying under rocket power or operating in space.
Because Columbia was the first fully operational shuttle it is by far the heaviest shuttle with the lowest payload. For that reason it was not flown much after the later shuttles were built. IIRC Columbia could not reach the altitude of the space station with any useful payload.
Columbia was originally built with ejection seats on the flight deck that were later removed.
During the first few flights of the Columbia NASA was very worried about the tiles coming off. They had developed a thing a lot like a caulking gun that could be used by an astronaut to fill in the gaps left by a lost tile. But, IIRC it was never flown. So, this is a problem that NASA has considered, and one for which they already had a potential solution more than 20 years ago.
On a personal note, I can think of no better way to die than to do it while following a dream. And not just a personal dream, but a dream that benefits all of humanity. They are heros not because they died, but because they dared.
Stonewolf
"NASA is the only agency that lies" that is a direct quotation from one of the many reports on the Challenger disaster. Now they have lost Columbia, and they still lie. They lied about what the shuttle could do and they lied about what it would cost. They even lied about how long it would take to build it. Since they built the shuttles they have lied about every new spacecraft project they have started. They gave specific costs and capability estimates for everyone and then failed to deliver EACH AND EVERY ONE OF THEM. And they used their lies to destroy every commercial attempt to build a competing system.
In the '60 when IBM took actions like that back in destroy their competition they were sued for antitrust violations and forced to change their behavior. But, NASA is a government agency that is hugely popular, even though it has wasted 100 of billions of dollars and lied about the waste.
When the US federal government wanted to help develop the aviation industry in the US they did two things. They create NACA, the forerunner of NASA to do research that private companies couldn't afford to do. The research was in part guided by the companies and the results of the research were made available to all companies equally. They also started offering competitive contracts to deliver mail by air. So, they created a way to research aeronautical problems so we could build better aircraft and they created an economic motivation for developing better and better aircraft. They did NOT develop their own air transport system. They build experimental planes, never production aircraft.
NASA was supposed to do research, they do some, but mostly they have built and jealously guard, a space transport monopoly. They actively work to create an economic disincentive to private space craft development. And, they guide their own research. They no long take guidance from industry on the problems that need to be solved because they have destroyed the industry they were meant to serve.
If we want space travel the first thing to do is shut down NASA now. Or, at least get them out of the business of building and operating a space transport system. I tell you this, they will use this disaster to try to take back the partial privatization that has already occurred. That must be stopped.
After NASA is out of the business then go back to using private companies to build and operate space ships. Put out a set of specs and let companies compete to meet the specs. You want a safe reliable way to get to and from the space station? Offer a transport contract and buy from whomever can fill the contract. The price will drop and the reliability will improve.
The X-prize is another model to follow. It has created more useful activity in a few years than we have seen from NASA since 1975. If we want to go to Mars, offer a Mars prize. Offer a billion dollar prize to the first group who reaches Mars with a crewed space ship and returns safely to earth. It might take 20 years, but someone will collect that prize.
If you are in favor of space travel, then NASA is not your friend NASA is your worst enemy. The saddest part is that they people at NASA are good well meaning well intentioned people who have no idea that they have as a group destroyed space travel. But, then "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". The road to space is over around or through NASA, not with NASA.
Nice to see that this bothers people who have detailed understanding of the physics.
Seems there are several problems unresolved questions here.
Is the black hole moving with a campanion star? Or, just skimming off some mass as it passes by? If it is actually moving *with* the companion star, what kept them together? Assuming a SN explosion accelerated the black hole to 400,00 kph, how did it drag along another star? Even if they were a close binary pair before the SN explosion, wouldn't the black hole now have system escape velocity?
Another question, how off balance does the explosion have to be to generate this kind of speed? If the explosion is 1% of balance, how much mass energy was released in the total explosion to get this speed? How do you get a SN explosion that is that off balance?
Could this pair have been accelerated by another mechanism such as a close pass to a tight binary star system? How tight would it have to be? What kind of stars (neutron, black holes...) to get a pair with enough energy to speed something up like that?
Like you said. this doesn't make sense.
Stonewolf
I take it that you are arguing FOR Windows?
Or are you telling us that you make so little and have so few deductions that you can file using 1040EZ?
I used to do that, then one year I was having a lot of trouble figuring out my taxes. So I took them to an accountant. After examining everything we filed ammended tax returns for as far back as we were legally able to and got back several thousand dollars that I had paid, but didn't owe.
I used the account for about 15 years until I tested some tax software and found that it was doing as well as the accountant. So, I swithched.
Only an idiot would do their taxes with pencil and paper. It takes an expert to file a US tax return.
Stonewolf
Why? What is wrong with the X license?
My desktop and my laptop all run GNU/Linux. But, I keep around one old machine with Windows 98. Why? Because once a year I need to do my taxes and the choice is to either have them done by an accountant, or have one machine that can run Windows. I can not find tax preperation software for Linux.
:-)
Oh, I suppose I might be able to find tax prep software for the Mac. And, when I'm rich enough to need the accountant I'll be rich enough to buy a Mac and that Rolls I've been wanting...
No, really, the Mac is not an option for me. Way to expensive. I can build 3 good PCs for the price of one Mac.
Seriously, Have have nothing against Macs, they're great. I just won't pay that much for a computer.
Stonewolf
But, the thing is that UNIX/Linux can no more afford to junk the X APIs than Microsoft can afford to junk the Window GUI APIs. All the software depends on them.
OTOH, over the last 15 years there have been several implementations of X that make the X server either part of OS or a special shared library that is directly callable. Both of the approaches give you a blazingly fast desktop, while preserving the X APIs. All this without having to give up the X protocol and the ability to run remote applications.
What I'm taking about is NOT the same as putting a GUI in the OS as Windows has done. The window manager, the desktop look and feel, the font server, these are stay out in user space. It *IS* the same as having a file system that lets you access your hardrive as files and directories rather than as tracks and sectors. It *IS* the same as using a file system to let many applications share the diskdrives. Only in this case you have a graphics system that lets you use and share the graphics hardware in a nice way. It is also similar to "tux" in the kernel. It was put in the kernel to proved a blazingly fast HTTP server, not because anyone thinks that every kernel needs an HTTP server built into it!
Make the X server a loadable module or add the hooks needed to create a multi-threaded, thread safe shared library, and get on with it. Kill this stupid problem now.
Stonewolf
Let me second that statement.
30 years of programming experience. Worked on international standards body (X consortium). Two degrees in CS. Web services experience. Network architectures. Corporate R&D. Business analysis. Long range forecasting.
In my last job as the company shrunk I was moved from a pure R&D/technical analysis job, to an architecture job, to a design job, to a coding job. And then they laid off all the coders and hired a company in India to do the coding work.
I can't even get a job at the local Junior College. They went broke because of the decline of the "tech sector" in this dear town. Best I've been able to find is the occasional testing job that pay about half what I made in the '80s.
The truth is that there are some very good people in India and China who will do the low level coding work work for very little money. And, in this market, no one is hiring people to do the kind of high level work I used to do. That is life, I have adapted to it. And I am.
Stonewolf
I just spent half an hour waiting on hold calling linksys tech support to be told that: No, they do not support Linux. There router will not work if you connect a computer to it running anything but Windows. And no, they will not tell me the commands needed to tftp the firmware to the router.
If you are a tired of this kind of treatment as I am... Please *call* Linksys and complain: http://www.linksys.com/contact/contact.asp
Stonewolf
And I owned a percentage of a small game company.
Here is why I think most games suck.
1) A great programmer can make a bad game playable, a poor programmer will make a great game suck. Too many gameprogrammer suck. But, then what do you expect from people who will put up with being treated the way producers treat game programmers? (Yeah, I used to be a game programmer so I know what I am talking about. I still have the scars.)
2) No planning. Everyone seems to think that the rules of normal project planning don't apply to games, so they change them and change them and finally ship something. You could save half the cost of all games by firing the designer after the game is designed and firing ANYONE who tries to change the design after production has started.
3) Design for you market. Game designers mostly design for other game designers. Real people mostly don't want them.
4) Make games that cost less. Me pay $50 for a game? Are you nuts?
5) Design for computers that people have. I will not buy a new computer to play a game, neither will most people.
6) You want me to spend how much time learning to play this game? I game is a diversion, like watching TV. I will not spend 2 hours learning to play the game and then spend 80 hours playing it.
7) No, I can't hit that combination of buttons in that order that fast. Which means I can't play your game, doesn't it. This is another case of game designers designing for other designers. Real people won't spend hours learning to do that and we don't brag about it at work.
8) Real people have lives. We like to spend some time playing games. But, games are not our life.
9) The computer game market would be 100 times bigger if games cost $10, took less than 5 minutes to learn, and could be replayed a few times. Think Tetras and Sim City, not Quake III.
Stonewolf
There is no technical reason to send an installer to install either DSL or a cable modem. It costs the cable company between $200 and $500 to send a truck to your house. Therefore, you have to conclude that the ONLY reason they sent him was so that he would install that software on your computer.
Most cable and DSL companies are doing everything they can to keep from having to roll a truck to do an install. So, you must conclude that getting that software on your machine is worth at least $300 a year to your cable company.
You have to assume that it is spyware of the worst sort.
Stonewolf
During the 1960s when there was no trade or diplomatic contact between the US and China and the Soviet Union, you could walk into a book store and by a copy of Mao's "Little Red Book." "On People's War," and everything ever written by Lenin... You could do that because in the US you have the right to read and talk about anything, even if it is offensive to someone.
.de and .fr sites than knuckle under to those fascist bastards.
It would be better to break off diplomatic relations and stop all trade with Germany and France, even the whole of the EU, than to allow even one page of material to be censored by those governments.
I would much prefer to see Google shut down their
Stonewolf
"Why are the Bells forced to lease out their DSL connectivity to other companies at below cost? Does this really spur investment? The reason that most people do not have access to DSL is that the Bells will NOT invest until they are allowed to compete against cable companies DIRECTLY"
The real question is why do YOU believe anything the Baby Bells say? They are not being required to lease lines below their costs. Never have been never will. The original rates were set so the Bells would make a profit. The Bells then cooked the accounting to make it look like they were losing money.
The Bells complain about their unfair treatment under the telecom act of 1996. Bull. They wrote the telecom act of 1996 and they agreed to everything in it before it was passed. The telecom act of 1996 was referred to in the press as the Telecom Welfare Act of 1996. It has many clauses in it that make it nearly impossible for anyone to compete with the Bells on traditional telephone and gives the Bells the opportunity to make huge profits. BUT, the world changed, the Internet happened, and those clauses started to hurt the Bells, so they started crying about it and lying about it and went back on the deal they negotiated.
Go back and look at what was being said in the middle '90s if you don't believe me.
Four years ago I had the experience of trying to explain Moore's law to a Bell executive. He was amazed by it. He was in charge of R&D for SBC and had never heard of Moore's law. He later got fired for destroying Prodigy.
Stonewolf
On the anniversary of September, 11
2001, I want to talk about the difference between the victims onboard
the first three airliners and the heroes onboard flight 93. What was
the difference? Why did the people on flight 93 fight back? Why did
the people on the other planes just sit and die?
The answer comes down to communication and how knowledge forced the
passengers to change their survival strategy. Everyone wants to
live. Until 9/11/01 the best known strategy for surviving an airline
hijacking was to sit in your seat, cooperate with the hijackers, and
wait it out. That strategy worked because until 9/11/01 hijackers were
trying to get hostages to trade for concessions and publicity. But,
that changed on 9/11/01. On that day the hijackers wanted airliners to
use as weapons. And, they counted on the passengers sitting in their
seats and being cooperative to allow the plan to work.
On flight 93, the passengers fought back. Why? Because they knew that
three other hijacked airliners had been used as weapons and everyone
on board them had died. When they knew they were onboard a weapon
their survival strategy changed and the scope of their survival
strategy also changed. Their choices no longer affected only their own
lives. Now, theei actions also affected the lives of hundreds or thousands
of people on the ground.
Given the choice of sitting quietly in their seats and waiting for
death or fighting and having a chance to live, they chose to fight for
their lives and the lives of the people on the ground. They knew that
if they won they would live and so would an unknown number of people
on the ground who were targeted by the weapon they were flying on. They
also knew that they could die and still save people on the ground. At
that point the correct thing to do, the moral thing to do, the action
that saved the most lives, was to fight. They fought.
We that given the same choice many people through
out history chose to do nothing and died as cowards and victims. Those
who chose to fight we deservedly call heroes.
But all that misses the whole point. The reason that the heroes of
flight 93 fought is that they knew they had to fight or die. They knew
because there was an air to ground phone on the back of the chair in
front of them and they used them to find out what was going on. It was
free, unregulated, communication that made the difference. It was that
basic freedom to communicate that let them know they needed to
fight. It was that same that let us know they did fight. It was their right to be
informed that let them become heroes.
As people who use the Internet, the most free and open communication
media every developed, we are honor bound to fight. To fight any
attempt to reduce the freedom to communicate. To fight to spread the
right of freedom of information and communication to everyone in the
world.
Flight 93 proved to the world that free people given accurate
knowledge of their situation will make heroic choices and take heroic
actions. Are we heroes who can make the same choices? Will we fight to
protect and extend the right to communicate that allowed the heroes of
flight 93 to become heroes?
I hope so. I believe so. Let's roll.
Stonewolf