I have to ask this, as it's perplexed me for a while - if the galaxy is about 125,000 light years across, when we look at the far reaches of the galaxy, we're looking way back in time at where they were *then*.
Do constructed photos like this one take into account that the features of the galaxy at that range from us have changed over that period of time? To phrase it another way, are we looking at the galaxy as it really is, with everything in the spots it would be in taking stellar motion into account, or are we looking at the galaxy as it appears to us with all that old light finally hitting the camera position?
Thinking about big distances makes my head hurt.
GMFTatsujin
Doesn't Sony make most of its PS2 cash on licensing permission to write games for the console? In this case then, it isn't alienating anyone except folks that paid for a game that's not licensed, the sales of which Sony sees not one red cent for.
You can't lose the same money twice, you know.
Tatsujin
Heaven knows, we wouldn't want to have to be beholden to Micro$oft (or any OTHER corporate interest) to keep the government functioning.
I mean, any more than we already are.
On the back end, look for and implement Open Source alternatives to data archival, transmission, and processing. Find ways to do the same thing that you're doing now, except that YOU'VE got the keys to the file format, encryption, etc.
In front of the constituency, tell them that you're putting their data back into the hands of people they've elected. They've had their information stolen out from under them, and had to pay for the priviledge. And they'll keep on paying, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
Tell them you're creating jobs here at home for all those IT students who graduated just in time for the big crunch. Tell them you're keeping those jobs here instead of sending them off to Redmund. Tell them those locals who put so much time and effort into getting a CS degree will soon be hard at work building a strong data infrastructure for the community.
Tell them that culpability has returned to city hall, and is no longer waiting on hold with tech support.
Tell them that.
GMFTatsujin
Re:Oooh! Apples are *trendy*! ...yawn.
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New iMac Announced
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· Score: 1
Some people buy a toaster so they can pull it apart, supercharge the heating coils, chop the power cable and set up a microwave power relay, and polish the chrome until they can count their pores in it.
Other people just want toast.
Re:Has everyone forgotten the Dec 25 Birthday?
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Christmas is Coming
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· Score: 1
This is precisely what Disney CEO Michael Eisner, in a speech to Congress in summer of 2000, was referring to when he warned of "the perilous irony of the digital age."
I don't know about you guys, this this an awful lot like another "This is what x was referring to when he warned of y" statement...
Let x = Truman, let y = Rise of the Industrial/Military Complex.
TOTALLY Seconded. Independence War was a fantastic game, and while the software rendering was alright, the 3Dfx was incredibly nice. Sadly, I have yet to find a Glide wrapper that will handle the game, too - something about weird texture compression, I think.
The problem is that, let's face it guys, they're not making better cards to run the *old* games on...
I worked for UPS for 3 years on what they called (at the time, anyway) the charge line.
The idea was this: Myself and three other guys stood in at the bottom of a big metal slide about 30 feet wide. At the top of the slide was a conveyer belt that brought packages and such in from the huge 18-wheeler trucks that would pull in non-stop, all night, every night.
Behind us was a *huge* rotating caddy of metal bins stacked three layers deep, which ran about the length of a football field. All the bins were color-coded to stand for the group of UPS trucks they were headed for. The UPS trucks would back up to the rotating caddy thing, and the loaders would pull packages out of the rotating crate caddy and puad them into the trucks.
As charagers, it was our job to grab packages off the slide after the diverter pushed them down. We would look at the address, and with our incredible mental databases of how streets and addresses were layed out in the city, we would put the package into the correct color-coded crate in the rotating caddy behind us.
Here's the best part: to keep the packages from piling up on one side of the slide, there was a big metal hydraulic swinging arm at the top between the slide and the conveyer belt. As packages came down the belt, the arm would periodically direct them to one part of the slide or the other.
We used to call the arm "the Crushinator." When we chargers got backed up and the package traffic kept coming in, the supervisor on the floor would almost never allow us to stop the conveyer belt so that we could clear off the slide and make room for the packages. The Crushinator would dutifully cycle through its various positions as packages backed up on the slide, and it mangled the crap out of anything in its way.
You can blame the box-slingers if you like, but I saw that metal monster chew on boxes way more often than I ever saw any organic meatsack lose his or her temper and take it out on cardboard. Honestly, folks - it's not as satisfying as you think.
I blame the amount of traffic that we were called upon to move with too much automation and not enough brains directing the traffic. I especially blame the floor supervisors, whose solution to clearing up a traffic jam was to pour more traffic in. The kinds of timing involved with moving boxes from one place to another is more of an art than a science, it seems, but it all depends on keeping those packages in motion at all times to make room for the next one. Keeping the various levels of movement in sync was a complex juggling act, and I'm glad I never had to figure out the schedules. It was ludicrous.
Don't even get me started on the bizarre kinds of packages we had to deal with -- 50 lbs. of preserved bull semen... yuck.
And yeah, I have to say it - your dad was the asshole. But that's a whole nuther rant.
Occasionally I hear talk about creating a Linux-based/GPL/Open Source/whatever TIVO equivilent. For all you programmers who are working on this, I've got an idea for you:
Create a database of all known TV Station watermark logos.
Create a routine to *detect* those logos during playback.
Enable an option to only show video frames which contain those logos, thus filtering out commercials with uncanny precision.
Blur the crap out of those logos with colors from the surrounding pixels, so we don't have to look at 'em.
Instead of having a subscription model that keeps your TV Guide up to date and sends back information on what the viewer is watching, use instead a subscription model that, every so often, updates the database of TV Station icons. This way, if the networks catch on, we got 'em stumped.
Another poster brought up the notion of archiving TV shows to CD. Personally, I see this as time-shifting for my children, so that when they're old enough to understand decent TV (I'm thinking Samurai Jack and West Wing), it will be available. I'm also not counting on the quality of our shows getting better from a writing and aesthetic viewpoint just because HDTV is around the corner, or that the shows I like will be released on DVD.
Anyway. For those of us who like to burn our own VCDs, publicly-available authoring tools like VCDImagerGUI and TMPGEnc have downloadable filters that can blot out those pesky station ID logos from captured footage, or replace them with interpolated video data that doesn't totally suck to look at. Check out VCDHelp.com for lots of useful information on capturing, converting, and authoring VCDs, and where to get the tools to do it.
I've been purchasing AMDs ever since I breached the 200MHz barrier. I absolutely love them, but yes, there are quirks in the chipsets you have to be aware of. Especially the VIA chipsets - yuck.
Imagine my surprise when I had to purchase a new sound card because of conflicts with the video card, which only existed in VIA systems! Installing that 4-in-1 IRQ routing driver crap is no fun either. Also, I've had to rebuild my system a couple of times because the motherboard resources unexpectedly shift assignments on Windows somewhere, and cause IRQ conflicts all over the place. On jumperless PnP systems no less.
It's a lot like balancing an elephant on the head of a pin. On the other hand, when everything is worked out and in place, the system works great, and I see the improvements in internal streamlined archetecture win out over the GHTz mythos. The problem of stability then shifts over to the OS, and as another poster already mentioned, Windows seems to happily and flawlessly execute the Random Crash Instruction Set in any hardware environment.
AMD is for people who have a passing interest in mucking about with hardware, and as far as I remember, they've never denied that fact. In fact, you almost have to be a hardware monkey to use AMD, since Intel in overwhelmingly favored by the Big Names That Build Computers. The benefits of being a hardware monkey are worth it, and, speaking just for myself, I've learned a lot. I feel much more comfortable buying parts to make and upgrade my own machine than I do trying to figure out what's Dell or Gateway decided to put in their systems this week. Plus, I've got 24-hour tech support, right inside my head.:)
I for one endorse this view whole-heartedly. Lock them down. Tight. Put the screws to the developer's computers.
I mean, every developer complains that the reason their software package is considered "buggy" is because they can't code for every possible configuration of computer out there, right? If only there were some way of making sure that all the PCs out there would behave the same way toward the code...
So here's your solution, folks: Develop in a locked-down environment... then import the developer's locked-down registry configuration as part of the application's install on the user's PC.
It'll work like a charm, almost like it was a custom job or something. And hey, AFAIK there's no software license out there that says the software is guaranteed not to screw up other, pre-existing software on the machine...
Otherwise, Windows XP would never have made it out the door.
Tatsujin
I don't know how difficult it could possibly be to figure out the functionality of the right-click.... I remember the first time >Iread what was inside it. I clicked on one of the entires and noticed what happened. Possessed of a monkey-like curiousity, I right-clicked on everything in sight until I understood the pattern.
What a freakin' genius I am, right?
People need to have the confidence to fuck around with their computers more. Do things you've never done before. Assume that everything you see on the screen and every peripheral on your desk has a useful purpose, is designed to help you be productive, and that some programmer somewhere put it there with the full expectation that, eventually, you'd click it. Assume that YOU WON'T BE PUNISHED FOR TRYING SOMETHING OUT. Assume that the self-destruct button will be clearly labeled, and you can avoid it if you come across it. Ever wonder what that widget on the screen does? Click it and find out, Einstein.
Every time I teach a GroupWise class, I point out the right-click functionality of Windows, and nipples all over the room become erect with excitement. Maybe it's just my style.
Tatsujin
Re:It all seemed so clear the first time through..
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Brian West Update
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Yes im sure that this would prove that and if you got my password list i would resign from my company - thats proffeisonalism (although as i run a secured netWrk with 2 firewalls and a DMz server between the internet and all of my secured domain servers (with pin security access for remote logon and mail access only at that point - it would be a fucking good hacker (you aint he) who could manage it - and we have paid to have it tested - i would probably hire anyone who could do it in fact !)
You may be a crackerjack sysadmin, but you'd make a shitty programmer - failure to close nested perens.
Tatsujin
Hot chick: Well, at least they got one thing right. Ever since Councelor Troi, this has been an absolute must. Voyager got it right in the second half of their run with Seven. At least they were able to keep some of my attention off the storyline and on the Jolene Blalock.
Ever since TROI???
Uhura had it GOIN' ON, baby. All the way live. Plus she flashed her panties out from under that li'l ol' Starfleet microskirt all the damn time.
Come to me, my luscious nubian princess...
Tatsujin
Phil Zimmerman, the Big Brain behind the popular home PC encryption tool, Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), is taking flak for enabling the infrastructure used by the terrorists behind the WTC attack.
I think the argument is supposed to be something along these lines: Without publicly available, tough-to-crack encryption, the terrorists would never have been able to communicate effectively to orchestrate their dastardly plot. Mr. Zimmerman brought this technology to the masses, and was a strong proponent of easing restrictions on the dissemination of that self-same technology. That technology eventually made it into the hands of the Bad Guys, and now we see the results.
I've got to resist the urge to compare encryption tech to a weapon. "Where's the outrage against Smith and Wesson!" I would shout at the top of my lungs. "What about Molitov, or Winchester? Who should be rolling over in their graves?"
Those questions are just as easily directed against Boeing and Lockheed-Martin though. After all, those guys made the weapons used. And of course, the aerospace industry IS taking a lot of flak.
But I've got to break away from that mindset.
Encryption is not a weapon in and of itself. Zimmerman was concerned - rightly, I think - that the increasing pace of technology, snooptech included, threatened the privacy of the common man. It threatened the ideals of the U.S. Constitution. It threatened to aid in the creation of a police state. That's what he was fighting against.
Encryption was a stand against the encroaching invasion of civil liberty. It was a tool for ensuring freedoms - the freedom to speak, the freedom to communicate securely, and the freedom to conduct business. Many of Zimmerman's methods derived from, and are enchancements on, commerce transaction security technologies. Had your credit card number lifted lately? I have, and it's no fun.
Encryption was a method of keeping the law honest, of maintaining the spirit of the law in a time when the law had no words to use. Remember, PGP came about during the birth of the publicly-available Internet (has it only been 6 years?). The Internet was, and still is, a new medium of interaction, with borders and behaviors outside of the well-established Way of Doing Things that the laws were written for. We have laws for public gatherings. We have laws for telephone conversations. We have laws for sending mail and packages around the country and the world. We didn't have anything for the Internet, because it works like all of those at once, and more besides.
Metaphors of all kinds popped up to describe the way the Internet worked - it's a telephone conversation, it's a society unto itself, it's a giant hard drive where everyone has access, it's a division of autocracies where No Man Is King - but none of those metaphors were 100% legally applicable to the actual situation of the Internet. Without adaquate descriptions of the legal state of the Internet, the Internet HAD NO legal state - and thus was open to anarchy from all vectors, including that of the methods of law enforcement, and whether the law was even allowed to enforce anything.
Anarchy in the methods of law enforcement. Think about that for a minute.
A while back on this board, there was a big debate over the appropriateness of the 2nd Amendment, specifically the Right to Bear Arms. Over and over, the point was brought up that guns don't kill people, people kill people.
There are ways of organizing a conspiracy without relying on high technology. It's been done over and over, successfully, for at least 6000 years. Ask Brutus, or whoever shot Kennedy, or Judah.
Tools that build up can be used to tear down. It's an unfortunate reality of the bidirectional parity of things. I'd like to thank Phil for giving us a tool that enhanced our meaning of civilization, and encouraged questions about it.
So you know how software prices go up and up in a pre-emptive attempt to recover costs from piracy? Ditto for tapes, CDs and DVDs?
Is there a similar situation in the pharmacutical market? I mean, yeah, it's not as easy as downloading a copy of deViagra, burning the pill onto a cd and distributing it through Napster...
I guess my point is, does the pharmacutical industry assume that somebody, somewhere is going to reverse engineer their Secret Sauce(tm) and start mass-producing knockoffs? In short, is the free AIDS drug in Brazil raising prices everywhere else to make up for the lost profit?
Or could it perhaps drive the price *down*, as an incentive for the folks who only skirt the edge of the law to pay what could be seen as a more reasonable price?
Well, IR had it's good points, and it's bad points.
One of the good points, especially from the poor student POV, is that IR didn't require purchasing new hardware. Every PDA out there in the Palm/WinCE class has IR built right in. And they all talk to each other (with a nifty translator for Palm-to-WinCE transfers). Nice.
Personally, I love IR beaming. Nifty applications, interesting data, meeting outlines, whatever. Beam, beam, beam. I can handle standing like a statue for a couple of seconds if it means I don't have to wrangle cords around.
At Our Local University Library we've got IR pucks stationed about the place, and nobody's complained yet. Plus, using the networked IR puck model lets us keep Palm data in a central spot, providing easy backups, security (go ahead, listen in on my IR beam when I need LOS to do it and the signal only goes about 10 meters anyway. I dares ya), and accessability from anywhere with a puck.
Bad point: IR pucks (all the ones I've seen anyway) only support one user at a time, unless you had multiple pucks. You had to line up in a queue to do a hotsync over the network, and by the time you got there, is was probably easier to just find a desktop and do it from there. I don't know if the same problem exists in Bluetooth, but 802.11b handles multiple users just fine.
IR, however much it may limit operability compared to 802.11b (I can't check my e-mail in the toilet - boo hoo), does provide a lot of freedom. And you don't have to worry about cell phones and whatnot stepping on your bandwidth.
There's still the issue of power to be addressed. I've got a Visor Prism (which, yay! recharges off the cradle) but plugging a wireless ethernet module into it drops the battery lifetime from all day to about 30 minutes. ZzzzhOOP!
Also, I'm curious as to how much use folks actually get out of having wireless ethernet. I mean, what do you use it for on a moment-to-moment basis? I'm not what you'd call a power user but I know my way around - I can't think of anything I do with my Visor that requires up-to-the-second connectivity. Your mileage may vary, of course. I suppose if you're doing some kind of live database operation it would help, but how many of us are in that boat?
Browse the web on a hand-held, though? Ick. Even on my 21" monitor, most web pages are a cluttered, garbled mess - Certainly that's a design issue that can be reconciled by clever webmasters, but I NEED all that real estate to get around. I can't imagine trying to squish all that (or even selected bits of it, thank you, clipping) down to the size of an index card. Rather, I can, but I typically wake up in a feotal position a few minutes later.
Also I worry about evil hackers using wireless technology to beam cancer into my brain.
Tatsujin
Yes, and I'm sure they kept their top-secret cancer research buried stenographically in their Brittany Spears nudie-mockup JPGs. Hey, that's a lot of documentation; Of COURSE they need a couple GBs worth...
Let's not forget file trading resources like Napster, Gnutella, and whatever's hot today to secretly transmit stenographed MP3s between sneaky executives...
... of course, we all know they'd get better quality encryption with Ogg-Vorbis.
Slashdot Mirror
"Stonage." Heh.
"Certain Chemicals." Heh.
Have you ever looked at your hands, man? I mean, *really* looked at your hands...
GMFTatsujin
I have to ask this, as it's perplexed me for a while - if the galaxy is about 125,000 light years across, when we look at the far reaches of the galaxy, we're looking way back in time at where they were *then*.
Do constructed photos like this one take into account that the features of the galaxy at that range from us have changed over that period of time? To phrase it another way, are we looking at the galaxy as it really is, with everything in the spots it would be in taking stellar motion into account, or are we looking at the galaxy as it appears to us with all that old light finally hitting the camera position?
Thinking about big distances makes my head hurt.
GMFTatsujin
Doesn't Sony make most of its PS2 cash on licensing permission to write games for the console? In this case then, it isn't alienating anyone except folks that paid for a game that's not licensed, the sales of which Sony sees not one red cent for.
You can't lose the same money twice, you know.
Tatsujin
I drop my organizer all the time, and I don't have to fold up a company to pay for the replacement...
Tatsujin
Heaven knows, we wouldn't want to have to be beholden to Micro$oft (or any OTHER corporate interest) to keep the government functioning.
I mean, any more than we already are.
On the back end, look for and implement Open Source alternatives to data archival, transmission, and processing. Find ways to do the same thing that you're doing now, except that YOU'VE got the keys to the file format, encryption, etc.
In front of the constituency, tell them that you're putting their data back into the hands of people they've elected. They've had their information stolen out from under them, and had to pay for the priviledge. And they'll keep on paying, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
Tell them you're creating jobs here at home for all those IT students who graduated just in time for the big crunch. Tell them you're keeping those jobs here instead of sending them off to Redmund. Tell them those locals who put so much time and effort into getting a CS degree will soon be hard at work building a strong data infrastructure for the community.
Tell them that culpability has returned to city hall, and is no longer waiting on hold with tech support.
Tell them that.
GMFTatsujin
Some people buy a toaster so they can pull it apart, supercharge the heating coils, chop the power cable and set up a microwave power relay, and polish the chrome until they can count their pores in it.
Other people just want toast.
Happy birthday, Sir Isaac Newton!
Tatsujin
I don't know about you guys, this this an awful lot like another "This is what x was referring to when he warned of y" statement...
Let x = Truman, let y = Rise of the Industrial/Military Complex.
Tatsujin
Maybe AOL pushed their marketing campaign in Florida...
Wow... I can't seem to get away from metamodding. Seems like every day, "Have you metamodded lately?" Yup. Sure did.
But yes, Zero, I personally have it out for you.
Stay in view, please.
Tatsujin
TOTALLY Seconded. Independence War was a fantastic game, and while the software rendering was alright, the 3Dfx was incredibly nice. Sadly, I have yet to find a Glide wrapper that will handle the game, too - something about weird texture compression, I think.
The problem is that, let's face it guys, they're not making better cards to run the *old* games on...
Tatsujin
I worked for UPS for 3 years on what they called (at the time, anyway) the charge line.
The idea was this: Myself and three other guys stood in at the bottom of a big metal slide about 30 feet wide. At the top of the slide was a conveyer belt that brought packages and such in from the huge 18-wheeler trucks that would pull in non-stop, all night, every night.
Behind us was a *huge* rotating caddy of metal bins stacked three layers deep, which ran about the length of a football field. All the bins were color-coded to stand for the group of UPS trucks they were headed for. The UPS trucks would back up to the rotating caddy thing, and the loaders would pull packages out of the rotating crate caddy and puad them into the trucks.
As charagers, it was our job to grab packages off the slide after the diverter pushed them down. We would look at the address, and with our incredible mental databases of how streets and addresses were layed out in the city, we would put the package into the correct color-coded crate in the rotating caddy behind us.
Here's the best part: to keep the packages from piling up on one side of the slide, there was a big metal hydraulic swinging arm at the top between the slide and the conveyer belt. As packages came down the belt, the arm would periodically direct them to one part of the slide or the other.
We used to call the arm "the Crushinator." When we chargers got backed up and the package traffic kept coming in, the supervisor on the floor would almost never allow us to stop the conveyer belt so that we could clear off the slide and make room for the packages. The Crushinator would dutifully cycle through its various positions as packages backed up on the slide, and it mangled the crap out of anything in its way.
You can blame the box-slingers if you like, but I saw that metal monster chew on boxes way more often than I ever saw any organic meatsack lose his or her temper and take it out on cardboard. Honestly, folks - it's not as satisfying as you think.
I blame the amount of traffic that we were called upon to move with too much automation and not enough brains directing the traffic. I especially blame the floor supervisors, whose solution to clearing up a traffic jam was to pour more traffic in. The kinds of timing involved with moving boxes from one place to another is more of an art than a science, it seems, but it all depends on keeping those packages in motion at all times to make room for the next one. Keeping the various levels of movement in sync was a complex juggling act, and I'm glad I never had to figure out the schedules. It was ludicrous.
Don't even get me started on the bizarre kinds of packages we had to deal with -- 50 lbs. of preserved bull semen... yuck.
And yeah, I have to say it - your dad was the asshole. But that's a whole nuther rant.
Tatsujin
Occasionally I hear talk about creating a Linux-based/GPL/Open Source/whatever TIVO equivilent. For all you programmers who are working on this, I've got an idea for you:
Another poster brought up the notion of archiving TV shows to CD. Personally, I see this as time-shifting for my children, so that when they're old enough to understand decent TV (I'm thinking Samurai Jack and West Wing), it will be available. I'm also not counting on the quality of our shows getting better from a writing and aesthetic viewpoint just because HDTV is around the corner, or that the shows I like will be released on DVD.
Anyway. For those of us who like to burn our own VCDs, publicly-available authoring tools like VCDImagerGUI and TMPGEnc have downloadable filters that can blot out those pesky station ID logos from captured footage, or replace them with interpolated video data that doesn't totally suck to look at. Check out VCDHelp.com for lots of useful information on capturing, converting, and authoring VCDs, and where to get the tools to do it.
Tatsujin
I've been purchasing AMDs ever since I breached the 200MHz barrier. I absolutely love them, but yes, there are quirks in the chipsets you have to be aware of. Especially the VIA chipsets - yuck.
:)
Imagine my surprise when I had to purchase a new sound card because of conflicts with the video card, which only existed in VIA systems! Installing that 4-in-1 IRQ routing driver crap is no fun either. Also, I've had to rebuild my system a couple of times because the motherboard resources unexpectedly shift assignments on Windows somewhere, and cause IRQ conflicts all over the place. On jumperless PnP systems no less.
It's a lot like balancing an elephant on the head of a pin. On the other hand, when everything is worked out and in place, the system works great, and I see the improvements in internal streamlined archetecture win out over the GHTz mythos. The problem of stability then shifts over to the OS, and as another poster already mentioned, Windows seems to happily and flawlessly execute the Random Crash Instruction Set in any hardware environment.
AMD is for people who have a passing interest in mucking about with hardware, and as far as I remember, they've never denied that fact. In fact, you almost have to be a hardware monkey to use AMD, since Intel in overwhelmingly favored by the Big Names That Build Computers. The benefits of being a hardware monkey are worth it, and, speaking just for myself, I've learned a lot. I feel much more comfortable buying parts to make and upgrade my own machine than I do trying to figure out what's Dell or Gateway decided to put in their systems this week. Plus, I've got 24-hour tech support, right inside my head.
Tatsujin
I for one endorse this view whole-heartedly. Lock them down. Tight. Put the screws to the developer's computers.
I mean, every developer complains that the reason their software package is considered "buggy" is because they can't code for every possible configuration of computer out there, right? If only there were some way of making sure that all the PCs out there would behave the same way toward the code...
So here's your solution, folks: Develop in a locked-down environment... then import the developer's locked-down registry configuration as part of the application's install on the user's PC.
It'll work like a charm, almost like it was a custom job or something. And hey, AFAIK there's no software license out there that says the software is guaranteed not to screw up other, pre-existing software on the machine...
Otherwise, Windows XP would never have made it out the door.
Tatsujin
... So, what exciting content am I missing out on, exactly? Advertisements for XP, maybe?
Let 'em keep their site locked up. They're under no compunction to let me see what they're doing anyway.
I don't know how difficult it could possibly be to figure out the functionality of the right-click.... I remember the first time >Iread what was inside it. I clicked on one of the entires and noticed what happened. Possessed of a monkey-like curiousity, I right-clicked on everything in sight until I understood the pattern.
What a freakin' genius I am, right?
People need to have the confidence to fuck around with their computers more. Do things you've never done before. Assume that everything you see on the screen and every peripheral on your desk has a useful purpose, is designed to help you be productive, and that some programmer somewhere put it there with the full expectation that, eventually, you'd click it. Assume that YOU WON'T BE PUNISHED FOR TRYING SOMETHING OUT. Assume that the self-destruct button will be clearly labeled, and you can avoid it if you come across it. Ever wonder what that widget on the screen does? Click it and find out, Einstein.
Every time I teach a GroupWise class, I point out the right-click functionality of Windows, and nipples all over the room become erect with excitement. Maybe it's just my style.
Tatsujin
You may be a crackerjack sysadmin, but you'd make a shitty programmer - failure to close nested perens.
Tatsujin
Ever since TROI???
Uhura had it GOIN' ON, baby. All the way live. Plus she flashed her panties out from under that li'l ol' Starfleet microskirt all the damn time.
Come to me, my luscious nubian princess...
Tatsujin
Phil Zimmerman, the Big Brain behind the popular home PC encryption tool, Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), is taking flak for enabling the infrastructure used by the terrorists behind the WTC attack.
I think the argument is supposed to be something along these lines: Without publicly available, tough-to-crack encryption, the terrorists would never have been able to communicate effectively to orchestrate their dastardly plot. Mr. Zimmerman brought this technology to the masses, and was a strong proponent of easing restrictions on the dissemination of that self-same technology. That technology eventually made it into the hands of the Bad Guys, and now we see the results.
I've got to resist the urge to compare encryption tech to a weapon. "Where's the outrage against Smith and Wesson!" I would shout at the top of my lungs. "What about Molitov, or Winchester? Who should be rolling over in their graves?"
Those questions are just as easily directed against Boeing and Lockheed-Martin though. After all, those guys made the weapons used. And of course, the aerospace industry IS taking a lot of flak.
But I've got to break away from that mindset.
Encryption is not a weapon in and of itself. Zimmerman was concerned - rightly, I think - that the increasing pace of technology, snooptech included, threatened the privacy of the common man. It threatened the ideals of the U.S. Constitution. It threatened to aid in the creation of a police state. That's what he was fighting against.
Encryption was a stand against the encroaching invasion of civil liberty. It was a tool for ensuring freedoms - the freedom to speak, the freedom to communicate securely, and the freedom to conduct business. Many of Zimmerman's methods derived from, and are enchancements on, commerce transaction security technologies. Had your credit card number lifted lately? I have, and it's no fun.
Encryption was a method of keeping the law honest, of maintaining the spirit of the law in a time when the law had no words to use. Remember, PGP came about during the birth of the publicly-available Internet (has it only been 6 years?). The Internet was, and still is, a new medium of interaction, with borders and behaviors outside of the well-established Way of Doing Things that the laws were written for. We have laws for public gatherings. We have laws for telephone conversations. We have laws for sending mail and packages around the country and the world. We didn't have anything for the Internet, because it works like all of those at once, and more besides.
Metaphors of all kinds popped up to describe the way the Internet worked - it's a telephone conversation, it's a society unto itself, it's a giant hard drive where everyone has access, it's a division of autocracies where No Man Is King - but none of those metaphors were 100% legally applicable to the actual situation of the Internet. Without adaquate descriptions of the legal state of the Internet, the Internet HAD NO legal state - and thus was open to anarchy from all vectors, including that of the methods of law enforcement, and whether the law was even allowed to enforce anything.
Anarchy in the methods of law enforcement. Think about that for a minute.
A while back on this board, there was a big debate over the appropriateness of the 2nd Amendment, specifically the Right to Bear Arms. Over and over, the point was brought up that guns don't kill people, people kill people.
There are ways of organizing a conspiracy without relying on high technology. It's been done over and over, successfully, for at least 6000 years. Ask Brutus, or whoever shot Kennedy, or Judah.
Tools that build up can be used to tear down. It's an unfortunate reality of the bidirectional parity of things. I'd like to thank Phil for giving us a tool that enhanced our meaning of civilization, and encouraged questions about it.
Tatsujin
So you know how software prices go up and up in a pre-emptive attempt to recover costs from piracy? Ditto for tapes, CDs and DVDs?
Is there a similar situation in the pharmacutical market? I mean, yeah, it's not as easy as downloading a copy of deViagra, burning the pill onto a cd and distributing it through Napster...
I guess my point is, does the pharmacutical industry assume that somebody, somewhere is going to reverse engineer their Secret Sauce(tm) and start mass-producing knockoffs? In short, is the free AIDS drug in Brazil raising prices everywhere else to make up for the lost profit?
Or could it perhaps drive the price *down*, as an incentive for the folks who only skirt the edge of the law to pay what could be seen as a more reasonable price?
Hmm.
Tatsujin
Well, IR had it's good points, and it's bad points.
One of the good points, especially from the poor student POV, is that IR didn't require purchasing new hardware. Every PDA out there in the Palm/WinCE class has IR built right in. And they all talk to each other (with a nifty translator for Palm-to-WinCE transfers). Nice.
Personally, I love IR beaming. Nifty applications, interesting data, meeting outlines, whatever. Beam, beam, beam. I can handle standing like a statue for a couple of seconds if it means I don't have to wrangle cords around.
At Our Local University Library we've got IR pucks stationed about the place, and nobody's complained yet. Plus, using the networked IR puck model lets us keep Palm data in a central spot, providing easy backups, security (go ahead, listen in on my IR beam when I need LOS to do it and the signal only goes about 10 meters anyway. I dares ya), and accessability from anywhere with a puck.
Bad point: IR pucks (all the ones I've seen anyway) only support one user at a time, unless you had multiple pucks. You had to line up in a queue to do a hotsync over the network, and by the time you got there, is was probably easier to just find a desktop and do it from there. I don't know if the same problem exists in Bluetooth, but 802.11b handles multiple users just fine.
IR, however much it may limit operability compared to 802.11b (I can't check my e-mail in the toilet - boo hoo), does provide a lot of freedom. And you don't have to worry about cell phones and whatnot stepping on your bandwidth.
For what it's worth,
Tatsujin
There's still the issue of power to be addressed. I've got a Visor Prism (which, yay! recharges off the cradle) but plugging a wireless ethernet module into it drops the battery lifetime from all day to about 30 minutes. ZzzzhOOP!
Also, I'm curious as to how much use folks actually get out of having wireless ethernet. I mean, what do you use it for on a moment-to-moment basis? I'm not what you'd call a power user but I know my way around - I can't think of anything I do with my Visor that requires up-to-the-second connectivity. Your mileage may vary, of course. I suppose if you're doing some kind of live database operation it would help, but how many of us are in that boat?
Browse the web on a hand-held, though? Ick. Even on my 21" monitor, most web pages are a cluttered, garbled mess - Certainly that's a design issue that can be reconciled by clever webmasters, but I NEED all that real estate to get around. I can't imagine trying to squish all that (or even selected bits of it, thank you, clipping) down to the size of an index card. Rather, I can, but I typically wake up in a feotal position a few minutes later.
Also I worry about evil hackers using wireless technology to beam cancer into my brain.
Tatsujin
Yes, and I'm sure they kept their top-secret cancer research buried stenographically in their Brittany Spears nudie-mockup JPGs. Hey, that's a lot of documentation; Of COURSE they need a couple GBs worth...
Let's not forget file trading resources like Napster, Gnutella, and whatever's hot today to secretly transmit stenographed MP3s between sneaky executives...
... of course, we all know they'd get better quality encryption with Ogg-Vorbis.
Tatsujin
Fine. Let's fix this right now.
*Ahem*
I declare that the encryption is breakable, but I won't tell you how. I'm sure somebody will think of it eventually and release it to the world.
Happy? Now I'm an accomplice. Come get me, you DMCA club-wielding, slope-browed thugs!
I swear, you freakin' Chicken Littles are giving me gas.
Tatsujin