You are assuming a 4 digit numeric PIN and no detection of three repeated failures resulting in a timed lockout of 15 minutes, a la car radios. I've simplified things a bit and the card does more than this, but the technical details for the interested are upto 8 characters presented to the WOM and hashed prior to storage/comparison (ie. 64 bits; 2^64 permutations.) Plus the lockout. That equates to 2^64/12 hours to try every combination which is just a little more daunting.
If you got hold of a card (and had the resources) you could still read and brute force the hash of course, or force a valid response at the appropriate point. However, that leaves the physical problem of reassembly of an IC with onboard EEPROM, and even if the card can still be made to fit into the readers it's probably going to be unreadable. All of which needs to be done before the card is cancelled. Quite an elegant solution for those "ultra-paranoid locations" really.;)
There are indeed, everyone thinks it's a joke because of the April 1st article above, but they do indeed exist, although I've not seen an example on a debit card, I can seen how it could work.
For the sceptics, yes there is an output, it's usually just a bit flag; yes or no, there is no way of reading the actual contents of the WOM. The setup I've seen is an IC, that presents to the outside world two write only blocks of memory, one permanantly stores a PIN, the other is used to input the user keyed PIN. The IC compares the two and sets a single bit output high or low depending upon whether the values match or not. The crux is, short of decoding the circuits within the IC, there is no way of retrieving the PIN from a stolen card - there os ready equivalent of/etc/passwd that can be easily read and bruteforced; it's more akin to a shadow password system for PINs.
Physically threatening the owner of the PIN is another issue, or course.;)
Hopefully none of the above, as such. It seems like an ideal moment to build a fully LSB compliant distro to me - anything else is a missed opportunity. I'm guessing it'll be primarily Connectiva's purdy icons and SuSE's customised config tools though.
Yeah, I even thought the LGPL wasn't that bad. Question 8 proved me wrong.
Question 8 got me too, although I did a lot better than I expected since I'm not really involved in releasing or distributing code and tend to prefer BSD style licensing anyway. I had thought that this issue was precisely what the Lesser GPL was supposed to solve though, all this seemed to do for me was raise the point that maybe Microsoft has a valid arguement.
I mean, suppose that I have a proprietary program running on Windows and commercial *NIXs that I want to be able to offer on Linux, but need to ensure that the code is not freely available for business reasons - it would give competitors an advantage for example. According to Question 8, if I so much as link against an LGPL library then my code is open to reverse engineering and my competitors will effectively have full access to my algorithms. Under those circumstances there is no way I am going to be able to offer my application under Linux without an awful lot of reinventing the wheel.
I may be mis-interpreting this, but it seems to me that the LGPL as stands would actually prevent commercial back-room applications, such as SAP for example, from being ported to Linux. Can anyone who understands the LGPL better than I shed some light on this, because this does not seem like a "good thing" to me.
True, Real Names is providing the Asian ISPs with resolution of Unicode hostnames to IPs, yet when Real Names dodgy business model starts to fall apart what do the ISPs do? Pay Real Names to maintain their service for them and keep them afloat? Form a group to develop their own equivalent service? No. They clamp their wallets shut and attempt to lay all the blame at Microsoft's door. If Asian loses it's Unicode DNS it's the fault of the ISPs, not Real Names and certainly not Microsoft.
As always, the real losers are the naive users who paid up the cash in the first place thinking they were onto a good thing.
There was a similar discussion here on/. not so long ago, and one post from it stuck in my mind as being perhaps the most worthy +5 post I'd read for a *long* time.
Basically someone had been going through code and found an entire subroutine commented out with the rider "This doesn't work". The original poster went on to say (s)he'd initially missed the point and thought the commenter was dumb, until the penny dropped - this would be a massive time saver if someone else thought of the same routine.
I have to admit, I'm not sure if this commenting practice would have occured to me - until I read this I'd always deleted broken code. It's definately something to bear in mind next to you waste a few hours working on a flawed algorithm.
..this article at Empire Online indicates that the Original Trilogy DVDs are still some way off. Mainly so that Lucas can do more fiddling with the trilogy, including shooting brand new footage. It's all from Rick McCallum, so it's probably true.
I'm betting he's waiting until after episode 3, to add what would be serious prequel spoilers to the second half of the "hexology", or whatever the term is ("hextet"?), since I seriously doubt it's going to be a nonology anymore.
The Case for the Empire
Everything you think you know about Star Wars is wrong.
by Jonathan V. Last
05/16/2002 12:00:00 AM
Jonathan V. Last, online editor
STAR WARS RETURNS today with its fifth installment, "Attack of the Clones." There will be talk of the Force and the Dark Side and the epic morality of George Lucas's series. But the truth is that from the beginning, Lucas confused the good guys with the bad. The deep lesson of Star Wars is that the Empire is good.
It's a difficult leap to make--embracing Darth Vader and the Emperor over the plucky and attractive Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia--but a careful examination of the facts, sorted apart from Lucas's off-the-shelf moral cues, makes a quite convincing case.
First, an aside: For the sake of this discussion, I've considered only the history gleaned from the actual Star Wars films, not the Expanded Universe. If you know what the Expanded Universe is and want to argue that no discussion of Star Wars can be complete without considering material outside the canon, that's fine. However, it's always been my view that the comic books and novels largely serve to clean up Lucas's narrative and philosophical messes. Therefore, discussions of intrinsic intent must necessarily revolve around the movies alone. You may disagree, but please don't e-mail me about it.
If you don't know what the Expanded Universe is, well, uh, neither do I.
I. The Problems with the Galactic Republic
At the beginning of the Star Wars saga, the known universe is governed by the Galactic Republic. The Republic is controlled by a Senate, which is, in turn, run by an elected chancellor who's in charge of procedure, but has little real power.
Scores of thousands of planets are represented in the Galactic Senate, and as we first encounter it, it is sclerotic and ineffectual. The Republic has grown over many millennia to the point where there are so many factions and disparate interests, that it is simply too big to be governable. Even the Republic's staunchest supporters recognize this failing: In "The Phantom Menace," Queen Amidala admits, "It is clear to me now that the Republic no longer functions." In "Attack of the Clones," young Anakin Skywalker observes that it simply "doesn't work."
The Senate moves so slowly that it is powerless to stop aggression between member states. In "The Phantom Menace" a supra-planetary alliance, the Trade Federation (think of it as OPEC to the Galactic Republic's United Nations), invades a planet and all the Senate can agree to do is call for an investigation.
Like the United Nations, the Republic has no armed forces of its own, but instead relies on a group of warriors, the Jedi knights, to "keep the peace." The Jedi, while autonomous, often work in tandem with the Senate, trying to smooth over quarrels and avoid conflicts. But the Jedi number only in the thousands--they cannot protect everyone.
What's more, it's not clear that they should be "protecting" anyone. The Jedi are Lucas's great heroes, full of Zen wisdom and righteous power. They encourage people to "use the Force"--the mystical energy which is the source of their power--but the truth, revealed in "The Phantom Menace," is that the Force isn't available to the rabble. The Force comes from midi-chlorians, tiny symbiotic organisms in people's blood, like mitochondria. The Force, it turns out, is an inherited, genetic trait. If you don't have the blood, you don't get the Force. Which makes the Jedi not a democratic militia, but a royalist Swiss guard.
And an arrogant royalist Swiss guard, at that. With one or two notable exceptions, the Jedi we meet in Star Wars are full of themselves. They ignore the counsel of others (often with terrible consequences), and seem honestly to believe that they are at the center of the universe. When the chief Jedi record-keeper is asked in "Attack of the Clones" about a planet she has never heard of, she replies that if it's not in the Jedi archives, it doesn't exist. (The planet in question does exist, again, with terrible consequences.)
In "Attack of the Clones," a mysterious figure, Count Dooku, leads a separatist movement of planets that want to secede from the Republic. Dooku promises these confederates smaller government, unlimited free trade, and an "absolute commitment to capitalism." Dooku's motives are suspect--it's not clear whether or not he believes in these causes. However, there's no reason to doubt the motives of the other separatists--they seem genuinely to want to make a fresh start with a government that isn't bloated and dysfunctional.
The Republic, of course, is eager to quash these separatists, but they never make a compelling case--or any case, for that matter--as to why, if they are such a freedom-loving regime, these planets should not be allowed to check out of the Republic and take control of their own destinies.
II. The Empire
We do not yet know the exact how's and why's, but we do know this: At some point between the end of Episode II and the beginning of Episode IV, the Republic is replaced by an Empire. The first hint comes in "Attack of the Clones," when the Senate's Chancellor Palpatine is granted emergency powers to deal with the separatists. It spoils very little to tell you that Palpatine eventually becomes the Emperor. For a time, he keeps the Senate in place, functioning as a rubber-stamp, much like the Roman imperial senate, but a few minutes into Episode IV, we are informed that the he has dissolved the Senate, and that "the last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away."
Lucas wants the Empire to stand for evil, so he tells us that the Emperor and Darth Vader have gone over to the Dark Side and dresses them in black.
But look closer. When Palpatine is still a senator, he says, "The Republic is not what it once was. The Senate is full of greedy, squabbling delegates. There is no interest in the common good." At one point he laments that "the bureaucrats are in charge now."
Palpatine believes that the political order must be manipulated to produce peace and stability. When he mutters, "There is no civility, there is only politics," we see that at heart, he's an esoteric Straussian.
Make no mistake, as emperor, Palpatine is a dictator--but a relatively benign one, like Pinochet. It's a dictatorship people can do business with. They collect taxes and patrol the skies. They try to stop organized crime (in the form of the smuggling rings run by the Hutts). The Empire has virtually no effect on the daily life of the average, law-abiding citizen.
Also, unlike the divine-right Jedi, the Empire is a meritocracy. The Empire runs academies throughout the galaxy (Han Solo begins his career at an Imperial academy), and those who show promise are promoted, often rapidly. In "The Empire Strikes Back" Captain Piett is quickly promoted to admiral when his predecessor "falls down on the job."
And while it's a small point, the Empire's manners and decorum speak well of it. When Darth Vader is forced to employ bounty hunters to track down Han Solo, he refuses to address them by name. Even Boba Fett, the greatest of all trackers, is referred to icily as "bounty hunter." And yet Fett understands the protocol. When he captures Solo, he calls him "Captain Solo." (Whether this is in deference to Han's former rank in the Imperial starfleet, or simply because Han owns and pilots his own ship, we don't know. I suspect it's the former.)
But the most compelling evidence that the Empire isn't evil comes in "The Empire Strikes Back" when Darth Vader is battling Luke Skywalker. After an exhausting fight, Vader is poised to finish Luke off, but he stays his hand. He tries to convert Luke to the Dark Side with this simple plea: "There is no escape. Don't make me destroy you. . . . Join me, and I will complete your training. With our combined strength, we can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy." It is here we find the real controlling impulse for the Dark Side and the Empire. The Empire doesn't want slaves or destruction or "evil." It wants order.
None of which is to say that the Empire isn't sometimes brutal. In Episode IV, Imperial stormtroopers kill Luke's aunt and uncle and Grand Moff Tarkin orders the destruction of an entire planet, Alderaan. But viewed in context, these acts are less brutal than they initially appear. Poor Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen reach a grisly end, but only after they aid the rebellion by hiding Luke and harboring two fugitive droids. They aren't given due process, but they are traitors.
The destruction of Alderaan is often cited as ipso facto proof of the Empire's "evilness" because it seems like mass murder--planeticide, even. As Tarkin prepares to fire the Death Star, Princess Leia implores him to spare the planet, saying, "Alderaan is peaceful. We have no weapons." Her plea is important, if true.
But the audience has no reason to believe that Leia is telling the truth. In Episode IV, every bit of information she gives the Empire is willfully untrue. In the opening, she tells Darth Vader that she is on a diplomatic mission of mercy, when in fact she is on a spy mission, trying to deliver schematics of the Death Star to the Rebel Alliance. When asked where the Alliance is headquartered, she lies again.
Leia's lies are perfectly defensible--she thinks she's serving the greater good--but they make her wholly unreliable on the question of whether or not Alderaan really is peaceful and defenseless. If anything, since Leia is a high-ranking member of the rebellion and the princess of Alderaan, it would be reasonable to suspect that Alderaan is a front for Rebel activity or at least home to many more spies and insurgents like Leia.
Whatever the case, the important thing to recognize is that the Empire is not committing random acts of terror. It is engaged in a fight for the survival of its regime against a violent group of rebels who are committed to its destruction.
III. After the Rebellion
As we all know from the final Star Wars installment, "Return of the Jedi," the rebellion is eventually successful. The Emperor is assassinated, Darth Vader abdicates his post and dies, the central governing apparatus of the Empire is destroyed in a spectacular space battle, and the rebels rejoice with their small, annoying Ewok friends. But what happens next?
(There is a raft of literature on this point, but, as I said at the beginning, I'm going to ignore it because it doesn't speak to Lucas's original intent.)
In Episode IV, after Grand Moff Tarkin announces that the Imperial Senate has been abolished, he's asked how the Emperor can possibly hope to keep control of the galaxy. "The regional governors now have direct control over territories," he says. "Fear will keep the local systems in line."
So under Imperial rule, a large group of regional potentates, each with access to a sizable army and star destroyers, runs local affairs. These governors owe their fealty to the Emperor. And once the Emperor is dead, the galaxy will be plunged into chaos.
In all of the time we spend observing the Rebel Alliance, we never hear of their governing strategy or their plans for a post-Imperial universe. All we see are plots and fighting. Their victory over the Empire doesn't liberate the galaxy--it turns the galaxy into Somalia writ large: dominated by local warlords who are answerable to no one.
Which makes the rebels--Lucas's heroes--an unimpressive crew of anarchic royals who wreck the galaxy so that Princess Leia can have her tiara back.
Given the lack of technical details in the article, it's a bit difficult to see who's in the wrong. The customer in question was a DSL customer, which is essentially a glorified "always-on" dial-up account, not a leased line equivalent, and as such it's quite possible that the IP space was on a DUL blocklist, rather than an open relay blocklist.
So, putting two and two together, if Telsta has designated a series of class C IP blocks for use with DSL with ARIN, it's quite likely that these would find their way into a DUL list before they are assigned to an actual user. Of course, that might just be a "2+2=5" scenario.
Do you need WAP? If not, make sure your phone doesn't have WAP features, because in my experience battery life of WAP phones is as poor as the service you get with it, even with WAP disabled.
Back to the matter at hand though, a more elegant solution would be to carry a spare charged battery wouldn't it? There are several companies that make dedicated mobile battery chargers that use conventional batteries for "emergency use". Here's one and several more. The best solution I found for me though was a USB cable to phone power charger. I almost never go far without my laptop, and it's a snip to plug in a USB cable and power your phone up while you type/frag/whatever. Of course, it's a tradeoff against your laptop battery, but hey, you probably have the mains adapter for that in the carry case, right?
Well, there's nothing to worry about then, is there? Given Microsoft's track record with "copy protection" and "product activation" technologies the patch will be widely available before the official launch date anyway.;)
500megs of files? It doesn't even take that. I've seen this happen with an "Out of office" response email. The luser had setup his Exchange account to send an out of office reply, but forgot to remove an automatic CC to his 10meg home email account.
Naturally the home account filled up pretty quickly at which point the remote and local servers began a game of ping pong betwen "Out of office" and "Mailbox is full" emails. Since we are an ISP and his 10MB account was on another large ISP this game of ping pong was going faster than a world champion on speed. As a side effect it also resulted in a DoS on the two mail servers as log files and message logs grew out of all proportion...
So it just goes to show; employees can cause grief even when they don't mean to.
Depends on what, precisely, you understand this to mean. Quite a few ISPs will reject emails that are sent to more than a certain number of recipients in an attempt to combat SPAM. Off the top of my head I think ours are configured at 50, although I know from experience that this is actually 150 because To: CC: and BCC: are counted seperately and not totalled.
More importantly it's a largely waste of time, because we have bounced precisely *zero* emails because of this filter. Obviously the spammers have gotten wise to this filtration method and have worked around it (it's really old after all), which rather makes the whole point of this discussion redundant, doesn't it?;)
I've seen this very problem, and worked out a a quick and cheap (read Free OS capable of running a DNS server) fix for this; two sets of DNS servers. What you do is set up one set of DNS servers to act as authoritive servers for all your domains, and another set that actually does DNS resolution for your customers. You firewall the former set so that they cannot receive DNS requests from your IP space, except from your trusted DNS servers.
The only DNS zones the the authoritive set know about and can answer queries for are your own - the resolvers work as normal DNS servers that answer any query coming to them in the normal way. This works like a charm, protects your DNS from DDNS updates and other hacky crap that shouldn't be allowed on the Internet. Oh and if you understand your chosen DNS daemon the configuration is probably easier too!
This is essentially the difference between getting a leased line from a Telco/ISP and peering. In the first case you can expect to pay for all the bandwidth in both directions, because essentially all the traffic on the line is yours. You are going to be making requests (I want to read Slashdot), people responding to your requests (here's your Slashdot Page) or people accessing services you are offering (your geek webpage just got linked by Slashdot). Peering on the otherhand involves you entering into an agreement that in exchange for routing another carriers traffic over part of the network that you provide and foot the bills for, they will let you send traffic over theirs. Think "quid pro quo" and you get the general idea - it's a "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" arrangement in its most basic form.
In the specific case of the African nations this is quite likely to be unbalanaced; most big web hosts are in the US and, to a lesser extend, in Europe, so most of the traffic on the links to and from Africa is unlikely to contain data that falls into the "peering" catagory. I really don't think that the Africans are getting fleeced; they just don't have the traffic patterns to make peering financially viable to western carriers. When we see major data hosting centers on the dark continent, then we should see the carriers of those data centers getting into peering agreements, until then though they are going to have to pay. The truth is, it's not Africa being singled out at all; the same billing scheme applies in the US and Europe as well. Peering is for carriers, not companies or small ISPs that piggy back of a large one, and Africa just doesn't have too many of those at present.
I have one of those Gateway Anykey-124 Programmable keyboards and they rock. I wish I had this keyboard at work on my Sun.
No one I've seen makes a keyboard like this anymore:
Drifting slightly off topic, but geeks like their keyboards to do stuff instead of resorting to rodents, right? Cherry do some pretty cool keyboards for geeks, but the one I've linked to is the one I intend to replace my Gateway 124 with.
I for one am not surprised that the installer and reviewer had such a bumpy ride - what an ugly way of resolving RPM dependencies, and judging by the comments elsewhere other people must be using a similar approach. The simplest way I've found so far to upgrade or install a package such as KDE that is packaging into lots of individual RPMs is as follows:
Get all your downloaded.RPMs into a directory together and sort them out - do you really need all that stuff installed? Fewer RPMs = fewer dependencies.
Run "rpm -Uvh --test *.rpm" - this will give you a list of all the dependency issues (if any) without actually touching your stuff.
There are two types types of dependency to resolve - the first to deal with is packages you need but do not have installed, usually libraries and so on. Generally I go to RPMFind and find out what I need and then grab and install it.
Next up is stuff that is incompatible with the new software - in this case, if you are removing KDE2x then anything that specifically requires KDE2x is probably broken and is best uninstalled, at least until the new version is up and running. Uninstall these packages with the command "rpm --erase <package>" and either get updated versions later or add them to your install directory now.
Having sorted out the obvious dependency problems try another test install ("rpm -Uvh --test *.rpm")
You should now have a much smaller dependency list (or even none). Simply repeat the last two steps a few more times and the test install command should eventually return you to the prompt with no errors after a lot of disk thrashing.
Time to install! Make sure you are root, or can at least update the files, the run "rpm -Uvh *.rpm"
It's slightly oversimplified (but functional), and there are other cases and tricks not covered, such as the "--nodeps" and "--replacefiles" switches for example, but this will resolve most dependency issues with the minimum of fuss. Hope that helps!
The interplay between Crighton and Scorpius in the final episodes of the season is fantastic.
True, but the scheming between Scorpius and Rygel in that restaraunt was even better; these two really should get more time together. And if there is a spin off series with Scorpius and Rygel thrown together of that standard I would be very happy indeed.
Re:aRts version backstep?
on
KDE 3.0 is Out
·
· Score: 2
you might want to file a bug report in bugs.kde.org, cuz i think this is serious:)
Not as serious as the grief KDE are going to get when all the less savvy Linux users try and do an upgrade install. I fear that this is not going to be one of their reputation's finer moments in many peoples eyes, a shame given all the hard work people have obviously put into this software.
Breakpoint Software have been doing this for ages. Their Hex editor product, "Hex Workshop" has a coded in expiry date that warns you that a newer version of the product is probably available before it runs normally. Also, some of Steve Gibson's software does this too. It's not a difficult concept really, just an extension of the shareware "trialware" concept.
A warning is probably a better bet than stopping running altogether, although it's a bit irritating getting the warning only to find that there isn't an update, even to remove the nag for a few more months. Of course, with Open Source the removal is only a quick edit and recompile away, so I've certainly got no problem with this, but then, I keep my software upto date with the security patches anyway. I'd get fired if I didn't given it's part of my job and all...
Looking at the file list it looks like KDE 3.0 includes the file "arts-1.0.0-1.i386.rpm", yet my KDE222 distro, and a few others I've checked, have the file "arts-2.2.2-2.i386.rpm". Any idea what gives, or is someone's version number out of sync?
Books on CD are more useful for some types of content than others. For general discussion and tutorial works there's not really much point in my view; paper is much easier on the eye and easier to deal with, and the point of websites for code snippets is already made. Where having an accompanying CD ROM is best is with the books that you would never read from cover to cover - raw reference works.
Take the simple example of a HTML/JavaScript reference I have; the book is basically a list of the various HTML tags and JavaScript commands grouped by type with a description and usage guide. It also comes with the entire book on CD in a searchable format, so if you want to do some obscure thing with the TABLE tag say, you can search on TABLE and get a complete template to cut and paste as required, complete with documentation of each sub-TAG.
I don't know where the book is, but the CD is in my laptop carrycase's CD box next to the O'Reilly Perl Bookshelf CD...
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm. Now I'm going all nostalgic for Archie, Veronica and WAIS. Well, maybe not WAIS.
On board battery? Think of a SecureID card on steroids and you'll get the general idea.
If you got hold of a card (and had the resources) you could still read and brute force the hash of course, or force a valid response at the appropriate point. However, that leaves the physical problem of reassembly of an IC with onboard EEPROM, and even if the card can still be made to fit into the readers it's probably going to be unreadable. All of which needs to be done before the card is cancelled. Quite an elegant solution for those "ultra-paranoid locations" really. ;)
For the sceptics, yes there is an output, it's usually just a bit flag; yes or no, there is no way of reading the actual contents of the WOM. The setup I've seen is an IC, that presents to the outside world two write only blocks of memory, one permanantly stores a PIN, the other is used to input the user keyed PIN. The IC compares the two and sets a single bit output high or low depending upon whether the values match or not. The crux is, short of decoding the circuits within the IC, there is no way of retrieving the PIN from a stolen card - there os ready equivalent of /etc/passwd that can be easily read and bruteforced; it's more akin to a shadow password system for PINs.
Physically threatening the owner of the PIN is another issue, or course. ;)
Hopefully none of the above, as such. It seems like an ideal moment to build a fully LSB compliant distro to me - anything else is a missed opportunity. I'm guessing it'll be primarily Connectiva's purdy icons and SuSE's customised config tools though.
Question 8 got me too, although I did a lot better than I expected since I'm not really involved in releasing or distributing code and tend to prefer BSD style licensing anyway. I had thought that this issue was precisely what the Lesser GPL was supposed to solve though, all this seemed to do for me was raise the point that maybe Microsoft has a valid arguement.
I mean, suppose that I have a proprietary program running on Windows and commercial *NIXs that I want to be able to offer on Linux, but need to ensure that the code is not freely available for business reasons - it would give competitors an advantage for example. According to Question 8, if I so much as link against an LGPL library then my code is open to reverse engineering and my competitors will effectively have full access to my algorithms. Under those circumstances there is no way I am going to be able to offer my application under Linux without an awful lot of reinventing the wheel.
I may be mis-interpreting this, but it seems to me that the LGPL as stands would actually prevent commercial back-room applications, such as SAP for example, from being ported to Linux. Can anyone who understands the LGPL better than I shed some light on this, because this does not seem like a "good thing" to me.
As always, the real losers are the naive users who paid up the cash in the first place thinking they were onto a good thing.
Basically someone had been going through code and found an entire subroutine commented out with the rider "This doesn't work". The original poster went on to say (s)he'd initially missed the point and thought the commenter was dumb, until the penny dropped - this would be a massive time saver if someone else thought of the same routine.
I have to admit, I'm not sure if this commenting practice would have occured to me - until I read this I'd always deleted broken code. It's definately something to bear in mind next to you waste a few hours working on a flawed algorithm.
I'm betting he's waiting until after episode 3, to add what would be serious prequel spoilers to the second half of the "hexology", or whatever the term is ("hextet"?), since I seriously doubt it's going to be a nonology anymore.
The Case for the Empire
Everything you think you know about Star Wars is wrong.
by Jonathan V. Last
05/16/2002 12:00:00 AM
Jonathan V. Last, online editor
STAR WARS RETURNS today with its fifth installment, "Attack of the Clones." There will be talk of the Force and the Dark Side and the epic morality of George Lucas's series. But the truth is that from the beginning, Lucas confused the good guys with the bad. The deep lesson of Star Wars is that the Empire is good.
It's a difficult leap to make--embracing Darth Vader and the Emperor over the plucky and attractive Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia--but a careful examination of the facts, sorted apart from Lucas's off-the-shelf moral cues, makes a quite convincing case.
First, an aside: For the sake of this discussion, I've considered only the history gleaned from the actual Star Wars films, not the Expanded Universe. If you know what the Expanded Universe is and want to argue that no discussion of Star Wars can be complete without considering material outside the canon, that's fine. However, it's always been my view that the comic books and novels largely serve to clean up Lucas's narrative and philosophical messes. Therefore, discussions of intrinsic intent must necessarily revolve around the movies alone. You may disagree, but please don't e-mail me about it.
If you don't know what the Expanded Universe is, well, uh, neither do I.
I. The Problems with the Galactic Republic
At the beginning of the Star Wars saga, the known universe is governed by the Galactic Republic. The Republic is controlled by a Senate, which is, in turn, run by an elected chancellor who's in charge of procedure, but has little real power.
Scores of thousands of planets are represented in the Galactic Senate, and as we first encounter it, it is sclerotic and ineffectual. The Republic has grown over many millennia to the point where there are so many factions and disparate interests, that it is simply too big to be governable. Even the Republic's staunchest supporters recognize this failing: In "The Phantom Menace," Queen Amidala admits, "It is clear to me now that the Republic no longer functions." In "Attack of the Clones," young Anakin Skywalker observes that it simply "doesn't work."
The Senate moves so slowly that it is powerless to stop aggression between member states. In "The Phantom Menace" a supra-planetary alliance, the Trade Federation (think of it as OPEC to the Galactic Republic's United Nations), invades a planet and all the Senate can agree to do is call for an investigation.
Like the United Nations, the Republic has no armed forces of its own, but instead relies on a group of warriors, the Jedi knights, to "keep the peace." The Jedi, while autonomous, often work in tandem with the Senate, trying to smooth over quarrels and avoid conflicts. But the Jedi number only in the thousands--they cannot protect everyone.
What's more, it's not clear that they should be "protecting" anyone. The Jedi are Lucas's great heroes, full of Zen wisdom and righteous power. They encourage people to "use the Force"--the mystical energy which is the source of their power--but the truth, revealed in "The Phantom Menace," is that the Force isn't available to the rabble. The Force comes from midi-chlorians, tiny symbiotic organisms in people's blood, like mitochondria. The Force, it turns out, is an inherited, genetic trait. If you don't have the blood, you don't get the Force. Which makes the Jedi not a democratic militia, but a royalist Swiss guard.
And an arrogant royalist Swiss guard, at that. With one or two notable exceptions, the Jedi we meet in Star Wars are full of themselves. They ignore the counsel of others (often with terrible consequences), and seem honestly to believe that they are at the center of the universe. When the chief Jedi record-keeper is asked in "Attack of the Clones" about a planet she has never heard of, she replies that if it's not in the Jedi archives, it doesn't exist. (The planet in question does exist, again, with terrible consequences.)
In "Attack of the Clones," a mysterious figure, Count Dooku, leads a separatist movement of planets that want to secede from the Republic. Dooku promises these confederates smaller government, unlimited free trade, and an "absolute commitment to capitalism." Dooku's motives are suspect--it's not clear whether or not he believes in these causes. However, there's no reason to doubt the motives of the other separatists--they seem genuinely to want to make a fresh start with a government that isn't bloated and dysfunctional.
The Republic, of course, is eager to quash these separatists, but they never make a compelling case--or any case, for that matter--as to why, if they are such a freedom-loving regime, these planets should not be allowed to check out of the Republic and take control of their own destinies.
II. The Empire
We do not yet know the exact how's and why's, but we do know this: At some point between the end of Episode II and the beginning of Episode IV, the Republic is replaced by an Empire. The first hint comes in "Attack of the Clones," when the Senate's Chancellor Palpatine is granted emergency powers to deal with the separatists. It spoils very little to tell you that Palpatine eventually becomes the Emperor. For a time, he keeps the Senate in place, functioning as a rubber-stamp, much like the Roman imperial senate, but a few minutes into Episode IV, we are informed that the he has dissolved the Senate, and that "the last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away."
Lucas wants the Empire to stand for evil, so he tells us that the Emperor and Darth Vader have gone over to the Dark Side and dresses them in black.
But look closer. When Palpatine is still a senator, he says, "The Republic is not what it once was. The Senate is full of greedy, squabbling delegates. There is no interest in the common good." At one point he laments that "the bureaucrats are in charge now."
Palpatine believes that the political order must be manipulated to produce peace and stability. When he mutters, "There is no civility, there is only politics," we see that at heart, he's an esoteric Straussian.
Make no mistake, as emperor, Palpatine is a dictator--but a relatively benign one, like Pinochet. It's a dictatorship people can do business with. They collect taxes and patrol the skies. They try to stop organized crime (in the form of the smuggling rings run by the Hutts). The Empire has virtually no effect on the daily life of the average, law-abiding citizen.
Also, unlike the divine-right Jedi, the Empire is a meritocracy. The Empire runs academies throughout the galaxy (Han Solo begins his career at an Imperial academy), and those who show promise are promoted, often rapidly. In "The Empire Strikes Back" Captain Piett is quickly promoted to admiral when his predecessor "falls down on the job."
And while it's a small point, the Empire's manners and decorum speak well of it. When Darth Vader is forced to employ bounty hunters to track down Han Solo, he refuses to address them by name. Even Boba Fett, the greatest of all trackers, is referred to icily as "bounty hunter." And yet Fett understands the protocol. When he captures Solo, he calls him "Captain Solo." (Whether this is in deference to Han's former rank in the Imperial starfleet, or simply because Han owns and pilots his own ship, we don't know. I suspect it's the former.)
But the most compelling evidence that the Empire isn't evil comes in "The Empire Strikes Back" when Darth Vader is battling Luke Skywalker. After an exhausting fight, Vader is poised to finish Luke off, but he stays his hand. He tries to convert Luke to the Dark Side with this simple plea: "There is no escape. Don't make me destroy you. . . . Join me, and I will complete your training. With our combined strength, we can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy." It is here we find the real controlling impulse for the Dark Side and the Empire. The Empire doesn't want slaves or destruction or "evil." It wants order.
None of which is to say that the Empire isn't sometimes brutal. In Episode IV, Imperial stormtroopers kill Luke's aunt and uncle and Grand Moff Tarkin orders the destruction of an entire planet, Alderaan. But viewed in context, these acts are less brutal than they initially appear. Poor Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen reach a grisly end, but only after they aid the rebellion by hiding Luke and harboring two fugitive droids. They aren't given due process, but they are traitors.
The destruction of Alderaan is often cited as ipso facto proof of the Empire's "evilness" because it seems like mass murder--planeticide, even. As Tarkin prepares to fire the Death Star, Princess Leia implores him to spare the planet, saying, "Alderaan is peaceful. We have no weapons." Her plea is important, if true.
But the audience has no reason to believe that Leia is telling the truth. In Episode IV, every bit of information she gives the Empire is willfully untrue. In the opening, she tells Darth Vader that she is on a diplomatic mission of mercy, when in fact she is on a spy mission, trying to deliver schematics of the Death Star to the Rebel Alliance. When asked where the Alliance is headquartered, she lies again.
Leia's lies are perfectly defensible--she thinks she's serving the greater good--but they make her wholly unreliable on the question of whether or not Alderaan really is peaceful and defenseless. If anything, since Leia is a high-ranking member of the rebellion and the princess of Alderaan, it would be reasonable to suspect that Alderaan is a front for Rebel activity or at least home to many more spies and insurgents like Leia.
Whatever the case, the important thing to recognize is that the Empire is not committing random acts of terror. It is engaged in a fight for the survival of its regime against a violent group of rebels who are committed to its destruction.
III. After the Rebellion
As we all know from the final Star Wars installment, "Return of the Jedi," the rebellion is eventually successful. The Emperor is assassinated, Darth Vader abdicates his post and dies, the central governing apparatus of the Empire is destroyed in a spectacular space battle, and the rebels rejoice with their small, annoying Ewok friends. But what happens next?
(There is a raft of literature on this point, but, as I said at the beginning, I'm going to ignore it because it doesn't speak to Lucas's original intent.)
In Episode IV, after Grand Moff Tarkin announces that the Imperial Senate has been abolished, he's asked how the Emperor can possibly hope to keep control of the galaxy. "The regional governors now have direct control over territories," he says. "Fear will keep the local systems in line."
So under Imperial rule, a large group of regional potentates, each with access to a sizable army and star destroyers, runs local affairs. These governors owe their fealty to the Emperor. And once the Emperor is dead, the galaxy will be plunged into chaos.
In all of the time we spend observing the Rebel Alliance, we never hear of their governing strategy or their plans for a post-Imperial universe. All we see are plots and fighting. Their victory over the Empire doesn't liberate the galaxy--it turns the galaxy into Somalia writ large: dominated by local warlords who are answerable to no one.
Which makes the rebels--Lucas's heroes--an unimpressive crew of anarchic royals who wreck the galaxy so that Princess Leia can have her tiara back.
I'll take the Empire.
Given the lack of technical details in the article, it's a bit difficult to see who's in the wrong. The customer in question was a DSL customer, which is essentially a glorified "always-on" dial-up account, not a leased line equivalent, and as such it's quite possible that the IP space was on a DUL blocklist, rather than an open relay blocklist. So, putting two and two together, if Telsta has designated a series of class C IP blocks for use with DSL with ARIN, it's quite likely that these would find their way into a DUL list before they are assigned to an actual user. Of course, that might just be a "2+2=5" scenario.
Back to the matter at hand though, a more elegant solution would be to carry a spare charged battery wouldn't it? There are several companies that make dedicated mobile battery chargers that use conventional batteries for "emergency use". Here's one and several more. The best solution I found for me though was a USB cable to phone power charger. I almost never go far without my laptop, and it's a snip to plug in a USB cable and power your phone up while you type/frag/whatever. Of course, it's a tradeoff against your laptop battery, but hey, you probably have the mains adapter for that in the carry case, right?
Well, there's nothing to worry about then, is there? Given Microsoft's track record with "copy protection" and "product activation" technologies the patch will be widely available before the official launch date anyway. ;)
Naturally the home account filled up pretty quickly at which point the remote and local servers began a game of ping pong betwen "Out of office" and "Mailbox is full" emails. Since we are an ISP and his 10MB account was on another large ISP this game of ping pong was going faster than a world champion on speed. As a side effect it also resulted in a DoS on the two mail servers as log files and message logs grew out of all proportion...
So it just goes to show; employees can cause grief even when they don't mean to.
More importantly it's a largely waste of time, because we have bounced precisely *zero* emails because of this filter. Obviously the spammers have gotten wise to this filtration method and have worked around it (it's really old after all), which rather makes the whole point of this discussion redundant, doesn't it? ;)
The only DNS zones the the authoritive set know about and can answer queries for are your own - the resolvers work as normal DNS servers that answer any query coming to them in the normal way. This works like a charm, protects your DNS from DDNS updates and other hacky crap that shouldn't be allowed on the Internet. Oh and if you understand your chosen DNS daemon the configuration is probably easier too!
In the specific case of the African nations this is quite likely to be unbalanaced; most big web hosts are in the US and, to a lesser extend, in Europe, so most of the traffic on the links to and from Africa is unlikely to contain data that falls into the "peering" catagory. I really don't think that the Africans are getting fleeced; they just don't have the traffic patterns to make peering financially viable to western carriers. When we see major data hosting centers on the dark continent, then we should see the carriers of those data centers getting into peering agreements, until then though they are going to have to pay. The truth is, it's not Africa being singled out at all; the same billing scheme applies in the US and Europe as well. Peering is for carriers, not companies or small ISPs that piggy back of a large one, and Africa just doesn't have too many of those at present.
Drifting slightly off topic, but geeks like their keyboards to do stuff instead of resorting to rodents, right? Cherry do some pretty cool keyboards for geeks, but the one I've linked to is the one I intend to replace my Gateway 124 with.
It's slightly oversimplified (but functional), and there are other cases and tricks not covered, such as the "--nodeps" and "--replacefiles" switches for example, but this will resolve most dependency issues with the minimum of fuss. Hope that helps!
True, but the scheming between Scorpius and Rygel in that restaraunt was even better; these two really should get more time together. And if there is a spin off series with Scorpius and Rygel thrown together of that standard I would be very happy indeed.
Not as serious as the grief KDE are going to get when all the less savvy Linux users try and do an upgrade install. I fear that this is not going to be one of their reputation's finer moments in many peoples eyes, a shame given all the hard work people have obviously put into this software.
A warning is probably a better bet than stopping running altogether, although it's a bit irritating getting the warning only to find that there isn't an update, even to remove the nag for a few more months. Of course, with Open Source the removal is only a quick edit and recompile away, so I've certainly got no problem with this, but then, I keep my software upto date with the security patches anyway. I'd get fired if I didn't given it's part of my job and all...
Looking at the file list it looks like KDE 3.0 includes the file "arts-1.0.0-1.i386.rpm", yet my KDE222 distro, and a few others I've checked, have the file "arts-2.2.2-2.i386.rpm". Any idea what gives, or is someone's version number out of sync?
Take the simple example of a HTML/JavaScript reference I have; the book is basically a list of the various HTML tags and JavaScript commands grouped by type with a description and usage guide. It also comes with the entire book on CD in a searchable format, so if you want to do some obscure thing with the TABLE tag say, you can search on TABLE and get a complete template to cut and paste as required, complete with documentation of each sub-TAG.
I don't know where the book is, but the CD is in my laptop carrycase's CD box next to the O'Reilly Perl Bookshelf CD...