At first I thought this article was about the amateur astronomer who found the most real asteroids with his backyard, home-built, telescope. That is an article I would like to read.
I think it is pretty likely that the Air Canada personnel had read his account of his previous run-in. Take the high-road Steve. Don't call people stupid.
Awkwardly playing dumb is one of the few techniques left to low wage workers when someone tries to bully them, with threats to report them to higher authority, or with demands for exceptional treatment.
Makes you wonder where the others are and if anything will be done with them besides stripping them down and turning them into a rotting tourist attraction in Moscow.
It is my understanding that the passengers experience "weightlessness" on the up portion of their trip, as well as the down portion. I believe the pilots train in how to gun the engines, point the nose up, then cut them, and fly the plane on a parabola that keeps the occupants weightless for the longest period of time consistent with not crashing at the end.
Contrast the BBC picture of the mockup with this line drawing from the Design bureau. Very different. Note particularly that the mockup has a smaller nose, and the two passenger windows are below the cockpit, like the Burans and the American shuttles. Note that the line drawing seems to have a cargo pod, or fuel tank, which is abandoned.
From my reading it sounds like the capsule only does a single burn. It doesn't have to do a burn to return from orbit into the Earth's atmosphere as it never acheives orbital velocity. Its trajectory would resemble that of a ballistic missile, like a SCUD, or a V2.
Ray Noorda must be kicking himself for letting Caldera settle so soon, and at mere pennies on the dollar for just a couple hundred million. The DRDOS case was the most solid of all the anti-MS efforts; they could have really cleaned up.
I too have speculated on why Noorda stopped short of delivering a more crushing blow, when he had the chance. It was a solid case.
You've suggested it was a mistake, or a failure of nerve. Let me suggest another possibility. Noorda too is a member of the billionaires club. Is it possible that Noorda's goal was to teach a younger, more aggressive, billionaire a lesson? Microsoft not only handed over hundreds of millions (the amount was not made public) of dollars, but Gates resigned the Presidency of Microsoft within days of the settlement. I've read speculation that Gates resignation was one of the conditions Noorda insisted on. I'd like to believe that it was.
The parent post got moderated down, as off-topic, probably because linzeal has a signature about the troubles in the mid-east. But his or her main point, was a link to Ken Thompson's 1995 ACM lecture...
"Spin doctoring" is a neologism refering to the act of putting a complimentary "spin" on news that shows some public figure or institution in a really bad light. If you follow the links you will find some other fascinating examples of "spin" being doctored. Note particularly the Microsoft's "gpl_faq.doc" and The Commercial Software Model and Sustainable Innovation.
I hate this kind of untruthfulness. The authors of the GPL document know the real meaning of open source, and the other terms they plan to redefine. They mean to sway the minds of the rest of the public who don't know how self-serving their redefinitions are.
Yet when Microsoft beats Netscape into the ground by putting their browser to shame and making IE one of the best browsers in the world, everyone is up in arms.
May I suggest that the shameful thing is that their browser didn't follow standards? In typical MS fashion they "extended" the standard. And they supplied HTML tools that generated non-standard pages too. Thus, with their market clout lots and lots of pages didn't work properly with browsers that did conform to standards.
To the naive user this made it look like all the conforming browsers were broken.
I'd call that shameful.
Yes, I know netscape retaliated in kind.
Re:don't waste your time
on
C
·
· Score: 4, Informative
If you are reading this discussion because you are planning to learn C, know that not only is K&R's book a very fine book, but there is geek cachet in being able to say "I learned C from Kernighan and Ritchie".
Bullmer said: The proposal... would not be a decree that I would know how to comply with...
Bullmer can't imagine how to comply? Well Jeez Microsoft, get a president who can imagine how to comply. If this was a small company, and they wouldn't comply with a court order, wouldn't they be shut down? It this small company supplied an essential service, and they wouldn't comply, wouldn't the government appoint a trustee to oversee their operation.
The degree to which it requires documentation of internal interfaces...
Hello, as others have pointed out, it is hard to believe that Microsoft has not been documenting all of their, APIs for internal use, all along.
...the degree to which it requires -- what do they call that stuff where, you know, you can't degrade the performance of anybody else at any time... there's simply no way to do that for the existing -- the existing product set.
I have shamelessly modified Bullmer's statement here. I believe that what Bullmer really means is that they cannot comply with a court ordered disclosure -- while maintaining the kind of secret booby-traps they used to torpedo DRDOS. Everyone who wants to follow this case owes it to themselves to learn about the steps Microsoft took to torpedo DRDOS. Here is a link to an article by Andrew Shulman.
DRDOS (Digital Research DOS) was an alternative to MSDOS. Like MSDOS, DRDOSes roots lay in Digital Research's CP/m, a primitive operating system to 8080 machines. DRDOS was a better DOS than DOS. It always lead MSDOS in features. It used high memory before MSDOS, it had a compressed volumes facility, like doublespace, before MSDOS. The suit against Microsoft in the DRDOS case was whether MS Windows 3.x was written to detect whether it was being invoked on a machine running DRDOS, and if so, it would fail, with an error message that said that DRDOS had failed. Damning evidence was introduced in this case. Microsoft announed that they had settled in early January 2000. While the terms of the settlement are confidential all reports are that the monetary portion of the settlement was nine figures. Some commentators suggest that a confidential clause in the settlement was that Bill Gates would have to resign the presidency of Microsoft. He did, in fact, resign within a couple of days of the announcement of the settlement.
Sen to Chihiro is the most successful non-U.S. produced movie in the world. It has grossed about 30 billion yen ($226 million U.S.), which is more than Titanic (the previous record holder).
A quick check of the Titanic's IMDB pages reveals that Titanic grossed on the order of $600 USD.
Having said that let me suggest that movie grosses are often a poor indicator of movie quality.
Interesting idea. This site has numbers for the power consumption of a range of processors. Note: The more modern processors consume way more power than older ones, like a P233mmx. A two gigahertz P4 can comsume 100watts. As much as a light bulb. Ouch!
I'd like to thank the previous poster for a very interesting post. I had never heard the term "Net Energy Value" before.
I have a question about methanol, the alternative fuel mentioned above. How does it smell?
Am I correct to believe that ethanol as fuel is a liquid? Is methanol also a liquid, or would you use it like propane. We have propane powered taxis here. I can't stand the smell. I believe the producers add something smelly to the fuel, so consumers can detect leaks.
That brings up another question. How volatile are these fuels? My understanding is that diesel is innately safer to handle than gasoline. That a spill is less likely to explode. And I was under the impression that ethanol was more dangerous to handle than gasoline.
Annoying when that kind of thing happens. So, you used "strings" to get the gist of it?
I believe that all ms document files store the actual text as printable characters. So, since strings skips everything but printable characters you can see what they wrote.
In fact you (used to|still can) see stuff they wrote they didn't intend to send you! Microsoft left a bug in word. Word used to store not only what you finally decide you want to print out, but it saved recent changes, in the document, across saves.
The problem with allowing the open source server to authenticate against the battle.net servers is that - being open source - it would be relatively easy to remove the check.
Good point. Another poster, in a similar thread, said that if they allowed bnetd a mechanism to query whether an ID was authorized it would expose them to an increased risk of a denial of service attack. Well, I'd say that was just a cost of doing business...
Seriously, people who go off into rants to their friends all the time are accomplishing nothing but making themselves look like losers. If anything, acting like that makes me want to disagree with you just so I don't have to be grouped with you in the slightest way. Antics like that are the stereotype of the slashdot crowd and make me very embarassed to admit I still read this site.
And one stereotype of techy boys is self-centered pigs who think, "I've got my toys, so the rest of the world can go hang for all I care. War? Poverty? Injustice? Fuck 'em, I have to get back to my game." Now I am going to try to assume this stereotype doesn't apply to any of you -- that you would join in, and raise your voice, if you thought an issue was really important.
Well, how do people get convinced an issue is really important?
Do you remember reading about the "underground railroad"? Would you be proud if you learned that one of your ancestors took heroic risks to help slaves escape over the underground railroad? Well, how do you think their close friends reacted to their "ranting" about the evils of slavery?
Or take child labour, or women's suffrage. When those were hot issues lots of people just didn't get it. Kids had always had to work. Women had never been able to vote.
Things change when people give a darn, and make an effort to convince other people to give a darn.
Okay, strategically, when your friend stops listening, you back off, and wait for another opportunity. But if your friend won't ever listen to you, are they really your friend?
There, I wasn't ranting, was I? FWIW, I do consider Microsoft an evil company.
I looked at bnetd's shutdown announcement. I read the formal request from Blizzard to shut it down. It is signed by a guy named Rod Rigole.
So I did a google search on Rod Rigole.
Are you sure this guy is a lawyer? Maybe he has just around lawyers. Maybe he is just a paralegal.
The first thing that comes up when you do a google search on this guy is that he was the guy who filmed the civil suit the family of Ron Goldman filed against OJ Simpson. Okay, maybe that is the way he paid his way through law school.
Now I don't know anything about your game, or your project, except that I am sure you have put in a lot of work on it. But I wouldn't fold over a vague letter like this.
I was very grateful to George Lucas for Episode 1.
But not because I liked the film, which I found childish and un-involving. No, he had the clout to insist that theatre owners couldn't get a print if they didn't have a good sound system. And a number of big fine old theatres around here did spend the money to get digital sound.
Now that I am middle-aged I am hard of hearing. Theatres with crappy sound are a real problem for me.
I would be happy to see him use his clout to help bring in digital projection.
I've seen one movie in Digital Projection. Mission to Mars, at the Paramount, in Toronto Ontario. I noticed a few instances of aliasing. But that was far less jarring than what I notice in practically every film I see.
The two biggest chains built a large number of new, state-of-the-art multi-plexes up here, as I believe they did all over North America, a few years ago. These auditoria have stadium seating and advanced sound. But the management lack whatever clue is necessary to see that the goldarn film is properly focussed!
About six years ago the local projectionist union had a labour dispute with Cineplex. The dispute went on for months. Finally, the union capitulated. They had to settle for something like a 50% cut in pay, and a 50% cut in hours.
Management believed that new projection technology made the projectors "idiot-proof". Most films would be set up by a non-union, clueless "manager".
I decided I would complain every time there was something wrong with the quality of the film presentation. And for several years I did so. But I have largely given up.
What I find is that the manager is almost always just a kid, who was serving popcorn six months ago, who really doesn't understand or give a darn about the quality of the film presentation.
So maybe 35mm film would provide a better picture -- if it were in focus? But the days of finding a trained projectionist are fading fast. Hopefully my experience that the digital projection was in perfect focus was not an anomaly, and we can look forward to an improvement in film presentation?
We have one smaller chain up here, Alliance-Atlantic, that still uses experienced projectionists, where you can rely on the film being in focus.
Can someone explain why the Good Guys always have to keep the Bad Guy on the line for something like three minutes in order to trace the call...
Cliff Stoll's book, "The Cuckoo's Egg" recounts his experience with getting a number traced, circa 1988. A West German guy was prowling US networks looking for poorly secured machines, to see if they had secrets the Soviets would pay for. It took months to get the first warrants to trace local calls (at first they didn't know the interloper was not a local script kiddie).
Once they determined he was a German it took more months to do the paperwork to get the German
authorities to co-operate and do a trace at their end.
When the German telco was authorized to do the trace it turned out the interloper lived where he was served by an old mechanical telephone exchange. This meant it would take the German telco technicians not three minutes, but HOURS to trace the interloper down that last kilometre.
...when all they should have to do is call up the Phone Company (on another line) and ask them to punch up the number of the person calling this number right now?
Okay, I don't mean to be sarcastic, but can you think of a protocol whereby the telco technician who answers that call can be sure the calling party is authorized to initiate that trace, that isn't going to take a couple of minutes?
Caller: Unless you answer my demands, I am going to throw a banana cream pie -- at (insert VIP here).
Good Guy #1: (Covering receiver.) Joe, it is the evil pie thrower. Initiate a trace on this phone!
So, the sidekick goes and hunts for a phone. Let me suggest that that is going to take at least twenty seconds. Does Joe know the number of the phone the hero received the call? If not he has to find out, so add time for this.
The sidekick phones the telco. Does he know the direct line to the telco technician who does traces? If not add about five minutes of voice mail hell in here.
If the hero and the sidekick are in a building with a private branch exchange, the sidekick has to contact the switchboard operator, and convince them to determine which outside line is connected to the hero's phone before he makes that call to the telco.
If the PBX is automated, he probably has to hunt down the IT guy, and get him to unlock the cupboard where the PBX hardware is located. How long do you think that would take?
The sidekick reaches the proper telco technician. Know what? Now he has to prove he is authorized to initiate a trace. How does he do that? Does he read off his badge number? Does he know some secret phrase only good guys know?
Does the telco technician know what to do, at a moment's notice? Or does he have to look it up in the manual, or ask his supervisor?
I don't know what the ratio of authorized traces is to court authorized phone taps. But I was really surprised when I read how many, or rather how few, wiretaps get authorized in the States.
I know the number has been climbing in recent years, but less than half a dozen years ago I read one of those brief pieces in Scientific American about this. Approximately 600 authorized Federal wiretaps per year. Approximately 600 authorized State wiretaps.
Why am I making such a big deal about specifying I am enumerating authorized wiretaps? About twenty years ago I watched a TV documentary about surveillance technology. The producers were cleverly cutting back and forth between two interviews. One was an aggressive guy selling bug detectors. The other was a "good guy" in Washington DC. He looked and sounded like Sgt Joe Friday, from the old TV show Dragnet.
The sales guy kept promising that his wares would detect any bug. Joe Friday kept assuring the interviewer that you could never know if your phone was tapped. Finally Joe Friday said something like: "Why we have done over a thousand legal wiretaps alone, without ever being detected." You had to hear how he said it, as if those thousand legal wiretaps were just the tip of the iceberg.
I've been using them less than a month, and I've had enough problems that I was already considering dumping them and going with DSL. It's already costing me more than local DSL providers charge.
A price increase would be the straw that broke the camel's back.
The original Globe article predicted that the other cable outfits, and the telcos offering
DSL, would follow suit.
The "astronaut"... theory was first made popular by Erick Von Daniken, who despite having a less than stellar reputation has always asked questions that can't be just explained away...
What question has Von D asked that can't be explained away? How about when will the public realize he is a phony?
Here in Canada one of our cabinet ministers
is talking about spending a whack of money
to provide every Canadian household with
high-speed access. It would cost billions
of dollars to put up the infrastructure.
It might be a better investment than providing
free computers. As someone said powerful
used computers are very cheap right now.
So cheap the monthly ISP subscription becomes
the barrier to access...
Slashdot Mirror
At first I thought this article was about the amateur astronomer who found the most real asteroids with his backyard, home-built, telescope. That is an article I would like to read.
Awkwardly playing dumb is one of the few techniques left to low wage workers when someone tries to bully them, with threats to report them to higher authority, or with demands for exceptional treatment.
Slashdot previously covered this, and this.
The plane they use in astronaut training (the "vomit comet") give you more than ten seconds of weightlessness. Here is another first person account, this time from a guy who rode one intended for the public.
It is my understanding that the passengers experience "weightlessness" on the up portion of their trip, as well as the down portion. I believe the pilots train in how to gun the engines, point the nose up, then cut them, and fly the plane on a parabola that keeps the occupants weightless for the longest period of time consistent with not crashing at the end.
From my reading it sounds like the capsule only does a single burn. It doesn't have to do a burn to return from orbit into the Earth's atmosphere as it never acheives orbital velocity. Its trajectory would resemble that of a ballistic missile, like a SCUD, or a V2.
I am following up my own post with a link to a biography of Noorda. He sounds like an interesting guy.
Here is Andrew Shulman's summary of the Caldera versus Microsoft suit.
I too have speculated on why Noorda stopped short of delivering a more crushing blow, when he had the chance. It was a solid case.
You've suggested it was a mistake, or a failure of nerve. Let me suggest another possibility. Noorda too is a member of the billionaires club. Is it possible that Noorda's goal was to teach a younger, more aggressive, billionaire a lesson? Microsoft not only handed over hundreds of millions (the amount was not made public) of dollars, but Gates resigned the Presidency of Microsoft within days of the settlement. I've read speculation that Gates resignation was one of the conditions Noorda insisted on. I'd like to believe that it was.
The parent post got moderated down, as off-topic, probably because linzeal has a signature about the troubles in the mid-east. But his or her main point, was a link to Ken Thompson's 1995 ACM lecture...
I hate this kind of untruthfulness. The authors of the GPL document know the real meaning of open source, and the other terms they plan to redefine. They mean to sway the minds of the rest of the public who don't know how self-serving their redefinitions are.
May I suggest that the shameful thing is that their browser didn't follow standards? In typical MS fashion they "extended" the standard. And they supplied HTML tools that generated non-standard pages too. Thus, with their market clout lots and lots of pages didn't work properly with browsers that did conform to standards.
To the naive user this made it look like all the conforming browsers were broken.
I'd call that shameful.
Yes, I know netscape retaliated in kind.
If you are reading this discussion because you are planning to learn C, know that not only is K&R's book a very fine book, but there is geek cachet in being able to say "I learned C from Kernighan and Ritchie".
Bullmer can't imagine how to comply? Well Jeez Microsoft, get a president who can imagine how to comply. If this was a small company, and they wouldn't comply with a court order, wouldn't they be shut down? It this small company supplied an essential service, and they wouldn't comply, wouldn't the government appoint a trustee to oversee their operation. Hello, as others have pointed out, it is hard to believe that Microsoft has not been documenting all of their, APIs for internal use, all along. I have shamelessly modified Bullmer's statement here. I believe that what Bullmer really means is that they cannot comply with a court ordered disclosure -- while maintaining the kind of secret booby-traps they used to torpedo DRDOS. Everyone who wants to follow this case owes it to themselves to learn about the steps Microsoft took to torpedo DRDOS. Here is a link to an article by Andrew Shulman.
DRDOS (Digital Research DOS) was an alternative to MSDOS. Like MSDOS, DRDOSes roots lay in Digital Research's CP/m, a primitive operating system to 8080 machines. DRDOS was a better DOS than DOS. It always lead MSDOS in features. It used high memory before MSDOS, it had a compressed volumes facility, like doublespace, before MSDOS. The suit against Microsoft in the DRDOS case was whether MS Windows 3.x was written to detect whether it was being invoked on a machine running DRDOS, and if so, it would fail, with an error message that said that DRDOS had failed. Damning evidence was introduced in this case. Microsoft announed that they had settled in early January 2000. While the terms of the settlement are confidential all reports are that the monetary portion of the settlement was nine figures. Some commentators suggest that a confidential clause in the settlement was that Bill Gates would have to resign the presidency of Microsoft. He did, in fact, resign within a couple of days of the announcement of the settlement.
A quick check of the Titanic's IMDB pages reveals that Titanic grossed on the order of $600 USD.
Having said that let me suggest that movie grosses are often a poor indicator of movie quality.
A two gigahertz P4 can comsume 100watts. As much as a light bulb. Ouch!
P4 power consumption
I have a question about methanol, the alternative fuel mentioned above. How does it smell?
Am I correct to believe that ethanol as fuel is a liquid? Is methanol also a liquid, or would you use it like propane. We have propane powered taxis here. I can't stand the smell. I believe the producers add something smelly to the fuel, so consumers can detect leaks.
That brings up another question. How volatile are these fuels? My understanding is that diesel is innately safer to handle than gasoline. That a spill is less likely to explode. And I was under the impression that ethanol was more dangerous to handle than gasoline.
I believe that all ms document files store the actual text as printable characters. So, since strings skips everything but printable characters you can see what they wrote.
In fact you (used to|still can) see stuff they wrote they didn't intend to send you! Microsoft left a bug in word. Word used to store not only what you finally decide you want to print out, but it saved recent changes, in the document, across saves.
Word "fast save" bug
Or here is another bug.
Word transmitted hidden summaries
Good point. Another poster, in a similar thread, said that if they allowed bnetd a mechanism to query whether an ID was authorized it would expose them to an increased risk of a denial of service attack. Well, I'd say that was just a cost of doing business...
And one stereotype of techy boys is self-centered pigs who think, "I've got my toys, so the rest of the world can go hang for all I care. War? Poverty? Injustice? Fuck 'em, I have to get back to my game." Now I am going to try to assume this stereotype doesn't apply to any of you -- that you would join in, and raise your voice, if you thought an issue was really important.
Well, how do people get convinced an issue is really important?
Do you remember reading about the "underground railroad"? Would you be proud if you learned that one of your ancestors took heroic risks to help slaves escape over the underground railroad? Well, how do you think their close friends reacted to their "ranting" about the evils of slavery?
Or take child labour, or women's suffrage. When those were hot issues lots of people just didn't get it. Kids had always had to work. Women had never been able to vote.
Things change when people give a darn, and make an effort to convince other people to give a darn.
Okay, strategically, when your friend stops listening, you back off, and wait for another opportunity. But if your friend won't ever listen to you, are they really your friend?
There, I wasn't ranting, was I? FWIW, I do consider Microsoft an evil company.
So I did a google search on Rod Rigole.
Are you sure this guy is a lawyer? Maybe he has just around lawyers. Maybe he is just a paralegal.
The first thing that comes up when you do a google search on this guy is that he was the guy who filmed the civil suit the family of Ron Goldman filed against OJ Simpson. Okay, maybe that is the way he paid his way through law school.
Now I don't know anything about your game, or your project, except that I am sure you have put in a lot of work on it. But I wouldn't fold over a vague letter like this.
But not because I liked the film, which I found childish and un-involving. No, he had the clout to insist that theatre owners couldn't get a print if they didn't have a good sound system. And a number of big fine old theatres around here did spend the money to get digital sound.
Now that I am middle-aged I am hard of hearing. Theatres with crappy sound are a real problem for me.
I would be happy to see him use his clout to help bring in digital projection.
The two biggest chains built a large number of new, state-of-the-art multi-plexes up here, as I believe they did all over North America, a few years ago. These auditoria have stadium seating and advanced sound. But the management lack whatever clue is necessary to see that the goldarn film is properly focussed!
About six years ago the local projectionist union had a labour dispute with Cineplex. The dispute went on for months. Finally, the union capitulated. They had to settle for something like a 50% cut in pay, and a 50% cut in hours.
Management believed that new projection technology made the projectors "idiot-proof". Most films would be set up by a non-union, clueless "manager".
I decided I would complain every time there was something wrong with the quality of the film presentation. And for several years I did so. But I have largely given up.
What I find is that the manager is almost always just a kid, who was serving popcorn six months ago, who really doesn't understand or give a darn about the quality of the film presentation.
So maybe 35mm film would provide a better picture -- if it were in focus? But the days of finding a trained projectionist are fading fast. Hopefully my experience that the digital projection was in perfect focus was not an anomaly, and we can look forward to an improvement in film presentation?
We have one smaller chain up here, Alliance-Atlantic, that still uses experienced projectionists, where you can rely on the film being in focus.
Cliff Stoll's book, "The Cuckoo's Egg" recounts his experience with getting a number traced, circa 1988. A West German guy was prowling US networks looking for poorly secured machines, to see if they had secrets the Soviets would pay for. It took months to get the first warrants to trace local calls (at first they didn't know the interloper was not a local script kiddie).
Once they determined he was a German it took more months to do the paperwork to get the German
authorities to co-operate and do a trace at their end.
When the German telco was authorized to do the trace it turned out the interloper lived where he was served by an old mechanical telephone exchange. This meant it would take the German telco technicians not three minutes, but HOURS to trace the interloper down that last kilometre.
Okay, I don't mean to be sarcastic, but can you think of a protocol whereby the telco technician who answers that call can be sure the calling party is authorized to initiate that trace, that isn't going to take a couple of minutes?
Caller: Unless you answer my demands, I am going to throw a banana cream pie -- at (insert VIP here).
Good Guy #1: (Covering receiver.) Joe, it is the evil pie thrower. Initiate a trace on this phone!
So, the sidekick goes and hunts for a phone. Let me suggest that that is going to take at least twenty seconds. Does Joe know the number of the phone the hero received the call? If not he has to find out, so add time for this.
The sidekick phones the telco. Does he know the direct line to the telco technician who does traces? If not add about five minutes of voice mail hell in here.
If the hero and the sidekick are in a building with a private branch exchange, the sidekick has to contact the switchboard operator, and convince them to determine which outside line is connected to the hero's phone before he makes that call to the telco.
If the PBX is automated, he probably has to hunt down the IT guy, and get him to unlock the cupboard where the PBX hardware is located. How long do you think that would take?
The sidekick reaches the proper telco technician. Know what? Now he has to prove he is authorized to initiate a trace. How does he do that? Does he read off his badge number? Does he know some secret phrase only good guys know?
Does the telco technician know what to do, at a moment's notice? Or does he have to look it up in the manual, or ask his supervisor?
I don't know what the ratio of authorized traces is to court authorized phone taps. But I was really surprised when I read how many, or rather how few, wiretaps get authorized in the States.
I know the number has been climbing in recent years, but less than half a dozen years ago I read one of those brief pieces in Scientific American about this. Approximately 600 authorized Federal wiretaps per year. Approximately 600 authorized State wiretaps.
Why am I making such a big deal about specifying I am enumerating authorized wiretaps? About twenty years ago I watched a TV documentary about surveillance technology. The producers were cleverly cutting back and forth between two interviews. One was an aggressive guy selling bug detectors. The other was a "good guy" in Washington DC. He looked and sounded like Sgt Joe Friday, from the old TV show Dragnet.
The sales guy kept promising that his wares would detect any bug. Joe Friday kept assuring the interviewer that you could never know if your phone was tapped. Finally Joe Friday said something like: "Why we have done over a thousand legal wiretaps alone, without ever being detected." You had to hear how he said it, as if those thousand legal wiretaps were just the tip of the iceberg.
The original Globe article predicted that the other cable outfits, and the telcos offering
DSL, would follow suit.
What question has Von D asked that can't be explained away? How about when will the public realize he is a phony?
Here in Canada one of our cabinet ministers
is talking about spending a whack of money
to provide every Canadian household with
high-speed access. It would cost billions
of dollars to put up the infrastructure.
It might be a better investment than providing
free computers. As someone said powerful
used computers are very cheap right now.
So cheap the monthly ISP subscription becomes
the barrier to access...