That was one of the first -- maybe the first -- 3D game on any platform. And this was first done on the TRS-80, with 128x48 black and white resolution! WOW! Now *that* had to have been one of the most important games... *EVER!* Who doesn't remember Deathmaze 5000?
Wow. The/. editors are finally getting it. They've posted the first Ask Slashdot question that really matters! A few of us might even learn where to go to find real "news for nerds." Thanks!
First, because calculators and computers will take Garbage In and give Garbage Out, and engineers who don't have an intuitive understanding of the approximate answers they should get are much less likely to catch simple software errors and user mistakes.
That's why runtime garbage collection is so important. I mean, do we honestly expect these young'uns to call free() for every malloc()? It's all too damn complex. And we've got astronauts' lives to worry about! I say we just forget these ancient languages and slide rules and have these NASA rocket scientists code everything up in LOGO. It's untyped, has automatic garbage collection, and the little turtle can teach them engineers Lunar Lander to learn the tricks of the rocket science trade!
It would appear that this law was enacted to resolve just that loophole. Treat the encryption key like a key to a lock or safe and you wind up with just the result the lawmakers wish to impose. Most of your comment is spent arguing why that is a wrong choice. Which is fair. I'm not sure I even disagree. But I want to understand why.
I wish a real lawyer would pipe up here. It would be really great if we got unofficial opinions from legal professionals on both sides of the pond.
I'm running disastrously short on time to finish some work (that I've been surfing in order to avoid - bad me! bad me!), so I'll have to be brief. I don't think the law would make any distinction between your opinion of a "reasonable" judge and a demand from what you would consider a "tabloid trial". The problem is that you're looking for *exceptions* while lawmakers write laws for the *generalized circumstance*. I don't think there's a way to reconcile the two.
Note that the intent of my question was to bring forth just this debate. Thanks for your opinion! --M
Let's compare two things: 1. Evidence of a crime in real life (bloody gloves) 2. Evidence of a crime on a computer (documents implimenting me in a fraud)
OK. So now we're getting to the meat of the debate. Thanks.
The police cannot make me tell them where to find 1. The best encryption analogy is, if I have them locked in a unknown safety deposit box, they can't make me tell them which one. This counts as 'incrimination', and I don't have to do it. It doesn't matter than they don't have time to search each one in each bank.
I'm not so sure about this. For example, if you're given immunity to prosecution they CAN compel self-incriminating testimony. However, can they demand a key for a safe which contains incriminating evidence, regardless of immunity? I don't know. I suspect a legitimate warrant could compel a suspect to give over keys to a safe, even if it contains incriminating evidence. But I'm not a lawyer. I bet any 1L could answer this question though.
Note that your argument hinges on whether the suspect may be forced by the state into giving testimony over the location of self-incriminating evidence, not whether the suspect must hand over a key. The fact that the "key" in a digital document is information in itself is another layer to the logical onion here. But certainly, law enforcement would _prefer_ that digital keys and physical keys be considered the same as far as conducting a criminal investigation goes.
RE: the thought experiment of law enforcement demanding access to private photos of you and your gf / wife - do they have the right? Yes. And further, they have the right to investigate if any wrongdoing has taken place upon receiving the photos (decrypted or physical prints). You may not like it, but once it's listed in a warrant (or found as part of an investigation related to a warrant), law enforcement has the right to demand the material whether you like it or not. The fact that it might be uncomfortable or embarrassing is not grounds to obstruct justice in a criminal investigation.
*shrug* that's just how it is.
The technical and philosophical issues surrounding the difference between digital representations of data vs. physical representations are -- I suspect -- beyond the court and legislature to resolve.
How about: The muder weapon is in a safe and law enforcement demands the key. Should a citizen have the right to say no in the face of a legal warrant? Because for a the last eight or so centuries the answer would be no. Before that the king just hanged, flayed, and let your entrails slip out to the ground as you choked.
It's such an important point that I'll say it again: every unnecessary law is bad.
It would appear that the English Parliament is not listening to you. Further, they claim that the law is "needed" (or "necessary"). I'm not in a position to say one way or the other whether it is necessary or whether laws already in existence give law enforcement these legal tools already. Let's assume that they already do exist and this law is redundant.
Getting back to my original question: is it wrong (or different) for law enforcement to demand encryption keys just as they might demand a code to unlock a safe? Because many people here seem to believe that their right to electronic privacy trumps law enforcement's legal resources for compelling testimony and documentation. Seems like that issue was settled centuries ago with the Magna Carta. The king may not have despotic rights any longer, but the legal framework remains in place to investigate and prosecute wrongdoing by government officials. And that includes searches and the seizing of documentation relevant to prosecution.
"They can search your computer with the same warrant powers, this forces you to incriminate yourself. by divulging something you know that can lead to damming evidence.
And how is that different from the police searching your home with a warrant? Suppose they found a murder weapon in your home that you knew of? Is "allowing" them to search thus incriminating yourself as well? No. Self incrimination only refers to speech under oath. Further, you can be compelled to self-incriminating speech (here in the US) upon being subpoenaed and given immunity for prosecution. The fifth amendment article against self-incrimination is not as broad as you believe.
I would like to know, in what way is this law different from court warrant powers demanding one open up their home or safe to police holding said warrant? To refuse law enforcement means risking contempt of court or possibly obstruction of justice. So the government now gets to demand information locked up in a different way. But in what way are the powers of law enforcement different between searching physical property with a warrant vs. digital files?
A bunch of these games were great. I think the issue is not so much that Sega/Sony are attempting to recommoditize abondonware as much as that there is demand for official ports. Perhaps this means a partial return to top down and side scrollers in liu of more 3D mega-games. I've had my fill of 3D gaming, and perhaps the DS success is an example Sony might want to capture as well. JMO...
OK. Sp Apple's emate is on this list, which is very cool. The emate is essentially an MP2100 Newton screen, in a clamshell with a built-in keyboard. The processor is a little different between the 2100 and the emate, but they're both arch compatible. Anyway, what matters is not the chip, but the user and programming environment. Due to the recent/. discussion on the Q1 vs. MP 2100 article, I ebayed myself a newton out of curiosity. It *IS* pretty amazing. And *awfully* slow. I mean horribly slow. Newt's Cape (web browser) can take over ten minutes rendering cnn.com in *plain text*! In comparison, my trusty old 386sx/16 from 1990 used to browse the net with lynx no trouble. Real fast.
This is not to insult the Newton dev team. The Newton was never intended to browse the net anyway, and never had any internal acceleration for text manipulation and rendering. And the environment - whoa. It's the prettiest thing since LMI and Symbolics. NewtonScript is an ease to hack. If you care you can code up c++ snippets and call them from within Newtonscript. So, you can write fast stuff - but you're still limited to NewtonScript to interact with the OS for drawing and datebase access (no filesystem, a relational db for data storage instead). Actually, I bet the relational db is part of why the Newton is so slow too.
The Newton has a lot to teach for UI consistency and streamlined design. It really was a beautiful product. I look at Squeak and think: THAT should be the next Newton. Not Gnome, KDE, or Windows XP Tablet edition (Never mind CE). *sigh*
Want to have fun? Check out Einstein, a Newton emulator for MacOS X and Linux/ARM: You'll have to use your nefarious hax0r sk11z too find a Newton ROM and then you too can learn 'bout the Newton (and emate) without having to ebay one.
And significantly cheaper too. A NeXT cube or slab could be had for ~$10K on release in (what 1987/88?). At that time the Sun 3/60 and 3/80 were comparable workstations from Sun, and the Indigo (I believe) was comparable from SGI. Both SGI and Sun sold their low end machines for ~$30K if I remember right. Huge difference. And note that the both the Sun 3 and NeXT Cube used the same 68030/40 arch, and both offered monochrom megapixel displays on the low end.
Note, I used to have a slab on my desk way back when. It was a good computer, but no panacea. IMO: the big advances of NeXTSTEP were display postscript and the objective-c development environment. But it really wasn't significantly better than any other 'NIX workstation at the time - just cheaper.
A NeXT slab would typically have a 25Mhz 68040. The older cubes had a slower 030, but included an expansion backplane and a dsp chip on the motherboard. Realize though that NeXTSTEP and its development tools are not a functional system, but harken to older procedural standards. Objective C is much closer to C than it is to LISP, for example. The development and runtime environments are completely different. MacOS X (derived from NeXTSTEP) is much closer to Windows (or RSX, VMS, PRIMEOS, OS/390 - you name it) because all have procedural roots. Data types must be explicit and declared, data and processes are separate and in their own memory space - requiring message passing for interprocess communication, blah blah blah. A functional environment would throw all that away.
The question is not: how much faster is an intel mac to a NeXT slab, but how fast is a modern PC compared to an old Symbolics machine? The answer: way the fuck faster. But we're still twenty years behind since little research has gone into functional environments in the interim. We've spent the time reimplementing old ideas on new platforms again and again and again. Weeeeeee!
Yeah. In a functional system that's exactly what you would get. Data type issues go away and all objects are registered and available to all other objects within the system. The Newton is a good example of a system like this, as is smalltalk and the old lisp machines from the eighties. Squeak would be the modern equivalent.
Developing in those systems would resolve the complaint you make pretty easily. But it would be s-l-o-w. And dumping procedural for a functional system still wouldn't resolve the core issue (IMO) which is that symbolic representation is inherently linear (one dimensional) while graphical systems represent objects and data in a two-dimensional area. So why hasn't programming by flowchart become the norm? Perhaps because one can't reasonably represent all the options available within a CLI grammar-space that one would need within a visual-area.
IOW: A picture is worth a thousand words, but a photo of a dying Ethiopian isn't an actuarial table and can't present deep second and third order information about life in Ethiopia.
"For example no mainstream GUI today manages to properly merge the power of the command line with the ease of use of a mouse driven interface, instead both act side by side,[...]"
How would you do this? A GUI is intended to provide simplicity by limiting choice to only those options relevant within a given context. Further, it uses visual metaphor to classify objects and data. CLIs use symbolic representation and grammar to organize files and actions, and as such are closer to reading, writing, and speech than a visual interpretation of system state. It's the difference between looking at a graph vs. a table of numbers - both portray the same information, but require different regions of the brain to interpret. Perhaps the problem you lament is not the computer interface, but limitations and differences between how people manipulate visual compared to manipulating the system with symbols and words. These are two distict areas in the brain - why should they work alike?
Sorry I didn't notice your reply until now. I just haven't had time to login and check replies due to an impending final exam and my work schedule. Honestly, I just posted that one word reply as a lark and didn't expect it to get notice. Sheesh, +5 for the crap I post and -1 when I post something I think relevant. Go figure. Anyway, agreed. And glad to see old timers like you around. --M
yeah. I've looked at XP/Tablet edition and I'm not too impressed. MS has a habit of releasing crap for a few releases and then doing it right. If they do it right in Vista I might buy. If not, well... perhaps I'll have to wait for Apple. The Linux "solutions" to pen input are even more of a joke than XP. So... I'm not expecting much from there. All I want is a useful slab based tablet. Who sells me the solution... I could care less.
How about pervasive pen interface support with good handwriting recognition, and pervasive speech recognition support and use within both the OS and Office 2007? I haven't bought a copy of Windows since win 3.0, but if they get those two features to work right I might just dump OS X and migrate to a Windows based tablet. This thing is simply too cool for words. heh.
would you list what WiFi card you bought for your Newton? It might also be helpful if you could list other useful devices and tips for getting a used Newton 2x00 up and running in the modern world. Thanks a bunch! --M
Slashdot Mirror
That was one of the first -- maybe the first -- 3D game on any platform. And this was first done on the TRS-80, with 128x48 black and white resolution! WOW! Now *that* had to have been one of the most important games... *EVER!* Who doesn't remember Deathmaze 5000?
+5, Insightful?
Funny, Assholes! FUNNY!!!!
Wow. The /. editors are finally getting it. They've posted the first Ask Slashdot question that really matters! A few of us might even learn where to go to find real "news for nerds." Thanks!
That's why runtime garbage collection is so important. I mean, do we honestly expect these young'uns to call free() for every malloc()? It's all too damn complex. And we've got astronauts' lives to worry about! I say we just forget these ancient languages and slide rules and have these NASA rocket scientists code everything up in LOGO. It's untyped, has automatic garbage collection, and the little turtle can teach them engineers Lunar Lander to learn the tricks of the rocket science trade!
Damn, I'm good!
It would appear that this law was enacted to resolve just that loophole. Treat the encryption key like a key to a lock or safe and you wind up with just the result the lawmakers wish to impose. Most of your comment is spent arguing why that is a wrong choice. Which is fair. I'm not sure I even disagree. But I want to understand why.
I wish a real lawyer would pipe up here. It would be really great if we got unofficial opinions from legal professionals on both sides of the pond.
I'm running disastrously short on time to finish some work (that I've been surfing in order to avoid - bad me! bad me!), so I'll have to be brief. I don't think the law would make any distinction between your opinion of a "reasonable" judge and a demand from what you would consider a "tabloid trial". The problem is that you're looking for *exceptions* while lawmakers write laws for the *generalized circumstance*. I don't think there's a way to reconcile the two.
Note that the intent of my question was to bring forth just this debate. Thanks for your opinion! --M
OK. So now we're getting to the meat of the debate. Thanks.
I'm not so sure about this. For example, if you're given immunity to prosecution they CAN compel self-incriminating testimony. However, can they demand a key for a safe which contains incriminating evidence, regardless of immunity? I don't know. I suspect a legitimate warrant could compel a suspect to give over keys to a safe, even if it contains incriminating evidence. But I'm not a lawyer. I bet any 1L could answer this question though.
Note that your argument hinges on whether the suspect may be forced by the state into giving testimony over the location of self-incriminating evidence, not whether the suspect must hand over a key. The fact that the "key" in a digital document is information in itself is another layer to the logical onion here. But certainly, law enforcement would _prefer_ that digital keys and physical keys be considered the same as far as conducting a criminal investigation goes.
Thanks,
--M
RE: the thought experiment of law enforcement demanding access to private photos of you and your gf / wife - do they have the right? Yes. And further, they have the right to investigate if any wrongdoing has taken place upon receiving the photos (decrypted or physical prints). You may not like it, but once it's listed in a warrant (or found as part of an investigation related to a warrant), law enforcement has the right to demand the material whether you like it or not. The fact that it might be uncomfortable or embarrassing is not grounds to obstruct justice in a criminal investigation.
*shrug* that's just how it is.
The technical and philosophical issues surrounding the difference between digital representations of data vs. physical representations are -- I suspect -- beyond the court and legislature to resolve.
How about: The muder weapon is in a safe and law enforcement demands the key. Should a citizen have the right to say no in the face of a legal warrant? Because for a the last eight or so centuries the answer would be no. Before that the king just hanged, flayed, and let your entrails slip out to the ground as you choked.
It would appear that the English Parliament is not listening to you. Further, they claim that the law is "needed" (or "necessary"). I'm not in a position to say one way or the other whether it is necessary or whether laws already in existence give law enforcement these legal tools already. Let's assume that they already do exist and this law is redundant.
Getting back to my original question: is it wrong (or different) for law enforcement to demand encryption keys just as they might demand a code to unlock a safe? Because many people here seem to believe that their right to electronic privacy trumps law enforcement's legal resources for compelling testimony and documentation. Seems like that issue was settled centuries ago with the Magna Carta. The king may not have despotic rights any longer, but the legal framework remains in place to investigate and prosecute wrongdoing by government officials. And that includes searches and the seizing of documentation relevant to prosecution.
And how is that different from the police searching your home with a warrant? Suppose they found a murder weapon in your home that you knew of? Is "allowing" them to search thus incriminating yourself as well? No. Self incrimination only refers to speech under oath. Further, you can be compelled to self-incriminating speech (here in the US) upon being subpoenaed and given immunity for prosecution. The fifth amendment article against self-incrimination is not as broad as you believe.
I would like to know, in what way is this law different from court warrant powers demanding one open up their home or safe to police holding said warrant? To refuse law enforcement means risking contempt of court or possibly obstruction of justice. So the government now gets to demand information locked up in a different way. But in what way are the powers of law enforcement different between searching physical property with a warrant vs. digital files?
A bunch of these games were great. I think the issue is not so much that Sega/Sony are attempting to recommoditize abondonware as much as that there is demand for official ports. Perhaps this means a partial return to top down and side scrollers in liu of more 3D mega-games. I've had my fill of 3D gaming, and perhaps the DS success is an example Sony might want to capture as well. JMO...
OK. Sp Apple's emate is on this list, which is very cool. The emate is essentially an MP2100 Newton screen, in a clamshell with a built-in keyboard. The processor is a little different between the 2100 and the emate, but they're both arch compatible. Anyway, what matters is not the chip, but the user and programming environment. Due to the recent /. discussion on the Q1 vs. MP 2100 article, I ebayed myself a newton out of curiosity. It *IS* pretty amazing. And *awfully* slow. I mean horribly slow. Newt's Cape (web browser) can take over ten minutes rendering cnn.com in *plain text*! In comparison, my trusty old 386sx/16 from 1990 used to browse the net with lynx no trouble. Real fast.
This is not to insult the Newton dev team. The Newton was never intended to browse the net anyway, and never had any internal acceleration for text manipulation and rendering. And the environment - whoa. It's the prettiest thing since LMI and Symbolics. NewtonScript is an ease to hack. If you care you can code up c++ snippets and call them from within Newtonscript. So, you can write fast stuff - but you're still limited to NewtonScript to interact with the OS for drawing and datebase access (no filesystem, a relational db for data storage instead). Actually, I bet the relational db is part of why the Newton is so slow too.
The Newton has a lot to teach for UI consistency and streamlined design. It really was a beautiful product. I look at Squeak and think: THAT should be the next Newton. Not Gnome, KDE, or Windows XP Tablet edition (Never mind CE). *sigh*
Want to have fun? Check out Einstein, a Newton emulator for MacOS X and Linux/ARM: You'll have to use your nefarious hax0r sk11z too find a Newton ROM and then you too can learn 'bout the Newton (and emate) without having to ebay one.
And significantly cheaper too. A NeXT cube or slab could be had for ~$10K on release in (what 1987/88?). At that time the Sun 3/60 and 3/80 were comparable workstations from Sun, and the Indigo (I believe) was comparable from SGI. Both SGI and Sun sold their low end machines for ~$30K if I remember right. Huge difference. And note that the both the Sun 3 and NeXT Cube used the same 68030/40 arch, and both offered monochrom megapixel displays on the low end.
Note, I used to have a slab on my desk way back when. It was a good computer, but no panacea. IMO: the big advances of NeXTSTEP were display postscript and the objective-c development environment. But it really wasn't significantly better than any other 'NIX workstation at the time - just cheaper.
Then go buy yourself a mac. It's essentially the same system today as it was seventeen odd years back - warts (need I say netinfo) and all...
A NeXT slab would typically have a 25Mhz 68040. The older cubes had a slower 030, but included an expansion backplane and a dsp chip on the motherboard. Realize though that NeXTSTEP and its development tools are not a functional system, but harken to older procedural standards. Objective C is much closer to C than it is to LISP, for example. The development and runtime environments are completely different. MacOS X (derived from NeXTSTEP) is much closer to Windows (or RSX, VMS, PRIMEOS, OS/390 - you name it) because all have procedural roots. Data types must be explicit and declared, data and processes are separate and in their own memory space - requiring message passing for interprocess communication, blah blah blah. A functional environment would throw all that away.
The question is not: how much faster is an intel mac to a NeXT slab, but how fast is a modern PC compared to an old Symbolics machine? The answer: way the fuck faster. But we're still twenty years behind since little research has gone into functional environments in the interim. We've spent the time reimplementing old ideas on new platforms again and again and again. Weeeeeee!
Yeah. In a functional system that's exactly what you would get. Data type issues go away and all objects are registered and available to all other objects within the system. The Newton is a good example of a system like this, as is smalltalk and the old lisp machines from the eighties. Squeak would be the modern equivalent.
Developing in those systems would resolve the complaint you make pretty easily. But it would be s-l-o-w. And dumping procedural for a functional system still wouldn't resolve the core issue (IMO) which is that symbolic representation is inherently linear (one dimensional) while graphical systems represent objects and data in a two-dimensional area. So why hasn't programming by flowchart become the norm? Perhaps because one can't reasonably represent all the options available within a CLI grammar-space that one would need within a visual-area.
IOW: A picture is worth a thousand words, but a photo of a dying Ethiopian isn't an actuarial table and can't present deep second and third order information about life in Ethiopia.
"For example no mainstream GUI today manages to properly merge the power of the command line with the ease of use of a mouse driven interface, instead both act side by side,[...]"
How would you do this? A GUI is intended to provide simplicity by limiting choice to only those options relevant within a given context. Further, it uses visual metaphor to classify objects and data. CLIs use symbolic representation and grammar to organize files and actions, and as such are closer to reading, writing, and speech than a visual interpretation of system state. It's the difference between looking at a graph vs. a table of numbers - both portray the same information, but require different regions of the brain to interpret. Perhaps the problem you lament is not the computer interface, but limitations and differences between how people manipulate visual compared to manipulating the system with symbols and words. These are two distict areas in the brain - why should they work alike?
Hey jd,
Sorry I didn't notice your reply until now. I just haven't had time to login and check replies due to an impending final exam and my work schedule. Honestly, I just posted that one word reply as a lark and didn't expect it to get notice. Sheesh, +5 for the crap I post and -1 when I post something I think relevant. Go figure. Anyway, agreed. And glad to see old timers like you around. --M
Dead.
yeah. I've looked at XP/Tablet edition and I'm not too impressed. MS has a habit of releasing crap for a few releases and then doing it right. If they do it right in Vista I might buy. If not, well... perhaps I'll have to wait for Apple. The Linux "solutions" to pen input are even more of a joke than XP. So... I'm not expecting much from there. All I want is a useful slab based tablet. Who sells me the solution... I could care less.
yeah, right. Just too funny. lol!
How about pervasive pen interface support with good handwriting recognition, and pervasive speech recognition support and use within both the OS and Office 2007? I haven't bought a copy of Windows since win 3.0, but if they get those two features to work right I might just dump OS X and migrate to a Windows based tablet. This thing is simply too cool for words. heh.
Hey,
would you list what WiFi card you bought for your Newton? It might also be helpful if you could list other useful devices and tips for getting a used Newton 2x00 up and running in the modern world. Thanks a bunch! --M