When I saw 'daily pot use' I thought first of cooking pots, that maybe this was some anthropological post about when humans first started cooking, then I thought maybe it was about sitting instead of squatting when answering a certain call of nature (also anthropological, presumably the 'pot' method can lead to varicose veins in the legs, so why not other things.)
But I guess your average slashdotter would assume 'pot' was for good old Mary Jane.
'Maybe what SHOULD be done is allow two certificates...from the "trusted" certificate authority...and then a second that can be self-generated by that other end to actually encrypt'
Sounds like a good idea to me. Somebody mod the anonymous coward up. (Unless somebody sees a flaw in AC's arg and can point it out.)
A couple of books I read recently come to mind. "My Life as a Pimp" by Iceberg Slim, and "The Valachi Papers". The reason is these books tell about the seamy side of life from the inside out. Iceberg Slim was quite literate. Joe Valachi was barely literate but he was intelligent and interviewed by an excellent writer, Peter Maas. A lot of "The Sopranos" comes from "The Valachi Papers".
So much for the unsavory; In the 'savory' department I'd recommend "Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin" and "Narrative of the Life of Frederic Douglass, an American Slave", "Act One" by Moss Hart is another autobiographical classic, by a successful American playwright of the 1st half of the 20th century.
"...because privacy matters. Privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be."
Y'know, when I read that, for some reason the first thing I thought of was James Brown, the singer/composer/dancer. I watched a documentary about him once, and remember that as a child, he would go off by himself and be in his own head. I think that's where a lot of his creativity came from. Maybe I just identified with that and maybe a lot of people don't care. But yes, I think privacy matters.
Looked at from a different point of view, I remember reading, as a layman, about a hypothesis of Darwinism that many big changes in evolution came from isolated, what one might call protected, environments where something analogous to human activies of design and 'working out the bugs' could happen.
Isn't one of the 4 freedoms supposed to be 'Freedom from Fear'? I think there's always a little bit of fear, or at least anxiety, when you don't have privacy.
"Does it serve the users well?" is a question that needs to be asked from time to time when developing code as a way of keeping perspective. But the point of the rules and guidelines is to find ways to achieve that goal. Whether the rules and guidelines actually serve their own users well is another question.
I made a post there, but it was late and I didn't realize I wasn't logged in so it was lost as an anonymous coward post (Probably just as well. Like I said, it was late.) Anyway, along comes this post about Time as 'emergent'. So, for a 'Godlike' observer, the Universe is Static. I see a connection to the Turing Test Free Will article, but can I explain it now that it's morning and I've had my coffee. Only one way to find out:
If for a Godlike observer there is no time, then everything is predetermined. It's like that Calvinist notion that if God is omniscient then He must know the future, and know who will go to heaven, etc. But that means people can't have any effect on the future, no true Free Will, only an illusion of it.
I personally find these thoughts leading to the idea that the universe might be a kind of rule 110 machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110. I like the idea of Free Will, but this doesn't cause me a lot of angst over Superdetermism because, supposing the universe is a sort of rule 110 thing. Within universe, you have to live it out and the future becomes the past. No matter how far you go in the Future, that will eventually be the fixed, immutable Past. But you will have 'lived it', and nothing could have worked it out and predicted it ahead of you. Even this Omniscient God (if there were one) could only 'know' the Future by cranking up some meta out-of-universe computer, to speed up the computation and beat the regular old Universe to some future point, but then the version of me running in that meta computer would be doing the living so it wouldn't matter. God or the Master Programmer or whoever could still only know me by waiting for me to live things out for myself.
Some posters have already touched on this, and I might have modded them up instead of posting myself if I had mod points right now, but, since I don't...
I'm thinking about this as a secular humanist/Darwinist not a believer in some form of Zoroastrian/Hindu/Judeo-Christian-Islamic religion, so, what do I expect in a million years? Humans like myself still running the world? Evolved super-humans? Or aritificial intelligences that owe their existence to human beings and are the heirs of humans as much, if not more, than humans are the heirs and owe their existence to the first primates.
Are we supposed to have machines of superior intelligence that take care of us? Keeping us in super high tech zoos that are like earthly paradises to us? Are we supposed to have merged with the machines somehow?
I don't know the answers to these questions, but I suspect humans will be only a memory, hopefully a a grateful memory. Hopefully, there is some 'point' to exiistence, and our heirs will be moving towards fulfilling that 'point'. ( I'm being as deliberately vague about this point as I can. If you don't get what I mean by it, don't worry, it's not important.)
I was going to put 'the high road' in my subject line, but then I realized there might be other 'high roads' some of them even 'higher'. Later I'll try to say a little about why it's a 'higher road', but first I'll say why I can 'afford' to go the linux route.
I worked in the Unix world from the early 80s. I was a programmer and a lot of my work involved porting code from one flavor/architecture of Unix to another, things like Xenix, BSD 4.2, System V, HPUX, so when Linux came along and I got my first distro, slackware on 50 diskettes (two of them mislabeled), I was used to having to figure things out when I replaced Dos and Windows 3.1 on my no-name brand laptop with its 33 MHZ CPU, 250 Megabyte Hard drive and 4 meg of RAM. Over the years I did my share of struggling to get apps to work, being sure to buy compatible modems and later ethernet cards, TV capture cards, etc, finding the right incantations to get a modem connection to an ISP where tech support had never heard of linux and didn't feel obliged to give you the time of day if you weren't running WIndows or a Mac.
I was very proud of the fact that I got the Netscape browser to work on my linux system and (o mirabile dictu) I actually got a short contract job to work at Netscape only a few weeks later! I remember telling the interviewer I used Netscape under Linux and he looked at me for a second and said, "So do I". I think that was 1995 but I'd have to go check and I'm not going to bother.
(I STILL HAVE TO PUT UP WITH frustrations here in the linux world, EVEN IN THIS POST! I was on slackware 14, using Seamonkey. I logged in to slashdot as shoor, but when I actually tried to post I got a smarmy message about how they didn't know if I was human and I should log in! Now I'm trying ubuntu and we'll see if it works.)
So why I didn't I take what might have been the easier path and just go with Microsoft? I was aware of some unsavory things about Microsoft's way of doing things. I realize that this is the business world and there are plenty of people from all walks of life who wouldn't think twice about the ethics or morality or whatever if they had the same opportunities as the bosses at Microsoft, so I'm not posting to get on that old soapbox. It's been so long that I don't know that I could even remember accurately the details, and if I got something wrong, I'm sure there'd be plenty of people eager to flame me over it. Even back in the 90s, when people would come to me for advice, I'd be straight with them and say Linux had a big learning curve and there were things you wouldn't find on it. I can get away with keeping my 'virtue' because I don't have the same needs as a lot of people. I'm not a big gamer for instance, and have mostly only experimented with games that could run under Wine, usually getting them when they were out of date and cheap. I don't need fancy spreadsheets or whatever. I actually do casual writing with emacs and vi (and no, I don't endorse emacs for anyone who hasn't already gone through the learning curve, but my fingers know the hot keys now, so I use it.) I used to prepare fancy hard copy stuff like resumes using TeX too.
But I hated Microsoft! I was around in the 70s, when the hobbyist computer world exploded, and people wondered where it was going, and there was excitement at all the cool prospects. I did contract work on somebody's CP/M based system and had an Ohio Scientific Superboard II with a 6502 microprocessor (same as in the Apple) and my brother homebrewed a system from the 8080 bug book. But then IBM came out with the PC with its miserable Intel 8086 CPU (when the Motorola 68000 and Zilog Z8000 had already come out) and suddenly it seemed like the only game in town was that with Dos!
I wonder if I still have my 6502 manual anywhere. My brother and I had an Ohio Scientific Superboard 2 and I programmed the game of life on it in assembly. Saved the code off to an audio cassette using Kansas City Standard (that part was my brother's doing, he was the hardware guy). That pre and post indexed addressing through page zero was pretty cool, but the 8 bit stack pointer... Well, it meant you had to be careful.
I would assume that these black holes are still on the scale of light years apart, and this cloud stretches across an area a few times the orbit of pluto. Something doesn't add up.
That was my thought too (up the St Lawrence), but I read enough of the fine article to see that it's going down the Atlantic seaboard and then up the Mississippi. I understand going by water as much as possible, but why that route?
Hmmm, why not create a plain.mozilla directory somewhere, mainly to preserve your bookmarks. Then, when you want to wipe stuff, rm -rf.mozilla, then tar over the saved clean.mozilla to restore it? You know, something like:
I watched a multi-part documentary on TV about the development of aircraft, emphasis on military aircraft, but there was talk about the Wright Bros and Santos-Dumont also. What I particularly remember is that one commentator said that while others were getting things off the ground, it was the Wright Brothers who understood the inherit instability of a plane. Others thought of a plane as a bit like a boat in the water, but the Wrights had been bicycle mechanics, and knew that one had to constantly control a bicycle, and they studied how birds, for example, had to constantly adjust their wings. What impressed people at the 1908 Paris Air Show wasn't just that the plane flew, but that it was so maneuverable, doing figure 8s, that kind of thing.
The article says the bubble moves at the speed of light. But I've seen claims that space is expanding or will eventually be expanding so that objects far apart will be moving away from each other faster than the speed of light. Does that mean this 'bubble' wouldn't reach everything?
(Somehow, this is making me think of a Greg Egan novel).
Why does anything exist? Physicists talk about vacuum energy and quantum fluctuations, but why? You answer a question and always there's another.
Is the universe digital? A sort of computer? Is there anything in the universe that can be identified as a real number (a true smooth curve for example? I think the relativity depends on 'smoothness' doesn't it?) or is every measurable thing expressible as rationals and therefore computable?
Well, it's hard to show in a simple example, but the main thing is the comment after the '}', to give a quick recognition of what's just finished. Good code shouldn't have too many nested braces, but even so, a block can get pretty long sometimes. The/* forever */ after the 'for(;;)' was mainly to help identify the start when you see the '}/* end forever */ at the end. Same with the/* end if 1== x */ which was pretty contrived I'll admit. It's also true that if somebody changed it to '2==x' you'd be in trouble. In real code you'd declare a constant and have something like:
OK, I was a C/assembly programmer, never did much with C++. I always liked the square bracket style, and one thing I found very helpful was putting a short comment at the end of a block after the closing '}', even if it was just to show that it ended a 'for' rather than an 'if'. Example:
for (;;)/* forever */ {
misc code
if (1==x)
{
break;
}/* end if 1==x */
misc code
Recent openwrt distros have a problem with the classic wrt54gl in that it doesn't have enough memory. I know because it happened to me. It installs, but when you try to change configuration, it bricks and you need to ground pin 15 to get it to reflash something. From the openwrt site:
"In a test with OpenWrt 10.03.1-rc6, the OS will install but LuCI will be unable to update settings because there isn't enough flash left free."
Old enough versions should work, but I'm happy with my tomato install.
I found this book in a trashbin. If nothing else, it's got lots of cool black and white photos, some by Weegie. From page 365:
"We can give the following practical definition of intelligence: Intelligence is that which such an intelligence test measures. The statement sounds empty but isn't, for it implies all the careful steps that have gone into the construction of the tests. The tests constructed by different workers all lead to scores with high intercorrelations; therefore they are measuring something in common. What they measure in common defines intelligence."
Not the catfish, but the killer whales coming up on land to snag prey.
The whales' early ancestors lived in the sea and came up on land. Then they went back to the sea though still air breathers. Now they are starting to go back on land again. Will they evolve new legs or just wriggle along like snakes?
Nobody knows why we had a low-entropy big bang, when a random choice of initial conditions would be overwhelmingly more likely to produce a maximum-entropy one
The explanation that I see is that there might be a 'multiverse', many big bangs, most of which would not produce a universe that could support life. Therefore, we're here because this is the one in a skadzillion that could and did produce life intelligent enough to wonder about this stuff. It's a plausible explanation to me, but that doesn't mean it's correct of course.
I'm still looking for a really good explanation of what the article is about. The 'arrow of time' I'm familiar with, and which has been mentioned in other posts, is the entropic one. There are so many ways for things to get disarrayed as opposed to the extremely few for them to get re-arrayed, that we never see it happen, nevert see things like objects getting hotter than ambient temperature without a source of heat or things randomly assembling themselves into some recognizable order.
I clicked to see who or what Mike Judge was. The topic immediately made me think of one of the first Science Fiction stories I ever read, C. M. Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons"
Actually dd is the unix utility that is un-unix like in its invocation (try 'man dd' on any unix/linux/OSX system from the command line). A lot of times plain old 'cat' will do the job, as in 'cat/dev/cdrom > cd.iso'
My attitude is that it is unrealistic to think data is secure in the cloud. If this makes people more cautious generally about using the cloud, that's a good thing. Whether or not the government really should have the right to do this or not is a different question. Also, while It may hurt, I doubt that this will destroy the cloud business.
Slashdot Mirror
When I saw 'daily pot use' I thought first of cooking pots, that maybe this was some anthropological post about when humans first started cooking, then I thought maybe it was about sitting instead of squatting when answering a certain call of nature (also anthropological, presumably the 'pot' method can lead to varicose veins in the legs, so why not other things.)
But I guess your average slashdotter would assume 'pot' was for good old Mary Jane.
'Maybe what SHOULD be done is allow two certificates...from the "trusted" certificate authority...and then a second that can be self-generated by that other end to actually encrypt'
Sounds like a good idea to me. Somebody mod the anonymous coward up. (Unless somebody sees a flaw in AC's arg and can point it out.)
A couple of books I read recently come to mind. "My Life as a Pimp" by Iceberg Slim, and "The Valachi Papers". The reason is these books tell about the seamy side of life from the inside out. Iceberg Slim was quite literate. Joe Valachi was barely literate but he was intelligent and interviewed by an excellent writer, Peter Maas. A lot of "The Sopranos" comes from "The Valachi Papers".
So much for the unsavory; In the 'savory' department I'd recommend "Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin" and "Narrative of the Life of Frederic Douglass, an American Slave",
"Act One" by Moss Hart is another autobiographical classic, by a successful American playwright of the 1st half of the 20th century.
"...because privacy matters. Privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be."
Y'know, when I read that, for some reason the first thing I thought of was James Brown, the singer/composer/dancer. I watched a documentary about him once, and remember that as a child, he would go off by himself and be in his own head. I think that's where a lot of his creativity came from. Maybe I just identified with that and maybe a lot of people don't care. But yes, I think privacy matters.
Looked at from a different point of view, I remember reading, as a layman, about a hypothesis of Darwinism that many big changes in evolution came from isolated, what one might call protected, environments where something analogous to human activies of design and 'working out the bugs' could happen.
Isn't one of the 4 freedoms supposed to be 'Freedom from Fear'? I think there's always a little bit of fear, or at least anxiety, when you don't have privacy.
"Does it serve the users well?" is a question that needs to be asked from time to time when developing code as a way of keeping perspective. But the point of the rules and guidelines is to find ways to achieve that goal. Whether the rules and guidelines actually serve their own users well is another question.
There was a slashdot article about a Turing Test for Free Will not too long ago http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/10/21/199213/physicist-unveils-a-turing-test-for-free-will/
I made a post there, but it was late and I didn't realize I wasn't logged in so it was lost as an anonymous coward post (Probably just as well. Like I said, it was late.) Anyway, along comes this post about Time as 'emergent'. So, for a 'Godlike' observer, the Universe is Static. I see a connection to the Turing Test Free Will article, but can I explain it now that it's morning and I've had my coffee. Only one way to find out:
If for a Godlike observer there is no time, then everything is predetermined. It's like that Calvinist notion that if God is omniscient then He must know the future, and know who will go to heaven, etc. But that means people can't have any effect on the future, no true Free Will, only an illusion of it.
This would also be evidence for 'Superdeterminism' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism/.
I personally find these thoughts leading to the idea that the universe might be a kind of rule 110 machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110. I like the idea of Free Will, but this doesn't cause me a lot of angst over Superdetermism because, supposing the universe is a sort of rule 110 thing. Within universe, you have to live it out and the future becomes the past. No matter how far you go in the Future, that will eventually be the fixed, immutable Past. But you will have 'lived it', and nothing could have worked it out and predicted it ahead of you. Even this Omniscient God (if there were one) could only 'know' the Future by cranking up some meta out-of-universe computer, to speed up the computation and beat the regular old Universe to some future point, but then the version of me running in that meta computer would be doing the living so it wouldn't matter. God or the Master Programmer or whoever could still only know me by waiting for me to live things out for myself.
One could extrapolate that the 4D universe is just a black hole in a 5D universe then. Maybe go up to as many dimensions as String theory expects.
Some posters have already touched on this, and I might have modded them up instead of posting myself if I had mod points right now, but, since I don't...
I'm thinking about this as a secular humanist/Darwinist not a believer in some form of Zoroastrian/Hindu/Judeo-Christian-Islamic religion, so, what do I expect in a million years? Humans like myself still running the world? Evolved super-humans? Or aritificial intelligences that owe their existence to human beings and are the heirs of humans as much, if not more, than humans are the heirs and owe their existence to the first primates.
Are we supposed to have machines of superior intelligence that take care of us? Keeping us in super high tech zoos that are like earthly paradises to us? Are we supposed to have merged with the machines somehow?
I don't know the answers to these questions, but I suspect humans will be only a memory, hopefully a a grateful memory. Hopefully, there is some 'point' to exiistence, and our heirs will be moving towards fulfilling that 'point'. ( I'm being as deliberately vague about this point as I can. If you don't get what I mean by it, don't worry, it's not important.)
I was going to put 'the high road' in my subject line, but then I realized there might be other 'high roads' some of them even 'higher'. Later I'll try to say a little about why it's a 'higher road', but first I'll say why I can 'afford' to go the linux route.
I worked in the Unix world from the early 80s. I was a programmer and a lot of my work involved porting code from one flavor/architecture of Unix to another, things like Xenix, BSD 4.2, System V, HPUX, so when Linux came along and I got my first distro, slackware on 50 diskettes (two of them mislabeled), I was used to having to figure things out when I replaced Dos and Windows 3.1 on my no-name brand laptop with its 33 MHZ CPU, 250 Megabyte Hard drive and 4 meg of RAM. Over the years I did my share of struggling to get apps to work, being sure to buy compatible modems and later ethernet cards, TV capture cards, etc, finding the right incantations to get a modem connection to an ISP where tech support had never heard of linux and didn't feel obliged to give you the time of day if you weren't running WIndows or a Mac.
I was very proud of the fact that I got the Netscape browser to work on my linux system and (o mirabile dictu) I actually got a short contract job to work at Netscape only a few weeks later! I remember telling the interviewer I used Netscape under Linux and he looked at me for a second and said, "So do I". I think that was 1995 but I'd have to go check and I'm not going to bother.
(I STILL HAVE TO PUT UP WITH frustrations here in the linux world, EVEN IN THIS POST! I was on slackware 14, using Seamonkey. I logged in to slashdot as shoor, but when I actually tried to post I got a smarmy message about how they didn't know if I was human and I should log in! Now I'm trying ubuntu and we'll see if it works.)
So why I didn't I take what might have been the easier path and just go with Microsoft? I was aware of some unsavory things about Microsoft's way of doing things. I realize that this is the business world and there are plenty of people from all walks of life who wouldn't think twice about the ethics or morality or whatever if they had the same opportunities as the bosses at Microsoft, so I'm not posting to get on that old soapbox. It's been so long that I don't know that I could even remember accurately the details, and if I got something wrong, I'm sure there'd be plenty of people eager to flame me over it. Even back in the 90s, when people would come to me for advice, I'd be straight with them and say Linux had a big learning curve and there were things you wouldn't find on it. I can get away with keeping my 'virtue' because I don't have the same needs as a lot of people. I'm not a big gamer for instance, and have mostly only experimented with games that could run under Wine, usually getting them when they were out of date and cheap. I don't need fancy spreadsheets or whatever. I actually do casual writing with emacs and vi (and no, I don't endorse emacs for anyone who hasn't already gone through the learning curve, but my fingers know the hot keys now, so I use it.) I used to prepare fancy hard copy stuff like resumes using TeX too.
But I hated Microsoft! I was around in the 70s, when the hobbyist computer world exploded, and people wondered where it was going, and there was excitement at all the cool prospects. I did contract work on somebody's CP/M based system and had an Ohio Scientific Superboard II with a 6502 microprocessor (same as in the Apple) and my brother homebrewed a system from the 8080 bug book. But then IBM came out with the PC with its miserable Intel 8086 CPU (when the Motorola 68000 and Zilog Z8000 had already come out) and suddenly it seemed like the only game in town was that with Dos!
I wonder if I still have my 6502 manual anywhere. My brother and I had an Ohio Scientific Superboard 2 and I programmed the game of life on it in assembly. Saved the code off to an audio cassette using Kansas City Standard (that part was my brother's doing, he was the hardware guy). That pre and post indexed addressing through page zero was pretty cool, but the 8 bit stack pointer... Well, it meant you had to be careful.
I would assume that these black holes are still on the scale of light years apart, and this cloud stretches across an area a few times the orbit of pluto. Something doesn't add up.
That was my thought too (up the St Lawrence), but I read enough of the fine article to see that it's going down the Atlantic seaboard and then up the Mississippi. I understand going by water as much as possible, but why that route?
Hmmm, why not create a plain .mozilla directory somewhere, mainly to preserve your bookmarks. Then, when you want to wipe stuff, rm -rf .mozilla, then tar over the saved clean .mozilla to restore it? You know, something like:
cd BACKUPs; tar cf - .mozilla | (cd ~; tar xvf -)
I watched a multi-part documentary on TV about the development of aircraft, emphasis on military aircraft, but there was talk about the Wright Bros and Santos-Dumont also. What I particularly remember is that one commentator said that while others were getting things off the ground, it was the Wright Brothers who understood the inherit instability of a plane. Others thought of a plane as a bit like a boat in the water, but the Wrights had been bicycle mechanics, and knew that one had to constantly control a bicycle, and they studied how birds, for example, had to constantly adjust their wings. What impressed people at the 1908 Paris Air Show wasn't just that the plane flew, but that it was so maneuverable, doing figure 8s, that kind of thing.
The article says the bubble moves at the speed of light. But I've seen claims that space is expanding or will eventually be expanding so that objects far apart will be moving away from each other faster than the speed of light. Does that mean this 'bubble' wouldn't reach everything?
(Somehow, this is making me think of a Greg Egan novel).
Why does anything exist? Physicists talk about vacuum energy and quantum fluctuations, but why? You answer a question and always there's another.
Is the universe digital? A sort of computer? Is there anything in the universe that can be identified as a real number (a true smooth curve for example? I think the relativity depends on 'smoothness' doesn't it?) or is every measurable thing expressible as rationals and therefore computable?
Well, it's hard to show in a simple example, but the main thing is the comment after the '}', to give a quick recognition of what's just finished. Good code shouldn't have too many nested braces, but even so, a block can get pretty long sometimes. The /* forever */ after the 'for(;;)' was mainly to help identify the start when you see the '} /* end forever */ at the end. Same with the /* end if 1== x */ which was pretty contrived I'll admit. It's also true that if somebody changed it to '2==x' you'd be in trouble. In real code you'd declare a constant and have something like:
if (BREAK_CONDITION == x)
OK, I was a C/assembly programmer, never did much with C++. I always liked the square bracket style, and one thing I found very helpful was putting a short comment at the end of a block after the closing '}', even if it was just to show that it ended a 'for' rather than an 'if'. Example:
for (;;) /* forever */ /* end if 1==x */
{
misc code
if (1==x)
{
break;
}
misc code
} /* end forever */
Recent openwrt distros have a problem with the classic wrt54gl in that it doesn't have enough memory. I know because it happened to me. It installs, but when you try to change configuration, it bricks and you need to ground pin 15 to get it to reflash something. From the openwrt site:
"In a test with OpenWrt 10.03.1-rc6, the OS will install but LuCI will be unable to update settings because there isn't enough flash left free."
Old enough versions should work, but I'm happy with my tomato install.
I found this book in a trashbin. If nothing else, it's got lots of cool black and white photos, some by Weegie. From page 365:
"We can give the following practical definition of intelligence: Intelligence is that which such an intelligence test measures. The statement sounds empty but isn't, for it implies all the careful steps that have gone into the construction of the tests. The tests constructed by different workers all lead to scores with high intercorrelations; therefore they are measuring something in common. What they measure in common defines intelligence."
Not the catfish, but the killer whales coming up on land to snag prey.
The whales' early ancestors lived in the sea and came up on land. Then they went back to the sea though still air breathers. Now they are starting to go back on land again. Will they evolve new legs or just wriggle along like snakes?
Nobody knows why we had a low-entropy big bang, when a random choice of initial conditions would be overwhelmingly more likely to produce a maximum-entropy one
The explanation that I see is that there might be a 'multiverse', many big bangs, most of which would not produce a universe that could support life. Therefore, we're here because this is the one in a skadzillion that could and did produce life intelligent enough to wonder about this stuff. It's a plausible explanation to me, but that doesn't mean it's correct of course.
I'm still looking for a really good explanation of what the article is about. The 'arrow of time' I'm familiar with, and which has been mentioned in other posts, is the entropic one. There are so many ways for things to get disarrayed as opposed to the extremely few for them to get re-arrayed, that we never see it happen, nevert see things like objects getting hotter than ambient temperature without a source of heat or things randomly assembling themselves into some recognizable order.
I clicked to see who or what Mike Judge was. The topic immediately made me think of one of the first Science Fiction stories I ever read, C. M. Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons
Actually dd is the unix utility that is un-unix like in its invocation (try 'man dd' on any unix/linux/OSX system from the command line). A lot of times plain old 'cat' will do the job, as in 'cat /dev/cdrom > cd.iso'
Is the 'Huzzah' sarcastic or sincere?
My attitude is that it is unrealistic to think data is secure in the cloud. If this makes people more cautious generally about using the cloud, that's a good thing. Whether or not the government really should have the right to do this or not is a different question. Also, while It may hurt, I doubt that this will destroy the cloud business.