Whenever we can say, "yes, our country was attacked by people of this ethnic group - this group of people that looks different from you and talks with an accent", people of those ethnic group are persecuted not only by the government, but by private citizens - we lose our right to freedom from bigotry.
Example: The day of the attacks, one of my high school French teachers went to a gas station. I don't know him myself, but people I do know and respect say he's a great guy. He's also an Arab. (Anyone see where I'm going with this?)
So this guy at the gas station asks the teacher "Hey, are you and Arab?" This teacher had only been in America a few months, so he did something that was pretty unwise and said that yes, he was. The gas station attendant start yelling at the teacher "You Arabs, you're responsible for this, you should all die" and so on.
I'd say look at the internment camps in WWII, but do I even need to bother? Suffice to say that I bet there's going to be a lot of pressure in congress for increases survailance of "suspicious" individuals. And what makes one supicious? Why, being an Arab, of course! Being a Muslim - we know all these guys are wacked-out fanatics, right? Speaking Arabic - how un-American!
I have to say, I am scared to death of what this is doing to the country, and what this is doing to me. For Chrissakes, I quoted Asimov for my Junior yearbook quote: "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetant". Now, look at my sig - I truly wan the bastards dead! Look at what even some people on/. are saying - anyone seen the "To Do" list? And I walk through the halls of my high school, and I see even scarier shit. Guys say that want to join up so they can kill every Arab they can.
Man, I've really strayed from the parent topic. Sorry. But, I just want all of you to realize - we need to worry about more than our right to encryption. For many Americans, their right to walk unmolested on the streets is at risk.
From the article: "The Combating Terrorism Act also expands the list of criminal offenses for which traditional, court-ordered wiretaps can be sought to explicitly include terrorism and computer hacking. "
So, they're lumping together idito script kiddies who DOS a web server and megalomaniacal psychopaths who kill thousands of innocent civilians for no reason. Something seems very wrong with this.
There's no red cross conspiracy to score free software here, man. It's just that they're so in the habit of needing liscences, they're not realizing they don't need them for now. Maybe the guy who made the list wasn't their real tech guy, just who he told to make a list. The guy hears the region high-ups say "we need so-and-so copies of Office" and assumes that they must need liscences as well. No harm, just ignorance. I'm sure MS already told them to forget the liscences for now.
Assuming the cell towers were still up, or new ones could be put up, cell modems and regular dial-up servers would probably give you the most range and flexibility. It wouldn't be the fastest, and it would be expensive if the cell company didn't chip in for the service, but they would, so that's moot.
In addition, if they aren't RAIDing their database servers, they really need to. What if sore bad shit happens?
I agree killing people for the actions of others is wrong, so we need to find out who did the thing. And once we do, we need to kill them. Not talk with them - this was a premeditated attack on innocent, unarmed civilians. No, we kill them as quickly as possible. If they are just terrorists, then we are avenged and can stop. If the perpetrators were a nation-state, we must occupy that country to make sure they never do this again. Will that be bloody? Yes, in all liklihood. But we need to protect ourselves - this means we need to take away the ability of others to launch this sort of attack.
He said, in essence, that while nonviolence is preferable in theory, when violence is neccessary it should be applied until your enemy is completely and utterly destroyed. That way, he can't see vengeance upon you.
I don't want a war, but if we have to have one, let's win it. No mercy, no pulling back, no amnesty. We go into whatever the country is that sponsored this (if there is one), we destroy the military structure completely, and we occupy the country indefinatly. Everyone involved in today's atrocity, we kill. Let's not indulge in Gulf War type half-measures.
We can never let this happen again. The best way to prevent it, as others have already pointed out, is to kill those with the desire and means to do such things. Worry about morality later - our nation's safety and security comes first.
I doubt even McVeigh would have done something THIS evil - compared to this, he was a rank amateur. No way an American would even think of this. More importantly, wouldn't it be sort of hard to hide all the planning and organization elements in the USA?
I know we've all said snide things about the President in the past - myself included - , but the time for that is over. As another poster already mentioned, we are either at war, or so close as to make no difference. And in wartime, we stand behind our leaders and trust them - any other way leads to chaos. President Bush is pissed as hell, and he will get the nation the vengeance it needs. What we need to do is support him.
...get an account, Mister Anonymous Coward, and mod me down when your time as moderator comes. Attaching a name to your work can be very satisfying - you should try it sometime.
By the way, I'm glad to have to people replying to my comments, both good and bad - and I don't give a rat's ass about karma.
What if we knew for a fact there were only a few ducks left in the world, but that many people had dogs that looked and sounded very much like ducks? Wouldn't occam's razor then state that the "duck" is really probably a dog? There's only one, highly reclusive and wacko Bobby Fischer, but many people could have learned to imitate his playing style and talk about things he would have known about.
You say that if I answered enough of your questions correctly about Wozniak, californial, etc, that I could pass for Woz. Man, that wold be challenging - very challenging - but certainly doable. Likewise, why couldn't a person simply have studied Fischer's playing style, and aped that? Such an impersonation would be research-intensive, but doable.
Of course, once we start speculating about intentional imposters as opposed to honest mistake on Short's part, we need to haul out Occam's razor and ask ourselves which is most simple, and therefor most likely:
1.) Fischer is actually playing anonymously over the internet, but it dropping pseudo-subtle hints that he is Fischer to a man he knows would catch on. This is happening after nearly a decade of complete seclusion, and after almost thirty years of "retirement" broken only by a single game.
2. Someone is impersonating Fischer - perhaps a person, perhaps a computer.
3. Someone, quite innocently, has acquired a vast knowledge of chess history and a playing style similar to Fischer's - perhaps by studying his old games simply in an effort to learn from him.
4. Short is just misinterpreting the chess moves and conversation of the anonymous player.
I don't know which of these is the most simple, but I suspect that #1 is not it.
Why does Short think this guy is Fischer? Because he whipped Short's ass and because he's familiar with obscure players from the sixties? Look, I'm really into computers from the 80s and late 70s. I could rattle off a large amount of obscure stats about Colecos, a bunch of z80 machines, early apples, including file systems, bus speeds - does this mean I'm Steve Wozniak or Bill Gates? I don't think so. Neither are all the other hundreds of people on/. with the same interest.
As for this guy being a good chess player - good for him, it doesn't mean he's fischer. I'm sure there are people of world-class quality at chess who choose not to go pro for a variety of reasons - again, it doesn't make them bobby fischer.
I read an article in Scientific American a while back that made a disturbing point: all through the later half of the twentieth century, and all of the twenty-first, the trend has been towards storing data in electronic media instead of paper. The problem is that computer media become obsolete very quickly, so you end up with data stored on tape drives that don't have players made anymore, for example. The question I have is: qhat will historians of the future do when they don't have 3.5 inch floppy drives, or CD-ROM drives, because they've been replaced with newer technology? How will they access our data?
The nice thing about paper, from a historian's point of view, is that anyone can obtain data from an actual dead tree or sheepskin.
I'm coming out of the closet - I am not a good programmer. I can do some basic database apps, basic second-year-programming DOS stuff, but that's about it. I can't write games, I don't know assembly, and I have never written a complex program with a real GUI.
That said, I find that GUI development environments are terrrible for me. To get any work done at all, I need to be staring at the code, and nothing but the code. I don't want to click through little dialog boxes to get to parts of my program, and I don't trust the way VB and Delphi hide my code from me. Without not just the ability, but the neccessity to step through my code line by line the old-fashioned way, I'm just lost.
Very true. At my high school, the teachers scream if someone changes the layout of their desktop. We recently upgraded to win2k - they still haven't stopped sending angry emails.
...but no more. I used to post angry replies when people flamed Katz, thinking this was a damn cheeky way to treat a site admin. No more. This article is so - what's the word - sensationalized, there we go, sensationalized. Katz is trying, consciously or not, to stir up problems where most people have none. It's absurd and irresponsible. I will now be blocking all articles by Jon Katz. Join me, and maybe he'll go away.
The Big Dig in Boston is causing major problems and cost overruns, and that's just an unpressurized underground street system, for chrissakes! And you think we can manage to build a tunnel across the country? And keep it in a vacuum? Hah!
Questions: What happens if a large rock is placed on the track by a terrorist group?
At my school, we use Norton Ghost on donated machines. This is a program that copies an exact disk image from one hard drive onto another. We just make one master hard disk, and clone a hard drive for each machine. The result is that each computer in a "batch" of donations is identical from the user's point of view, and all the computers in the school have more or less the same "look" to them on the desktop. Slap PolEdit on all of them to keep the idiots from messing with the machines, put Centurion Guards on the machines you don't want the smart people messing with either, and you have a really workable setup in which donated machines are quite useful.
Liscencing isn't a problem, as I said, because we just Ghost a clean drive onto all the machines in a donation batch. Ditto for porn and viruses. In fact, the biggest porn problem comes from teachers themselves (surprise surprise). I spent two hours last friday cleaning a science teacher's computer which was filled to capacity with JPEGs of an - ahem - interesting nature.
Drivers sometimes are a problem, but it's rare we can't find them within an hour of searching on the internet. Since we're ghosting each batch of donations anyway, the additional time required for driver installation is nill.
Regarding proprietary hardware: I've seen computers at my high school that would terrify all right-thinking techs. I've seen computers that were being held together with duct tape, computers with all sorts of proprietary crap - especially compaqs, with the funky square keyboard connectors they used a few years ago - but I've never seen anything in a donation so alien no one in the building could work with it.
My district's budget is a joke - donations are the only thing that let us get enough computers. Every non-department-head teacher computer is a donation, as are all the computers in the programming lab. I don't know what we'd do without people giving us their half-working crap, and our fixing it and putting it in a place it has to be.
Interesting sidenote: You know who gives us more computers than anyone else? Anheiser Bush.
Stehpen Hawking has been one of my heroes since as long as I can remember - in a situation where a lesser man would have curled up and waited to die, Hawking used his awe-inspiring intellect to unravel parts of the nature of the universe. Hawking is, IMHO, the single most praiseworthy person on the face of the Earth, which is why I can't believe he actually spouted this Matrix nonsense. This has to be an oversimplification - it would be easy enough to misunderstand the ideas of a person who scores god-only-knows how high on IQ tests. Machines enslaving people? Why would they want to? How would they want to? Most important, how would they? I don't care what what's-her-face from Terminator says, no one is going to put a superintelligent AI in control of nukes - there's just no military reason to do it, and that's just about the only plausible "robot kills millions" scenario.
Hawking must have been speaking metaphorically - perhaps referring to our increasing dependance on machines. Yes, I did read the article, but come on! This is Stephen Hawking - we of all people should show enough respect for him not to be convinced he uttered such tripe by ananova and (ick) yahoo, of all things.
Yes, I know, it's wonderful that Blizzard is waiting until the game is stable and perfect and bug-free. Good for them. But while they work on this one game, other developers are working like mad trying to shove out the most graphically intensive games they can, as quickly as they can. "Damn the bugs! Full speed ahead!"
The problem this could create for blizzard is that when Warcraft III is released, it will look graphically dated compared to buggier, less fun games that came out a month before and only spent a year in development, thus working with newer hardware and software right from the get-go. Consider Daikatana, for example. Yes, I know it had a bunch of issues above and beyond crappy graphics, but just consider those graphics for a second. Why did Daikatana use the old, Quake II engine? Because when they were starting work on the game (actually, a little after they started work on it) that was the best engine available. By the time newer hardware and software came out, there was already so huge a committment to QII engine, and so much more work to do, that it just wasn't possible to move to a better engine. This "engine lag" is a risk all games with really long development cycles run, and games like Warcraft III and Duke4ever might fall prey to it. Admittedly, a lot of games with long dev cycles are very successful, but many aren't.
If warcraft II suffers from engine lag, will it still be attractive to the average (not hardcore) gamer? I don't know.
From the article: "They also refused to promptly provide a copy of the Search Warrant when one was repeatedly requested."
That, boys and girls, is a violation of a defendant's rights. A big one. We don't need to worry too much about this case, I think - a competant lawyer will get it thrown out on those grounds alone. I'm just surpises at the FBI stupidity. Wait a sec...no I'm not.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Whenever we can say, "yes, our country was attacked by people of this ethnic group - this group of people that looks different from you and talks with an accent", people of those ethnic group are persecuted not only by the government, but by private citizens - we lose our right to freedom from bigotry.
/. are saying - anyone seen the "To Do" list? And I walk through the halls of my high school, and I see even scarier shit. Guys say that want to join up so they can kill every Arab they can.
Example: The day of the attacks, one of my high school French teachers went to a gas station. I don't know him myself, but people I do know and respect say he's a great guy. He's also an Arab. (Anyone see where I'm going with this?)
So this guy at the gas station asks the teacher "Hey, are you and Arab?" This teacher had only been in America a few months, so he did something that was pretty unwise and said that yes, he was. The gas station attendant start yelling at the teacher "You Arabs, you're responsible for this, you should all die" and so on.
I'd say look at the internment camps in WWII, but do I even need to bother? Suffice to say that I bet there's going to be a lot of pressure in congress for increases survailance of "suspicious" individuals. And what makes one supicious? Why, being an Arab, of course! Being a Muslim - we know all these guys are wacked-out fanatics, right? Speaking Arabic - how un-American!
I have to say, I am scared to death of what this is doing to the country, and what this is doing to me. For Chrissakes, I quoted Asimov for my Junior yearbook quote: "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetant". Now, look at my sig - I truly wan the bastards dead! Look at what even some people on
Man, I've really strayed from the parent topic. Sorry. But, I just want all of you to realize - we need to worry about more than our right to encryption. For many Americans, their right to walk unmolested on the streets is at risk.
From the article: "The Combating Terrorism Act also expands the list of criminal offenses for which traditional, court-ordered wiretaps can be sought to explicitly include terrorism and computer hacking. "
So, they're lumping together idito script kiddies who DOS a web server and megalomaniacal psychopaths who kill thousands of innocent civilians for no reason. Something seems very wrong with this.
There's no red cross conspiracy to score free software here, man. It's just that they're so in the habit of needing liscences, they're not realizing they don't need them for now. Maybe the guy who made the list wasn't their real tech guy, just who he told to make a list. The guy hears the region high-ups say "we need so-and-so copies of Office" and assumes that they must need liscences as well. No harm, just ignorance. I'm sure MS already told them to forget the liscences for now.
The guy was just trying to say that suing the Red Cross would be impractical - not that he wants MS to try.
Assuming the cell towers were still up, or new ones could be put up, cell modems and regular dial-up servers would probably give you the most range and flexibility. It wouldn't be the fastest, and it would be expensive if the cell company didn't chip in for the service, but they would, so that's moot.
In addition, if they aren't RAIDing their database servers, they really need to. What if sore bad shit happens?
Did you see the TV coverage? The attacks blasted truly massive amounts of smoke and dust into the air - I'm not surprised it showed up on the Doppler.
I hope more Canadians feel the same as you.
I agree killing people for the actions of others is wrong, so we need to find out who did the thing. And once we do, we need to kill them. Not talk with them - this was a premeditated attack on innocent, unarmed civilians. No, we kill them as quickly as possible. If they are just terrorists, then we are avenged and can stop. If the perpetrators were a nation-state, we must occupy that country to make sure they never do this again. Will that be bloody? Yes, in all liklihood. But we need to protect ourselves - this means we need to take away the ability of others to launch this sort of attack.
He said, in essence, that while nonviolence is preferable in theory, when violence is neccessary it should be applied until your enemy is completely and utterly destroyed. That way, he can't see vengeance upon you.
I don't want a war, but if we have to have one, let's win it. No mercy, no pulling back, no amnesty. We go into whatever the country is that sponsored this (if there is one), we destroy the military structure completely, and we occupy the country indefinatly. Everyone involved in today's atrocity, we kill. Let's not indulge in Gulf War type half-measures.
We can never let this happen again. The best way to prevent it, as others have already pointed out, is to kill those with the desire and means to do such things. Worry about morality later - our nation's safety and security comes first.
I doubt even McVeigh would have done something THIS evil - compared to this, he was a rank amateur. No way an American would even think of this. More importantly, wouldn't it be sort of hard to hide all the planning and organization elements in the USA?
I know we've all said snide things about the President in the past - myself included - , but the time for that is over. As another poster already mentioned, we are either at war, or so close as to make no difference. And in wartime, we stand behind our leaders and trust them - any other way leads to chaos. President Bush is pissed as hell, and he will get the nation the vengeance it needs. What we need to do is support him.
...get an account, Mister Anonymous Coward, and mod me down when your time as moderator comes. Attaching a name to your work can be very satisfying - you should try it sometime.
By the way, I'm glad to have to people replying to my comments, both good and bad - and I don't give a rat's ass about karma.
What if we knew for a fact there were only a few ducks left in the world, but that many people had dogs that looked and sounded very much like ducks? Wouldn't occam's razor then state that the "duck" is really probably a dog? There's only one, highly reclusive and wacko Bobby Fischer, but many people could have learned to imitate his playing style and talk about things he would have known about.
You say that if I answered enough of your questions correctly about Wozniak, californial, etc, that I could pass for Woz. Man, that wold be challenging - very challenging - but certainly doable. Likewise, why couldn't a person simply have studied Fischer's playing style, and aped that? Such an impersonation would be research-intensive, but doable.
Of course, once we start speculating about intentional imposters as opposed to honest mistake on Short's part, we need to haul out Occam's razor and ask ourselves which is most simple, and therefor most likely:
1.) Fischer is actually playing anonymously over the internet, but it dropping pseudo-subtle hints that he is Fischer to a man he knows would catch on. This is happening after nearly a decade of complete seclusion, and after almost thirty years of "retirement" broken only by a single game.
2. Someone is impersonating Fischer - perhaps a person, perhaps a computer.
3. Someone, quite innocently, has acquired a vast knowledge of chess history and a playing style similar to Fischer's - perhaps by studying his old games simply in an effort to learn from him.
4. Short is just misinterpreting the chess moves and conversation of the anonymous player.
I don't know which of these is the most simple, but I suspect that #1 is not it.
Why does Short think this guy is Fischer? Because he whipped Short's ass and because he's familiar with obscure players from the sixties? Look, I'm really into computers from the 80s and late 70s. I could rattle off a large amount of obscure stats about Colecos, a bunch of z80 machines, early apples, including file systems, bus speeds - does this mean I'm Steve Wozniak or Bill Gates? I don't think so. Neither are all the other hundreds of people on /. with the same interest.
As for this guy being a good chess player - good for him, it doesn't mean he's fischer. I'm sure there are people of world-class quality at chess who choose not to go pro for a variety of reasons - again, it doesn't make them bobby fischer.
I read an article in Scientific American a while back that made a disturbing point: all through the later half of the twentieth century, and all of the twenty-first, the trend has been towards storing data in electronic media instead of paper. The problem is that computer media become obsolete very quickly, so you end up with data stored on tape drives that don't have players made anymore, for example. The question I have is: qhat will historians of the future do when they don't have 3.5 inch floppy drives, or CD-ROM drives, because they've been replaced with newer technology? How will they access our data?
The nice thing about paper, from a historian's point of view, is that anyone can obtain data from an actual dead tree or sheepskin.
I'm coming out of the closet - I am not a good programmer. I can do some basic database apps, basic second-year-programming DOS stuff, but that's about it. I can't write games, I don't know assembly, and I have never written a complex program with a real GUI.
That said, I find that GUI development environments are terrrible for me. To get any work done at all, I need to be staring at the code, and nothing but the code. I don't want to click through little dialog boxes to get to parts of my program, and I don't trust the way VB and Delphi hide my code from me. Without not just the ability, but the neccessity to step through my code line by line the old-fashioned way, I'm just lost.
"People don't like change."
Very true. At my high school, the teachers scream if someone changes the layout of their desktop. We recently upgraded to win2k - they still haven't stopped sending angry emails.
...but no more. I used to post angry replies when people flamed Katz, thinking this was a damn cheeky way to treat a site admin. No more. This article is so - what's the word - sensationalized, there we go, sensationalized. Katz is trying, consciously or not, to stir up problems where most people have none. It's absurd and irresponsible. I will now be blocking all articles by Jon Katz. Join me, and maybe he'll go away.
The Big Dig in Boston is causing major problems and cost overruns, and that's just an unpressurized underground street system, for chrissakes! And you think we can manage to build a tunnel across the country? And keep it in a vacuum? Hah!
Questions: What happens if a large rock is placed on the track by a terrorist group?
At my school, we use Norton Ghost on donated machines. This is a program that copies an exact disk image from one hard drive onto another. We just make one master hard disk, and clone a hard drive for each machine. The result is that each computer in a "batch" of donations is identical from the user's point of view, and all the computers in the school have more or less the same "look" to them on the desktop. Slap PolEdit on all of them to keep the idiots from messing with the machines, put Centurion Guards on the machines you don't want the smart people messing with either, and you have a really workable setup in which donated machines are quite useful.
Liscencing isn't a problem, as I said, because we just Ghost a clean drive onto all the machines in a donation batch. Ditto for porn and viruses. In fact, the biggest porn problem comes from teachers themselves (surprise surprise). I spent two hours last friday cleaning a science teacher's computer which was filled to capacity with JPEGs of an - ahem - interesting nature.
Drivers sometimes are a problem, but it's rare we can't find them within an hour of searching on the internet. Since we're ghosting each batch of donations anyway, the additional time required for driver installation is nill.
Regarding proprietary hardware: I've seen computers at my high school that would terrify all right-thinking techs. I've seen computers that were being held together with duct tape, computers with all sorts of proprietary crap - especially compaqs, with the funky square keyboard connectors they used a few years ago - but I've never seen anything in a donation so alien no one in the building could work with it.
My district's budget is a joke - donations are the only thing that let us get enough computers. Every non-department-head teacher computer is a donation, as are all the computers in the programming lab. I don't know what we'd do without people giving us their half-working crap, and our fixing it and putting it in a place it has to be.
Interesting sidenote: You know who gives us more computers than anyone else? Anheiser Bush.
Stehpen Hawking has been one of my heroes since as long as I can remember - in a situation where a lesser man would have curled up and waited to die, Hawking used his awe-inspiring intellect to unravel parts of the nature of the universe. Hawking is, IMHO, the single most praiseworthy person on the face of the Earth, which is why I can't believe he actually spouted this Matrix nonsense. This has to be an oversimplification - it would be easy enough to misunderstand the ideas of a person who scores god-only-knows how high on IQ tests. Machines enslaving people? Why would they want to? How would they want to? Most important, how would they? I don't care what what's-her-face from Terminator says, no one is going to put a superintelligent AI in control of nukes - there's just no military reason to do it, and that's just about the only plausible "robot kills millions" scenario.
Hawking must have been speaking metaphorically - perhaps referring to our increasing dependance on machines. Yes, I did read the article, but come on! This is Stephen Hawking - we of all people should show enough respect for him not to be convinced he uttered such tripe by ananova and (ick) yahoo, of all things.
That last line should read: "If warcraft III suffers from engine lag, will it still be attractive to the average (not hardcore) gamer? I don't know."
Yes, I know, it's wonderful that Blizzard is waiting until the game is stable and perfect and bug-free. Good for them. But while they work on this one game, other developers are working like mad trying to shove out the most graphically intensive games they can, as quickly as they can. "Damn the bugs! Full speed ahead!"
The problem this could create for blizzard is that when Warcraft III is released, it will look graphically dated compared to buggier, less fun games that came out a month before and only spent a year in development, thus working with newer hardware and software right from the get-go. Consider Daikatana, for example. Yes, I know it had a bunch of issues above and beyond crappy graphics, but just consider those graphics for a second. Why did Daikatana use the old, Quake II engine? Because when they were starting work on the game (actually, a little after they started work on it) that was the best engine available. By the time newer hardware and software came out, there was already so huge a committment to QII engine, and so much more work to do, that it just wasn't possible to move to a better engine. This "engine lag" is a risk all games with really long development cycles run, and games like Warcraft III and Duke4ever might fall prey to it. Admittedly, a lot of games with long dev cycles are very successful, but many aren't.
If warcraft II suffers from engine lag, will it still be attractive to the average (not hardcore) gamer? I don't know.
From the article: "They also refused to promptly provide a copy of the Search Warrant when one was repeatedly requested."
:-)
That, boys and girls, is a violation of a defendant's rights. A big one. We don't need to worry too much about this case, I think - a competant lawyer will get it thrown out on those grounds alone. I'm just surpises at the FBI stupidity. Wait a sec...no I'm not.