"The vice president supports finding a solution to these issues that allows the Internet and e-commerce to flourish without stripping states and localities of their ability to educate children and fight crime,"
finkployd responds: > Now there is a trade off. Do we allow e-commerce? > Or do we allow state to educate kids and fight crime. Choose carefully, we can only pick one:) > > Where is is written that to be a vice president, you have to be a complete moron? Beteen Gore > and Danny boy, we have had 12 years of some of the most off the wall comments come from that department.
The place it's written where, in order to be a vice president, you really do have to be a complete moron is in the minds of the voters.
It's a classical fallacy; that of "false dichotomy", and it's made much easier to do by a quirk of the English language. Most geeks instinctively know the difference between "A OR B" and "A XOR B", but the general public generally doesn't. Ask Joe Schmoe if he wants "pepperoni or olives" on his pizza, and he'll never say "both".
Politicians love this technique, because it makes demonizing one's opponent trivial. If you're not for Mr. Foo's Plan to save the chiiiildrun, you must be into taking pictures of nude six-year-old kids making bombs from instructions they got off the Internet.
With taxes; there are plenty of other ways to fund the local police and schools, but e-commerce threatens one of those ways. Therefore you can have e-commerce or police protection. By implication, you can't have both.
With crypto, you can have either free crypto or less terrorism. Never mind that the crypto cat is already out of the bag and that there are plenty of effective ways to fight terrorism. By putting them in a sentence with the word "or", the implication is that the two are mutually exclusive.
Anyone with two brain cells to rub together, geek or not, can see the flaws in those arguments.
As an added bonus, the use of the false dichotomy allows your handlers to get two opposing sound bites for the price of one. In Silicon Valley, "The VP supports finding a solution to these issues that allows the Internet and e-commerce to flourish". In the Mississippi Delta, "The Veep strongly opposes measures which would strip the states and counties of their ability to educate children and fight crime."
There's a reason why basic courses in logic, philosophy, and reasoning-and-rhetoric are no longer taught in high schools: none of the presently-ruling class of politicians would ever be elected if a substantial portion of the electorate were capable of even the most basic elements of reasoning: it's much easier to manipulate the actions of a flock of drooling sheeplike morons than it is to convince a bunch of sharp-minded logicians.
If it were ever extended to the broader population (this can never happen until the broader population acquires the rudiments of logical thinking), the 'net's style of open debate would scare the hell out of politicians, because bullshit would be exposed for what it is. Is anyone here buying LinuxOne?
Sadly, the converse is also true. The fact that the broader population will never acquire the critical thinking skills that we geeks take for granted means that "politicans and geek issues" will remain a red herring. You can't bluster geeks, you have to convince them. But as a politician, why spend millions trying to convince the geeks when there are 200-million sheep out there who will beg (with their votes) for your comforting logical fallacies like a masochist begs for the whip?
No, not in the industrial "build a million cars" sense, but fer chrissakes - the $150M cost of Sojourner wasn't in the gear that went to Mars.
What I want to know is this: having designed and built a Mars probe, what's the marginal cost of building another one?
And if that cost is low, why not launch two missions; one shuttle mission to put 10-15 identical probes into a stable Earth orbit (hang 'em off the side of the Space Station even!), and one ELV (expendable launch vehicle) to put a bus with a big dumb tank of fuel and rocket engine into orbit a few days/weeks later?
The shuttle's reliable - it's manned, it's going into orbit, and it's coming back after it deploys its payload. The space station will be reliable; it's manned, it's not gonna fall down. So the odds that your science payload (the Mars probes) will be lost before launch are pretty slim.
The big dumb tank of fuel with the rocket engine on the back is expendable - it can be "as reliable as the rocket used to launch it", that is, "pretty good, but if it fails to reach orbit, we launch another one, our science payload is still safe".
The next step is pretty obvious - strap the bundle of probes onto the big dumb tank and fire it off, using whatever gravitational slingshots you like.
10 probes en route to Mars for the price of one expensive shuttle launch and one cheap ELV boost to low-earth orbit is gonna be cheap.
As a bonus, you get some statistics on lander reliability. Was Pathfinder "lucky" and Mars Polar Lander "unlucky"? Find out when you do the same thing next year with 10 MPL-style landers. "Of 10 MPL-style landers, only 3 made it. Of the 7 failed MPL landers, 6 of their DS2-style probes survived and transmitted; the bug is probably with the lander itself, not the separation of the probes. We were just really unlucky with the 1999 MPL. Of the 10 airbag-bouncy-landers, 8 survived. This is the better technology to use."
$150M per mission is faster/better/cheaper than $1B per mission. But $400M for 10 missions beats both hands down. We know re-entry is difficult - we don't know how hard "separating probes from busses is", but it seems pretty simple a'la Galileo. (And with 10 probes in my hypothetical mission, if one gets "stuck" on the bus, big deal, there are 9 more where it came from:-)
(FWIW, here's my guess as to what happened to MPL: Since the DS2 probes also failed to respond, I really question the "canyon" theory - there's no evidence that anything reached the ground in one piece. Or does the "canyon" theory posit that all three (lander and both DS2 probes) all landed in the same canyon? Not having the size of the canyon handy, nor remembering the expected distance between the probes and the lander sites, I'm not sure if this is plausible or not. My gut says "there was a problem on re-entry that destroyed the probe before DS2-probe-separation" is still the simpler explanation.)
> You're giving science the benefit of being judged by it's noblest intentions, and law by its worst failures.
Guilty as charged. This is one point on which I will readily concede.
Your arguments are sound and cogent - perhaps I have missed a point that others have raised here, in that while science aims for an idealized truth, lawyers and jurors alike are forced (whether by something inherent in the system or by "tradition") to work for something that fits in the established bounds of legal precedent.
Given the broken tools we have to work with (an irreconcilably-conflicting mass of laws too complicated for citizens to fully comprehend themselves), perhaps our adversarial system is the effect of humans using broken tools, and not the cause as I'd originally implied.
(Throw a bunch of otherwise level-headed geeks onto a bulletin board system and yell "vi rules" at them and they all ultimately turn into raving lunatics tearing at each other's throats. Problem is, in law, we never got past the "holy war" stage of debate, "Legal precedent" is IMHO often used as little more than a glorified version of argument-by-authority. This case matters because this judge was better than that judge, and my client's opponents are obviously fools for citing the case that took the opposing view...)
So perhaps the really interesting question is - how can we do to our legal codes and bodies of precedent what we do to hairy code? (Leaving aside the practical matter that the lawyers and politicians who make the decisions have based their careers on the system in its present form and will never allow it to be thrown out for a redesign-from-first-principles or a code review and pruning of the dead wood.)
> Don't knock adversary systems. After all, most standards bodies > [ and scientific publications, and open source developers, work that way ] > > why are adversary proceedings good enough for science, standards, and open-source software > but not for the mechanics of the larger societies that we live in?
The flaw in your reasoning was addressed by others in the notion of the zero-sum game. The examples you cite aren't zero-sum games. Law, as it is practiced today, is.
My 2 bits on zero-sum:
In law, the defendant's loss is the plaintiff's gain, and vice versa. Because lawyers have a contractual obligation to represent the interests of the client, and because those interests are, by the nature of the "plaintiff vs. defendant" arena, inherently diametrically opposed to the interests of the other side, the way "you win" is to "make the other guy lose".
The examples you cite are not zero-sum games; the goal of standards review in engineering, peer review in science, and open-source development is NOT to make "the other guy lose", but "to find the bugs and fix them to arrive at the truth".
If you are laboring under the delusion that the goal of any court proceeding is "to get to the truth", I cannot help you.
Consider criminal law. The verdict is never "innocent", it's "not guilty". It doesn't mean "we know for a fact that the defendant is innocent" - it merely means "we cannot ascertain the defendant's guilt beyond a reasonabe doubt."
In the OJ Simpson case, 12 people decided (whether you agree with them or not) that he was not "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt". But during a civil trial thereafter, it was established that "on the balance of probabilities", he was guilty.
So did he kill his wife or not? The courts cannot - and will not - tell you. All the courts can tell you is that if you apply one set of standards for verdict-determination and one set of arguments to one set of people, you'll get one answer, and that if you change all three of these variables, you'll get a diametrically-opposed answer.
In engineering, there are design goals that can be measured against and optimized. In science, there's an objective truth being sought by both sides of a debate. In open source, the quality of software speaks for itself; if you don't like a feature, you fork the code.
But in law, it's still trial by combat - the only way for one side to win is to make the other side lose. Primitive mammalian "us-vs-them" behavior at its finest.
Unfortunately, I don't have a better idea either:(
Another poster made an interesting point regarding the notion of lawmaking as the responsibility of an informed citizenry, and the problem with Congress being that very few of its members are informed in anything other than how to get re-elected.
The problem is that there are very few "informed citizens" around.
One "solution" would be to change the definition of "citizen" from "has a pulse" to "has a pulse, can read and write English at a college level, can demonstrate to a jury of other "citizens" a suitable understanding of how our society works, the ethical and moral bases for property rights and community rights, and can come up with a cogent argument for balancing the rights of the individual versus the right of the collective.
Any answer more sophisticated than "huh?" or "when's Oprah on?" would probably qualify one for citizenship... but I suspect there'd be a massive backlash anyways. How dare you deny the drooling masses their vote? (Which really means "How dare you deny the 0.0001% of the population which makes the rules their right to manipulate the emotions of the drooling morons because their votes are easier to acquire than the votes of the clued-in people?)
What we really need is a way of voting "I'm clueless". Imagine if 500 representatives voted on NASA's funding of SETI - but 450 said "I haven't a clue what a radio is, let alone a radio telescope, so I abstain". The other 50 could squabble for a few hours over what evidence was available for which factors in the Drake Equation, and say "We support/oppose the project because most of us believe there's a high/low probability of success using presently-available technology."
Since nobody with the power to vote can be expected to reliably admit their cluelessness on an issue, nor can they be trusted with the responsibility of judging it on their own, the vote of a representative could be declared clueless.
The process of assigning a value to a representative's clue-flag on any given vote, ("an electronic vote of confidence from 5% of the drooling morons who pressed the 'up-moderate' button on their remote controls during the sound bite!", "endorsement from a PAC!") would likely end up just as flawed as the present system.
Doling this power out to the population in a/.-esque karma system won't help. For every ESR or RMS we geeks can declare as "clued and worthy to speak for us on the clue of the Congresscritters voting for XYZ", there's a Jim Bakker or Jerry Falwell.
Taking the vote away from the clueless would be a start, but once you throw out democracy, you'll end up with either a utopia or a totalitarian nightmare. My bet, knowing human nature, is that the clued-in 10% are just as capable of corruption as the 0.0001% and just as capable of stupidity as the bottom 90%.
It's already been pointed out that the lawmaking process can't keep up with the pace of technological development.
It follows from this that the lawyers responsible for presenting cases and the judges responsible for understanding the legal arguments presented are incapable - by definition - of keeping pace with technological development.
But the other problem is the adversarial nature of our legal system: "My lawyer can beat up your lawyer" and the notion of the lawyer as hired gun - a lawyer isn't paid to argue what's right vs. what's wrong; determining who's right is the judge's job. The lawyer has a very serious legal responsibility to represent the client's case as strongly as he can, regardless of its strength or weakness. (It is for this reason that a good lawyer will not take a weak case - but if the money's big enough, everyone's got his or her price.)
Unfortunately, what this means is that very intelligent people - and most lawyers are smart cookies - end up making insanely stupid arguments, building factual houses of cards with beautiful rhetorical facades. If you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, you have no alternative but to boggle 'em with bullshit.
Trial by judge puts you at the mercy of someone who knows the law, but hasn't a clue about technology. Trial by jury (with the present jury selection process and minimal pay for jury duty) is arguably worse - you're at the mercy of drones who know neither law nor technology.
For trial by judge, you need someone who can make a strong legal argument to the judge. For trial by jury, you need someone who can gain the jury's emotional sympathies; a showman or huckster.
But either way, it still comes down to "My lawyer can beat up your lawyer". Until the legal system rises to anything more than medieval "trial by combat", with lawyers filling the roles of the armed combatants, we're doomed to be stuck in this quagmire for the forseeable future.
(Story of how traffic started acting funny during photo radar demonstration due to presence of radar detectors)
Radar detectors are illegal in my jurisdiction, and we experimented with photo radar.
Because our photo radar cops were using unmarked vehicles ("if they knew we were photo radar cops, they'd slow down and we'd lose revenue!"), every time *any* vehicle came up to an unmarked van, it would slow down and crawl by it at a snail's pace, resulting in 3-lane blockages at 55 all along the highway. Once they got out of range, some people would floor it and get the hell out of dodge, and others would continue to hog the left lane, resulting in very high road rage levels.
The roads were more dangerous during our trial period than at any time I'd ever driven. Thankfully, photo radar was rejected and road safety levels rose from the bottom of the Marianas Trench back to their usual gutter level:)
> So, unless entry onto a highway makes it probable cause that we're speeding > then they would have no legal footing on which to monitor our actions.
Careful with that argument. Around where I drive, entry onto a highway isn't just probable cause that one is speeding, it's pretty much the de facto standard:-)
The serious argument - is about the right to face one's accuser. If I contest a speeding ticket I believe was wrongfully given to me by a police officer, I get my day in court.
While most traffic court cases are really nuisance cases where the defendant is guilty but hoping the cop can't be bothered to show up, the fact remains that if the cop can't be bothered to show up to explain his actions, the defendant ought to go free. "Innocent until proven guilty" is an extremely important principle in our justice system, and it's inextricably linked to the right of the accused to challenge one's accuser in court.
Automated ticket-assigning systems attack this principle in an extremely underhanded way - "the machine can't lie" rapidly becomes "you're guilty because the machine says so". Why not dispense with judges and juries while you're at it?
If you like the fact that the GPS-speedometer only reports violators and doesn't track your whereabouts, remember that sodomy (the exact definition of which is a function of jurisdiction) is still illegal in many areas of the U.S. Perhaps an infrared camera with pattern-recognition software ought to be installed in every bedroom?
It's not really intrusive - it only calls the authorities when patterns of movement indicating illegal sex (head-bobbing for oral, presence of two erect penii for gays, presence of two humans in the absence of a penis for lesbians, but we're still having trouble distinguishing between doggie-style vaginal and doggie-style anal heterosexual - that's in version 2.0) have been detected.
But God-fearing heterosexual Christians who have sex in the missionary position under the sheets with the lights out have nothing to worry about.
Re:Weapons of Mass Destruction
on
Living Terrors
·
· Score: 2
>[bioagents can be fixed with vaccines but there's no effective defence for] NASDAQ from a HERF attack
Actually, I'm afraid it's the other way around.
From the market side - go ahead and fry Nasdaq. The ECNs and other off-market trading vehicles will do just fine. The NYSE (effectively the consolidated quotes you get) is actually just the best bid/ask of many stocks on many regional exchanges. (e.g. the Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland and other $OBSCURE_CITY Stock Exchanges).
10 years ago, this was a serious risk. Today, it's a given that trading will continue (although there'll be some wonderful opportunities for arbitrageurs) in the event of an electronic attack against a major financial center, simply because of the widespread distribution of physical locations where trading can take place.
Finally, the dollar amounts involved in the stock market's are nothing compared to the bond and currency markets, and those are effectively traded in a 24/7 market as trading moves from continent to continent.
Bottom line - HERF NASDAQ and you've cost a lot of people a small amount of money, and made a few people a large amount of money, and life goes on. The panicking citizens, or even panicking traders, are ultimately neutral in what is essentially a zero-sum game due to fact that most of the bucks will be moving in the futures and derivative markets.
On the biowar side, unfortunately, panic works in the attacker's favor. What's the one thing you don't want when someone dumps a pile of Ebola/Influenza hybrid into a city.
Right - people moving around, spreading it.
What's the one thing Joe Sixpack will do when he feels fine but everyone else is dropping around him like flies?
Right - get on a plane or a car and haul ass outa dodge.
Worse - what's the one thing that both Mandy "Granola" Chomskyite and Fred "Tinfoil" Survivalist will do when the troops announce "Stay in your homes. The city is under quarantine."
Mandy will march with all her friends in the streets to protest the fact that the Corporate Masters are trying to slay all the $OPPRESSED_MINORITY_GROUP in the cities. And Fred will pick up a gun and "protest" the invocation of martial law by $EVIL_ONE_WORLD_GUMMINT by shooting between his pickup truck and the county line.
In the case of biowarfare, the likely course of citizen panic, and particularly in an industrialized democracy, greatly favors the attacker.
HERFing NASDAQ would be a walk in the park by comparison.
Two more "accidents" to add to the pile of anecdotes:
Me, doing 65 in a 65 zone, passing a slowpoke doing about 45. The slowpoke cut me off for some unknown reason; I swerved to avoid. He then saw me swerving behind him and jerked himself directly back into my path. Somewhere around the second swerve was where I lost it; I managed to miss him (in retrospect, I kinda wish I'd taken him out:-), but at the price of rolling my vehicle after leaving the road. The slowpoke never stopped. The seatbelt saved my life; I was uninjured, and was told how much air I caught while offroad by a witness who saw the whole thing from a dozen car lengths back. With the witness backing me up, the cops reported it as hit-and-run; the slowpoke was likely after an insurance settlement.
An acquaintance travelling in line with the flow of traffic when he got cut off when being passed by a drunk doing about 80ish. The drunk miscalculated and knocked him off into the ditch, and then spun out and ended up in the ditch himself. Everyone walked away. The drunk got his day in court, was convicted, and is probably on the road again.
Speed differentials kill. Stupid drivers kill. Drunk drivers kill. But speed, in and of itself, does not kill.
If the state wants to put a little gadget in the car to collect money from drivers, a GPS-based speedometer will be just fine.
If the state wants to employ these kinds of technolgoies to save lives, however, a breathalyzer in series with a seat belt buckle sensor and the ignition coil would be far more effective.
Of course, it'd be cheaper still to simply have better driver education (including a mandatory emergency manoeuvers course - which the highest-risk teenagers would probably enjoy as well as learn from:-), stricter driving test standards, and tougher convictions for impaired driving, but hey, that's not as sexy and high-tech, is it?
There are very few true "accidents" on the road. The problem isn't with the car, it's with the idiot driving it. If a driver is unsafe, he or she doesn't belong on the road at any speed.
Gee, Scott Kurtz says it's unfunny-and-sick for geeks to make fun of clueless lusers (who can't articulate their problems to tech support).
...well, as long as you're gonna let someone else tell you what's funny and what's sick, lemme let you in on a little secret:
I have it on good authority that Tackhead says it's unfunny-and-sick for humorless prats to make fun of (geeks who make fun of clueless users (who can't articulate their problems to tech support)).
No questions here that haven't already been asked. I'm just another geek who cut his 6502 teeth on the commented dissassemblies you so thoughtfully had included with the original Apple ][ reference manuals.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. For including schematics, for the built-in disassembler, for CALL -151, for documenting it all, and for including it in the ROMs you got from the factory.
And thank you for - 20 years later - the fact that I'm getting paid to do what I'd be doing anyways.
Last year, I found an original Apple ][ motherboard at a surplus store, stripped of its TTL but still containing its masked PROMs. My project for this summer will mark the 20th anniversary of my "first experience" with an Apple computer. As you've no doubt already guessed, it involves a power supply, a TV set, this board, and a large antistatic foam pad full of spare TTL and RAM chips.
"Most of all, we must never, ever again feel awestruck wonder about any manufactured device. They dont last, and are not worthy of that form of respect. "
I've been looking for a way to express this too - I point out that well-crafted code is not a manufactured device, no matter how humble the system in which it's embedded. Witness the skill of the original PDP hackers and "Spacewar", and the tight code of the old-school video game developers. Those devices I believe I'm fully justified in feeling awe for.
But on to what I see as the key insight of the Manifesto:
"The twentieth century featured any number of -isms. They were fatally based on the delusion that philosophy trumps engineering. It doesn't."
Thank you, Bruce, for expressing in three sentences the idea I've been trying to convey to those who "Just Don't Get It" for most of my life. Your phrasing captures the insight in a delightful marriage of eloquence and force.
If you enjoyed the site referenced in the Salon article, try the real McCoy. The Cult of Father Darwin Mailing List has been around for a good many years, and we love a good culling.
Clueless twits with the "FAQs are for pussies" gene need not apply. Before signing on, for the love of Uncle Chuck, please read The CoFD FAQ.
(On second thought, don't bother. We love flaming helminthic parasites who can't read FAQs into smoldering piles of ash...)
I can assure you that, unlike www.darwinawards.com , the CoFD has never, and will never pull any punches when it comes to "sensitive" deaths. Hell, we had a fsckin' field day over the "don't wear a seatbelt and let your chauffeur drive drunk" gene (ex-Princess Die), the "trees are your friends" gene (Sonny Bono, $DEADKENNEDY), and the "Hey, I can fly in this fog" gene ($DEADKENNEDY, closely related to "Hey, I can drive" gene posessed by yet another $DEADKENNEDY).
For Y2K, I personally celebrated by laughing heartily at news footage of some dumb bloke in California standing up on a light pole and reaching up to grab a couple of nearby wires for support. Presumably, he had the "electrical safety is for pussies" gene. Darwin be Praised, he fell down and went boom (actually, "zzap-thud" was more like it) shortly afterwards. Verily, I could almost hear the Voice of Darwin echoing in the Y2K crowd. YOU. Yes, YOU, on the streetlight. Outa the gene pool. NOW.
For any who object - I quote the final lines of the CoFD FAQ:
"Finally? There is no finally, for Evolution, under the guiding hand of the Father continues ever on; you can but stave off the inevitable for a few decades, but eventually your time will come and you will die.
It is up to you to determine if your genetic line will be found Worthy, or whether you will become a statistic in some journalist's copysheet and a scorned entry in this list.
>How likely is 'more likely' and what were the purchasing habits of these people before?
Excellent point.
"Uh, yeah, I'd have never bought a CD from these guyz I'd never heard of before, but now that I've got some MP3z of 'em, yeah, I might buy a CD from 'em. Of course, like, I've already got their entire fuxin' discography, so I prolly won't. I'd have bought their new release, but figured, fuggit, I can get it some other day. I mean, I got the whole new release in MP3 three weeks before the release actually came out anyways... but yeah, I'd have at least considered buying it if I didn't already have it, d00d"
Well, technically this (hypothetical) user is "more likely" to buy the CD, aren't they?
>I'm not paying hard earned cash for something that goes bye-bye when my
Western Digital decides to go head farming on the platters.
The best reason of all why "copy-protected" MP3s will never sell.
When you've got 13G of MP3s (as this poster has) at $1.00 a pop, buying a spare hard drive to back up one's collection (and stashing the spare drive in a safety-deposit-box offsite, in the event of fire/earthquake/etc) is a wise investment.
Fortunately, there's not a damn thing RIAA and MPAA can do about my MP3 collection. They're files on hard drives. The operating system doesn't support any form of DRM, and as such, I'll always be able to back 'em up.
The only thing I'd question from the poster:
>if I am paying money, I want hard media.. (tape, CD, record) not bitstream
Tapes are transitory. They'll sound like crap in 10-20 years as the magnetic flux slowly fades away, and/or as the tape itself changes chemically over the years. Vinyl will also degrade over repeated plays, even with spectacular care and expense paid in equipment. The CD (not the CD-R!) is probably the only "it'll last you a lifetime" medium out there.
While MP3s on magnetic media (hard drives) are transitory, at least they can be perfectly replicated from one hard drive to another as part of an ongoing backup strategy. No can-do with tape or vinyl:-(
(Of course, no can-do with MP3s if RIAA and MPAA have their way, but fsck them.)
>i would think that blocking netnews could be a pain. sure the local university servers might not carry the.binaries, but you can pay supernews 10$ a month for unlimited access. then it's just another tcp request
which can be routed through proxies (proxies wouldnt be for joe schmoe).
Just to play Devil's Advocate - although USENET is ill-suited to the transmission of large binaries, and although a full feed of.binaries.mp3 is probably around 100G per day...
...if I were a newsadmin on a college campus, it might be cheaper to eat the bandwidth costs of serving 100G per day once, to my news server, where the students could l33ch from it over the LAN, than have the same students independently downloading stuff over the WAN, whether it be USENET-via-Supernews or Napster.
Naturally, if it's only a small percentage of the userbase, it's cheaper to let that population draw down only the portion of USENET they want over the WAN. But when it grows to a large enough segment of the userbase, it just might be cheaper (in terms of number-of-bits-sucked-through-the-big-pipe) to supply it locally.
I, too, was glad to see that L0pht hasn't stopped their efforts on the hardware front.
My software/hardware interest was sparked when I started poking around an Apple ][ (cue next interview: "Thanks Woz, for including a ROM disassembly in your docs!") with CALL -151, and discovered that I could talk right down to the bare metal.
From there, it was a question of learning to reverse-engineer 6502 with the built-in disassembler, and later on, dumping data from other machines (e.g. 1980s video games!) into the magic Apple box and seeing what I could glean from the disassembly. It was immediately obvious that I had to match the schematics of the hardware I was playing with against the addresses I was seeing in the code, and from then on, I became a hardware geek.
I mention this because the concern I had with the barrier to entry is that when I got into it, any 12-year-old with enough time on his hands and brains in his skull could get started. Likewise with programming today - thank the Gods for Linux and open source because a 12-year-old can still get started in software by typing "man foo" and picking up a copy of K&R. (*shudder* - imagine a world without Free Software - what 12-year-old, however brainy, would get anywhere with an M$ system, where the very notion of "development tools" implies "very expensive add-on", rather than being part of the core distribution...)
I guess the interesting question - and the one that can probably only be answered by the next 10 years of hacker history - is gonna be how today's 12-year-old is gonna make the jump between taking apart a computer and putting it back together again, typing "make foo", learning how to write good code that'll be properly optimized for the compiler, and {then the miracle happens} and he's in college poking around with a logic analyzer and a DVD-RAM drive in the lab off-hours.
Having read L0pht's reply however, I realize that online auctions are bringing surplus electronic equipment availability to an all-time high. If you need a single-user SMT rework station, you can get one for a few hundred bucks. And the costs - like EPROM burners in the past 10 years from $800 to $150, are falling at the same rate. As for expensive VHDL software, I mean no disrespect to those who write such software when I say that for the hobbyist, if there were ever an ethical justification for piracy, "hobby use" just might be it. (And I note in passing that much electronic software is issued on a "try-before-you-buy, limited to 500 pads per board" basis:-)
Someone else spoke about getting "warm fuzzies" from L0pht in the context of being glad the media are turning to them when they have questions. Count me in on the "warm fuzzies" too, but for a very different reason: in response to my hardware hacking question, they didn't just stop at saying "the bar's been raised, but don't worry, the hardware scene's alive and well".
Where others might have stopped there, L0pht went - as they always have - one step further. In addition to the warm fuzzies mentioned above, they also managed to give me, and everyone else reading, a set of practical, concrete things to do today - bone up on VHDL, invest in new equipment, make that old 20 MHz scope available to someone still learning the basics, poke around presently-available wireless technologies, and network with fellow geeks who share your interest.
Thanks, L0pht - not just for the idea of "Making the theoretical practical since 1992", but for living up to it and setting the standard in the years to come.
> > For example, the Chernobyl reactor didn't "melt down", it caught fire. > > It had a power surge due to being operated incorrectly, leading to a steam explosion. > The steam explosion put graphite moderator in contact with white-hot naked fuel pellets > (as well as removing[ Emphasis mine ] the lid on the reactor), and that led to the fire.
I wholly agree with your description of what happened, but damn, you have a gift for understatement:-)
Follow-up: Unlike the "maybe the experimenter got careless with his math and used the wrong shape of vessel" theory espoused by this post, ISTR that it was eventually determined that the root cause was an in-duh-vidual adding thirty-five pounds of uranium to the acid solution, rather than the 5ish-pounds he was supposed to use.
That's beyond "carelessly bad math" (which in this situation still would qualify it as a Fuckup of Pretty Big Proportions) and well into the realm of "A Fuckup of Such Grand Proportion That Deming, the Man Who Taught Total Quality Management and Process Engineering to the Japanese, Is Probably Still Rolling In His Grave Three Months Later".
> I seriously question the sanity of anyone who overclocks a production system.
I'd echo that - but with one very important qualifier that completely inverts the intent of your original post, namely "without knowing what they're doing".
The rules for successful overclocking are actually pretty simple - know the relationship between FSB speed and the multipliers and dividers that turn that FSB speed into AGP and PCI speeds, and how that relationship varies as a function of motherboard vintage.
Would I run a C366 (5.5 x 66 MHz) at 75 MHz FSB, to get 412.5 MHz? Hell no:
AGP: 2/3 of 75 is 50 MHz, and I'm (wastefully) underclocking the AGP bus, or if it runs at 1 * 75 is 75 MHz, I'm (far-beyond-dangerously!) overclocking my AGP bus.
PCI: 1/2 of 75 is 37.5 MHz, and I'm overclocking my PCI bus by maybe 10%, which most hard drives can handle, but perhaps not all.
That "hell no" argument goes double if you ask me to run it at 83 MHz FSB * 5.5 for 458 MHz.
But if I crank that puppy up to 100 MHz FSB, I have - modulo heat - rock-solid stability:
AGP: The mobo should detect 100 MHz FSB and switch to 2/3 of 100 MHz, or 66 MHz. You're running at spec.
PCI: The mobo should detect 100 MHz FSB and switch to 1/3 of 100 MHz, or 33 MHz. You're running at spec.
That's right - as long as it can be cooled effectively, a C366 running at 550 MHz is more stable than one running at 412 or 458.
A similar set of calculations can be performed for other CPUs running at other core multiplier frequencies, and will reveal different "sweet spots" where the PCI and AGP busses run in spec. (In an ironic twist, buying a "faster" CPU of the PII and Celeron vintages actually makes things worse:)
So would I allow some random kiddie who says "0vercl0cking iz k00l 4 gamez, d00d!" crank a production system of unknown processor vintage and motherboard capability to "as fast as you think you can get it, kid"? No, that's madness. He might have a CPU that'll run fine at 550 MHz at 2.1V, but not at 2.0V. Instead of turning the voltage to 2.1V and testing heat dissipation, he leaves it at 2.0V and "steps back" to run the FSB at 83. Two weeks later, the hard drive explodes and everyone blames overclocking. It wasn't the fault of overclocking, it was the fault of one particular overclocker.
But would I, if starved for speed (and cash - in that I couldn't afford to buy the speed off the shelf), allow an overcautious doomsayer dissuade me from applying overclocking in such a way as to get speed without sacrificing stability? No again - that would be just as insane.
Like everything else in computing - blind adoption and blind rejection is madness. A clued admin will realize that there's a middle ground.
If an admin has the power to select quality equipment, and the clue to tweak said equipment without risking stability, the right answer to "Admin, we want a fast server but are on a low budget" is "yes, I can do that, but only if you let me select every component and not quibble if the motherboard I choose costs $10 more than the cheapest one on the market."
> [ someone's huge list of links to mirrors deleted ]
I was around when Gibson released the deliberately-overpriced objet d'art from whence sprang the term "information wants to be free". (And I got my copy of the poem within two days, woo-hoo!)
But speaking of source... Having seen the Gibsonian maxim utterly devastate the Cult of $cientology - an "all balls, no brains" dinosaur which was designed in the 1950s in such a way that it could never have the capacity to adapt to changes in its informational environment, I'm looking forward to seeing it wreak similar havoc on those who wish to shut down distribution of DeCSS.
You see, unlike the Co$, the DVD CCA just might be smart enough to come up with a way around what they perceive as "the problem of free information" that doesn't involve the futile game of whack-a-mole that so characterized the Co$ battle.
Whatever they come up with, I doubt they'll succeed. But how the DVD CCA fails to control the spread of DeCSS could well be as instructional for those of us who study memetics as the failure of the Co$ to control its sekrit skript00res.
(Of course, for sheer entertainment value, nothing could equal watching the Co$ repeatedly bash its head against the non-levitating brick ashtray of the Internet, but hey, I'm trying to learn about information warfare, not just laugh at organizations that Just Don't Get It:-)
Two questions (Well, three, really, but I'm a hardware geek, and I love trying to squeeze three things in the space of two):
1) Wireless.
Lots of folks have been asking today about the wireless network project. "Me too"; the page has been up for years, it's a fascinating and extremely powerful idea, but for those of us who aren't RF engineers...
when do we get to see some hardware projects to build, or is it the case that - due to regulatory restrictions on what can and cannot be transmitted on US airwaves - work is being done independently on the notion of a secure wireless IP-based network but isn't being released so that those of us who aren't RF engineers can't gum up the works by screwing things up before it's ready:-)
2) The future of hardware hacking.
With the trend towards more and more functionality becoming embedded into ASICs and single-chip solutions, the golden age of "just desolder this", or "reverse-engineer the schematics and jumper that", or "replace a [PROM|EPROM|EEPROM|PIC|FPGA] with one with the following special programming, and here's the [CPU|microcontroller]'s instruction set and a memory map of the embedded system" appears to be drawing to a close. Anyone can desolder a 24-pin DIP EPROM and hack it, but trying to desolder a 100-pin PQFP is a real bear without $500+ worth of specialized equipment, and knowing what to do with the chip after you've desoldered it is well-nigh impossible.
Do you see a time when "hardware hacking" (as we've traditionally known it) will have to fall by the wayside? If so - what, if anything, do you see as taking its place? (Perhaps users taking advantage of the vastly more-powerful gear out there today and building their own hackable hardware, eliminating the need to hack other people's hardware?)
I suppose that's tangentially related to the wireless.net question - for mass distribution of the tools needed to build such a network, for instance, it seems to me that re-purposing cheap, widely-available stuff that others have junked is a better path than having to build things from scratch. But if the cheap, widely-available stuff of the future isn't gonna be re-usable... where does one go from there?
3) The future of l0pht.
(At least publicly), there's been a lot more activity on the software side of l0pht than on the hardware side.
To the extent that you can discuss it openly, do you see l0pht's main activities over the next 3-5 years as continuing to revolve around the "expose weaknesses in software" side or the "work on next-generation hardare projects" side?
Meanwhile, thanks for much great work on both the hardware and software sides of the equation, and best wishes for your continued good work. A couple of years ago, some of your tools saved an ex-employer's butt, and the look on my pointy-haired boss' face when I showed him where I got the tools that saved him was something I'll never forget. Y'all rule, and convincing a PHB of it takes work above and beyond the call of duty:-)
Re:Natural Killers Turning the Tide of Battle
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Gates of Fire
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Having found the referenced article fascinating, I browsed up a level and found yet more good stuff. Might I recommend "Leadership in the Information Age":
"The US Army leadership culture will need to evolve to deal with a different type of soldier. Currently, those professionals who best understand emerging IT find a hostile climate in the services. People adept at using the new technology are ridiculed as being "nerds" or "geeks" and not true soldiers. However, 21st-century Army leaders need to recognize that moving and shooting apply to the information medium as well. When the fog and friction of combat begin to stress the information systems, a successful leader needs to be technically proficient to continue the mission with degraded systems and improvise new solutions."
("If you can hack, Uncle Sam wants YOU!")
Any/.ers who think that the military is just for testosterone-crazed lunkheads should also take a look at some of these papers. Yeah, the pay sucks compared to Silicon Valley IPO-mania, and it's a "government job" in the sense of a lot of regulation and what-not, but there's still a lot of fascinating work, both on a technological ("look at this neat tool!") and human ("how can we get more out of our people and processes") related, going on, and there are some really smart people working their asses off on it.
Many of the principles the military is trying to encourage can be applied directly to business. Place your "Natural killers" in positions where they can slay your competitors. (They sound perfect for marketing and sales!) Make sure your support personnel aren't just $5/hour drones who say "try rebooting and reinstalling Windows", but that they've got the clue to figure stuff out for your customers when the chips are down. Lead your company or your team, or find someone who can - so you can let them do the leading while you develop the cool technology without having to worry about the day-to-day hassles of management.
And back to the original topic of the Spartans at Thermopylae - I once heard that the Klingons of Star Trek were loosely based on the warriors of feudal Japan. I think we've pretty much dispelled that myth today, and made sure that the book review more than qualifies as "news for nerds":-)
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finkployd responds:
> Now there is a trade off. Do we allow e-commerce?
> Or do we allow state to educate kids and fight crime. Choose carefully, we can only pick one
>
> Where is is written that to be a vice president, you have to be a complete moron? Beteen Gore
> and Danny boy, we have had 12 years of some of the most off the wall comments come from that department.
The place it's written where, in order to be a vice president, you really do have to be a complete moron is in the minds of the voters.
It's a classical fallacy; that of "false dichotomy", and it's made much easier to do by a quirk of the English language. Most geeks instinctively know the difference between "A OR B" and "A XOR B", but the general public generally doesn't. Ask Joe Schmoe if he wants "pepperoni or olives" on his pizza, and he'll never say "both".
Politicians love this technique, because it makes demonizing one's opponent trivial. If you're not for Mr. Foo's Plan to save the chiiiildrun, you must be into taking pictures of nude six-year-old kids making bombs from instructions they got off the Internet.
With taxes; there are plenty of other ways to fund the local police and schools, but e-commerce threatens one of those ways. Therefore you can have e-commerce or police protection. By implication, you can't have both.
With crypto, you can have either free crypto or less terrorism. Never mind that the crypto cat is already out of the bag and that there are plenty of effective ways to fight terrorism. By putting them in a sentence with the word "or", the implication is that the two are mutually exclusive.
Anyone with two brain cells to rub together, geek or not, can see the flaws in those arguments.
As an added bonus, the use of the false dichotomy allows your handlers to get two opposing sound bites for the price of one. In Silicon Valley, "The VP supports finding a solution to these issues that allows the Internet and e-commerce to flourish". In the Mississippi Delta, "The Veep strongly opposes measures which would strip the states and counties of their ability to educate children and fight crime."
There's a reason why basic courses in logic, philosophy, and reasoning-and-rhetoric are no longer taught in high schools: none of the presently-ruling class of politicians would ever be elected if a substantial portion of the electorate were capable of even the most basic elements of reasoning: it's much easier to manipulate the actions of a flock of drooling sheeplike morons than it is to convince a bunch of sharp-minded logicians.
If it were ever extended to the broader population (this can never happen until the broader population acquires the rudiments of logical thinking), the 'net's style of open debate would scare the hell out of politicians, because bullshit would be exposed for what it is. Is anyone here buying LinuxOne?
Sadly, the converse is also true. The fact that the broader population will never acquire the critical thinking skills that we geeks take for granted means that "politicans and geek issues" will remain a red herring. You can't bluster geeks, you have to convince them. But as a politician, why spend millions trying to convince the geeks when there are 200-million sheep out there who will beg (with their votes) for your comforting logical fallacies like a masochist begs for the whip?
What I want to know is this: having designed and built a Mars probe, what's the marginal cost of building another one?
And if that cost is low, why not launch two missions; one shuttle mission to put 10-15 identical probes into a stable Earth orbit (hang 'em off the side of the Space Station even!), and one ELV (expendable launch vehicle) to put a bus with a big dumb tank of fuel and rocket engine into orbit a few days/weeks later?
The shuttle's reliable - it's manned, it's going into orbit, and it's coming back after it deploys its payload. The space station will be reliable; it's manned, it's not gonna fall down. So the odds that your science payload (the Mars probes) will be lost before launch are pretty slim.
The big dumb tank of fuel with the rocket engine on the back is expendable - it can be "as reliable as the rocket used to launch it", that is, "pretty good, but if it fails to reach orbit, we launch another one, our science payload is still safe".
The next step is pretty obvious - strap the bundle of probes onto the big dumb tank and fire it off, using whatever gravitational slingshots you like.
10 probes en route to Mars for the price of one expensive shuttle launch and one cheap ELV boost to low-earth orbit is gonna be cheap.
As a bonus, you get some statistics on lander reliability. Was Pathfinder "lucky" and Mars Polar Lander "unlucky"? Find out when you do the same thing next year with 10 MPL-style landers. "Of 10 MPL-style landers, only 3 made it. Of the 7 failed MPL landers, 6 of their DS2-style probes survived and transmitted; the bug is probably with the lander itself, not the separation of the probes. We were just really unlucky with the 1999 MPL. Of the 10 airbag-bouncy-landers, 8 survived. This is the better technology to use."
$150M per mission is faster/better/cheaper than $1B per mission. But $400M for 10 missions beats both hands down. We know re-entry is difficult - we don't know how hard "separating probes from busses is", but it seems pretty simple a'la Galileo. (And with 10 probes in my hypothetical mission, if one gets "stuck" on the bus, big deal, there are 9 more where it came from :-)
(FWIW, here's my guess as to what happened to MPL: Since the DS2 probes also failed to respond, I really question the "canyon" theory - there's no evidence that anything reached the ground in one piece. Or does the "canyon" theory posit that all three (lander and both DS2 probes) all landed in the same canyon? Not having the size of the canyon handy, nor remembering the expected distance between the probes and the lander sites, I'm not sure if this is plausible or not. My gut says "there was a problem on re-entry that destroyed the probe before DS2-probe-separation" is still the simpler explanation.)
Guilty as charged. This is one point on which I will readily concede.
Your arguments are sound and cogent - perhaps I have missed a point that others have raised here, in that while science aims for an idealized truth, lawyers and jurors alike are forced (whether by something inherent in the system or by "tradition") to work for something that fits in the established bounds of legal precedent.
Given the broken tools we have to work with (an irreconcilably-conflicting mass of laws too complicated for citizens to fully comprehend themselves), perhaps our adversarial system is the effect of humans using broken tools, and not the cause as I'd originally implied.
(Throw a bunch of otherwise level-headed geeks onto a bulletin board system and yell "vi rules" at them and they all ultimately turn into raving lunatics tearing at each other's throats. Problem is, in law, we never got past the "holy war" stage of debate, "Legal precedent" is IMHO often used as little more than a glorified version of argument-by-authority. This case matters because this judge was better than that judge, and my client's opponents are obviously fools for citing the case that took the opposing view...)
So perhaps the really interesting question is - how can we do to our legal codes and bodies of precedent what we do to hairy code? (Leaving aside the practical matter that the lawyers and politicians who make the decisions have based their careers on the system in its present form and will never allow it to be thrown out for a redesign-from-first-principles or a code review and pruning of the dead wood.)
> [ and scientific publications, and open source developers, work that way ]
>
> why are adversary proceedings good enough for science, standards, and open-source software
> but not for the mechanics of the larger societies that we live in?
The flaw in your reasoning was addressed by others in the notion of the zero-sum game. The examples you cite aren't zero-sum games. Law, as it is practiced today, is.
My 2 bits on zero-sum:
In law, the defendant's loss is the plaintiff's gain, and vice versa. Because lawyers have a contractual obligation to represent the interests of the client, and because those interests are, by the nature of the "plaintiff vs. defendant" arena, inherently diametrically opposed to the interests of the other side, the way "you win" is to "make the other guy lose".
The examples you cite are not zero-sum games; the goal of standards review in engineering, peer review in science, and open-source development is NOT to make "the other guy lose", but "to find the bugs and fix them to arrive at the truth".
If you are laboring under the delusion that the goal of any court proceeding is "to get to the truth", I cannot help you.
Consider criminal law. The verdict is never "innocent", it's "not guilty". It doesn't mean "we know for a fact that the defendant is innocent" - it merely means "we cannot ascertain the defendant's guilt beyond a reasonabe doubt."
In the OJ Simpson case, 12 people decided (whether you agree with them or not) that he was not "guilty beyond a reasonable doubt". But during a civil trial thereafter, it was established that "on the balance of probabilities", he was guilty.
So did he kill his wife or not? The courts cannot - and will not - tell you. All the courts can tell you is that if you apply one set of standards for verdict-determination and one set of arguments to one set of people, you'll get one answer, and that if you change all three of these variables, you'll get a diametrically-opposed answer.
In engineering, there are design goals that can be measured against and optimized. In science, there's an objective truth being sought by both sides of a debate. In open source, the quality of software speaks for itself; if you don't like a feature, you fork the code.
But in law, it's still trial by combat - the only way for one side to win is to make the other side lose. Primitive mammalian "us-vs-them" behavior at its finest.
Another poster made an interesting point regarding the notion of lawmaking as the responsibility of an informed citizenry, and the problem with Congress being that very few of its members are informed in anything other than how to get re-elected.
The problem is that there are very few "informed citizens" around.
One "solution" would be to change the definition of "citizen" from "has a pulse" to "has a pulse, can read and write English at a college level, can demonstrate to a jury of other "citizens" a suitable understanding of how our society works, the ethical and moral bases for property rights and community rights, and can come up with a cogent argument for balancing the rights of the individual versus the right of the collective.
Any answer more sophisticated than "huh?" or "when's Oprah on?" would probably qualify one for citizenship... but I suspect there'd be a massive backlash anyways. How dare you deny the drooling masses their vote? (Which really means "How dare you deny the 0.0001% of the population which makes the rules their right to manipulate the emotions of the drooling morons because their votes are easier to acquire than the votes of the clued-in people?)
What we really need is a way of voting "I'm clueless". Imagine if 500 representatives voted on NASA's funding of SETI - but 450 said "I haven't a clue what a radio is, let alone a radio telescope, so I abstain". The other 50 could squabble for a few hours over what evidence was available for which factors in the Drake Equation, and say "We support/oppose the project because most of us believe there's a high/low probability of success using presently-available technology."
Since nobody with the power to vote can be expected to reliably admit their cluelessness on an issue, nor can they be trusted with the responsibility of judging it on their own, the vote of a representative could be declared clueless.
The process of assigning a value to a representative's clue-flag on any given vote, ("an electronic vote of confidence from 5% of the drooling morons who pressed the 'up-moderate' button on their remote controls during the sound bite!", "endorsement from a PAC!") would likely end up just as flawed as the present system.
Doling this power out to the population in a /.-esque karma system won't help. For every ESR or RMS we geeks can declare as "clued and worthy to speak for us on the clue of the Congresscritters voting for XYZ", there's a Jim Bakker or Jerry Falwell.
Taking the vote away from the clueless would be a start, but once you throw out democracy, you'll end up with either a utopia or a totalitarian nightmare. My bet, knowing human nature, is that the clued-in 10% are just as capable of corruption as the 0.0001% and just as capable of stupidity as the bottom 90%.
It follows from this that the lawyers responsible for presenting cases and the judges responsible for understanding the legal arguments presented are incapable - by definition - of keeping pace with technological development.
But the other problem is the adversarial nature of our legal system: "My lawyer can beat up your lawyer" and the notion of the lawyer as hired gun - a lawyer isn't paid to argue what's right vs. what's wrong; determining who's right is the judge's job. The lawyer has a very serious legal responsibility to represent the client's case as strongly as he can, regardless of its strength or weakness. (It is for this reason that a good lawyer will not take a weak case - but if the money's big enough, everyone's got his or her price.)
Unfortunately, what this means is that very intelligent people - and most lawyers are smart cookies - end up making insanely stupid arguments, building factual houses of cards with beautiful rhetorical facades. If you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, you have no alternative but to boggle 'em with bullshit.
Trial by judge puts you at the mercy of someone who knows the law, but hasn't a clue about technology. Trial by jury (with the present jury selection process and minimal pay for jury duty) is arguably worse - you're at the mercy of drones who know neither law nor technology.
For trial by judge, you need someone who can make a strong legal argument to the judge. For trial by jury, you need someone who can gain the jury's emotional sympathies; a showman or huckster.
But either way, it still comes down to "My lawyer can beat up your lawyer". Until the legal system rises to anything more than medieval "trial by combat", with lawyers filling the roles of the armed combatants, we're doomed to be stuck in this quagmire for the forseeable future.
Radar detectors are illegal in my jurisdiction, and we experimented with photo radar.
Because our photo radar cops were using unmarked vehicles ("if they knew we were photo radar cops, they'd slow down and we'd lose revenue!"), every time *any* vehicle came up to an unmarked van, it would slow down and crawl by it at a snail's pace, resulting in 3-lane blockages at 55 all along the highway. Once they got out of range, some people would floor it and get the hell out of dodge, and others would continue to hog the left lane, resulting in very high road rage levels.
The roads were more dangerous during our trial period than at any time I'd ever driven. Thankfully, photo radar was rejected and road safety levels rose from the bottom of the Marianas Trench back to their usual gutter level :)
> then they would have no legal footing on which to monitor our actions.
Careful with that argument. Around where I drive, entry onto a highway isn't just probable cause that one is speeding, it's pretty much the de facto standard :-)
The serious argument - is about the right to face one's accuser. If I contest a speeding ticket I believe was wrongfully given to me by a police officer, I get my day in court.
While most traffic court cases are really nuisance cases where the defendant is guilty but hoping the cop can't be bothered to show up, the fact remains that if the cop can't be bothered to show up to explain his actions, the defendant ought to go free. "Innocent until proven guilty" is an extremely important principle in our justice system, and it's inextricably linked to the right of the accused to challenge one's accuser in court.
Automated ticket-assigning systems attack this principle in an extremely underhanded way - "the machine can't lie" rapidly becomes "you're guilty because the machine says so". Why not dispense with judges and juries while you're at it?
If you like the fact that the GPS-speedometer only reports violators and doesn't track your whereabouts, remember that sodomy (the exact definition of which is a function of jurisdiction) is still illegal in many areas of the U.S. Perhaps an infrared camera with pattern-recognition software ought to be installed in every bedroom?
It's not really intrusive - it only calls the authorities when patterns of movement indicating illegal sex (head-bobbing for oral, presence of two erect penii for gays, presence of two humans in the absence of a penis for lesbians, but we're still having trouble distinguishing between doggie-style vaginal and doggie-style anal heterosexual - that's in version 2.0) have been detected.
But God-fearing heterosexual Christians who have sex in the missionary position under the sheets with the lights out have nothing to worry about.
Actually, I'm afraid it's the other way around.
From the market side - go ahead and fry Nasdaq. The ECNs and other off-market trading vehicles will do just fine. The NYSE (effectively the consolidated quotes you get) is actually just the best bid/ask of many stocks on many regional exchanges. (e.g. the Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland and other $OBSCURE_CITY Stock Exchanges).
10 years ago, this was a serious risk. Today, it's a given that trading will continue (although there'll be some wonderful opportunities for arbitrageurs) in the event of an electronic attack against a major financial center, simply because of the widespread distribution of physical locations where trading can take place.
Finally, the dollar amounts involved in the stock market's are nothing compared to the bond and currency markets, and those are effectively traded in a 24/7 market as trading moves from continent to continent.
Bottom line - HERF NASDAQ and you've cost a lot of people a small amount of money, and made a few people a large amount of money, and life goes on. The panicking citizens, or even panicking traders, are ultimately neutral in what is essentially a zero-sum game due to fact that most of the bucks will be moving in the futures and derivative markets.
On the biowar side, unfortunately, panic works in the attacker's favor. What's the one thing you don't want when someone dumps a pile of Ebola/Influenza hybrid into a city.
Right - people moving around, spreading it.
What's the one thing Joe Sixpack will do when he feels fine but everyone else is dropping around him like flies?
Right - get on a plane or a car and haul ass outa dodge.
Worse - what's the one thing that both Mandy "Granola" Chomskyite and Fred "Tinfoil" Survivalist will do when the troops announce "Stay in your homes. The city is under quarantine."
Mandy will march with all her friends in the streets to protest the fact that the Corporate Masters are trying to slay all the $OPPRESSED_MINORITY_GROUP in the cities. And Fred will pick up a gun and "protest" the invocation of martial law by $EVIL_ONE_WORLD_GUMMINT by shooting between his pickup truck and the county line.
In the case of biowarfare, the likely course of citizen panic, and particularly in an industrialized democracy, greatly favors the attacker.
HERFing NASDAQ would be a walk in the park by comparison.
Me, doing 65 in a 65 zone, passing a slowpoke doing about 45. The slowpoke cut me off for some unknown reason; I swerved to avoid. He then saw me swerving behind him and jerked himself directly back into my path. Somewhere around the second swerve was where I lost it; I managed to miss him (in retrospect, I kinda wish I'd taken him out :-), but at the price of rolling my vehicle after leaving the road. The slowpoke never stopped. The seatbelt saved my life; I was uninjured, and was told how much air I caught while offroad by a witness who saw the whole thing from a dozen car lengths back. With the witness backing me up, the cops reported it as hit-and-run; the slowpoke was likely after an insurance settlement.
An acquaintance travelling in line with the flow of traffic when he got cut off when being passed by a drunk doing about 80ish. The drunk miscalculated and knocked him off into the ditch, and then spun out and ended up in the ditch himself. Everyone walked away. The drunk got his day in court, was convicted, and is probably on the road again.
Speed differentials kill. Stupid drivers kill. Drunk drivers kill. But speed, in and of itself, does not kill.
If the state wants to put a little gadget in the car to collect money from drivers, a GPS-based speedometer will be just fine.
If the state wants to employ these kinds of technolgoies to save lives, however, a breathalyzer in series with a seat belt buckle sensor and the ignition coil would be far more effective.
Of course, it'd be cheaper still to simply have better driver education (including a mandatory emergency manoeuvers course - which the highest-risk teenagers would probably enjoy as well as learn from :-), stricter driving test standards, and tougher convictions for impaired driving, but hey, that's not as sexy and high-tech, is it?
There are very few true "accidents" on the road. The problem isn't with the car, it's with the idiot driving it. If a driver is unsafe, he or she doesn't belong on the road at any speed.
I have it on good authority that Tackhead says it's unfunny-and-sick for humorless prats to make fun of (geeks who make fun of clueless users (who can't articulate their problems to tech support)).
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. For including schematics, for the built-in disassembler, for CALL -151, for documenting it all, and for including it in the ROMs you got from the factory.
And thank you for - 20 years later - the fact that I'm getting paid to do what I'd be doing anyways.
Last year, I found an original Apple ][ motherboard at a surplus store, stripped of its TTL but still containing its masked PROMs. My project for this summer will mark the 20th anniversary of my "first experience" with an Apple computer. As you've no doubt already guessed, it involves a power supply, a TV set, this board, and a large antistatic foam pad full of spare TTL and RAM chips.
"Most of all, we must never, ever again feel awestruck wonder about any manufactured device. They dont last, and are not worthy of that form of respect. "
I've been looking for a way to express this too - I point out that well-crafted code is not a manufactured device, no matter how humble the system in which it's embedded. Witness the skill of the original PDP hackers and "Spacewar", and the tight code of the old-school video game developers. Those devices I believe I'm fully justified in feeling awe for.
But on to what I see as the key insight of the Manifesto:
"The twentieth century featured any number of -isms. They were fatally based on the delusion that philosophy trumps engineering. It doesn't."
Thank you, Bruce, for expressing in three sentences the idea I've been trying to convey to those who "Just Don't Get It" for most of my life. Your phrasing captures the insight in a delightful marriage of eloquence and force.
Clueless twits with the "FAQs are for pussies" gene need not apply. Before signing on, for the love of Uncle Chuck, please read The CoFD FAQ.
(On second thought, don't bother. We love flaming helminthic parasites who can't read FAQs into smoldering piles of ash...)
I can assure you that, unlike www.darwinawards.com , the CoFD has never, and will never pull any punches when it comes to "sensitive" deaths. Hell, we had a fsckin' field day over the "don't wear a seatbelt and let your chauffeur drive drunk" gene (ex-Princess Die), the "trees are your friends" gene (Sonny Bono, $DEADKENNEDY), and the "Hey, I can fly in this fog" gene ($DEADKENNEDY, closely related to "Hey, I can drive" gene posessed by yet another $DEADKENNEDY).
For Y2K, I personally celebrated by laughing heartily at news footage of some dumb bloke in California standing up on a light pole and reaching up to grab a couple of nearby wires for support. Presumably, he had the "electrical safety is for pussies" gene. Darwin be Praised, he fell down and went boom (actually, "zzap-thud" was more like it) shortly afterwards. Verily, I could almost hear the Voice of Darwin echoing in the Y2K crowd. YOU. Yes, YOU, on the streetlight. Outa the gene pool. NOW.
For any who object - I quote the final lines of the CoFD FAQ:
Ditto. "A scientist is an atom's way of thinking about atoms."
Excellent point.
"Uh, yeah, I'd have never bought a CD from these guyz I'd never heard of before, but now that I've got some MP3z of 'em, yeah, I might buy a CD from 'em. Of course, like, I've already got their entire fuxin' discography, so I prolly won't. I'd have bought their new release, but figured, fuggit, I can get it some other day. I mean, I got the whole new release in MP3 three weeks before the release actually came out anyways... but yeah, I'd have at least considered buying it if I didn't already have it, d00d"
Well, technically this (hypothetical) user is "more likely" to buy the CD, aren't they?
The best reason of all why "copy-protected" MP3s will never sell.
When you've got 13G of MP3s (as this poster has) at $1.00 a pop, buying a spare hard drive to back up one's collection (and stashing the spare drive in a safety-deposit-box offsite, in the event of fire/earthquake/etc) is a wise investment.
Fortunately, there's not a damn thing RIAA and MPAA can do about my MP3 collection. They're files on hard drives. The operating system doesn't support any form of DRM, and as such, I'll always be able to back 'em up.
The only thing I'd question from the poster:
>if I am paying money, I want hard media.. (tape, CD, record) not bitstream
Tapes are transitory. They'll sound like crap in 10-20 years as the magnetic flux slowly fades away, and/or as the tape itself changes chemically over the years. Vinyl will also degrade over repeated plays, even with spectacular care and expense paid in equipment. The CD (not the CD-R!) is probably the only "it'll last you a lifetime" medium out there.
While MP3s on magnetic media (hard drives) are transitory, at least they can be perfectly replicated from one hard drive to another as part of an ongoing backup strategy. No can-do with tape or vinyl :-(
(Of course, no can-do with MP3s if RIAA and MPAA have their way, but fsck them.)
Just to play Devil's Advocate - although USENET is ill-suited to the transmission of large binaries, and although a full feed of .binaries.mp3 is probably around 100G per day...
Naturally, if it's only a small percentage of the userbase, it's cheaper to let that population draw down only the portion of USENET they want over the WAN. But when it grows to a large enough segment of the userbase, it just might be cheaper (in terms of number-of-bits-sucked-through-the-big-pipe) to supply it locally.
My software/hardware interest was sparked when I started poking around an Apple ][ (cue next interview: "Thanks Woz, for including a ROM disassembly in your docs!") with CALL -151, and discovered that I could talk right down to the bare metal.
From there, it was a question of learning to reverse-engineer 6502 with the built-in disassembler, and later on, dumping data from other machines (e.g. 1980s video games!) into the magic Apple box and seeing what I could glean from the disassembly. It was immediately obvious that I had to match the schematics of the hardware I was playing with against the addresses I was seeing in the code, and from then on, I became a hardware geek.
I mention this because the concern I had with the barrier to entry is that when I got into it, any 12-year-old with enough time on his hands and brains in his skull could get started. Likewise with programming today - thank the Gods for Linux and open source because a 12-year-old can still get started in software by typing "man foo" and picking up a copy of K&R. (*shudder* - imagine a world without Free Software - what 12-year-old, however brainy, would get anywhere with an M$ system, where the very notion of "development tools" implies "very expensive add-on", rather than being part of the core distribution...)
I guess the interesting question - and the one that can probably only be answered by the next 10 years of hacker history - is gonna be how today's 12-year-old is gonna make the jump between taking apart a computer and putting it back together again, typing "make foo", learning how to write good code that'll be properly optimized for the compiler, and {then the miracle happens} and he's in college poking around with a logic analyzer and a DVD-RAM drive in the lab off-hours.
Having read L0pht's reply however, I realize that online auctions are bringing surplus electronic equipment availability to an all-time high. If you need a single-user SMT rework station, you can get one for a few hundred bucks. And the costs - like EPROM burners in the past 10 years from $800 to $150, are falling at the same rate. As for expensive VHDL software, I mean no disrespect to those who write such software when I say that for the hobbyist, if there were ever an ethical justification for piracy, "hobby use" just might be it. (And I note in passing that much electronic software is issued on a "try-before-you-buy, limited to 500 pads per board" basis :-)
Someone else spoke about getting "warm fuzzies" from L0pht in the context of being glad the media are turning to them when they have questions. Count me in on the "warm fuzzies" too, but for a very different reason: in response to my hardware hacking question, they didn't just stop at saying "the bar's been raised, but don't worry, the hardware scene's alive and well".
Where others might have stopped there, L0pht went - as they always have - one step further. In addition to the warm fuzzies mentioned above, they also managed to give me, and everyone else reading, a set of practical, concrete things to do today - bone up on VHDL, invest in new equipment, make that old 20 MHz scope available to someone still learning the basics, poke around presently-available wireless technologies, and network with fellow geeks who share your interest.
Thanks, L0pht - not just for the idea of "Making the theoretical practical since 1992", but for living up to it and setting the standard in the years to come.
>
> It had a power surge due to being operated incorrectly, leading to a steam explosion.
> The steam explosion put graphite moderator in contact with white-hot naked fuel pellets
> (as well as removing [ Emphasis mine ] the lid on the reactor), and that led to the fire.
I wholly agree with your description of what happened, but damn, you have a gift for understatement :-)
A representative post as to "why this ought to count as one of the more colossal blunders of the century":
Follow-up: Unlike the "maybe the experimenter got careless with his math and used the wrong shape of vessel" theory espoused by this post, ISTR that it was eventually determined that the root cause was an in-duh-vidual adding thirty-five pounds of uranium to the acid solution, rather than the 5ish-pounds he was supposed to use.
That's beyond "carelessly bad math" (which in this situation still would qualify it as a Fuckup of Pretty Big Proportions) and well into the realm of "A Fuckup of Such Grand Proportion That Deming, the Man Who Taught Total Quality Management and Process Engineering to the Japanese, Is Probably Still Rolling In His Grave Three Months Later".
I'd echo that - but with one very important qualifier that completely inverts the intent of your original post, namely "without knowing what they're doing".
The rules for successful overclocking are actually pretty simple - know the relationship between FSB speed and the multipliers and dividers that turn that FSB speed into AGP and PCI speeds, and how that relationship varies as a function of motherboard vintage.
Would I run a C366 (5.5 x 66 MHz) at 75 MHz FSB, to get 412.5 MHz? Hell no:
That "hell no" argument goes double if you ask me to run it at 83 MHz FSB * 5.5 for 458 MHz.
But if I crank that puppy up to 100 MHz FSB, I have - modulo heat - rock-solid stability:
- AGP: The mobo should detect 100 MHz FSB and switch to 2/3 of 100 MHz, or 66 MHz. You're running at spec.
- PCI: The mobo should detect 100 MHz FSB and switch to 1/3 of 100 MHz, or 33 MHz. You're running at spec.
That's right - as long as it can be cooled effectively, a C366 running at 550 MHz is more stable than one running at 412 or 458.A similar set of calculations can be performed for other CPUs running at other core multiplier frequencies, and will reveal different "sweet spots" where the PCI and AGP busses run in spec. (In an ironic twist, buying a "faster" CPU of the PII and Celeron vintages actually makes things worse :)
So would I allow some random kiddie who says "0vercl0cking iz k00l 4 gamez, d00d!" crank a production system of unknown processor vintage and motherboard capability to "as fast as you think you can get it, kid"? No, that's madness. He might have a CPU that'll run fine at 550 MHz at 2.1V, but not at 2.0V. Instead of turning the voltage to 2.1V and testing heat dissipation, he leaves it at 2.0V and "steps back" to run the FSB at 83. Two weeks later, the hard drive explodes and everyone blames overclocking. It wasn't the fault of overclocking, it was the fault of one particular overclocker.
But would I, if starved for speed (and cash - in that I couldn't afford to buy the speed off the shelf), allow an overcautious doomsayer dissuade me from applying overclocking in such a way as to get speed without sacrificing stability? No again - that would be just as insane.
Like everything else in computing - blind adoption and blind rejection is madness. A clued admin will realize that there's a middle ground.
If an admin has the power to select quality equipment, and the clue to tweak said equipment without risking stability, the right answer to "Admin, we want a fast server but are on a low budget" is "yes, I can do that, but only if you let me select every component and not quibble if the motherboard I choose costs $10 more than the cheapest one on the market."
I was around when Gibson released the deliberately-overpriced objet d'art from whence sprang the term "information wants to be free". (And I got my copy of the poem within two days, woo-hoo!)
But speaking of source... Having seen the Gibsonian maxim utterly devastate the Cult of $cientology - an "all balls, no brains" dinosaur which was designed in the 1950s in such a way that it could never have the capacity to adapt to changes in its informational environment, I'm looking forward to seeing it wreak similar havoc on those who wish to shut down distribution of DeCSS.
You see, unlike the Co$, the DVD CCA just might be smart enough to come up with a way around what they perceive as "the problem of free information" that doesn't involve the futile game of whack-a-mole that so characterized the Co$ battle.
Whatever they come up with, I doubt they'll succeed. But how the DVD CCA fails to control the spread of DeCSS could well be as instructional for those of us who study memetics as the failure of the Co$ to control its sekrit skript00res.
(Of course, for sheer entertainment value, nothing could equal watching the Co$ repeatedly bash its head against the non-levitating brick ashtray of the Internet, but hey, I'm trying to learn about information warfare, not just laugh at organizations that Just Don't Get It :-)
1) Wireless.
Lots of folks have been asking today about the wireless network project. "Me too"; the page has been up for years, it's a fascinating and extremely powerful idea, but for those of us who aren't RF engineers...
2) The future of hardware hacking.
With the trend towards more and more functionality becoming embedded into ASICs and single-chip solutions, the golden age of "just desolder this", or "reverse-engineer the schematics and jumper that", or "replace a [PROM|EPROM|EEPROM|PIC|FPGA] with one with the following special programming, and here's the [CPU|microcontroller]'s instruction set and a memory map of the embedded system" appears to be drawing to a close. Anyone can desolder a 24-pin DIP EPROM and hack it, but trying to desolder a 100-pin PQFP is a real bear without $500+ worth of specialized equipment, and knowing what to do with the chip after you've desoldered it is well-nigh impossible.
I suppose that's tangentially related to the wireless.net question - for mass distribution of the tools needed to build such a network, for instance, it seems to me that re-purposing cheap, widely-available stuff that others have junked is a better path than having to build things from scratch. But if the cheap, widely-available stuff of the future isn't gonna be re-usable... where does one go from there?
3) The future of l0pht.
(At least publicly), there's been a lot more activity on the software side of l0pht than on the hardware side.
Meanwhile, thanks for much great work on both the hardware and software sides of the equation, and best wishes for your continued good work. A couple of years ago, some of your tools saved an ex-employer's butt, and the look on my pointy-haired boss' face when I showed him where I got the tools that saved him was something I'll never forget. Y'all rule, and convincing a PHB of it takes work above and beyond the call of duty :-)
"The US Army leadership culture will need to evolve to deal with a different type of soldier. Currently, those professionals who best understand emerging IT find a hostile climate in the services. People adept at using the new technology are ridiculed as being "nerds" or "geeks" and not true soldiers. However, 21st-century Army leaders need to recognize that moving and shooting apply to the information medium as well. When the fog and friction of combat begin to stress the information systems, a successful leader needs to be technically proficient to continue the mission with degraded systems and improvise new solutions."
("If you can hack, Uncle Sam wants YOU!")
Any /.ers who think that the military is just for testosterone-crazed lunkheads should also take a look at some of these papers. Yeah, the pay sucks compared to Silicon Valley IPO-mania, and it's a "government job" in the sense of a lot of regulation and what-not, but there's still a lot of fascinating work, both on a technological ("look at this neat tool!") and human ("how can we get more out of our people and processes") related, going on, and there are some really smart people working their asses off on it.
Many of the principles the military is trying to encourage can be applied directly to business. Place your "Natural killers" in positions where they can slay your competitors. (They sound perfect for marketing and sales!) Make sure your support personnel aren't just $5/hour drones who say "try rebooting and reinstalling Windows", but that they've got the clue to figure stuff out for your customers when the chips are down. Lead your company or your team, or find someone who can - so you can let them do the leading while you develop the cool technology without having to worry about the day-to-day hassles of management.
And back to the original topic of the Spartans at Thermopylae - I once heard that the Klingons of Star Trek were loosely based on the warriors of feudal Japan. I think we've pretty much dispelled that myth today, and made sure that the book review more than qualifies as "news for nerds" :-)