> However, you may absolutely not impinge on his freedom or that of his investors. He is doing you, nor anyone else, any harm. The argument that his failure will discredit "real" research is weak at best. None of these concerns are substancial enough to warrant such instrusions into his life.
To clarify - by "money should be spent only where it'll do good" I did not mean that any law should be written to prevent the parting of a fool and his money, and agree that my argument on discrediting "real" research, while sufficient to say "I recommend that you not..." is insufficient to get to "I [will use the power of the state to] mandate that you cannot". The world "should" be free of pain and hunger too, but that doesn't mean it's proper to rob the rich to give to the poor.
The other flaw in my argument is that I blurred the line between "reasonable expectation" of profit (commercially-exploitable research) and "reasonable expectation" of scientific return.
Meanwhile, if the guy's a fraud, we already have laws that cover fraud, and processes (courts) to figure out whether he knowingly bilked people out of their money or whether he was just a nut acting in good faith.
Likewise an excellent reply. Your key point "But the larger question is whether science 'playing the odds' is a good idea" is the crux of the debate.
Probably the best example of it was cold fusion - they had a "that's funny" experience, an experimental apparatus and a falsifiable theory ("if you get piles of neutrons coming out of our apparatus, you've gotta rewrite a few parts of physics when dealing with hydrogen atoms near platinum atoms"); with all three of these things put together, people built the apparatus and unfortunately for Pons and Fleischmann, falsified the theory. Good science - CF did attempt to build on the existing body of knowledge, there was reason to invest a small amount of money trying it out, but it looks like P&F simply made a mistake with their calorimetry and released their findings before anyone had a chance to catch it.
In the case of Mills, there may be a "that's funny" electrochemical effect going on (perhaps the same one in cold fusion!) involving ionized gases, but there's no apparatus available for non-Millsian people to build and test, and no reason to believe the theory underlying the "free energy" he purports to create is anything other than a random string of scientific terms strung together in such a way as to confuse a layman.
As a last point - Cold Fusion vs. Mills; P&F proposed a device that (they thought) released a pile of energy at room temperature. If it were merely a chemical reaction, it would violate a known law of thermodynamics, so they concluded that some other process was at work, namely fusion. The mistake was assuming "it can't be chemical", but given that assumption, made in good faith on bad calorimetry, what happened afterwards was science; nuclear fusion has properties which we can detect.
Mills proposes a device that does much the same thing, and has ((too)many!) other magickal properties... but he doesn't say "here's what my stuff does, come and build one yourself" - he says "here's what my stuff *will do*, come and *buy one now*" (with the implication that if it doesn't work, just like the apricot pit people, come back to him in six months and buy more, he'll have the bugs worked out then!:) - and rewrites physics from the ground up for the hell of it in a fit of "I must be right and you're wrong because my being right will allow me to take over the world, Pinky!". In all three areas - failing to demonstrate "that's funny", (forgivable if you're strong on the other two), not having an apparatus that others can construct on their own, and creating a theory of physics that introduces more problems (oops, the sun stops working, etc.) than it fixes (my magic boxes do something neat!), he crosses the line between science and charlatanry.
(On "creating more problems than it solves", Mills' theory reminds me of the interlocking crystal spheres that used to be the "answer" for why the planets moved differently than the stars in a geocentric universe. The number of spheres required and their complexity explodes when someone looks at Jupiter with a telescope. Kepler and Newton, on the other hand, answer more questions than they raise. Einstein even more so, explaining plenty of other stuff, but also covering Mercury's slight shift due to being so close to the large-mass sun. With so many good theories, "OK, suppose you work out the sphere math with a big computer, which they didn't have 500 years ago, see? The 12-sphere model can work fine with 5432 spheres, including one more crystal sphere immersed in molasses to make Mercury go slower... then you can hook up a generator to the regular Mercurian sphere and the molasses Mercurian sphere, and woo-hoo, free energy!" just doesn't wash, even if it would give us free energy if only someone would fund my $200M Mercurian Molasses Generator Project.)
It's been a nice discussion here too - scientists need a "devil's advocate" such as yourself in order to prevent them from becoming too complacent. Science may be pure - but scientists, just like charlatans, are still human.
> > [Tackhead sez "some theories aren't worth investigating"] > [emerson sez "how do we choose which are worth investigating and which aren't, and how do we do it in such a way > as to avoid only doing science in areas where we already know the results"]
Your point about "rejecting theories out of hand can lead to boringly-safe science" is well-taken, as well as your insight that "what makes a better idea better" is an - is the - important question.
The key - also as you point out - is to screen out the chaff before spending a fortune trying to repeat the experiments of crackpots. The thing I've not fully articulated is "how do you screen the wheat from the chaff in absence of experiment". So here are some random thoughts:
My original post (Asimov's Corollary to Clarke's Law) is actually a pretty useful guideline -- if the reason you want to test a theory is that it's Really Really Appealing To Laypeople, odds are it's bunk that can't stand on its own merits and must appeal to human emotion to get approval. Apricot pits for cancer, free energy, and the like.
Following closely in the footsteps of "Really Really Appealing To Laypeople" is often "putting the cart before the horse". The other reason people believe apricot pits cure cancer is because "science has been working on a cure for cancer for decades and I need something I can buy NOW!". The quack sells you an answer for now, and promises the research to back it up later. The scientist performs the research first, and only worries about productizing it later.
By "research", I don't mean "going away for 20 years and emerging with a theory out of thin air". Although Einstein was a clerk in a patent office, he wasn't wholly divorced from the scientific community, even though his theory was pretty revolutionary.
Another indication of junk science - sort of a combination of all of the above - is the "I understand everything and you don't" effect. Most great scientific discoveries didn't start with "I know the Answer to Life, The Universe, And Everything, and You Don't!", but with a guy looking at an experimental or mathematical result and saying "huh? that's funny..."
Finally, Occam's Razor. Relativity was a revolutionary theory, but it was worthy of investigation. Why? Because physicists at the time already had reason to believe that classical mechanics wasn't quite what it was cracked up to be. The canonical example would be the Michelson-Morely experiments on the speed of light to see what the preferred frame of reference for the universe was - but unfortunately, the speed of light seemed to be constant no matter which way the experimental apparatus was moving.
Yes, Einstein threw Newtonian physics for a loop, but there was ample evidence that there were things going on that couldn't be explained by Newton's vision of the world. Einstein did some funky math and came up with a better explanation. Newtonian physics works for most problems, but Einsteinian physics works just as well for those problems, and much better for problems where you're moving really quickly or near big heavy things.
(And the quantum physicists came up with a better explanation still when they showed that, contrary to Einstein's famous quip, God does in fact play dice with the universe, and that He sometimes throws them where they can't be seen... and so on, through QCD, superstrings, and whatever's at the forefront of physics research today.)
...and Mills? What - known and reproducible - phenomenon, unexplainable by conventional physics or chemistry, does his theory purport to explain? Show me evidence to suggest that the laws of thermodynamics are bunk, and I might be interested, but thermodynamics is pretty basic stuff.
So's the hydrogen atom. (Cue the "If you fuck with hydrogen, you fuck up the rest of the natural world" thread - which is merely a snarky way of saying "If you change basic physical properties of matter, you end up with a universe that's wholly unlike the one we observe around us."
I don't mean "unlike commonsense results for slow objects", as was Newtonian physics, nor "unlike commonsense results for big objects", like physics before quantum theory, but "wholly unlike anything we observe", in the sense of nuclear fusion in the sun working, basic chemical processes essential to life working, etc.) This is a reductio ad absurdum argument - if Mills' theory were true, yes, we'd have free energy -- which is all well and good, but if the truth of his theory also implies that the sun would be a diffuse cloud of goo at three times its mass and half of its radiation output, or that water is a highly-unstable explosive compound when it comes into contact with nitrogen, his theory must be an absurdity.
Which reminds me of one more "good way to tell what's worth investigating and what's not":
Good science doesn't throw out old theories, it builds upon them.
And speaking of theories, what is his theory? Does he even have one? Is he even interested in any aspect of physics whatsoever, for that matter, apart from its ability to provide him with a product to hawk to the world?
Recommended reading for anyone who's put up with my ramblings thus far:
The Demon-Haunted World - Carl Sagan. If you read only one book on the philosophy of science in this millenium, read this one.
Anything that looks related to "what constitutes good science" on CSICOP's web site.
For medical analogies to the "junk physics" problem, Quackwatch
I'll close off with a Sagan quote that I saw buried in one of the subthreads on Slashdot today - more relevant to my initial post on Clarke and Asimov than this post, but worth repeating: "They laughed at Galileo. They laughed at Columbus. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
> > [Tackhead says it's a waste of money that could be better spent elsewhere] > [An AC writes] Maybe it will sharpen up the BS detectors of the general public, who knows?
If anything could do that, I'd pay the $25M myself:)
Sadly, the track record seems to be that BS simply attracts other con artists to make more BS. Witness spam, for instance.
Similarly, as the level of scientific literacy drops, bad science seems to drive out good science. The investor who gets burned in this scam will be less likely to invest in science when someone legitimate does propose a privately-funded Mars probe, with profits to be made by selling the raw data to NASA, televising the landing on pay-per-view, and making IMAX films of it for the general public. (Or selling probe-ee-o's to the Martians, who seem to have a taste for the things.)
That said - one good point your post reminds me of is that since (in this instance) it's mostly private money going into the scam, it's not taking money away from the current crop of Mars probes, and it's a small enough con that it's not getting national recognition, so in this instance, any damage will probably be restricted to the suckers involved.
(Philosophically, I do agree with you that the investors are entitled to lose their shirts any way they see fit; my concern is more with the "bad science drives out good" side-effects.)
> > Paranoia ("lookit the Eeeevul Corporit Masterzz"), especially when combined with a liberal arts education > > ("cuz science is so hard compared to marching in protest!"), can be a pretty useful combination when > > you're trying to ferret out real oppression, but [ it sucks in a science reporter ] > > What's with the sterotype? I have a liberal arts degree..
My stereotype wasn't so much against liberal arts grads, but against Village Voice reporters. IMHO there's a difference between the type of liberal arts grad who really did broaden their language and thinking skills, and the type who uses it as a cover for (usually left-wing) politicking. It's the difference between taking a broad spectrum of history, philosophy, and logic/rhetoric courses and "Gaian Theory 101", "All Western Culture Is Bad", and "All Men Are Pigs".
As I said in my post - there's nothing wrong with combining left-wing politics and liberal arts. You still get a degree, some English skills to express your views, and usually end up in journalism so you have a platform to spout them after you graduate. If you're tracking down stories about what really went on in Seattle, that's a Good Thing. (I happen to disagree with the positions espoused by the protestors, but I'm damn glad the alternative press is reporting on it. Both sides of the debate - a political/socioeconomic one - deserve to be heard.)
What's bad is that these types tend also to pronounce "nuclear" as "nookyoolur" and the only thing they "know" about it is that anything remotely connected with it must be Very Very Bad, because Nookyoolur Bombs are Very Very Bad (and were designed by Men, who are All Pigs:). Unless, of course, the nookyoolur stuff comes from a crackpot who vows to Smash The Greedy Gaia-Raping Oil Companies If Only The Establishment Would Get Off His Back, in which case the crackpot's theory must be Very Very Good and consequently True.
The problem is when you combine a reporter who has that particular brand of "education" with a pseudoscientific crackpot seeking publicity and gullible suckers. The reporter's innate fear of capitalism (and "all ideas are equally worthy" ideological bias, which worked fine in PoliSci class and philosophy) leads him to swallow the "establishment conspiracy" theory hook, link, sinker, rod, reel, and copy of Angling Times, leading to the kind of starry-eyed writeup we saw in the Village Voice today -- lending credibility where credibility isn't deserved. Unlike the legitimate debate about which "side" is "right" or "wrong" when it comes to WTO politics, scientific frauds should not be allowed to masquerade as "alternative viewpoints" that are equally worthy of consideration.
> Yes, all in all, Mill is most likely wrong. > No one is asking us to swallow his line whole.
Exqueezeme? Mills certainly is.
The $25M he's conned people into giving him could also buy 25% of a small space probe to Mars.
Which of those two "investments in science" offers the greater chance of a positive (scientific) return? Which of those experiments is more likely to teach us something about the way the world works?
> What is the harm of allowing Mill and his investors to risk their money and effort?
The harm in allowing investors to waste their money on cockamamie bunk like Mills' is that it takes money away from real research, and gives all research a bad name.
Junk physics is very much like quack medicine - the harm in people spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on apricot pits to cure cancer isn't that the stupid people bankrupt (and kill) themselves, but that their support of such quackery may lead other people to do so as well.
Money should be spent where there's a reasonable expectation that it'll do some good. Unlike philosophy or politics, in science, not all ideas are created equal, and not all theories are worthy of inquiry.
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." - Arthur C. Clarke, Clarke's First Law
"When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion--the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right." - Isaac Asimov's Corollary to Clarke's First Law.
Even ignoring the fact that I know enough about physics (having worked at a reactor in a previous life oughta qualify me:-) to read through the bunk in the article being discussed here (and make no mistake, the "technology" in this article is bunk), there's also the fact that "great fervor and emotion" (as in "Help, help, we're bein' repressed, can't you see the violence inherent in the system!") is the Village Voice's stock and trade.
This isn't always bad. Paranoia ("lookit the Eeeevul Corporit Masterzz"), especially when combined with a liberal arts education ("cuz science is so hard compared to marching in protest!"), can be a pretty useful combination when you're trying to ferret out real oppression, but when it comes to science, all you end up with is total gullibility when it comes to anything involving scientific clue.
"Ah," I hear you say, "but this free-energy theory could be true! Who are you, Tackhead, to say what's worthy or not?". Well, yes, it could be true. And the earth could be carried on the back of a giant turtle, but is it worth investigating when there are better theories to work with? The relativist notion that "all ideas are equally worthy of debate" is great for politics and art, (issues on which Village Voice reporters spend a lot of time writing, and writing well), but a complete flop when you try to extend them to science. The evidence we have makes it pretty bloody clear that world is not sitting on the back of a giant turtle, and any attempt to claim that this "theory" is "just as valid as the big bang theory" is hogwash.
Science, unlike politics, requires skepticism, not paranoia, and it doesn't respect your politics one way or the other. Given the political leanings and (lack of science in the) educational backgrounds involved, I'd bet that anyone with a crackpot theory that, if it were true, might destabilize capitalism, would have a lot of credibility in the eyes of a VV reporter, no matter how loony the theory.
On both counts - bad physics according to what I know in my brain, and hokey emotional rhetoric instead of valid peer review according to what I feel in my gut - my money's with Asimov's Corollary on this one.
> 25 million investment in a fraud? I don't think anyone could get 25 million peddling snake oil. > I'm willing to give him the benifit of the doubt.
$25M in a fraud is checkenfeed. If you were involved in the Canadian securities industry 2-3 years ago, perhaps you heard of Bre-X? A company that claimed, on the basis of falsified core samples, to have discovered the largest gold deposit on the face of the planet?
Try six billion dollars in market capitalization, and the entire thing was a fraud. Not one ounce of gold in the ground, and for at least a year, almost the entire community of securities analysts in the mining sector had been kept completely hoodwinked, to say nothing of the mutual fund managers and average-joes-on-the-street.
Believe me - there are plenty of people gullible enough that a sufficiently-skilled huckster can raise $25M for a fraud.
Well, if... > an obscure San Francisco company called Marketel International is also staking a claim to U.S. Patent No. 5,794,207. > In a suit filed in January, Marketel claims it came up with the idea for this type of buyer-driven commerce and shared it with Walker years ago under a nondisclosure agreement. ...then surely something like "buyer-driven commerce", which seems to mean "the buyer sets the price of the item through some auction-like process", is patentable. I'm gonna rush out and get "seller-driven commerce" patented today!
Oh sure, some naysayers will say that's a bogus patent, after all, there's plenty of places using "seller-driven commerce", the business model whereby the store sets the price of the item and the consumer is offered the choice between buying it at that price or taking his or her business elsewhere has been done before, there's plenty of prior art. Feh! I say it's revolutionary and innovative, and the USPTO will agree because they're too overworked to actually read any of the patents people apply for anyways! It's mine! ALL MINE, I SAY! MINE! 3Y3 0Wn U A77!
Go ahead, mock my "seller-driven commerce" patent all you want, but the day you offer any goods for sale at a specified price, I'll be seein' you in court.
(Do you have the money to hire the patent lawyer it'll take to prove I'm full of shit? No? Then pay up, suckers.)
> Since the Defendants are > a) ignoring the order to cease and desist, > b) not co-operating with the process server, > and c) indicating they won't pay,
Rule #1. Spammers lie. "I'll cease and desist" in a courtroom from a spammer means nothing.
Rule #2. If it looks like a spammer's telling the truth, see Rule #1. (This is the mistake the judge was forced to make - believing them in court).
Rule #3. Spammers are stupid. As evidenced by the three real-world behavior of Mr. Vale and company.
Spammers are sociopaths - the law of the Internet ("Spam me and die") doesn't apply to them, so why should the law of a judge apply to them? Thankfully, in this case, Rule #3 may have some meatspace payback.
> I hope the judge will find them in contempt of court and issue a bench warrent for their arrest. Let them get shome nice striped sunlight for a while.
I concur. I, too, would pay good money to see Bubba the Butt Bandit abusing Vale's, uh, "apricot pits" nightly on a webcam. Hell, I'd buy myself a T-3 so I could get it in 640x480 with Dolby Surround Sound.
Meanwhile, anyone remember whatever happened to TCPS and FPA, the Brooklyn spammers of "world's biggest gangbang video" and "are you being investigated" fame? I know they got their asses sued off, I just don't know where the cases are in the courts.
Next up - Scumbag Sam the Toner Man. Your days are numbered, spambag. The law's catching up to you.
AS IS STATED IN THE PROPHECY! Book of the Subgenius, Chapter 12: Dateline for Dominance. Page 119! Look under "1991", and read along with me as I quote:
20% of U.S. population now considered clinically insane. Concentration camps for 'abnormals" are opened in some states; SubGeniuses begin waging open war on non-SubGeniuses.
So "Dateline for Dominance" as printed in my 1987 version of "Book of the SubGenius" is only 8 years behind the times. It just means that we counted the dates wrong and the saucers are 8 years late in coming, and that X-Day won't be until 2005! Woo-hoo!
...and if you're worried about 20% of us being nuts, wait'll 1992, when...
What we would call "lunatic-fringe kooks" account for 43% of U.S. population. Over 2 million separate, active sects. Well over half, however, are basically aligned with the Church of the SubGenius. The rest are violently anti-SubGenius, anti-individual, anti-thought Conspiracy dupes who still cling to a now-useless lifestyle. The United States is divided between these two powerful social forces.
The Fifth Civil War: Abnormals vs. Normals. During this period, the U.S. reverts to medieval barbarism.. Feudal warlord chieftains rule the thousands of mini-states into which the country has splintered. Bands of outlaws roam the countryside and the cities. Law as we know it is non-existent. Only huge corporations provide any stability to the social structure; they have *become* the "government", and jealously guard the remaining pockets of high technology. Most corporations run by "Bob".
Our effort to skew Time Magazine's Top Fraud of the Century" poll in favor of our spiritual Leader, J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, because Time (of all magazines, after publishing The Cult of Greed and Power!) was probably too scared to have L. Ron Hubbard on the list. Unlike Elron's cult, OUR cult isn't afraid of being labelled for the fraud it is! HAH!
They'll never clean my cage! Now give me some more of... (post runs out)
#include I first heard about Powell's during a thread on news.admin.net-abuse.email regarding [Sp]amazon's business tactic of spamming its customers regardless of the customer's "don't fscking spam me ever" clickbox setting.
That was a good enough endorsement for me, so I placed my next order with 'em. Never got spammed. I've placed subsequent orders with 'em. I never did get a reply from Spamazon when I told 'em why I wasn't ordering from them anymore:)
Re:Trendy? How 'bout gratuitous WTO-bashing?
on
WTO + SDMI = NWO
·
· Score: 1
> > were it not for the yahoos [... ] the peaceful protesters > > would have been politely ignored as they always are > > And you say you don't understand them.
I understand the dynamic perfectly. I feel it every time I fantasize about taking a lead pipe to a spammer's skull because they just won't stop, no matter how many ISPs kick them off. That doesn't make acting on my impulse right.
Likewise, the fact that peaceful protest is generally ignored when compared to violence is a bummer. It does not, in general, justify violence.
And it sure as fsck doesn't justify what happened in Seattle, as it appears that most of the violent yahoos trashing downtown didn't give a damn about the WTO one way or another, they just wanted to raise hell for its own sake. IMHO, for most of the yahoos, the legitimate protest that was going on was merely a convenient cover story.
Trendy? How 'bout gratuitous WTO-bashing?
on
WTO + SDMI = NWO
·
· Score: 3
> One word in that article... that kinda peeved me. Trendy [being used to describe Linux]
Funny, this time last week, we'd have been kvetching about how $GOVERNMENTAGENCY was the problem.
Then a few yahoos trash Seattle yelling "help, help, I'm bein' repressed!" - and all of a sudden, old 60s-era journalists remember their drug-filled youths and decide that violent protest is trendy.
(Yes, violent protest. Were it not for the yahoos trashing downtown, the peaceful protesters would have been politely ignored as they always are. An ex-hippie journalist who grew up in the 60s can't write lines comparing Seattle to the Democratic Convention and Kent State incidents of his or her youth without the tear gas, pepper spray, and bullets to go with it. Violence == ratings, and if violence can be made trendy, the folks running the news organizations (obviously pawns of the WTO:-) can assure themselves of more violence in the future.)
And now that the smoke has cleared, those same journalists have realized that it's trendy to bash capitalism, so everyone with a left-leaning cause decides to do a s/$OLDBADGUY/WTO/g in their articles.
Don't like SDMI? Blame the WTO! Someone cuts you off in traffic? Blame the WTO! Now that's what I call trendy.
Someone questions knee-jerk WTO-bashing? Blame the WTO and accuse them of being part of the Conspiracy. Betcha that's trendy too.
Y'know what I wanna see being trendy? Geeks getting jobs, making money, maybe a few more millionaires through the stock option lottery, and then - if they still persist in believing the hype against global capital even after having benefitted so immensely from it - putting some of those dollars back into their communities and making a difference.
...and now that I've got everyone's attention with that Subject: header...
Regrettably, I'm on a limited bandwidth connection and not in a position to upload it. That's the bad news.
The good news is that an Anonymous Coward has graciously posted information which should lead you to either a site which has it, or to people in a position to upload one. There's a large contingent of OTR (Old-Time-Radio) fans out there, and they've done some great work in preserving the old recordings.
If you're fortunate enough to be on an ISP with a good USENET binaries feed, some polite requests in the appropriate requests group might help. I understand that there is currently a proposal in the works for a spoken-word MP3 newsgroup which would presumably include radio plays as well as speeches.
(Meanwhile, analysis of any similarity between the legions of old-time radio fans and the monks of Leibowitz is left as a meta-exercise for the reader:)
As the AC wrote in his post - 15 parts of just under half an hour, no commercials. To me, it sounds like a tape from the radio broadcast, with audio level varying somewhat from episode to episode. I think one of the parts (at least as I downloaded it) had a small fragment of fading-out audio from a previous programme in it that caused me to decide it was someone's direct-from-radio tape.
I did some research (probably a Dejanews search) when I downloaded it and made a couple of notes on the source: "This program, in 15 parts, was produced by Marv Nunn and Karl Schmidt for WHA and NPR according to the credits. It was probably never released for sale. The program was adapted from a story by Walter Miller Jr., by John Reeves. It originally aired from 10-04-83 to 01-10-84."
I regret that's all I can do to help, but between the AC's advice for seeking out OTR sites and archives and the possibility of a USENET posting for those with binaries feeds or access thereto, someone with greater bandwidth than I should be able to solve the rest of the puzzle.
I recently downloaded an MP3 version of the NPR radio play of Canticle. By staggering coincidence, I'd also discovered a long-lost DOS disk containing the first version of Sid Meier's Civilization.
I put two and two together, and listened to one in the background while playing the other in all its 320x200x256 glory.
At first, I thought it was just a coincidence that I seemed to develop literacy and basic technology at about the same rate as the radio play, but I was truly freaked out as time went by and my technology was always within a generation of that in the play.
The climax came when, in the story, the bombs had begun to fall and the debate on euthanasia begun -- because about 20 minutes earlier, my last AI opponent and I had each developed nuclear weapons and started using them on each other. It was bad enough when I started building the nukes at the same time as the world of Canticle, but the timing of the war and the resultant mess... "spooky" doesn't even begin to describe the feeling.
The game ended within about half an hour of the radio play - 40,000 of us headed for Alpha Centauri, yet another one of those staggering coincidences.
Kudos to Miller for the novel, to NPR for the radio play, and to Sid Meier for Civ. Yeah, I know that what I experienced was just a coincidence -- but after 8-12 hours in a darkened room playing Civ and listening to Canticle, I'll never feel that the timing of my game and the events in the radio play were just a coincidence. Too spooky for words, but awe-inspiring. Which is, of course, what good SF - whether it comes in the form of a novel, a radio play, or a strategy game - is all about.
> The problem is in order to download the mass media approved b.s. you still have to > break the download limits. When ever they fix that people will be going back to anarchy mode. Right?
Nope. ISPs hate traffic that goes out over the backbone because it costs them money - IIRC all big ISPs pay by the byte as part of the peering arrangements. But all traffic internal to their network is free. The obvious thing to do:
$BIGCORP pays Telstra $BIGNUM dollars to mirror its $MEDIACRAP inside Telstra's network.
Since internal traffic is basically free of peering charges, it doesn't cost Telstra anything for two cable modem users to share data between each other's stuff. Of course, they can still monitor and charge for it if they like, leading to the second obvious thing to do:
Packets to any host other than the ones hosting mirrors of $MEDIACRAP get billed.
This gets us away from the Internet and back to the business model that cable companies understand. You can only get "free content" (TV) from "content providers" (TV stations) that your "infrastructure provider" (cable company) has "approved of" (has received $BIGNUM bucks from in order to put on their cable lineup).
As a sop to the little guy (public-access TV), you can still produce your own content, but in keeping with the TV model, you're just like the little guy in the TV world. Yes, you can host a web site (get on the air), but with a per-month bandwidth cap that ensures you look just as small and insignificant as you are. ("on the channel nobody watches", "your show gets aired at 3:00 in the morning every second Tuesday", and "look at the way the guy's old handycam washes out all the color and the big snowy skips where he must have pressed Record and Play on his second VCR to edit the video".)
Quoth a Telstra droid: > "(The remaining 20 per cent) are basically using the network as a data network and they're pulling vast amounts of traffic off the network."
Just magine, people using the Internet as a "data network". How the fsck else do you use the Internet?
More to the point: unless Telstra assumed that the only people interested in cablemodem service would be the casual web surfer (for whom a 56K dialup is probably quite sufficient - most dialup users sit on a 56K dialup and has it idle for 5-10 minutes while they read a large web page), if you use your broadband connection like a television or a telephone (which about the only way other than "as a data networK" that I can think of), aren't you using just as much bandwidth as if you're using it to download gigs of pr0n, warez, and MP3z?:-)
The more cynical side of me says this is the first step towards a policy of "if you use it to upload large piles of your own content or download piles of data from other cablemodem users, that's bad, but the quotas won't apply if you're downloading streaming video from our TV-based mondo-multimedia-marketing-partners, 'cuz TV is Good For You" -- i.e. the logical first step that mass media might want to take in reclaiming their role as the gatekeepers of content. After all, what would a cable company like more than to see a world where writing your own content and downloading other people's content was bad and expensive, but downloading mass-media-approved and advertiser-sponsored content was good and free.
While I don't see anything in this USENET article that points to him being investigated for "treason" (or any other crime), if the NTSecurity article is talking about an ongoing investigation (the existence of which they haven't substantiated and which the FBI would deny anyways), it's possible that the off-the-wall guesses (in the USENET post) at the identities of the names of individuals who were blacked out in his FOIA report may be what (and perhaps rightly so, though perhaps not in the context of the USENET post in question) landed him in hot water.
It's also possible that this whole thing ("He's being investigated for treason because of his advocacy of strong crypto on the IETF") is another case of net.journalism jumping the proverbial gun, that there was no investigation per se, and that it's just some (admittedly spooky) stuff from the early '90s.
Furthermore, if the subject matter of the "investigation" dates back 5-6 years, consider that that crypto laws have changed dramatically (though admittedly not as dramatically as many would like!) since the early 90s.
Although the notion of encrypted PPP is regarded as an irritant ("our jobs would be easier if nobody could do this") to the Feds in 1999, the very concept probably scared the living hell ("SOMEONE WANTS TO USE SOMETHING MY BOSS SAYS IS S00PER 3733+ CRYPT0 IN WHAT?!") out of them in 1991.
Consequently, anyone advocating the inclusion of DES (remmeber when DES was the Data Encryption Standard?) in a network protocol intended for worldwide use, particularly at a stage when the FBI was no doubt several orders of magnitude less-net-clued-in than they are today would have, by definition, been regarded as a potential threat to national security.
If that theory is correct, what happened is just as wrong in 1991 as it would be in 1999, of course, but much more understandable.
...snipped from a leaked ECHELON transmission which included some FBI interoffice memos. File under "How we're gonna make damn sure the IETF builds support for snooping technology into IPv6"
[begin transmission] Phase 1: Send up a trial balloon... Phase 2: Bully the vendors... Phase [CENSORED]:...OK, so if after all that, they still don't wanna build in support for CALEA into the network policies, I know! We'll just have anyone who disagrees executed for treason until the only people left alive are our supporters, and then support for CALEA will be unanimous! [end transmission]
>...is wrong and short sighted. It will also have a meaningless effect on the conference.
Amen.
Civil disobedience does not give you the right to break laws in the advocacy of your cause and not expect repercussions. The point of civil disobedience is that while you're breaking the law, you're also willing to face up to your responsibilities as a citizen -- and you're therefore willing to suffer the consequences.
If you're DOSsing WTO servers in the name of some hippie cause, you should be prepared to lose your internet connectivity at a minimum, and face criminal charges (with associated seizure of your computer equipment) at a maximum. When the dust settles, I'll still disagree with what you're doing, I'll still disagree with your politics, but at least I'll respect that you're willing to take the heat for your views. You're a whackjob, but you've got integrity.
If, however, you're DOSsing WTO servers but not prepared to suffer these consequences, you're lame, just like a relay-raping spammer or a random script kiddie, and I look forward to laughing at your whining when your ISP cuts you off and (if you're in the US) the Feds show up at your door to haul your ass to jail.
Sadly, I suspect that most of these "e-hippies" couldn't define civil disobedience with both hands and a flashlight, and fall in the latter category rather than the former. They choose to DOS attack WTO servers rather than express their views effectively because anything more complicated than spending 2 minutes setting up an infinite-reload script might actually require work on their part. Feh.
The article writes: > 'Accurate' combat simulations such as the > recently released F15 and USNF produced by Jane's just seem to get > away with it, passing the pundits unchecked.
If playing flight sims can give you sufficient clue, motivation, and discipline to pass the tests required in order for your nation's Air Force to trust you with a $50-100+M piece of machinery, to say nothing of the millions invested in your flight training, and the countless hours of support and maintenance and training for the ground crews that support your aircraft...
...then can playing flight sims be really such a bad thing?
Although I strongly disagree with the whole "violence in video games engenders violent behavior in real life" premise, if I did accept the premise, I'd much rather see the kids playing flight sims and real-time strategy games than first-person shooters.
Given the (again, IMHO bogus) premise that "children become what they play", a nation of aviators and people who can think quickly under stress sounds like a lot more fun place to live than a nation of people trained in house-clearing tactics:-)
Man goes to doctor, says he's depressed. Says life seems harsh and cruel. Says he feels all alone in a threatening world where what lies ahead is vague and uncertain.
Doctor says 'Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him, that should pick you up.'
Man burst into tears. Says 'But doctor,... I am Pagliacci.'
> > how did South Park make her life better? How does irreverence and "lowest common > > denominator" humor make anybody's life? > > This post raises valid questions, and I don't see the core of malicious intent which would > validate a label of 'Flamebait'!
Probably the reference to "lowest-common-denominator" humor. IMHO unjustified, but I can see where the moderator might have been coming from.
The key part of Marvin's post, IMHO, was in asking the question "How did South Park make her [Mary Kay's] life better?"
Evidently, it didn't. Mary Kay chose to die, arguably of her own free will. I respect that choice, and hope that she found what she was looking for, either in some form of an afterlife or in nonexistence. I wasn't Mary Kay; I cannot judge her, nor can I even say that I wouldn't do the same were I plagued by whatever drove her over the edge.
What I can say, however, is this: whether it made her life any better or not, South Park's "lowest-common-denominator" humor certainly made my life a little bit more fun. And for that, I am saddened.
Slashdot Mirror
To clarify - by "money should be spent only where it'll do good" I did not mean that any law should be written to prevent the parting of a fool and his money, and agree that my argument on discrediting "real" research, while sufficient to say "I recommend that you not..." is insufficient to get to "I [will use the power of the state to] mandate that you cannot". The world "should" be free of pain and hunger too, but that doesn't mean it's proper to rob the rich to give to the poor.
The other flaw in my argument is that I blurred the line between "reasonable expectation" of profit (commercially-exploitable research) and "reasonable expectation" of scientific return.
Meanwhile, if the guy's a fraud, we already have laws that cover fraud, and processes (courts) to figure out whether he knowingly bilked people out of their money or whether he was just a nut acting in good faith.
Probably the best example of it was cold fusion - they had a "that's funny" experience, an experimental apparatus and a falsifiable theory ("if you get piles of neutrons coming out of our apparatus, you've gotta rewrite a few parts of physics when dealing with hydrogen atoms near platinum atoms"); with all three of these things put together, people built the apparatus and unfortunately for Pons and Fleischmann, falsified the theory. Good science - CF did attempt to build on the existing body of knowledge, there was reason to invest a small amount of money trying it out, but it looks like P&F simply made a mistake with their calorimetry and released their findings before anyone had a chance to catch it.
In the case of Mills, there may be a "that's funny" electrochemical effect going on (perhaps the same one in cold fusion!) involving ionized gases, but there's no apparatus available for non-Millsian people to build and test, and no reason to believe the theory underlying the "free energy" he purports to create is anything other than a random string of scientific terms strung together in such a way as to confuse a layman.
As a last point - Cold Fusion vs. Mills; P&F proposed a device that (they thought) released a pile of energy at room temperature. If it were merely a chemical reaction, it would violate a known law of thermodynamics, so they concluded that some other process was at work, namely fusion. The mistake was assuming "it can't be chemical", but given that assumption, made in good faith on bad calorimetry, what happened afterwards was science; nuclear fusion has properties which we can detect.
Mills proposes a device that does much the same thing, and has ((too)many!) other magickal properties... but he doesn't say "here's what my stuff does, come and build one yourself" - he says "here's what my stuff *will do*, come and *buy one now*" (with the implication that if it doesn't work, just like the apricot pit people, come back to him in six months and buy more, he'll have the bugs worked out then! :) - and rewrites physics from the ground up for the hell of it in a fit of "I must be right and you're wrong because my being right will allow me to take over the world, Pinky!". In all three areas - failing to demonstrate "that's funny", (forgivable if you're strong on the other two), not having an apparatus that others can construct on their own, and creating a theory of physics that introduces more problems (oops, the sun stops working, etc.) than it fixes (my magic boxes do something neat!), he crosses the line between science and charlatanry.
(On "creating more problems than it solves", Mills' theory reminds me of the interlocking crystal spheres that used to be the "answer" for why the planets moved differently than the stars in a geocentric universe. The number of spheres required and their complexity explodes when someone looks at Jupiter with a telescope. Kepler and Newton, on the other hand, answer more questions than they raise. Einstein even more so, explaining plenty of other stuff, but also covering Mercury's slight shift due to being so close to the large-mass sun. With so many good theories, "OK, suppose you work out the sphere math with a big computer, which they didn't have 500 years ago, see? The 12-sphere model can work fine with 5432 spheres, including one more crystal sphere immersed in molasses to make Mercury go slower... then you can hook up a generator to the regular Mercurian sphere and the molasses Mercurian sphere, and woo-hoo, free energy!" just doesn't wash, even if it would give us free energy if only someone would fund my $200M Mercurian Molasses Generator Project.)
It's been a nice discussion here too - scientists need a "devil's advocate" such as yourself in order to prevent them from becoming too complacent. Science may be pure - but scientists, just like charlatans, are still human.
> [emerson sez "how do we choose which are worth investigating and which aren't, and how do we do it in such a way
> as to avoid only doing science in areas where we already know the results"]
Your point about "rejecting theories out of hand can lead to boringly-safe science" is well-taken, as well as your insight that "what makes a better idea better" is an - is the - important question.
The key - also as you point out - is to screen out the chaff before spending a fortune trying to repeat the experiments of crackpots. The thing I've not fully articulated is "how do you screen the wheat from the chaff in absence of experiment". So here are some random thoughts:
Yes, Einstein threw Newtonian physics for a loop, but there was ample evidence that there were things going on that couldn't be explained by Newton's vision of the world. Einstein did some funky math and came up with a better explanation. Newtonian physics works for most problems, but Einsteinian physics works just as well for those problems, and much better for problems where you're moving really quickly or near big heavy things.
(And the quantum physicists came up with a better explanation still when they showed that, contrary to Einstein's famous quip, God does in fact play dice with the universe, and that He sometimes throws them where they can't be seen... and so on, through QCD, superstrings, and whatever's at the forefront of physics research today.)
So's the hydrogen atom. (Cue the "If you fuck with hydrogen, you fuck up the rest of the natural world" thread - which is merely a snarky way of saying "If you change basic physical properties of matter, you end up with a universe that's wholly unlike the one we observe around us."
I don't mean "unlike commonsense results for slow objects", as was Newtonian physics, nor "unlike commonsense results for big objects", like physics before quantum theory, but "wholly unlike anything we observe", in the sense of nuclear fusion in the sun working, basic chemical processes essential to life working, etc.) This is a reductio ad absurdum argument - if Mills' theory were true, yes, we'd have free energy -- which is all well and good, but if the truth of his theory also implies that the sun would be a diffuse cloud of goo at three times its mass and half of its radiation output, or that water is a highly-unstable explosive compound when it comes into contact with nitrogen, his theory must be an absurdity.
Which reminds me of one more "good way to tell what's worth investigating and what's not":
And speaking of theories, what is his theory? Does he even have one? Is he even interested in any aspect of physics whatsoever, for that matter, apart from its ability to provide him with a product to hawk to the world?
Recommended reading for anyone who's put up with my ramblings thus far:
The Demon-Haunted World - Carl Sagan. If you read only one book on the philosophy of science in this millenium, read this one.
Anything that looks related to "what constitutes good science" on CSICOP's web site.
For medical analogies to the "junk physics" problem, Quackwatch
I'll close off with a Sagan quote that I saw buried in one of the subthreads on Slashdot today - more relevant to my initial post on Clarke and Asimov than this post, but worth repeating: "They laughed at Galileo. They laughed at Columbus. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
> [An AC writes] Maybe it will sharpen up the BS detectors of the general public, who knows?
If anything could do that, I'd pay the $25M myself :)
Sadly, the track record seems to be that BS simply attracts other con artists to make more BS. Witness spam, for instance.
Similarly, as the level of scientific literacy drops, bad science seems to drive out good science. The investor who gets burned in this scam will be less likely to invest in science when someone legitimate does propose a privately-funded Mars probe, with profits to be made by selling the raw data to NASA, televising the landing on pay-per-view, and making IMAX films of it for the general public. (Or selling probe-ee-o's to the Martians, who seem to have a taste for the things.)
That said - one good point your post reminds me of is that since (in this instance) it's mostly private money going into the scam, it's not taking money away from the current crop of Mars probes, and it's a small enough con that it's not getting national recognition, so in this instance, any damage will probably be restricted to the suckers involved.
(Philosophically, I do agree with you that the investors are entitled to lose their shirts any way they see fit; my concern is more with the "bad science drives out good" side-effects.)
> > ("cuz science is so hard compared to marching in protest!"), can be a pretty useful combination when
> > you're trying to ferret out real oppression, but [ it sucks in a science reporter ]
>
> What's with the sterotype? I have a liberal arts degree..
My stereotype wasn't so much against liberal arts grads, but against Village Voice reporters. IMHO there's a difference between the type of liberal arts grad who really did broaden their language and thinking skills, and the type who uses it as a cover for (usually left-wing) politicking. It's the difference between taking a broad spectrum of history, philosophy, and logic/rhetoric courses and "Gaian Theory 101", "All Western Culture Is Bad", and "All Men Are Pigs".
As I said in my post - there's nothing wrong with combining left-wing politics and liberal arts. You still get a degree, some English skills to express your views, and usually end up in journalism so you have a platform to spout them after you graduate. If you're tracking down stories about what really went on in Seattle, that's a Good Thing. (I happen to disagree with the positions espoused by the protestors, but I'm damn glad the alternative press is reporting on it. Both sides of the debate - a political/socioeconomic one - deserve to be heard.)
What's bad is that these types tend also to pronounce "nuclear" as "nookyoolur" and the only thing they "know" about it is that anything remotely connected with it must be Very Very Bad, because Nookyoolur Bombs are Very Very Bad (and were designed by Men, who are All Pigs :). Unless, of course, the nookyoolur stuff comes from a crackpot who vows to Smash The Greedy Gaia-Raping Oil Companies If Only The Establishment Would Get Off His Back, in which case the crackpot's theory must be Very Very Good and consequently True.
The problem is when you combine a reporter who has that particular brand of "education" with a pseudoscientific crackpot seeking publicity and gullible suckers. The reporter's innate fear of capitalism (and "all ideas are equally worthy" ideological bias, which worked fine in PoliSci class and philosophy) leads him to swallow the "establishment conspiracy" theory hook, link, sinker, rod, reel, and copy of Angling Times, leading to the kind of starry-eyed writeup we saw in the Village Voice today -- lending credibility where credibility isn't deserved. Unlike the legitimate debate about which "side" is "right" or "wrong" when it comes to WTO politics, scientific frauds should not be allowed to masquerade as "alternative viewpoints" that are equally worthy of consideration.
> No one is asking us to swallow his line whole.
Exqueezeme? Mills certainly is.
The $25M he's conned people into giving him could also buy 25% of a small space probe to Mars.
Which of those two "investments in science" offers the greater chance of a positive (scientific) return? Which of those experiments is more likely to teach us something about the way the world works?
> What is the harm of allowing Mill and his investors to risk their money and effort?
The harm in allowing investors to waste their money on cockamamie bunk like Mills' is that it takes money away from real research, and gives all research a bad name.
Junk physics is very much like quack medicine - the harm in people spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on apricot pits to cure cancer isn't that the stupid people bankrupt (and kill) themselves, but that their support of such quackery may lead other people to do so as well.
Money should be spent where there's a reasonable expectation that it'll do some good. Unlike philosophy or politics, in science, not all ideas are created equal, and not all theories are worthy of inquiry.
- Arthur C. Clarke, Clarke's First Law
"When, however, the lay public rallies round an idea that is denounced by distinguished but elderly scientists and supports that idea with great fervor and emotion--the distinguished but elderly scientists are then, after all, probably right."
- Isaac Asimov's Corollary to Clarke's First Law.
Even ignoring the fact that I know enough about physics (having worked at a reactor in a previous life oughta qualify me :-) to read through the bunk in the article being discussed here (and make no mistake, the "technology" in this article is bunk), there's also the fact that "great fervor and emotion" (as in "Help, help, we're bein' repressed, can't you see the violence inherent in the system!") is the Village Voice's stock and trade.
This isn't always bad. Paranoia ("lookit the Eeeevul Corporit Masterzz"), especially when combined with a liberal arts education ("cuz science is so hard compared to marching in protest!"), can be a pretty useful combination when you're trying to ferret out real oppression, but when it comes to science, all you end up with is total gullibility when it comes to anything involving scientific clue.
"Ah," I hear you say, "but this free-energy theory could be true! Who are you, Tackhead, to say what's worthy or not?". Well, yes, it could be true. And the earth could be carried on the back of a giant turtle, but is it worth investigating when there are better theories to work with? The relativist notion that "all ideas are equally worthy of debate" is great for politics and art, (issues on which Village Voice reporters spend a lot of time writing, and writing well), but a complete flop when you try to extend them to science. The evidence we have makes it pretty bloody clear that world is not sitting on the back of a giant turtle, and any attempt to claim that this "theory" is "just as valid as the big bang theory" is hogwash.
Science, unlike politics, requires skepticism, not paranoia, and it doesn't respect your politics one way or the other. Given the political leanings and (lack of science in the) educational backgrounds involved, I'd bet that anyone with a crackpot theory that, if it were true, might destabilize capitalism, would have a lot of credibility in the eyes of a VV reporter, no matter how loony the theory.
On both counts - bad physics according to what I know in my brain, and hokey emotional rhetoric instead of valid peer review according to what I feel in my gut - my money's with Asimov's Corollary on this one.
> I'm willing to give him the benifit of the doubt.
$25M in a fraud is checkenfeed. If you were involved in the Canadian securities industry 2-3 years ago, perhaps you heard of Bre-X? A company that claimed, on the basis of falsified core samples, to have discovered the largest gold deposit on the face of the planet?
Try six billion dollars in market capitalization, and the entire thing was a fraud. Not one ounce of gold in the ground, and for at least a year, almost the entire community of securities analysts in the mining sector had been kept completely hoodwinked, to say nothing of the mutual fund managers and average-joes-on-the-street.
Believe me - there are plenty of people gullible enough that a sufficiently-skilled huckster can raise $25M for a fraud.
As long as we're on the subject:
Anything not nailed down is mine.
Anything I can pry loose is not nailed down.
> an obscure San Francisco company called Marketel International is also staking a claim to U.S. Patent No. 5,794,207.
> In a suit filed in January, Marketel claims it came up with the idea for this type of buyer-driven commerce and shared it with Walker years ago under a nondisclosure agreement.
Oh sure, some naysayers will say that's a bogus patent, after all, there's plenty of places using "seller-driven commerce", the business model whereby the store sets the price of the item and the consumer is offered the choice between buying it at that price or taking his or her business elsewhere has been done before, there's plenty of prior art. Feh! I say it's revolutionary and innovative, and the USPTO will agree because they're too overworked to actually read any of the patents people apply for anyways! It's mine! ALL MINE, I SAY! MINE! 3Y3 0Wn U A77!
Go ahead, mock my "seller-driven commerce" patent all you want, but the day you offer any goods for sale at a specified price, I'll be seein' you in court.
(Do you have the money to hire the patent lawyer it'll take to prove I'm full of shit? No? Then pay up, suckers.)
> a) ignoring the order to cease and desist,
> b) not co-operating with the process server,
> and c) indicating they won't pay,
Rule #1. Spammers lie. "I'll cease and desist" in a courtroom from a spammer means nothing.
Rule #2. If it looks like a spammer's telling the truth, see Rule #1. (This is the mistake the judge was forced to make - believing them in court).
Rule #3. Spammers are stupid. As evidenced by the three real-world behavior of Mr. Vale and company.
Spammers are sociopaths - the law of the Internet ("Spam me and die") doesn't apply to them, so why should the law of a judge apply to them? Thankfully, in this case, Rule #3 may have some meatspace payback.
> I hope the judge will find them in contempt of court and issue a bench warrent for their arrest. Let them get shome nice striped sunlight for a while.
I concur. I, too, would pay good money to see Bubba the Butt Bandit abusing Vale's, uh, "apricot pits" nightly on a webcam. Hell, I'd buy myself a T-3 so I could get it in 640x480 with Dolby Surround Sound.
Meanwhile, anyone remember whatever happened to TCPS and FPA, the Brooklyn spammers of "world's biggest gangbang video" and "are you being investigated" fame? I know they got their asses sued off, I just don't know where the cases are in the courts.
Next up - Scumbag Sam the Toner Man. Your days are numbered, spambag. The law's catching up to you.
SPUTUM uber alles!
20% of U.S. population now considered clinically insane. Concentration camps for 'abnormals" are opened in some states; SubGeniuses begin waging open war on non-SubGeniuses.
So "Dateline for Dominance" as printed in my 1987 version of "Book of the SubGenius" is only 8 years behind the times. It just means that we counted the dates wrong and the saucers are 8 years late in coming, and that X-Day won't be until 2005! Woo-hoo!
What we would call "lunatic-fringe kooks" account for 43% of U.S. population. Over 2 million separate, active sects. Well over half, however, are basically aligned with the Church of the SubGenius. The rest are violently anti-SubGenius, anti-individual, anti-thought Conspiracy dupes who still cling to a now-useless lifestyle. The United States is divided between these two powerful social forces.
The Fifth Civil War: Abnormals vs. Normals. During this period, the U.S. reverts to medieval barbarism.. Feudal warlord chieftains rule the thousands of mini-states into which the country has splintered. Bands of outlaws roam the countryside and the cities. Law as we know it is non-existent. Only huge corporations provide any stability to the social structure; they have *become* the "government", and jealously guard the remaining pockets of high technology. Most corporations run by "Bob".
AIYEEEEEEEEE YES! LET THERE BE SLACK!
Everything else you wanted to know is available at http://www.subgenius.com. Might I recommend:
some classics
Our Y2K preparedness page
Our effort to skew Time Magazine's Top Fraud of the Century" poll in favor of our spiritual Leader, J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, because Time (of all magazines, after publishing The Cult of Greed and Power!) was probably too scared to have L. Ron Hubbard on the list. Unlike Elron's cult, OUR cult isn't afraid of being labelled for the fraud it is! HAH!
They'll never clean my cage! Now give me some more of... (post runs out)
I first heard about Powell's during a thread on news.admin.net-abuse.email regarding [Sp]amazon's business tactic of spamming its customers regardless of the customer's "don't fscking spam me ever" clickbox setting.
That was a good enough endorsement for me, so I placed my next order with 'em. Never got spammed. I've placed subsequent orders with 'em. I never did get a reply from Spamazon when I told 'em why I wasn't ordering from them anymore :)
> > would have been politely ignored as they always are
>
> And you say you don't understand them.
I understand the dynamic perfectly. I feel it every time I fantasize about taking a lead pipe to a spammer's skull because they just won't stop, no matter how many ISPs kick them off. That doesn't make acting on my impulse right.
Likewise, the fact that peaceful protest is generally ignored when compared to violence is a bummer. It does not, in general, justify violence.
And it sure as fsck doesn't justify what happened in Seattle, as it appears that most of the violent yahoos trashing downtown didn't give a damn about the WTO one way or another, they just wanted to raise hell for its own sake. IMHO, for most of the yahoos, the legitimate protest that was going on was merely a convenient cover story.
Funny, this time last week, we'd have been kvetching about how $GOVERNMENTAGENCY was the problem.
Then a few yahoos trash Seattle yelling "help, help, I'm bein' repressed!" - and all of a sudden, old 60s-era journalists remember their drug-filled youths and decide that violent protest is trendy.
(Yes, violent protest. Were it not for the yahoos trashing downtown, the peaceful protesters would have been politely ignored as they always are. An ex-hippie journalist who grew up in the 60s can't write lines comparing Seattle to the Democratic Convention and Kent State incidents of his or her youth without the tear gas, pepper spray, and bullets to go with it. Violence == ratings, and if violence can be made trendy, the folks running the news organizations (obviously pawns of the WTO :-) can assure themselves of more violence in the future.)
And now that the smoke has cleared, those same journalists have realized that it's trendy to bash capitalism, so everyone with a left-leaning cause decides to do a s/$OLDBADGUY/WTO/g in their articles.
Don't like SDMI? Blame the WTO! Someone cuts you off in traffic? Blame the WTO! Now that's what I call trendy.
Someone questions knee-jerk WTO-bashing? Blame the WTO and accuse them of being part of the Conspiracy. Betcha that's trendy too.
Y'know what I wanna see being trendy? Geeks getting jobs, making money, maybe a few more millionaires through the stock option lottery, and then - if they still persist in believing the hype against global capital even after having benefitted so immensely from it - putting some of those dollars back into their communities and making a difference.
But success is never trendy, is it?
Regrettably, I'm on a limited bandwidth connection and not in a position to upload it. That's the bad news.
The good news is that an Anonymous Coward has graciously posted information which should lead you to either a site which has it, or to people in a position to upload one. There's a large contingent of OTR (Old-Time-Radio) fans out there, and they've done some great work in preserving the old recordings.
If you're fortunate enough to be on an ISP with a good USENET binaries feed, some polite requests in the appropriate requests group might help. I understand that there is currently a proposal in the works for a spoken-word MP3 newsgroup which would presumably include radio plays as well as speeches.
(Meanwhile, analysis of any similarity between the legions of old-time radio fans and the monks of Leibowitz is left as a meta-exercise for the reader :)
As the AC wrote in his post - 15 parts of just under half an hour, no commercials. To me, it sounds like a tape from the radio broadcast, with audio level varying somewhat from episode to episode. I think one of the parts (at least as I downloaded it) had a small fragment of fading-out audio from a previous programme in it that caused me to decide it was someone's direct-from-radio tape.
I did some research (probably a Dejanews search) when I downloaded it and made a couple of notes on the source: "This program, in 15 parts, was produced by Marv Nunn and Karl Schmidt for WHA and NPR according to the credits. It was probably never released for sale. The program was adapted from a story by Walter Miller Jr., by John Reeves. It originally aired from 10-04-83 to 01-10-84."
I regret that's all I can do to help, but between the AC's advice for seeking out OTR sites and archives and the possibility of a USENET posting for those with binaries feeds or access thereto, someone with greater bandwidth than I should be able to solve the rest of the puzzle.
I put two and two together, and listened to one in the background while playing the other in all its 320x200x256 glory.
At first, I thought it was just a coincidence that I seemed to develop literacy and basic technology at about the same rate as the radio play, but I was truly freaked out as time went by and my technology was always within a generation of that in the play.
The climax came when, in the story, the bombs had begun to fall and the debate on euthanasia begun -- because about 20 minutes earlier, my last AI opponent and I had each developed nuclear weapons and started using them on each other. It was bad enough when I started building the nukes at the same time as the world of Canticle, but the timing of the war and the resultant mess... "spooky" doesn't even begin to describe the feeling.
The game ended within about half an hour of the radio play - 40,000 of us headed for Alpha Centauri, yet another one of those staggering coincidences.
Kudos to Miller for the novel, to NPR for the radio play, and to Sid Meier for Civ. Yeah, I know that what I experienced was just a coincidence -- but after 8-12 hours in a darkened room playing Civ and listening to Canticle, I'll never feel that the timing of my game and the events in the radio play were just a coincidence. Too spooky for words, but awe-inspiring. Which is, of course, what good SF - whether it comes in the form of a novel, a radio play, or a strategy game - is all about.
> break the download limits. When ever they fix that people will be going back to anarchy mode. Right?
Nope. ISPs hate traffic that goes out over the backbone because it costs them money - IIRC all big ISPs pay by the byte as part of the peering arrangements. But all traffic internal to their network is free. The obvious thing to do:
$BIGCORP pays Telstra $BIGNUM dollars to mirror its $MEDIACRAP inside Telstra's network.
Since internal traffic is basically free of peering charges, it doesn't cost Telstra anything for two cable modem users to share data between each other's stuff. Of course, they can still monitor and charge for it if they like, leading to the second obvious thing to do:
Packets to any host other than the ones hosting mirrors of $MEDIACRAP get billed.
This gets us away from the Internet and back to the business model that cable companies understand. You can only get "free content" (TV) from "content providers" (TV stations) that your "infrastructure provider" (cable company) has "approved of" (has received $BIGNUM bucks from in order to put on their cable lineup).
As a sop to the little guy (public-access TV), you can still produce your own content, but in keeping with the TV model, you're just like the little guy in the TV world. Yes, you can host a web site (get on the air), but with a per-month bandwidth cap that ensures you look just as small and insignificant as you are. ("on the channel nobody watches", "your show gets aired at 3:00 in the morning every second Tuesday", and "look at the way the guy's old handycam washes out all the color and the big snowy skips where he must have pressed Record and Play on his second VCR to edit the video".)
> "(The remaining 20 per cent) are basically using the network as a data network and they're pulling vast amounts of traffic off the network."
Just magine, people using the Internet as a "data network". How the fsck else do you use the Internet?
More to the point: unless Telstra assumed that the only people interested in cablemodem service would be the casual web surfer (for whom a 56K dialup is probably quite sufficient - most dialup users sit on a 56K dialup and has it idle for 5-10 minutes while they read a large web page), if you use your broadband connection like a television or a telephone (which about the only way other than "as a data networK" that I can think of), aren't you using just as much bandwidth as if you're using it to download gigs of pr0n, warez, and MP3z? :-)
The more cynical side of me says this is the first step towards a policy of "if you use it to upload large piles of your own content or download piles of data from other cablemodem users, that's bad, but the quotas won't apply if you're downloading streaming video from our TV-based mondo-multimedia-marketing-partners, 'cuz TV is Good For You" -- i.e. the logical first step that mass media might want to take in reclaiming their role as the gatekeepers of content. After all, what would a cable company like more than to see a world where writing your own content and downloading other people's content was bad and expensive, but downloading mass-media-approved and advertiser-sponsored content was good and free.
It's also possible that this whole thing ("He's being investigated for treason because of his advocacy of strong crypto on the IETF") is another case of net.journalism jumping the proverbial gun, that there was no investigation per se, and that it's just some (admittedly spooky) stuff from the early '90s.
Furthermore, if the subject matter of the "investigation" dates back 5-6 years, consider that that crypto laws have changed dramatically (though admittedly not as dramatically as many would like!) since the early 90s.
Although the notion of encrypted PPP is regarded as an irritant ("our jobs would be easier if nobody could do this") to the Feds in 1999, the very concept probably scared the living hell ("SOMEONE WANTS TO USE SOMETHING MY BOSS SAYS IS S00PER 3733+ CRYPT0 IN WHAT?!") out of them in 1991.
Consequently, anyone advocating the inclusion of DES (remmeber when DES was the Data Encryption Standard?) in a network protocol intended for worldwide use, particularly at a stage when the FBI was no doubt several orders of magnitude less-net-clued-in than they are today would have, by definition, been regarded as a potential threat to national security.
If that theory is correct, what happened is just as wrong in 1991 as it would be in 1999, of course, but much more understandable.
[begin transmission] ...OK, so if after all that, they still don't wanna build in support for CALEA into the network policies, I know! We'll just have anyone who disagrees executed for treason until the only people left alive are our supporters, and then support for CALEA will be unanimous!
Phase 1: Send up a trial balloon...
Phase 2: Bully the vendors...
Phase [CENSORED]:
[end transmission]
It's a joke, a joke you bastards! A jo
NO CARRIER
Amen.
Civil disobedience does not give you the right to break laws in the advocacy of your cause and not expect repercussions. The point of civil disobedience is that while you're breaking the law, you're also willing to face up to your responsibilities as a citizen -- and you're therefore willing to suffer the consequences.
If you're DOSsing WTO servers in the name of some hippie cause, you should be prepared to lose your internet connectivity at a minimum, and face criminal charges (with associated seizure of your computer equipment) at a maximum. When the dust settles, I'll still disagree with what you're doing, I'll still disagree with your politics, but at least I'll respect that you're willing to take the heat for your views. You're a whackjob, but you've got integrity.
If, however, you're DOSsing WTO servers but not prepared to suffer these consequences, you're lame, just like a relay-raping spammer or a random script kiddie, and I look forward to laughing at your whining when your ISP cuts you off and (if you're in the US) the Feds show up at your door to haul your ass to jail.
Sadly, I suspect that most of these "e-hippies" couldn't define civil disobedience with both hands and a flashlight, and fall in the latter category rather than the former. They choose to DOS attack WTO servers rather than express their views effectively because anything more complicated than spending 2 minutes setting up an infinite-reload script might actually require work on their part. Feh.
> recently released F15 and USNF produced by
Jane's just seem to get
> away with it, passing the pundits unchecked.
If playing flight sims can give you sufficient clue, motivation, and discipline to pass the tests required in order for your nation's Air Force to trust you with a $50-100+M piece of machinery, to say nothing of the millions invested in your flight training, and the countless hours of support and maintenance and training for the ground crews that support your aircraft...
Although I strongly disagree with the whole "violence in video games engenders violent behavior in real life" premise, if I did accept the premise, I'd much rather see the kids playing flight sims and real-time strategy games than first-person shooters.
Given the (again, IMHO bogus) premise that "children become what they play", a nation of aviators and people who can think quickly under stress sounds like a lot more fun place to live than a nation of people trained in house-clearing tactics :-)
Doctor says 'Treatment is simple. Great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go and see him, that should pick you up.'
Man burst into tears. Says 'But doctor, ... I am Pagliacci.'
From The Watchmen, Alan Moore
> > denominator" humor make anybody's life?
>
> This post raises valid questions, and I don't see the core of malicious intent which would
> validate a label of 'Flamebait'!
Probably the reference to "lowest-common-denominator" humor. IMHO unjustified, but I can see where the moderator might have been coming from.
The key part of Marvin's post, IMHO, was in asking the question "How did South Park make her [Mary Kay's] life better?"
Evidently, it didn't. Mary Kay chose to die, arguably of her own free will. I respect that choice, and hope that she found what she was looking for, either in some form of an afterlife or in nonexistence. I wasn't Mary Kay; I cannot judge her, nor can I even say that I wouldn't do the same were I plagued by whatever drove her over the edge.
What I can say, however, is this: whether it made her life any better or not, South Park's "lowest-common-denominator" humor certainly made my life a little bit more fun. And for that, I am saddened.