Jamie writes in the intro to this article: > A slightly clearer picture of TRUSTe's role emerged, > but few of my concerns were allayed.
I had to laugh when I saw the phrase "clearer picture of TRUSTe's role". For me, it's because I've gotten a clearer picture of TRUSTe real role that I'm concerned in the furst place.
Notandi Sunt Tibi Mores: By your actions shall you be judged.
TRUSTe's role is simple: Take money in from companies with a vested interest in violating your privacy, then turn out a false illusion of security to suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcustomers that their information won't be shared. Trusting folks like that is like sending your name to a spammer's remove list.
The TRUSTe mark is a mark of untrustworthiness - as others have pointed out, it's flawed by design - all it can mean is one of two things.
Either:
I will sell your name to the highest bidder, but I buried the policy that says so in a font of microscopic size twelve levels down in my site, but the policy is available, and by God, we are following it, selling your name just as we promised. TRUSTe has verified that we follow our policies. Or:
I will install trojans on your hard drive, but as long as they don't communicate their information back to me through port 80, we're off the hook. If it ain't that, we're paying TRUSTe good money to help us find another technicality that'll allow us to keep the mark up there for the rubes^H^H^H^H^Hcustomers who are still deluded enough to think we're ethical.
Some have called for TRUSTe to die and be replaced by something else. By what, pray tell? No monolitic "seal of approval" organization can have de facto trustworthiness - it's not in the nature of the 'net to place its trust in centralized institutions.
It is, however, in the nature of the 'net to sniff out BS, and expose it wherever it may lie. That sniffing has caught M$ out with umpteen egregious violations, the EBay spamming fiasco, the RealTrojans, and countless other folks, be they TRUSTe members or not.
Caveat Emptor. I know which companies I still trust. I know which companies I don't. And I know which companies I never will. Ironically, the ones I trust, more often than not, don't have the TRUSTe logo on them. And over the past year, I have to admit that the more "clear a picture I have of TRUSTe's role" I get, the less I trust the sites which bear it.
When I see a TRUSTe logo, I immediately think "Your reputation was so shoddy you had to pay these weasels for good PR insurance in the event that you get caught with your hand in the privacy cookie jar? Puh-leeze!" Can I possibly be the only one who thinks this way?
Final word: If you have pull at your company, consider withdrawing from the TRUSTe program. Declare your privacy policy up front and stand by it. Why would you want to dilute the trust you've built up by associating with a group whose sole function it is to defend egregious violators of customers' privacy.
> Kinda reminds me of the time they wanted to bore a few miles deep into Kansas, > set off an H-bomb every hour and trap the heat.
And since evolution doesn't exist in Kansas, so it's not like anyone should worry about an increase in the mutation rate should the seal on the underground chamber ever break! Woo-hoo!
More seriously - since you can build H-bombs that get a *very* high portion of their yield from fusion, as opposed to fission, there probably wouldn't be that much radiation to worry about in the first place. Also consider that since the bombs would be built free of the size/weight/shape constraints imposed by weapons platforms, you could likely achieve further increases in the fusion:fission energy output ratio. My snarky comment about Kansas' creationist lobby aside, I hadn't heard of this idea until now, but it's not quite as crazy as it sounds.
What I wanna know is - why do most of my answers for questions #1-10 generally point back to my answer to #1, with or without the added technologies mentioned in the exam? That, for me, (aside from the fact that most of the technologies mentioned already exist, but just aren't widely-deployed due to the clue barrier required) is the interesting thing about the quiz.
1) Post your warning to things that get archived. State your claim. Invite debate on the issue. The truth will come out in either the debate or in the bogus reviewer's lack of willingness to debate.
Canonical historical example: Co$ vs. The Net and similar memetic wars.
2) I'd deinstall my network connection:) Seriously - a packet-sniffer and a logger, so that when I got reamed by the next piece of Real^H^H^H^HTrojanNetworkSoftware, I'd have the proof and could fight back with the mechanism outlined in #1).
3a) Search publicly-available archives to see what other people thought about the offerer. Gauge relative clue of proponents vs. opponents on quality of their writing and argument, and watch out for astroturf campaigns. See #1.
3b) If I really want it, go with a trustworthy (see 3a for defintion of "trustworthy") bonding or escrow agent. Interestingly, this is the only answer of mine so far that "requires" any of the new technologies described in the premises to the Final Exam.
4) Story of my life. The unforgeable pseudonymous identities aren't needed, but simply make killing the spammers easier. MAPS, RBL, woo-hoo! Though I would like a law banning all unsolicited commercial email and allowing a private right of action in a dollar amount that would allow me to make a tidy sum off the spam campaign described in the exam.
5) Play anyway over a secure link if I trust and have verified that the people with whom I'm playing are who they say they are and aren't working in an entrapment scheme. The odds of them working in an entrapment scheme for a game of poker are pretty slim, so I'd likely play.
6) Wouldn't send it. If it appears on a screen, and someone's looking at the screen with my daughter, I'm out $100K. CDA-like acts chill free speech, and just like video and audio, the decrypted joke has to be displayed in a form viewable by humans at some point or another. (Unlike my poker game, the odds of there being someone politically-correct and uptight enough to charge me are pretty high at a university.)
7) Second answer where unforgeable pseudonymous identities would make life easier. Nail 'em to the wall credibility-wise using the answer to question #1. Note that it's still pretty hard for an opponent to pull this off on today's 'net, even in the absence of unforgeable pseudonymous identities. Your NNTP-Posting-Host or other IP-related info, if you're coming from a dialup port or cable modem, are pretty hard to credibly forge unless your enemy happens to live in the same geographical area as you do.
8) You can't. Deal with it and employ the techniques of #1 so that users using the techniques of #3 can get to the truth.
9) You can't, unless you have the money to buy a landshark. The techniques of #1 may help with a little payback in PR losses for the company, but if you wanna blow 'em outa the water, you still need a lawyer to sue 'em for negligence.
10) You can't. And #1 won't work either. Lusers will be stupid and not check URLs. Why do you think AOL password-phishers continue to con lusers into thinking that "AOL's billing department" needs their passwords and uses a hotmail.com address? You can, however, as CEO of Bloomberg, afford sufficient lawyermass to dust off and nuke the offenders from orbit. Do so, and mount their heads on pikes, pour encourager les autres.
11a) Collect as many of the subversive devices as possible, smash them, and haul the carcasses in to your local political officer in exchange for food bounties. Feed daughter with proceeds.
11b) Wait a few more years for your government to collapse. Unlike East Germany's government, which collapsed due to the close proximity of "people who had enough food that they envied the people with Levi's Jeans and Sony Walkmans", North Korea's government is collapsing without any help from the West.
If there's not enough food for you and your family, eventually enough of your countrymen will die that the population will drop to the point where the survivors can eat. IF the North Korean leadership survives the depopulation phase, it'll take another 5-10 years between the end of the famine and the time when the people can keep an unsmashed device or two well-hidden and start envying the Walkman-wielding folks elsewhere, leading to an East-German-style final collapse of the government.
Unfortunately, unless you also did 11a) to keep you fed in the interim, your daughter will still be dead. And perhaps you too.
Until you can FTP food or learn to code, write, or play music while starving to death, you won't be able to trade anything in exchange for food drops, and even if you could, the food drops will be detectable and you'll likely be shot for receiving them.
There will always be problems that cannot be solved solely in cyberspace, a fact which is, IMNSHO, profoundly worth knowing.
(My only beef is, as I suspect many slashdotters would agree, that most of us already know this. I'd love to see a followup showing how the students of this class answered these questions, particularly #11. Did they "get it" over the duration of the course, or not?)
Re: [Packard-Bell "support" outsourced to a company paying ~30% less to its tech support reps]
> I'm sure that if you didnt like the support you had before, you will love what you'll get now.:-)
*LOL*, of that, I have no doubt.
As for me, I've never owned a PB, but I once knew a total newbie-to-computers who asked me "what to buy". Basically, I said "Anything but Packard-Hell".
Then she bought a Packard-Hell anyways, due to the "I just take it home from the big box consumer store and plug it in" factor, and predictably lived to regret it. 6 months later, she went to a small local whitebox assembler, waited 72 hours for assembly and burnin, donated the PB to a local charity, and never looked back. For some strange reason, all her old software felt like it was faster, and all her new software actually installed and ran the first time.
I kinda pity the charity, though:)
(Actually, that bit about my never owning Packard-Hell equipment isn't quite true. I still have a 12" amber-screen console ca. 1986 with their name on it that I rescued from the dumpster during an office move. It's about the only thing of theirs that ever worked...)
> Our dollars buying politicians is just as bad as anyone elses dollars buying them.
Morally, you're absolutely right. Politics, however, isn't about morality, it's about power. Getting it. Exercising it. Keeping it.
> It might not be as bad for us, but it is still bad in general. I don't want anyone's > dollars buying politicians.
Nor do I. But until someone comes up with a solution to the fact that power corrupts, and that power and politics go hand-in-hand in damn near any form of government, and given that there appears to be little support amongst the "great unwashed" for anarchy, buying a piece of the current system appears to be the least ethically-offensive option open to us. Yes, they may be the "Great Unwashed" - 250,000,000 cluebies, if you will - but if the notion of "Washington Knows Best" is bogus, isn't "Geekdom Knows Best" equally bogus? Or are we somehow infallible in our political judgement and incorruptible in our souls?)
To the AC who advocated armed revolt ("Shoot the thief"): Leaving aside the improbability of a few thousand pocket-protector-clad individuals pulling off such a feat, do you really think that those of us who rose to power in the chaos following your Glorious People's Uprising would be any less-corrupt than the ones presently in power? If your answer is "yes", may I humbly remind you that the historical record (France, Russia, China) doesn't exactly bear you out.
I want either less corruption or more chance to participate. Given that "less corruption" is a non-starter in a world in which corruption is rampant, that leaves only the latter choice.
We're geeks. It's in our nature to fix things. But if we lack the power to fix it, it's also in our nature to tweak it or work around it. Given the impracticality and improbability of fixing the current system, I'd rather tweak it by purchasing legislators friendly to our interests. The likely consequences of the "ethical" alternative - ignoring the system and ceding control of the debate to our opponents - are too dire for me to stomach.
For years, Washington ignored the 'net. For years, the 'net ignored Washington. It was a happy coexistence, but those days are over. Now that DC has noticed us, we are faced with a choice. Either:
Ignore them - and let the "Internet is a haven for pedophiles" crowd buy their votes on censorship.
Ignore them - and let the "Internet is a haven for drug dealers and terrorists" crowd buy their votes on crypto.
Ignore them - and let the "Internet is a great way to track all customers and send them offers which will interest them" crowd buy their votes on privacy.
Buy their votes ourselves.
Politicans are for sale. Deal with it. Surely it's better that it be our dollars doing the buying than those of our opponents.
> tests of this kind are designed to pick up liars. > For example, they will ask you two differently > worded questions about the same topic. > > Would you describe yourself as punctual? Yes/No > Would you describe yourself as patient? Yes/No
...which is probably the other reason why most of my high school teachers and university profs always reminded us to "read every question on the exam before you start writing down answers":-)
Personality Profiling 101:
Knowing how to spot these kinds of questions is a very useful life skill, whether in a Geek Profiling situation or a job interview. For an excellent example of the "ask the same question different ways" techique in action, and for an opportunity get some practice, play with this version of the Keirsey Temperament Sorter.
First, answer with "the truth" - your honest answers to the questions. Then, when you've read your results and realized that the questionnaire is only measuring "yes/no" answers along four orthogonal axes, try to give the "right" answers for an "all-yes" or "all-no" score on the axis of your choice.
Advanced class:
Note that someone who scores "perfectly" - with zero inconsistent answers, less so on Kiersey, but probably more so on something more sophisticated, like Mosaic, is likely to be spotted as a liar. Humans are inherently fuzzy things, and some degree of internal inconsistency is to be expected. Doublethink is normal.
If your answer to "Do you believe in non-violence" is "yes", and your response, 10 questions later, to "What if you saw your wife boinking the milkman" is "I'd ask them to please stop and put their clothes on before inviting them both out to dinner to rationally discuss our differences of opinion on marital fidelity", it could well be as much of a red flag as "I'd cut them into little chunks with my big mofo chainsaw and cook and eat them both, and then throw her goldfish in the microwave for dessert! Muhahahaha!".
(In my obviously-contrived example, a "right" response to the wife question would be "umm, that'd totally such, uh, I dunno, I hope I wouldn't like, freak out completely or anything", particularly if your other answers "If some bozo cut me off in traffic, I'd just let him get up ahead and get busted for speeding, he's worth making a fuss over" are generally consistent with nonviolence.)
Once upon a time, "breaking into systems" was the only way you could have more power and connectivity than an 8-bit microcomputer and a 300-baud modem making local phone calls. Today, with Linux distros available for free (remember when paying SCO ~$1000 was the only way to run Linux on hardware that cost less than $10000?), and the 'net being just as cheap as phone service, everyone has root on their own machine. The days when learning about "the big iron running the a Real OS" required breaking into someone else's machine are over.
Today, hacking in the sense of "doing cool stuff with a real OS" (as opposed to, say, reverse-engineering assembly code as part of a copy-protection defeat) doesn't require breaching the security of third party systems. Rather, it's now about knowing how your own system works.
For anyone who hasn't yet read Stephen Levy's "Hackers", (I, like many, was inspired to re-read my dog-eared copy upon the recent/. review), go read it. IMNSHO, open source has become the canonical embodiment of the original TMRC-era philosophy: "Always yield to the hands-on imperative".
> But if you're mobbed by people who are looking for free phone calls, software or exploits, > you're just an opportunist, possibly even a criminal. [... ] While it's certainly > possible to use hacking ability to commit a crime, once you do this you cease > being a hacker and commence being a criminal. It's really not a hard distinction to > make.
Thank you, Mr. Goldstein, for making the distinction. Why the media has steadfastly refused to pick up on this for the past 10-12 years is both unfathomable and unforgivable.
Not that anyone's reading this thread anymore, but on the off chance that someone does... you'll also note that I used the phrase "for lack of a better term" in front of the reference. Sadly, the English language doesn't easily differentiate between "wannafuck-love" and "damngoodfriend-love".
I grok where AC is coming from - under most circumstances, what he describes would be an easy trap to fall into - but I know the difference between loving her as a friend and pining after her as a mate. Both she and I have had relationships during the time we've known each other and I've never felt jealous about her relationships. (We've each found that another fringe benefit of having a DamnGoodFriend of the opposite sex is that you can generally get a straight answer on relationship questions because neither of you is trying to get the other into or out of bed.)
And with her paying half the rent as long as we're rooming together, I'd hardly say I'm coming away empty-handed. (Read: "I got the dual overclocked Celeron not to save money, but because it was more fun to set up than buying the PII-450s!") I do wish she were into Quake, though. Pobody's nerfect.
I'll be the first to admit that my lifestyle certainly isn't for everyone. (Imagine me finding Ms. Right and having to explain my "roommate" to her. Wasn't there a 70s sitcom that had this as a plot device?:-)
The important point of my original posting, however - which got lost when I cluttered it with my example of an off-the-wall "solution" to the "lovelorn geek" problem - was really just to say that having no relationship is, at least for me, infinitely better than being in the wrong relationship.
Seriously - if you're not shooting blanks, and you sleep with a woman, you're taking the full financial risk of any progeny that may be developed. Them's the legal breaks. The alternative - that the law permit a male be able to force a female to have an abortion against her will, Just Doesn't Work in any ethical scheme, no matter how twisted, I can dream up.
If you don't want kids, and you posess a Y chromosome, get thyself snipped. It's the best birthday present you'll ever give yourself. And if your partner doesn't want kids either, it's the best present you can give her too. For less than $500, it's a hell of a lot cheaper and safer than asking your partner to have a tubal ligation.
Finally, to the Epopt, who said that folks who described having children as "pointless" as "obsessively self-centered": a reminder that obsessive self-centeredness can be as much a trait of breeders as it is of the childfree. (Woo-hoo, I get to re-use a link from yesterday's post!)
(But - in the Epopt's defence - while I resent his implied characterization of the childfree as selfish, he's quite right in one thing: if you have to ask, you'll never understand. That goes for both sides of the "to sprog or not to sprog" debate. While I understand the reasons for spawning on the surface, I'll never grok in fullness the desire to sprog. A few years ago, I broke off a 5-year relationship because we were each dumb enough to get into it before realizing that we just couldn't agree on this subject. We've remained friends - she's got 2 kids now and is ecstatic about it, and I've got none and am equally ecstatic. Had we continued our relationship, it would have been hell. She'd curse me for the child I'd never give her, or I'd curse her for the one she saddled me with. Eech.
As one who probably would be tempted to "throw 'em away" if I ever ended up with one, I took the responsibility for making damn sure I'd never end up with one in the first place. Better for me, better for my companion, and better for a putative kid not to exist at all than to have me as a Dad!
I'm a firm believer in the "if you don't like 'em, don't have 'em" school. Naturally, if you do like kids, go nuts. After all, someone's gotta breed more geeks to make up for those of us who prefer DOOM's "Knee-deep in Dead" to the Mommy Track's "Elbow-deep in baby shit!":-)
Problem is, the only people you want to catch with this software - i.e. psychopaths - are by clinical definition, people who have no compunctions about lying on the test to begin with.
"We're trying to screen out potentially violent whackjobs for re-education camps. Are you, or have you ever, having or had fantasies about burning down your school and raping and murdering everyone within a 500 foot radius of the building?"
Since only the dumbest potentially-violent whackjob (even by whackjob-level standards) would ever answer "yes" to that question, all we're doing is screening out the 'tardly ones who couldn't put a pipe bomb together to save their lives, and ensuring that the ones who really wanna go through with it will be undetected.
It's great lawsuit-protection though. Just think - now there'll be a real test, scored by a computer (Ooooh! it came from a Com-pew-ter! It must be true!), that can protect the school boards from lawsuits. There's a big difference, legally-speaking, between "We had no idea he'd go postal, he was a nice quiet kid", and "His psych profile said he was a nice quiet kid, so you can't claim we even thought he had the potential to go postal."
Lawyers. Feh. (My answer: "No, but I do think that a hundred lawyers being blown to giblets en masse with rocket launchers, and then left to rot at the bottom of the Columbine High swimming pool, would be a real good start. Especially with a pile of BBQ sauce and a big tank of propane.")
I'm currently living with my best friend. We've known each other for >10 years, and I've asked her out during that time, but she wasn't interested. She still ain't. Never will be. (You know the old saying, "if a woman don't sleep with you in the first 10 years, she probably never will?") Apart from the occasional hug of sympathy when Shit Happens, we've never laid a finger on each other. Certainly nothing sexual.
Now that we've hung out for 10-odd years, I can see it's just as well - a year or so ago, she told me she wanted to have kids someday, something which I find horrific. (Hey geeks, if you think women are buggy, try kids! If your pet dog knocked things over everywhere it went, and spent two years pissing and shitting all over itself, and thought that puking on your shoulder was a nice way to say "hello", you'd probably have it put down! Somehow when sproggen do it, it's considered "cute". Sigh.)
"So where's the sex?", I hear you cry. Gentlemen (and ladies, hey, these roles can just as easily be reversed), evolution provided you with all the equipment you require for orgasm. A hint: mix genitals and hands. Your built-in feedback system should take care of the rest.
Back to my platonic friend, roommate, and for lack of a better term, love o' my life. Having her around has been a breath of fresh air. Someday she'll find Mr. Right and move on. But in the meantime, my rent's been cut in half, and I have a dinner companion whenever I want one. When the day comes that she moves on, I'll happily revert to bachelorhood.
Happily? Yeah, happily. Fact is, there ain't too many women out there who don't want sprog, so the odds of me finding Ms. Right are pretty much nil. So I'm outa the gene pool. Big deal. Because of this, I can go to LAN parties, play Quake and Rainbow Six 'till all hours of the night, enjoy some smut when the urge strikes, and if I feel like "going caveman" and not bothering with showering or shaving for a 3-day coding binge, hey, so be it. Life is so hard.
So let's see the suburban minivan-driving, it-seats-6-sproggen crowd top that for a lifestyle? "Sorry, we can't make it to the opera tonight, couldn't find a babysitter. Quake? It scares the kids when I turn the subwoofer on. Pr0n? I get the real thing from my wife... um, but only on her terms. Code? I remember coding all night for the hell of it. Once. Now every time I get deeply into a problem, I'm interrupted by a shriek that could shatter jello. Bratleigh wants the bottle again, either that or I'm gonna be up to my elbows in baby shit... again. But hey, at least I found a girl. I'm happy. Really."
Want companionship? Someone to love? Find a good friend and make the most of it.
Wanna fuck? Wanking is cheap, readily-available, and it's guilt-free.
To put it another way - love and sex are the evolutionarily-developed bribes to make you go through the hassle of finding a partner and raising umpteen sprog to propagate your genes. But you're a homo sapiens, fer chrissakes. That's Latin for "thinking (wo)man". You've got a huge-ass brain. Why not use it to figure out a solution that gives you the joy of being with someone you love, the pleasure of all the sex you want, and the freedom that comes with not having sproggen? Where is it written that you have to sprog, and/or that you have to get your love and sex from the same source? If you can get 'em from the same source, great (and having a good friend is a good way to start anyways) - but don't worry if you can't.
As a final note - for anyone who suggests that being childfree is somehow "immature" or "selfish", might I recommend the comics of Nina Paley?
If, as IETF's statement on IPv6 Address Privacy states, "The privacy of communication is a major issue in the Internet Engineering Task Force", and if they've Done The Right Thing here...
While I'm encouraged by IETF's sound technical and privacy statement on MAC addresses in IPv6, there's a second issue that's still open. IMHO the technical and privacy factors are even stronger when it comes to decisions that amount to building a security hole into the system.
If a pro-privacy stand was the right thing for MAC addresses in IPv6, then it's even more so for CALEA and other wiretapping "standards".
Seen on a recent NOVA documentary on recently-declassified nuclear sub stories:
The first of the show was fascinating in its own right - what happened to Thresher and Scorpion, two US nuclear submarines that were lost in the 60s with all hands aboard. Remember the guy who spent a lot of time hunting for the Titanic and didn't find it the first few times? Part of that was a cover story; he was actually examining the wreckage of Thresher.
That was pretty amazing (short version: You don't want to be in a sub experiencing a catastrophic failure, but if you saw "the camera in the sub" scene in Trinity And Beyond, a movie consisting largely of similarly-amazing declassified footage of nuclear tests, you already knew that), but the second part of the show totally blew me away.
Those of you who are old enough may remember Howard Hughes and his plan to "mine the oceans" for manganese nodules. I remember hearding about this on a NOVA documentary many years ago.
That entire business plan was a cover story for a CIA op. Hughes was asked to come on board as the ideal cover - "Only Hughes would have the money to try mining the oceans, and it's so zany the public would have no trouble believing it as a Hughes project". The real goal was to retrieve - not "examine the wreckage of", not "send a 'bot into the sub to look for neat toys", but to retrieve, intact, a lost Russian nuclear submarine from a depth 17,000 feet.
What Hughes ended up building was pretty far out, even for Hughes. Imagine a large ship with a submarine-shaped bay ("for holding the manganese nodules") in the middle of it. Now imagine a huge contraption that resembled the business end of salad tongs, but was roughly the length of a submarine.
Now drop the contraption 17,000 feet down on long poles, grab your sub, and raise it. Once raised, pop into the sub to get all the codebooks, communications equipment, reactor design info, and for bonus points, three nuclear missiles. The ultimate prize in the Cold War.
Unfortunately, they scraped bottom on their first attempt, and rather than raise the entire thing up to inspect it thoroughly for damage, they went ahead and picked up the sub anyways. About halfway up, three fingers on the "claw" broke off, leading to structural failure of the sub. The bow, with the bridge and all the intelligence information, along with the nukes, went back down to the bottom and was destroyed on impact. All that remained in the stern were bodies and/or parts thereof.
The only official acknowledgement ever made was that a tape - showing a funeral at sea for the Russian sailors - was eventually sent to the Russian Premier when the secret leaked.
Some of this footage - of the wrecks of Thresher, Scorpion, and the operation to retrieve the aforementioned Russian sub, has only recently been declassified.
Finally, one plan that didn't get off the ground, but was hinted at in that "Interception Capabilities 2000" report - the placement of taps on underground cables. Seems the Russian Northern Fleet used to communicate via undersea cables around the North Cape, and it further seems that "since the cables were undersea, they were secure", and the communications were sent unencrypted. The plan was to use a different type of sub to place a listening device in the sand beneath the cable, (Russian navy inspects cable, sees no tap on cable, lays cable back down on top of buried listening device!) and then to string 2,000 miles of new cable to Greenland, where a satellite uplink would provide the US with real-time intel on the Northern Fleet. Apparently, this plan was scuppered when a mole inside NSA compromised it. It would have cost $2-3 billion dollars -- but what's a billion when you're talking about the possibility of having hours, or even days, of advance notice of World War III?
I have a hunch that 20 years from now, we'll be discovering some similarly audacious things from today's era.
It's been said before, but I'll say it again. NSA and CIA have better things to do with their time than worry about you.
In the meantime - for anyone who's ever wondered "why would geeks ever want to work for the spooks", that's probably just the tip of the iceberg of why. Yes, most of the work is probably mind-numbingly dull, and made even duller by government regulations. But the chance to be part of a once-in-a-lifetime "moon shot" operation, and to play with or develop technology that's beyond the state of the art, is probably a significant motivating factor.
If there's anyone out there reading this who's built a quantum computer or some other piece of technolgy the rest of us haven't even dreamt of yet: "Cool hack, dude! 20-30 years from now, I hope we get to hear your story too."
Damn, re-reading that brought back a lot of laughs. Of particular note - look for the lawyer falling for the "FTP site at 127.0.0.1" troll, as well as the "ARSCC" troll.
The ARSCC troll is particularly amusing. Those of you who read news.admin.net-abuse.email and and have heard about the Lumber Cartel (TINLC) - imagine being questioned about "who runs the Lumber Cartel" in a deposition. The ARSCC started out the same way - another ficticious organization cooked up by netizens to troll a group so deeply in denial that they already believed that "since so many people on the 'net disagree with us, they must all be part of the same large conspiracy against us", fell for it hook, line, and sinker.
In both n.a.n-a.e and a.r.s., the conspiracy meme was already fully expressed amongst the lams and the spammers, respectively. All the 'netizens had to do was give the Conspiracy a name, and watch its opponents go nuts trying to find out who, in meatspace, was part of it. When properly executed, such a troll leads the opponent into executing a meatspace distributed denial-of-service attack against himself by seeing conspirators wherever he goes.
I'm not at all surprised that many spammers fell for the Lumber Cartel (spammers are, if dogshit will forgive me, dumber 'n dogshit), but the clams fell for the mythical ARSCC even more easily!
The cult's falling for the ARSCC troll indicates another bit of defective memetic programming; by sekrit skripture, they're trained to ask "who are you working for?" whenever anyone questions them, because the notion of "activist" (in the sense of "someone who acts independently and takes personal risk to challenge big organizations when they're misbehaving") simply didn't exist in the 1950s-and-60s memetic environment out of which the cult formed. To the cult, there can be no independent objectors to its practices; anyone who criticizes it is a priori assumed to be part of an organized conspiracy against the cult.
(Any coercive organization generally needs an "enemy" on which it can fixate its members' emotions. Another 50s-and-60s memetic bug either introduced by this, or reinforced by it, in the CO$, is the fact that the cult exists in a universe composed of large organizations battling on roughly equal footings, like superpowers in the WWII and the Cold War. An army defeated because it was "nibbled to death by ducks" was simply inconceivable until after Vietnam, by which time Cult doctrine had been frozen. Oops.)
It's only recently that trolling has become a weapon of memetic warfare per se - fabricating organizations and watching conspiracy-minded loons run around in circles looking for them is, of course, a grand 'net tradition, going as far back as the original USENET Cabal. TINC. The Cabal told me so.
I saw a man upon a stair, a little man who wasn't there I saw the man again today. Gee I wish he'd go away.
> their lawyers tried in depositions to disvover the real identity > of the mysterious person called 'Major Domo' who'd been running > all those anti-scientology mailing lists....
What cracked me up was when they tried to break some PGP-encrypted data on some drives they'd managed to seize from a Netizen. For a bunch of UFO cultists who claim total domination over Matter, Energy, Space, and Time (for only $300,000!) through sheer force of mental will, you'd think they'd be able to break PGP trivally by simply using their powers to apply clairvoyance backwards in time and just watch their enemies entering the PGP keys.
Better yet, since cult sekrit skripture includes a "blame-the-victim" meme, effectively "If anything we claim doesn't work for you, you're by definition not doing it right and in need of either further cult proce$$ing, or you're subconsciously working for the enemies of the cult and in need of punishment", I'll bet a lot of would-be PGP breakers in the cult spent a lot of time eating rice and beans.
The image of an entire room of high-ranking cultists staring at a hard drive, thinking "DECRYPT! DECRYPT! DECRYPT!" at it for hours on end, and then blaming themselves (or being punished) for their failure to break PGP, kept me giggling for months.
Back on topic - in addition to learning about new denial-of-service attacks and other cult nastiness, I learned more about memetic warfare and information warfare from lurking on a.r.s. for three years than anywhere else. I consider a.r.s. to be the infowar boot camp for the world, both for private citizens and intelligence agencies alike.
Why? a.r.s. is the canonical "what happens when the print era of journalism meets the/. age of reader-feedback" battle. The cult is an ideal control group because it can't change its tactics. It lives in a set of memetic straitjackets of its own construction; most significantly, it has a meme that ensures that can't adapt to any new reality of media because "Everything Hubbard Wrote Was True And Will Remain True Forever", including the parts about dealing with bad PR (essentially, "use superior financial resources to defame your opponent in the major media first, because more people read the news articles than the 1 or 2 rebuttals that might appear on the editorial page") in the 1960s. As we all know, "dat don't work no more".
A better analogy would be the immovable object and the irresistable force. What the cult never imagined was that someday there'd be an irresistable force that didn't have to move the object, but could just flow around it.
> He doesn't seem (like many other companies) to be focussed on making his company the > dominant company, but focussed on making his engine the best engine.
Carmack knows the difference between doing his business and doing his job. Consider the folks who ran the railroads 60 years ago - they saw their job as "building faster and better trains", but their business was "moving stuff from A to B". When someone came out with a better way to move cargo and people from A to B, they were bypassed completely and lost horrific sums of money.
Most technology firms, IMHO, are making the same mistake. The "portal" trend is a prime example of these kinds of mistakes - not "diversification", but "di-worse-ification".
Selling games is a job. Building technology is a business. By building the best engine he can, he ensures ongoing revenue from licensing, and keeps his firm in the running for the "if someone builds Snow Crash, or an immersive 3D environment to replace the desktop paradigm, it might run on our engine" prizes. The really kewl games are a wonderful bonus.
Contrast this with a lot of gaming firms whose idea is "to produce a hit game every year or so, we don't care if it's an ultra-wow-3D-thriller- with-gibs-flying-everywhere or another copy of Trivial Pursuit, in fact, we prefer Trivial Pursuit since it's cheaper to develop", and you'll see where the smart money is.
Making a hit game is fun, but it's hit-and-miss; it's only a job. Building a technology with broader application, and releasing really cool games (or licensing the technology) to showcase it, is a business. It's fun enough to be worth doing, and it also pays the bills that allow you to keep improving that technology, ad infinitum.
Far be it from me to speak for Carmack - but judging from the quality and consistency of his releases - he not only knows the difference between his business and his job, he's using that knowledge of the difference to make a difference. (And having a damn good time at it too!)
Re:Download the thing, use it, and then b***h...
on
Whither Netscape 5.0?
·
· Score: 2
I like the voting idea - both in concept and execution. It's a wonderful change from the closed-source model of "we'll fix the bugs we want to fix, regardless of what our users want.
Now, for all of you who liked my request for one-click image autoload toggle a week or so ago, drop by and vote! Maybe a future version of Mozilla will offer you as much control as the old 3.01 Netscape!
Of particular interest - bugs #15148, 15145, 9307, 11875, and 7380. Special thanks to MattyT for doing the legwork of RFE submission and articulating a scheme whereby things could also be allowed/disallowed as a function of domain. I'd be overjoyed with one-click global toggles for all images/cookies/java/javascript, but it'd be positivly orgasmic if the toggles applied globally or according to a user-defined list of accept/deny domains depending on the user's configuration. (Bury the configuration as deep as you want in the menu structure, so long as the actual process of turning these "features" on and off is a single click or menu-hotkey.)
Now if only we lived in an alternate universe where this had been implemented in 3.02, or rather 3.1 so many years ago, and had been part of the codebase ever since!:) Just imagine, a browser where one mouse-click will turn off images, cookies, and javascript, rather than hiding it under the present (4.x) pile of menus...
I used to have one identity for all my online and meatspace activities. But after several years of seeing the continual erosion of privacy rights and individual rights in favor of group rights and the development of the surveillance state, I concluded that this was no longer practical, and so I "killed off" the parts of my real identity that wouldn't reflect well upon me, and developed new identities, which I keep as compartmentalized as possible.
One of them is "me", and has a fairly typical geekish profile, including USENET postings.
One of me is on Slashdot. You're reading from him now.
The interesting identity is an old version of me who used to hang out with a group of folks who [censored] which, while trendy now, may at some time in the future become unfashionable.
I no longer associate with that last group - not so much because there's anything wrong with [censored], or because I'm no longer interested in [censored], but because I'm hedging my bets against catastrophe. I miss 'em. They were good people, and I made some good friends.
But if you believe - as I do - that the war for privacy and individual rights will ultimately be lost, it was a necessary sacrifice.
My [censored] was pretty mild by today's standards. But it doesn't matter if my [censored] was politics (communism? fascism? democracy?), guns (of any form), sex (of any form that involves pleasure, judging from the religious right), drugs (hey, there are folks advocating prohibition of tobacco and alcohol too!), or rock 'n' roll (industrial music post-Columbine anyone?). If we end up with living in a surveillance state, and folks into [censored] become the scapegoat-du-jour, I could have been targeted for surveillance in a random sweep.
Remember the corollary of the "they came for the foos and I didn't speak up" quotation is that "sooner or later, they'll come for you".
By cutting off that association now, as opposed to "the day the Bad Guys Take Over", I gave myself - and my friends, who may have more integrity and courage than myself - some protection. "Yeah, Mr. Thought Policeman, I used to think [censored] was cool, but I'm better now. I don't know any of my former associates, ain't heard from 'em in years, and your records'll back me up on that. Sorry I can't help you track them down for treatment/reeducation/extermination, as is my civic duty under Neomegalopolis Penal Code Section XVIII.4 Sub-Paragraph (b)."
Yeah, that's spineless cowardice. I sincerely admire the courage of the/. poster who said he'd "rather be under the tanks than riding in them", but when it comes right down to it, how many of us, when push comes to shove, are willing to make that commitment? And how many of us are willing to make that decision on behalf of our families and loved ones well as ourselves?
Frankly, I kinda enjoyed my [censored] days. But I also enjoy my job and my geeky toys. And when I concluded that the halcyon days of a "free world" were almost over, I was forced to ask myself whether I wanted my job and my toys more than I wanted my [censored]. I concluded that there were other forms of fun that I enjoyed more than [censored], and walked away from it.
If I'm wrong about the future, I'll have given up a small part of my life in exchange for more time to spend on other things that I enjoy just as much. A fair trade. But if I'm right, ten years from now, I'll be thanking my lucky stars that I chickened out now and got some experience in living under authoritarianism before it became an essential skill. I'm still not that great at it, but I'm learning and adapting.
It sucks to live in the twilight era of freedom, but there you have it.
"Oh, I know I'm a louse, but I'm a live louse!" - Daffy Duck
Netscape 3.01: Options -> Autoload Images on/off. If off, clicking on the "Images" button in the toolbar loads images.
Netscape 4.xx and above: The feature is there, but it's buried under umpteen menus and hard to turn on or off.
That "feature" alone has made me never want to "upgrade" from 3.01.
Here's my "All I Ever Wanted From Netscape Or Mozilla" list, for which I've been waiting since Netscape 3.01:
Image autoload on/off from the Options menu with one click, like NS3.01.
Java/Javascript enable/disable from the Options menu with one click, unlike any Netscape version ever released.
Pop-up window enable/disable from the Options menu with one click, unlike any Netscape version ever released.
GIF animation enable/disable from the Options menu with one click, unlike any Netscape version ever released.
If I have to download 50M of bloatware to get any or all of those four simple features, I'll do it over a 14.4k link and give you my snail-mail address and all the demographic data your marketers want. If I have to download 3M of the most elegantly-crafted code on God's green earth over a T-1, but lose the ability to easily enable/disable image autoloading that I have with NS3.01, it's still a downgrade, not an upgrade as far as I'm concerned:)
The one good thing about the Windoze install is autodetection of hardware from a huge variety of vendors.
To us geeks, that's lame. I mean, fer chrissakes, how could anyone not know what their hardware is, and if we don't, we know what's close-enough-to-work-on-boot. Don't have an SBSuperMegaWowzersLive! driver on your Windoze CD? Tell Windoze to pretend it's an SB64 or whatever, which'll be close enough for now, and install the right drivers later, simple, right?
Wrong.
The fact that the guy didn't even know if he had a video card (i.e. that "having a video card" is exactly the same in terms of installation as "having a chipset-built-into-the-motherboard") should be telling us something. I'll bet you any money that if the Linux install had popped up a cute little window with a penguin and an animated magnifying glass (to show the user that the system hadn't hung) and said something like "now looking for video hardware... you have a FooBar video card... now installing FooBar video drivers... now looking for sound card...", the guy would have been happy. Since the home user still has to install Linux him/herself, it's incumbent on us to make that installation at least as easy as a Windoze install.
Your installer can't fully identify the hardware? Make a guess based on the manufacturer. Can't even guess? Default to 640x480x16 VGA, just like Windoze, and pop up a note to the effect of "I couldn't figure out what you've got, but I know this'll work. Read this file or go to this URL for assistance." Heck, since we're not M$, we can even provide useful information - like "I dumped the information I could glean from your hardware into this other file. Show this file to someone who knows a lot about computers, and see if he can recognize something."
NO, the Windoze way of "plug it in and watch the installer scribble on your hard drive as it makes educated guesses as to your hardware config" approach isn't the kind of flexibility we want for ourselves, but if Linux is ever gonna Dominate The World, we've gotta stop designing for ourselves and start designing for the guys who don't know whether they've got video cards or not.
RIP, Mr. Scott. Thanks for some wonderful acting. Dr. Strangelove has brought many a smile to my face over the years, and will continue to do so for many years to come.
It appears as if MCO entered orbit "too low", and burned up in the atmosphere. (85km minimum survivable altitude, ~60km expected altitude of probe). Doesn't this sound like something you've heard people worrying about before?
Scientific Reality:The ability of Mission Control to save a "too low" probe during an Earth flyby, (with the probe within a few light-seconds of the transmitter), is a hell of a lot higher than the ability of Mission Control to save a "too low" probe near Mars, (i.e. at a distance of many light-minutes). Thus, the probability of an MCO-style worst-case scenario happening to an RTG-based probe on Earth flyby (I don't recall even the most ardent eco-dude worried about the Venus flyby:-) is still negligible.
(You'll also note that I'm assuming, deliberately and incorrectly, that the dispersal of Cassini's plutonium in Earth's atmosphere would be the catastrophe the anti-nukes told us it would be. It wouldn't. Before they were banned, above-ground nuclear weapons tests had already dispersed many Cassinis' worth of plutonium into the atmosphere, and we're still alive.)
Political Reality:Unfortunately, the naive analysis, which is the only thing the media will propagate, and the only thing the politicians will understand - will read something like this: "We told you so! This is exactly what those eeeeeevil scientists said could never happen with Cassini! But we KNEW! We knew that NASA can't be trusted to fly its probes perfectly, but nobody listened to us! Well, yer gonna hafta listen now! MCO burned up in the atmosphere just like we feared Cassini would! We were right and the eeeeeevil scientists were wrong! Ban all RTGs now before NASA does this with an RTG-based probe in Earth's atmosphere!" And the politicians will obey the screaming hordes.
The loss of MCO is bad for Mars science, but not catastrophic, given the redundancy NASA is putting into its Mars program. Lots of small ships is better than one big ship. The political fallout from the preceding naive analysis of MCO's fiery demise, however, will be much longer-lived and carry a much higher price than the loss of one probe.
If we're lucky, it'll be limited to a ban on Earth flybys for any future RTG-based probes. If we're unlucky, it'll spell the end of RTGs altogether.
While you can easily explore the inner planets on solar power, and maybe even Jupiter if you're careful and advance solar technology somewaht, the mass penalty for larger-and-larger solar panels increases dramatically as you move away from the sun. If one of the side-effects of the MCO failure results in a ban on RTGs, we can basically forget about exploring the outer solar system for at least a generation (i.e. until we can come up with a better technology). That would be a major blow to space science.
Slashdot Mirror
> A slightly clearer picture of TRUSTe's role emerged,
> but few of my concerns were allayed.
I had to laugh when I saw the phrase "clearer picture of TRUSTe's role". For me, it's because I've gotten a clearer picture of TRUSTe real role that I'm concerned in the furst place.
Notandi Sunt Tibi Mores: By your actions shall you be judged.
TRUSTe's role is simple: Take money in from companies with a vested interest in violating your privacy, then turn out a false illusion of security to suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcustomers that their information won't be shared. Trusting folks like that is like sending your name to a spammer's remove list.
The TRUSTe mark is a mark of untrustworthiness - as others have pointed out, it's flawed by design - all it can mean is one of two things.
Either:
I will sell your name to the highest bidder, but I buried the policy that says so in a font of microscopic size twelve levels down in my site, but the policy is available, and by God, we are following it, selling your name just as we promised. TRUSTe has verified that we follow our policies.
Or:
I will install trojans on your hard drive, but as long as they don't communicate their information back to me through port 80, we're off the hook. If it ain't that, we're paying TRUSTe good money to help us find another technicality that'll allow us to keep the mark up there for the rubes^H^H^H^H^Hcustomers who are still deluded enough to think we're ethical.
Some have called for TRUSTe to die and be replaced by something else. By what, pray tell? No monolitic "seal of approval" organization can have de facto trustworthiness - it's not in the nature of the 'net to place its trust in centralized institutions.
It is, however, in the nature of the 'net to sniff out BS, and expose it wherever it may lie. That sniffing has caught M$ out with umpteen egregious violations, the EBay spamming fiasco, the RealTrojans, and countless other folks, be they TRUSTe members or not.
Caveat Emptor. I know which companies I still trust. I know which companies I don't. And I know which companies I never will. Ironically, the ones I trust, more often than not, don't have the TRUSTe logo on them. And over the past year, I have to admit that the more "clear a picture I have of TRUSTe's role" I get, the less I trust the sites which bear it.
When I see a TRUSTe logo, I immediately think "Your reputation was so shoddy you had to pay these weasels for good PR insurance in the event that you get caught with your hand in the privacy cookie jar? Puh-leeze!" Can I possibly be the only one who thinks this way?
Final word:
If you have pull at your company, consider withdrawing from the TRUSTe program. Declare your privacy policy up front and stand by it. Why would you want to dilute the trust you've built up by associating with a group whose sole function it is to defend egregious violators of customers' privacy.
> set off an H-bomb every hour and trap the heat.
And since evolution doesn't exist in Kansas, so it's not like anyone should worry about an increase in the mutation rate should the seal on the underground chamber ever break! Woo-hoo!
More seriously - since you can build H-bombs that get a *very* high portion of their yield from fusion, as opposed to fission, there probably wouldn't be that much radiation to worry about in the first place. Also consider that since the bombs would be built free of the size/weight/shape constraints imposed by weapons platforms, you could likely achieve further increases in the fusion:fission energy output ratio. My snarky comment about Kansas' creationist lobby aside, I hadn't heard of this idea until now, but it's not quite as crazy as it sounds.
What I wanna know is - why do most of my answers for questions #1-10 generally point back to my answer to #1, with or without the added technologies mentioned in the exam? That, for me, (aside from the fact that most of the technologies mentioned already exist, but just aren't widely-deployed due to the clue barrier required) is the interesting thing about the quiz.
1) Post your warning to things that get archived. State your claim. Invite debate on the issue. The truth will come out in either the debate or in the bogus reviewer's lack of willingness to debate.
Canonical historical example: Co$ vs. The Net and similar memetic wars.
2) I'd deinstall my network connection :) Seriously - a packet-sniffer and a logger, so that when I got reamed by the next piece of Real^H^H^H^HTrojanNetworkSoftware, I'd have the proof and could fight back with the mechanism outlined in #1).
3a) Search publicly-available archives to see what other people thought about the offerer. Gauge relative clue of proponents vs. opponents on quality of their writing and argument, and watch out for astroturf campaigns. See #1.
3b) If I really want it, go with a trustworthy (see 3a for defintion of "trustworthy") bonding or escrow agent. Interestingly, this is the only answer of mine so far that "requires" any of the new technologies described in the premises to the Final Exam.
4) Story of my life. The unforgeable pseudonymous identities aren't needed, but simply make killing the spammers easier. MAPS, RBL, woo-hoo! Though I would like a law banning all unsolicited commercial email and allowing a private right of action in a dollar amount that would allow me to make a tidy sum off the spam campaign described in the exam.
5) Play anyway over a secure link if I trust and have verified that the people with whom I'm playing are who they say they are and aren't working in an entrapment scheme. The odds of them working in an entrapment scheme for a game of poker are pretty slim, so I'd likely play.
6) Wouldn't send it. If it appears on a screen, and someone's looking at the screen with my daughter, I'm out $100K. CDA-like acts chill free speech, and just like video and audio, the decrypted joke has to be displayed in a form viewable by humans at some point or another. (Unlike my poker game, the odds of there being someone politically-correct and uptight enough to charge me are pretty high at a university.)
7) Second answer where unforgeable pseudonymous identities would make life easier. Nail 'em to the wall credibility-wise using the answer to question #1. Note that it's still pretty hard for an opponent to pull this off on today's 'net, even in the absence of unforgeable pseudonymous identities. Your NNTP-Posting-Host or other IP-related info, if you're coming from a dialup port or cable modem, are pretty hard to credibly forge unless your enemy happens to live in the same geographical area as you do.
8) You can't. Deal with it and employ the techniques of #1 so that users using the techniques of #3 can get to the truth.
9) You can't, unless you have the money to buy a landshark. The techniques of #1 may help with a little payback in PR losses for the company, but if you wanna blow 'em outa the water, you still need a lawyer to sue 'em for negligence.
10) You can't. And #1 won't work either. Lusers will be stupid and not check URLs. Why do you think AOL password-phishers continue to con lusers into thinking that "AOL's billing department" needs their passwords and uses a hotmail.com address? You can, however, as CEO of Bloomberg, afford sufficient lawyermass to dust off and nuke the offenders from orbit. Do so, and mount their heads on pikes, pour encourager les autres.
11a) Collect as many of the subversive devices as possible, smash them, and haul the carcasses in to your local political officer in exchange for food bounties. Feed daughter with proceeds.
11b) Wait a few more years for your government to collapse. Unlike East Germany's government, which collapsed due to the close proximity of "people who had enough food that they envied the people with Levi's Jeans and Sony Walkmans", North Korea's government is collapsing without any help from the West.
If there's not enough food for you and your family, eventually enough of your countrymen will die that the population will drop to the point where the survivors can eat. IF the North Korean leadership survives the depopulation phase, it'll take another 5-10 years between the end of the famine and the time when the people can keep an unsmashed device or two well-hidden and start envying the Walkman-wielding folks elsewhere, leading to an East-German-style final collapse of the government.
Unfortunately, unless you also did 11a) to keep you fed in the interim, your daughter will still be dead. And perhaps you too.
Until you can FTP food or learn to code, write, or play music while starving to death, you won't be able to trade anything in exchange for food drops, and even if you could, the food drops will be detectable and you'll likely be shot for receiving them.
There will always be problems that cannot be solved solely in cyberspace, a fact which is, IMNSHO, profoundly worth knowing.
(My only beef is, as I suspect many slashdotters would agree, that most of us already know this. I'd love to see a followup showing how the students of this class answered these questions, particularly #11. Did they "get it" over the duration of the course, or not?)
> I'm sure that if you didnt like the support you had before, you will love what you'll get now. :-)
*LOL*, of that, I have no doubt.
As for me, I've never owned a PB, but I once knew a total newbie-to-computers who asked me "what to buy". Basically, I said "Anything but Packard-Hell".
Then she bought a Packard-Hell anyways, due to the "I just take it home from the big box consumer store and plug it in" factor, and predictably lived to regret it. 6 months later, she went to a small local whitebox assembler, waited 72 hours for assembly and burnin, donated the PB to a local charity, and never looked back. For some strange reason, all her old software felt like it was faster, and all her new software actually installed and ran the first time.
I kinda pity the charity, though :)
(Actually, that bit about my never owning Packard-Hell equipment isn't quite true. I still have a 12" amber-screen console ca. 1986 with their name on it that I rescued from the dumpster during an office move. It's about the only thing of theirs that ever worked...)
Condolences to those whose jobs were cut, but someone had to make the obvious wisecrack.
Morally, you're absolutely right. Politics, however, isn't about morality, it's about power. Getting it. Exercising it. Keeping it.
> It might not be as bad for us, but it is still bad in general. I don't want anyone's
> dollars buying politicians.
Nor do I. But until someone comes up with a solution to the fact that power corrupts, and that power and politics go hand-in-hand in damn near any form of government, and given that there appears to be little support amongst the "great unwashed" for anarchy, buying a piece of the current system appears to be the least ethically-offensive option open to us. Yes, they may be the "Great Unwashed" - 250,000,000 cluebies, if you will - but if the notion of "Washington Knows Best" is bogus, isn't "Geekdom Knows Best" equally bogus? Or are we somehow infallible in our political judgement and incorruptible in our souls?)
To the AC who advocated armed revolt ("Shoot the thief"): Leaving aside the improbability of a few thousand pocket-protector-clad individuals pulling off such a feat, do you really think that those of us who rose to power in the chaos following your Glorious People's Uprising would be any less-corrupt than the ones presently in power? If your answer is "yes", may I humbly remind you that the historical record (France, Russia, China) doesn't exactly bear you out.
I want either less corruption or more chance to participate. Given that "less corruption" is a non-starter in a world in which corruption is rampant, that leaves only the latter choice.
We're geeks. It's in our nature to fix things. But if we lack the power to fix it, it's also in our nature to tweak it or work around it. Given the impracticality and improbability of fixing the current system, I'd rather tweak it by purchasing legislators friendly to our interests. The likely consequences of the "ethical" alternative - ignoring the system and ceding control of the debate to our opponents - are too dire for me to stomach.
- Ignore them - and let the "Internet is a haven for pedophiles" crowd buy their votes on censorship.
- Ignore them - and let the "Internet is a haven for drug dealers and terrorists" crowd buy their votes on crypto.
- Ignore them - and let the "Internet is a great way to track all customers and send them offers which will interest them" crowd buy their votes on privacy.
- Buy their votes ourselves.
Politicans are for sale. Deal with it. Surely it's better that it be our dollars doing the buying than those of our opponents.> For example, they will ask you two differently
> worded questions about the same topic.
>
> Would you describe yourself as punctual? Yes/No
> Would you describe yourself as patient? Yes/No
Personality Profiling 101:
Knowing how to spot these kinds of questions is a very useful life skill, whether in a Geek Profiling situation or a job interview. For an excellent example of the "ask the same question different ways" techique in action, and for an opportunity get some practice, play with this version of the Keirsey Temperament Sorter.
First, answer with "the truth" - your honest answers to the questions. Then, when you've read your results and realized that the questionnaire is only measuring "yes/no" answers along four orthogonal axes, try to give the "right" answers for an "all-yes" or "all-no" score on the axis of your choice.
Advanced class:
Note that someone who scores "perfectly" - with zero inconsistent answers, less so on Kiersey, but probably more so on something more sophisticated, like Mosaic, is likely to be spotted as a liar. Humans are inherently fuzzy things, and some degree of internal inconsistency is to be expected. Doublethink is normal.
If your answer to "Do you believe in non-violence" is "yes", and your response, 10 questions later, to "What if you saw your wife boinking the milkman" is "I'd ask them to please stop and put their clothes on before inviting them both out to dinner to rationally discuss our differences of opinion on marital fidelity", it could well be as much of a red flag as "I'd cut them into little chunks with my big mofo chainsaw and cook and eat them both, and then throw her goldfish in the microwave for dessert! Muhahahaha!".
(In my obviously-contrived example, a "right" response to the wife question would be "umm, that'd totally such, uh, I dunno, I hope I wouldn't like, freak out completely or anything", particularly if your other answers "If some bozo cut me off in traffic, I'd just let him get up ahead and get busted for speeding, he's worth making a fuss over" are generally consistent with nonviolence.)
Today, hacking in the sense of "doing cool stuff with a real OS" (as opposed to, say, reverse-engineering assembly code as part of a copy-protection defeat) doesn't require breaching the security of third party systems. Rather, it's now about knowing how your own system works.
For anyone who hasn't yet read Stephen Levy's "Hackers", (I, like many, was inspired to re-read my dog-eared copy upon the recent /. review), go read it. IMNSHO, open source has become the canonical embodiment of the original TMRC-era philosophy: "Always yield to the hands-on imperative".
> But if you're mobbed by people who are looking for free phone calls, software or exploits, ... ] While it's certainly
> you're just an opportunist, possibly even a criminal. [
> possible to use hacking ability to commit a crime, once you do this you cease
> being a hacker and commence being a criminal. It's really not a hard distinction to
> make.
Thank you, Mr. Goldstein, for making the distinction. Why the media has steadfastly refused to pick up on this for the past 10-12 years is both unfathomable and unforgivable.
I grok where AC is coming from - under most circumstances, what he describes would be an easy trap to fall into - but I know the difference between loving her as a friend and pining after her as a mate. Both she and I have had relationships during the time we've known each other and I've never felt jealous about her relationships. (We've each found that another fringe benefit of having a DamnGoodFriend of the opposite sex is that you can generally get a straight answer on relationship questions because neither of you is trying to get the other into or out of bed.)
And with her paying half the rent as long as we're rooming together, I'd hardly say I'm coming away empty-handed. (Read: "I got the dual overclocked Celeron not to save money, but because it was more fun to set up than buying the PII-450s!") I do wish she were into Quake, though. Pobody's nerfect.
I'll be the first to admit that my lifestyle certainly isn't for everyone. (Imagine me finding Ms. Right and having to explain my "roommate" to her. Wasn't there a 70s sitcom that had this as a plot device? :-)
The important point of my original posting, however - which got lost when I cluttered it with my example of an off-the-wall "solution" to the "lovelorn geek" problem - was really just to say that having no relationship is, at least for me, infinitely better than being in the wrong relationship.
Seriously - if you're not shooting blanks, and you sleep with a woman, you're taking the full financial risk of any progeny that may be developed. Them's the legal breaks. The alternative - that the law permit a male be able to force a female to have an abortion against her will, Just Doesn't Work in any ethical scheme, no matter how twisted, I can dream up.
If you don't want kids, and you posess a Y chromosome, get thyself snipped. It's the best birthday present you'll ever give yourself. And if your partner doesn't want kids either, it's the best present you can give her too. For less than $500, it's a hell of a lot cheaper and safer than asking your partner to have a tubal ligation.
Here's some recommended reading for both for those who don't want kids, and for those who do, but can't understand why we don't. (I particularly liked Why books are better than babies.
Another website for your perusal: alt.support.childfree.moderated archive.
Finally, to the Epopt, who said that folks who described having children as "pointless" as "obsessively self-centered": a reminder that obsessive self-centeredness can be as much a trait of breeders as it is of the childfree. (Woo-hoo, I get to re-use a link from yesterday's post!)
(But - in the Epopt's defence - while I resent his implied characterization of the childfree as selfish, he's quite right in one thing: if you have to ask, you'll never understand. That goes for both sides of the "to sprog or not to sprog" debate. While I understand the reasons for spawning on the surface, I'll never grok in fullness the desire to sprog. A few years ago, I broke off a 5-year relationship because we were each dumb enough to get into it before realizing that we just couldn't agree on this subject. We've remained friends - she's got 2 kids now and is ecstatic about it, and I've got none and am equally ecstatic. Had we continued our relationship, it would have been hell. She'd curse me for the child I'd never give her, or I'd curse her for the one she saddled me with. Eech.
As one who probably would be tempted to "throw 'em away" if I ever ended up with one, I took the responsibility for making damn sure I'd never end up with one in the first place. Better for me, better for my companion, and better for a putative kid not to exist at all than to have me as a Dad!
I'm a firm believer in the "if you don't like 'em, don't have 'em" school. Naturally, if you do like kids, go nuts. After all, someone's gotta breed more geeks to make up for those of us who prefer DOOM's "Knee-deep in Dead" to the Mommy Track's "Elbow-deep in baby shit!" :-)
"We're trying to screen out potentially violent whackjobs for re-education camps. Are you, or have you ever, having or had fantasies about burning down your school and raping and murdering everyone within a 500 foot radius of the building?"
Since only the dumbest potentially-violent whackjob (even by whackjob-level standards) would ever answer "yes" to that question, all we're doing is screening out the 'tardly ones who couldn't put a pipe bomb together to save their lives, and ensuring that the ones who really wanna go through with it will be undetected.
It's great lawsuit-protection though. Just think - now there'll be a real test, scored by a computer (Ooooh! it came from a Com-pew-ter! It must be true!), that can protect the school boards from lawsuits. There's a big difference, legally-speaking, between "We had no idea he'd go postal, he was a nice quiet kid", and "His psych profile said he was a nice quiet kid, so you can't claim we even thought he had the potential to go postal."
Lawyers. Feh. (My answer: "No, but I do think that a hundred lawyers being blown to giblets en masse with rocket launchers, and then left to rot at the bottom of the Columbine High swimming pool, would be a real good start. Especially with a pile of BBQ sauce and a big tank of propane.")
I'm currently living with my best friend. We've known each other for >10 years, and I've asked her out during that time, but she wasn't interested. She still ain't. Never will be. (You know the old saying, "if a woman don't sleep with you in the first 10 years, she probably never will?") Apart from the occasional hug of sympathy when Shit Happens, we've never laid a finger on each other. Certainly nothing sexual.
Now that we've hung out for 10-odd years, I can see it's just as well - a year or so ago, she told me she wanted to have kids someday, something which I find horrific. (Hey geeks, if you think women are buggy, try kids! If your pet dog knocked things over everywhere it went, and spent two years pissing and shitting all over itself, and thought that puking on your shoulder was a nice way to say "hello", you'd probably have it put down! Somehow when sproggen do it, it's considered "cute". Sigh.)
"So where's the sex?", I hear you cry. Gentlemen (and ladies, hey, these roles can just as easily be reversed), evolution provided you with all the equipment you require for orgasm. A hint: mix genitals and hands. Your built-in feedback system should take care of the rest.
Back to my platonic friend, roommate, and for lack of a better term, love o' my life. Having her around has been a breath of fresh air. Someday she'll find Mr. Right and move on. But in the meantime, my rent's been cut in half, and I have a dinner companion whenever I want one. When the day comes that she moves on, I'll happily revert to bachelorhood.
Happily? Yeah, happily. Fact is, there ain't too many women out there who don't want sprog, so the odds of me finding Ms. Right are pretty much nil. So I'm outa the gene pool. Big deal. Because of this, I can go to LAN parties, play Quake and Rainbow Six 'till all hours of the night, enjoy some smut when the urge strikes, and if I feel like "going caveman" and not bothering with showering or shaving for a 3-day coding binge, hey, so be it. Life is so hard.
So let's see the suburban minivan-driving, it-seats-6-sproggen crowd top that for a lifestyle? "Sorry, we can't make it to the opera tonight, couldn't find a babysitter. Quake? It scares the kids when I turn the subwoofer on. Pr0n? I get the real thing from my wife... um, but only on her terms. Code? I remember coding all night for the hell of it. Once. Now every time I get deeply into a problem, I'm interrupted by a shriek that could shatter jello. Bratleigh wants the bottle again, either that or I'm gonna be up to my elbows in baby shit... again. But hey, at least I found a girl. I'm happy. Really."
Want companionship? Someone to love? Find a good friend and make the most of it.
Wanna fuck? Wanking is cheap, readily-available, and it's guilt-free.
To put it another way - love and sex are the evolutionarily-developed bribes to make you go through the hassle of finding a partner and raising umpteen sprog to propagate your genes. But you're a homo sapiens, fer chrissakes. That's Latin for "thinking (wo)man". You've got a huge-ass brain. Why not use it to figure out a solution that gives you the joy of being with someone you love, the pleasure of all the sex you want, and the freedom that comes with not having sproggen? Where is it written that you have to sprog, and/or that you have to get your love and sex from the same source? If you can get 'em from the same source, great (and having a good friend is a good way to start anyways) - but don't worry if you can't.
As a final note - for anyone who suggests that being childfree is somehow "immature" or "selfish", might I recommend the comics of Nina Paley?
While I'm encouraged by IETF's sound technical and privacy statement on MAC addresses in IPv6, there's a second issue that's still open. IMHO the technical and privacy factors are even stronger when it comes to decisions that amount to building a security hole into the system.
If a pro-privacy stand was the right thing for MAC addresses in IPv6, then it's even more so for CALEA and other wiretapping "standards".
The first of the show was fascinating in its own right - what happened to Thresher and Scorpion, two US nuclear submarines that were lost in the 60s with all hands aboard. Remember the guy who spent a lot of time hunting for the Titanic and didn't find it the first few times? Part of that was a cover story; he was actually examining the wreckage of Thresher.
That was pretty amazing (short version: You don't want to be in a sub experiencing a catastrophic failure, but if you saw "the camera in the sub" scene in Trinity And Beyond, a movie consisting largely of similarly-amazing declassified footage of nuclear tests, you already knew that), but the second part of the show totally blew me away.
Those of you who are old enough may remember Howard Hughes and his plan to "mine the oceans" for manganese nodules. I remember hearding about this on a NOVA documentary many years ago.
That entire business plan was a cover story for a CIA op. Hughes was asked to come on board as the ideal cover - "Only Hughes would have the money to try mining the oceans, and it's so zany the public would have no trouble believing it as a Hughes project". The real goal was to retrieve - not "examine the wreckage of", not "send a 'bot into the sub to look for neat toys", but to retrieve, intact, a lost Russian nuclear submarine from a depth 17,000 feet.
What Hughes ended up building was pretty far out, even for Hughes. Imagine a large ship with a submarine-shaped bay ("for holding the manganese nodules") in the middle of it. Now imagine a huge contraption that resembled the business end of salad tongs, but was roughly the length of a submarine.
Now drop the contraption 17,000 feet down on long poles, grab your sub, and raise it. Once raised, pop into the sub to get all the codebooks, communications equipment, reactor design info, and for bonus points, three nuclear missiles. The ultimate prize in the Cold War.
Unfortunately, they scraped bottom on their first attempt, and rather than raise the entire thing up to inspect it thoroughly for damage, they went ahead and picked up the sub anyways. About halfway up, three fingers on the "claw" broke off, leading to structural failure of the sub. The bow, with the bridge and all the intelligence information, along with the nukes, went back down to the bottom and was destroyed on impact. All that remained in the stern were bodies and/or parts thereof.
The only official acknowledgement ever made was that a tape - showing a funeral at sea for the Russian sailors - was eventually sent to the Russian Premier when the secret leaked.
Some of this footage - of the wrecks of Thresher, Scorpion, and the operation to retrieve the aforementioned Russian sub, has only recently been declassified.
Finally, one plan that didn't get off the ground, but was hinted at in that "Interception Capabilities 2000" report - the placement of taps on underground cables. Seems the Russian Northern Fleet used to communicate via undersea cables around the North Cape, and it further seems that "since the cables were undersea, they were secure", and the communications were sent unencrypted. The plan was to use a different type of sub to place a listening device in the sand beneath the cable, (Russian navy inspects cable, sees no tap on cable, lays cable back down on top of buried listening device!) and then to string 2,000 miles of new cable to Greenland, where a satellite uplink would provide the US with real-time intel on the Northern Fleet. Apparently, this plan was scuppered when a mole inside NSA compromised it. It would have cost $2-3 billion dollars -- but what's a billion when you're talking about the possibility of having hours, or even days, of advance notice of World War III?
I have a hunch that 20 years from now, we'll be discovering some similarly audacious things from today's era.
It's been said before, but I'll say it again. NSA and CIA have better things to do with their time than worry about you.
In the meantime - for anyone who's ever wondered "why would geeks ever want to work for the spooks", that's probably just the tip of the iceberg of why. Yes, most of the work is probably mind-numbingly dull, and made even duller by government regulations. But the chance to be part of a once-in-a-lifetime "moon shot" operation, and to play with or develop technology that's beyond the state of the art, is probably a significant motivating factor.
If there's anyone out there reading this who's built a quantum computer or some other piece of technolgy the rest of us haven't even dreamt of yet: "Cool hack, dude! 20-30 years from now, I hope we get to hear your story too."
Damn, re-reading that brought back a lot of laughs. Of particular note - look for the lawyer falling for the "FTP site at 127.0.0.1" troll, as well as the "ARSCC" troll.
The ARSCC troll is particularly amusing. Those of you who read news.admin.net-abuse.email and and have heard about the Lumber Cartel (TINLC) - imagine being questioned about "who runs the Lumber Cartel" in a deposition. The ARSCC started out the same way - another ficticious organization cooked up by netizens to troll a group so deeply in denial that they already believed that "since so many people on the 'net disagree with us, they must all be part of the same large conspiracy against us", fell for it hook, line, and sinker.
In both n.a.n-a.e and a.r.s., the conspiracy meme was already fully expressed amongst the lams and the spammers, respectively. All the 'netizens had to do was give the Conspiracy a name, and watch its opponents go nuts trying to find out who, in meatspace, was part of it. When properly executed, such a troll leads the opponent into executing a meatspace distributed denial-of-service attack against himself by seeing conspirators wherever he goes.
I'm not at all surprised that many spammers fell for the Lumber Cartel (spammers are, if dogshit will forgive me, dumber 'n dogshit), but the clams fell for the mythical ARSCC even more easily!
The cult's falling for the ARSCC troll indicates another bit of defective memetic programming; by sekrit skripture, they're trained to ask "who are you working for?" whenever anyone questions them, because the notion of "activist" (in the sense of "someone who acts independently and takes personal risk to challenge big organizations when they're misbehaving") simply didn't exist in the 1950s-and-60s memetic environment out of which the cult formed. To the cult, there can be no independent objectors to its practices; anyone who criticizes it is a priori assumed to be part of an organized conspiracy against the cult.
(Any coercive organization generally needs an "enemy" on which it can fixate its members' emotions. Another 50s-and-60s memetic bug either introduced by this, or reinforced by it, in the CO$, is the fact that the cult exists in a universe composed of large organizations battling on roughly equal footings, like superpowers in the WWII and the Cold War. An army defeated because it was "nibbled to death by ducks" was simply inconceivable until after Vietnam, by which time Cult doctrine had been frozen. Oops.)
It's only recently that trolling has become a weapon of memetic warfare per se - fabricating organizations and watching conspiracy-minded loons run around in circles looking for them is, of course, a grand 'net tradition, going as far back as the original USENET Cabal. TINC. The Cabal told me so.
I saw a man upon a stair, a little man who wasn't there
I saw the man again today. Gee I wish he'd go away.
> of the mysterious person called 'Major Domo' who'd been running
> all those anti-scientology mailing lists
What cracked me up was when they tried to break some PGP-encrypted data on some drives they'd managed to seize from a Netizen. For a bunch of UFO cultists who claim total domination over Matter, Energy, Space, and Time (for only $300,000!) through sheer force of mental will, you'd think they'd be able to break PGP trivally by simply using their powers to apply clairvoyance backwards in time and just watch their enemies entering the PGP keys.
Better yet, since cult sekrit skripture includes a "blame-the-victim" meme, effectively "If anything we claim doesn't work for you, you're by definition not doing it right and in need of either further cult proce$$ing, or you're subconsciously working for the enemies of the cult and in need of punishment", I'll bet a lot of would-be PGP breakers in the cult spent a lot of time eating rice and beans.
The image of an entire room of high-ranking cultists staring at a hard drive, thinking "DECRYPT! DECRYPT! DECRYPT!" at it for hours on end, and then blaming themselves (or being punished) for their failure to break PGP, kept me giggling for months.
Back on topic - in addition to learning about new denial-of-service attacks and other cult nastiness, I learned more about memetic warfare and information warfare from lurking on a.r.s. for three years than anywhere else. I consider a.r.s. to be the infowar boot camp for the world, both for private citizens and intelligence agencies alike.
Why? a.r.s. is the canonical "what happens when the print era of journalism meets the /. age of reader-feedback" battle. The cult is an ideal control group because it can't change its tactics. It lives in a set of memetic straitjackets of its own construction; most significantly, it has a meme that ensures that can't adapt to any new reality of media because "Everything Hubbard Wrote Was True And Will Remain True Forever", including the parts about dealing with bad PR (essentially, "use superior financial resources to defame your opponent in the major media first, because more people read the news articles than the 1 or 2 rebuttals that might appear on the editorial page") in the 1960s. As we all know, "dat don't work no more".
A better analogy would be the immovable object and the irresistable force. What the cult never imagined was that someday there'd be an irresistable force that didn't have to move the object, but could just flow around it.
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
> dominant company, but focussed on making his engine the best engine.
Carmack knows the difference between doing his business and doing his job. Consider the folks who ran the railroads 60 years ago - they saw their job as "building faster and better trains", but their business was "moving stuff from A to B". When someone came out with a better way to move cargo and people from A to B, they were bypassed completely and lost horrific sums of money.
Most technology firms, IMHO, are making the same mistake. The "portal" trend is a prime example of these kinds of mistakes - not "diversification", but "di-worse-ification".
Selling games is a job. Building technology is a business. By building the best engine he can, he ensures ongoing revenue from licensing, and keeps his firm in the running for the "if someone builds Snow Crash, or an immersive 3D environment to replace the desktop paradigm, it might run on our engine" prizes. The really kewl games are a wonderful bonus.
Contrast this with a lot of gaming firms whose idea is "to produce a hit game every year or so, we don't care if it's an ultra-wow-3D-thriller- with-gibs-flying-everywhere or another copy of Trivial Pursuit, in fact, we prefer Trivial Pursuit since it's cheaper to develop", and you'll see where the smart money is.
Making a hit game is fun, but it's hit-and-miss; it's only a job. Building a technology with broader application, and releasing really cool games (or licensing the technology) to showcase it, is a business. It's fun enough to be worth doing, and it also pays the bills that allow you to keep improving that technology, ad infinitum.
Far be it from me to speak for Carmack - but judging from the quality and consistency of his releases - he not only knows the difference between his business and his job, he's using that knowledge of the difference to make a difference. (And having a damn good time at it too!)
Now, for all of you who liked my request for one-click image autoload toggle a week or so ago, drop by and vote! Maybe a future version of Mozilla will offer you as much control as the old 3.01 Netscape!
Of particular interest - bugs #15148, 15145, 9307, 11875, and 7380. Special thanks to MattyT for doing the legwork of RFE submission and articulating a scheme whereby things could also be allowed/disallowed as a function of domain. I'd be overjoyed with one-click global toggles for all images/cookies/java/javascript, but it'd be positivly orgasmic if the toggles applied globally or according to a user-defined list of accept/deny domains depending on the user's configuration. (Bury the configuration as deep as you want in the menu structure, so long as the actual process of turning these "features" on and off is a single click or menu-hotkey.)
Now if only we lived in an alternate universe where this had been implemented in 3.02, or rather 3.1 so many years ago, and had been part of the codebase ever since! :) Just imagine, a browser where one mouse-click will turn off images, cookies, and javascript, rather than hiding it under the present (4.x) pile of menus...
One of them is "me", and has a fairly typical geekish profile, including USENET postings.
One of me is on Slashdot. You're reading from him now.
The interesting identity is an old version of me who used to hang out with a group of folks who [censored] which, while trendy now, may at some time in the future become unfashionable.
I no longer associate with that last group - not so much because there's anything wrong with [censored], or because I'm no longer interested in [censored], but because I'm hedging my bets against catastrophe. I miss 'em. They were good people, and I made some good friends.
But if you believe - as I do - that the war for privacy and individual rights will ultimately be lost, it was a necessary sacrifice.
My [censored] was pretty mild by today's standards. But it doesn't matter if my [censored] was politics (communism? fascism? democracy?), guns (of any form), sex (of any form that involves pleasure, judging from the religious right), drugs (hey, there are folks advocating prohibition of tobacco and alcohol too!), or rock 'n' roll (industrial music post-Columbine anyone?). If we end up with living in a surveillance state, and folks into [censored] become the scapegoat-du-jour, I could have been targeted for surveillance in a random sweep.
Remember the corollary of the "they came for the foos and I didn't speak up" quotation is that "sooner or later, they'll come for you".
By cutting off that association now, as opposed to "the day the Bad Guys Take Over", I gave myself - and my friends, who may have more integrity and courage than myself - some protection. "Yeah, Mr. Thought Policeman, I used to think [censored] was cool, but I'm better now. I don't know any of my former associates, ain't heard from 'em in years, and your records'll back me up on that. Sorry I can't help you track them down for treatment/reeducation/extermination, as is my civic duty under Neomegalopolis Penal Code Section XVIII.4 Sub-Paragraph (b)."
Yeah, that's spineless cowardice. I sincerely admire the courage of the /. poster who said he'd "rather be under the tanks than riding in them", but when it comes right down to it, how many of us, when push comes to shove, are willing to make that commitment? And how many of us are willing to make that decision on behalf of our families and loved ones well as ourselves?
Frankly, I kinda enjoyed my [censored] days. But I also enjoy my job and my geeky toys. And when I concluded that the halcyon days of a "free world" were almost over, I was forced to ask myself whether I wanted my job and my toys more than I wanted my [censored]. I concluded that there were other forms of fun that I enjoyed more than [censored], and walked away from it.
If I'm wrong about the future, I'll have given up a small part of my life in exchange for more time to spend on other things that I enjoy just as much. A fair trade. But if I'm right, ten years from now, I'll be thanking my lucky stars that I chickened out now and got some experience in living under authoritarianism before it became an essential skill. I'm still not that great at it, but I'm learning and adapting.
It sucks to live in the twilight era of freedom, but there you have it.
"Oh, I know I'm a louse, but I'm a live louse!"
- Daffy Duck
Netscape 4.xx and above: The feature is there, but it's buried under umpteen menus and hard to turn on or off.
That "feature" alone has made me never want to "upgrade" from 3.01.
Here's my "All I Ever Wanted From Netscape Or Mozilla" list, for which I've been waiting since Netscape 3.01:
If I have to download 50M of bloatware to get any or all of those four simple features, I'll do it over a 14.4k link and give you my snail-mail address and all the demographic data your marketers want. If I have to download 3M of the most elegantly-crafted code on God's green earth over a T-1, but lose the ability to easily enable/disable image autoloading that I have with NS3.01, it's still a downgrade, not an upgrade as far as I'm concerned :)
The one good thing about the Windoze install is autodetection of hardware from a huge variety of vendors.
To us geeks, that's lame. I mean, fer chrissakes, how could anyone not know what their hardware is, and if we don't, we know what's close-enough-to-work-on-boot. Don't have an SBSuperMegaWowzersLive! driver on your Windoze CD? Tell Windoze to pretend it's an SB64 or whatever, which'll be close enough for now, and install the right drivers later, simple, right?
Wrong.
The fact that the guy didn't even know if he had a video card (i.e. that "having a video card" is exactly the same in terms of installation as "having a chipset-built-into-the-motherboard") should be telling us something. I'll bet you any money that if the Linux install had popped up a cute little window with a penguin and an animated magnifying glass (to show the user that the system hadn't hung) and said something like "now looking for video hardware... you have a FooBar video card... now installing FooBar video drivers... now looking for sound card...", the guy would have been happy. Since the home user still has to install Linux him/herself, it's incumbent on us to make that installation at least as easy as a Windoze install.
Your installer can't fully identify the hardware? Make a guess based on the manufacturer. Can't even guess? Default to 640x480x16 VGA, just like Windoze, and pop up a note to the effect of "I couldn't figure out what you've got, but I know this'll work. Read this file or go to this URL for assistance." Heck, since we're not M$, we can even provide useful information - like "I dumped the information I could glean from your hardware into this other file. Show this file to someone who knows a lot about computers, and see if he can recognize something."
NO, the Windoze way of "plug it in and watch the installer scribble on your hard drive as it makes educated guesses as to your hardware config" approach isn't the kind of flexibility we want for ourselves, but if Linux is ever gonna Dominate The World, we've gotta stop designing for ourselves and start designing for the guys who don't know whether they've got video cards or not.
Anyone remember what happened cu-seeme, and later on, micros~1 NetMeeting?
The first application of any new technology is almost always pornography. (grinning, ducking, and running)
RIP, Mr. Scott. Thanks for some wonderful acting. Dr. Strangelove has brought many a smile to my face over the years, and will continue to do so for many years to come.
Scientific Reality:The ability of Mission Control to save a "too low" probe during an Earth flyby, (with the probe within a few light-seconds of the transmitter), is a hell of a lot higher than the ability of Mission Control to save a "too low" probe near Mars, (i.e. at a distance of many light-minutes). Thus, the probability of an MCO-style worst-case scenario happening to an RTG-based probe on Earth flyby (I don't recall even the most ardent eco-dude worried about the Venus flyby :-) is still negligible.
(You'll also note that I'm assuming, deliberately and incorrectly, that the dispersal of Cassini's plutonium in Earth's atmosphere would be the catastrophe the anti-nukes told us it would be. It wouldn't. Before they were banned, above-ground nuclear weapons tests had already dispersed many Cassinis' worth of plutonium into the atmosphere, and we're still alive.)
Political Reality:Unfortunately, the naive analysis, which is the only thing the media will propagate, and the only thing the politicians will understand - will read something like this: "We told you so! This is exactly what those eeeeeevil scientists said could never happen with Cassini! But we KNEW! We knew that NASA can't be trusted to fly its probes perfectly, but nobody listened to us! Well, yer gonna hafta listen now! MCO burned up in the atmosphere just like we feared Cassini would! We were right and the eeeeeevil scientists were wrong! Ban all RTGs now before NASA does this with an RTG-based probe in Earth's atmosphere!" And the politicians will obey the screaming hordes.
The loss of MCO is bad for Mars science, but not catastrophic, given the redundancy NASA is putting into its Mars program. Lots of small ships is better than one big ship. The political fallout from the preceding naive analysis of MCO's fiery demise, however, will be much longer-lived and carry a much higher price than the loss of one probe.
If we're lucky, it'll be limited to a ban on Earth flybys for any future RTG-based probes. If we're unlucky, it'll spell the end of RTGs altogether.
While you can easily explore the inner planets on solar power, and maybe even Jupiter if you're careful and advance solar technology somewaht, the mass penalty for larger-and-larger solar panels increases dramatically as you move away from the sun. If one of the side-effects of the MCO failure results in a ban on RTGs, we can basically forget about exploring the outer solar system for at least a generation (i.e. until we can come up with a better technology). That would be a major blow to space science.