Yes, we get it. It's just that we find it interesting that for what appears to be the first time, Xerox is actually trying to make money off of something that happened at PARC. I think a lot of us also think it's rather ironic, or at least irritating, that instead of getting off their fat, desperate corporate asses and implementing a PARC invention, they've sat around waiting for someone else to implement it, then sued them.
Disclaimer: "We" in this context means "people who get it and find it interesting yet ironic or irritating for the following reasons" but does not, in fact, mean all SlashDotters.
There are several billboards at Turner Field here in Atlanta that could not possibly be of interest to someone in, say, Seattle. Ads for local grocery and hardware stores, for example. So would anybody have a problem if when NBC broacasts next season's World Series (of which I'm sure at least two games will be played in Atlanta, troll troll) they replace those boards with ones for national brands?
How about this: Just as they do national / regional / local TV commercials, they can replace the local Atlanta boards with U.S. / northwest / Seattle boards in broadcasts seen in the metropolitan Seattle area? They may as well, since Seattle will be watching the series on TV instead of at their fancy new stadium, troll troll).
Or even better: Now that TimeWarner Cable has access to everything its AOL subscribers have bought on-line for the last year (and every website they've visited), sooner or later maybe they can start replacing those bulletin boards with ones of interest to your household! Imagine visiting Ford's website one afternoon, then that weekend settling down to watch a ballgame only to see ads for Explorers and Tauruses (or Jimmy's and Bonnevilles and auto insurance companies) plastered all over the stadium. Hell, they could do that for the regular advertising, too! Ghod help you if you're watching the game with your S.O. and ads for divorce lawyers, escort services and rubber fetish 1-900 numbers start showing up.
Just a paranoid raving. Or I'd think it was, if stuff like this didn't actually start happening every time I turned around...
If Time-Warner owns AOL, that means they'll own Netscape. Maybe this means somebody'll get around to fixing it so that CNN.com doesn't crash Communicator anymore...
My grandfather-in-law just had an angioplasty--at the age of 91. That was two days ago. This morning he was home feeding his chickens. Of course, at that age, a failed angioplasty would mean open heart surgery which probably would have left him quite dead.
What's arterial plaque made of that would allow us to make swimbots that just scoot around the bloodstream scraping it off the arterial walls? It would be so nice to eat well-marbled dead cow for breakfast, lunch and dinner with no fear of heart attack or stroke.
Of course there's still the minor problem of turning into a big fat fuck...
I took my interpretation from the O.C.G. 16.11.12 6:
(d) This Code section shall not forbid the transportation of any firearm by a person who is not among those enumerated as ineligible for a license under Code Section 16-11-129, provided the firearm is enclosed in a case, unloaded, and separated from its ammunition. This Code section shall not forbid any person who is not among those enumerated as ineligible for a license under Code Section 16-11-129 from transporting a loaded firearm in any private passenger motor vehicle in an open manner and fully exposed to view or in the glove compartment, console, or similar compartment of the vehicle; provided, however, that any person in possession of a valid permit issued pursuant to Code Section 16-11-129 may carry a handgun in any location in a motor vehicle. (Emphasis added).
Needless to say, of you have a pistol in the glove box and the cop asks to see your registration, it would be considered prudent to inform him or her of its presence prior to opening the glovebox.
last time I checked, the government had to compensate private citizens for confiscation of property
With due respect, when was the last time you checked, 1965? The government does indeed have to compensate landowners for land taken under eminent domain laws--think of it as you selling it against your will. However, if a government suspects that property has been used as part of a criminal act or enterprise, in many cases they can simply seize it. And what passes for justification for seizure is getting more and more ludicrous all the time.
Go to your nearest state court building and look on the announcements board at some of the "lawsuits" being prosecuted. I'll give you two examples posted in front of the Fulton County State Superior Court here in Atlanta, Georgia, back in 1997: State of Georgia vs. Brown 1973 Ford Torino Sedan and State of Georgia vs. $19,420. One Saturday a restaurant owner in Atlanta asked one of his employees to take his car and drive down to the bank to deposit the week's receipts. The employee put on his warmup jacket, took the cash and a firearm, got in his boss's car and started driving to the bank. He then got pulled over for an improper lane change or running a green light or some damned thing. The officer, seeing the gun in the car's center console (which in Georgia is where you're supposed to keep it if you don't have a CCW), arrested the driver on suspicion of being black and armed after 1AM and upon searching his person discovered the butt of a marijuana cigaratte in his jacket. He arrested the employee for possession of marijuana and possession of a firearm while in possession of a controlled substance. The state then decided that the car was involved in a drug felony (the gun thing) because the drug felony occurred inside the car, and that the contents of the deposit bag were tied in somehow as well, so they seized them.
Needless to say the restauranteur wanted his stuff back. But meanwhile in Ohio a man made the unfortunate decision to borrow his wife's car and seek the services of a prostitute. When the police arrested him, they seized the car. When his wife went to the state and pointed out that it wasn't his car, that it was hers, and that she did not give her husband consent to use it to solicit a prostitute, the state essentially told her that if she'd learn to suck her husband off properly, maybe he wouldn't have done this, and fuck you, lady, it's our car now. Then the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the police about the wife's car, which quite frankly terrifies me, but setting my personal feelings aside, yeah, when the state of Georgia found out about the Ohio thing they told the restauranteur he could go and fuck himself as well. The really, really fantastic part of the whole thing was that without the $19,420 the owner had to choose between paying his employees and paying his creditors, and when he chose to pay his employees, his creditors went to sue him and when he filed for bankruptcy, the loss of $19,420 was disallowed because it was legally confiscated by the government. So he lost the restaurant as well, because of somebody else's half-smoked joint.
So the next time you think the fourth amendment means anything at all in America, and that you don't have to worry about having your stuff taken away because you're not some evil drug kingpin, think about the restauranteur, and wait until the government seizes your house for possession of a fucking microphone.
On South African leg the recent Around Alone, a solo circumnavigation sailboating race, one of the contestants was "piloting by navigation"--instead of getting his bearings by actually looking at the coast and comparing that to a map, he kept his eyes on his GPS receiver. Then he hit a reef, destroying his keel and putting him out of the race. The GPS had misreported his position by nearly three kilometers.
Once when I was on a camping trip in Colorodo, my friend's GPS spent a good half hour insisting we were in Kansas.
GPS is not reliable. At its absolute best, the fast-reading "civilian" version of it is only accurate to within around twenty or thirty meters. Have you ever driven down a controlled access road that had a city street right next to it? What will your car do when it thinks you're speeding on a surface street you're travelling parallel to?
And I seriously doubt that any practical system can cope with modern three dimensional roadway topographies. What happens when you're driving 120km/h and the GPS suddenly misreads that you are in a 50km/h zone because your motorway has a city street and a hospital beneath it? Or if your GPS reading takes place at the very moment you are on an overpass, where your motorway goes over a 20km/h cart path? Thirty seconds later your car slows to a crawl and you get rammed as you attempt to struggle from the rightmost lane to the shoulder.
Furthermore, GPS is not guaranteed to be available. Quite possibly the device can be defeated by building a Faraday cage around the receiving antenna, or better yet getting a 0.5mW transmitter that says "I am in Greece" over and over again in GPSspeak and taping it to the antenna.
The internal maps had better be accurate, too, and remain accurate. When that tiny roundabout finally gets enlarged to handle trebble the traffic at double the speed, you had better hope your car won't keep you "safe" by holding you to the old circle's rated speed. This probably represents yet another hidden cost: having to upgrade your maps periodically.
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Re:Money makes the world go 'round....
on
Apocalypse Not
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As for my computers, I shut them down: the Linux box so I could replace the tape drive, the other Linux box because there was no point in keeping it up without the other one, and the Windows 1895 machines not because I refuse to trust a Closed Source OS to handle the rollover correctly but because I downloaded the new Mcaffee virus signature file to a Samba volume then forgot to run any scans before I shut down the Linux machine that hosted the Samba volume. Then I realized there had been a fan or computer running in my office every single moment for the past six years. It was very, very quiet.
Then I loaded a bunch of booze and ammo and preservatives-laden/canned food into the pickup and headed for the hills. But hell, I do that every New Year's. It's only so I can get roaring drunk and shoot off guns; they frown on doing that inside the city limits. As for the preservative-laden foods--I'm usually far too hung over on January 1 to cook.
I don't have a question. I just wanted to thanks. There are plenty of people in this industry whom I can admire for their technical competence, but precious few who have your talent but also your spirit, compassion and sincerity. Woz, you are a true hacker and a good man. Thank you.
Warning: vaguely on-topic, but only for the "End of the World" part of the topic. Not on-topic at all for the "Geeks in Space" part. Probably nobody's going to read this but I had to write it down anyway just to share the joy.
So on 1999.12.30, my girlfriend flew down to Atlanta and we "caught up" with each other and on 1999.12.31 we packed up all the champaigne and beer into my brother's Camry because my motorcycle won't hold that much stuff and a girlfriend at one time and we headed on up to Toccoa, Georgia, to get extremely drunk with my cousin Chip and his wife Shannon who is originally from New Jersey.
When we got up there we started drinking almost immediately and by 2330EST between the four adults we had drunk plenty of beer and five bottles of champaigne ranging from Moët & Chandon White Star down to André Strawberry Sparkling Wine which tastes like somebody made a spritzer out of Boone's Farm and Diet Seven Up and some pee.
After we watched Satan emerge from Times Square to repossess Dick Clark's soul we stumbled outside and turned on the boombox and soaked the bonfire in about a gallon and a half of gasoline and stood about twenty feet away from it and tried to light it by shooting Roman candles into the pile. Well, gasoline fumes spread along the ground and when the bonfire finally caught the flames shot along the ground almost to our feet and then raced back to the bonfire which subsequently went wham! and lifted about two feet off the ground and when it cambe back down it went from being a five foot high pile of wood about five feet wide to being a one foot high pile of wood about twenty-five feet wide that was on fire and we were standing right in the middle of it kicking like hell to get all the burning bits in the middle of the yard and away from the Camry and the dog pen and the hundred and ten year old heart-of-pine house and most importantly away from our feet.
Once the fire was more or less centralized we started to dance and jump up and down in a frenetic semicircle at that exact distance from the bonfire where the clothes on one side of your body are starting to smoke while the other half is getting crunchy with frost. We hollered and thrassed while in the dog pen all five beagles and a bloodhound named Elvis started baying at us for almost burning down their yard. We danced and danced and finally Chip and Shannon stumbled inside and my girlfriend fell down on the ground and begged me to bring her a blanket so she could pass out in the yard. I spent the next half hour cajoling her upright so I could get her back to the house but the whole point of this story is that from the time the bonfire exploded to the time I dragged my girlfriend to safety the radio station on the boombox had been playing "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" by R.E.M. over and over again in a continuous loop and when I staggered back outside at about three-thirty A.M. to to vomit on the beagles it was still playing and now I know how Alex felt about Beethoven towards the end of A Clockwork Orange and boy did my head hurt the next day.
P.S. There's nothing better for a hangover than having a three year old and a five year old jumping up and down on your stomach while shrieking at you to turn on the television so they can watch Pokémon.
I'd like to nominate two other products: the Brief editor and the Sprint word processor. Both were very, very customizable--Brief had a clean C-style macro language (as well as a LISPy one) and good OS integration, and Sprint could be hacked into acting like just about any (text-based mid-1980s) word processor you wanted it to. I'd love to see what either could do in a flat-memory environment.
IMHO I think that open-sourcing dead products is a very good thing if you can do it without your lawyers screaming at you about potential loss of trade secrets, even ten-year-old ones now outside your revenue stream. It's good publicity and good community relations, and it actually does make the world a better place.
I nominate the Tu-144 SST. The Tu-144 was a hastily assembled, politically motivated Soviet response to the Concorde and physically resembled that plane, except for the addition of canard control surfaces. Unfortunately, the design was terribly unstable. First tested in December 1968--before Concorde's first flight--the project was scrapped after the plane's very public and spectacular crash at the 1971 Paris air show. I think the Tu-144 stands as an excellent example of the type of failure that results from panicky first-to-market projects.
My other nomination is the Honest John, a short range missile developed for the U.S. military in the 1950s. Although a very capable weapon when carrying a conventional warhead, in 1954 the Pentagon insisted on deploying a nuclear-tipped version with a warhead of over 100 kiloton yield. Unfortunately, with a warhead that size, the blast radius of the missile exceeded its range.
I will send you a written letter on paper that contains the URL of the FAQ.
Here is a link to a.wav file in which I speak the URL aloud.
I have filed a lawsuit in California which names a site at which you can find a link to the FAQ. As with all California lawsuits, you can get a copy of the complaint by sending a check for $n to addr.
All of these produce the same effect; however, only type two is a direct link. The others will ultimately result in you having the same information. So, how do we decide which of these functionally equivalent forms is the illegal one?
And to ask a broader question, where the hell do they get off trying to ban reverse engineering anyway? If it weren't for the reverse engineering of computer technologies, the California economy would still be where it was was in in 1977.
I agree that Alpha may be the best way for this project to lean, if only for one reason: The state project objective is to build systems for post-flight analysis. If this is computationally intensive analysis of telemetry data, as opposed to mere database chugging, then it probably involves a whole lot of floating-point, at which current Alpha processors blow Intel out of the water.
I have no idea how well Linux scales up to Alpha multiprocessor architecture, but unless the application knows how to take explicit advantage of multiple CPUs, or there are multiple instances of the (forked off IPC-active) numbercruncher processes, I don't think you're going to see any benefit from N>1 processors anyway.
Unless your heart is really set on Linux, you may also wish to consider multiprocessor Suns running Solaris; this combination scales quite nicely, has very good built-in thread support, and still leaves Intel's floating point standing.
Fear sells. This has been a major tenet of yellow journalism and of publishing in general for some time.
And the easiest thing to make someone afraid of is something they are dependent on, but can't control or don't understand. Fear is a great hook--you're watching Friends or whatever and all of a sudden some talking heads pop up and says, "Why bottled water may be bad for you, tonight on the 11AliveCast." So you watch the 11AliveCast and they keep teasing you along until 11:26PM, when they tell you bottled water isn't fluoridated so please for ghod's sake brush.
And the next week bottled water sales are down. They really are. Air travel drops a small but significant amount after airline crashes, and boy-oh-boy do those ever grab airtime. The irony is that lots of those panickers end up driving, which is far more dangerous than flying.
Or one sociopath goes and puts cyanide in Tylenol capsules in Chicago in 1982. The press went absolutely batshit over that one, and within a month seven local poisonings became 270 copycats poisonings nationwide, and every bottle of Tylenol in the U.S. had to be taken off the shelf. Within a year all OTC pharmeceuticals were repackaged to be tamper resistant, for over $1.3 billion per year in direct costs, never mind the indirect costs of making otherwise harmless medicines impossible for elderly people to open.
Sending the population into a panic also makes governments adopt hasty, poorly thought-out measured to remedy what their citizens are convinced are terrible, terrible problems. Does anybody remember the plastic handgun scare of 1985? Huge panic, many laws passed, product did not exist and is still technologically unfeasible.
Whipping up a frenzy of concern and fear may not be responsible journalism, but it brings in readers and viewers, consequences be damned. Speaking of hasty government actions, read about W.R. Hearst's interest in the Spanish-American war some time, if you're ever curious about the lengths people have gone to to sell papers.
Moral: The manipulation of public perception can turn minor problems into major problems, not the least of which will be the public perception itself.
Let me get this straight: I'm going to run the Linux I bought to replace Windows that I bought to replace DOS that I bought to replace my Atari 400 so I can run a Java RTE so I can run a PDP emulator so I can run Unix V7 so I can rebuild V6 from the Lions-commented source in a book legally reprinted from an illegally photocopied Australian book based on source code from that came from New Jersey by way of Wales. To quote Calvin and Hobbes, "The theological implications are staggering."
Is there any way of setting up an environment to run Version 7, possibly inside a VM of some sort under Linux?
I think that one of the most significant things about Lions's work is that it's a commentary on a complete kernel. Works like Bach's seminal Design of the Unix Operating System notwithstanding, there are no follow-the-code examples of a real OS out there today; modern Unices like Linux and BSD are far too complex to just sit down with and start understanding the deep mysteries of OS construction. Of those two, I'd prefer BSD for its more cohesive design, but even then, you're looking at twenty or a hundred times the code of the original Version [67] kernels. A 1990s Unix contains deep kernel hacks that make sense only in implementing advanced networking, scheduling, and virtual memory contexts; the study of these should be postponed until after the fundamentals are mastered. In contrast, there are wristwatches that could run V6; on a Palm Pilot or an embedded 386SX/20 system, V6 would scream compared to the now incredibly bloated 2.2.x Linuces.
I think the Lions book and a running system on top of it would be a tremendously Good Thing for a burgeoning Linus Torvalds or Alan Cox.
There was a reference to Western Electric trying to supress the Lions Book. I never heard of them having anything to do with the OS. What was their stake in Version 6 or 7?
We've been focussing too much on humans--when will we get Dog Things? Just drop a Doberman's brain into a custom chassis and send put it on patrol. Teach it to chase speeders down the road, bite them on the bumper and haul them to a complete stop.
Turn dolphins into nuclear-powered attack submarines.
As for the second part of my title--what about the possibilities of sending a signal back up the nerve? If the so-called pleasure centers of the brain can be tapped, this could be humanity's last invention.
I have a feeling that the Bush campaign really does see the writing on the wall--that this is satire and as such is protected free speech--and that what they are doing is seeking to get it taken down while the matter is "reviewed"; in other words, the Bush camp is fighting a delaying action in hopes the site can be taken off-line until after it matters.
Satire is protected speech. I don't think that asking for a contribution makes gwbush.com a political action site any more than the Times is for asking you to buy a subscription to their newspaper, which openly endorses candidates.
Nevertheless, Bush's team will make every effort to wear Exley down using every questionable--but still legal--tactic available.
That's the real terror: that all you need to do to get your way against a not-as-rich-as-you person is to sic lawyers on them to the point that they must either capitulate or become bankrupt. I think he'll soon find some soft money in the form of pro bono legal representation against Exley. Maybe Exley's payme-link should point to his legal defense fund.
Ditto for the Glock 17, which can fire underwater if need be.
The Glock mechanism is extremely elegant--they started with first principles and along the way to a complete package they incidentally solved a lot of the problems all other manufacturers took as givens--a genuinely insightful bit of engineering. If you look carefully at the dents they leave in your primers, you can have a Zen moment understanding how the entire trigger-cock DAO mechanism operates.
The hacks are just buried further beneath all the other mundane garbage. Many times a great hack is simply something done to get a stuck project unstuck; if nobody ever stops to look back on it, nobody realizes how wonderful it was. Often, a hack is merely an amazing insight, applied at the right moment.
You can find a beautiful and elegant hack just by opening a grandfather clock: the escape wheel and pallet.
One of engineering's best hacks was the laying of the first cable for the bridge across Niagra Falls: the surveyor saw a kid flying a kite, so he gave the kid a dollar to snag his kite in some bushes on the other side of the falls. Then he used the kite string to pull a cord, and the cord to pull a rope, the rope to pull a cable, and the bridge was underway.
One question I think needs answering at this point--what's the difference between a great hack, and a great invention? I ask this because something like the screw inside an Artesian well simply blows my mind with its simplicity, but in the intervening millenia it has become a standard device. If inventions count, I propose the wheel-and-axle and the use of interlocking gears as the two most significant hacks in history.
Before we discuss computer privacy and civil liberty issues we have to discuss some even older civil liberty issues having to do with anonymity and free speech.
I think that Slashdot itself had a fine idea when it started the points system--it preserves the right of anonymity but lends more credibility to "signed" things. E-mail and other electronic communication should be the same way: one should have the right to post anonymously.
At the same time, there must be such a thing as a digital signature that is not traceable back to a real person. This is the sort of strength that anonymous remailers have--or used to, before the "church" of Scientology coerced the Swedish (I think) government into confiscating the identities of an anonymous remailer's system. In order to protect political speech, there must be a way to sign things verifiably but privately. Prior to the American Revolution, the influential Federalist Papers were published as a series of pamphlets, all signed by "Publius". In this modern age, if anyone can sign "Publius" to any document, the real message would be drowned out by spam, mockery, satire, and possibly even subverters of Publius's message. On the other hand, if Alexander Hamilton and James Madison had to sign their own, real names to their works, they would have been arrested, shipped to England and hung as treasoners after the first pamphlet was published. Always remember that several of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were arrested; of them, a few were tortured or executed, or died in prison. That's what can happen when you chose to speak out against a government, but use your own true name.
So, how do we protect the right of safe free speech without having meaningful speech drowned out by spam?
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer: "We" in this context means "people who get it and find it interesting yet ironic or irritating for the following reasons" but does not, in fact, mean all SlashDotters.
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How about this: Just as they do national / regional / local TV commercials, they can replace the local Atlanta boards with U.S. / northwest / Seattle boards in broadcasts seen in the metropolitan Seattle area? They may as well, since Seattle will be watching the series on TV instead of at their fancy new stadium, troll troll).
Or even better: Now that TimeWarner Cable has access to everything its AOL subscribers have bought on-line for the last year (and every website they've visited), sooner or later maybe they can start replacing those bulletin boards with ones of interest to your household! Imagine visiting Ford's website one afternoon, then that weekend settling down to watch a ballgame only to see ads for Explorers and Tauruses (or Jimmy's and Bonnevilles and auto insurance companies) plastered all over the stadium. Hell, they could do that for the regular advertising, too! Ghod help you if you're watching the game with your S.O. and ads for divorce lawyers, escort services and rubber fetish 1-900 numbers start showing up.
Just a paranoid raving. Or I'd think it was, if stuff like this didn't actually start happening every time I turned around...
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If Time-Warner owns AOL, that means they'll own Netscape. Maybe this means somebody'll get around to fixing it so that CNN.com doesn't crash Communicator anymore...
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What's arterial plaque made of that would allow us to make swimbots that just scoot around the bloodstream scraping it off the arterial walls? It would be so nice to eat well-marbled dead cow for breakfast, lunch and dinner with no fear of heart attack or stroke.
Of course there's still the minor problem of turning into a big fat fuck...
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(d) This Code section shall not forbid the transportation of any firearm by a person who is not among those enumerated as ineligible for a license under Code Section 16-11-129, provided the firearm is enclosed in a case, unloaded, and separated from its ammunition. This Code section shall not forbid any person who is not among those enumerated as ineligible for a license under Code Section 16-11-129 from transporting a loaded firearm in any private passenger motor vehicle in an open manner and fully exposed to view or in the glove compartment, console, or similar compartment of the vehicle; provided, however, that any person in possession of a valid permit issued pursuant to Code Section 16-11-129 may carry a handgun in any location in a motor vehicle. (Emphasis added).
Needless to say, of you have a pistol in the glove box and the cop asks to see your registration, it would be considered prudent to inform him or her of its presence prior to opening the glovebox.
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With due respect, when was the last time you checked, 1965? The government does indeed have to compensate landowners for land taken under eminent domain laws--think of it as you selling it against your will. However, if a government suspects that property has been used as part of a criminal act or enterprise, in many cases they can simply seize it. And what passes for justification for seizure is getting more and more ludicrous all the time.
Go to your nearest state court building and look on the announcements board at some of the "lawsuits" being prosecuted. I'll give you two examples posted in front of the Fulton County State Superior Court here in Atlanta, Georgia, back in 1997: State of Georgia vs. Brown 1973 Ford Torino Sedan and State of Georgia vs. $19,420. One Saturday a restaurant owner in Atlanta asked one of his employees to take his car and drive down to the bank to deposit the week's receipts. The employee put on his warmup jacket, took the cash and a firearm, got in his boss's car and started driving to the bank. He then got pulled over for an improper lane change or running a green light or some damned thing. The officer, seeing the gun in the car's center console (which in Georgia is where you're supposed to keep it if you don't have a CCW), arrested the driver on suspicion of being black and armed after 1AM and upon searching his person discovered the butt of a marijuana cigaratte in his jacket. He arrested the employee for possession of marijuana and possession of a firearm while in possession of a controlled substance. The state then decided that the car was involved in a drug felony (the gun thing) because the drug felony occurred inside the car, and that the contents of the deposit bag were tied in somehow as well, so they seized them.
Needless to say the restauranteur wanted his stuff back. But meanwhile in Ohio a man made the unfortunate decision to borrow his wife's car and seek the services of a prostitute. When the police arrested him, they seized the car. When his wife went to the state and pointed out that it wasn't his car, that it was hers, and that she did not give her husband consent to use it to solicit a prostitute, the state essentially told her that if she'd learn to suck her husband off properly, maybe he wouldn't have done this, and fuck you, lady, it's our car now. Then the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the police about the wife's car, which quite frankly terrifies me, but setting my personal feelings aside, yeah, when the state of Georgia found out about the Ohio thing they told the restauranteur he could go and fuck himself as well. The really, really fantastic part of the whole thing was that without the $19,420 the owner had to choose between paying his employees and paying his creditors, and when he chose to pay his employees, his creditors went to sue him and when he filed for bankruptcy, the loss of $19,420 was disallowed because it was legally confiscated by the government. So he lost the restaurant as well, because of somebody else's half-smoked joint.
So the next time you think the fourth amendment means anything at all in America, and that you don't have to worry about having your stuff taken away because you're not some evil drug kingpin, think about the restauranteur, and wait until the government seizes your house for possession of a fucking microphone.
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On South African leg the recent Around Alone , a solo circumnavigation sailboating race, one of the contestants was "piloting by navigation"--instead of getting his bearings by actually looking at the coast and comparing that to a map, he kept his eyes on his GPS receiver. Then he hit a reef, destroying his keel and putting him out of the race. The GPS had misreported his position by nearly three kilometers.
Once when I was on a camping trip in Colorodo, my friend's GPS spent a good half hour insisting we were in Kansas.
GPS is not reliable. At its absolute best, the fast-reading "civilian" version of it is only accurate to within around twenty or thirty meters. Have you ever driven down a controlled access road that had a city street right next to it? What will your car do when it thinks you're speeding on a surface street you're travelling parallel to?
And I seriously doubt that any practical system can cope with modern three dimensional roadway topographies. What happens when you're driving 120km/h and the GPS suddenly misreads that you are in a 50km/h zone because your motorway has a city street and a hospital beneath it? Or if your GPS reading takes place at the very moment you are on an overpass, where your motorway goes over a 20km/h cart path? Thirty seconds later your car slows to a crawl and you get rammed as you attempt to struggle from the rightmost lane to the shoulder.
Furthermore, GPS is not guaranteed to be available. Quite possibly the device can be defeated by building a Faraday cage around the receiving antenna, or better yet getting a 0.5mW transmitter that says "I am in Greece" over and over again in GPSspeak and taping it to the antenna.
The internal maps had better be accurate, too, and remain accurate. When that tiny roundabout finally gets enlarged to handle trebble the traffic at double the speed, you had better hope your car won't keep you "safe" by holding you to the old circle's rated speed. This probably represents yet another hidden cost: having to upgrade your maps periodically.
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As for my computers, I shut them down: the Linux box so I could replace the tape drive, the other Linux box because there was no point in keeping it up without the other one, and the Windows 1895 machines not because I refuse to trust a Closed Source OS to handle the rollover correctly but because I downloaded the new Mcaffee virus signature file to a Samba volume then forgot to run any scans before I shut down the Linux machine that hosted the Samba volume. Then I realized there had been a fan or computer running in my office every single moment for the past six years. It was very, very quiet.
Then I loaded a bunch of booze and ammo and preservatives-laden/canned food into the pickup and headed for the hills. But hell, I do that every New Year's. It's only so I can get roaring drunk and shoot off guns; they frown on doing that inside the city limits. As for the preservative-laden foods--I'm usually far too hung over on January 1 to cook.
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I don't have a question. I just wanted to thanks. There are plenty of people in this industry whom I can admire for their technical competence, but precious few who have your talent but also your spirit, compassion and sincerity. Woz, you are a true hacker and a good man. Thank you.
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So on 1999.12.30, my girlfriend flew down to Atlanta and we "caught up" with each other and on 1999.12.31 we packed up all the champaigne and beer into my brother's Camry because my motorcycle won't hold that much stuff and a girlfriend at one time and we headed on up to Toccoa, Georgia, to get extremely drunk with my cousin Chip and his wife Shannon who is originally from New Jersey.
When we got up there we started drinking almost immediately and by 2330EST between the four adults we had drunk plenty of beer and five bottles of champaigne ranging from Moët & Chandon White Star down to André Strawberry Sparkling Wine which tastes like somebody made a spritzer out of Boone's Farm and Diet Seven Up and some pee.
After we watched Satan emerge from Times Square to repossess Dick Clark's soul we stumbled outside and turned on the boombox and soaked the bonfire in about a gallon and a half of gasoline and stood about twenty feet away from it and tried to light it by shooting Roman candles into the pile. Well, gasoline fumes spread along the ground and when the bonfire finally caught the flames shot along the ground almost to our feet and then raced back to the bonfire which subsequently went wham! and lifted about two feet off the ground and when it cambe back down it went from being a five foot high pile of wood about five feet wide to being a one foot high pile of wood about twenty-five feet wide that was on fire and we were standing right in the middle of it kicking like hell to get all the burning bits in the middle of the yard and away from the Camry and the dog pen and the hundred and ten year old heart-of-pine house and most importantly away from our feet.
Once the fire was more or less centralized we started to dance and jump up and down in a frenetic semicircle at that exact distance from the bonfire where the clothes on one side of your body are starting to smoke while the other half is getting crunchy with frost. We hollered and thrassed while in the dog pen all five beagles and a bloodhound named Elvis started baying at us for almost burning down their yard. We danced and danced and finally Chip and Shannon stumbled inside and my girlfriend fell down on the ground and begged me to bring her a blanket so she could pass out in the yard. I spent the next half hour cajoling her upright so I could get her back to the house but the whole point of this story is that from the time the bonfire exploded to the time I dragged my girlfriend to safety the radio station on the boombox had been playing "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" by R.E.M. over and over again in a continuous loop and when I staggered back outside at about three-thirty A.M. to to vomit on the beagles it was still playing and now I know how Alex felt about Beethoven towards the end of A Clockwork Orange and boy did my head hurt the next day.
P.S. There's nothing better for a hangover than having a three year old and a five year old jumping up and down on your stomach while shrieking at you to turn on the television so they can watch Pokémon.
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It was my understanding that the project was scrapped. Thank you for setting me straight.
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IMHO I think that open-sourcing dead products is a very good thing if you can do it without your lawyers screaming at you about potential loss of trade secrets, even ten-year-old ones now outside your revenue stream. It's good publicity and good community relations, and it actually does make the world a better place.
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My other nomination is the Honest John, a short range missile developed for the U.S. military in the 1950s. Although a very capable weapon when carrying a conventional warhead, in 1954 the Pentagon insisted on deploying a nuclear-tipped version with a warhead of over 100 kiloton yield. Unfortunately, with a warhead that size, the blast radius of the missile exceeded its range.
So, any other nominations?
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All of these produce the same effect; however, only type two is a direct link. The others will ultimately result in you having the same information. So, how do we decide which of these functionally equivalent forms is the illegal one?
And to ask a broader question, where the hell do they get off trying to ban reverse engineering anyway? If it weren't for the reverse engineering of computer technologies, the California economy would still be where it was was in in 1977.
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I have no idea how well Linux scales up to Alpha multiprocessor architecture, but unless the application knows how to take explicit advantage of multiple CPUs, or there are multiple instances of the (forked off IPC-active) numbercruncher processes, I don't think you're going to see any benefit from N>1 processors anyway.
Unless your heart is really set on Linux, you may also wish to consider multiprocessor Suns running Solaris; this combination scales quite nicely, has very good built-in thread support, and still leaves Intel's floating point standing.
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Actually, it was Abbott Joseph Liebling. Cynical enough to be Mencken, though...
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And the easiest thing to make someone afraid of is something they are dependent on, but can't control or don't understand. Fear is a great hook--you're watching Friends or whatever and all of a sudden some talking heads pop up and says, "Why bottled water may be bad for you, tonight on the 11AliveCast." So you watch the 11AliveCast and they keep teasing you along until 11:26PM, when they tell you bottled water isn't fluoridated so please for ghod's sake brush.
And the next week bottled water sales are down. They really are. Air travel drops a small but significant amount after airline crashes, and boy-oh-boy do those ever grab airtime. The irony is that lots of those panickers end up driving, which is far more dangerous than flying.
Or one sociopath goes and puts cyanide in Tylenol capsules in Chicago in 1982. The press went absolutely batshit over that one, and within a month seven local poisonings became 270 copycats poisonings nationwide, and every bottle of Tylenol in the U.S. had to be taken off the shelf. Within a year all OTC pharmeceuticals were repackaged to be tamper resistant, for over $1.3 billion per year in direct costs, never mind the indirect costs of making otherwise harmless medicines impossible for elderly people to open.
Sending the population into a panic also makes governments adopt hasty, poorly thought-out measured to remedy what their citizens are convinced are terrible, terrible problems. Does anybody remember the plastic handgun scare of 1985? Huge panic, many laws passed, product did not exist and is still technologically unfeasible.
Whipping up a frenzy of concern and fear may not be responsible journalism, but it brings in readers and viewers, consequences be damned. Speaking of hasty government actions, read about W.R. Hearst's interest in the Spanish-American war some time, if you're ever curious about the lengths people have gone to to sell papers.
Moral: The manipulation of public perception can turn minor problems into major problems, not the least of which will be the public perception itself.
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Should be fun.
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I think that one of the most significant things about Lions's work is that it's a commentary on a complete kernel. Works like Bach's seminal Design of the Unix Operating System notwithstanding, there are no follow-the-code examples of a real OS out there today; modern Unices like Linux and BSD are far too complex to just sit down with and start understanding the deep mysteries of OS construction. Of those two, I'd prefer BSD for its more cohesive design, but even then, you're looking at twenty or a hundred times the code of the original Version [67] kernels. A 1990s Unix contains deep kernel hacks that make sense only in implementing advanced networking, scheduling, and virtual memory contexts; the study of these should be postponed until after the fundamentals are mastered. In contrast, there are wristwatches that could run V6; on a Palm Pilot or an embedded 386SX/20 system, V6 would scream compared to the now incredibly bloated 2.2.x Linuces.
I think the Lions book and a running system on top of it would be a tremendously Good Thing for a burgeoning Linus Torvalds or Alan Cox.
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There was a reference to Western Electric trying to supress the Lions Book. I never heard of them having anything to do with the OS. What was their stake in Version 6 or 7?
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Turn dolphins into nuclear-powered attack submarines.
As for the second part of my title--what about the possibilities of sending a signal back up the nerve? If the so-called pleasure centers of the brain can be tapped, this could be humanity's last invention.
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Satire is protected speech. I don't think that asking for a contribution makes gwbush.com a political action site any more than the Times is for asking you to buy a subscription to their newspaper, which openly endorses candidates.
Nevertheless, Bush's team will make every effort to wear Exley down using every questionable--but still legal--tactic available.
That's the real terror: that all you need to do to get your way against a not-as-rich-as-you person is to sic lawyers on them to the point that they must either capitulate or become bankrupt. I think he'll soon find some soft money in the form of pro bono legal representation against Exley. Maybe Exley's payme-link should point to his legal defense fund.
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The Glock mechanism is extremely elegant--they started with first principles and along the way to a complete package they incidentally solved a lot of the problems all other manufacturers took as givens--a genuinely insightful bit of engineering. If you look carefully at the dents they leave in your primers, you can have a Zen moment understanding how the entire trigger-cock DAO mechanism operates.
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You can find a beautiful and elegant hack just by opening a grandfather clock: the escape wheel and pallet.
One of engineering's best hacks was the laying of the first cable for the bridge across Niagra Falls: the surveyor saw a kid flying a kite, so he gave the kid a dollar to snag his kite in some bushes on the other side of the falls. Then he used the kite string to pull a cord, and the cord to pull a rope, the rope to pull a cable, and the bridge was underway.
One question I think needs answering at this point--what's the difference between a great hack, and a great invention? I ask this because something like the screw inside an Artesian well simply blows my mind with its simplicity, but in the intervening millenia it has become a standard device. If inventions count, I propose the wheel-and-axle and the use of interlocking gears as the two most significant hacks in history.
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I think that Slashdot itself had a fine idea when it started the points system--it preserves the right of anonymity but lends more credibility to "signed" things. E-mail and other electronic communication should be the same way: one should have the right to post anonymously.
At the same time, there must be such a thing as a digital signature that is not traceable back to a real person. This is the sort of strength that anonymous remailers have--or used to, before the "church" of Scientology coerced the Swedish (I think) government into confiscating the identities of an anonymous remailer's system. In order to protect political speech, there must be a way to sign things verifiably but privately. Prior to the American Revolution, the influential Federalist Papers were published as a series of pamphlets, all signed by "Publius". In this modern age, if anyone can sign "Publius" to any document, the real message would be drowned out by spam, mockery, satire, and possibly even subverters of Publius's message. On the other hand, if Alexander Hamilton and James Madison had to sign their own, real names to their works, they would have been arrested, shipped to England and hung as treasoners after the first pamphlet was published. Always remember that several of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were arrested; of them, a few were tortured or executed, or died in prison. That's what can happen when you chose to speak out against a government, but use your own true name.
So, how do we protect the right of safe free speech without having meaningful speech drowned out by spam?
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