I felt it would be beneficial for my wife and kid to have more Chinese-language services in our neighborhood, so I told the Census there were five guys from Mainland China living in my basement.
Not knowing what your particular Asset Tracking software does, I'd be hard pressed to make a blanket statement like "Oh, yeah, Linux can do that".
However, if I can spec out an idiot tool:
* Monitors physical disk spec
* Monitors connectivity to the net (don't want
machines walking off completely)
* Tracks quantity of RAM inside of system
* Tracks software installed
* Reports back to a manager system with routine hourly/ daily reports on system status.
* Pages admin in the event of an "incident" (i.e. a machine with no users logged in mysteriously going offline at 3 a.m.)
I see UCD-snmp, Tripwire, and a few hundred lines of Perl code.
Integration time? About two to three weeks.
(I'd say 48 hours and lots of coffee, but since I'm in IT and not development, I get rewarded for being conservative)
Dan Savage is hip, funny, and nasty (all good characteristics in my book), but that doesn't make him right.
The core of his article is the old argument for tactical voting: "If you don't vote for Gore, you'll get Bush, and then you'll be sorry.". What Savage is forgetting is that the Executive branch does not make laws. The President acts as a cheerleader (NOT a lawmaker) for domestic policies, is given free reign with foreign policy. (I'm going to lose my lefty cred for this) What I've heard of Bush's foreign policy, i.e. very limited intervention, does not bother me.
<IRONY>
The President has veto power over legislation. So remember that if Bush becomes president, that torrent of progressive legislation that has been coming out of Congress will just come to a halt. If Bush had been president 8 years ago, we wouldn't have laws like.... Never mind.
</IRONY>
"But What About The Supreme Court?" you scream. Indeed what about it? The Democratic party has been scaring us with losing Roe v. Wade for years. As for me, I live in Washington state (pro-choice well before Roe v. Wade). I have friends in Oregon (ditto), and California (also pro-choice). The worst case scenario would not affect me or anyone I am vaguely close to. Yes, places like Kansas would probably pass pro-life legislation. Frankly, having been to Kansas, I think they pretty much have it coming. I am getting bone tired of holding my nose and supporting the Democratic party when the party, in it's rush for dollars has not been supporting me.
Frankly, having listened to my mother howl over what an outrage 8 years of Clinton's warmed-over centerist policies have been, I would kind of look forward to a Bush presidency. "OK. You have the Congress, you have the executive. Now YOU try to change the Republic brain-boy!"
There's still a few weeks before the election. I might change my mind again.
j.
Re:Cyberselfish, anyone?
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Lawsuits Suck
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This is exactly the type of thing Borsook was talking about in her book--she was amazed that the underappreciated, downtrodden nerd didn't associate with other underappreciated downtrodden people, like minorities, environmentalists, labor, etc. but rather associated with big business.
Yeah, but let me take a stab as to why this is...
Most geeks I know are very results-oriented. Lock yourself into a room for 40 hours straight, get flat food shoved under the door, drink more Jolt, go! Go! GO! and get the project done!!
The political process is, by definition, the opposite of all that. Politics is about developing coalitions and forming a consensus, even if the consensus is not anyone's perfect solution. These things annoy the geek mindframe.
It's inefficient. It's a drag, and my God it is soooooo slow.
The end result is that many geeks are unplugged from the political process, or involved in idealistic 3rd party movements. (Libertarians are popular, since a Libertarian can be defined inside of a fairly broad ideological specrtum. With no viable candidates or past voting record to defend, you can claim Libertarianism is for x or not for y and be pretty safe).
So it's time to look at the political process like version control or documenting your code. Is it fun and rad? Uh-uh. Is it part of your core beliefs? Nope. But in life, like in code, ya gotta do it at a certain point our wound up being hung.
One problem I have with Napster (and maybe it's just a PEBKAC[1] problem) is that I can search for songs, or artists, but I can't search for "something that sounds like Husker Du, but different". End result: I wind up downloading stuff I know. This is fine, but I haven't been turned on to much really new stuff via Napster, for exactly that reason.
I don't consider "format" to be a dirty word (Although when I hear it from Messr. Curry, I want to take a shower). The DJ my local college station does not slap on random records. He plays stuff that works together. Is that a format? Yes. It's not a driven-by-the-station-manager-and-the-promo-chick- that-blows-him format, but a format nevertheless.
Mostly, it's a question of choice. If I want to download x song by y artist, I should be able to do so. If I want to just listen to stuff in an associative stream, I should be able to do that too.
If Napster turns into the little boxes #Top40# #Country# #Dance# that Mr. Curry with his 20 years of brain ossification is visualizing, then yeah. We have a problem.
j.
[1] PEBKAC - Sl. Cust. Service.: Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair.
The language you speak at home or with your friends is usually better for cursing people out.
For instance, when I lived in Taipei, people would use Mandarin for a lot of communications, but when it was time to get down-and-dirty, only the native Min-Nan dialect would do.
In Beijing (where Mandarin IS the local dialect), they didn't seem to have this restriction!
Legislation strengthening the bill of rights is in order - extending them to any place which is made explicitly accessible to the public, such as shopping malls.
First, I don't think mere legislation would be enough. A constitutional amendment would probably be required to make it stick (standard IANAL disclaimer applies).
Second, the issue of extending the bill of rights to public spaces gets wildly tricky. If folks with a petition can stand in a mall and get signatures, and/or if the Jehovah's Witnesses can preach, can I run a hot dog stand in a mall? (with the appropriate licenses from the city of course) Is it OK to admit people who are visibly armed?
By themselves, these are stupid straw-man arguments, so bear with me here. Malls exist (and derive their "value added") because all the stuff that goes on in the streets doesn't happen there. Now, if you extend the rights of the streets into the malls, you are depriving the owners of something quite valuable (i.e. the ability to collect much higher rents than a comparable standalone storefront would).
Property rights are also part of the Constitution. Countries that have ambiguous or ill-defined property rights are generally really un-fun places. (actually, most of them are a lot of fun in the "let's party!" sense, but also miserable at distribution of wealth, with most tangibles being held by an extremely small group of people tied to the current leadership).
The problem in the U.S. is largely local, and the solution should probably be local as well. It was easier to allow large property developers to take 1000 acres of land to build a mall than to take the time to build a living, viable, and open community space. Likewise, it should probably be possible to rewrite zoning ordinaces to say that anyone with a large, enclosed retail space should draw up a series of guidelines under which people should be able to excercise some form of free speech/political expression, possibly in the same vein as broadcasters are required to air a certain number of public service announcements as part of their programming.
No, I don't know how to make this happen either, but it's worth a think.
But we're not talking about Nazi Germany here. This should be a pretty simple private property case. Because it involves written language, people sometimes think it's a free speech case.
If the Aryan Nations applies for a permit to march here, the city is all but required to give them permission. That's free speech (and its a good thing -- even if the AN is not). If members of same said group show up at the mall and do a demonstration, they'll be hustled out on to the street in short order. A mall is private property, and it's guests can be chosen by the management as they see fit.
If there is ANY issue to discuss here, it should be that many communities "public spaces" (i.e. shopping malls, business centers,/.,etc.) are in fact privately owned, and what the ramifications are for free speech and expression in light of that.
And no, the original post was really not that funny, but that's beside the point.
Looks like we're going to abandon using the economic stick on the Middle Kingdom.
This is probably not a bad thing. We've done 10 years of rhetoric, threats, and even a few punishments which cost the Chinese market access in the US.
Influence on China's human rights record? Zero.
If you think that "getting tough on China" will work, think again. Chinese foreign policy is based on one principle:
China was brought low by foreigners once (the opium wars, the "unequal treaties", Shanghai being put under foreign legal jurdistiction, the "8-nation army" which put down the White Lotus sect and sacked Empress Dowager Cixi's palace, etc. etc.), This will never happen again.
The leaders of the PRC have done actions in the past and will continue to do actions in the future simply to demonstrate to each other that China will not be pushed around by foreign pressure. For example, asst. Sec of State Winston Lord's 1993 list of requests for human rights improvments were met with one of the worst years of political crackdowns since Tiananmen.
Is this frustrating? Yep. Does China need to change? Yep. Is there anything reasonable the US can do about it? Nope.
I've followed some of the comments here, and would like to make some observations. I have extensive experience in hosting servers in Taiwan, and have been involved in projects in several other countries (HK, PRC, Philippines, Singapore, etc.).
1) It is not necessary for one of the Major Powers to cut Internet connectivity to your offshore host. It is merely necessary for your host organization to consider (by themselves, or with outside prodding) the consequences of having their net connection shut off. Your host organization will probably decide that your business is not worth the potential consequences.
2) With development comes stricter IP laws. The old pirate havens of Korea, Taiwan, and Hongkong have all been pressured very hard (and effectively!) to enforce IP in their territories. Other countries (Indonesia comes to mind) are still something of a piracy haven, but acquiring bandwidth will be difficult, and I don't know if I would want to host a "free speech" site in a country with a two-year history of multi-party democracy.
3) Banking privacy and copyright are two different sets of laws. I would be wary of current or former British colonies. Most have rather nasty "prior restraint" laws which could complicate your life.
4) Other things to look at are the existence (and viability of) libel/slander laws, etc. These are much more commonly used in most of the overseas territories I've had the pleasure of living or traveling in.
5) There was a wonderful site on the web for several years at taxbusters.org which offered services to get numbered bank accounts, second passports, etc. The owner of the site always seemed to have trouble keeping his site hosting, no matter what exotic corner of the world the server was parked in.
6) Most importantly, prepare for sticker shock. Dedicated T1 connectivity gets very expensive (i.e. around US$60-70,000/month) when you're almost anywhere in Asia. I can't speak for other parts of the world.
In summary, I'm not very optimistic about this avenue of exploration, but wish you all the best just the same.
It is a common policy of Japanese electronics companies to test-market (although some would say "beta-test") their products in Japan before releasing them worldwide.
I remember a friend who had just done a shopping trip to Akihabara coming back home to brag about his "only available in Japan" stereo. What a drag to have the stereo suffer a system crash about two hours into the party that night.
At a guess, I'd say it's done inside of the routers (Zhongguo Dianxing uses and recommends Cisco). Regretfully, when I was meeting with the techs at China Telecom, I was asking about boring questions regarding bandwidth availability, and didn't think to bug them about the Great Firewall.
The technology is pretty simple, actually. There's only one supplier of Internet service in the PRC... The Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications Circa 1997, there were three points of entry into the national network. One which passed through Beijing, one which apparently landed at Shanghai, and one which came in through Guangzhou (presumably from Hong Kong).
What was done was a simple (apparently) IP-based firewall. Any attempts to contact such subversive websites as cnn.com, chinatimes.com, or icrt.com.tw (old Taiwan hands will chuckle at this one) would resolve all right, you would just wait forever for the connection to be established.
Many hackers, including a few who post to Slashdot, make use of proxy servers to work around this. Better-known proxy servers are blocked, and new proxy addresses get propagated. Nobody who really WANTS information is deprived of it.
Why is all of this done? Well, I don't play golf with Jiang Zemin, but I can take a guess. China is not monolithic in it's politics. There are a few moderates in the government, and a few extremely conservative troglodytes as well. The firewall is (IMNSHO) a way to appease the more conservative members of the government that letting people have access to the Internet is OK. Does it work? Nope. Does it have to? Well... Only well enough to fool a few not-very-technical 70 year-old Politburo members.
Cheers!
J.
Re:The polie don't mind that you use drugs? wtf
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A New DeCSS
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* sigh *
I already told you I think this is irrelevant, but since you persist, have you considered how many people use or traffic in drugs and don't go to jail?
You seem to have this premise going that you're in a totalitarian (or at least semi-totalitarian) state that will mess with you at will. If it benefits your world view to think this way, be my guest. I've had the pleasure in my life of going to some truly fun parts of the globe (including the PRC and Suharto-era Indonesia). Methinks you need to get out more before you go on all hip and quoting Orwell. No, not all is sweetness and light here in the good ol' USA, but things could be a lot worse, and in many places, they are!
Take care,
J.
Suits aren't expensive, pursuing them is...
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A New DeCSS
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Since IANAL, I won't talk very much about the law (which I have merely a laymans grasp of) but rather about business, which I know a lot more about.
Even getting sued is a major expense eevn if you are innocent (I know),
First-hand experience is hard to controvert. However, a lot of the trouble and expense is related to the nature of the offense.
If we are dealing with an action which occurred in the past and has a set dollar amount that can be ascribed to the action, the purpose of the suit can be said to be that of recovering costs arising from the act. Auto accidents are a nice, easy example of that. What did your car, doctor's bills and the inconvenience, pain and suffering cost you? Is there any way that the guilty party will get out of this without somehow replacing your car, paying the doctor's bills, and compensating you for your lost time at a minimum? Doubtful.
Intellectual property issues are more complicated, as most suits are related not to actual damages, but "potential revenue" which is forfeit due to "piracy". The goal of the plaintiff is usually not to recover lost money, but to staunch the bleeding, and, in many cases, protect their legal claim to their intellectual property.
To summarize: The goals of the DVD consortium are not to punish coders and burn down their websites. Their goals are a) to protect their legal claims to CSS as a licensable piece of intellectual property and b) to further that goal, keep DeCSS from being distributed. At the same time, they wish to do this as efficiently (i.e. at the lowest cost) possible. Suing everybody who posts DeCSS for everything down to their shoelaces does not accomplish this. Lawsuits are expensive for plaintiffs too, y'know. Sending them nasty lawyer letters and saving the claws for the few, the brave, and the stubborn who persist in distributing DeCSS after being warned is much more efficient. More on this later.
People don't like drug laws and such and there have been many, many, many attempts to override them through similar attempts at civil disobedience; however all of these have failed and over 50 years later we still have unpopular drug laws and they are still enforced.
Enforced? Where? Maybe in Singapore or Kuala Lumpur, not here in Seattle. Oh yes, there are some laws, and if you are REALLY out of hand, I think you can get prosecuted under those laws. They have a near-zero effect on most of the people I know who want to use drugs or pursue the trade. This is largely a political issue. Other than as an example that Big Brother Has The Power To Kick You In The Head (which I dispute) I see little relevancy here.
Also please tell me exactly how this does anything at all? So I have a program that has the name of another unpopular program. Does this really change anything?
Going back to our earlier point. The goal of the DVD consortium is to eliminate the distribution of DeCSS for the lowest possible cost. The goal of the Open CSS folks is to keep DeCSS freely distributed, and to raise the cost of these control efforts to a point where it is not cost-effective to continue harassing a few folks who mostly just want to play DVDs on their Linux boxes.
A bogus DeCSS acts as chaff. More searches of websites that must be done, more lawyer letters to write, much more work for the DVD consortium, very little effort or risk for any individual who wishes to post the bogus software on her webpage.
Does it change anything? Good question. I can't put a value on what the CSS encoding/licensing scheme is worth (as code, obviously not much. As a device to license, quite a bit). I expect the DVD consortium will spend a lot more than they already have to protect this piece of IP.
Face it danger is not a good thing and I would rather have my pride/honor/respect/and freedom than play DVDs on unsupported OSs.
You really fear authority that much? Whatever.
Flame me if you like but I am interested (I mean really interested) why this kind of thing was selected by taco in the first place? Does he realize that VA and the individuals who control his job could end up being forced to possibly even realease him from employment? Yeah I guess the slashdot croud does like to live dangerously.
Living dangerously? * sniggers *
Perhaps you need to hear about something called "editorial independence". Taco's job is not likely to be at risk over this. Second, if you believe what you hear in chat rooms, Taco isn't a guy whose quality of life would be threatened very much by losing his day job.
Having spent a fair ammount of time both in the PRC and watching it from a nearby perch in Taiwan, it's time to explain a few things:
1) Always remember that neither China nor the CCP are monolithic. The nature of Chinese/Confucian governance gives bureaucrats a lot more leeway in interpreting the various laws and regulations as they see fit than their counterparts in America or Europe would have. This wide-ranging discretion and power also leads to a fair ammount of corruption, but that's outside the scope of our article today.
2) This announcement is largely about internal politics. One or more members of the conservative wing of the CCP called in a favor, and so this little gem of an announcement appeared. In a few months, it may be forgotten again, or a more restrictive regulation may appear to supplant it. This arbitrary use of the law is very common.
3) In a lot of cases, Chinese law is not as hardcore as CNN or Richard Gere would make it out to be. In most cases, you receive several visits from various people explaining that there is a problem that needs to be addressed. Only if you insist as a matter of principle to continue to do whatever is irritating the government will they run their teeth through you. (this does not excuse the restrictions imposed on free speech in the PRC, but serves to explain a little about how it works).
What it means for website operators is very hard to say. Bearing in mind points #1 & 2, it probably means very little. If your organization enjoys a good relationship with your counterparts in the CCP, they are not likely to go out of their way to hassle you unless some impetus to do so is given from above. If they have it out for you, another tool has been added to their already ample box of Ways To Make Unruly Citizens Have a Lousy Day.
The proof will not be in the newspaper article or associated regulations, but in how things are handled afterwards. There's an expression in Chinese: san1 fen1 zhong1 re4 du4 literally: "Hot for three minutes", i.e. someone goes and does a crackdown to score political points, then life goes back to normal.
My goodness! Some people just aren't able to sleep at night without an evil empire to keep them warm.
The Panama canal story is so old and worn out that I wonder why you bother with it. Hutchison Whampoa, the manager of the ports at the either end of the canal, is a publicly traded company (on the Hong Kong stock exchange). Want to be a part of the Great Chinese Conspiracy to control "our" canal? Reach into your bank account and buy a few shares.
Export of cryptography is a joke. Please don't get me started on this one.
Returning to the main topic (the detection of stealth aircraft), about eight years ago I was talking with a friend about techniques for detecting a stealthy aircraft. While we were thinking of using a thermal sensor rather than using radio, the principle was the same, namely to look for atmospheric disturbances. While the technology to accomplish this is non-trivial, I sincerely doubt it would require access to classified data.
Is there Chinese espionage of American military and industrial data? Sure. And French espionage, and Japanese, and Israeli, and so on. As long as the United States has the world's most sophisticated trove of military technology, people will attempt to steal it. Occasionally they will succeed.
I feel that much of the attention/criticism which has been heaped on the Clinton administration is somewhat unwarranted. More than anything, Chinese espionage techniques have become much more sophisticated in the last 10 years, and China has made acquisition of military technology a much higher priority.
If you really need a domestic enemy who has been "selling us out" to the Chinese, perhaps you should look at Boeing, IBM, Sun, Lockheed, and the other champions of American business who have been scampering to sell goods, services, and technology in China. The Chinese are demanding technology transfer of one form or another as a requirment for entry to the PRC's domestic market. Any time the Congress or Clinton administration attempts to slow this process down (and no, it doesn't happen much), out come the lobbyists to explain to our elected officials the error of their ways. Don't kid yourself, Boeing contributes more money to both parties than any Buddhist monestary could ever hope to.
In summation, don't worry about the penny-ante sideshow that gets reported in the media. Keep your eye on who's REALLY giving away the store!
I've never had to evacuate from a hurricane. However, I have had to deal with one or two (or ten or twelve) typhoons during the seven years I lived in Taiwan. Better still, on a small island in the middle of the Pacific, you don't get to evacuate inland.
We lived through the typhoon season every fall. Our standard plan was to stock up on bottled water,fresh vegetables (they would be in short supply for a few weeks after a typhoon, and wincingly expensive), and beer. The worst consequence we ever had to deal with were friends who came up from the center of the island after a few days because their water had stopped (they usually smelled pretty ripe by then!).
How do you survive? a few pointers now the Florida coast has to reconstruct...
1) Wood-frame houses are great -- in California. Look into concrete and brick as building materials.
2) Some parts of the world have iron or stainless steel hurricane shutters for the windows. They're attractive and useful at the same time!
3) Walk the extra 200 feet to the beach. Pumping salt water out of your beachfront house has just got to bite.
> Correction: Those were damn fine amusement park rides.
Yep. Read on.
>Why does a movie have to be 'artsy' to be >considered good?
There's nothing wrong with a three-braincell flick. Speilberg does his best work with movies like "Raiders", "Jaws" and "E.T." They were one-dimensional, designed to be that way, and they were great at it! Every time Speilberg has tried to do "meaningful" movies (i.e. Empire of the Sun, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List) I've seen the results and just wanted to hurl! It's more cotton candy in a fancy made-for-grownups wrapper.
Speilberg directing A.I.? * shudders * Not being familiar with the craft of moviemaking, I could be dead wrong. Perhaps the story, set, and whatnot have been worked out to the point where all that's needed is a technician with a good eye to bring Kubrick's vision to life. Frankly though, I'm not optomistic about this one.
The Valley in general is a big advertisment for too much growth and too little planning, but the real problem is much deeper. I never met a group of people who were more disconnected from their living environment than when I lived down in the South Bay. The transient population (i.e. people with no roots in the Bay and no real interest in staying there) was through the roof. With everyone focused on their job, their car, and their own 1/8 acre of grass, it's not a big suprise that the neighborhood is generally in disarray.
There's something that can be said for a community of like-minded people getting together and leaving management to a like-minded group of managers, but a really cool place to live has to be one that you get involved in. If a developer is putting up a building or mall you don't like, go to the DCLU meeting and tell them what needs to be changed! Attend those community meetings. If you're too busy to be bothered, you probably deserve what you get.
My information is a little out of date. I haven't been on a Chinese system since mid-1997. When I was there, here's how it worked:
All traffic was directed through a proxy server. The copy of Netscape I was using had the addresses pre-programmed. When I attempted to turn the proxies off, nothing worked correctly. There seemed to be a firewall that turned off web access from a user system at port 80. I could ssh back to my home system in Taiwan with no problems though...
I would half-disagree with the original poster's gut feeling. The People's Republic has enough ultra-nationalists to do stupid things like this that it is not necessary for the old hacks who actually draw a paycheck from the party to get involved.
Slashdot Mirror
... and what does it have to do with any of this?
If you're in Seattle, oz.net does DSL via US West or Covad, and is comfortable with users hosting servers (last I checked).
speakeasy.org should be able to do this too, but I'm not familiar with their Acceptable Use Policy.
I felt it would be beneficial for my wife and kid to have more Chinese-language services in our neighborhood, so I told the Census there were five guys from Mainland China living in my basement.
Now I'm really in trouble.
Not knowing what your particular Asset Tracking software does, I'd be hard pressed to make a blanket statement like "Oh, yeah, Linux can do that".
However, if I can spec out an idiot tool:
* Monitors physical disk spec
* Monitors connectivity to the net (don't want
machines walking off completely)
* Tracks quantity of RAM inside of system
* Tracks software installed
* Reports back to a manager system with routine hourly/ daily reports on system status.
* Pages admin in the event of an "incident" (i.e. a machine with no users logged in mysteriously going offline at 3 a.m.)
I see UCD-snmp, Tripwire, and a few hundred lines of Perl code.
Integration time? About two to three weeks.
(I'd say 48 hours and lots of coffee, but since I'm in IT and not development, I get rewarded for being conservative)
j.
Dan Savage is hip, funny, and nasty (all good characteristics in my book), but that doesn't make him right.
The core of his article is the old argument for tactical voting: "If you don't vote for Gore, you'll get Bush, and then you'll be sorry.". What Savage is forgetting is that the Executive branch does not make laws. The President acts as a cheerleader (NOT a lawmaker) for domestic policies, is given free reign with foreign policy. (I'm going to lose my lefty cred for this) What I've heard of Bush's foreign policy, i.e. very limited intervention, does not bother me.
<IRONY>
The President has veto power over legislation. So remember that if Bush becomes president, that torrent of progressive legislation that has been coming out of Congress will just come to a halt. If Bush had been president 8 years ago, we wouldn't have laws like.... Never mind.
</IRONY>
"But What About The Supreme Court?" you scream. Indeed what about it? The Democratic party has been scaring us with losing Roe v. Wade for years. As for me, I live in Washington state (pro-choice well before Roe v. Wade). I have friends in Oregon (ditto), and California (also pro-choice). The worst case scenario would not affect me or anyone I am vaguely close to. Yes, places like Kansas would probably pass pro-life legislation. Frankly, having been to Kansas, I think they pretty much have it coming. I am getting bone tired of holding my nose and supporting the Democratic party when the party, in it's rush for dollars has not been supporting me.
Frankly, having listened to my mother howl over what an outrage 8 years of Clinton's warmed-over centerist policies have been, I would kind of look forward to a Bush presidency. "OK. You have the Congress, you have the executive. Now YOU try to change the Republic brain-boy!"
There's still a few weeks before the election. I might change my mind again.
j.
Yeah, but let me take a stab as to why this is...
Most geeks I know are very results-oriented. Lock yourself into a room for 40 hours straight, get flat food shoved under the door, drink more Jolt, go! Go! GO! and get the project done!!
The political process is, by definition, the opposite of all that. Politics is about developing coalitions and forming a consensus, even if the consensus is not anyone's perfect solution. These things annoy the geek mindframe.
It's inefficient. It's a drag, and my God it is soooooo slow.
The end result is that many geeks are unplugged from the political process, or involved in idealistic 3rd party movements. (Libertarians are popular, since a Libertarian can be defined inside of a fairly broad ideological specrtum. With no viable candidates or past voting record to defend, you can claim Libertarianism is for x or not for y and be pretty safe).
So it's time to look at the political process like version control or documenting your code. Is it fun and rad? Uh-uh. Is it part of your core beliefs? Nope. But in life, like in code, ya gotta do it at a certain point our wound up being hung.
Ta!
j.
One problem I have with Napster (and maybe it's just a PEBKAC[1] problem) is that I can search for songs, or artists, but I can't search for "something that sounds like Husker Du, but different". End result: I wind up downloading stuff I know. This is fine, but I haven't been turned on to much really new stuff via Napster, for exactly that reason.
I don't consider "format" to be a dirty word (Although when I hear it from Messr. Curry, I want to take a shower). The DJ my local college station does not slap on random records. He plays stuff that works together. Is that a format? Yes. It's not a driven-by-the-station-manager-and-the-promo-chick- that-blows-him format, but a format nevertheless.
Mostly, it's a question of choice. If I want to download x song by y artist, I should be able to do so. If I want to just listen to stuff in an associative stream, I should be able to do that too.
If Napster turns into the little boxes #Top40# #Country# #Dance# that Mr. Curry with his 20 years of brain ossification is visualizing, then yeah. We have a problem.
j.
[1] PEBKAC - Sl. Cust. Service.: Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair.
The language you speak at home or with your friends is usually better for cursing people out.
For instance, when I lived in Taipei, people would use Mandarin for a lot of communications, but when it was time to get down-and-dirty, only the native Min-Nan dialect would do.
In Beijing (where Mandarin IS the local dialect), they didn't seem to have this restriction!
Legislation strengthening the bill of rights is in order - extending them to any place which is made explicitly accessible to the public, such as shopping malls.
First, I don't think mere legislation would be enough. A constitutional amendment would probably be required to make it stick (standard IANAL disclaimer applies).
Second, the issue of extending the bill of rights to public spaces gets wildly tricky. If folks with a petition can stand in a mall and get signatures, and/or if the Jehovah's Witnesses can preach, can I run a hot dog stand in a mall? (with the appropriate licenses from the city of course) Is it OK to admit people who are visibly armed?
By themselves, these are stupid straw-man arguments, so bear with me here. Malls exist (and derive their "value added") because all the stuff that goes on in the streets doesn't happen there. Now, if you extend the rights of the streets into the malls, you are depriving the owners of something quite valuable (i.e. the ability to collect much higher rents than a comparable standalone storefront would).
Property rights are also part of the Constitution. Countries that have ambiguous or ill-defined property rights are generally really un-fun places. (actually, most of them are a lot of fun in the "let's party!" sense, but also miserable at distribution of wealth, with most tangibles being held by an extremely small group of people tied to the current leadership).
The problem in the U.S. is largely local, and the solution should probably be local as well. It was easier to allow large property developers to take 1000 acres of land to build a mall than to take the time to build a living, viable, and open community space. Likewise, it should probably be possible to rewrite zoning ordinaces to say that anyone with a large, enclosed retail space should draw up a series of guidelines under which people should be able to excercise some form of free speech/political expression, possibly in the same vein as broadcasters are required to air a certain number of public service announcements as part of their programming.
No, I don't know how to make this happen either, but it's worth a think.
But we're not talking about Nazi Germany here. This should be a pretty simple private property case. Because it involves written language, people sometimes think it's a free speech case.
/. ,etc.) are in fact privately owned, and what the ramifications are for free speech and expression in light of that.
If the Aryan Nations applies for a permit to march here, the city is all but required to give them permission. That's free speech (and its a good thing -- even if the AN is not). If members of same said group show up at the mall and do a demonstration, they'll be hustled out on to the street in short order. A mall is private property, and it's guests can be chosen by the management as they see fit.
If there is ANY issue to discuss here, it should be that many communities "public spaces" (i.e. shopping malls, business centers,
And no, the original post was really not that funny, but that's beside the point.
At a former employer we were feeding several (fairly) high-speed streams of packetized data into and out of a monolithic database.
There are still a few applications in the world that need big iron.
Looks like we're going to abandon using the economic stick on the Middle Kingdom.
This is probably not a bad thing. We've done 10 years of rhetoric, threats, and even a few punishments which cost the Chinese market access in the US.
Influence on China's human rights record? Zero.
If you think that "getting tough on China" will work, think again. Chinese foreign policy is based on one principle:
China was brought low by foreigners once (the opium wars, the "unequal treaties", Shanghai being put under foreign legal jurdistiction, the "8-nation army" which put down the White Lotus sect and sacked Empress Dowager Cixi's palace, etc. etc.), This will never happen again.
The leaders of the PRC have done actions in the past and will continue to do actions in the future simply to demonstrate to each other that China will not be pushed around by foreign pressure. For example, asst. Sec of State Winston Lord's 1993 list of requests for human rights improvments were met with one of the worst years of political crackdowns since Tiananmen.
Is this frustrating? Yep. Does China need to change? Yep. Is there anything reasonable the US can do about it? Nope.
My 2 fen for today.
j.
I've followed some of the comments here, and would like to make some observations. I have extensive experience in hosting servers in Taiwan, and have been involved in projects in several other countries (HK, PRC, Philippines, Singapore, etc.).
1) It is not necessary for one of the Major Powers to cut Internet connectivity to your offshore host. It is merely necessary for your host organization to consider (by themselves, or with outside prodding) the consequences of having their net connection shut off. Your host organization will probably decide that your business is not worth the potential consequences.
2) With development comes stricter IP laws. The old pirate havens of Korea, Taiwan, and Hongkong have all been pressured very hard (and effectively!) to enforce IP in their territories. Other countries (Indonesia comes to mind) are still something of a piracy haven, but acquiring bandwidth will be difficult, and I don't know if I would want to host a "free speech" site in a country with a two-year history of multi-party democracy.
3) Banking privacy and copyright are two different sets of laws. I would be wary of current or former British colonies. Most have rather nasty "prior restraint" laws which could complicate your life.
4) Other things to look at are the existence (and viability of) libel/slander laws, etc. These are much more commonly used in most of the overseas territories I've had the pleasure of living or traveling in.
5) There was a wonderful site on the web for several years at taxbusters.org which offered services to get numbered bank accounts, second passports, etc. The owner of the site always seemed to have trouble keeping his site hosting, no matter what exotic corner of the world the server was parked in.
6) Most importantly, prepare for sticker shock. Dedicated T1 connectivity gets very expensive (i.e. around US$60-70,000/month) when you're almost anywhere in Asia. I can't speak for other parts of the world.
In summary, I'm not very optimistic about this avenue of exploration, but wish you all the best just the same.
j.
It is a common policy of Japanese electronics companies to test-market (although some would say "beta-test") their products in Japan before releasing them worldwide.
I remember a friend who had just done a shopping trip to Akihabara coming back home to brag about his "only available in Japan" stereo. What a drag to have the stereo suffer a system crash about two hours into the party that night.
j.
At a guess, I'd say it's done inside of the routers (Zhongguo Dianxing uses and recommends Cisco). Regretfully, when I was meeting with the techs at China Telecom, I was asking about boring questions regarding bandwidth availability, and didn't think to bug them about the Great Firewall.
j.
I was last on line in the PRC in mid-1997.
The technology is pretty simple, actually. There's only one supplier of Internet service in the PRC... The Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications Circa 1997, there were three points of entry into the national network. One which passed through Beijing, one which apparently landed at Shanghai, and one which came in through Guangzhou (presumably from Hong Kong).
What was done was a simple (apparently) IP-based firewall. Any attempts to contact such subversive websites as cnn.com, chinatimes.com, or icrt.com.tw (old Taiwan hands will chuckle at this one) would resolve all right, you would just wait forever for the connection to be established.
Many hackers, including a few who post to Slashdot, make use of proxy servers to work around this. Better-known proxy servers are blocked, and new proxy addresses get propagated. Nobody who really WANTS information is deprived of it.
Why is all of this done? Well, I don't play golf with Jiang Zemin, but I can take a guess. China is not monolithic in it's politics. There are a few moderates in the government, and a few extremely conservative troglodytes as well. The firewall is (IMNSHO) a way to appease the more conservative members of the government that letting people have access to the Internet is OK. Does it work? Nope. Does it have to? Well... Only well enough to fool a few not-very-technical 70 year-old Politburo members.
Cheers!
J.
I already told you I think this is irrelevant, but since you persist, have you considered how many people use or traffic in drugs and don't go to jail?
You seem to have this premise going that you're in a totalitarian (or at least semi-totalitarian) state that will mess with you at will. If it benefits your world view to think this way, be my guest. I've had the pleasure in my life of going to some truly fun parts of the globe (including the PRC and Suharto-era Indonesia). Methinks you need to get out more before you go on all hip and quoting Orwell. No, not all is sweetness and light here in the good ol' USA, but things could be a lot worse, and in many places, they are!
Take care,
J.
Even getting sued is a major expense eevn if you are innocent (I know),
First-hand experience is hard to controvert. However, a lot of the trouble and expense is related to the nature of the offense.
If we are dealing with an action which occurred in the past and has a set dollar amount that can be ascribed to the action, the purpose of the suit can be said to be that of recovering costs arising from the act. Auto accidents are a nice, easy example of that. What did your car, doctor's bills and the inconvenience, pain and suffering cost you? Is there any way that the guilty party will get out of this without somehow replacing your car, paying the doctor's bills, and compensating you for your lost time at a minimum? Doubtful.
Intellectual property issues are more complicated, as most suits are related not to actual damages, but "potential revenue" which is forfeit due to "piracy". The goal of the plaintiff is usually not to recover lost money, but to staunch the bleeding, and, in many cases, protect their legal claim to their intellectual property.
To summarize: The goals of the DVD consortium are not to punish coders and burn down their websites. Their goals are a) to protect their legal claims to CSS as a licensable piece of intellectual property and b) to further that goal, keep DeCSS from being distributed. At the same time, they wish to do this as efficiently (i.e. at the lowest cost) possible. Suing everybody who posts DeCSS for everything down to their shoelaces does not accomplish this. Lawsuits are expensive for plaintiffs too, y'know. Sending them nasty lawyer letters and saving the claws for the few, the brave, and the stubborn who persist in distributing DeCSS after being warned is much more efficient. More on this later.
People don't like drug laws and such and there have been many, many, many attempts to override them through similar attempts at civil disobedience; however all of these have failed and over 50 years later we still have unpopular drug laws and they are still enforced.
Enforced? Where? Maybe in Singapore or Kuala Lumpur, not here in Seattle. Oh yes, there are some laws, and if you are REALLY out of hand, I think you can get prosecuted under those laws. They have a near-zero effect on most of the people I know who want to use drugs or pursue the trade. This is largely a political issue. Other than as an example that Big Brother Has The Power To Kick You In The Head (which I dispute) I see little relevancy here.
Also please tell me exactly how this does anything at all? So I have a program that has the name of another unpopular program. Does this really change anything?
Going back to our earlier point. The goal of the DVD consortium is to eliminate the distribution of DeCSS for the lowest possible cost. The goal of the Open CSS folks is to keep DeCSS freely distributed, and to raise the cost of these control efforts to a point where it is not cost-effective to continue harassing a few folks who mostly just want to play DVDs on their Linux boxes.
A bogus DeCSS acts as chaff. More searches of websites that must be done, more lawyer letters to write, much more work for the DVD consortium, very little effort or risk for any individual who wishes to post the bogus software on her webpage.
Does it change anything? Good question. I can't put a value on what the CSS encoding/licensing scheme is worth (as code, obviously not much. As a device to license, quite a bit). I expect the DVD consortium will spend a lot more than they already have to protect this piece of IP.
Face it danger is not a good thing and I would rather have my pride/honor/respect/and freedom than play DVDs on unsupported OSs.
You really fear authority that much? Whatever.
Flame me if you like but I am interested (I mean really interested) why this kind of thing was selected by taco in the first place? Does he realize that VA and the individuals who control his job could end up being forced to possibly even realease him from employment? Yeah I guess the slashdot croud does like to live dangerously.
Living dangerously? * sniggers *
Perhaps you need to hear about something called "editorial independence". Taco's job is not likely to be at risk over this. Second, if you believe what you hear in chat rooms, Taco isn't a guy whose quality of life would be threatened very much by losing his day job.
1) Always remember that neither China nor the CCP are monolithic. The nature of Chinese/Confucian governance gives bureaucrats a lot more leeway in interpreting the various laws and regulations as they see fit than their counterparts in America or Europe would have. This wide-ranging discretion and power also leads to a fair ammount of corruption, but that's outside the scope of our article today.
2) This announcement is largely about internal politics. One or more members of the conservative wing of the CCP called in a favor, and so this little gem of an announcement appeared. In a few months, it may be forgotten again, or a more restrictive regulation may appear to supplant it. This arbitrary use of the law is very common.
3) In a lot of cases, Chinese law is not as hardcore as CNN or Richard Gere would make it out to be. In most cases, you receive several visits from various people explaining that there is a problem that needs to be addressed. Only if you insist as a matter of principle to continue to do whatever is irritating the government will they run their teeth through you. (this does not excuse the restrictions imposed on free speech in the PRC, but serves to explain a little about how it works).
What it means for website operators is very hard to say. Bearing in mind points #1 & 2, it probably means very little. If your organization enjoys a good relationship with your counterparts in the CCP, they are not likely to go out of their way to hassle you unless some impetus to do so is given from above. If they have it out for you, another tool has been added to their already ample box of Ways To Make Unruly Citizens Have a Lousy Day.
The proof will not be in the newspaper article or associated regulations, but in how things are handled afterwards. There's an expression in Chinese: san1 fen1 zhong1 re4 du4 literally: "Hot for three minutes", i.e. someone goes and does a crackdown to score political points, then life goes back to normal.
Take care!
Jeremy
My goodness! Some people just aren't able to sleep at night without an evil empire to keep them warm.
The Panama canal story is so old and worn out that I wonder why you bother with it. Hutchison Whampoa, the manager of the ports at the either end of the canal, is a publicly traded company (on the Hong Kong stock exchange). Want to be a part of the Great Chinese Conspiracy to control "our" canal? Reach into your bank account and buy a few shares.
Export of cryptography is a joke. Please don't get me started on this one.
Returning to the main topic (the detection of stealth aircraft), about eight years ago I was talking with a friend about techniques for detecting a stealthy aircraft. While we were thinking of using a thermal sensor rather than using radio, the principle was the same, namely to look for atmospheric disturbances. While the technology to accomplish this is non-trivial, I sincerely doubt it would require access to classified data.
Is there Chinese espionage of American military and industrial data? Sure. And French espionage, and Japanese, and Israeli, and so on. As long as the United States has the world's most sophisticated trove of military technology, people will attempt to steal it. Occasionally they will succeed.
I feel that much of the attention/criticism which has been heaped on the Clinton administration is somewhat unwarranted. More than anything, Chinese espionage techniques have become much more sophisticated in the last 10 years, and China has made acquisition of military technology a much higher priority.
If you really need a domestic enemy who has been "selling us out" to the Chinese, perhaps you should look at Boeing, IBM, Sun, Lockheed, and the other champions of American business who have been scampering to sell goods, services, and technology in China. The Chinese are demanding technology transfer of one form or another as a requirment for entry to the PRC's domestic market. Any time the Congress or Clinton administration attempts to slow this process down (and no, it doesn't happen much), out come the lobbyists to explain to our elected officials the error of their ways. Don't kid yourself, Boeing contributes more money to both parties than any Buddhist monestary could ever hope to.
In summation, don't worry about the penny-ante sideshow that gets reported in the media. Keep your eye on who's REALLY giving away the store!
Jeremy Anderson
I've never had to evacuate from a hurricane. However, I have had to deal with one or two (or ten or twelve) typhoons during the seven years I lived in Taiwan. Better still, on a small island in the middle of the Pacific, you don't get to evacuate inland.
,fresh vegetables (they would be in short supply for a few weeks after a typhoon, and wincingly expensive), and beer. The worst consequence we ever had to deal with were friends who came up from the center of the island after a few days because their water had stopped (they usually smelled pretty ripe by then!).
We lived through the typhoon season every fall. Our standard plan was to stock up on bottled water
How do you survive? a few pointers now the Florida coast has to reconstruct...
1) Wood-frame houses are great -- in California. Look into concrete and brick as building materials.
2) Some parts of the world have iron or stainless steel hurricane shutters for the windows. They're attractive and useful at the same time!
3) Walk the extra 200 feet to the beach. Pumping salt water out of your beachfront house has just got to bite.
Good luck!
> Correction: Those were damn fine amusement park rides.
Yep. Read on.
>Why does a movie have to be 'artsy' to be >considered good?
There's nothing wrong with a three-braincell flick. Speilberg does his best work with movies like "Raiders", "Jaws" and "E.T." They were one-dimensional, designed to be that way, and they were great at it! Every time Speilberg has tried to do "meaningful" movies (i.e. Empire of the Sun, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List) I've seen the results and just wanted to hurl! It's more cotton candy in a fancy made-for-grownups wrapper.
Speilberg directing A.I.? * shudders * Not being familiar with the craft of moviemaking, I could be dead wrong. Perhaps the story, set, and whatnot have been worked out to the point where all that's needed is a technician with a good eye to bring Kubrick's vision to life. Frankly though, I'm not optomistic about this one.
The Valley in general is a big advertisment for too much growth and too little planning, but the real problem is much deeper. I never met a group of people who were more disconnected from their living environment than when I lived down in the South Bay. The transient population (i.e. people with no roots in the Bay and no real interest in staying there) was through the roof. With everyone focused on their job, their car, and their own 1/8 acre of grass, it's not a big suprise that the neighborhood is generally in disarray.
There's something that can be said for a community of like-minded people getting together and leaving management to a like-minded group of managers, but a really cool place to live has to be one that you get involved in. If a developer is putting up a building or mall you don't like, go to the DCLU meeting and tell them what needs to be changed! Attend those community meetings. If you're too busy to be bothered, you probably deserve what you get.
Jeremy
My information is a little out of date. I haven't been on a Chinese system since mid-1997. When I was there, here's how it worked:
All traffic was directed through a proxy server. The copy of Netscape I was using had the addresses pre-programmed. When I attempted to turn the proxies off, nothing worked correctly. There seemed to be a firewall that turned off web access from a user system at port 80. I could ssh back to my home system in Taiwan with no problems though...
I would half-disagree with the original poster's gut feeling. The People's Republic has enough ultra-nationalists to do stupid things like this that it is not necessary for the old hacks who actually draw a paycheck from the party to get involved.
J.