If your friend had access to known concentrations of pharmaceutically clean opiates, instead of unknown quantities of whatever the hell black tar is he might be alive today.
Quite likely. I think we agree that prohibition is not only a failure, but damaging both to users of prohibited drugs and to society as a whole. However...let's not pretend that people don't have problems with opiates or benzos, just as they do with alcohol. Many people who use heroin to get high just can't control their desire for it. They always want more, and as they get habituated, their dosages are going to rise to toxic levels--i.e., levels that their livers can't handle. People like that need medical supervision and counseling.
taking drugs for enhancement is actually self-defeating, psychologically and philosophically. you can cut at the issue with two simple questions: how much of what you do is you? how much of it is the drug?
Philosophically speaking, I don't understand your question, nor its underlying assumptions. If a drug makes me more alert, increases my ability to concentrate, and keeps me from falling asleep at meetings, then all of a sudden it's not me who's writing (code or articles), it's not me who just figured out the solution to a problem that's been giving my boss fits, and it's not me who's staying awake during meetings? Non sequitur.
As for that Barry Bonds guy, I'm not sure, but he's some baseball player who got caught using steroids? (Maybe you can tell, but I don't follow sports much.) Isn't steroid use actually unhealthy? I'd say it's a bad idea to enhance your performance with substances that make your nuts fall off. So if steroids damage health, then their use in sports should be against the rules. But how about techniques or drugs that do not damage the athlete's health? For example, I've heard of people getting blood transfusions to pump themselves up with red blood cells before an event, then getting disqualified for it. If the technique is not damaging, why shouldn't athletes use it? I don't really care enough about athletics to debate this point, but I don't see why not.
If I heard from a trustworthy source that Provigil will have a detrimental effect on body parts I'm fond of, then I'd stop using it. I see no reason why I shouldn't use it otherwise. Nor do I see how being awake, alert, and more productive than before I started taking Provigil is supposed to be damaging to my "self image". Waking up to the tail end of my own snore during a meeting with everyone staring at me—now that was bad for my self-image.
Just why do we need Google's streetview, anyway? The maps are great, the satellite views are kinda interesting...but why do I need to go on a virtual road-trip? I'm serious...can anyone tell me how Streetview is useful (as opposed to a novelty)?
Yeah, I really don't want to run speaker wire all over my house, nor do I really care about broadcasting my music from some central source. The kind of solution I would find attractive is just something like a plain old amplifier that reads MP3 via a USB input, and that can manage MP3 music reasonably well (i.e., has the ability to select playlists, or build a playlist by searches on the fly). Right now, I'd like a reasonably compact stereo I could put in my bedroom that will play from a USB stick or USB magnetic drive. Is there such an appliance out there?
It seems to me that there would be a significant market for all kinds of USB-interfaced audio devices that could fill the niches that used to be occuppied by everything from boom boxes to living room stereos. Why do I have to have a computer to play my music at all?
Right now, there's only 2 ways I can listen to my music: either sit by my computer (which pipes the music to a home-theater quality receiver via an optical out), or tediously load it onto my MP3 player (not an iPod). Why is this so fricking primitive and complicated at the same time?
So the tire pressure monitors broadcast a unique ID. Is it the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN)? I doubt it. Maybe theoretically someone could find out which ID corresponds to a specific person's car...but there are much easier ways to find out who's driving by, for crying out loud—like looking at the license plate. Drivel like this makes us genuine paranoids look bad.
Sigh. It's a joke, son. Stephenson though it was really witty to a have a character piously remark "Don't worry, they'll listen to Reason"—as they were being chased by mother-stabbing, father-raping pirates. The other passengers aboard look at him like he's lost his mind. Then he produces Reason from a medium sized briefcase, and blows the entire pirate flotilla to hell. The subtext is, I suppose, that this sort of "reason" is the only kind that mother-stabbing, father-raping pirates are likely to listen to. I thought the "Reason" episode was screamingly funny. I have no idea how one would build an atomic-powered automatic cannon...and it's rather pointless to pursue the question, don't you think?
Perhaps you wouldn't like Snow Crash. Just a guess, mind you.
Neither. "Reason" was a nuclear powered automatic cannon, if I recall correctly. Remember, he had to hang the heat sink into the ocean to keep it from melting down...
I have Vista installed on my PC. When I bought a new hard drive, I found out that I could not simply activate Vista on my PC (with all the same hardware as before, except the drive itself). I reluctantly called Microsoft support, who asked me for a 25 character (from memory) code, and then read me out another 25 character code which I had to enter to activate Vista.
You do understand that you will have the same problem with XP, right? I've had to undergo the 25 number torture 3 times in about as many years now, because I keep swapping out parts on my homebrew PC. While merely adding a new drive to the box shouldn't trigger the Inquisition, changing your boot drive might. That's about the only part on my present XP box that I haven't changed. Nevertheless, if you go to XP, you will at least not be saddled with all the DRM and pretty graphics overhead of Vista.
Personally, I've had it with Microsoft's OS policies. XP is definitely the last MS operating system I will ever buy. My daughter's laptop just broke, and I had to buy a replacement—but I made sure it came with XP Professional instead of Vista. (I'd rather have bought a laptop with Linux on it, but that doesn't seem to be an option right now—you either pay for an OS from MS or Apple). Also, I don't yet know enough about Linux to properly support someone else using it.
However, that is going to change. I've finally made the commitment to switch myself over to Linux in the next year or so. I've put together a new box called "SuseQ" (as you might guess, she runs Suse V10.3), and I'm very happy with her. I'm planning to shift as many of my computer tasks to SuseQ as quickly as I can. The only iffy part are the games: not too many seem to work with Linux variants. That's got to change. I really think the wind has shifted: people are just fed up with this "you have to buy our new OS or die" BS that Microsoft hands out.
OK, I got to the part where the drone transfers its consciousness into a knife missile, disguises itself as a dildo, and packs itself into Our Heroine's luggage. Now that was truly funny. Especially the dialogue in which the drone promised not to be "invasive". The book's looking up...
The main reason science doesn't get taught effectively in the US is plain old laziness, apathy, and stupidity.
I have to agree with you there. It really doesn't matter all that much whether the public schools teach evolution or not...there are very few teachers in these schools who are remotely qualified to teach just about any subject. I would put more of the blame on the educational establishment—particularly the NEA (National Education Associaton) than on the parents. They've been brainwashed into believing that it's solely the State's prerogative to educate their kids.
That's why we home-schooled our youngest daughter. Yes, both my wife and I are Christians, so I guess we're unqualified "religious nuts" in your view. We did teach her Biology, including the standard scientific accounts of evolution. I communicated to her my opinion that faith in divine creation isn't at odds with science in this (or any) regard. After all, God could will evolution to take place, could he not? (I understand this is similar to the Catholic Church's official opinion on the subject.) In any case, it's probably too late for you to call the cops and have her taken away from us...she's almost 18 now, and Junior at the University of Texas (Dallas).
If I tried to tell you that Elvis Presley was going to return next week and rule the Earth for a thousand years, you'd laugh at me and call me crazy.
Well, that's "theism," and it's semantically indistinguishable from any other religious point of view.
No, that's a parody of a particular Christian doctrine, held by a segment of American Protestants. I'm not sure whether you mean to assert that your parody is "theism", or the actual doctrine is theism, but I'm quite sure that neither one is theism. Your assertion that whatever you are talking about is "semantically indistinguishable from any other religious point of view" is, I'm afraid, completely unintelligible. Do you you even know what Theism is, and how it differs, from, say Deism? Perhaps you'd find that "thought processes" (religious or not) will hurt less if you get some practice.
Besides, everyone knows it's Jim Morrison, not Elvis who's going to rule the world.
I'm perhaps a quarter of the way through Matter, so this review was timely for me (and thanks for not including spoilers). "Not his best", you say? Regrettably, that's the comment I'd have for just about anything Banks has written in the last 10 years. "Not bad" would also be apt.
Up to this point of Matter, my reaction can be characterized as "trying to remember why I ever liked this author so much". The Banks I remember from Use of Weapons, Player of Games, and Consider Phlebas (to concentrate just on the space opera) had a razor wit, a well-developed sense of irony, and a deft command of the story-teller's craft. None of these qualities is evident in Matter: so far, it has been a ponderous, boring slog through very familiar territory. Perhaps the worst thing about Matter is its long-windedness. Had editors not become extinct some time in the latter decade or so of the twentieth century, perhaps someone could have given Mr. Banks a hand by drawing fat red lines through about 75% of the narrative and dialogue of this book. One heavy concentration of red lines would be drawn through the portion of the book in which a character the reader knows to be a hypocritical (but egregiously loquacious) jackal makes an extended funeral oration for one of his victims. One sensible way for an author to handle this would be to cite the opening phrases, then say something like, "...and the loquacious, hypocritical jackal went on in this vein for several hours". Instead, Mr. Banks subjects the reader to the entire boring speech. There's no excuse for that, and no forgiveness.
It doesn't get better, you say. Hmm. Don't know if I am going to make it. Ironically, when I received the book (from Brit Amazon), I rejoiced at how thick it was. Some early reviews had claimed that Matter was a return to form for Banks; I really wanted to like this book.
Speaking of good Banks, only one person mentioned Inversions. It's my personal favorite, because of its extreme subtlety; the book demands a lot of work from the reader; it is not frothy reading. The Bridge is also one of his best, I think—though it's hard to pigeon-hole, it's definitely not space opera.
Re:Against a Dark Background
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Matter
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I've read almost all of his books, including "The Business", "The Bridge" and other non-science fiction works. "Matter" is one of his best but I have to say "Against a Dark Background" has to be his best work. Nothing beats a lazy gun!
Just about everyone who liked Against a Dark Background mentions the "lazy gun". I think I remember what it is: a weapon that weighs a bit more or less, depending on which way is up. That makes the book great? All I can recollect is that the plot was an incoherent mess. I must not be properly recollecting the lazy gun.
I think C net might be missing the point of the "rainbow storage" idea...or maybe the inventor doesn't see the possibilities himself. If you haven't read the article, this is a technology that encodes data and stores it as colored geometric shapes on paper, or other printable medium. I don't think that "rainbow" storage is going to replace more conventional data storage...but I think there might be a real use for this: archival data storage. By "archival" I mean, "can still be read 1,000 years from today".
We're all familiar with the problems of any long-term computer data storage technology: mainly, the problem is progress. If you want to keep records of something for a long time, you have to consider that your storage media may simply become unreadable over time—not because of degradation in the media itself (you're going to store it in a very safe, temperature and humidity-controlled cave, right?)—but because devices that can read the media have all been junked and replaced by something far better. That's why museums and universities are always on the lookout for old media that needs to be converted to modern technology before it's too late.
But paper is forever. Well, nearly—and, of course, I'm talking about really good, acid-free paper kept stored under reasonably controlled conditions. Or you might use something even more durable than sheets of paper. You'd also have to think carefully about the inks. Assuming that the inventor can really get some decent compression rates, then perhaps he's onto something. If the "rainbow tech" allows you to store significantly more Megs of data on a sheet of A4 than you could by using a simpler technology (micro-braille?), then I'd say it would be worth a look. You'd have to be careful to store a copy of the encoding algorithm (presumably in plain, printed text) along with each cave-full of archive, of course...
I could see Magnetic Media go the way of the CRT in 10 years? I think it is possible. Unless Magnetic makes some Huge Improvement in capasity and also we get a hug increase in demmand in data.
Sure, it's possible. Ten years leaves you a bit of wiggle room. But I'm skeptical...I think hard drives will still be around in 20 years. Heck...I'll bet on 100 years—I won't be around to pay up.
The reason I am skeptical of announcements of the impending doom of magnetic drives is that I first heard it in...let me see...1982 or thereabouts. People were talking about the "inherent limitations" of magnetic drives, but it wasn't clear at that time what could possibly replace them. Of course, what happened is that magnetic drive technology has proven astoundingly resilient: we went from huge platters inside drive bays the size of a washing machine that collectively held maybe 2M to cheap standard-sized drives that hold half a terabyte (street price currently hovering around 100 inflated US dollars).
Don't get me wrong: I'm excited about the idea of replacing the boot drive on my PC with a super-fast flash drive—once the price for an 80G flash-based drive gets down to under $200. However, I think magnetic drives will maintain their huge price-per-MB of storage space advantage over rival technologies for a long time to come. So the drives in my PC that hold my video and movies will still be magnetic. I just want fast boot times, and quick swapping. Notebooks are another story, of course—I think it's quite likely that most notebooks will no longer have magnetic drives in ten years.
But for solid-state storage devices to make magnetic media drives completely obsolete, two things would have to happen:
Magnetic drive technology would have to hit a capacity "wall"—a point at which it becomes more expensive to make a standard-size (fits in a PC bay) drive of X capacity than an equivalent solid state device.
Manufacturing costs for solid state devices having X capacity can be brought down to the point where it's profitable to sell the product at a price consumers will pay.
These two points are related of course; they boil down to saying that it's going to have to become darn cheap to make a huge solid state "drive", where "huge" will probably be defined in tens of terabytes.
It may be simpler than that - it may be that there is nobody else in the house to call 911 when you suffer an accident.
Call 911? Heck, my cats can do that and perform CPR while administering Last Rites, just in case.
Seriously...my theory is that cats help reduce vermin about the house, thus contributing to the health of their designated care-providers. (Heaven forfend that anyone should ever think he owns a cat.) My house used to be overrun with those huge cockroaches that they call "palmetto bugs" here in Texas. After I got the cats, no more roaches (but fat and happy cats). They go after anything that wiggles, scuttles, or flies around. (Though their success rate on flying prey leaves something to be desired. Hmm note to self: must look into breeding flying cats.)
The association between humans and cats has been a long and mutually beneficial one. The only major issue to trouble this partnership was the invention of doors by an unknown carpenter circa 3800 B.C. (oddly enough, the unlucky inventor suffered a fatal fall down a steep stairway soon after filing the patent). Ever since, cats have been sitting in front of doors and meowing. Most people think the cat wants out (or in), but not so: the cat is demanding that all doors everywhere be permanently removed. A closed door is an offense to all cat-kind.
My respect for Bruce Schneier increases every time I read one of his articles. I'd previously been ambivalent about the "transparent society" notion. Part of me felt uncomfortable with the video cameras going up in so many public places, but I also found it difficult to put my finger on what is wrong with such police surveillance. By defintion, whatever is done in public is there for everyone to see and record if they want. What's the difference between a policeman standing on a corner, watching a public street, and a policeman sitting in an office watching that same street via a surveillance camera?
As Schneier points out, the degree of power wielded by the observer gives an asymmetric value to information gained by that observation. Surveillance technology greatly increases the ability of the police to know about our actions and movements—one cop can watch many cameras, and those cameras can permanently record everything they "see". Moreover, reciprocity is never an issue when public surveillance is discussed. The debate is always about whether the government has the right to watch us—whether we have the right to watch the government is never brought into that discussion.
It seems to me that if the government has a right to record what goes on in public precisely because it is public, then we have a right to watch the government for that very same reason. Are police interrogations not a matter of public interest? Of course they are. Consequently, it should be an absolute requirement that every interaction between a police officer and a member of the public must be recorded. To extend this principle, is it not true that every meeting of public officials, every communication of such officials with one another is a public matter? Absolutely: everything must be recorded! I understand that not everything can be broadcast live. For example, there may be good reasons not to broadcast police interrogations—after all, even the police might decide a suspect is innocent, so there's no point in broadcasting the humiliation of an innocent citizen. And of course, deliberations of the National Security Council can't be put into the public domain immediately, lest the terrorists win. But such events must be recorded, and the conditions under which they become public must be strictly codified. For example, it should be cause for mandatory dismissal of charges if the government cannot produce a recording of the accused's interrogation during a trial. And I think after a couple of years, the need for secrecy of National Security Council deliberations expires. I'd like to watch the meetings at which Mr. Bush became convinced that the invasion of Iraq was necessary, if you please.
If you think these suggestions are unrealistic, then you get the point. The point is that the government is always willing to watch the public, but it is never willing to make its own actions public. And that's not right, is it?
They also did not have or had vary generous speed limits on autobahns at least until recently.
I've heard rumors of the new speed limits on the Autobahn. Why, oh why are these limits being imposed? Eurocrats? How are the German drivers reacting to this? (As I recall, the German automobile association has something like the political clout of the National Rifle Association in the USA.) It's a pity, really—it was always a pleasure to drive on the Autobahn: you could go as fast as you wanted as long as you obeyed the rules (like not hanging out in the left lane after you're done passing), and you could rely on almost all drivers being competent and knowing the rules.
It seems to me that, superficially at least, it makes sense to talk about a "botnet market" as separate from the anti-virus software market if you are talking about a higher-level network solution, not simply another program that consumers run on their PCs. But from the article, it's not clear what the focus of this supposed market is. If it's software that's run by companies with large PC networks, or ISPs, and if its purpose is to track botnet-like behavior by network clients with the aim of isolating suspect clients from that network, then it makes some sense to me. This could be a good thing...if it works. If it's yet another "safe computing" package marketed to Joe Sixpack, then it's an outstandingly stupid idea. If a computer is part of a botnet, the critical failure has already occurred, and no application package is going to fix it.
I suppose the people who are boosting this new "market" are responding to a money-making opportunity created by a real social problem: the fact that massive botnets exist, and that such phenomena rob us of collective resources--that is, resources that exist for our common use. Ultimately such collective thievery boils down to every individual having to pay more for services, and to endure degraded service quality to subsidize the thieves. Surely preventing this is a worthy goal...or a goal worth paying money for.
As many here know, the virus/botnet problem is due to two factors: a massively deployed operating system that is by design insecure, and a multitude of ignorant users. Of the two, the OS is most to blame. If Joe couldn't get his PC zombified by clicking some link to download stupid stuff off a web page, or reading some mystery email, the problem would be much diminished. However, I judge on the basis of their track record that Microsoft is unlikely to ever create a truly secure operating system; it's just not a priority. Because of Microsoft's ability to get computer retailers to bundle only their OS with every computer that is sold and because of most buyers' disinclination to learn about what they are purchasing, the situation is likely to continue—unless computer users are given a strong incentive to change their buying habits.
And here's where network-level anti-botnet software might change things. Suppose ISPs started to identify PCs that are compromised to the extent that they constitute a public nuisance or threat—and isolate them from the network. Obviously, the anti-bot software would have to be very good; you don't want a significant number of false positives. But it seems to me that if you do automated traffic analysis, it wouldn't be that hard to identify the zombies (here's where those who really know about this stuff get to jump in and tell me why I'm wrong). Once identified, the zombie is isolated, the owner gets a singing telegram notifying him of the action that was taken and why, and what he should do to fix the problem. ("Reinstall Windows" will probably not be the recommended solution.)
I think that this would help, but it would require several other changes. For one thing, it's not clear to me that ISPs actually care about botnets or viruses. I'm not sure why that is. (Again, someone with a better understanding of the communications infrastructure might want to help me out here.) For another, the [L|U][n|i]n[u|i]x OS has to become a commercial product. That's right: it has to be pried out of the hands of the well-meaning and hardworking people who have made it what it is today, and put into the hands of some money-grubbing capitalist who will make deals with computer retailers, guarantee support to end-users, and above all give it a decent name. You see, normal people don't trust free things; they only trust people who take their money. That's the fundamental stumbling block of the free software movement: in the market place, anything that's to be had for nothing is perceived as having no value.
Anyway, the result I'm hoping for is that, as a result of penalizing stupid user behavior, people will either start using one of the epigonoi of Unix, or that MS will crumble under market pressure and actually create a decent secure OS. Well, I can dream.
I don't remember laughing at the idea of a personal computer costing less than $1000. I remember the early 1980s, when $200-$600 was the norm for a roughly-current-tech personal computer.
I think you're comparing what was then a toy or curio with today's "serious" computers meant to do real work. What was available in the early 80s? Well, there was the Apple II. One of those would set you back $1300--for the cheapest model, with 4K of RAM(http://oldcomputers.net/pet2001.html). For its day, that was a serious computer...and for 1977, that was a serious price. True, you could pick up a Commodore PET for a mere $800 (http://oldcomputers.net/pet2001.html)...but that was a pretty lame machine. If you're thinking of the Vic 20 or the later Commodore 64, or the various offerings by Atari, those weren't really comparable to a "serious" computer of today. They were fun, but not serious computers. My first personal computer was a Compaq "transportable" PC. It had 256K of RAM, 2 floppy drives (the "small" 5" sized ones)...and no hard drive. The screen was a grayscale monochrome about 5" diagonal. It was the size and weight of a sewing machine.
I paid $1800 for the Compaq. In 80s money, that's quite a chunk. I told my wife I needed it for "business"...but really I just wanted to play Zork, and teach myself to progam in C. (Now there's a memory: I put the Lattice C compiler on one floppy, the code and editor on another, the linker and object code on a third, and compiled on a 128K RAM "disk" that I had split off from the 256K total RAM I had available. I felt like a juggler, swapping those floppies...but I cheated by usually holding one in my teeth. I also had to run in place in hip deep snow the whole time.)
The point is that the price for "serious" machines has remained fairly steady, or declined moderately from the mid-80s, but it still costs what—to most of us—is real money to get one. (The price for gaming rigs, on the other hand, has skyrocketed.) But it's also true that some people spend too much money on laptops. If you're one of those "road warriors" who has to work spreadsheets, PhotoShop, or give live demos of bloatware, you need a $2K laptop. But if all you want is connectivity, then the $200 laptop is all you need. I don't think Sony has anything to worry about...some buyers, like parents who used to spend $1K on laptops for their kids will get the cheap ones instead. But there will still be plenty of buyers for the workhorse, expensive laptop. These cheap laptops don't replace full-featured ones. We're just seeing the creation of a new, needed, market niche: the cheap laptop for people who don't need the features and power of the expensive ones.
Thanks for clearing that up. In light of the revised pricing scheme...I can make available a cat that will walk across the keyboard for a few kibbles a day 8^)
Three bucks a captcha? Minimum? Hey, I speak English, and if I can post to/. at work, I can do captchas, and I can do 'em faster than the Russians. Let's see...I can do at least 2 captchas a minute (including breaks), so that comes out to...$360 an hour! I'm in. Someone give me the URL!
Er...that translation is really crucial. Are you sure that was a dollar sign in front of the 3? Or are they perhaps paying in Russian Roubles? That would be considerably less favorable, as the Rouble is going for 24 to the U.S. Dollar. Still...$15/hour...maybe my kid will be interested.
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Quite likely. I think we agree that prohibition is not only a failure, but damaging both to users of prohibited drugs and to society as a whole. However...let's not pretend that people don't have problems with opiates or benzos, just as they do with alcohol. Many people who use heroin to get high just can't control their desire for it. They always want more, and as they get habituated, their dosages are going to rise to toxic levels--i.e., levels that their livers can't handle. People like that need medical supervision and counseling.
Philosophically speaking, I don't understand your question, nor its underlying assumptions. If a drug makes me more alert, increases my ability to concentrate, and keeps me from falling asleep at meetings, then all of a sudden it's not me who's writing (code or articles), it's not me who just figured out the solution to a problem that's been giving my boss fits, and it's not me who's staying awake during meetings? Non sequitur.
As for that Barry Bonds guy, I'm not sure, but he's some baseball player who got caught using steroids? (Maybe you can tell, but I don't follow sports much.) Isn't steroid use actually unhealthy? I'd say it's a bad idea to enhance your performance with substances that make your nuts fall off. So if steroids damage health, then their use in sports should be against the rules. But how about techniques or drugs that do not damage the athlete's health? For example, I've heard of people getting blood transfusions to pump themselves up with red blood cells before an event, then getting disqualified for it. If the technique is not damaging, why shouldn't athletes use it? I don't really care enough about athletics to debate this point, but I don't see why not.
If I heard from a trustworthy source that Provigil will have a detrimental effect on body parts I'm fond of, then I'd stop using it. I see no reason why I shouldn't use it otherwise. Nor do I see how being awake, alert, and more productive than before I started taking Provigil is supposed to be damaging to my "self image". Waking up to the tail end of my own snore during a meeting with everyone staring at me—now that was bad for my self-image.
Just why do we need Google's streetview, anyway? The maps are great, the satellite views are kinda interesting...but why do I need to go on a virtual road-trip? I'm serious...can anyone tell me how Streetview is useful (as opposed to a novelty)?
Yeah, I really don't want to run speaker wire all over my house, nor do I really care about broadcasting my music from some central source. The kind of solution I would find attractive is just something like a plain old amplifier that reads MP3 via a USB input, and that can manage MP3 music reasonably well (i.e., has the ability to select playlists, or build a playlist by searches on the fly). Right now, I'd like a reasonably compact stereo I could put in my bedroom that will play from a USB stick or USB magnetic drive. Is there such an appliance out there?
It seems to me that there would be a significant market for all kinds of USB-interfaced audio devices that could fill the niches that used to be occuppied by everything from boom boxes to living room stereos. Why do I have to have a computer to play my music at all?
Right now, there's only 2 ways I can listen to my music: either sit by my computer (which pipes the music to a home-theater quality receiver via an optical out), or tediously load it onto my MP3 player (not an iPod). Why is this so fricking primitive and complicated at the same time?
So the tire pressure monitors broadcast a unique ID. Is it the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN)? I doubt it. Maybe theoretically someone could find out which ID corresponds to a specific person's car...but there are much easier ways to find out who's driving by, for crying out loud—like looking at the license plate. Drivel like this makes us genuine paranoids look bad.
Sigh. It's a joke, son. Stephenson though it was really witty to a have a character piously remark "Don't worry, they'll listen to Reason"—as they were being chased by mother-stabbing, father-raping pirates. The other passengers aboard look at him like he's lost his mind. Then he produces Reason from a medium sized briefcase, and blows the entire pirate flotilla to hell. The subtext is, I suppose, that this sort of "reason" is the only kind that mother-stabbing, father-raping pirates are likely to listen to. I thought the "Reason" episode was screamingly funny. I have no idea how one would build an atomic-powered automatic cannon...and it's rather pointless to pursue the question, don't you think?
Perhaps you wouldn't like Snow Crash. Just a guess, mind you.
Neither. "Reason" was a nuclear powered automatic cannon, if I recall correctly. Remember, he had to hang the heat sink into the ocean to keep it from melting down...
Don't worry...he'll listen to Reason...
Yeah, I've stopped believing in the possibility of natural intelligence, myself.
You do understand that you will have the same problem with XP, right? I've had to undergo the 25 number torture 3 times in about as many years now, because I keep swapping out parts on my homebrew PC. While merely adding a new drive to the box shouldn't trigger the Inquisition, changing your boot drive might. That's about the only part on my present XP box that I haven't changed. Nevertheless, if you go to XP, you will at least not be saddled with all the DRM and pretty graphics overhead of Vista.
Personally, I've had it with Microsoft's OS policies. XP is definitely the last MS operating system I will ever buy. My daughter's laptop just broke, and I had to buy a replacement—but I made sure it came with XP Professional instead of Vista. (I'd rather have bought a laptop with Linux on it, but that doesn't seem to be an option right now—you either pay for an OS from MS or Apple). Also, I don't yet know enough about Linux to properly support someone else using it.
However, that is going to change. I've finally made the commitment to switch myself over to Linux in the next year or so. I've put together a new box called "SuseQ" (as you might guess, she runs Suse V10.3), and I'm very happy with her. I'm planning to shift as many of my computer tasks to SuseQ as quickly as I can. The only iffy part are the games: not too many seem to work with Linux variants. That's got to change. I really think the wind has shifted: people are just fed up with this "you have to buy our new OS or die" BS that Microsoft hands out.
OK, I got to the part where the drone transfers its consciousness into a knife missile, disguises itself as a dildo, and packs itself into Our Heroine's luggage. Now that was truly funny. Especially the dialogue in which the drone promised not to be "invasive". The book's looking up...
I have to agree with you there. It really doesn't matter all that much whether the public schools teach evolution or not...there are very few teachers in these schools who are remotely qualified to teach just about any subject. I would put more of the blame on the educational establishment—particularly the NEA (National Education Associaton) than on the parents. They've been brainwashed into believing that it's solely the State's prerogative to educate their kids.
That's why we home-schooled our youngest daughter. Yes, both my wife and I are Christians, so I guess we're unqualified "religious nuts" in your view. We did teach her Biology, including the standard scientific accounts of evolution. I communicated to her my opinion that faith in divine creation isn't at odds with science in this (or any) regard. After all, God could will evolution to take place, could he not? (I understand this is similar to the Catholic Church's official opinion on the subject.) In any case, it's probably too late for you to call the cops and have her taken away from us...she's almost 18 now, and Junior at the University of Texas (Dallas).
No, that's a parody of a particular Christian doctrine, held by a segment of American Protestants. I'm not sure whether you mean to assert that your parody is "theism", or the actual doctrine is theism, but I'm quite sure that neither one is theism. Your assertion that whatever you are talking about is "semantically indistinguishable from any other religious point of view" is, I'm afraid, completely unintelligible. Do you you even know what Theism is, and how it differs, from, say Deism? Perhaps you'd find that "thought processes" (religious or not) will hurt less if you get some practice.
Besides, everyone knows it's Jim Morrison, not Elvis who's going to rule the world.
I'm sorry, but you're going to have to explain that one to me. Are there alcohol trees? Or did someone spill a can of beer on the tree's roots?
I'm perhaps a quarter of the way through Matter, so this review was timely for me (and thanks for not including spoilers). "Not his best", you say? Regrettably, that's the comment I'd have for just about anything Banks has written in the last 10 years. "Not bad" would also be apt.
Up to this point of Matter, my reaction can be characterized as "trying to remember why I ever liked this author so much". The Banks I remember from Use of Weapons, Player of Games, and Consider Phlebas (to concentrate just on the space opera) had a razor wit, a well-developed sense of irony, and a deft command of the story-teller's craft. None of these qualities is evident in Matter: so far, it has been a ponderous, boring slog through very familiar territory. Perhaps the worst thing about Matter is its long-windedness. Had editors not become extinct some time in the latter decade or so of the twentieth century, perhaps someone could have given Mr. Banks a hand by drawing fat red lines through about 75% of the narrative and dialogue of this book. One heavy concentration of red lines would be drawn through the portion of the book in which a character the reader knows to be a hypocritical (but egregiously loquacious) jackal makes an extended funeral oration for one of his victims. One sensible way for an author to handle this would be to cite the opening phrases, then say something like, "...and the loquacious, hypocritical jackal went on in this vein for several hours". Instead, Mr. Banks subjects the reader to the entire boring speech. There's no excuse for that, and no forgiveness.
It doesn't get better, you say. Hmm. Don't know if I am going to make it. Ironically, when I received the book (from Brit Amazon), I rejoiced at how thick it was. Some early reviews had claimed that Matter was a return to form for Banks; I really wanted to like this book.
Speaking of good Banks, only one person mentioned Inversions. It's my personal favorite, because of its extreme subtlety; the book demands a lot of work from the reader; it is not frothy reading. The Bridge is also one of his best, I think—though it's hard to pigeon-hole, it's definitely not space opera.
Just about everyone who liked Against a Dark Background mentions the "lazy gun". I think I remember what it is: a weapon that weighs a bit more or less, depending on which way is up. That makes the book great? All I can recollect is that the plot was an incoherent mess. I must not be properly recollecting the lazy gun.
I think C net might be missing the point of the "rainbow storage" idea...or maybe the inventor doesn't see the possibilities himself. If you haven't read the article, this is a technology that encodes data and stores it as colored geometric shapes on paper, or other printable medium. I don't think that "rainbow" storage is going to replace more conventional data storage...but I think there might be a real use for this: archival data storage. By "archival" I mean, "can still be read 1,000 years from today".
We're all familiar with the problems of any long-term computer data storage technology: mainly, the problem is progress. If you want to keep records of something for a long time, you have to consider that your storage media may simply become unreadable over time—not because of degradation in the media itself (you're going to store it in a very safe, temperature and humidity-controlled cave, right?)—but because devices that can read the media have all been junked and replaced by something far better. That's why museums and universities are always on the lookout for old media that needs to be converted to modern technology before it's too late.
But paper is forever. Well, nearly—and, of course, I'm talking about really good, acid-free paper kept stored under reasonably controlled conditions. Or you might use something even more durable than sheets of paper. You'd also have to think carefully about the inks. Assuming that the inventor can really get some decent compression rates, then perhaps he's onto something. If the "rainbow tech" allows you to store significantly more Megs of data on a sheet of A4 than you could by using a simpler technology (micro-braille?), then I'd say it would be worth a look. You'd have to be careful to store a copy of the encoding algorithm (presumably in plain, printed text) along with each cave-full of archive, of course...
Sure, it's possible. Ten years leaves you a bit of wiggle room. But I'm skeptical...I think hard drives will still be around in 20 years. Heck...I'll bet on 100 years—I won't be around to pay up.
The reason I am skeptical of announcements of the impending doom of magnetic drives is that I first heard it in...let me see...1982 or thereabouts. People were talking about the "inherent limitations" of magnetic drives, but it wasn't clear at that time what could possibly replace them. Of course, what happened is that magnetic drive technology has proven astoundingly resilient: we went from huge platters inside drive bays the size of a washing machine that collectively held maybe 2M to cheap standard-sized drives that hold half a terabyte (street price currently hovering around 100 inflated US dollars).
Don't get me wrong: I'm excited about the idea of replacing the boot drive on my PC with a super-fast flash drive—once the price for an 80G flash-based drive gets down to under $200. However, I think magnetic drives will maintain their huge price-per-MB of storage space advantage over rival technologies for a long time to come. So the drives in my PC that hold my video and movies will still be magnetic. I just want fast boot times, and quick swapping. Notebooks are another story, of course—I think it's quite likely that most notebooks will no longer have magnetic drives in ten years.
But for solid-state storage devices to make magnetic media drives completely obsolete, two things would have to happen:
These two points are related of course; they boil down to saying that it's going to have to become darn cheap to make a huge solid state "drive", where "huge" will probably be defined in tens of terabytes.
Call 911? Heck, my cats can do that and perform CPR while administering Last Rites, just in case.
Seriously...my theory is that cats help reduce vermin about the house, thus contributing to the health of their designated care-providers. (Heaven forfend that anyone should ever think he owns a cat.) My house used to be overrun with those huge cockroaches that they call "palmetto bugs" here in Texas. After I got the cats, no more roaches (but fat and happy cats). They go after anything that wiggles, scuttles, or flies around. (Though their success rate on flying prey leaves something to be desired. Hmm note to self: must look into breeding flying cats.)
The association between humans and cats has been a long and mutually beneficial one. The only major issue to trouble this partnership was the invention of doors by an unknown carpenter circa 3800 B.C. (oddly enough, the unlucky inventor suffered a fatal fall down a steep stairway soon after filing the patent). Ever since, cats have been sitting in front of doors and meowing. Most people think the cat wants out (or in), but not so: the cat is demanding that all doors everywhere be permanently removed. A closed door is an offense to all cat-kind.
My respect for Bruce Schneier increases every time I read one of his articles. I'd previously been ambivalent about the "transparent society" notion. Part of me felt uncomfortable with the video cameras going up in so many public places, but I also found it difficult to put my finger on what is wrong with such police surveillance. By defintion, whatever is done in public is there for everyone to see and record if they want. What's the difference between a policeman standing on a corner, watching a public street, and a policeman sitting in an office watching that same street via a surveillance camera?
As Schneier points out, the degree of power wielded by the observer gives an asymmetric value to information gained by that observation. Surveillance technology greatly increases the ability of the police to know about our actions and movements—one cop can watch many cameras, and those cameras can permanently record everything they "see". Moreover, reciprocity is never an issue when public surveillance is discussed. The debate is always about whether the government has the right to watch us—whether we have the right to watch the government is never brought into that discussion.
It seems to me that if the government has a right to record what goes on in public precisely because it is public, then we have a right to watch the government for that very same reason. Are police interrogations not a matter of public interest? Of course they are. Consequently, it should be an absolute requirement that every interaction between a police officer and a member of the public must be recorded. To extend this principle, is it not true that every meeting of public officials, every communication of such officials with one another is a public matter? Absolutely: everything must be recorded! I understand that not everything can be broadcast live. For example, there may be good reasons not to broadcast police interrogations—after all, even the police might decide a suspect is innocent, so there's no point in broadcasting the humiliation of an innocent citizen. And of course, deliberations of the National Security Council can't be put into the public domain immediately, lest the terrorists win. But such events must be recorded, and the conditions under which they become public must be strictly codified. For example, it should be cause for mandatory dismissal of charges if the government cannot produce a recording of the accused's interrogation during a trial. And I think after a couple of years, the need for secrecy of National Security Council deliberations expires. I'd like to watch the meetings at which Mr. Bush became convinced that the invasion of Iraq was necessary, if you please.
If you think these suggestions are unrealistic, then you get the point. The point is that the government is always willing to watch the public, but it is never willing to make its own actions public. And that's not right, is it?
I've heard rumors of the new speed limits on the Autobahn. Why, oh why are these limits being imposed? Eurocrats? How are the German drivers reacting to this? (As I recall, the German automobile association has something like the political clout of the National Rifle Association in the USA.) It's a pity, really—it was always a pleasure to drive on the Autobahn: you could go as fast as you wanted as long as you obeyed the rules (like not hanging out in the left lane after you're done passing), and you could rely on almost all drivers being competent and knowing the rules.
It seems to me that, superficially at least, it makes sense to talk about a "botnet market" as separate from the anti-virus software market if you are talking about a higher-level network solution, not simply another program that consumers run on their PCs. But from the article, it's not clear what the focus of this supposed market is. If it's software that's run by companies with large PC networks, or ISPs, and if its purpose is to track botnet-like behavior by network clients with the aim of isolating suspect clients from that network, then it makes some sense to me. This could be a good thing...if it works. If it's yet another "safe computing" package marketed to Joe Sixpack, then it's an outstandingly stupid idea. If a computer is part of a botnet, the critical failure has already occurred, and no application package is going to fix it.
I suppose the people who are boosting this new "market" are responding to a money-making opportunity created by a real social problem: the fact that massive botnets exist, and that such phenomena rob us of collective resources--that is, resources that exist for our common use. Ultimately such collective thievery boils down to every individual having to pay more for services, and to endure degraded service quality to subsidize the thieves. Surely preventing this is a worthy goal...or a goal worth paying money for.
As many here know, the virus/botnet problem is due to two factors: a massively deployed operating system that is by design insecure, and a multitude of ignorant users. Of the two, the OS is most to blame. If Joe couldn't get his PC zombified by clicking some link to download stupid stuff off a web page, or reading some mystery email, the problem would be much diminished. However, I judge on the basis of their track record that Microsoft is unlikely to ever create a truly secure operating system; it's just not a priority. Because of Microsoft's ability to get computer retailers to bundle only their OS with every computer that is sold and because of most buyers' disinclination to learn about what they are purchasing, the situation is likely to continue—unless computer users are given a strong incentive to change their buying habits.
And here's where network-level anti-botnet software might change things. Suppose ISPs started to identify PCs that are compromised to the extent that they constitute a public nuisance or threat—and isolate them from the network. Obviously, the anti-bot software would have to be very good; you don't want a significant number of false positives. But it seems to me that if you do automated traffic analysis, it wouldn't be that hard to identify the zombies (here's where those who really know about this stuff get to jump in and tell me why I'm wrong). Once identified, the zombie is isolated, the owner gets a singing telegram notifying him of the action that was taken and why, and what he should do to fix the problem. ("Reinstall Windows" will probably not be the recommended solution.)
I think that this would help, but it would require several other changes. For one thing, it's not clear to me that ISPs actually care about botnets or viruses. I'm not sure why that is. (Again, someone with a better understanding of the communications infrastructure might want to help me out here.) For another, the [L|U][n|i]n[u|i]x OS has to become a commercial product. That's right: it has to be pried out of the hands of the well-meaning and hardworking people who have made it what it is today, and put into the hands of some money-grubbing capitalist who will make deals with computer retailers, guarantee support to end-users, and above all give it a decent name. You see, normal people don't trust free things; they only trust people who take their money. That's the fundamental stumbling block of the free software movement: in the market place, anything that's to be had for nothing is perceived as having no value.
Anyway, the result I'm hoping for is that, as a result of penalizing stupid user behavior, people will either start using one of the epigonoi of Unix, or that MS will crumble under market pressure and actually create a decent secure OS. Well, I can dream.
I think you're comparing what was then a toy or curio with today's "serious" computers meant to do real work. What was available in the early 80s? Well, there was the Apple II. One of those would set you back $1300--for the cheapest model, with 4K of RAM(http://oldcomputers.net/pet2001.html). For its day, that was a serious computer...and for 1977, that was a serious price. True, you could pick up a Commodore PET for a mere $800 (http://oldcomputers.net/pet2001.html)...but that was a pretty lame machine. If you're thinking of the Vic 20 or the later Commodore 64, or the various offerings by Atari, those weren't really comparable to a "serious" computer of today. They were fun, but not serious computers. My first personal computer was a Compaq "transportable" PC. It had 256K of RAM, 2 floppy drives (the "small" 5" sized ones)...and no hard drive. The screen was a grayscale monochrome about 5" diagonal. It was the size and weight of a sewing machine.
I paid $1800 for the Compaq. In 80s money, that's quite a chunk. I told my wife I needed it for "business"...but really I just wanted to play Zork, and teach myself to progam in C. (Now there's a memory: I put the Lattice C compiler on one floppy, the code and editor on another, the linker and object code on a third, and compiled on a 128K RAM "disk" that I had split off from the 256K total RAM I had available. I felt like a juggler, swapping those floppies...but I cheated by usually holding one in my teeth. I also had to run in place in hip deep snow the whole time.)
The point is that the price for "serious" machines has remained fairly steady, or declined moderately from the mid-80s, but it still costs what—to most of us—is real money to get one. (The price for gaming rigs, on the other hand, has skyrocketed.) But it's also true that some people spend too much money on laptops. If you're one of those "road warriors" who has to work spreadsheets, PhotoShop, or give live demos of bloatware, you need a $2K laptop. But if all you want is connectivity, then the $200 laptop is all you need. I don't think Sony has anything to worry about...some buyers, like parents who used to spend $1K on laptops for their kids will get the cheap ones instead. But there will still be plenty of buyers for the workhorse, expensive laptop. These cheap laptops don't replace full-featured ones. We're just seeing the creation of a new, needed, market niche: the cheap laptop for people who don't need the features and power of the expensive ones.
Thanks for clearing that up. In light of the revised pricing scheme...I can make available a cat that will walk across the keyboard for a few kibbles a day 8^)
Three bucks a captcha? Minimum? Hey, I speak English, and if I can post to /. at work, I can do captchas, and I can do 'em faster than the Russians. Let's see...I can do at least 2 captchas a minute (including breaks), so that comes out to...$360 an hour! I'm in. Someone give me the URL!
Er...that translation is really crucial. Are you sure that was a dollar sign in front of the 3? Or are they perhaps paying in Russian Roubles? That would be considerably less favorable, as the Rouble is going for 24 to the U.S. Dollar. Still...$15/hour...maybe my kid will be interested.