Sorry for airing reruns but its more relevant here. As I have said before:
Re
NSF blowing a measly million to put speech recognition in silicon [for which there were many interesting and informative comments posted] I said:
Just a million? Pfft! I went down the tubes with one S.R. startup back in '92 that ate far more of some VC's money than that. Now NSF is not in it to get rich and I hope I am right in assuming that a successful chip design, if a mere $1000000 gets that far, would then be available at no fee to any foundry, or at least US foundry. OK, any foundry that wants to sell S.R. chips to the DOD. This lines up pretty well with IBM's recent give-away of its S.R. code: it is an admission that Speech Recognition is a commodity and nobody knows how to make any money with it so govt must fund further development. BTW, automated recognition of music [as in "what is this tune I keep humming?"] has been on the drawing board at Philips over in the Netherlands for over a year. Philips isn't saying much. But it appears you have to have a pretty accurate sample to get recognition since they want to arrest your piracy based on this recognition...no S.R. software worth its $1000000 is that fussy about sound quality.
who actually can talk and may even think for themselves.
AAAS has arranged and will webcast
a debate on the science policy views of the
two parties as presented by "representative"
policy advisors to the parties...might just as
well listen to the people who write the cue cards
as to the people who read them.
The represetatives?
Former House Science Committee Chairman Bob Walker will represent the Bush campaign. Walker, chairman of Wexler & Walker Public Policy Associates, has been described as "perhaps the best political and policy strategist and tactician in Washington." Speaking on behalf of the Kerry-Edwards campaign will be physicist Henry Kelly, formerly the assistant director for technology of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He is currently president of the Federation of American Scientists.
[unable to resist bait, it must be a trap but...]
You may be right that putting out a news release before you have any other
visible material is a bad move but unless you are one of those dolts who
suspect anyone with a GPA>3.5 is a pinko bedwetter and you press your hands
over your ears unless your hearing the reassuring words of Cheney or Rice, you would certainly be aware
that this administration has been eating the seed corn, so to speak, as far
as funding basic research. Just go to
the details on your president's science spending as reported by the largest
and most respected non government body of scientists in the US. You don't
even have to read the whole of each article, just read the link/headlines
in the right hand column...the only "science" for which Bush hasn't cut back
funding is DOD programs. There are DOZENS of "just a few people that doesn't like Bush" science organizations and stories. Are you not looking or do you just wish not to see? If you hear to many of his speechings you can begin to sound as him.
hmmm. its not working.
AND WHO SAID CTRL-ALT-DEL WAS ANY MORE BRILLIANT THAN SHIFT? IT JUST WORKS BECAUSE IT GETS HELP FROM THE BIOS.
nope, still not working.
I have actually shipped products that could be turned on by either a 20 digit licen$e code or by
typing in my companies initials...so have some of you!
Cerf and confederates are quite right but the problem with science as a political issue is that a scientific development leads its political
consequences by years, sometimes decades. Politicians and most businesses
don't operate in that sort of timeframe. [And most politicians are getting most of their money from businesses? gawd, I can't tell flamebait from reasonable conjecture anymore!] So even though most of the jobs we
do today and the way we fight wars today involve technology that was hot science 10 or
20 years ago, few of us are voting like science mattered, let alone being
led by leaders who think that way. A
poll at scienceblog.com
shows that its readers strongly consider Bush harmful to scientific progress.
Except that we yanks have lent more DNA to Europeans than I think we have any interest in collecting, all of the Big Brother technologies you list are in place or on the drawing boards in the US thanks to our current national administration's accidental discovery that fear is a much easier way to consolidate power than reason ever was. And I shouldn't forget, as mentioned in/., we don't just oggle crooks with our satellites.
Let me undescore the impact the conference is likely to have by pointing out that when NIST speaks, the DOJ listens. Here is a quote from a rejected submission of mine that found other documents NIST has authored that Ashcroft and co. now use.
Feeding the fascination many/. readers may have for the escalation of
technique and counter-technique beteween hackers and computer forensics
experts may not be as valuable as keeping clues about how to avoid
getting caught out of the hands of the hackers but I just can't resist...
Sciencedaily.com
pointed me to something hackers and other criminals might want to study
carefully:
the PDF guidebook that NIST wrote for the DOJ's first responders to computer
crime scenes. Though it has John Ashcroft's
name at the top, a glance at the document's time line shows that it was
authored by experts mostly from outside the DOJ and completed before
the current administration's appointments: the imprimatur of
Justice Department on the document may not be ironic.
Drat! I'm gonna get modded for flamebait but with a sig like mine, who'd notice?
you have a lot of stupid clients and stupid laws. The point the book
was making is that patents now wind up in courts
[where 12 people who don't know how to get out of
jury duty or a judge who doesn't like trying drug dealers get to decide the novelty of some technology claim they are very unlikely to understand] instead of being adjudicated by the PTO [which hires experts and has tons of relevant personal and organizational experience in such matters] and WHY? because the solution 20 years ago to the percieved backlog at the PTO was to speed it all up by granting claims without adequate review. Putting more money into the PTO would not have been kosher Reaganomics. I'm surprised they didn't also save taxpayer's money by cutting power to all the stoplights.
Solid comment coward! I'd like to add that there is another way in which wealth seems to grant the wealthy a special logic that disconnects them from the world of work: the way 99% of us "create wealth" is by going to work every morning. Russell Roberts a frequent contributor to the library of Econonmics and Liberty whose
interview with Lawence Lessig has been reported in/. also had this to say about sending that work abroad. I don't give a s__t about some fat capitalist's theory of wealth creation, even while dreaming of being rich myself, if it means I am out of a job. In the disconnect that you describe, I am seeing a connection: The same minds [Roberts] concern themselves over a corporation's rights to a person's ideas as concern themselves over obtaining cheap labor regardless of social costs which are not born by the corportation.
This is, uh, make that WAS, a submission that, as I write this reply, was still marked as "pending"...I can see that I don't write as well as other folks but I do find a good balance of links:
A hard look at our patent system
NY Times briefly reviews a new book [NYTimes is not for the electronically homeless: you must be able to make up a username and an email address to get access] by two
lawyers on just how F...ed up our patent system is. There
are several trends underlined that some/. folk have
already been hurt by. An interesting general theme is how
various past attempts at reform have backfired in one way
or another. For example lowering the bar for obtaining a
patent has largely had the effect of moving the real
debates about what is novel and who really invented it
off to the courts. If GPL is more your idea of how to
handle intellectual property, you might want to read
the article at Worldchanging.org calling for patent
reform and pointing to an alternative to the WIPO stand
on international IP laws. You should probably be aware of all these sides of the issue if
you think of yourself as a person who gets ideas that have
commercial value.
/. posters: Thanks for all the information for a newbie taking the BSD plunge. This is/. at its best: a lot of people who know what they are talking about and willing to pass on what they know. BTW, entirely by accident, I found an HP site where you can try out BSD. They are running FreeBSD 5.2.1. You sign up for an account and get to play on their machine. HP puts up the service as a way to show off its high performance systems [alpha's, 64-bit itaniums and other cool tools headed for obsolescence:( ]. I wonder if HP's choice of BSD as one of the OS's for testdriving their hottest boxes implys that they think BSD is less likely to get in the way of demanding computations than some other OS's we shant name.
I thought I was the only person in my town who
even knew that you could pedal distances and maintain speeds most people only expect a car can do. [working at an MIT lab means I am not the only
person at my office who knows this funny little secret.] I might have missed the establishment of this repository despite my various bookmarks on HPV links to some of the content....but its ok with me if god let there be slashdot and then let me get addicted to it just so I would pick up on this trove as soon as it had a URL. OK, I admit not every programmer also has filled lab notebooks with as many sketchs of recumbent trikes and automatic
transmissions for bikes as of code or UML or ERDs. There certainly are software engineers who waddle back and forth between vending machine and workstation but they may not have grokked the essential parallel between cycling and programming: the challenge of wresting unlimited accomplishments from strictly limited resources by dint of hard work. Of course, if you
want most of what's useful science in this compendium without having to suck it all down from the web you could just buy a copy of David Wilson's Bicycling Science. Sorry, I am not being facetious or cheeky this evening.
Even Time mag. knows we are more wide open than any
nation, having declared itself at war, has any reason to be. [time may or may not be money but Time
wants your money to read past cover stories]
I bought a cheap [e-mahcine] 2.4gHz box with the
intention of just reformating XP to oblivion and
loading up a Linux...but now here is BSD. Hmmm
the install instructions at the BSD site look
detailed. Last time I tried this was with RH 6.something, I was using an even cheaper machine with an oddball graphics card...never did get X
windows or any thing but command line mode [which
would have served my purposes]. I guess what I
really want before wiping windows off my box is a
throrough HW compatibility list...one size DOES
NOT fit all PC's.
yeah, I have to agree that breeder reactors are
not INHERENTLY safe technology and no matter how many guards you put around the outside, you can
still have idiots on the inside of a nuke plant.
The ironic thing is that your 4th point can be
achieved by that very proliferation of weapons we
want to avoid:(
...won't M$ will have grounds to complain that a backdoor way of making their proprietary [Word, Exel...] stuff into open source stuff has been created?
the answer, without going into a lot of phyics is
that between proven sources and the regenerative
capacity of so-called breeder reactors, we could
could go [at present power consumption levels] for
centuries. This was the original "power too cheap
to meter" argument made for nukes back in the
[naive, optimistic] '50s. It would outlast oil by several generations. Politics always trumps
science and acute accidents like Chernobl always
change peoples minds more effectively than diffuse
accidents like our overheated bioshpere slipping by with little alarm despite wiping out entire species. If one percent of what our nation spends to secure an oil supply [you may even leave out the cost of the Iraq misadventure] were spent on building nuke plants that were idiot proof and safe disposal methods, we would not be worried about another three mile island, and we would be
able to afford to turn on our air conditioners.
Assuming the unmentioned location in Washington state [DC would of course be the ideal location but...;)]is the Hanford superfund-glows-in-the-dark nuclear leak wasteland, they have a few cubic miles
of dirt to scrape up and vitrify and only coyotes and cockroaches would go anyware near the damn place...why not just let'm vitrify it in place [so dust storms don't put the thorium/plutonium etc in
your orange juice] and leave it where it lies.
You're right. I forgot what put me off about the
Sony/Ericsson developer support. Part of it was
they didn't handle MIDP2 back when I looked into
it and part of it was the $500/$2500 membership if
you wanted to be a developer who actually got your
questions answered. I just checked the
Java support page and see that they do handle
MIDP2 nowadays...I should stay tuned or shut up.
I have plenty of out-of-date Java experience so I
subscribed to Sony's developer news 2 minutes
after I saw the Java logo pop up on my new
Sony/Ericsson T610. The cost of the SDK with
interface h/w for the Sony platform is a bit out of hobbiest range.
and I hear bad things about bluetooth security
holes. Is this my next chance to write the killer
app? That Sony is now obsolete and never had
CDMA anyway so now I got TWO reasons to buy a new cell phone. Anybody got a pretty printer..the
sample code is wrapped ugly. and its C code!
great! I have even more C experience and its
even more out of date. OK, brew sdk is a free
download,...this is gonna be fun. BTW, go read
the article then follow
link to an article on porting games from J2ME to Brew
Virtually every project of 10 or more engineers that I have been on in my 30 years of software dev has cooked up its own logging facility. You are on the
back of a very crowded bus here. Depending on whether memory, disk i/o resources or realtime and multithread requirements reign in your application, rather different logging approaches are applicable. Being able to dump the Nth
occurance is a nice feature but so many more
are needed.
THE BIGGEST DIFFERENCE I SEE between your logger
kit and some I have used/written is that you published the code.
A partial feature checklist I would be looking for:
[]has both compile time and run time mechanism to
set severity thresholds.
[] idenifies the process/thread from which the logging call is issued
[] can generate some kind of event ID so context can be deduced even when the same message occurs many times.
[]timestamping: this can give you a poor man's perfmon with added programability.
[] supports detection of recursion by indenting
printouts that are called as you go deeper on the stack
[] NOMENCLATURE REGULARITY: a syntax for timestamps, severity, function name from which print is called, etc so that you can automate [eg with AWK etc ] the sorting and dredging for clues in a long
output run.
[]when not in use, can be "turned off" with no
compile or run time overhead but still present as comments.
Objection sustained. My apology is tucked into
the "RE: pirate to pirate" thread. But I have
to admire/.'ers who have managed despite their ire, to serve up
some interesting insights from several positions
about how, once some thing CAN be had for free,
folks get good at figuring out why it SHOULD be
free. I have even more admiration for the replies that stayed on topic with interesting posts about what sysadmins can actually
do to ward off troubles of the sort reported...THAT
is the news I can use.
...because it verges on flamebait for responses that will not be entirely on topic [I thought the/. gods did a good thing recatorizing the story as IT] but the sparks have been kind of flying and I do enjoy
fireworks. The sad truth is that there are valid
points being made by both Calamormine and Quaters.
Consider how some small time software developers try
to make a living with share ware or the "free" trial
version that, if you like it but want all the bells
and whistles, you have to pony up 59.95 to get a
licencse key [and of course, those poor guys are at the mercy of people who pass around key-gen
programs]. Point being that products that benefit
from word-of-keyboard marketing CAN take advantage of pervasive sharing. You could learn a lot from
reading Dan Bricklin's article on how the right
license can make or break a small company's
fortunes.
BTW, My oldest son is a fairly creative musician but though he still spends hours per day composing or improvising, has chosen to study molecular biology, abandoning an
idea he had in high school to put his compositions up on his web site. Why? When he comes home from college, I unplug the rest of our computers from the cable modem, he plugs his laptop in so he can keep picking "stuff" up with Ares. I let him have a nice wallow in the information sewer highway and point out the keylog files on his hard drive at the end of his visit. Within a few days the weird protocol/port combinations bouncing off my firewall drop down to normal levels. Why? You have to ask someone his age I guess.
I can't tell you how fervently I wish I could make a living in a cabin off the grid with a few hot PCs and a solar powered satellite dish serving up fairly priced tricks and treats you all would not mind paying to have on your computers but I can't think of any way to protect it. I have resigned myself to working in a soulless megacorp, writing software I can't tell anyone about because megacorps have the means to get customers by the short hairs and hang on.
Our government spends way more than it takes in.
A huge percentage of our finished goods are made in other countries, even high tech goods. We start wars on skimpy evidence just to keep the population in line behind a shakey leader. The government constantly puts out an interpretation of its situation wildly at odds with what is reported in the world press. Our health care system is available to shrinking portion of our population. And now we hear that somebody else has to check and see if our election process is rigged. All that is left is for our credit rating to catch up with our deficit spending and the last of our green card engineers to go back to home countries where their wages will soon be buying them a better life than than they do here.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry for airing reruns but its more relevant here. As I have said before:
Re NSF blowing a measly million to put speech recognition in silicon [for which there were many interesting and informative comments posted] I said:
Just a million? Pfft! I went down the tubes with one S.R. startup back in '92 that ate far more of some VC's money than that. Now NSF is not in it to get rich and I hope I am right in assuming that a successful chip design, if a mere $1000000 gets that far, would then be available at no fee to any foundry, or at least US foundry. OK, any foundry that wants to sell S.R. chips to the DOD. This lines up pretty well with IBM's recent give-away of its S.R. code: it is an admission that Speech Recognition is a commodity and nobody knows how to make any money with it so govt must fund further development.
BTW, automated recognition of music [as in "what is this tune I keep humming?"] has been on the drawing board at Philips over in the Netherlands for over a year. Philips isn't saying much. But it appears you have to have a pretty accurate sample to get recognition since they want to arrest your piracy based on this recognition...no S.R. software worth its $1000000 is that fussy about sound quality.
The represetatives?
people snarfing my dirty pictures before I can even get home with the camera!
/. put on the brakes!
I posted first but
[unable to resist bait, it must be a trap but...] You may be right that putting out a news release before you have any other visible material is a bad move but unless you are one of those dolts who suspect anyone with a GPA>3.5 is a pinko bedwetter and you press your hands over your ears unless your hearing the reassuring words of Cheney or Rice, you would certainly be aware that this administration has been eating the seed corn, so to speak, as far as funding basic research. Just go to the details on your president's science spending as reported by the largest and most respected non government body of scientists in the US. You don't even have to read the whole of each article, just read the link/headlines in the right hand column...the only "science" for which Bush hasn't cut back funding is DOD programs. There are DOZENS of "just a few people that doesn't like Bush" science organizations and stories. Are you not looking or do you just wish not to see? If you hear to many of his speechings you can begin to sound as him.
hmmm. its not working.
AND WHO SAID CTRL-ALT-DEL WAS ANY MORE BRILLIANT THAN SHIFT? IT JUST WORKS BECAUSE IT GETS HELP FROM THE BIOS.
nope, still not working.
I have actually shipped products that could be turned on by either a 20 digit licen$e code or by typing in my companies initials...so have some of you!
Cerf and confederates are quite right but the problem with science as a political issue is that a scientific development leads its political consequences by years, sometimes decades. Politicians and most businesses don't operate in that sort of timeframe. [And most politicians are getting most of their money from businesses? gawd, I can't tell flamebait from reasonable conjecture anymore!] So even though most of the jobs we do today and the way we fight wars today involve technology that was hot science 10 or 20 years ago, few of us are voting like science mattered, let alone being led by leaders who think that way. A poll at scienceblog.com shows that its readers strongly consider Bush harmful to scientific progress.
Except that we yanks have lent more DNA to Europeans than I think we have any interest in collecting, all of the Big Brother technologies you list are in place or on the drawing boards in the US thanks to our current national administration's accidental discovery that fear is a much easier way to consolidate power than reason ever was. And I shouldn't forget, as mentioned in /., we don't just oggle crooks with our satellites.
Drat! I'm gonna get modded for flamebait but with a sig like mine, who'd notice?
you have a lot of stupid clients and stupid laws.
The point the book was making is that patents now wind up in courts [where 12 people who don't know how to get out of jury duty or a judge who doesn't like trying drug dealers get to decide the novelty of some technology claim they are very unlikely to understand] instead of being adjudicated by the PTO [which hires experts and has tons of relevant personal and organizational experience in such matters] and WHY? because the solution 20 years ago to the percieved backlog at the PTO was to speed it all up by granting claims without adequate review. Putting more money into the PTO would not have been kosher Reaganomics. I'm surprised they didn't also save taxpayer's money by cutting power to all the stoplights.
Solid comment coward! I'd like to add that there is another way in which wealth seems to grant the wealthy a special logic that disconnects them from the world of work: the way 99% of us "create wealth" is by going to work every morning. Russell Roberts a frequent contributor to the library of Econonmics and Liberty whose interview with Lawence Lessig has been reported in /. also had this to say about sending that work abroad. I don't give a s__t about some fat capitalist's theory of wealth creation, even while dreaming of being rich myself, if it means I am out of a job. In the disconnect that you describe, I am seeing a connection: The same minds [Roberts] concern themselves over a corporation's rights to a person's ideas as concern themselves over obtaining cheap labor regardless of social costs which are not born by the corportation.
my sig always has the last word:
/. posters: /. at its best: a lot of people who know what they are talking about and willing to pass on what they know.
Thanks for all the information for a newbie taking the BSD plunge. This is
BTW, entirely by accident, I found an HP site where you can try out BSD. They are running FreeBSD 5.2.1. You sign up for an account and get to play on their machine. HP puts up the service as a way to show off its high performance systems [alpha's, 64-bit itaniums and other cool tools headed for obsolescence:( ]. I wonder if HP's choice of BSD as one of the OS's for testdriving their hottest boxes implys that they think BSD is less likely to get in the way of demanding computations than some other OS's we shant name.
Comment ends, sig begins :
I thought I was the only person in my town who even knew that you could pedal distances and maintain speeds most people only expect a car can do. [working at an MIT lab means I am not the only person at my office who knows this funny little secret.] I might have missed the establishment of this repository despite my various bookmarks on HPV links to some of the content....but its ok with me if god let there be slashdot and then let me get addicted to it just so I would pick up on this trove as soon as it had a URL. OK, I admit not every programmer also has filled lab notebooks with as many sketchs of recumbent trikes and automatic transmissions for bikes as of code or UML or ERDs. There certainly are software engineers who waddle back and forth between vending machine and workstation but they may not have grokked the essential parallel between cycling and programming: the challenge of wresting unlimited accomplishments from strictly limited resources by dint of hard work.
Of course, if you want most of what's useful science in this compendium without having to suck it all down from the web you could just buy a copy of David Wilson's Bicycling Science . Sorry, I am not being facetious or cheeky this evening.
Even Time mag. knows we are more wide open than any nation, having declared itself at war, has any reason to be. [time may or may not be money but Time wants your money to read past cover stories]
I bought a cheap [e-mahcine] 2.4gHz box with the intention of just reformating XP to oblivion and loading up a Linux...but now here is BSD. Hmmm the install instructions at the BSD site look detailed. Last time I tried this was with RH 6.something, I was using an even cheaper machine with an oddball graphics card...never did get X windows or any thing but command line mode [which would have served my purposes]. I guess what I really want before wiping windows off my box is a throrough HW compatibility list...one size DOES NOT fit all PC's.
yeah, I have to agree that breeder reactors are not INHERENTLY safe technology and no matter how many guards you put around the outside, you can still have idiots on the inside of a nuke plant. The ironic thing is that your 4th point can be achieved by that very proliferation of weapons we want to avoid :(
...won't M$ will have grounds to complain that a backdoor way of making their proprietary [Word, Exel...] stuff into open source stuff has been created?
the answer, without going into a lot of phyics is that between proven sources and the regenerative capacity of so-called breeder reactors, we could could go [at present power consumption levels] for centuries. This was the original "power too cheap to meter" argument made for nukes back in the [naive, optimistic] '50s. It would outlast oil by several generations. Politics always trumps science and acute accidents like Chernobl always change peoples minds more effectively than diffuse accidents like our overheated bioshpere slipping by with little alarm despite wiping out entire species. If one percent of what our nation spends to secure an oil supply [you may even leave out the cost of the Iraq misadventure] were spent on building nuke plants that were idiot proof and safe disposal methods, we would not be worried about another three mile island, and we would be able to afford to turn on our air conditioners.
Assuming the unmentioned location in Washington state [DC would of course be the ideal location but...;)]is the Hanford superfund-glows-in-the-dark nuclear leak wasteland, they have a few cubic miles of dirt to scrape up and vitrify and only coyotes and cockroaches would go anyware near the damn place...why not just let'm vitrify it in place [so dust storms don't put the thorium/plutonium etc in your orange juice] and leave it where it lies.
You're right. I forgot what put me off about the Sony/Ericsson developer support. Part of it was they didn't handle MIDP2 back when I looked into it and part of it was the $500/$2500 membership if you wanted to be a developer who actually got your questions answered. I just checked the Java support page and see that they do handle MIDP2 nowadays...I should stay tuned or shut up.
I have plenty of out-of-date Java experience so I subscribed to Sony's developer news 2 minutes after I saw the Java logo pop up on my new Sony/Ericsson T610. The cost of the SDK with interface h/w for the Sony platform is a bit out of hobbiest range. and I hear bad things about bluetooth security holes. Is this my next chance to write the killer app? That Sony is now obsolete and never had CDMA anyway so now I got TWO reasons to buy a new cell phone. Anybody got a pretty printer..the sample code is wrapped ugly. and its C code! great! I have even more C experience and its even more out of date. OK, brew sdk is a free download,...this is gonna be fun. BTW, go read the article then follow link to an article on porting games from J2ME to Brew
Objection sustained. My apology is tucked into the "RE: pirate to pirate" thread. But I have to admire /.'ers who have managed despite their ire, to serve up
some interesting insights from several positions
about how, once some thing CAN be had for free,
folks get good at figuring out why it SHOULD be
free. I have even more admiration for the replies that stayed on topic with interesting posts about what sysadmins can actually
do to ward off troubles of the sort reported...THAT
is the news I can use.
...because it verges on flamebait for responses that will not be entirely on topic [I thought the /. gods did a good thing recatorizing the story as IT] but the sparks have been kind of flying and I do enjoy
fireworks. The sad truth is that there are valid
points being made by both Calamormine and Quaters.
Consider how some small time software developers try
to make a living with share ware or the "free" trial
version that, if you like it but want all the bells
and whistles, you have to pony up 59.95 to get a
licencse key [and of course, those poor guys are at the mercy of people who pass around key-gen
programs]. Point being that products that benefit
from word-of-keyboard marketing CAN take advantage of pervasive sharing. You could learn a lot from
reading Dan Bricklin's article on how the right
license can make or break a small company's
fortunes.
BTW, My oldest son is a fairly creative musician but though he still spends hours per day composing or improvising, has chosen to study molecular biology, abandoning an
idea he had in high school to put his compositions up on his web site. Why? When he comes home from college, I unplug the rest of our computers from the cable modem, he plugs his laptop in so he can keep picking "stuff" up with Ares. I let him have a nice wallow in the information sewer highway and point out the keylog files on his hard drive at the end of his visit. Within a few days the weird protocol/port combinations bouncing off my firewall drop down to normal levels. Why? You have to ask someone his age I guess.
I can't tell you how fervently I wish I could make a living in a cabin off the grid with a few hot PCs and a solar powered satellite dish serving up fairly priced tricks and treats you all would not mind paying to have on your computers but I can't think of any way to protect it. I have resigned myself to working in a soulless megacorp, writing software I can't tell anyone about because megacorps have the means to get customers by the short hairs and hang on.
Our government spends way more than it takes in. A huge percentage of our finished goods are made in other countries, even high tech goods. We start wars on skimpy evidence just to keep the population in line behind a shakey leader. The government constantly puts out an interpretation of its situation wildly at odds with what is reported in the world press. Our health care system is available to shrinking portion of our population. And now we hear that somebody else has to check and see if our election process is rigged. All that is left is for our credit rating to catch up with our deficit spending and the last of our green card engineers to go back to home countries where their wages will soon be buying them a better life than than they do here.