If you build your house in the middle of a public thoroughfare instead of on private property, yes. The Internet is a public highway. You are expected to mark the boundaries of your property.
IANAL, but after reading the injunction itself, all I can think is, "Holy cow! I may have broken the DMCA myself!"
We have a large piece of CNC (computer numerical control) manufacturing equipment. The machine is purchased, not leased. The software controlling it is proprietary, but runs on a Windows NT console. The manufacturer's idea of securing their IP is to give access to the controlling software only through the Administrator logon. The OEM keeps the Administrator password.
We use the machine through an operator logon that can only execute the software, and has no access to Win NT utilities or controls. As the OEM would have it, we have no Administrator access to the OS.
We wanted to network the system, so we wheedled a field technician into giving us the Administrator password. Now it sounds as if we are violating DMCA if we log on to the console as Administrator!
To complicate matters further, I don't know whether our purchase contract says anything about whether we or the OEM hold the license to Win NT. Normally, I would expect the owner of the hardware to also own the OS license, and we've behaved as such; we've even changed the admin password. But from what I've read today, then doesn't the DMCA allow the OEM to prohibit us from having Administrator access to our own licensed OS?
Yes, mustard gas was a nasty thing--a very nasty thing--to use in war.
But did you know that msutard gas was also the very first chemical used as a successful chemotherapy treatment for cancer?
Yes, I'd guess that the first use for an LCCM (and second, and third) might be terrorism. But you never can predict what horror of today will find a beneficial use tomorrow. Not every tech advance comes from NASA.
I've become a "network administrator" by virtue of being the only person in my company who understands the difference between ping and Pong. So when we needed a new Windows server we had to get a local company to set it up. They set up a weekly backup for the data partition and the system partition - or so we thought. On closer examination, the system backup was backing up "C:" instead of "C:\", so we had four backups of the "C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator" folder. I won't be recommending these guys to anybody else...
When 5+4 ZIP code extensions came out way back when, somebody in the national media suggested ditching the entire ZIP system and using the other 9-digit number you already had - your Social Security number - as your mailing address.
Fortunately for the 3 tons of bulk mail everybody receives each year, nobody took him seriously.
Back in the 80's I worked on the Honeywell CP-6 operating system. This was pre-GUI, of course. Across CP-6, you typed "help " at program prompts to get info (just like MS-DOS now). I forget what system program you had to be in, but if you typed "help sam" at the right spot, you got the complete text of "The Cremation of Sam McGee", the earliest "easter egg" I ever saw.
Actually, my first thought was of something about 80 years before Crichton's Jurassic Park and The Lost World: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Lost World, in which he introduced Professor Challenger. Dinosaurs, action, adventure, and a good bit of humor--from a master storyteller. Worth digging up, if you're not too anal about the science (which was really pretty good for its day).
Reminds me of the egg-dropping contest they had one year at the University of Arkansas. Design a container that will protect several eggs (3?) from breakage after a several-story fall. You must be able to open, reclose, and relaunch the container within yea-many seconds. Dimensions are limited to X by Y by Z.
It ran in several rounds, each round from a higher floor. The ultimate winner didn't depend on padding at all; he used an otherwise empty box that had egg cups strung on shock cord suspended in the middle. Maximum volume + minimum mass = minimum impact velocity.
Next time, maybe a box kite instead of a wing, with the camera shock-corded in the center?
First off, American scientists and technicians do use these units. I've been familiar with the metric system since childhood.
Next, language changes. Sometimes the changes make sense, sometimes they don't. English in particular (American or British) is a thoroughly bastardized and mangled language. How can you say a language make sense that can contain the sentence, "Though coughing and hiccoughing, he fought through the tough boughs." The four-letter combination "ough" is pronounced seven different ways in a ten-word sentence.
Finally, French names are more respected in English than those of many other countries. We do use the spellings "Bordeaux" and "Chartres"; but we spell the German names "München" and "Köln" as "Munich" and "Cologne". (Come to think of it, isn't "Cologne" a French spelling?)
National brand 31-120 Handi Notes notepad, 60 Sheets / 3 x 5 Narrow Ruled White Paper. Sanford Expresso Extra Fine in green or blue or Bic SOFTFeel Medium in black.
I can't recall my source but what I read in the 1970's was that the "official" 100km boundary was set by treaty between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. in the 1960's.
Don't stop there! We'll have to get rid of our phone lines, Internet Explorer and Netscape, our computers themselves, our cable TV/internet connections, our communications satellites, our--
Wait a minute; the Luddite in me is starting to like the sound of this...
...if you can't handle that, then I have no idea how you expect to get anywhere in life.
The question is, do you wnat to go anywhere, or is there someplace specific you're aiming for? What do you want from your life, and is a stressful IT job how to get it?
Is your job what you want to do, or does your job pay for what you want to do?
I left full-time IT work about 18 years ago, when it was still "DP work". I understand your love/hate relationship perfectly.
I love troubleshooting (my spouse still sometimes staggers out at 3:00am to find me, crick-necked and eye-glazed, trying to kludge up the bugs in some little screensaver I'm writing to entertain the kids), but I hated deadlines, and loathed the feeling that everything I wrote was obsolete before the first user miskeyed an entry. If anything, that's worse today, when new and incompatible versions of OS's seem to emerge on a weekly basis.
There's just not much feeling of reality in pushing electrons around. One thing I noticed in those days: We had a variety of field engineers come in for maintenance on our mainframes; in those days even the IS people didn't touch the hardware. (How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?) Whenever one of the FE's took a break, he always started talking about cars, usually about the classic junker in his garage that he'd been rebuilding from the ground up. I'm sure the FE's needed the feel of something tangible in their hands after spying on flying bits all day long.
These days I hold a mixed job, the sort you can only get into by taking a single position and then doing whatever nobody else knows how to do. My title is Senior Draftsman, but I'm also a designer, network administrator, and general computer guru, because nobody else in the company knows how. I still work heavily with computers (and solemnly curse MS and BG almost daily), but I also get the satisfaction of seeing some of my designs turned into solid objects that will presumably still be hanging around a few years after the release of Longhorn, or even Blackcomb.
Yes, the pay is less (much less), but in the end I'll have more to show from my present job than I ever had from programming work. All I can show my kids from those days is a Xerox mainframe nameplate, a few pages of incomprehensible code in a dead language, and a reel tape (yes, one of the big old SF-movie reels). Not much to show for a degree and years of work.
It's not just CD-R's that have been over-trusted, as the Library of Congress report makes clear. In the 1980's advertisers said that CD players were better than phonographs because a music CD, if handled carefully, would never wear out. At the time, I believed them.
But about six months ago I was shocked to discover that several of my treasured music CD-ROM's had visible damage. These were commercially-recorded disks bought in the late 80's and early 90's, that had always been stored indoors in their original cases. None of these had ever been ever been taken traveling or stored without heat or AC; certainly none of them had been subjected to stress, except the stress of being played.
The worst of them had what appeared to be both pinhole burns and flaked spots in the metal film. The very worst of them were some of my prized Deutsche Grammophon classical disks, manufactured by Polydor International. My collection is much smaller than that of the Library, but I had more than one disk that looked like Image 1 in the Library's report.
Needless to say, I have been taking better care than ever of my old vinyl LP's, some of which are over 35 years old and still in good condition.
It seems to me that a national ID would be an additional form, not a replacement for a state ID. Don't qualifications for a driver's license differ between states (in such things as vision testing, vehicle classifications, and so on)? In fact, it seems likely that a state ID would be one of the accepted identifiers when you apply for your NID.
Schneier's article hints that he expects such an ID system to be mandatory if implemented. That brings to mind the interesting case of Dudley Hiibel, currently before the U.S. Supreme Court. Is one obligated to identify oneself at all, if one chooses not to?
The database for such a system would necessarily provide online access to state and local law enforcement, rendering it a prime target for hackers and other criminals. And can we really be certain that the Sheriff's Office or the Department of Finance of Bugtussel County can't be bribed for direct access?
A side note: The little item about license plate shields questions whether these would be legal. The last I knew, even most of the little plastic frames that carry a car dealer's name are illegal in my state, although there are millions of them - they obscure a small part of the lettering on the plate.
You are asking about one of the fundamental flaws in your chosen profession, and one of the key reasons I stopped trying to work as a programmer years ago. Fact of life: Managers don't look at what you can do, they look at what you have done.
The same technician-manager conflict arises in virtually every technical profession; ask any experienced engineer, or even a good welder. Management and HR can't judge ability from your resume; they can only judge success. But I've said for years there's no technical job in which sheer incompetence can be so easily disguised as in programming. The imbalance is more severe, because the true incompetents are so much more dense (in more than one sense).
And management knows it. Hiring a programming team is a crapshoot, because you may not find out for years which of them is worth the money. Experience is superior to education, but it's far easier to see if a welder can lay a bead cleanly than if a programmer can write 10K lines of clean code.
In my day I wrote payroll software in Fortran, library routines and system utilities in assembler or PL-6, and database applications in (gack!) COBOL. Fortran was clean, assembler and PL-6 had system-level access, and HAIRBOL had database functions built in. I used what I had to, however it worked. I didn't think of myself as a Fortran or COBOL programmer; I thought of myself as a system programmer and (in occasional moments of overconfidence) a system designer.
But to prospective employers, I learned, I was not a system designer or a system programmer; I wasn't even particularly a Fortran or COBOL programmer. I was a Honeywell programmer because that's the hardware my company had. I was a accounting programmer because I'd written accounting software.
So the way you phrased your question catches my ear. First:
As someone with 12 years C++ . ..
but then:
. . . from 10+ years experience in programming . ..
Which is it? Is your boss looking at the amount of time you've spent in C++ (and you should learn even a complex language thoroughly in 2 years) or at your body of work as a programmer?
The manager who needs a search engine would rather hire a kid who spent 2 years coding someone else's engine than someone with decades of design experience from accounting to gene sequencing who has never done a search engine. But the manager who needs a design team leader will look for someone who hasn't turned all his projects into lumber because the only tool he knew was a handsaw.
In conclusion (I ramble too much to say in summary), I believe this is an argument you can't win--you can only outlive it. Tangible benefits from years of programming experience take years to reveal.
when computer games didn't require a half gig of video memory and a terahertz processor.
I first played Adventure in 1981 on a Xerox CP-V system from the early 60's; the code would have been a highly-tweaked Fortran IV. The game was unmistakably written for an old-fashioned CRT: Most of the room descriptions were two or three lines long, but when you first came to the "Volcano View" the screen flooded with text, a description exactly 80 chars wide by 23 lines long, leaving just one line at the bottom of the screen for the prompt.
A couple of years later my company upgraded to a Honeywell CP-6 system with custom implementations of both Adventure and Zork. They were both written in a dead language called PL-6 (no relation to PL/1; PL-6 was created from scratch as an OS language for CP-6, which Honeywell claimed was the first OS written completely from scratch in over a decade). Adventure and Zork were both terrific games, puzzling and imaginative and full of humour--and tremendously influential: I still come across references to clouds of greasy black smoke by people who have obviously never killed a little dwarf in their lives.
I've still got a copy of the PL-6 sources for Adventure (the munger, the interpreter, and the cave itself); I've been meaning for 15 years to convert it into something that would run on a PC (in between selling my novel and building my dream house, presumably).
And if I could find the right 5-1/4 disk, I could insert a picture of J. Pierpont Flathead...
I'm scratchpadding my figures here, but a space elevator would give a substantial boost to a moon flight. Depending on the length of the cable (which depends mass of the orbital "anchor" at the cable's end), you can give a vehicle a launch velocity of upwards of 7,500-12,000 mph (yes, I'm an American), just by letting it fly free on a tangent.
But it's still going to need fuel for orbital adjustments and landings. The elevator is going to hold a large fuel reserve, all shipped up from the surface.
In other words, an elevator will be a major terrorist target. Blow the orbital anchor, and the cable's center of gravity suddenly drops below the geosynchronous point. Down falls a cable long enough to wrap completely around the Earth's equator! (See Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars for an appalling description of such a disaster.)
I'm in favor of an elevator myself--anything to get us back into space--but I won't be moving to Ecuador any time soon after it opens...
(Incidentally, one possible explanation of why the US and Russia haven't been boosting elevators too much: Neither one of them has any strong control over any equatorial real estate.)
It's not about the Moon, but don't neglect Kim Stanley Robinson's marvelous trilogy Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars. Another marvelous analysis of colonists and settlers vs. Earth.
Slashdot Mirror
If you build your house in the middle of a public thoroughfare instead of on private property, yes. The Internet is a public highway. You are expected to mark the boundaries of your property.
IANAL, but after reading the injunction itself, all I can think is, "Holy cow! I may have broken the DMCA myself!"
We have a large piece of CNC (computer numerical control) manufacturing equipment. The machine is purchased, not leased. The software controlling it is proprietary, but runs on a Windows NT console. The manufacturer's idea of securing their IP is to give access to the controlling software only through the Administrator logon. The OEM keeps the Administrator password.
We use the machine through an operator logon that can only execute the software, and has no access to Win NT utilities or controls. As the OEM would have it, we have no Administrator access to the OS.
We wanted to network the system, so we wheedled a field technician into giving us the Administrator password. Now it sounds as if we are violating DMCA if we log on to the console as Administrator!
To complicate matters further, I don't know whether our purchase contract says anything about whether we or the OEM hold the license to Win NT. Normally, I would expect the owner of the hardware to also own the OS license, and we've behaved as such; we've even changed the admin password. But from what I've read today, then doesn't the DMCA allow the OEM to prohibit us from having Administrator access to our own licensed OS?
This is all just entirely too weird for me.
Yes, mustard gas was a nasty thing--a very nasty thing--to use in war.
But did you know that msutard gas was also the very first chemical used as a successful chemotherapy treatment for cancer?
Yes, I'd guess that the first use for an LCCM (and second, and third) might be terrorism. But you never can predict what horror of today will find a beneficial use tomorrow. Not every tech advance comes from NASA.
I've become a "network administrator" by virtue of being the only person in my company who understands the difference between ping and Pong. So when we needed a new Windows server we had to get a local company to set it up. They set up a weekly backup for the data partition and the system partition - or so we thought. On closer examination, the system backup was backing up "C:" instead of "C:\", so we had four backups of the "C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator" folder. I won't be recommending these guys to anybody else...
When 5+4 ZIP code extensions came out way back when, somebody in the national media suggested ditching the entire ZIP system and using the other 9-digit number you already had - your Social Security number - as your mailing address.
Fortunately for the 3 tons of bulk mail everybody receives each year, nobody took him seriously.
For the instructions the password is endeavor.
For the test itself the password is xcode6fire.
Back in the 80's I worked on the Honeywell CP-6 operating system. This was pre-GUI, of course. Across CP-6, you typed "help " at program prompts to get info (just like MS-DOS now). I forget what system program you had to be in, but if you typed "help sam" at the right spot, you got the complete text of "The Cremation of Sam McGee", the earliest "easter egg" I ever saw.
Actually, my first thought was of something about 80 years before Crichton's Jurassic Park and The Lost World: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Lost World, in which he introduced Professor Challenger. Dinosaurs, action, adventure, and a good bit of humor--from a master storyteller. Worth digging up, if you're not too anal about the science (which was really pretty good for its day).
Reminds me of the egg-dropping contest they had one year at the University of Arkansas. Design a container that will protect several eggs (3?) from breakage after a several-story fall. You must be able to open, reclose, and relaunch the container within yea-many seconds. Dimensions are limited to X by Y by Z.
It ran in several rounds, each round from a higher floor. The ultimate winner didn't depend on padding at all; he used an otherwise empty box that had egg cups strung on shock cord suspended in the middle. Maximum volume + minimum mass = minimum impact velocity.
Next time, maybe a box kite instead of a wing, with the camera shock-corded in the center?
A nanometer is a metric unit.... :)
First off, American scientists and technicians do use these units. I've been familiar with the metric system since childhood.
Next, language changes. Sometimes the changes make sense, sometimes they don't. English in particular (American or British) is a thoroughly bastardized and mangled language. How can you say a language make sense that can contain the sentence, "Though coughing and hiccoughing, he fought through the tough boughs." The four-letter combination "ough" is pronounced seven different ways in a ten-word sentence.
Finally, French names are more respected in English than those of many other countries. We do use the spellings "Bordeaux" and "Chartres"; but we spell the German names "München" and "Köln" as "Munich" and "Cologne". (Come to think of it, isn't "Cologne" a French spelling?)
National brand 31-120 Handi Notes notepad, 60 Sheets / 3 x 5 Narrow Ruled White Paper . Sanford Expresso Extra Fine in green or blue or Bic SOFTFeel Medium in black.
I can't recall my source but what I read in the 1970's was that the "official" 100km boundary was set by treaty between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. in the 1960's.
Don't stop there! We'll have to get rid of our phone lines, Internet Explorer and Netscape, our computers themselves, our cable TV/internet connections, our communications satellites, our--
Wait a minute; the Luddite in me is starting to like the sound of this...
...if you can't handle that, then I have no idea how you expect to get anywhere in life.
The question is, do you wnat to go anywhere, or is there someplace specific you're aiming for? What do you want from your life, and is a stressful IT job how to get it? Is your job what you want to do, or does your job pay for what you want to do?
I left full-time IT work about 18 years ago, when it was still "DP work". I understand your love/hate relationship perfectly.
I love troubleshooting (my spouse still sometimes staggers out at 3:00am to find me, crick-necked and eye-glazed, trying to kludge up the bugs in some little screensaver I'm writing to entertain the kids), but I hated deadlines, and loathed the feeling that everything I wrote was obsolete before the first user miskeyed an entry. If anything, that's worse today, when new and incompatible versions of OS's seem to emerge on a weekly basis.
There's just not much feeling of reality in pushing electrons around. One thing I noticed in those days: We had a variety of field engineers come in for maintenance on our mainframes; in those days even the IS people didn't touch the hardware. (How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?) Whenever one of the FE's took a break, he always started talking about cars, usually about the classic junker in his garage that he'd been rebuilding from the ground up. I'm sure the FE's needed the feel of something tangible in their hands after spying on flying bits all day long.
These days I hold a mixed job, the sort you can only get into by taking a single position and then doing whatever nobody else knows how to do. My title is Senior Draftsman, but I'm also a designer, network administrator, and general computer guru, because nobody else in the company knows how. I still work heavily with computers (and solemnly curse MS and BG almost daily), but I also get the satisfaction of seeing some of my designs turned into solid objects that will presumably still be hanging around a few years after the release of Longhorn, or even Blackcomb.
Yes, the pay is less (much less), but in the end I'll have more to show from my present job than I ever had from programming work. All I can show my kids from those days is a Xerox mainframe nameplate, a few pages of incomprehensible code in a dead language, and a reel tape (yes, one of the big old SF-movie reels). Not much to show for a degree and years of work.
It's not just CD-R's that have been over-trusted, as the Library of Congress report makes clear. In the 1980's advertisers said that CD players were better than phonographs because a music CD, if handled carefully, would never wear out. At the time, I believed them.
But about six months ago I was shocked to discover that several of my treasured music CD-ROM's had visible damage. These were commercially-recorded disks bought in the late 80's and early 90's, that had always been stored indoors in their original cases. None of these had ever been ever been taken traveling or stored without heat or AC; certainly none of them had been subjected to stress, except the stress of being played.
The worst of them had what appeared to be both pinhole burns and flaked spots in the metal film. The very worst of them were some of my prized Deutsche Grammophon classical disks, manufactured by Polydor International. My collection is much smaller than that of the Library, but I had more than one disk that looked like Image 1 in the Library's report.
Needless to say, I have been taking better care than ever of my old vinyl LP's, some of which are over 35 years old and still in good condition.
BTW, love your nick--
I know, but I don't like to shout...
It seems to me that a national ID would be an additional form, not a replacement for a state ID. Don't qualifications for a driver's license differ between states (in such things as vision testing, vehicle classifications, and so on)? In fact, it seems likely that a state ID would be one of the accepted identifiers when you apply for your NID.
Schneier's article hints that he expects such an ID system to be mandatory if implemented. That brings to mind the interesting case of Dudley Hiibel, currently before the U.S. Supreme Court. Is one obligated to identify oneself at all, if one chooses not to?
The database for such a system would necessarily provide online access to state and local law enforcement, rendering it a prime target for hackers and other criminals. And can we really be certain that the Sheriff's Office or the Department of Finance of Bugtussel County can't be bribed for direct access?
A side note: The little item about license plate shields questions whether these would be legal. The last I knew, even most of the little plastic frames that carry a car dealer's name are illegal in my state, although there are millions of them - they obscure a small part of the lettering on the plate.
One of my favorites is on the bottom of every keyboard these days:
:gninraW"
".yrujni suoires esuac yam draobyek yna fo esu taht eveileb strepxe emoS
Sorry about that - to see the message while I copied it I had to type with the keyboard upside down...
You are asking about one of the fundamental flaws in your chosen profession, and one of the key reasons I stopped trying to work as a programmer years ago. Fact of life: Managers don't look at what you can do, they look at what you have done.
.
.
The same technician-manager conflict arises in virtually every technical profession; ask any experienced engineer, or even a good welder. Management and HR can't judge ability from your resume; they can only judge success. But I've said for years there's no technical job in which sheer incompetence can be so easily disguised as in programming. The imbalance is more severe, because the true incompetents are so much more dense (in more than one sense).
And management knows it. Hiring a programming team is a crapshoot, because you may not find out for years which of them is worth the money. Experience is superior to education, but it's far easier to see if a welder can lay a bead cleanly than if a programmer can write 10K lines of clean code.
In my day I wrote payroll software in Fortran, library routines and system utilities in assembler or PL-6, and database applications in (gack!) COBOL. Fortran was clean, assembler and PL-6 had system-level access, and HAIRBOL had database functions built in. I used what I had to, however it worked. I didn't think of myself as a Fortran or COBOL programmer; I thought of myself as a system programmer and (in occasional moments of overconfidence) a system designer.
But to prospective employers, I learned, I was not a system designer or a system programmer; I wasn't even particularly a Fortran or COBOL programmer. I was a Honeywell programmer because that's the hardware my company had. I was a accounting programmer because I'd written accounting software.
So the way you phrased your question catches my ear. First:
As someone with 12 years C++ . .
but then:
. . . from 10+ years experience in programming . .
Which is it? Is your boss looking at the amount of time you've spent in C++ (and you should learn even a complex language thoroughly in 2 years) or at your body of work as a programmer?
The manager who needs a search engine would rather hire a kid who spent 2 years coding someone else's engine than someone with decades of design experience from accounting to gene sequencing who has never done a search engine. But the manager who needs a design team leader will look for someone who hasn't turned all his projects into lumber because the only tool he knew was a handsaw.
In conclusion (I ramble too much to say in summary), I believe this is an argument you can't win--you can only outlive it. Tangible benefits from years of programming experience take years to reveal.
when computer games didn't require a half gig of video memory and a terahertz processor.
I first played Adventure in 1981 on a Xerox CP-V system from the early 60's; the code would have been a highly-tweaked Fortran IV. The game was unmistakably written for an old-fashioned CRT: Most of the room descriptions were two or three lines long, but when you first came to the "Volcano View" the screen flooded with text, a description exactly 80 chars wide by 23 lines long, leaving just one line at the bottom of the screen for the prompt.
A couple of years later my company upgraded to a Honeywell CP-6 system with custom implementations of both Adventure and Zork. They were both written in a dead language called PL-6 (no relation to PL/1; PL-6 was created from scratch as an OS language for CP-6, which Honeywell claimed was the first OS written completely from scratch in over a decade). Adventure and Zork were both terrific games, puzzling and imaginative and full of humour--and tremendously influential: I still come across references to clouds of greasy black smoke by people who have obviously never killed a little dwarf in their lives.
I've still got a copy of the PL-6 sources for Adventure (the munger, the interpreter, and the cave itself); I've been meaning for 15 years to convert it into something that would run on a PC (in between selling my novel and building my dream house, presumably).
And if I could find the right 5-1/4 disk, I could insert a picture of J. Pierpont Flathead...
I'm scratchpadding my figures here, but a space elevator would give a substantial boost to a moon flight. Depending on the length of the cable (which depends mass of the orbital "anchor" at the cable's end), you can give a vehicle a launch velocity of upwards of 7,500-12,000 mph (yes, I'm an American), just by letting it fly free on a tangent.
But it's still going to need fuel for orbital adjustments and landings. The elevator is going to hold a large fuel reserve, all shipped up from the surface.
In other words, an elevator will be a major terrorist target. Blow the orbital anchor, and the cable's center of gravity suddenly drops below the geosynchronous point. Down falls a cable long enough to wrap completely around the Earth's equator! (See Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars for an appalling description of such a disaster.)
I'm in favor of an elevator myself--anything to get us back into space--but I won't be moving to Ecuador any time soon after it opens...
(Incidentally, one possible explanation of why the US and Russia haven't been boosting elevators too much: Neither one of them has any strong control over any equatorial real estate.)
It's not about the Moon, but don't neglect Kim Stanley Robinson's marvelous trilogy Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars. Another marvelous analysis of colonists and settlers vs. Earth.