Yes, the internet can route around specific failures, but it still has to go over some kind of physical link, and there are only a limited number of those going to North Korea. The internet is not some magical data genie that can take your bits anywhere, it requires a lot of infrastructure to get those bits from your house to Slashdot or China. We might like to think of the internet as a land of pure data and information, but it cannot exist without the physical layer.
Granted, it would require cooperation from China and Russia, but they could definitely be cut off it they pissed off the world too much with their 'hackers'. They definitely don't have links with South Korea or Japan. And the ability of the internet to route around failures is limited if everyone you network with wants to drop you off the network...
Perhaps you're used to a western country like the U.S. or Europe, where you can get a net connection anywhere and it has multiple redundant paths, but that is not what North Korea is like. North Korea probobly has less bandwidth going in and out than most major universities in the west. Also, you must realize that the NK gov't severely restricts their own networks, because they don't want their citizens to be 'contaminated' with foreign ideas and media.
From Wikipedia:
Telephones - mobile cellular:
In November 2002, cell phones were introduced to North Korea and by November 2003, 20000 North Koreans had bought cell phones. On May 24. 2004 cell phones were banned. North Korea supposingly still have a mobile network in Pyongyang which is open for government officials and maybe foreigner, but not locals.
Telephone system:
international: satellite earth stations - 1 Intelsat (Indian Ocean) and 1 Russian (Indian Ocean Region); other international connections through Moscow and Beijing
Internet Service Providers (ISPs): NA. North Korea has been testing its first Web portal http://www.kcckp.net/external_e/ (see also [1]).
In 2002 the first Internet cafe has opened ([2], [3], [4] ). It is connected via a line to China. Also, foreign visitors can link their computers to the Internet through international phone lines available in a few hotels in Pyongyang.
Because when they screw up, there will be consequences. Frankly, I'm not so much concerned about my privacy as I am with what will happen when they mmix up my records with a terrorists, or a drug dealer's.
I have a friend in my local Linux user's group who told me this story about a database screwup. Apparently, there's a dude with the same name as him in town who's a major drug dealer, and at one point the FBI had kept him under surveilance because of a mix-up. A friend of his who was in the marines was nearly turned down for a security clearence and court-marshalled because he had sworn that he did not contact convicted felons, and they thought my friend was a dealer. This was in the 80's - hopefully things are better now, but I suspect things have gone downhill since the 'war on terror' began.
Christ, the fact that Ted Kennedy got put on the no-fly list scares me more than any violation of privacy. They can fuck with your life in so many ways when they screw up, and there is little or no oversight over any of this.
Yeah, but Google was made by a small group of really smart, motivated people who wanted to create something innovative. I don't think the government is capable of doing something like that, outside of military special forces - they're too big, too beraucratic, and stifling.
Problem with satellites is, they move really fast relative to the ground, so it's hard to use them to track movements of people or vehicles over time. Spy satelites aren't put in geosynchronous orbit because that's really far away and it would be impossible to see stuff from that altitude.
I would guess that blimps could loiter overn an area for a really long time compared to sats. Plus, you could upgrade them over time, something you can't do with satellites.
Most of the other posters are asking about the fiction books, or sci-fi in general. I would like to ask you about current events and the supposed "clash of cultures" (Left/Right, West/East, CLI/GUI etc) that are going on right now.
From "In the Beginning was the Command Line" -
Quote - "Orlando used to have a military installation called McCoy Air Force Base, with long runways from which B-52s could take off and reach Cuba, or just about anywhere else, with loads of nukes. But now McCoy has been scrapped and repurposed. It has been absorbed into Orlando's civilian airport. The long runways are being used to land 747-loads of tourists from Brazil, Italy, Russia and Japan, so that they can come to Disney World and steep in our media for a while.
"To traditional cultures, especially word-based ones such as Islam, this is infinitely more threatening than the B-52s ever were. It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or "honoring diversity" or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other-to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of qualities." - Unquote
Given the current "war on terror", do you think that conflict between Islamic cultures and western cultures was inevitable? Is the U.S. really an image-driven culture that has no values?
You do not appear to be a very religious person, and have made some rather disparaging depictions of religion in your works. There seems to be an assumption in much of cyberpunk and even leftist politics that assumes that people will naturally become secular as technology becomes more advanced. Yet currently we have a president who considers Jesus to be his guiding philosopher, and applies faith-based beliefs to almost every descision he makes, and his avowed arch-enemies are people who want to establish the rule of Islamic law across the world. Do you think that religion will diminish in importance and everyone will become mostly secular capitalists as in your books, or do you think faith will be an important issue for people in the 21st century?
Lastly, you write about other nation's cultures very well. What do you think it would take for the U.S. to win proverbial "Hearts and minds" in the rest of the world, Islamic and otherwise? Is that even a desirable thing to do?
Oh my god, if they perfect such a thing, I am *so* going to China. Just imagine Tiannamen square filled with people, all of them smiling, and an odd buzzing sound in the air...
On the other hand, I imagine they could have the thing have a pain setting in case you get out of hand, and a wireless reciever so they can activate it remotely...
but that could be fun, too : ) "This one goes up to 11!"
In fact, Eugene Debs, a Socialist Party candidate, once ran for president while incarcerated in a federal prison - and recieved nearly a million votes!
From wikipedia -
"On June 16, 1918 he made an anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, protesting World War I, and was arrested under the Espionage Act of 1917. He was sentenced to serve 10 years in prison and disenfranchised for life. While in prison in Atlanta, he ran for President. On December 25, 1921 President Warren G. Harding released Debs from prison, commuting his sentence to time served.
In the 1920 election, while in jail, he received 913,664 votes, the most ever for a Socialist Party presidential candidate in the U.S. He was also a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World during this period."
Can you imagine a political prisoner on a 3rd-party ticket recieving a million votes today? Too bad the American public doesn't have that much balls anymore.
That reminds me of a anecdote in Steven Levy's Hackers, where Marvin Minsky is being shown a program a guy just wrote.
At one point in the discussion, Sussman told Minsky that he was using a certain randomizing technique in his program because he didn't want the machine to have any preconceived notions. Minsky said, "Well, it has them, it's just that you don't know what they are."
True wisdom - computers are not unbiased, they just precisely carry out the biases of the programmers. It doesn't nessecarily slant things based on the topic, but it can be affected by the way the media reports things. Some would say that giving Kobe Bryant equal importance to Iraq or other real news is bias, but Google makes the choice based on what the media reports. Garbage in, garbage out.
Nah, I know a guy who has about half that many games and systems (including lots of imports and rare systems), and he never owned a game store, though he did work at one once. It doesn't take that much money to do, it's just that most people don't have the interest or time to track down so many games, especially imports.
Heh, and then they'll be like, "But wait, we'll have to fight a few wars, impose a few regimes, and deal with some really unsavory people to get our hands on shit we can grow in Iowa... nevermind."
If biofuels ever really becomes practical, the farm lobby alone will be enough to ensure its permanenet use.
Great, two hot Chinese women whose 'superpowers' are that they can fuck anyone and inject any needle without being harmed. I guess it was about time X-Men went hentai and became XXX-Men.
I'm imagining them in the leather bodysuits from the movies, but crotchless and with a opening at the elbows for shooting up. Their arch-nemesis shall be Donkey Boy and Heroin Girl.
Oh god, what kind of pathetic geek am I? I just turned an important piece of AIDS research that could help millions into a bad porno comic joke... I will log off before I embarrass myself further.
If you need me, I will be in my bedroom, masturbating...
Okay, did the dems seriously believe that people would fall for this? Or did they thinnk the repubs were so stupid and warmongering that they would support it even if it shot down their president's campaign? I don't think that kind of really blatant political manuevering would work, even in the U.S.; you have to make it more subtle.
I have been thinking though, that it might be in the best interests of the dems to just let Bush win this election and try to get their man in office in 2008. Think about it this way: no matter who's in office, a lot of bad shit is going to happen. There's going to be another terrorist attack sooner or later, Iraq is going to get worse, and the economy probobly won't improve anytime soon. If Kerry gets in this year, a lot of people might blame him for bad stuff that happens on his watch, and go "Look what happened when we voted democrat". It might be better for them to just let Bush deal with the consequences of his actions and let people see how bad his ideas really were, kina like how Nixon created a lot of disgust for the republicans after re-election.
But then, I'm not sure I trust Bush not to start a nuclear war in the next 4 years.
Oh, and an addendum - Do you think Plan 9, or any other OS with a relatively restrictive license can succeed now against traditional UNIXes and Microsoft?
How much do you think UNIX's success has been shaped by the relatively light restrictions placed on its use, distribution and modification?
The original UNIX, BSD, and now Linux seem to have been 'freeer' than other OSes of the time, do you think they would have been successful without this?
Yes, I read all about it on AntiSlashdot: News for Nerds. Stuff that AntiMatters.
Unfortunately some Slashdotters got onto AntiSlashdot, and the resulting reaction with the thoughtful, intelligent and polite women there caused an explosive reaction which destroyed the AntiSlashdot server. A shame, really, since AntiSlashdottings gave the affected server a tremendous amount of free bandwidth, their site design was colorful yet tasteful, and I always loved Joan Dogz's thoughtful articles.
Oh well, I guess I'm stuck with regular 'ol Slashdot now. It's just as good, right?
You have a problem with a girlfriend that likes playing Halo with you? Give her to me, I'll make sure she's occupied while you're hacking some code : )
but seriously, you'd better be creating Linux patches or something that important if you're going to be neglecting such a girlfriend ; )
I should note that Japanese also mixes Chinese-style ideograms with a phonetic alphabet - actually, two. One is called hiragana, and the other is katakana.
Japanese phonetic writing in hiragana or katakana is *much* easier to read than Chinese, and easier than English as well. That's because it's a turely phonetic - one character makes one sound, and the pronounciation isn't changed by the surrounding characters, though there are special modifiers that can be attached to change a particular character's sound.
Of course, the language is also filled with the Chinese-style characters, so it's not quite so simple to read a newspaper....:(
Well, it'd be pretty hard to pre-position yourself to get such a shot, unless you were in an airplane.... trust me, volcanoes can regularly send out clouds that big.
For comparison, look at These pics of a volcano in Japan I used to live near. The pics show ash not steam, so it's a different color but you get the idea. The ash cloud would regularly blanket the nearby cities like a fog, and settle on everything. Keep in mind there was a major city across the bay about 3km away, about as far as Bremerton is from Seattle.
I'm suprised that a volcano like St. Helens only does that much ash and steam, to be honest.
Hmm, just thought I'd share my recent experiences with museum security.
I recently went to a the "Treasures of Dresden" exhibit at the museum in Jackson, Mississippi. Basically, it was a collection of uber-valuable porcelens, armor, and jewels collected by the duke or prince of Dresden, including a gigantic diamond ornament that has the 2nd or 3rd largest diamond in the world in it.
It wasn't a terribly big museum, but security there consisted of metal detectors and X-rays at the entrance, with maybe a half-dozen or so armed sherrif's deputies patrolling the hall and posted at the diamond's room. While you probobly could have overpowered the security if you were heavily armed and had speed and suprise, I doubt you could have made it out without casualties or before the rest of the police/sherrif's dept. got called onto the scene.
This obviously was paid for by the county, but if some town like Jackson, MS can do it most other places probobly could too. Plus in the U.S., it's not too hard to get armed security guards.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're the doofus here.
Yes, the internet can route around specific failures, but it still has to go over some kind of physical link, and there are only a limited number of those going to North Korea. The internet is not some magical data genie that can take your bits anywhere, it requires a lot of infrastructure to get those bits from your house to Slashdot or China. We might like to think of the internet as a land of pure data and information, but it cannot exist without the physical layer.
Granted, it would require cooperation from China and Russia, but they could definitely be cut off it they pissed off the world too much with their 'hackers'. They definitely don't have links with South Korea or Japan. And the ability of the internet to route around failures is limited if everyone you network with wants to drop you off the network...
Perhaps you're used to a western country like the U.S. or Europe, where you can get a net connection anywhere and it has multiple redundant paths, but that is not what North Korea is like. North Korea probobly has less bandwidth going in and out than most major universities in the west. Also, you must realize that the NK gov't severely restricts their own networks, because they don't want their citizens to be 'contaminated' with foreign ideas and media.
From Wikipedia:
Telephones - mobile cellular: In November 2002, cell phones were introduced to North Korea and by November 2003, 20000 North Koreans had bought cell phones. On May 24. 2004 cell phones were banned. North Korea supposingly still have a mobile network in Pyongyang which is open for government officials and maybe foreigner, but not locals.
Telephone system: international: satellite earth stations - 1 Intelsat (Indian Ocean) and 1 Russian (Indian Ocean Region); other international connections through Moscow and Beijing
Internet Service Providers (ISPs): NA. North Korea has been testing its first Web portal http://www.kcckp.net/external_e/ (see also [1]).
In 2002 the first Internet cafe has opened ([2], [3], [4] ). It is connected via a line to China. Also, foreign visitors can link their computers to the Internet through international phone lines available in a few hotels in Pyongyang.
"Oh, bother."
- Winnie the Pooh
Because when they screw up, there will be consequences. Frankly, I'm not so much concerned about my privacy as I am with what will happen when they mmix up my records with a terrorists, or a drug dealer's.
I have a friend in my local Linux user's group who told me this story about a database screwup. Apparently, there's a dude with the same name as him in town who's a major drug dealer, and at one point the FBI had kept him under surveilance because of a mix-up. A friend of his who was in the marines was nearly turned down for a security clearence and court-marshalled because he had sworn that he did not contact convicted felons, and they thought my friend was a dealer. This was in the 80's - hopefully things are better now, but I suspect things have gone downhill since the 'war on terror' began.
Christ, the fact that Ted Kennedy got put on the no-fly list scares me more than any violation of privacy. They can fuck with your life in so many ways when they screw up, and there is little or no oversight over any of this.
Yeah, but Google was made by a small group of really smart, motivated people who wanted to create something innovative. I don't think the government is capable of doing something like that, outside of military special forces - they're too big, too beraucratic, and stifling.
Problem with satellites is, they move really fast relative to the ground, so it's hard to use them to track movements of people or vehicles over time. Spy satelites aren't put in geosynchronous orbit because that's really far away and it would be impossible to see stuff from that altitude.
I would guess that blimps could loiter overn an area for a really long time compared to sats. Plus, you could upgrade them over time, something you can't do with satellites.
Most of the other posters are asking about the fiction books, or sci-fi in general. I would like to ask you about current events and the supposed "clash of cultures" (Left/Right, West/East, CLI/GUI etc) that are going on right now.
From "In the Beginning was the Command Line" -
Quote - "Orlando used to have a military installation called McCoy Air Force Base, with long runways from which B-52s could take off and reach Cuba, or just about anywhere else, with loads of nukes. But now McCoy has been scrapped and repurposed. It has been absorbed into Orlando's civilian airport. The long runways are being used to land 747-loads of tourists from Brazil, Italy, Russia and Japan, so that they can come to Disney World and steep in our media for a while.
"To traditional cultures, especially word-based ones such as Islam, this is infinitely more threatening than the B-52s ever were. It is obvious, to everyone outside of the United States, that our arch-buzzwords, multiculturalism and diversity, are false fronts that are being used (in many cases unwittingly) to conceal a global trend to eradicate cultural differences. The basic tenet of multiculturalism (or "honoring diversity" or whatever you want to call it) is that people need to stop judging each other-to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, that God exists and has this or that set of qualities."
- Unquote
Given the current "war on terror", do you think that conflict between Islamic cultures and western cultures was inevitable? Is the U.S. really an image-driven culture that has no values?
You do not appear to be a very religious person, and have made some rather disparaging depictions of religion in your works. There seems to be an assumption in much of cyberpunk and even leftist politics that assumes that people will naturally become secular as technology becomes more advanced. Yet currently we have a president who considers Jesus to be his guiding philosopher, and applies faith-based beliefs to almost every descision he makes, and his avowed arch-enemies are people who want to establish the rule of Islamic law across the world. Do you think that religion will diminish in importance and everyone will become mostly secular capitalists as in your books, or do you think faith will be an important issue for people in the 21st century?
Lastly, you write about other nation's cultures very well. What do you think it would take for the U.S. to win proverbial "Hearts and minds" in the rest of the world, Islamic and otherwise? Is that even a desirable thing to do?
I think he's saying that one of them hasn't made a terrible, terrible, musical...
Oh my god, if they perfect such a thing, I am *so* going to China. Just imagine Tiannamen square filled with people, all of them smiling, and an odd buzzing sound in the air...
On the other hand, I imagine they could have the thing have a pain setting in case you get out of hand, and a wireless reciever so they can activate it remotely...
but that could be fun, too : ) "This one goes up to 11!"
In fact, Eugene Debs, a Socialist Party candidate, once ran for president while incarcerated in a federal prison - and recieved nearly a million votes! From wikipedia -
"On June 16, 1918 he made an anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, protesting World War I, and was arrested under the Espionage Act of 1917. He was sentenced to serve 10 years in prison and disenfranchised for life. While in prison in Atlanta, he ran for President. On December 25, 1921 President Warren G. Harding released Debs from prison, commuting his sentence to time served.
In the 1920 election, while in jail, he received 913,664 votes, the most ever for a Socialist Party presidential candidate in the U.S. He was also a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World during this period."
Can you imagine a political prisoner on a 3rd-party ticket recieving a million votes today? Too bad the American public doesn't have that much balls anymore.
That reminds me of a anecdote in Steven Levy's Hackers, where Marvin Minsky is being shown a program a guy just wrote.
At one point in the discussion, Sussman told Minsky that he was using a certain randomizing technique in his program because he didn't want the machine to have any preconceived notions. Minsky said, "Well, it has them, it's just that you don't know what they are."
True wisdom - computers are not unbiased, they just precisely carry out the biases of the programmers. It doesn't nessecarily slant things based on the topic, but it can be affected by the way the media reports things. Some would say that giving Kobe Bryant equal importance to Iraq or other real news is bias, but Google makes the choice based on what the media reports. Garbage in, garbage out.
Nah, I know a guy who has about half that many games and systems (including lots of imports and rare systems), and he never owned a game store, though he did work at one once. It doesn't take that much money to do, it's just that most people don't have the interest or time to track down so many games, especially imports.
....No, that's where the "You don't *want* to know" questions go.
Heh, and then they'll be like, "But wait, we'll have to fight a few wars, impose a few regimes, and deal with some really unsavory people to get our hands on shit we can grow in Iowa... nevermind."
If biofuels ever really becomes practical, the farm lobby alone will be enough to ensure its permanenet use.
Great, two hot Chinese women whose 'superpowers' are that they can fuck anyone and inject any needle without being harmed. I guess it was about time X-Men went hentai and became XXX-Men.
I'm imagining them in the leather bodysuits from the movies, but crotchless and with a opening at the elbows for shooting up. Their arch-nemesis shall be Donkey Boy and Heroin Girl.
Oh god, what kind of pathetic geek am I? I just turned an important piece of AIDS research that could help millions into a bad porno comic joke... I will log off before I embarrass myself further.
If you need me, I will be in my bedroom, masturbating...
Okay, did the dems seriously believe that people would fall for this? Or did they thinnk the repubs were so stupid and warmongering that they would support it even if it shot down their president's campaign? I don't think that kind of really blatant political manuevering would work, even in the U.S.; you have to make it more subtle.
I have been thinking though, that it might be in the best interests of the dems to just let Bush win this election and try to get their man in office in 2008. Think about it this way: no matter who's in office, a lot of bad shit is going to happen. There's going to be another terrorist attack sooner or later, Iraq is going to get worse, and the economy probobly won't improve anytime soon. If Kerry gets in this year, a lot of people might blame him for bad stuff that happens on his watch, and go "Look what happened when we voted democrat". It might be better for them to just let Bush deal with the consequences of his actions and let people see how bad his ideas really were, kina like how Nixon created a lot of disgust for the republicans after re-election.
But then, I'm not sure I trust Bush not to start a nuclear war in the next 4 years.
Oh, and an addendum - Do you think Plan 9, or any other OS with a relatively restrictive license can succeed now against traditional UNIXes and Microsoft?
How much do you think UNIX's success has been shaped by the relatively light restrictions placed on its use, distribution and modification?
The original UNIX, BSD, and now Linux seem to have been 'freeer' than other OSes of the time, do you think they would have been successful without this?
Finally... vi or Emacs? ; )
Yes, I read all about it on AntiSlashdot: News for Nerds. Stuff that AntiMatters.
Unfortunately some Slashdotters got onto AntiSlashdot, and the resulting reaction with the thoughtful, intelligent and polite women there caused an explosive reaction which destroyed the AntiSlashdot server. A shame, really, since AntiSlashdottings gave the affected server a tremendous amount of free bandwidth, their site design was colorful yet tasteful, and I always loved Joan Dogz's thoughtful articles.
Oh well, I guess I'm stuck with regular 'ol Slashdot now. It's just as good, right?
You have a problem with a girlfriend that likes playing Halo with you? Give her to me, I'll make sure she's occupied while you're hacking some code : )
but seriously, you'd better be creating Linux patches or something that important if you're going to be neglecting such a girlfriend ; )
Does this mean that LucasArts hasn't gone to the Dark Side?
I should note that Japanese also mixes Chinese-style ideograms with a phonetic alphabet - actually, two. One is called hiragana, and the other is katakana.
:(
Japanese phonetic writing in hiragana or katakana is *much* easier to read than Chinese, and easier than English as well. That's because it's a turely phonetic - one character makes one sound, and the pronounciation isn't changed by the surrounding characters, though there are special modifiers that can be attached to change a particular character's sound.
Of course, the language is also filled with the Chinese-style characters, so it's not quite so simple to read a newspaper....
Well, it'd be pretty hard to pre-position yourself to get such a shot, unless you were in an airplane.... trust me, volcanoes can regularly send out clouds that big.
For comparison, look at These pics of a volcano in Japan I used to live near. The pics show ash not steam, so it's a different color but you get the idea. The ash cloud would regularly blanket the nearby cities like a fog, and settle on everything. Keep in mind there was a major city across the bay about 3km away, about as far as Bremerton is from Seattle.
I'm suprised that a volcano like St. Helens only does that much ash and steam, to be honest.
Hmm, just thought I'd share my recent experiences with museum security.
I recently went to a the "Treasures of Dresden" exhibit at the museum in Jackson, Mississippi. Basically, it was a collection of uber-valuable porcelens, armor, and jewels collected by the duke or prince of Dresden, including a gigantic diamond ornament that has the 2nd or 3rd largest diamond in the world in it.
It wasn't a terribly big museum, but security there consisted of metal detectors and X-rays at the entrance, with maybe a half-dozen or so armed sherrif's deputies patrolling the hall and posted at the diamond's room. While you probobly could have overpowered the security if you were heavily armed and had speed and suprise, I doubt you could have made it out without casualties or before the rest of the police/sherrif's dept. got called onto the scene.
This obviously was paid for by the county, but if some town like Jackson, MS can do it most other places probobly could too. Plus in the U.S., it's not too hard to get armed security guards.
Well, at lest they didn't say it was going 18 times the speed of light this time...
Duh, they're going to cast McCauly Caulkin as Young Barf.... I mean, if it's going to mock Star Wars now, it's gotta be a prequel, right?