I *know* why some people prefer Linux, I've been running Unix systems of various flavors since the late 70s. Crackers prefer Linux also, because you can do a lot more with it if you break in. Most of the time the Windows box ran without firewalls, sometimes it had ZoneAlarm, sometimes it had ZeroKnowledge's firewall, but basically nobody bothered it because it's not worth the effort.
And I did learn not to trust wu-ftp when I'm installing web servers:-) As I said, the RH7.x installations have been much better behaved.
It's a tradeoff of threat model vs. administrative effort, and since the box was partly there to research security threats, I didn't mind if it occasionally got trashed, because that was a learning experience about the security levels of vanilla Linux installs (and I learned that RH6.2 wasn't very secure, while RH7.1 was pretty decent.)
This wasn't the kind of box that particularly needed to be secure - wipe&reinstall isn't that hard if you don't have real user data. Eventually I did put the boxes behind a NAT server when they didn't need to be exposed to the net, and that was good enough.
Unfortunately, Windows is way too big to fix, as are too many of the major applications that run on it, and security isn't something you can just patch on after the fact. Some of the newer versions, such as XP, don't crash anywhere near as often, which suggests that maybe enough major parts have been rewritten that many of the old bugs have been discarded and replaced with a smaller number of newer bugs.
One of the things that annoys me the most is the number of reported holes that are caused by buffer overflows. There's simply no excuse for them this decade! If you don't have a good enough quality control process to test for them all, and MS doesn't, you shouldn't let your people write code in C! Don't get me wrong - I really *like* C, and I've been using it for over 20 years. It's a great language for a lot of things, including compact, efficient, clean, obvious code, and it does let you shoot yourself in the foot. But if you can't keep your people from shooting, and can't tell where the holes are, and can't tell whether all your feet are intact, it's not the language for you. And if you want to use C++ or C-- or C-sharp or C-dull, and you don't enforce the use of safe I/O and copying methods, don't do that either. (By the way, this rant applies to Linux as well.)
Esther Dyson has her signature-line about "Always make new mistakes". Buffer overflows and testing for maliciously formatted input aren't new mistakes, folks! They're CS100 material, the first thing you should be learning after you learn how to do arrays and input functions. (And I learned my programming in PL/I, an language that won't let you overflow buffers.) At least make the bugs interesting, like race conditions or something! Accepting input that abuses..s in directory paths when they shouldn't be there isn't a new mistake, and it's one of the most common bug reports I see that aren't memory-related.
As an old Unix hacker I've found it annoying that Windows is sometimes more secure than Linux, but it can happen. My lab used to have an unprotected DSL with out-of-the-box RedHat 6.x and unprotected Win95 boxes on it that we used for testing things. As far as I could tell, nobody ever successfully hacked the Windows box, and when I was running ZoneAlarm, it'd detect a lot of doorknockers but no real attack - No surprise, because we had file-system sharing turned off, a relatively obscure freeware web server, no Napster/Kazaa/Gnutella/Morpheus/etc., and not much else useful on it except clients so not much to crack.
But the main Linux box got broken into all the time - I eventually changed its name to "Kenny" because it was getting brutally killed every week. As far as I could tell, nobody seriously bothered it once I upgraded to RH 7.1 in a medium-secure mode (I didn't install FTP servers, for instance, and Apache didn't have any web pages complex enough to be exploited), but by then I wasn't doing much complex, and I'd replaced the highly reliable Pentium-66 with an faster el-cheapo machine that often died on its own so it wasn't available to crackers.
The most common attacks I was aware of were some rootkit followed by installing Staecheldraht DDOS and some IRC bots. (And after I'd wiped out Staecheldraht a couple of times, the loser got annoyed and wiped out my disk drive once.) I noticed the initial attack because one of Kenny's P66 cousins was used to run a tcpdump sniffer to monitor the LAN and it kept doing ICMP to machines at universities. At least one of the rootkits "fixed" ls and ps to not report on its directories and processes, but forgot about some other utilities like/proc, and forgot about semantics problems like
umount: Can't unmount/home2 - in use
$ ps -ef [nothing obvious shows up]
There have been a number of similar products on the market, though maybe they're just LCD and not VFD, but this one looked like more trouble to install than most of the others, and taking up two bays does seem silly.
This comment is mainly aimed at rapidweather and his machines-with-wimpy-disks situation
Many current Linux distributions aren't very competent about partitioning and installing on disks less than about 4-6GB - my lab has a bunch on antiques with 2GB and or 2BG + 540MB sets like yours, and it's really annoying - especially because RedHat 6.x was too insecure to run for very long on a DSL line exposed to the outside world. RH7.x was better, Mandrake 8.x also seems good enough (and does a much better partitioning job), and I'm going to try Knoppix if I can get a good CD-R burn (I've been having troubles with burners.) My home machine had a 6GB disk, dualbooted with 2GB for Linux and 4GB for Windows. In the last year, the price of disks has dropped radically - it's hard to buy a desktop drive smaller than 10GB, and 80BG drives on sale are ~$80, or ~$129 not on sale. You should just go out and buy a decent disk - if you're on a budget that may only be 30GB, but it's still a big win over 540MB or 2GB. Once you do, of course, you'll then have the entertainment of figuring out whether your BIOS can actually detect the drive, or whether your motherboard is made by somebody who's still in businss, and whether downloads are available, and whether you're going to risk trashing the thing if you screw up too badly (which means spending $99 at Fry's to replace the motherboard+CPU with a new ~1.3GHz one.:-) Needless to say, this was more trouble than the physical hardware upgrades, but I got lucky and didn't botch the BIOS upgrade.
When I started my current round of machine upgrades, rule #1 was that all the disks go in removable-disk drawers. That does mean they take 5.25" slots instead of 3.5", and adds about $25/slot for the hardware (about $12 for spare drawers), but it's way more convenient. It turns out that my firmware doesn't do a good job of autodetecting changes in disk drives, so I end up having to kick the thing a couple of times at boot when I actually do switch drives, but it's still a big win. If I were doing this in my lab, as opposed to home, I'd standardize on using all the same size and same partitioning for removables.
I first upgraded the machine by adding a 20GB drive (which it recognized fine without the BIOS upgrade), and then replacing the 6GB drive with a 120GB (5400 rpm was $129 on sale; this week they had 7200rpm with 8MB buffers for that price after rebate.) I don't really know what to do with that much space, so there are a couple of extra 10GB partitions for installing different Linux versions in once I get around to it.
I agree - it does sound like the 80GB is for 2.5" formats, and that's the main thing that will actually be supported for a while, but it's still not bad.
I'm currently using 3.5" drives, in removable drawers that make them take up 5.25" disk drive formats. It would be quite nice to be able to use the smaller slots, especially if they get the Serial-ATA worked out so the cabling's simpler, and having 80GB removables for a TiVo-like device would be convenient.
If they're really able to do ~80GB disks for ~$166, that's a much more attractive format for many things than Dataplay, assuming they don't go too far out of their way making it unusable via DRM. The 1.8" version sounds really good for a followup iPod, and if it's removable, it's easier to swap back and forth between your TiVo and your PC.
You'd think if he'd put 2000 pages of handwriting into a new translation of Beowulf that he'd follow up on it. But perhaps the market for Beowulf translations wasn't really strong in the mid-30s depression or late-30s beginning of the war, and Tolkien didn't have the instant marketability that he'd have had after LOTR was published and took off. Or academic politics being what they are, maybe he'd have been competing with somebody else's Beowulf. Plus putting it into the library counts for something, I guess.
Or maybe it was enough for him to translate it so it was around as convenient source material for his lectures and the translation was more like working notes? Beowulf itself isn't that long a book, more like 20-50 pages typed than 2000.
In AD 0601, War Was Beginning. What happeneth? Somebody set us up the catapult! We get wave splashing! What? Main drawbridge open up! It's thou! How are you, gentlemen! All thy castle are belong to us! Ye are on the way to destruction! What thou saith? Thou hast no chance to survive, make thy time! HA HA HA HA HA Take off every longboat! Ye know what ye do. Move longboat! For great justice!
Nethack has a monster called an "Ettin", presumably from Dungeons&Dragons or some similar gamer source. Google has some pointers to fairytales about Ettins, who seem to be multiple-headed giants.
The two thousand pages of handwriting make it awfully hard to fake. There are people who might very well want to claim that they've discovered a new manuscript by Tolkien and sell it even if they'd done it themselves, though that's a lot of work to not claim as your own once you've done it. True, there aren't a huge number of people who can do AngloSaxon well enough to get away with it, but they *would* be the ones most likely to get access to the Bodleian's stacks to plant it there.
If it were typed pages, and a lot smaller, somebody who'd done a Babelfish translation might try to get away with a BeowulfClusterF..... nevermind.....
A "teergrube" is a tarpit for email, which responds to smtp correctly but v..e...rrrrrr...yyyyyy.....ssssss..llll...oooo...w wwwww....lllll...yyyyyyyyyyy, and is designed to accept mail for a large number of bogus addresses that you arrange for spammers to find. It really doesn't burn much bandwidth to make a spammer take five minutes to send an email message, because you're spending most of the time waiting before sending back the next line of response, and some implementations can keep a lot of suckers busy in parallel. Most spamware, and most real email systems, can only keep a given number of sessions going at a time, so the more simultaneous sessions that are talking to teergruben, the less actual email they can send. If you want to get fancy and track the things down, that's fun too, and the teergrube can hold the spammer's session open long enough to get ahold of their ISP (if they've got a responsive ISP)
Different ways to help spammers find them are to put them on web pages, or to have a spider-trap just waiting to generate them for web crawlers, or of course to be sure to unsubscribe them to all the spam unsubscribe addresses you've got, as well as the yes-tell-me-more addresses. They're more fun if you've got a lot of domain names to play with, but even if spammers kill off dangerous domains, you can trick some of them by doing addresses from lots of different thirdlevel domains, like alice@aardvark.example.com, alice@aardwulf.example.com,... alice@zymurgy.example.com, bob@aardvark.example.com,... And just to make things fun for the harvesters, you might as well make sure they've all got web pages pointing to a couple of other subdomains on your system.
If you want to get fancy with DNS, you can also set some of your subdomains to point to known open relays, if you happen to know anybody. Instead of having the spammer deliver all the email directly to aardvark.example.com, you can tell them that aardvark.example.com is at an IP address that's that misconfigured machine in Korea that's been spamming you, and have _them_ get teergrubed also.
They've got a web site. They've got a press relations person named Joann joann@postini.com, and in Cyberspace, everybody's the press. They're ostensibly looking to hire people. You've got expertise they obviously need. And either they're Evil, in which case you won't mind blocking them, or they're Good Guys but have some bad customers they haven't caught, in which case they probably want to know, or they're clueless or overloaded, in which case their PR person ought to know.
The "Fair Use" concept in copyright law is an issue of US law, arising out of US court decisions, not something we acquired with the Berne Convention. I don't know how Mexico does copyright law. But data is certainly the obvious one to talk about, because recording your data on your CD-Writer is obviously a legal reason to have blank CDs.
If you're going to teach, it's really helpful if you take a course or two in teaching methods, and a course in technical writing. Toastmaters wouldn't hurt either, if you haven't picked up equivalent experience at work. You really need to know how to do things like preparing lesson plans, having some clue about pacing if you're teaching a semester-long course as opposed to a one-night session, and in general how to talk without being boring, or scatterbrained, or running out of material, and it helps a lot to know about different learning styles that different people have, because some of your students will be great at abstract thought, some will be really concrete, some will be intuitives who get a lot out of examples if you've given them principles first while others do better with a few examples before you give them principles, but at least half the class learns differently than you do.
No need to do that at MIT or Stanford; your local community college can teach you that just as well. Real-world experience is always valuable too, of course, but the only way to get it is to teach people in the real world:-)
Remember the worst teachers you had in college? Besides the grad student who didn't speak English, there was that old guy who droned on and on and rambled without getting to the point, and the guy who discovered halfway through the semester that the class had only gotten through a third of the programming projects he'd planned for the semester, so he'd have to double your workload for the second half? All of them were nice people I'd studied under, one was a co-worker teaching a night course, and the last one really was a good teached but I had to drop a humanities elective to be able to finish his course instead. You could be one of them, or you could be a much better teacher than that.
... which is of course why everybody moved to Silicon Valley. It was a lot of fun, even though it made housing prices silly, the weather is great, and if you didn't have the contacts to get jobs easily, it was easier to make them when you were there in person as well as on the net, and of course there's the fun of walking by a sidewalk cafe and hearing a conversation about some latest trend in your field as opposed to some random topic you don't care about. But while it'll be a long time before there's another boom like this one, there's no guarantee that it'll be around here.
A couple of my friends have done this. One of them has been trying for years to start a startup to do something, anything (:-) A few of the projects have gotten up to 20%-likely-to-start phase, but not started, and while the latest project was no better than 5% likely, and probably more like 1%, it's still worth trying to do a business plan for until something better comes along, and it was too early in the fall to get a job at the mall.
Another friend of mine worked on the project writing the technical side of the business plan. She didn't seriously expect it to turn into money, and she'd have dropped it in a minute if a paying job came along, but it gave her a 3-month job entry on her resume as well. I don't know if she called it a contract or a limited partnership or what.
inscribed in the Principality of the Mists, West Kingdom, this Third Day of Christmas, Anno Societatis XXXVII
Eh, what was that? Watery tarts distributing swords are a *perfectly* *fine* way to establish a government. Certainly as representative as stuffing ballot boxes....
Most people only have so many stories
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and it gets really tiresome to read the ones who've run out of imagination but keep pumping out the books anyway. Look at Anne McCaffrey's Pern books - she had a lot of good stories for a while, but gradually she was just cranking the formula, recycling the stories, and doing a rather lame attempt to tell some of them from different viewpoints. By contrast, Ray Bradbury stopped writing for twenty or thirty years, and when he started again, he'd changed a lot.
Imagine if Brin were to do a couple more Uplift trilogies without getting enough new ideas in between. Doing literary criticism or whatever in between novels is a well-established tradition.
Australian Aboriginal oral history goes back about 40-50,000 years, but they don't spend much time explaining it to outsiders.... Some of the North American Indian groups did hunter-gatherer lifestyles rather than agriculture.
Also, herding-based agriculture is rather different from plant-growing agriculture, though it seems to still involve a lot of men ganging up and stealing other men's women and cows or goats.
Most of the estimates I've seen about the beginning of agriculture are about 10,000 years ago. Certainly at least 6000 (several sets of calendars go back that far) and probably a good bit more.
We probably haven't been "human" for much more than a million years (maybe 3-4 if you stretch the definitions a bit), and if your term "human history" actually means history rather than existence, history's probably about 40-50,000 years (Australian Aborigines' oral histories), or if you don't like those, 35,000 years for cave paintings in France.
On the other hand, one major branch of agriculture is herding, as opposed to planting, and sometimes gangs of thugs would be happy to steal your women and goats or cows instead of your women and your wheat:-) That was still popular in much of the world a thousand years ago - think of the Mongol hordes - or for that matter nomads in East Africa before the colonialists took over more recently.
Re:Democracies, and speaking of debunking
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Ancient Greek "democracy" still had a pyramid-shaped society, but the top of the pyramid was a lot less pointy.
By the way, if you haven't had the privilege of meeting Walter Williams, he's black, and I've found him to be much less reactionary than the impressions I've gotten of Thomas Sowell, the other well-known black Republican pundit.
I'll rant about your position on the War Between The States separately. Meanwhile, thanks for the pointer to the Confederate Constitution - I'd never seen it. Williams also doesn't mention that most of the Bill of Rights is moved into the body of the Constitution, added to whatever section is appropriate. There are a few other places that "negro slavery" is mentioned, but that's not really surprising, given that the secession was largely about slavery, not economics, but dwelling on it would weaken Williams's main points, as well as being pretty obvious.
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And I did learn not to trust wu-ftp when I'm installing web servers :-) As I said, the RH7.x installations have been much better behaved.
This wasn't the kind of box that particularly needed to be secure - wipe&reinstall isn't that hard if you don't have real user data. Eventually I did put the boxes behind a NAT server when they didn't need to be exposed to the net, and that was good enough.
One of the things that annoys me the most is the number of reported holes that are caused by buffer overflows. There's simply no excuse for them this decade! If you don't have a good enough quality control process to test for them all, and MS doesn't, you shouldn't let your people write code in C! Don't get me wrong - I really *like* C, and I've been using it for over 20 years. It's a great language for a lot of things, including compact, efficient, clean, obvious code, and it does let you shoot yourself in the foot. But if you can't keep your people from shooting, and can't tell where the holes are, and can't tell whether all your feet are intact, it's not the language for you. And if you want to use C++ or C-- or C-sharp or C-dull, and you don't enforce the use of safe I/O and copying methods, don't do that either. (By the way, this rant applies to Linux as well.)
Esther Dyson has her signature-line about "Always make new mistakes". Buffer overflows and testing for maliciously formatted input aren't new mistakes, folks! They're CS100 material, the first thing you should be learning after you learn how to do arrays and input functions. (And I learned my programming in PL/I, an language that won't let you overflow buffers.) At least make the bugs interesting, like race conditions or something! Accepting input that abuses ..s in directory paths when they shouldn't be there isn't a new mistake, and it's one of the most common bug reports I see that aren't memory-related.
My lab used to have an unprotected DSL with out-of-the-box RedHat 6.x and unprotected Win95 boxes on it that we used for testing things. As far as I could tell, nobody ever successfully hacked the Windows box, and when I was running ZoneAlarm, it'd detect a lot of doorknockers but no real attack - No surprise, because we had file-system sharing turned off, a relatively obscure freeware web server, no Napster/Kazaa/Gnutella/Morpheus/etc., and not much else useful on it except clients so not much to crack.
But the main Linux box got broken into all the time - I eventually changed its name to "Kenny" because it was getting brutally killed every week. As far as I could tell, nobody seriously bothered it once I upgraded to RH 7.1 in a medium-secure mode (I didn't install FTP servers, for instance, and Apache didn't have any web pages complex enough to be exploited), but by then I wasn't doing much complex, and I'd replaced the highly reliable Pentium-66 with an faster el-cheapo machine that often died on its own so it wasn't available to crackers.
The most common attacks I was aware of were some rootkit followed by installing Staecheldraht DDOS and some IRC bots. (And after I'd wiped out Staecheldraht a couple of times, the loser got annoyed and wiped out my disk drive once.) I noticed the initial attack because one of Kenny's P66 cousins was used to run a tcpdump sniffer to monitor the LAN and it kept doing ICMP to machines at universities. At least one of the rootkits "fixed" ls and ps to not report on its directories and processes, but forgot about some other utilities like /proc, and forgot about semantics problems like
There have been a number of similar products on the market, though maybe they're just LCD and not VFD, but this one looked like more trouble to install than most of the others, and taking up two bays does seem silly.
Many current Linux distributions aren't very competent about partitioning and installing on disks less than about 4-6GB - my lab has a bunch on antiques with 2GB and or 2BG + 540MB sets like yours, and it's really annoying - especially because RedHat 6.x was too insecure to run for very long on a DSL line exposed to the outside world. RH7.x was better, Mandrake 8.x also seems good enough (and does a much better partitioning job), and I'm going to try Knoppix if I can get a good CD-R burn (I've been having troubles with burners.) My home machine had a 6GB disk, dualbooted with 2GB for Linux and 4GB for Windows. In the last year, the price of disks has dropped radically - it's hard to buy a desktop drive smaller than 10GB, and 80BG drives on sale are ~$80, or ~$129 not on sale. You should just go out and buy a decent disk - if you're on a budget that may only be 30GB, but it's still a big win over 540MB or 2GB. Once you do, of course, you'll then have the entertainment of figuring out whether your BIOS can actually detect the drive, or whether your motherboard is made by somebody who's still in businss, and whether downloads are available, and whether you're going to risk trashing the thing if you screw up too badly (which means spending $99 at Fry's to replace the motherboard+CPU with a new ~1.3GHz one.
When I started my current round of machine upgrades, rule #1 was that all the disks go in removable-disk drawers. That does mean they take 5.25" slots instead of 3.5", and adds about $25/slot for the hardware (about $12 for spare drawers), but it's way more convenient. It turns out that my firmware doesn't do a good job of autodetecting changes in disk drives, so I end up having to kick the thing a couple of times at boot when I actually do switch drives, but it's still a big win. If I were doing this in my lab, as opposed to home, I'd standardize on using all the same size and same partitioning for removables.
I first upgraded the machine by adding a 20GB drive (which it recognized fine without the BIOS upgrade), and then replacing the 6GB drive with a 120GB (5400 rpm was $129 on sale; this week they had 7200rpm with 8MB buffers for that price after rebate.) I don't really know what to do with that much space, so there are a couple of extra 10GB partitions for installing different Linux versions in once I get around to it.
I'm currently using 3.5" drives, in removable drawers that make them take up 5.25" disk drive formats. It would be quite nice to be able to use the smaller slots, especially if they get the Serial-ATA worked out so the cabling's simpler, and having 80GB removables for a TiVo-like device would be convenient.
If they're really able to do ~80GB disks for ~$166, that's a much more attractive format for many things than Dataplay, assuming they don't go too far out of their way making it unusable via DRM. The 1.8" version sounds really good for a followup iPod, and if it's removable, it's easier to swap back and forth between your TiVo and your PC.
Or maybe it was enough for him to translate it so it was around as convenient source material for his lectures and the translation was more like working notes? Beowulf itself isn't that long a book, more like 20-50 pages typed than 2000.
Nethack has a monster called an "Ettin", presumably from Dungeons&Dragons or some similar gamer source. Google has some pointers to fairytales about Ettins, who seem to be multiple-headed giants.
If it were typed pages, and a lot smaller, somebody who'd done a Babelfish translation might try to get away with a BeowulfClusterF..... nevermind.....
Different ways to help spammers find them are to put them on web pages, or to have a spider-trap just waiting to generate them for web crawlers, or of course to be sure to unsubscribe them to all the spam unsubscribe addresses you've got, as well as the yes-tell-me-more addresses. They're more fun if you've got a lot of domain names to play with, but even if spammers kill off dangerous domains, you can trick some of them by doing addresses from lots of different thirdlevel domains, like alice@aardvark.example.com, alice@aardwulf.example.com, ... alice@zymurgy.example.com, bob@aardvark.example.com, ... And just to make things fun for the harvesters, you might as well make sure they've all got web pages pointing to a couple of other subdomains on your system.
If you want to get fancy with DNS, you can also set some of your subdomains to point to known open relays, if you happen to know anybody. Instead of having the spammer deliver all the email directly to aardvark.example.com, you can tell them that aardvark.example.com is at an IP address that's that misconfigured machine in Korea that's been spamming you, and have _them_ get teergrubed also.
They've got a web site. They've got a press relations person named Joann joann@postini.com, and in Cyberspace, everybody's the press. They're ostensibly looking to hire people. You've got expertise they obviously need. And either they're Evil, in which case you won't mind blocking them, or they're Good Guys but have some bad customers they haven't caught, in which case they probably want to know, or they're clueless or overloaded, in which case their PR person ought to know.
The "Fair Use" concept in copyright law is an issue of US law, arising out of US court decisions, not something we acquired with the Berne Convention. I don't know how Mexico does copyright law. But data is certainly the obvious one to talk about, because recording your data on your CD-Writer is obviously a legal reason to have blank CDs.
No need to do that at MIT or Stanford; your local community college can teach you that just as well. Real-world experience is always valuable too, of course, but the only way to get it is to teach people in the real world :-)
Remember the worst teachers you had in college? Besides the grad student who didn't speak English, there was that old guy who droned on and on and rambled without getting to the point, and the guy who discovered halfway through the semester that the class had only gotten through a third of the programming projects he'd planned for the semester, so he'd have to double your workload for the second half? All of them were nice people I'd studied under, one was a co-worker teaching a night course, and the last one really was a good teached but I had to drop a humanities elective to be able to finish his course instead. You could be one of them, or you could be a much better teacher than that.
... which is of course why everybody moved to Silicon Valley. It was a lot of fun, even though it made housing prices silly, the weather is great, and if you didn't have the contacts to get jobs easily, it was easier to make them when you were there in person as well as on the net, and of course there's the fun of walking by a sidewalk cafe and hearing a conversation about some latest trend in your field as opposed to some random topic you don't care about. But while it'll be a long time before there's another boom like this one, there's no guarantee that it'll be around here.
Another friend of mine worked on the project writing the technical side of the business plan. She didn't seriously expect it to turn into money, and she'd have dropped it in a minute if a paying job came along, but it gave her a 3-month job entry on her resume as well. I don't know if she called it a contract or a limited partnership or what.
inscribed in the Principality of the Mists, West Kingdom, this Third Day of Christmas, Anno Societatis XXXVII
Eh, what was that? Watery tarts distributing swords are a *perfectly* *fine* way to establish a government. Certainly as representative as stuffing ballot boxes....
hey, it's pedantry, but it's good pendantry :-)
Imagine if Brin were to do a couple more Uplift trilogies without getting enough new ideas in between. Doing literary criticism or whatever in between novels is a well-established tradition.
Also, herding-based agriculture is rather different from plant-growing agriculture, though it seems to still involve a lot of men ganging up and stealing other men's women and cows or goats.
We probably haven't been "human" for much more than a million years (maybe 3-4 if you stretch the definitions a bit), and if your term "human history" actually means history rather than existence, history's probably about 40-50,000 years (Australian Aborigines' oral histories), or if you don't like those, 35,000 years for cave paintings in France.
On the other hand, one major branch of agriculture is herding, as opposed to planting, and sometimes gangs of thugs would be happy to steal your women and goats or cows instead of your women and your wheat
Brin's fun to listen to when he's on a rant.
I'll rant about your position on the War Between The States separately. Meanwhile, thanks for the pointer to the Confederate Constitution - I'd never seen it. Williams also doesn't mention that most of the Bill of Rights is moved into the body of the Constitution, added to whatever section is appropriate. There are a few other places that "negro slavery" is mentioned, but that's not really surprising, given that the secession was largely about slavery, not economics, but dwelling on it would weaken Williams's main points, as well as being pretty obvious.