Maybe some parts of Utah are that way, and maybe that's true for bars that aren't also restaurants, but a few months ago when I was in SLC, I could walk down the street at midnight and get a beer and dinner , and the place even allowed smoking, unlike California. (While I dislike smoking, and had to sit at the far end of the bar so I could breathe while I ate, there was still more freedom in supposedly uptight Mormon country a few blocks from Temple Square than here in Silicon Valley.) No need to show ID, but I'm obviously older than 21.
And any business that wants to scan my driver's license to make sure my papers are in order before they sell me a drink isn't getting my business.
So my lab used to have *real* computers in it. The PDP-11s had been followed up by Vaxen, and our 11/780 was the size of two refrigerators for the CPU cabinet and another for the tape drive, plus four washing machines for the RM05 drives. And there was the air conditioner in the back of the lab.
But then we got the AT&T 3B20, because we *were* Bell Labs, after all. Looked like another air conditioner, or more precisely like a phone switch. 3-4 six-foot-high cabinets with smooth blue doors on the front and back - you had to open it up to see any of the clutter on the wiring side, but the front looked like nice clean plugin boards for all the processors, plus the four truck batteries that were the built-in 48v UPS system (Telco offices run on 48v DC...) It wasn't blazingly fast - about the speed of the 780, 1 MIPS or so, but when we'd have power glitches, the Vax would be lieing in little pieces all over the floor and the 3B20 would have a note on the console saying "By the way, the power was out for a couple minutes, but everything's fine, thought you'd like to know."
A couple years later, we thought about getting another 3B20 for our other lab, in the Bright Orange model. Not because we really wanted it, but because our director was obsessed about us not buying anything other than an AT&T computer (or maybe a Vax, because they were familiar), and if we put the 3B20 in the front of the lab, it would be big enough to hide a *real* computer behind:-)
Hey, Seth, the Internet, or IP, or at least parts of it, were designed to allow communications during/after nuclear attacks and other major destruction. If *it's* down, either major disasters have happened! Ok, or else it's just a bad modem or another backhoe problem or too many people running Napster....
For a long time, the EBS and its predecessor Conelrad were *only* used for one reason (plus tests) - nuclear attack warnings. The first time I heard an EBS announcement saying "This is not a test, repeat, this is not a test" I freaked for a few seconds until they got to the storm warning bit.
( [expletive deleted], half of you are probably kids too young to remember all the missile scares and hide under the desk and kiss your ass goodbye drills that they raised us on in US public schools in the 60s/70s. It was really nice during the 90s when there finally wasn't a Soviet Union conspiring with the US Military-Industrial Complex to keep us all worried that they might go crazy and nuke the planet, and we could pretend to be civilized people for a couple of years.)
If you're shipping around small files, like MP3s, there are lots of transfer systems that can do the job. But the Lossless Compression movement for music means that a concert tape is typically a few hundred megabytes large, maybe 1/3 the size of the uncompressed original, so it takes much longer to download, just as ISOs for Linux distributions are large. In that environment, you can't always depend on connections being up for a long enough time, so you need to be able to download parts of files, and swarming systems like BitTorrent help a lot.
Some environments, like the Gnutella/Napster/Freenet things, have communities that hang around connected for a long time even if they're not downloading anything. But others, like distributing a new release of RedHat/Debian/Mandrake CDs, or even just Mozilla, have a lot of users who want to show up, download stuff, and leave. This feature makes it possible for them to be a temporary community providing services to each other without requiring longterm committment. If you download a CD using BitTorrent, you're useful for 95-99% of the time you're on line, rather than being consumer-only for the first 100% of the download time and having to hang around for another 100% of the time to be any use to anybody, so the community scales much more cleanly even if the first thing you want to do after downloading the latest Linux release is install it. (Software's a much different usage pattern than music here.)
Additionally, it makes it very efficient for the first set of people who are downloading the file. Instead of having to download the whole thing from one source, which is probably overloaded, you're able to download pieces from lots of different people. The server takes advantage of this - instead of giving Alice chunks 1, 2, 3,..N in order, and giving Bob the same things, it spreads around the load, so Alice is downloading chunk 1 while Bob downloads chunk 2, and when they're done, Alice starts downloading Chunk 3 from the server and Chunk 2 from Bob, and other chunks from Dave, Eve, and Freddie if they've gotten them.
This also reduces the latency required for later people in the process to get their material - instead of waiting for the entire 600MB CD to be copied N times in a row, the downloading gets pipelined.
While it can help out those slashdotted sites with cool casemods, one of the cool things about BitTorrent is that it doesn't just work on whole files at a time, like Freenet and the Napster followons - it's made to handle individual chunks of files (e.g. separate megabytes of CD-sized files), so once you've downloaded a chunk that other people want, you can start uploading that to other people while you're downloading the next chunk. This means that you're able to do useful work before you've finished downloading the whole file, and instead of everybody downloading Meg 1 from the server, then Meg 2, different people get different chunks to download, and can share them with each other.
Also, because you're typically downloading a few tens to hundreds of megabyte chunks, you're a useful server for 90-99% of the time you're downloading, rather than the Freenet model where you're only useful *after* you've finished downloading the stuff you want. So instead of a long-term persistent set of users who always want stuff, BitTorrent is designed for temporary communities of people who want stuff Right Now, and it doesn't depend on them hanging around being useful after they've got what they want. (So you can download the latest release of a Debian ISO and then go install it without feeling like you're depriving the community by taking your machine offline.)
BitTorrent might be able to manage larger numbers of smaller files, e.g. a Slashdot event, but I haven't looked lately, and it's more interesting for the bigger things. (Of course, some slashdotting problems aren't file retrievals, but server interactions, like that one-IC web server powered by a potato battery, and it doesn't have anything to offer for that:-)
Proxy servers outside the state aren't a problem - the law implicitly requires that ISPs implement something like a proxy server that censors requests made by residents of Pennsylvania, though it doesn't specify a particular implementation technique. The state government would be happy if you apply their filtering to all of your other clients outside the state, but they don't insist on it - you just have to keep Pennsylvanians from seeing Officially Banned Material, and for the moment only bans child pornography.
There are constitutional problems with it, and it is regulating interstate commerce, and it's arguable that the requirement for interstate businesses to pay for blocking mechanisms without reimbursement is unconstitutional. Even the Australians, whose pro-censorship folks are as rabidly pro-censorship as anybody in the US, only require that ISPs provide censorware to customers who want it, rather than requiring them to implement it themselves, plus of course requiring web hosting providers to take down any material they don't approve of (which is a rather wider set, since they lack the equivalent of the US First Amendment.)
The law doesn't make it illegal to send encrypted traffic, so you can still use PGP or IPSEC or use SSL web forms to send in your credit card number. If the encrypted data you're sending is Officially Banned Data, then you're committing a crime regardless of whether it's encrypted. If an ISP can detect that you're transmitting Officially Banned Data and doesn't block it, they're Guilty, but if you're sending your requests encrypted they're probably off the hook. probably.
The Pennsylvania law was written pretty broadly and generally - backbone IP carriers probably are included, and if some local DA feels like delivering a blocking order to one of the national ISPs, he probably can. I'd be surprised if *my* employer's router backbone business would be able to add proxy servers to all our routers in Pennsylvania in N days the first time they get a blocking order, but they can afford enough lawyers to argue the thing in court if they get one, while a Mom&Pop garage ISP probably couldn't, especially if they had to buy new hardware to implement it.
A fiber carrier or Frame or ATM carrier probably isn't an ISP - if they're not routing the IP packets themselves, just hauling bits or frames or cells, they probably don't match PA's law, except that most carriers providing those services also run ISP businesses.
The law involves three parts, and some are technically hard to implement, independent of the dubious constitutionality.
Random politicians, cops, DAs deciding material is Officially Bad and notifying ISPs that they want it blocked. That's got some constitutional problems, but at least it's better than requiring the ISPs to proactively guess what things to block or use a commercial censorware package that's casting a much broader net and not only blocks Bad sites but also blocks any site that might let you evade their blocking mechanism (e.g. SethF's work on censorware blocking Google, Wayback, and anonymizers).
Web sites being ordered to take down specific pages - again, there are problems, but no technical difficulties and it's based on specific notice.
ISPs being ordered to block their users' access to URLs that aren't on their site. This is technically difficult, and the legislators don't understand the technical implications. Some ISPs may provide their users with a complete package, browser and all, but the normal ISP configuration never sees the URL - the user types the URL into their browser, their system does a DNS lookup to get the IP address associated with the domain name in the URL, and the user sends IP packets which the ISP's routers forward strictly by IP address. Asking the ISP to block a given URL is similar to asking the Post Office to block mail-order requests for specific books - it requires ripping open any envelopes addressed to specific bookstores to see what's being ordered. Actually it's worse than that - it's more like asking the big mail-sorting centers to block the requests, when they normally don't handle individual envelopes - they deliver mailbags to specific zipcodes after the local post office sorts the envelopes into bags by machine. The only time a real human looks at the address to notice that the envelope is addressed to a bookstore is when something goes wrong with the sorting machine (like ISPs handling bouncemail) or when the destination post office delivers it (equivalent to the URL's web host in the previous case.)
There are technical means that ISPs could use to implement Pennsylvania's orders - they could install proxy servers on all of their connections leaving Pennsylvania, either forcing users to explicitly proxy their browsers, or using transparent proxy servers. Some ISPs do this, to take advantage of caching and reduce their overall bandwidth needs, but except for local ISPs that happen to be entirely within Pennsylvania, most of them didn't build their network to easily keep track of state lines so they can enforce the "Banned in Boston" rules in Boston, "Banned in Philadelphia" rules in Philly, and "Banned in Pittsburgh" rules in Pittsburgh.
Does anybody know if any national ISPs were consulted on the implementation issues? I suspect most of them are perfectly willing to comply with orders to take down web pages, but would have lots more trouble with the blocking requirements - it's much cleaner to implement on the edges of the network, in the user's browser where there's enough information to decide.
I can't see this being highly useful during a movie, though I suppose you could IRC with your friends, especially if it's the kind of movie that deserves Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment.
But Live Concerts are a different application - I have used various typing devices to record setlists and do near-realtime concert reviews, and wireless access could have let me do them realtime. That kind of thing is more common for things like Deadhead jam bands than for some other genres, but it's nice to be able to do a stream-of-consciousness review about how Dave's doing a really hot Cajun interpretation of this piece or the guy playing the pedal steel is doing something really twisted to the melody, which lets you edit it down later and email it. It's also sometimes convenient to be able to pull down the lyrics for a song to see what's going on during this rendition of it.
Farther around Antarctica from there, several colonies of Adelie and Emperor penguins are endangered by breakups in the ice. The changes in ice have made it difficult for the adult penguins to get between their breeding grounds and areas where there are enough fish to feed them, and there's a substantial chance of a major population crash due to chick deaths.
One thing in common between the ICANN and Internet Ad-Hoc Committee proposals for new global TLDs was that they did their first round of expansion with seven relatively boring names, instead of the commercially interesting.inc,.ltd, and.sex. This was an important and correct choice to make - the real problems in starting a new TLD aren't picking the names - they're deciding on policies for who owns them, how the registries work, how to get the old Network Solutions monopoly out of total control, and similar issues that may not succeed the first time. You're only going to get one chance to start the official.inc TLD, and you don't want to botch the job - much better to start off with.aero and.museum and.name and.shop, so you can see if your process works and see whether the Internet community throws you out on your ear. If you succeed, *then* you sell off the expensive names.
And resisting.kids was also a good move - it's not driven by the market, but by US politicians, and the policy decisions about what should or should not go into it are a maze of little twisty passages that get rearranged while you're walking through them. It's not just about not having sex in that part of the internet - it's also about not having violence (can you show CNN?) and having lots of conflicting opinions about how much greed and commerciality shows up - would the dominant climate be Sesame Street with enhanced underwriting instead of ads, or would it be US Saturday morning cartoons with ads for sugar-coated cereal and consumer products?...
OK, so the crypto's not provably any good, and probably actually not very good, and the price of buying a spare OC48 to everybody you want to talk to makes it a bit impractical even if DWDM makes it potentially less outrageously expensive, and a couple of cheap chips can outrun the thing. But it *is* still cool:-)
mbkennel's posting has some good discussion on it. Chaotic crypto has usually been cracked any time anybody's seriously attacked an implementation of it, and this approach sounds like it's designed to be *easier* to crack than the average chaotic system, but it's still interesting stuff.
Chaotic crypto crackable, OTPs not
on
Optical Cryptography
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Most of the chaotic cryptosystems people have tried to design have been crackable, and cracked. Perhaps there's something about this one that's different, but just because something's relatively hard to predict doesn't make it impossible for people who are far better at math than I am.
By contrast, a theoretical one-time pad is theoretically provably uncrackable - if you really do have uncorrelated random bits for your pad, and you really only use them once, it's perfectly secure, and even knowing N-1 bits of a message tells you nothing about the other bit. In practice, source of random numbers aren't always perfect, and sometimes people cheat and reuse pads - the NSA's "Venona" crack of Soviet crypto primarily succeeded due to rampant reuse of pads by sloppy crypto users, though I think they also found some non-randomness in the pads that they could exploit a bit. But this optical system guarantees that if you know the initial conditions, you can use the first N-1 bits of a message to predict the next one, and sometimes you may be able to deduce those initial conditions closely enough to crack the system.
The main similarity is that you need to have a dedicated fiber just to talk encrypted to somebody, which makes both methods impractical for real applications. But quantum crypto gives you a guarantee about whether somebody's able to read your bits or not, and this method doesn't.
2048-bit public-key encryption really isn't that expensive - it takes about 4 times as long as 1024, but you were willing to run 1024-bit crypto 3 years ago and your CPU speeds have quadrupled since then. You're probably safe enough using 1024-bit crypto, but 768-bit is only a little past the current edge of the envelope, and you might as well switch to 1536 or 2048 for anything you want kept private over the long term. Encrypting your credit card numbers doesn't need over 1024, since anybody who can afford anything that strong before your credit card expires doesn't need your puny bank account:-)
But OC48s are still kinda expensive, even though their cheaper cousin, Gigabit Ethernet, has come down to $150 for a PCI board.
He didn't declare himself to be autocrat of the world,
He didn't refuse to listen to real users,
He didn't act obnoxiously and irresponsibly.
Jon Postel wasn't perfect, and he did make some mistakes, but he was fundamentally reasonable and tried to do a good job. He didn't let the fact that he really was in charge of the world as we know it go to his head....
I'll certainly be happy to use better display hardware when it's affordable, whether on CRTs, laptops, or PDAs. But I'm finding this article perfectly readable on a grainy CRT, while the typical latex->dvi->ps->pdf is pretty illegible unless magnified enough to show a small window into the picture. But even with better displays, I expect my laptop to be landscape-mode, not portrait, and my PDA to have way too small a screen. NeWs postscript-based window system was wonderful, at least compared with X or MSWindows, but there are still jobs for an content-description language like HTML/MathML rather than a page-description language like Postscript.
If MathML does a good enough job, and is supported well enough by popular browsers, that's fine - it's the proper approach according to the SGML religion that led to HTML. That way, the browser can respond not only to user preferences, but to the limitations of the display - if it's a clumsy display, the fine tweaking you did is wasted and may make things worse.
As an example of what can go wrong, look at your average TeX-written math/cs paper on your average PC screen. The font's too grainy and greeky to read at 75-100dpi, and it's probably in some two-column format that looks really nice printed on portrait-mode dead trees, but is horrendously annoying to read on a portrait-mode screen that can only display about half a paper page at bad resolution. Arrrgh!
Somebody once commented that there are better renditions of the TeX fonts for PCs - I think it was a TrueType implementation of CMR fonts or something, but it's been too long to remember the correct details.
Remember who's writing it. It's not your average stuffy New York Times article - so don't be surprised if the opinions and attitudes are more like what you'd expect to read in Wired:-)
The Dead were fundamentally a dance band, though rather more drugged-out than your average contra-dance band. Their interaction with the crowd was one of the things that made them great - sometimes not so good, but other times just totally magic. Listening to recordings of their stuff can be good too, and David Gans's Grateful Dead Hour on the radio provides an interesting mix of selected songs by the band, interviews with people in the scene, source material that influenced their music, material that was influenced by them, etc.
On a different track related to your message, there's a ~bimonthly ballroom dance in Oakland www.gaskellball.com/ with live music played by The Brassworks. As with your contra dances, the live band makes the experience much different than canned music.
Nroff and troff themselves aren't particularly convenient for typesetting math, but the "eqn" preprocessor was pretty good for translating a convenient math-oriented language into troff. The neqn preprocessor produced cruder output from the same input language, since nroff produces its output for monospaced typewriter-like devices, but it was still semi-workable.
If I were learning this stuff today, I'd probably learn Tex / LaTeX, but the stuff really is ugly. I'd rather have a good math package for html.
I looked at Etracks's web page. Unlike many alleged spammers, they *look* like they're in the legitimate email marketing business - sending email to people who actually want to receive it, e.g. product announcements that people have asked to be updated on, etc. They have a management team that has some respectable-sounding background, and relatively professional-looking pages with relatively professional-looking data.
Compare that to the average spamhaus or spammer page you've seen that tells how you can !Annoy! People!! Fast!!! or get !!!Bullet-Proof !!!Bulk!!!! Email!! Accounts!!! and !!!Address !!!Harvesting !Software!!!!!!!.
That doesn't mean that these guys *aren't* just spammers with college educations trying to attract a better-paying class of spammer or trying not to discourage the occasional legitimate customer, but at least on the surface they look respectable. But perhaps Mofo Knows
Slashdot Mirror
And any business that wants to scan my driver's license to make sure my papers are in order before they sell me a drink isn't getting my business.
But then we got the AT&T 3B20, because we *were* Bell Labs, after all. Looked like another air conditioner, or more precisely like a phone switch. 3-4 six-foot-high cabinets with smooth blue doors on the front and back - you had to open it up to see any of the clutter on the wiring side, but the front looked like nice clean plugin boards for all the processors, plus the four truck batteries that were the built-in 48v UPS system (Telco offices run on 48v DC...) It wasn't blazingly fast - about the speed of the 780, 1 MIPS or so, but when we'd have power glitches, the Vax would be lieing in little pieces all over the floor and the 3B20 would have a note on the console saying "By the way, the power was out for a couple minutes, but everything's fine, thought you'd like to know."
A couple years later, we thought about getting another 3B20 for our other lab, in the Bright Orange model. Not because we really wanted it, but because our director was obsessed about us not buying anything other than an AT&T computer (or maybe a Vax, because they were familiar), and if we put the 3B20 in the front of the lab, it would be big enough to hide a *real* computer behind
Hey, Seth, the Internet, or IP, or at least parts of it, were designed to allow communications during/after nuclear attacks and other major destruction. If *it's* down, either major disasters have happened! Ok, or else it's just a bad modem or another backhoe problem or too many people running Napster....
( [expletive deleted], half of you are probably kids too young to remember all the missile scares and hide under the desk and kiss your ass goodbye drills that they raised us on in US public schools in the 60s/70s. It was really nice during the 90s when there finally wasn't a Soviet Union conspiring with the US Military-Industrial Complex to keep us all worried that they might go crazy and nuke the planet, and we could pretend to be civilized people for a couple of years.)
If you're shipping around small files, like MP3s, there are lots of transfer systems that can do the job. But the Lossless Compression movement for music means that a concert tape is typically a few hundred megabytes large, maybe 1/3 the size of the uncompressed original, so it takes much longer to download, just as ISOs for Linux distributions are large. In that environment, you can't always depend on connections being up for a long enough time, so you need to be able to download parts of files, and swarming systems like BitTorrent help a lot.
Additionally, it makes it very efficient for the first set of people who are downloading the file. Instead of having to download the whole thing from one source, which is probably overloaded, you're able to download pieces from lots of different people. The server takes advantage of this - instead of giving Alice chunks 1, 2, 3,
This also reduces the latency required for later people in the process to get their material - instead of waiting for the entire 600MB CD to be copied N times in a row, the downloading gets pipelined.
Also, because you're typically downloading a few tens to hundreds of megabyte chunks, you're a useful server for 90-99% of the time you're downloading, rather than the Freenet model where you're only useful *after* you've finished downloading the stuff you want. So instead of a long-term persistent set of users who always want stuff, BitTorrent is designed for temporary communities of people who want stuff Right Now, and it doesn't depend on them hanging around being useful after they've got what they want. (So you can download the latest release of a Debian ISO and then go install it without feeling like you're depriving the community by taking your machine offline.)
BitTorrent might be able to manage larger numbers of smaller files, e.g. a Slashdot event, but I haven't looked lately, and it's more interesting for the bigger things. (Of course, some slashdotting problems aren't file retrievals, but server interactions, like that one-IC web server powered by a potato battery, and it doesn't have anything to offer for that :-)
There are constitutional problems with it, and it is regulating interstate commerce, and it's arguable that the requirement for interstate businesses to pay for blocking mechanisms without reimbursement is unconstitutional. Even the Australians, whose pro-censorship folks are as rabidly pro-censorship as anybody in the US, only require that ISPs provide censorware to customers who want it, rather than requiring them to implement it themselves, plus of course requiring web hosting providers to take down any material they don't approve of (which is a rather wider set, since they lack the equivalent of the US First Amendment.)
The law doesn't make it illegal to send encrypted traffic, so you can still use PGP or IPSEC or use SSL web forms to send in your credit card number. If the encrypted data you're sending is Officially Banned Data, then you're committing a crime regardless of whether it's encrypted. If an ISP can detect that you're transmitting Officially Banned Data and doesn't block it, they're Guilty, but if you're sending your requests encrypted they're probably off the hook. probably.
A fiber carrier or Frame or ATM carrier probably isn't an ISP - if they're not routing the IP packets themselves, just hauling bits or frames or cells, they probably don't match PA's law, except that most carriers providing those services also run ISP businesses.
There are technical means that ISPs could use to implement Pennsylvania's orders - they could install proxy servers on all of their connections leaving Pennsylvania, either forcing users to explicitly proxy their browsers, or using transparent proxy servers. Some ISPs do this, to take advantage of caching and reduce their overall bandwidth needs, but except for local ISPs that happen to be entirely within Pennsylvania, most of them didn't build their network to easily keep track of state lines so they can enforce the "Banned in Boston" rules in Boston, "Banned in Philadelphia" rules in Philly, and "Banned in Pittsburgh" rules in Pittsburgh.
Does anybody know if any national ISPs were consulted on the implementation issues? I suspect most of them are perfectly willing to comply with orders to take down web pages, but would have lots more trouble with the blocking requirements - it's much cleaner to implement on the edges of the network, in the user's browser where there's enough information to decide.
But Live Concerts are a different application - I have used various typing devices to record setlists and do near-realtime concert reviews, and wireless access could have let me do them realtime. That kind of thing is more common for things like Deadhead jam bands than for some other genres, but it's nice to be able to do a stream-of-consciousness review about how Dave's doing a really hot Cajun interpretation of this piece or the guy playing the pedal steel is doing something really twisted to the melody, which lets you edit it down later and email it. It's also sometimes convenient to be able to pull down the lyrics for a song to see what's going on during this rendition of it.
Farther around Antarctica from there, several colonies of Adelie and Emperor penguins are endangered by breakups in the ice. The changes in ice have made it difficult for the adult penguins to get between their breeding grounds and areas where there are enough fish to feed them, and there's a substantial chance of a major population crash due to chick deaths.
And resisting
mbkennel's posting has some good discussion on it. Chaotic crypto has usually been cracked any time anybody's seriously attacked an implementation of it, and this approach sounds like it's designed to be *easier* to crack than the average chaotic system, but it's still interesting stuff.
By contrast, a theoretical one-time pad is theoretically provably uncrackable - if you really do have uncorrelated random bits for your pad, and you really only use them once, it's perfectly secure, and even knowing N-1 bits of a message tells you nothing about the other bit. In practice, source of random numbers aren't always perfect, and sometimes people cheat and reuse pads - the NSA's "Venona" crack of Soviet crypto primarily succeeded due to rampant reuse of pads by sloppy crypto users, though I think they also found some non-randomness in the pads that they could exploit a bit. But this optical system guarantees that if you know the initial conditions, you can use the first N-1 bits of a message to predict the next one, and sometimes you may be able to deduce those initial conditions closely enough to crack the system.
The main similarity is that you need to have a dedicated fiber just to talk encrypted to somebody, which makes both methods impractical for real applications. But quantum crypto gives you a guarantee about whether somebody's able to read your bits or not, and this method doesn't.
But OC48s are still kinda expensive, even though their cheaper cousin, Gigabit Ethernet, has come down to $150 for a PCI board.
- He didn't play politics much,
- He didn't declare himself to be autocrat of the world,
- He didn't refuse to listen to real users,
- He didn't act obnoxiously and irresponsibly.
Jon Postel wasn't perfect, and he did make some mistakes, but he was fundamentally reasonable and tried to do a good job. He didn't let the fact that he really was in charge of the world as we know it go to his head....I'll certainly be happy to use better display hardware when it's affordable, whether on CRTs, laptops, or PDAs. But I'm finding this article perfectly readable on a grainy CRT, while the typical latex->dvi->ps->pdf is pretty illegible unless magnified enough to show a small window into the picture. But even with better displays, I expect my laptop to be landscape-mode, not portrait, and my PDA to have way too small a screen. NeWs postscript-based window system was wonderful, at least compared with X or MSWindows, but there are still jobs for an content-description language like HTML/MathML rather than a page-description language like Postscript.
As an example of what can go wrong, look at your average TeX-written math/cs paper on your average PC screen. The font's too grainy and greeky to read at 75-100dpi, and it's probably in some two-column format that looks really nice printed on portrait-mode dead trees, but is horrendously annoying to read on a portrait-mode screen that can only display about half a paper page at bad resolution. Arrrgh!
Somebody once commented that there are better renditions of the TeX fonts for PCs - I think it was a TrueType implementation of CMR fonts or something, but it's been too long to remember the correct details.
Remember who's writing it. It's not your average stuffy New York Times article - so don't be surprised if the opinions and attitudes are more like what you'd expect to read in Wired :-)
On a different track related to your message, there's a ~bimonthly ballroom dance in Oakland www.gaskellball.com/
with live music played by The Brassworks. As with your contra dances, the live band makes the experience much different than canned music.
If I were learning this stuff today, I'd probably learn Tex / LaTeX, but the stuff really is ugly. I'd rather have a good math package for html.
Compare that to the average spamhaus or spammer page you've seen that tells how you can !Annoy! People!! Fast!!! or get !!!Bullet-Proof !!!Bulk!!!! Email!! Accounts!!! and !!!Address !!!Harvesting !Software!!!!!!!.
That doesn't mean that these guys *aren't* just spammers with college educations trying to attract a better-paying class of spammer or trying not to discourage the occasional legitimate customer, but at least on the surface they look respectable. But perhaps Mofo Knows