I believe in reading source material, but I just can't bring myself to do it in this case. Not for just one quick comment. SyFy Portal has a discussion of an interview with Rick Berman, from a transcript of a Star Trek Magazine interview courtesy of Sci-Fi Pulse. (Got that?)
Here's the statement, rebutting the idea that the creator of Star Trek: Enterprise hated the original series. "I can openly admit that I did not see all 79 epsides of the original series ... but it was something we respected and did our best to lead up to. But I think that was something that was unsettling for fans."
No ... ya think?!?
OK, somebody explain this to me. We've been launching space shuttles since Columbia first went up in April 1981. For 22 years, with the exception of the tragic Challenger O-ring in 1986, there have been no problems. Now, all of a sudden, foam is falling off the external fuel tank every time we launch one. And I'd buy the "well hey, they're 25 year old spacecraft" arguement, except for one thing: the external fuel tank is the only part of the shuttle that's not reusable. And yet, after two consecutive launches in which foam fell off, NASA is now saying that foam is the biggest obstacle to next shuttle flight. Did somebody make an engineering change? A vendor change? Has foam always fallen off the ank, and it wasn't until Columbia blew up that we noticed it?
Technorati tags: shuttle | space shuttle | Columbia | Challenger | NASA | space | foam
Let's see, you live in America, and you're an American citizen, so you think that things are ultimately fair. Oh, you're not naive, you know that there are people who are not entirely fair, or maybe some that are corrupt, or maybe some that don't have the public's best interest at heart. Maybe there are even some that will ignore your fundamental rights as an American. You might find yourself wronfully imprisoned. But it's OK, because ultimately, someone, somewhere, will set it right, even if your case has to go to the Supreme Court.
Guess what. Your mother was right.
Sometimes life just isn't fair.
Take Jose Padilla, the alleged "dirty bomber". (Please.) He's been sitting in solitary confinement for more than two years. Now, I'm not saying he's innocent. He might be guilty as hell. But he's been sitting in prison for all this time WITHOUT BEING CHARGED WITH ANYTHING.
Twice now, courts have ruled that he should either be charged or released. Reasonable, no? But he's still sitting in jail with no charges. And now the Supreme Court has declined to hear the case (via Building a Pyramid).
Scary, scary stuff.
My nephew, Jake, is four years old, and he's so smart that the pediatrician can't even measure his intelligence because the scale only goes up to age seven. He lives 1000 miles away from me, but I met him for the first time a couple of years ago during the big Northeast blackout, when I got stranded in New York. He was really sweet, and I could see from his personality a lot of why people said he was just like me at that age. Given his obvious intelligence -- he was spelling multisyllabic words at two -- I took it as a compliment.
Today I had lunch with my mother, who informed me that Jake has been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism.
Jake's fortunate, though. Apparently, the doctor said, he has all of the "good" qualities that come with that diagnosis, and none of the "bad" ones. Unsure of what that meant, I went off in search of information on Asperger's. [Update: what it actually meant is that my mother mis-interpreted what my sister said. Jake was tested for Asperger's, but because he only scored high on the cognitive portion -- he is, as I said, extraordinarily intelligent -- and not on the negative areas, such as interpersonal relationships, he is offically NOT diagnosed with Asperger's. But the rest of this post still stands.]
I'm a little shaken by what I've found.
If you live in Silicon Valley, you probably already know this, but apparently there has been a huge spike in the number of children diagnosed with autism, especially in areas with high concentrations of, well, geeks. Why? Well, an article in Wired, The Geek Syndrome, points to a potential reason.
Let's put it this way. If you're a programmer or an engineer and you work with a large number of other programmers or engineers, you know someone with autism. Period. They may not even know it. It might even be you.
But apparently those "good" qualities the pediatrician was talking about are closely related to the creativity and focus that make us good at what we do. A few of the necessary genes, apparently, is a Good Thing.
Too many, though, is a Bad Thing.
Thing is, where people who are borderline autistic, or who have Asperger's, used to gravitate towards professions (and attitudes) in which they were unlikely to reproduce (such as monks and "strange old aunts"), they are now becoming programmers and engineers and starting to wind up in the same profession, where they meet each other, get married, and ... well ... produce children.
It's been a running joke for some time that autism runs rampant in the tech industry. As the Wired article points out, Bill Gates is regularly rumored to have it. Think I'm overestimating? There's a screening test, the Autism Quotient (AQ) linked from the article. Pass the URL around your office and see what you come up with.
I don't even want to tell you what my score was.
So here's my question: if the genes that give us the ability to succeed and change the world ultimately cause problems when they become too concentrated, could it lead to a breakdown in society? Autism rates are rising around the world. Are we just a generation or two from an intellectual armageddon?
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Technorati tags: autism, intelligence, evolution
I've discovered that I'm generally cranky when I post to InformIT. My take on a one-click aggregation solution is no exception.
I can't even comment on this analysis of the legal twisting and turning of reality with regard to the torture of Iraqi (and Afgani) prisoners. Consider the notion that:
In order to prove 'severe mental pain or suffering,' the statute requires proof of 'prolonged mental harm' that was caused by or resulted from one of four enumerated acts... [T]he development of a mental disorder such as posttraumatic stress disorder, which can last months or even years, or even chronic depression... might satisfy the prolonged harm requirement... [I]f a defendant [interrogator] has a good faith belief that his actions will not result in prolonged mental harm, he lacks the mental state necessary for his actions to constitute torture. A defendant could show that he acted in good faith by taking such steps as surveying professional literature, consulting with experts, or reviewing evidence gained from past experience... Because the presence of good faith would negate the specific intent element of torture, good faith may be a complete defense to such a charge.
It makes me physically ill.
I've been listening to the supposedly liberal press falling all over themselves to appear conservative for a whole week now, I have to ask: we are talking about Ronald Reagan, right? President of the United States between 1980 and 1988, right? That Reagan? 'Cause you'd be hard pressed to know it watching the obsequeous coverage on all the networks this week. Maybe the media is the one suffering from Alzheimers. I mean, we keep hearing about "the Great Communicator" and how he was so "idealistic" and stuck to his principles and all that. I've heard him described as "the Republican party's JFK." So tell me, why aren't we being reminded of:
What else did I miss?
This is kind of a difficult one for me to take sides on. I don't like Michael Moore, because I feel like he's an opportunist who'll stir up trouble wherever he can.
On the other hand, I hate Bush more.
Moore's new film, Fahrenheit 9/11, about the censorship that took place after the terrorist attacks, is clearly not going to be a pro-Bush piece. It's also the winner of the top prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival. Apparently that's not enough to avoid Disney from prohibiting Miramax from distributing the film.
Disney says it would violate campaign finance laws. Moore says it would anger Florida Governor Jeb Bush and endanger Disney's tax breaks.
We'll see how it plays out.
I guess that being in your 80s gives you the perspective to see what the rest of us would see if we ever slowed down enough to pay attention. And being a famous author gives you some license to say it out loud. Kurt Vonnegut is both, and proves it with Cold Turkey, a piece about peace, kindness, power, addiction, and fossil fuels. Interesting.
Via tima thinking outloud >Tima Out Loud, Six Apart has made some changes to the licenses that were such a controversy. First, they've changed the personal license from 3 authors and 5 blogs to 5 and 5, with the ability to purchase more of each for $9.95 each. Also, a "blog" is defined as a site, as opposed to a subsite, so most of the people who were pissed off that they would now have to pay actually still qualify for the free version.
OK, so Six Apart releases Movable Type 3.0. They remove the restriction preventing people from charging money to support it, and they still provide a free version. So what's the complaining about? Apparently people are ticked that the free version only allows 1 author and 3 weblogs. The "Personal" version allows 3 authors and 5 blogs, and costs (right now) $70.
OK, folks, a "personal" blog is, well, YOU. It's not you hosting things for your friends. It's YOU. If you want twenty seven different blogs, then fine, create them as categories and do different templates. If you want to use the free version to enable your friends to host their blogs on your server, fine, just install multiple copies of the free version. Its not that big of a deal. These people have put a lot of work into their product, they deserve compensation.
Get over it.
When we're amongst ourselves, a frequent topic among computer book authors -- and, I suspect, most other types of authors -- is the fact that Amazon canabalizes sales of new books (for which we receive royalties) with prominent links to used books (for which we do not). One author recently found a way to make himself feel just a little better about it. I'm reprinting this, with his permission, from a private mailing list. (Update: After I posted this, he also posted it to his blog.)
I try not to mope about Amazon.Com selling used books on new book pages, even though I suspect that it's eating our lunch in these penny-pinching times.
However, my ears steam a bit when I see one of my out of print books selling for pennies. At a price that nominal, some Amazon Marketplace seller is killing other sales, making the book appear worthless, and won't even earn $1.
I was preparing a book donation for a library and realized something: Amazon will ship books anywhere, so these penny sellers are the world's cheapest book shipment service.
Tonight, I bought one of my books for $0.23 plus $3.49 shipping and handling. The penny seller will receive $0.23 plus a standard shipping credit of $2.26, $1.84 of which will be spent on media mail's two-pound rate. Her profit will be 65 cents minus packaging costs and labor.
I hope they appreciate the book at the public library in Ketchikan, Alaska, as much as I enjoyed buying it.
Rogers Cadenhead
I understand honoring your father, but when you're Mel Gibson and you know that your father "follows a tiny wing of traditionalist Catholicism that views the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council as a conspiracy between Jews and Masons to take over the church" maybe it'd be a good idea if you tell him not to talk to the media while you're fighting charges that your film is anti-Semitic. That way he won't tell the Associated Press that the Holocaust is "all — maybe not all fiction — but most of it is."
Why does he say that? Well, "They claimed that there were 6.2 million (Jews) in Poland before the war and after the war there were 200,000, therefore he (Hitler) must have killed 6 million of them. They simply got up and left. They were all over the Bronx and Brooklyn and Sydney and Los Angeles."
Um ... riiiiiiiight.
Maybe growing up with this man is why Gibson can't understand why his film might spark controversy.
According to TV Guide, Steven Speilberg managed to sidestep the controversy, though, "declaring himself 'too smart to answer a question like that.' At a press conference Wednesday to promote the DVD release of Schindler's List, the Oscar-winning filmmaker said he had yet to see the film, which has been accused of promoting anti-Semitism. 'When I do see [it],' he added, 'the first person who will hear from me will be Mel Gibson and no one else.'"
What's frightening to me is the idea that Belgian child sex rings are real. We'd all like to think that this is the stuff porno for psychopaths, but unfortunately, it's not. Even more disturbing is that while this very sad story took place in Belgium, reporter Peter Landesman told Fresh Air "that tens of thousands of women, girls and boys are smuggled into the United States from Eastern Europe and held captive as sex slaves in American cities like New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Chicago. Landesman reports that the U.S. government has done little to pursue the traffickers."
And it's not just Landesman. Check out the Polaris Project, trying to stop human trafficking.
Microsoft has admitted that "perhaps it had taken its trademark rights 'a little too seriously'" when it sued 17 year old Mike Rowe over his domain name, MikeRoweSoft.com. This week the case was settled, with Microsoft agreeing to trade Rowe the domain for "a free Microsoft Xbox video-game console and a free trip to the company's Redmond campus for the Microsoft Research Tech Fest" as well as Microsoft paying for him to pursue Microsoft certification and any costs involved in moving his web design business to a new domain. Microsoft will also direct mikerowesoft.com's traffic to the new domain.
Well, I've finally taken the gloves off and posted a snarky posting to InformIT, What? You mean you can read an XML file from another application?
The scoop? Microsoft is now trying to patent methods for reading an XML file produced by another application as a way to keep companies from building competing products that read a Word file.
But I've dropped my usual objective demeanor on this one. Let's see if anybody notices or -- gasp -- comments on the InformIT blog. I hope so.
I've just deleted exactly 314 comment spams sent to this blog. Fortunately, I am conversant enough to simply wipe them out with a single SQL statement to the database rather than doing it individually, so the most annoying part was simply waiting for the scumbag to finish so I didn't have to rebuild the site more than once.
But I'm truly, deeply, annoyed now. It's one thing to send one or two comments, but this moron sent a comment to literally every single post on the site. That, as the Irish say, is going beyond the beyond. So, since I have the IP address the comments were posted from, I have sent the following email to FAST.NET, the spammers connection ISP:
--------
Ladies and/or gentlemen --
I have just deleted some 300 identical comment spams to my website. I
am including a sample below. These were likely done with a script, as
they arrived 2-3 per minute. I don't know (or care) whether you host
any of the domains this person is trying to advertise, but the actual
spams originated on your network. They were sent between 3:27pm and
5:12pm EST today.
Please let me know what action you will be taking.
Thank you,
Nicholas Chase
--------------------- MESSAGE INCLUDED BELOW ---------------------
IP Address: 207.29.194.4
Name: propecia
Email Address: puner_vol@freemail.com
URL: (snipped)
(rest of the message snipped for obvious reasons)
------------
I'll keep you posted on what Fast.net actually does.
The FBI has issued a warning for police to watch for people carrying almanacs.
The FBI noted that use of almanacs or maps may be innocent, "the product of legitimate recreational or commercial activities." But it warned that when combined with suspicious behavior -- such as apparent surveillance -- a person with an almanac "may point to possible terrorist planning." ... The FBI said information typically found in almanacs that could be useful for terrorists includes profiles of cities and states and information about waterways, bridges, dams, reservoirs, tunnels, buildings and landmarks. It said this information is often accompanied by photographs and maps.
In the meantime, an Air Force pilot asked a clerk at Staples (where she's a regular customer) for information on buying Flight Simulator for her 10-year-old, and got nighttime visit from police.
Tell me something: isn't there a point at which it becomes easier to just stop trying to rule the world?
(For list watchers: these links aren't on the list, but were eventually followed from number 138.)
Well, as a regular listener to Democracy Now, Free Speech Radio News and the like on WMNF, I already knew that an official within the French government has initiated an investigation of "allegations that Halliburton, subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, and a French company together paid $180 million in illegal commissions to government officials during the construction of a natural gas complex in Nigeria" during the time in which it was headed by Dick Cheney. I didn't expect to hear about it in the mainstream press, but apparently only 11 of Top 12 US Papers are Ignoring Cheney's Pending Bribery Investigation.
The odd paper out? The Dallas Morning News. Who'da thunk it. A Texas paper breaks the silence. Hm.
(Keeping track? This was number 181 on the list.)
I understand that there are people who read all of the blogs on their blogroll every day, or at least, every few days. And they even find time to comment on them. I want to know who these people are and how they manage to make a living.
I have, in essence, three blogs that I am supposed to be updating on a regular basis. I'm supposed to do at least three blogs a week for the XML Reference Guide, I've got this one, and I've got The Vanguard Science Fiction Report, which has been fallow so long I'm embarrassed to admit that it's mine. So today, now that the weeks of emergency room visits and surgeries in the family have settled down into the normal level of chaos, I sat down and went through my blogroll for potential posting material.
I thought it might be a little educational to document the "flow" of my surfing, and how it eventually gets turned into actual postings, so here is the list of the "first cut". These are postings that may eventually wind up on one of my three blogs:
And some XML tools mentioned on Cafe Con Leche:
Even I can't believe how long the list is.
As you can see, it's a rather eclectic group, but it also shows the pattern of how I surf. (Note that I didn't even touch Op-Ed News today, because I know I have enough material for this blog, which is the only place it belongs, or the W3C because I've adopted a "monthly" schedule for them on InformIT.)
Over the next week or so, you can see what makes the cut and what doesn't, and what leads to other things.
Wizbang has some links to Wizbang: the Paris Hilton tapes, but what's really interesting is that through a weird quirk in PageRank, Wizbang got a ton of traffic to their fairly short posting. So my question is, is it worth chasing trends like this to get traffic, or does it fade more quickly than the traffic can find you?
OK, so here's the thing about electronic voting machines. The manufacturer says that it would be impossible to make one with a paper receipt because you'd worry about jamming and so on. Sounds reasonable, right? Well, the company in question is Diebold. Sound familiar? Chances are you see it on just about every ATM machine you go to, since they're, like, the leading manufacturer of
ATMs.
Fortunately, Congress seems to be catching on. Maybe it's appropriate that it's Senator Graham (of Florida) who just rolled out an electronic voting bill.
So I was thinking over at InformIT about standards bodies and their relevance, but my really big question is this: what would happen if we all decided NOT to use an accepted standard, and used something else instead?
I mean, seriously. What if a group of scientists decided not to use the "accepted" names for the elements, or renamed the planets or something? I mean, there's no law about it, right?
The Massachusetts State Supreme Court has ruled that it is unconstitutional to deny gay and lesbian couples the obligations and legal protections of marriage just because the person they'd be marrying is of the same gender. They did NOT say that Massachusetts has to issue marriage licenses. A "civil union" type of thing works too.
But some members of congress feel threatened by this, and want to create an amendment to the US Constitution defining marriage as a union between one man and one woman. Can you imagine if fifty years ago they had created an amendment banning marriage between blacks and whites?
Oppose Writing Intolerance into the U.S. Constitution by sending a fax, letter or email through the ACLU. The Constitution should be used to PROTECT freedom, not restrict it.
I commented more extensively on Clay Shirky's The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview over on InformIT, but I have one more point to question.
Clay's talking about syllogisms, and uses this one as an example of why thy don't work:
"Consider the following assertions:
- Count Dracula is a Vampire
- Count Dracula lives in Transylvania
- Transylvania is a region of Romania
- Vampires are not real
You can draw only one non-clashing conclusion from such a set of assertions -- Romania isn't real."
Excuse me? I think the main problem is that he's mis-understanding the difference between
A are B
and
All A are B
I commented more over at InformIT.
Apparently one of my most popular posts is Why DO we pay taxes, anyway? I still haven't been able to answer that question, but in my quest to find out, I found a link to the entirety of the United States Code. If you find it, let me know.
Gee, I wonder why The House Nixed Anti-Profiteering Penalties in the Iraq Spending Bill.
It's scary how people listen to the rhetoric but never find out the facts behind it. Can't blame them, though, because the media doesn't make the connection. Check out Caught on Film: The Bush Credibility Gap. Believe it or not, it's at least hosted on the official web server of the House of Representatives. An official committee publication? I don't know, but it's good ammunition for those conservatives in your life who think Bush can do no wrong.
I used to be a big Michael Moore fan, based on seeing Roger and Me. Of course, I didn't live anywhere near Flint, Michigan, so I didn't really have any historical context on which to base my judgement. And as a result, I assumed that what I was seeing was the truth. Why? Because it was a documentary.
Or so I thought.
I started to lose my respect for Michael Moore the day after the Academy Awards. As you may or may not remember, he got his fellow documentary nominees up on stage with him and berated Bush for the war.
Now, it's not that I don't agree that we probably shouldn't have gone to war. I do agree with that. But the next day, I read that his fellow nominees had had no idea that that was what he was going to do.
That's just plain wrong, in my view.
But still, I had a lot of respect for Moore and the biting wit I had seen in Roger and Me. Until, that is, I started seeing some disturbing news about Moore's winning film, Bowling For Columbine. And it came from several sources:
Dave Kopel on Michael Moore on National Review Online
Spinsanity - Viewer beware: In "Bowling for Columbine," Michael Moore once again puts distortions and contradictions before the truth
Rachel Lucas: Michael Moore is a liar Archives
Truth about Bowling for Columbine
Quacking for Columbine
So now I wonder: when is a documentary not a documentary? I mean, isn't a documentary supposed to tell the true story of something or somebody?
Daniel Drezner's posting got me really thinking about what it is that bothers me about this whole overseas outsourcing thing.
Let me make something clear.
I'm not opposed to spreading the wealth, so-to-speak, by providing jobs overseas, necessarily. What bothers me is the dishonesty about it. OK, you're doing it to boost the bottom line. Fine. Just don't try and tell us that it's to boost sales (ie, Boeing) or that we're going to like it, really.
Jon, who has "worked in and through the waves of global outsourcing first in the Engineering and Construction industry and most recently in the IT industry" probably put it best in his comment on Drezner's original post: "I do agree that the gains from this trend will benefit American corporations. However the benefit will not extend to the consumer and most certainly not to those displaced US employees suddenly finding a barren market for their career skills and expertise within the US.
Corporations will get the profit of the less costly operating and production costs found off-shore, which wealth will be re-distributed in executive incentive and bonus packages, certainly in no way returned to those US employees no longer employed. And the Administration’s support for reduced corporate taxation further lessen the degree to which the fruits of this labor will be reintegrated in a manner beneficial to the populace at large. The fantasy that US corporations will adopt as SOP and offer released workers “ex-employment” insurance is exactly that – a fantasy."
Daniel Drezner suggests that I don't understand that in some cases one person can be made better off without someone else being made worse off. Of course I understand that. I just don't think that moving high-paying tech jobs overseas is one of those situations. And looking at the first few comments on his posting, it looks like I'm not the only one who thinks the likelihood of companies buying "targeted insurance products" to cushion the effects to workers displaced is, to say the least, unlikely.
Drezner quotes the report's suggestion that "at least theoretically, displaced U.S. workers will find new jobs in more dynamic industries." Why do I suspect that's double-speak for "lower paying jobs somewhere else"? Sure, a coder can get a job flipping burgers, but is that really an improvement for anybody but corporate shareholders?
So no, I don't understand how this is good for American workers. I'll tell you what else I don't understand. I don't understand how you can tell me that effectively eliminating overtime will create more jobs, when it's now cheaper to have fewer workers and make them work longer hours. I don't understand how a member of Congress can say that poor working families don't deserve a tax credit because they pay no taxes, when a much larger portion of their income goes to gasoline taxes, sales taxes, and other taxes that don't scale based on economic class.
I don't understand why we as Americans, we have allowed ourselves to become so complacent to what is clearly unfair.
Maybe it's just that John Dickinson was right, as quoted in 1776: "A poor man will fight to the death to protect the possibility of becoming rich, rather than face the reality of being poor."
I hope not.
(Additional note: Daniel Drezner actually has an impressive CV. I'll definitely be checking out some of his other writing.)
My car is in the shop today, and will likely stay there until at least Monday. It may stay there longer than that. Oh, it's not that the parts aren't available, or that the shop doesn't have time to fix it. The problem is that my beloved 1996 Saturn, which has given me very little trouble in the 150,000 plus miles that I've driven it, has a bad bushing in the shifter. Now, for those of you unfamiliar with cars, or with bushings (as I was when the day began) a bushing is typically a small, round, piece of plastic that goes around a piece metal that rotates, filling some of the same function that ball bearings might.
At first I was relieved to find out that the reason I couldn't shift my car out of third was not the linkage inside the transmission after all, but rather a problem with the shifter itself. After all, it's got to be cheaper to take apart the center console than the transmission, right?
Well, yes, that's true. But apparently Saturn has seen fit to take this small piece of plastic and provide it only attached to the clutch cable. Price for the clutch cable? $375. Oh, and another hour or four to install it, since it's got to be threaded up through the dashboard and over to the transmission.
Total cost to repair the one inch piece of plastic? $750.
I have no light in my radio for the same reason: a $600 job to replace the entire wiring harness. I decided I can live without the light. And it's not just cars, either. I once had to replace an entire laptop motherboard because the power supply jack got loose. (Thankfully, it was a warranty repair, but still...)
Why do companies DO this? And why do we let them?!?
An open request to Saturn: Why, oh, why, would you design something like this so that a simple repair becomes so darn complicated?
[Update: This entry has more comments than any other post on this blog, with lots of great information on how to fix this problem without spending an arm and a leg. Now, if you scroll down, you'll see a description from "HA-Y-N Saturn" of a particularly ingenious fix. He's given me permission to post the photo. (Forgive me for not just adding it to a comment, but MT won't let me, for obvious reasons.)]
The RIAA is preparing for an even more massive onslaught of lawsuits against individual file sharers. One so-called "pirate" is challenging the subpoena of her records, but probably won't get far. The Electronic Frontier Foundation will let you search to see if you're being subpoenaed. The database has 1145 subpoenas at the time of this writing. The effect? According to this SFGate article, "an independent digital media industry analyst, said the 'fear factor' caused usage of file-sharing programs to drop about 22 percent in the seven weeks after the RIAA announced its plans to sue individuals." So that's a victory for the RIAA, right?
Well, not exactly. "Yet Leigh noted industry sales reports show the drop in CD sales accelerated during the same period." In other words, they've pissed off their customers. Basically, people are saying, "I'm not going to buy your product anyway."
It's sad, really. I used to think file sharing was great, because I'm one of those people who would actually listen to the music and then buy it. But I've seen my son's generation adopt an "everything's free" mind-set, which is wrong too.
Years ago, I was part of Mojo Nation, a network that provided a decentralized system of file storage. The idea was interesting, with users getting "tokens" for providing either bandwidth or storage, or whatever. The interesting part was that there was no way to tell what information was being stored on your system. Each document was broken up into pieces, and multiple copies of each piece were distributed over multiple machines. Kind of like an anti-censorship version of the internet, where any one node could be taken down and not effect the integrity of the available data. Overall, I liked the concept, though I was uncomfortable with the idea that I might be inadvertantly providing access to child pornography. Eventually the network collapsed -- or at least I think it did -- and I stopped thinking about it.
But freedom's on my mind a lot lately. I'd never looked into it, but apparently FreeNet is a lot like it, as a distributed system that stymies censorship. But now its founder, Ian Clarke is leaving the USA. Why?
Several reasons really. Firstly, because the work I am doing now doesn't really require me to be in any particular location, I could probably work from the North Pole if I had a fast Internet connection. Secondly, because I don't like living in a country where, as a non-citizen, I am considered less deserving of justice than American citizens. Thirdly, because I feel that the direction intellectual property is being taken in this country, such as with the DMCA and software patents, make innovation much more difficult and risky here, particularly in the P2P space. There are many things I like about the US, but it just doesn't make sense to be here any more.
Thing is, freedom is an elusive thing. Let's go back to my original problem with Mojo Nation for a moment. What about the idea that criminal activities can take place on such a system, or even child pornography? Clarke:
Free speech doesn't exist if people are only free to say what you consider to be decent or true. Few would tolerate the mandatory installation of police cameras in private homes, even though it could prevent all forms of child abuse, and domestic violence. Are those that might oppose such a scheme to be considered advocates of child abuse? The rationale behind Freenet is discussed in more detail on our philosophy page.
You know, I really don't have anything against Indian programmers or call centers, or anything like that, but I've got to take issue with a report that calls the sending of 3.3 million high-paying technical jobs overseas a "win-win" situation. A McKinsey Global Institute report, Offshoring: Is it a Win-Win Game? makes just that claim, on the theory that the US companies that pay $6/hour to an Indian programmer instead of $60/hour to a US programmer will have all of this extra money to pour back into the economy. Oh, and those 3.3 million workers? (Or non-workers, as the case may be...) "Targeted insurance products managed by businesses could be one way to lessen the pain to workers. This approach could help provide wages for those who lose jobs because of offshoring for an acceptable period of time. Given the large surpluses generated from offshoring, programs to address the impact on workers are feasible." Um ... excuse me, but if companies were interested in lessening pain to their workers, they wouldn't lay them off in the first place. This isn't about stimulating the economy, it's about the impossible cycle of growth a corporation has to maintain to keep it's stock price up.
Sorry, it's not 57,000 voters, it's 89,300 voters who were illegally removed from the Florida rolls. And there's no evidence that they've been added back on. I don't know if I'd (yet) compare Bush to Hitler, but I heartily agree that We Must Stop Bush From Stealing the 2004 Election.
When Bush the First was in office with Quayle the buffoon as Vice President, the scariest words in Washington were "Barbara, I don't feel well." This time around, it seemed more efficient to have the buffoon take the top spot, with the mastermind behind him. The Smirking Chimp apparently agrees. Note Cheney's title.
The idea that we are going to move to computerized voting scares the crap out of me, specifically because I work on computers. Now, after less than one election cycle since Bush's "Help American vote" initiative mandated electronic voting, we see that not only doesn't it work, it blatantly doesn't work. Add to this the requirement that all states "clean up" their voting rolls using the same methods that disenfranchised 57,000 innocent peope in Florida during the 2000 election and you've got Lynching by Laptop.
(NOTE: This article gives a different number of voters than another that shows 89,300 innocent voters disenfranchised.)
Welcome to Bush's logic: By removing the requirement to pay overtime, employers will hire more people. Excuse me?!? The only way employers are going to hire more people is if it's cheaper than making the people you already have do everything by working longer and longer hours. If you have five people and one of them leaves (or better, is fired) why replace him or her when you can just give the other 4 another 10 hours of work to do? Well, Bush has done it anyway. Millions of workers have now been labeled "managers" or "skilled advsiors", labeling them as "exempt" from overtime rules. Oh, and a "skilled advisor" is anybody who learned their trade in the military. Hi, veterans! Welcome to the 80 hour work week!
A couple of years ago, I thought about being an Internet Consultant. Now don't laugh. I've been doing this for a goodly number of years now; I've been on the Internet longer than the World Wide Web has. But before I really got started, lots of firms started popping up selling courses and promising that you can make big money being an Internet Consultant. In other words, give us some money and we'll teach you the buzzwords you need to scam all these people who don't know what a web site is.
Needless to say, I changed my mind about hanging that title on my shingle.
Today I remembered why. I belong to a fairly sizable number of mailing lists that involve technical issues that your average person really doesn't need to worry about, like XML-DEV and RSS-DEV. Today this message came across www-html, the group that defines (or tries to define) the tags that go into various versions of HTML.
Names have of course been changed to protect the clueless.
------------------
Hello,
We cannot seem to get our site to work consistently in AOL. If you visit www.mywebsite.com or http://food.myothersite.com, it give the Web Site Not Responding error. However, if you visit www.myothersite.com the page immediately displays, but when you click on the link leading you to the shopping cart, http://food.myothersite.com, you once again receive the WSNR error. The only difference that I can see is that we have the w3c 4.01 on the Main My Other Site Page which is not made with the shopping cart program we use, Comersus, but is a stand alone page. We tried to place the 4.01 code in the cart, but it will not accept it. The cart developer says it is AOL's problem and not theirs.
Could you please help me with resolving this problem?
Thank you so much for any help and your consideration.
Sincerely,
Jane Doe
Internet Consultant
www.myconsultingsite.com
PH: 408-555-5555
FX: 408-555-6666
Email: jane@myconsultingsite.com
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For those of you who are not "Internet Consultants" and thus have no reason to know why this is to ridiculous, I'll give you a heads-up. The site http://food.myothersite.com is the same whether you go directly or you get there via a link to a shopping cart. It's not appearing because the hosting provider -- which may not even be AOL, who knows? -- doesn't have DNS set up properly.
It has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with the version of HTML on her pages.
There. Rant over. I feel better now. It just makes me crazy when people latch onto a title that they clearly aren't qualified for just because it sounds good. For heaven's sake, call yourself a Web Designer. There's no shame in that! Leave Internet Consultant for those of us who've put in the time and the work to learn this stuff.
(Whatever her problem was, it's apparently fixed now.)
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has good guide on How not to get sued by the RIAA for file sharing. I'm torn on this. On the one hand, I think the RIAA is insane for trying to sue random people, including parents, grandparents, and roommates of actual file sharers. They're trying to make examples of people in the hopes of scaring other people into stopping, and it's working. It told my son this morning that when he gets his computer back -- it's finally given up the ghost, I think -- Kazaa comes off and stays off.
On the other hand, I'm a bit disappointed in how this whole file-sharing thing has gone. I mean, when I found Napster, I thought it was terrific. I downloaded all kinds of music I never would have bought sound-unheard -- and then I bought some of it. And the stuff I bought was not your usual top-40 stuff, but some ska CD's and Southern Culture On the Skids and the like. I could really look at it and say, "Hey, this is helping you, and it's particularly helping artists who can't afford millions in publicity."
But I think that's because I'm a little older than your typical file sharer. When I told my son he had to give up file sharing, he said, "Then where am I going to get my music?" It never occured to him to actually buy it. It doesn't seem to occur to most people to just buy it. We've raised a generation that figures whatever they want is free for the taking as long as somebody on the Internet has it.
Maybe I'm just a little bit sensitised to the issue because I frequently get letters from people who've bought one of my books in Iran asking for help. Now, I have nothing against Iran, and I certainly have nothing against my readers, but there's one problem: there IS no authorized translation of my books in Iran. I didn't get paid for those books. There's no copyright law there, so someone picked up a copy, paid some translator a little bit of cash, and now they're making money off my work and I'm left only with the labor of cleaning up after them.
But I digress. Bands who want to distribute their music should be able to do that. The RIAA shouldn't be able to strong-arm technology companies into crippling our computers to prevent that. But because somewhere along the line we as a whole lost our impulse to Do The Right Thing, we're all paying the price.
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