May 2001 Archives
[via FMH]"There is a tendency to say that the complex, urban societies that developed in the eastern Mediterranean were more advanced because they had writing," he said. "But these Atlantic ones were innovative in other ways. They were hugely more advanced in navigation, shipbuilding and their solar knowledge, and that of the seasons and the stars."
[via wood s lot]One of the beauties of public education is that you have to engage people who aren’t necessarily like you, and figure out ways to manage those differences within the acceptable bounds of civil society. If you say that all groups, regardless of their interest, can withdraw to their respective niches, put the gates around their views, arm themselves to the teeth with their own views, and never have to engage anyone else, what have we got left to call civil society?
Not that I wouldn't still kick the hell out of Whedon if I ran into him in a dark alley before the new season starts.I for one am going to sit back and wait for Joss Whedon to be brilliant again. The guy has pulled more rabbits out of his hat than David Copperfield. (OK, I don't think David Copperfield actually pulls rabbits out of hats, but you get my drift.) Buffy has died (momentarily) once before, and was brought back to life. Angel was trapped in hell, but now he's hunky-dory. Whedon even managed to pull off the old "hey, here's a family member you never heard about before" trick with Dawn. Whatever storyline Whedon devises to bring Buffy back to life, though, it will probably require patience on our part; it will be painful watching the Scoobys grieve through the first few discombobulating episodes next season. But I trust Whedon. Even more than that, I doubt that UPN paid $2.3 million per episode for two Sarah Michelle Gellar-less seasons of "Dawn, Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Sister."
So, we'll just have to wait for the two-hour UPN opener (no date yet), and pore over the finale for clues about the future. Most of all, we have the summer to marvel over how Whedon crafted this incredible past season, how he took his modern fairytale deeper and deeper into the unknown, plumbed the characters' psyches and devised new rites of passage for this singular, complex heroine and her family of beautiful misfits.
Tell it, brother! This is probably the best solution to a vast number of problems besides those of cell phone users. Who knows; it might even create enough demand for alternatives to having to drive in the first place. Unfortunately, the feedback is even more vitriolic than the usual Linux vs. Microsoft flame wars; I suspect that's because most Americans aren't even willing to consider the horrors of not being able to drive, much less the possibility of not needing to do so.Reducing the number of accidents on the road will take choices much harder than banning cell phones, hamburgers, radios or passengers. If we as a society want to get serious, we have to stop looking at drivers' licenses as entitlements and create a serious and difficult national driver-safety program that is part of our licensing. Current driver-test staples like keeping your hands at "10 and 2" and making a three-point turn are really not enough.
All drivers should be taught real defensive driving skills and given comprehensive road tests on wet tracks with simulations of emergencies. And passing this test when you're 16 years old is not sufficient--there should be a mandatory re-licensing every seven to 10 years.
Puts a lot of other concerns in perspective, no?Ur, Sumeria - Doctors are questioning the safety of the newly developed copper axe, and whether it should be allowed to be produced. Dr. Arouf Hamudezzaner, of St. John's Sumerian Hospital, has reported an alarming increase in the number of deep cuts attributed to the copper axe. He says: "With the older stone axes we saw more bruises and abrasions. However, the new copper axes are so sharp they can actually cut you, sometimes clean to the bone."
Too bad the hardcore partisans (some on the open source side, but more in the proprietary camp) are determined to spread their hysteria as widely as possible.Allowing proprietary and GPL code to interact while keeping the two separate is a fundamental process practiced by organizations around the world. For example, if an application or driver runs in user space and makes normal calls to the operating system, the proprietary source code is not required to be licensed under the GPL but may be licensed under a proprietary license if the author chooses.
In this case, Microsoft's much-proclaimed security features seem to have been more of a hindrance than a help.Upside of the Outlook defence system: when something tries to access your address book it warns you. Downside: when you click no, don't do it, it warns you again and again, apparently forever. The pop ups continue even after you've shut down Outlook, the task won't kill, and you can only knock it off when you reboot the system. Subsidiary downside: it turns out it wasn't actually trying to access the address book at all, but was giving me one of those Microsoft messages.
But really, I can't help concluding that Microsoft still hasn't figured out what the plot is, despite all of the verbiage about Outlook's defence systems. Outlook is a prime target for attacks, not because it's the most commonly-used email client, but because it's full of security holes, by design. Microsoft's addiction to automation created these holes, and as this is a cornerstone of the software's design, there's really no way attacks can be blocked, without also blocking all of the automation.
Also the latest word on Angel, the planned Giles spinoff, and other matters. I'm still pissed, mind you, and I'm still not certain about what.Whedon: It's our job this summer to make people aware that Buffy — starring Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy — is coming back on UPN next fall. And I'm just gonna keep saying it to everybody I meet and every chance I get, and UPN is going to start advertising it today. We'll get the word out.
Why can I get more upset about what happens to a bunch of fictional characters than I do about real people I know and love? Sometimes I feel like I'm not allowed to get upset about things in the real world.
Last year, I had to rush down to Mississippi to see my Dad before he went in for what became a quintuple (rather than the expected triple) bypass operation. He's been through so much over the past decade — knee operations, cancer, chemo, angioplasty, etc. — that he goes to the hospital at the first sign of trouble. This time, it turned out to be nothing more than stomach trouble, no matter how long the docs wanted to keep him around for observation. Hospital visits have gotten so routine for him that it barely seems worth worrying about, right? So I have to keep a calm, even happy, face on things.
Who knows? Maybe I've really just lost track of what's really upsetting me.
shitshitshitshitshit
So what if I'm not handling this well. There's too much stuff in my real life that I have to handle well.
You couldn't just let it go, you bastard. You had to twist the knife.
Shit.
Sounds like a pretty typical rebuild for me, too. Of course, I must be truly delusional, given Microsoft's history, to believe that there's even a remote possibility that they'll deliver on the promises of robustness they've been making since at least 95.If I have not reached my three install limit, but my computer's profile does not match what is on file at Microsoft, I have to call tech support and convince them that I am not violating the licensing agreement by installing XP on a different computer. This is going to be another major problem for hobbyist like myself. I like to open up my computer and "play" with the guts of my system. I upgrade whenever I have the money (and my wife's agreement), so I upgrade hardware a few times a year. Just this year I received a new motherboard and processor as a gift. To make the new system complete I also bought a new video card and memory. I kept the modem, sound card, network card, CD-ROM, and hard drive. I would imagine that if I were using Windows XP, this would be a large enough change that I would have to call Microsoft when I did the reinstall. In addition, I had to do a second reinstall a few days later after a fouled up driver caused Windows to crash. I would have to call them again I am sure. Would it count as two installs or only one since I would still be working on rebuilding the system?
They seem to be shutting down the newer simulations first, but it's only a matter of time befoIt took a bit to get started, and occasionally we'd rope in someone real to interact with the scripts. I told Dr. Lieke we should end it right then and there. It was a great experiment, I was going to get my PhD with some groundbreaking CS and Sociology research, but it could hurt people to be involved. He convinced me that if the scripts were smart enough, they could "learn" from the real humans and we'd enter get into the annuls of AI reserach.
connection lost
Aside from the fact that there's still a lot to be said for text and language, does this sound like the security nightmare to end all security nightmares to anyone else?The executable Net - termed X Internet by Forrester - will consist of quickly downloaded, disposable programs loaded onto PCs and handhelds, and move away from today's transactional Web services.
"Executable applications will give users tools to experience the Net in more entertaining and engaging ways. For example, imagine a corporate buyer navigating a virtual marketplace with a Doom-like user interface - buyers could simply shoot the deals they want. That's a far cry from today's Web," said Carl D. Howe, research director, principal analyst and leading middle initial man at Forrester.
Conversation with a cow orker in the next cubicle:
Me: Hey, Mike!
Mike: Yeah?
Me: I just saw some scary news. UPN is working on an American version of Iron Chef.
Mike: So?
Me: Guess who's going to be the Chairman.
Mike: William Shatner?
pause
Me: Oh, so you've already heard the news.
Mike: No, I just picked the most ridiculous person I could think of.
Me: Apparently, so did they.
[link via Pete]
Wiretap everybody, all the time; what a wonderful idea.The Council of the European Union, which represents the 15 member governments, will discuss implementing a policy originally designed with the FBI six years ago. It calls for the retention of "every phone call, every mobile phone call, every fax, every e-mail, every website's contents, all internet usage, from anywhere, by everyone, to be recorded, archived and be accessible for at least seven years," notes the journal.
Later, he goes on to admit that at times, he got tired of hearing about Hitchhiker's, which makes me feel free to make my own confession: I haven't been able to re-read Hitchhiker's in a damned long time. During a certain part of my life, I was hanging around a guy who quoted Adams constantly. It seemed like half the words that came out of his mouth had come out of Adams's pen long before. Perhaps I've had enough distance now that I can enjoy the series again, absent hearing it in Fanboy's voice. Never dulled my respect for Adams himself, though.Years and years ago, I did a game based on Hitchhiker's Guide with a company called Infocom, which was a great company. They were doing witty, intelligent, literate games based on text. You know, there are several thousand years of human culture telling you you can do quite a lot with text, and putting in the extra element of interactivity should just add to the possibilities. You turn the computer into the storyteller and the player into the audience, like in the old days when the storyteller would actually respond to the audience, rather than just having the audience respond to the storyteller. I had an enormous amount of fun, actually, working on that. I just loved constructing these virtual conversations between the player and the machine.
This guy writes about a lot of interesting ideas about energy solutions, with an emphasis on decentralizing power production. I've long assumed that centralized power production created economies of scale that reduced pollution as well as cost, but some of his remarks contradict that view, and seem to be worth examining.What we don't need is the kind of energy future championed by Bush, a top-down, centralized, undemocratic vision in which we would become even more dependent on remote energy sources and remote energy decisionmakers.
There is a better way, a bottom-up rather than top-down strategy, that looks to communities and households and businesses and farms as energy producers, not simply energy consumers.
This brief examination of how power distribution has developed over time also suggests some interesting ideas on how to best meet our needs in the future.A century ago, when electricity was just entering society, a fierce debate broke out about its future shape and ownership structure. The debate went on for more than a generation. When the dust finally settled, we had developed rules that embraced a hybrid system: one-third owned directly or indirectly by the electric customer, one-third owned by the investor. Electric companies were given monopoly over both electricity generation and sales. In return for that monopoly and a guaranteed profit, these companies agreed to be regulated by state, and later, federal agencies, and to provide low-cost, reliable electricity to all customers. The electric utility was born.
Almost makes you wonder if the Office of National Drug Control Policy is on something.Boosting the price of cocaine is a fundamental goal of the conventional drug-fighters. The thinking is, obviously, that as the price goes up, use will go down. But, Bob says, "their most dramatic finding" was that "you can't look at data and say price in and of itself controls the numbers of users over all." Consequently, this meant that increasing pressure on smugglers in order to force a price hike would not necessarily retard use in the long run. "It is almost impossible to infer how price affects demand," he notes. Moreover, Bob adds, there is a big cost to raising the price of cocaine. Higher prices might cause some casual drug users to find another form of amusement for a while. But one result of higher prices is that the purity of the product increases. "Jacking up prices really sticks it to dependents," he explains. "There will be more ODs."
Davidoff sees Python as filling the same niche today that BASIC served way back when:"It had to run in 4k. In fact the 8k version had algorithms that were more efficient but that took up more space. By the time the 4k BASIC was done, the 8k version was out." Incredibly, the three of them produced the interpreter without seeing the MITS Altair itself - the coding and debugging was done entirely on a simulator.
Interesting to hear from such an early player in the computing game, to see what he thinks of the environment today."Hats off to them. It's an extremely well designed language. It's object orientated from the get-go. They've really succeeded there," he says, and commends it as the ideal teaching language. That used to be BASIC, of course.
So long, and thanks...Douglas Adams, whose cult science fiction comedy "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" drew millions of fans and spawned a mini-industry, has died at age 49.
He goes on to apply this type of reasoning to a possible scheme for ending California's power crisis more quickly, cleanly, and efficiently than by building new power plants. Unfortunately, his plan is politically infeasable; aside from the reasons he mentions, wouldn't managing supply in this way disrupt the "spot market" scheme that was supposed to make deregulation such a huge cost-saver?Like any other state or province, electrical demand in Alberta and British Columbia peaks during the day and is low at night. So most nights, according to Sobota, those coal-fired plants in Alberta provide all the electricity for both provinces. This allows water to back up behind the dams in British Columbia overnight. And when power demand is low enough, Alberta electricity is even used to turn some of those BC generators into pumps at night, running them backward to store even more water in reservoirs above the dams. All this stored water is then available the next day to run the same generators in overdrive, making power that is sold to U.S. western states. By using Alberta power to pump water at night, there is about double the available capacity the next day, right when we need it. Those clever Canadians.
Ethical questions aside (it is, after all, only a game), I find the idea of allowing the user to alter rendering at the hardware level (or, in some cases, at the system library level) to be a technically fascinating hack.At the time, ASUS boasted: "There are three special weapons for ASUS VGA cards' users -- Transparent View, Wireframe View, and Extra Light. If you do not have an ASUS VGA card -- be careful! Never compete in the 3D games with anyone who has an ASUS VGA card. Because the only result is to loose (sic)."
In an open letter of complaint, the Online Gamers Association said that releasing the drivers "would ruin the spirit of good sportsmanship in online and competitive gaming [and] would be disastrous for the online gaming community, and for the growing sport of professional gaming."
A media watchdog group is petitioning the Federal Trade Commission to set standards for any television program calling itself a news program. I'm not sure it should be regulated in this way, but with all the entertainment-programming promotion I see during sweeps ("news" programs doing fluff pieces on their networks' shows), I have a lot of sympathy with their complaints."The stations have the clear right to broadcast shows solely depicting weather, sports, mayhem, and fluff," states the petition. "The stations could offer all-mayhem-all-the-time shows, if they want. However, it is false and deceptive to lure news consumers to such shows by advertising them as 'news.'"
I don't know whether Varon's prank says more about professional speakers or professional audiences.Watching the speech, I noticed that Varon had also absorbed the norms of the conventional luncheon talk. There were the lame jokes at the beginning, the pro forma personal anecdote (although, since his involved opium smuggling, I thought it might be too over-the-top for the prank; I was wrong), the overhead projector, the gradually emerging self-satisfaction of the speaker.
Does it surprise anyone that if a company wants to play down lousy performance, it will bury the relevant figures in an excessively wordy report?New research from Merrill Lynch finds a strong correlation between the length of a tech firm's annual financial statements and the company's performance on the stock market.
In most cases, researchers concluded that companies with longer reports perform worse.
Or maybe not...Last year, Avgher did a series of small family studies that suggested that the limitase and CMC-1 were linked and genetically passed on as a unit. Therefore, [highly educated professionals] were literally unable, on a chemical level, to hear what other people were saying.
Note that this did not prevent me from looking up at the clock and saying, "It can't possibly be 2 AM!" But it's still annoying.Q. I have problems when installing or trying to play the game. The game prompts me for a CD, but it doesn't recognize that the disk it is looking for is already in the drive?
A. The problem seems to be as a result of CDROM drive letter assignment. If you have one or more CDROM drives assigned to letters higher then H:, you will need to reassign the drive letter to something lower. The best configuration should be the next available drive letter. For example, if your hard drive is letter C:, try changing your CDROM drive letter to D:. If you have more then one hard drive, change the CDROM drive to the next available drive letter. The object is to make your CDROM drive letter as low as possible.
I'm not advocating giving up traditional energy generation methods entirely, but I think that maintaining our dependency on non-renewable fuels is painfully foolish and short-sightedTaylor maintains that wind farms are the biggest bird killers in the country. "The most profitable ones are where the wind blows most frequently and the most consistently, which is in the wilderness. That's where birds are," he explains. The Audubon Society has called for a moratorium on windmills, he says. The Audubon Society, however, denies this. "We support wind power as long as the turbines are well-sited," says Perry Plumart, the group's government relations director.
One high-profile environmentalist admits that birds do occasionally crash into the twirling blades. But, he says (anonymously and carefully, for fear of unleashing another contagious quote), "Do you know how many birds die every day?" They crash into skyscrapers and plate glass windows; they're crushed by trucks; they're sucked into jet engines and gag on smog. Kids with BB guns knock them off. Windmills are a concern, but they don't appear high on anyone's list of avian threats.
It would be great if all electricity sources were given the same scrutiny," says Christine Real de Azua, an AWEA spokeswoman. She points out that traditional power sources impact birds as well. For example, mountain-top removal coal mining decimates vast habitat, and toxic emissions from power plants are threatening loons and other wildlife, not to mention the potential impact from fossil-fuel induced climate change.
I'm sure most the people who are so determined to hold Darwin responsible for gross misinterpretations of his ideas consider themselves good Christians; wonder how they feel about the various Crusades, Inquisitions, etc. performed throughout history in Christ's name? (Or more to the point, based on misinterpretation of His teachings.)"Be it resolved that the Legislature of Louisiana does hereby deplore all instances and ideologies of racism, and does hereby reject the core concepts of Darwinist ideology that certain races and classes of humans are inherently superior to others," reads the Legislature's statement, which was approved 9-5 by the state's House Education Committee.
Among Broome's pet peeves, according to the Baton Rouge Advocate, are that Darwin "teaches that some humans have evolved further than others." That he "holds that people of color are 'savages,'" and that in doing so he has "provided the main rationale for modern racism."
This only works on the molecular level for now, but even if it can't be adapted to work on a larger scale, there are some interesting applications for precise control and positioning of molecules.The system works by using two laser beams and setting up an interference pattern. The beams refract on hitting an object, causing that object to move into the brightest part of the beam. By adjusting the interference pattern, the object can be pushed/pulled and rotated.
So, I've been reading Craig Mitchell's My Boot lately; I think I stumbled across it via MeFi or something like that. Anyway, it's the personal site of a guy who lives here in St. Louis. In addition to the infamous dating-service story She Hates My Futon (It's been another year; time for another chapter?), he has an online diary. (No recent updates there, either, but that's beside the point. If I have one.)
Over the past month, I've started keeping a diary, too, just not an online one. (See, there's this really odd technology based on compressed shavings of dead trees, and sticks of graphite, and... oh, you have heard of it? Never mind.) Which brings me to something that might be considered a point, if looked at from the right angle. In one entry, Craig asks, "Why write a journal at all if you're worried about your friends and family reading it?" After all, he reasons, sooner or later, somebody is going to read it.
I don't really go along with the assumption that somebody's going to read the bloody thing someday, which brings up another question: "Who are you writing it for, then?" Myself, of course; the nonexistent audience to which I write is just a conceit to make myself organize my thoughts in a different way. That's the main purpose of the exercise for me, especially at a time when those thoughts seem particularly jumbled.
More later, maybe...
