Here is the best criticism I’ve found of the faults of that sad movie, even better because it gives such wonderful suggestion for how to FIX the flaws. Stupid timid movie studios. So afraid to try anything new, but when they somehow miraculously get a winner through, they are then so afraid to mess with the gods who have brought it to them…or perhaps they did mess with the Wachowskis, by “helping” them cross-brand and self-promote. Sad, sad indeed. Something beautiful once agan wasted.

Allegedly stolen goods are the subject of “Illegal Art: Freedom of Expression in the Corporate Age,” an exhibition at the Gaea Foundation’s Resource Center for Activism and Arts.
…
What do we get? Painstakingly rendered graphite drawings posing the likes of Barney Rubble and Goofy in macabre scenes; multiple heads of Colonel Sanders taking the circular shape of a mandala; a Warhol-like portrait of Liz Taylor made from $1 bills. The point: Copyrights meant to protect creators are now protecting corporate revenue and inhibiting freedom of expression.

Every exhibit has received a cease-and-desist letter (or so the article seems to imply). Seems like a good show to me.

Adam Batkin convinced me to give his darn RedHat 9 a try, so I thought fine, it can’t be that bad if everyone in business and all the ITS servers are using it. I installed, and then Adam goes away to Israel, and I’m completely baffled by this system. I’m used to Debian doing automatic dependancy checking and keeping everything up to date, but RedHat doesn’t seem to have that at all. Why not? I mean, how can you use a system that doesn’t do that? I try to install GAIM and it needs three libraries, I download them and try to install but they need two more. I get those two, but they need another one. That one needs three more. This is just impossible. How can people do this all day?

I must be missing something important and fundamental. Can someone please tell me what it is? Is it that I’m not paying RedHat to use all of their standard packages through the RedHat Network?

I tried installing Ximian Desktop, hoping that would clear everything up through their “marvelous” RedCarpet software (Adam’s word). But I can’t, because RedHat doesn’t have wget installed by default. What the heck? Sigh, back to RPMFind I go…

Sitting in a meeting while using instant messanger to talk to someone else in the meeting and simulatenously checking email and looking something up online? Yeah, I’ve done that.

The ubiquity of technology in the lives of executives, other businesspeople and consumers has created a subculture of the Always On — and a brewing tension between productivity and freneticism. For all the efficiency gains that it seemingly provides, the constant stream of data can interrupt not just dinner and family time, but also meetings and creative time, and it can prove very tough to turn off.

The New York Times is on top of it.

This excellent article provides a fair, balanced, and complete explanation of declining sales for the recording industry, including a thorough debunkment of RIAA claims that P2P is the primary reason why their sales are down.

I’m not generally one to take a birthday as a big deal. Partially it’s because my birthdays have always been over the summer, so no one is around. I’ve also just never been caught up in the excitement of the whole thing. That said, I’m 20 in three days. Hmm. While I try to discoruage people giving me commercial gifts (as opposed to the rare meaningful or deep gift, which I think is worth giving at any time of the year), I know that some elements in my family are committed 😉 so I might as well receive what I want rather then what they hope I want.

Okay, here’s what I want. Something from my Amazon wish list, or a toaster oven, or a microwave, or a subscription to the New Yorker, or a nice, compact digital camera with good quality and a nice zoom. Happy?

Ninety percent of coverage of the most recent RIAA action — their decision to start suing hundreds of file traders — is blatant parroting of the RIAA press releases and unsubstantiated numbers, just like all the rest of the reporting on this issue in the past. Papers take the party line, light up their headlines with words like “pirate” and “thief,” and refuse to actually consider the issues. Well, the Detroit Free Press did a better job.

Wayne Rosso, president of the service, was clearly pleased by the strong support from Grokster’s users Thursday, and dismissed the RIAA’s pursuit of his customers.

“They’re sociopaths,” he said. “Somebody needs to put Prozac in their water supply. They can do whatever they want to ruin their own business.”

As many as 57 million people nationwide have copied songs from the Internet. Kazaa, the largest service, is now the most-downloaded computer program in history, with more than 230 million copies distributed worldwide. About 2.5 million copies of the program were downloaded last week.

Recent studies show the majority of computer owners have music files on their hard drives, obtained from Internet services or from CDs they already own.

Come on guys, it’s not like you need customers to survive! Why not sue 1/4 of the entire American population?

That’s right, RIAA. Keep digging your own grave.

When people work longer hours at less pay, they are more tired, less efficient, more prone to accidents, and are living less fulfilling lives. Overtime laws mean that it is cheaper for an employer to hire another employee then to force a few empolyees to continually work longer hours. This is a valuable check on employment, it means that empolyers aren’t tempted to take the quick fix, and it means that employees are fairly compensated when they work extra. Naturally, overtime protection must be eliminated. Is there anything the Bush administration won’t do? Oh, why do I even ask such naive questions…

From the Apple product preview page:

Panther will include a final X11 window server for Unix-based apps, improved NFS/UFS, FreeBSD 5 innovations as well as support for popular Linux APIs, IPv6 and other important acronyms.

I hope I’ll be able to launch X apps from the Dock, that would be really useful…like I used to be able to do with OroborOSX ;). “Other acronyms”…that’s intriguing.

Dear customer,
When you are calling a company that offers full-service janitorial supply, including chemicals, paper, dispensing systems, floor equipment, safety gear, maintenance equipment, training, and liners, you need to explain what it is you want. When you just say you need to talk to technical support and refuse to elaborate, you’re going to end up talking to someone like me, who does not know the first thing about valves that go in three thousand dollar scrubbers, and who will probably not be able to help you with your particular floor machine problem.

“Okay, do you want to talk to the repair department?” “No, just let me blabber on about my part number and how it won’t fit in the machine even though it matches what I ordered.” “All right, thats very interesting, you’re going on hold now, goodbye.” Eventually she’ll hang up, right? 😉

The Apple Power Mac G5 is an impressive upgrade from the pokey Power Mac G4. It uses a new 64 bit processor, which means something (although I’m not yet sure what). It can, because of the 64 bits, support up to 8 GB of RAM, which is, um, a lot. It is a lot quieter then the last generation of Power Macs, which I’ll call the “turboprop” model.

So cheesegrater is far faster then turboprop, can hold far more RAM, and has a better bus, faster FireWire, USB2, and a 4x DVD burner/CD burner which Apple continues to call the SuperDrive (that is funny because I believe it was the Sony 1.44MB floppy drives that could also read the old 800k floppies that was called the “Super Drive.”) What’s not to be impressed about?

Well, Apple is comparing the new model to PCs, talking about its Pentium-trouncing power. Apple goes in cycles. First the new G3s were (briefly) faster then Pentiums and Apple did their “snail” advertising campaign. Then the Macs started lagging, and Apple talked for a long time about the megahertz myth (Mhz is not a good measure of anything) and how the Macs were easier to use, etc. Now the G5 is out and Apple is once again shouting about speed…except that their benchmarks, like most computer benchmarks, are flawed. There are discussions as to why on the web, but I won’t link to them because it appears that the Apple tweaking is just like every other vendor does when using these benchmarks, they attempt to compensate for the different ways that different computer platforms process things and optimize the tests for their platform. Apple’s modifications were actually far less blatant then others have been, most notably the completely dishonest ATI video test results of late. But the point is, if megahertz doesn’t matter, neither do specific and non-standard lab tests. What matters most, it seems to me, is comparing the time it takes to complete tasks in common applications that have been independently optimized by their vendors for each platform. But enough about that.

My biggest gripe with the G5s is the incredible shrinking expansion options. My old G4 has 4 card slots and seven drive bays, so that I can add, say, video capture, an audio processor, a tape drive, and, oh, I dunno, five hard drives. The new G5s, while maintaining the 4 PCI slots, now only allows for two hard drives plus the built-in SuperDrive. Yes, I can add things like tape drives or Zip drives or CD burners or whatever using FireWire, but it is much nicer to just have an integrated unit. And only two hard drives? Sure I can have 500GB of storage, but I have to buy 2 expensive 250GB drives, instead of just popping in all the hard drives I have lying around like I would rather do. 😛 It looks from the photos like the G5 chips, along with their cooling units, are so huge and bulky that they take up most of the available room in the case.

Don’t expect to see a G5 laptop for a while…

The rumors were completely true, and there were no suprises from Steve Jobs’ keynote at the Apple World Wide Developer Conference (he gave it there because of a disputed between Apple and the company that runs Macworld Expo). There is a wonderfully fast new G5 Power Mac, yes, I want to buy it, no I won’t (although it would make a great $2,000 birthday present), and yes, it does look like a cheese grater.

In a day I’ve read localroger’s “novel,” with quotes becuase it seemed awfully short, although I don’t have a word count at this moment. localroger, Roger Williams, is a contributor to kuro5hin, a semi-enlightened discussion site. He has written a good amount of what some would call “hard SF” (the “soft” stuff is called scifi, the “real” stuff, at least as Isaac Asimov saw it, was SF). This book, which Williams wrote in the late eighties, is being hosted by k5 under a tipjar payment system — contribute if you want to, or don’t. I haven’t, don’t think I will.

The book is based on the idea of the Singularity, which is a relatively new theory that says, basically, that at some point humans will create a smart computer, a real artificial intelligence. When that happens, the computer will be able to very quickly increase its capacity (as computers are able to do, by adding more processor, memory, etc.) and quickly outstrip human intelligence. When this happens, computer will begin to very quickly take over, probably faster then we can stop them. This happens, quite jarringly and quite by accident, in Williams’ novel. The computer, called Prime Intellect, operates under Asimov’s somewhat famous three laws of robotics. These laws say that a computer must prevent harm to a human, that it must do as a human commands, as long as said order does not conflict with the first law, and that it must protect it’s own survival, as long as said survival does not contradict the first or second laws. While ethical quagmires can result from the interaction of these laws, as Asimov has explored at great length in his short stories, and as he got older and decided to unify all of his science fiction universes into one, Asimov also created a new Zeroeth Law, a computer must first protect humanity. This law, not explicitly programmed into Williams’ Prime Intellect, comes into play here as well.

What happens when we are free from want and need, when we can do anything we desire, when death has been eradicated, when we can be as alone or as connected as we wish? What if we can do anything, with no consequences? What is left of being human? Is this world better or worse then what we have now?

Interesting questions. The plot basis for this book is fascinatingly complex. But it quickly becomes apparent why there is a need for editors in this world. The concept is brilliant, well executed in the basis of the story. The computer’s rise to power is sudden, unexpected, and shocking in its simplicity. And yet, the emotional impact is not there. What is there is lots of sex and violence, which would be fine in service of the story, but the excesses here do nothing to push the plot forward. Take this and throw in constant reminders of past plot points (yeah, we read it, we were there!) and then tack on a truly terrible conclusion, with no explanation for the final choice the computer makes, and you have a deeply dissatisfying read.

Williams exhibits great potential. Writing is not his field, he works in technology. With a good editor and six months or so to revise, this story could be a great work of science fiction. As it stands, however, the beautiful idea is wasted on ultimately shallow characters and a misshapen storyline.

Sorry Roger, but it just didn’t work for me. I’m going to read some of your other stories, and look at the discussion of Prime Intellect on the various K5 boards, and see how much you’ve improved over time.

The web is too big. I think many people have had this realization at one point or another. Not just that the web is big and vast and there is no way you can ever understand it all, we all should have that healthy feeling. No, the understanding that there is too much important stuff on the web that you want to read and never will. Specifically, blog-type stuff. People you know, or people you like, or people you want to read, but there are just not enough hours in the day. Okay, I’m not doing a good job of explaining this, but that is because I am once again suffering from it — a deep dark pit of mental despair and anguish.

It’s all Becky’s fault, but I’ll leave that for another time 🙂

I’m looking for solutions. My first was simply to realize and be deeply committed to the idea that no one is omnicient and most of us can’t just sit in front of our computers all day and that yes, we will miss information, but we will get enough as to have a measurable impact on our lives and…oh, who am I kidding.

I have two solutions, a short-term and a long-term. Short term: set up a content aggregator like Matt has done, or simply tack on to his. Most blogs and news sites support something called RSS which allows you to grab their stories and put them all together on one big page. LiveJournal lets you do it with something they call a “Friends Page.” There are programs, like the great NetNewsWire for the Mac, that also do this, but I think I’d rather go Matt’s approach, and have a unified web page with RSS and a few screen scrapers thrown in. I’ll look into this.

The second, and more important, is a remembrance agent. Some of you may remember this from my wearable days. Well, those days are coming back. I WANT MY WEARABLE so I need to determine the best and most expeditious way to go about this…without requisite skills, knowledge, or funding, it will be, well, “hard” is one word. But intelligent filters are definetally needed, and anything that makes me seem or feel or actually be smarter is always good. 🙂

I think some of this despair may have also been set off by reading localroger’s novel. It’s somewhat depressing.

Eh, I’ll get over it.

A bit of a follow-up to my last polling thread:

Percentage of Americans who believe the earliest humans lived at the same time as the dinosaurs:52
Percentage of Americans who believe aliens have contacted the U.S. government:37
Percentage of Americans who think the government should have the right to control what information the news media can report:28
Percentage of Americans who believe the Sept. 11 attacks were predicted by the Book of Revelation:23
Percentage of Americans who believe the death penalty has not been used against innocent people in the last five years:22

Well, this might explain those:

Percentage of Americans who get their news from radio talk shows every day:22

The solution is simple. Kill the ~22% overlap!

This site shows how Social Security Numbers are handed out in the US. There are two problems with SSNs. The first is that they provide a unique key for an individual, and therefore can be used to tie together information in all kinds of databases to make a complete picture when perhaps such a complete picture should not be available. Proper legislation that provides a strong privacy safe harbor and a short enumerated listing of acceptable uses could solve this problem. This issue is the “national ID” issue, and the closest thing we have today in the US is state drivers licenses.

The second and more immediate issue is that SSNs are being used both as identifiers (because they are a unique number) and as passwords. You call up a bank, for instance, and to verify your identity, they ask for your SSN and a mother’s maiden name. Businesses frequently have to use their Tax ID number as a secret code. The massive and readily apparent problem with this system is that you cannot have one item serve as both an identifier and a secret key. This should be obvious, right? If I want to keep something secure, I need a secret key to protect it. A secret key can take the form of a password, a random string of numbers, whatever, but the most important part is that it is non-obvious, so that people can’t easily guess it, not readily available to a random person, and, most important secret, so that the only person who knows it is YOU.

Computer passwords are usually stored in something called a one-way hash, which basically means that it cannot be reconstructed if someone were to compramise the computer.

A Social Security Number fulfills none of these requirements. First, because it is being used both as an identifer and a password, plenty of people have access to it. Bank employees, government employees, your employer and some of the people you work with, car companies, insurers, schools, the state, county, and local government. Accountants. Some stores. Credit card companies. The list goes on, and it is continuing to expand as more and more companies and organizations are using SSN as a unique key. Even if someone doesn’t have your SSN, however, they can still guess it. As the page linked above demonstrates, your SSN is just a serial number, meaning it goes in order.

If you know where someone is born, you can figure out the first three digits. Know when they are born and you get the next two. Now there are only four digits left, and they go in order. But it is even easier then that. Pay a few bucks to any of a myriad of sources and you can get someone’s SSN, and from that medical history, insurance records, employment information, legal history…the list goes on.

My solution, and that of many privacy advocates, victims of identity theft, and concerned individuals, has been to avoid giving our your SSN at all costs. But just not giving out your SSN doesn’t really solve the problem. As the web page above shows, SSNs are easy to guess. As a few minutes of googling will show, SSNs are readily obtainable for a small fee. And experience shows that your SSN is everywhere, and the systems that it connects to, which are being increasingly linked together, often store inaccurate or mis-categorized data about you.

The solution is simple: restrict SSN use. It can be an ID or a password, but not both. Just like we have to remember different passwords online for different web sites, so should we in person. Ideally, companies could start utilizing public key infrastructures. A person’s public identifier key could be readily available, while his or her private key could be keep secret and safe. When someone needs to verify their identity, they can use their private key to digitally sign a document, and anyone can verify ther person’s identity against their public key. Now that is real security.

AMC was showing Highlander, the original film today, so I watched probably 85% of it. I had occasionally caught some episodes of the series in my pre-TiVo days, so I was interesting in seeing where this had gone, and where the movie fit in the context of the series. A quick IMDb search showed a whole slew of Highlander properties. I read about the first movie and confirmed it was what I had seen, and then went on to Highlander II which is set in the future and involves an ozone shield. The hell? After a bit’s reflection I realized the best way to figure this thing out quickly. I went to Amazon and typed in Highlander. Up popped search results, and on the left the wonderfully helpful “So you’d like to…” entitled “figure out Highlander.” Bingo! Turns out the the progression is even weirder then I could have imagined. At some point between the series and the third movie the continuity gets completely screwed up. Still, I would like to watch this thing through at some point…

The good news: lots of new photos online over at images.agblog.com. The bad news? They’re all older photos from 2001 and 2002 that I never transitioned to the new site. But hey, they’re new to you! Let’s see…I got the pictures from Shaina’s Bat Mitzvah, the April 01 Rocky Horror, some from Cable First (ah, freshman year!), and a few others. I’m lazy tonight, so no links — go find them yourself! It’s not hard!

Now that Buffy is over, we can reflect on the entire beautiful run, and realize that while the show may have ended, it has changed our culture, and through that (and reruns) it will continue to live on.

The series may be done, but the influences left on television culture are unmistakable. Without a demon-kicking Buffy the chances are there would be no Sydney Bristow on Alias, or Charmed witches, and series pitches for Smallville and Dark Angel would have been laughed out of the room.

Entrepeneurs are using iPods to create alternatives to Musak. Just drop off an iPod loaded with tunes at a restaraunt and bam, they have 30 hours of music and can customize the mood by choosing a different playlist. Good for the restaurant, good for the independents who get airplay, and good for the people who are running the services. Excellent.