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Why are we still using credit cards?

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 01:56:28 GMT

It seems to me a scandal that at the end of 2009 our protocols for financial transactions STILL require me to give every vendor everything he needs to impersonate me to someone else. I.e., this thing called a "credit card number". And my name, card expiration date and CVN.

Whatever happened to the revolutionary idea of proving ownership of a secret without revealing it? I.e., why are we still not using public key cryptography? The patents expired years ago, so they're not an excuse.

I can't see why we don't all have a crypto dongle, essentially a smart card chip in a USB stick. When you buy something online, you plug it into your computer and it signs the transaction. To protect those who leave it plugged in all the time, it should have a button that you press to confirm each transaction. Point of sale devices could also have USB sockets for these things.

Yes, there's still the possibility that the computer into which you plug your dongle might be running malware. But at least the damage would be compartmented. You might be tricked into a transaction or two, but the compromised computer would be unable to steal your credentials and impersonate you to someone else. That would be a huge improvement.

Every time I read yet another news story about 40 million credit card numbers being stolen from a vendor's database, I get angry. Why is this even still possible?

Well, duh....

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 05:41:34 GMT

The American Psychological Association says you can't change your sexual orientation, and trying to do so can cause harm.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/08/05/gay.to.straight/index.html

No doubt the religious right will object (again) loudly and strenuously. Just as they've always objected to hard facts, logic and reason that conflicts with their religious dogma. Funny how often their god feels just as they do about stuff like this.

MARS-500

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 06:47:05 GMT

The MARS-500 project is a Russian simulation of a round trip space flight from Earth to Mars and back. It is being conducted near Moscow.

One of the previous experiments apparently included violence and a sexual assault! Hopefully this won't someday happen on a real mission...

What's a little strange to me is that the experiment is mainly about the behavior of a group of humans confined in a small, isolated and sometimes dangerous environment. This is hardly new to human experience, though it might be to a group of young and highly educated technical professionals representative of a space flight crew. Until the last century it was common for groups of men to sail around the world for years in cramped ships, with no modern conveniences, carrying all their food and supplies (except for what they could fish from the sea), occasionally facing extreme dangers, completely cut off from the outside world.

Certainly no manned trip to Mars would have to do without computers or communications, and I think they'd play the central role in keeping a Mars crew occupied and sane.

The Apollo astronauts carried a few favorite songs to the moon on cassette tapes that they recorded over with dictation as needed. But computer storage technology has already reached the point where there's no technological reason a Mars-bound ship can't carry a major fraction of all the books, movies and music albums that will exist on earth on the day of launch. The astronauts certainly wouldn't be bored for lack of anything to read, watch or listen to.

Except for a few days out of each year around solar conjunction, there will also be continuous communications with earth, and there's no reason to limit it to Mission Control. The astronauts could easily be given direct Internet access, though some sort of access control is needed to protect the uplink from malicious congestion.

But as the ship leaves earth, the speed-of-light delay will increase linearly with distance and the available data rate will decrease with the square of the distance. The distance from Earth to Mars ranges widely, from about 1/2 AU at opposition to 2.5 AU at solar conjunction, so even when the mission is at Mars the round trip delay will range from 4 minutes to over 20 and the achievable throughput (for the same antennas, frequencies and power levels) will vary by a factor of 25:1.

Obviously nothing can be done to increase the speed of light. You have to adapt to it. No matter how high the link throughput, you can't get even one bit of information before one light round trip time. You can request information in anticipation of needing it, but link capacity is limited and you don't want to spend it on transferring information that you never use.

We have various experimental protocols designed to maintain high throughput over links with high bandwidth*delay products. Throughput is objective and easily measured, but it's just one criteria out of many. It also assumes that the file is larger than the bandwidth*delay product, and that's especially unreasonable when the delay is in minutes.

All this could make for an interesting experiment for a project like MARS-500.

What applications and network protocols should be provided to a group of Mars-bound human astronauts? How would they actually use them? Mission related traffic would obviously have priority over personal traffic, but how would the astronauts allocate link capacity among themselves when there's not enough for everything? Is email, or an email-like file transfer service, the only workable application with round trip delays measured in minutes? And how would the crew use them?

In his classic essay "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", Eric Raymond explained that "Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch". This strongly suggests that the best way to develop the communication protocols and usage strategies for a Mars mission is to add an experienced network programmer to the crew of a simulated mission and let him devise and use his own communication protocols. I really think this would work, and if I were a lot younger I'd even consider volunteering myself.

Government spending is not a zero-sum game

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 06:04:50 GMT

~~Libertarians~~ Conservatives often argue that ~~the economy~~ government spending is a zero-sum game, and that ~~government spending~~ it necessarily decreases everyone's standard of living.

I strongly disagree; the economy is most definitely NOT a zero sum game. The big variable is productivity. This number drops quite a bit when lots of people are out of work and a lot of capital plant sits idle. If the government can do something (i.e., spend money, change regulations) to significantly increase productivity, then we might come out ahead.

I'm not saying that the stimulus package will necessarily increase economic productivity enough to cover its cost. Some of its elements might and others might not. You can't just scream "Socialism!"; you have to argue each one on its merits.

Government expenditures can work both ways on productivity. One very large federal expenditure is specifically intended to reduce the productivity of any country we choose (if not our own) as much as possible. That's the military budget. The completely pointless wars that destroyed most of the infrastructure and productive populations of Vietnam and now Afghanistan and Iraq are excellent examples. These wars also did their part in lowering our own productivity, albeit unintentionally.

Even in peacetime, our military budget -- larger than the rest of the world's combined -- is a huge drag on our productivity. (Will we really need to fight every other country in the world at the same time? Maybe we will when oil really gets scarce.) Defenders of the military like to say "if you want peace, prepare for war". But experience has shown that our military regularly burns a hole in the President's pocket. Bush's disastrous Iraq war is the best but by no means the only example. We've also seen that our enemies are careful to attack us in ways that render our most expensive military toys completely useless. What good were our aircraft carrier battle groups in stopping the 9/11 attacks? They cost Osama bin Laden about $500,000 and 19 volunteer casualties, easily the most successfully leveraged military investment in history.

Just diverting money away from weapons and warfare will be a big improvement even if that money largely goes to waste.

I used to be fairly libertarian. I've changed my mind. We now have direct experimental evidence for what happens when our government takes a completely laissez-faire role in the economy. It's irrational to maintain a view contrary to real-world experience.

The system becomes unstable, and it eventually crashes.

I draw an analogy between the current economic crash and a wide area electrical blackout. Blackouts occur when some random but not unexpected event triggers a cascading failure that takes down the whole grid. That's why grids employ dispatchers. They have computers constantly running "what-if" scenarios: what if this plant trips offline or that power line shorts? If the computer model shows that a cascading failure could result, the dispatchers shift power flows or bring additional generators online to guard against it. They can't protect against every possible failure scenario, but they do a pretty good job of avoiding the most likely ones. That's why we still have blackouts, but they've become pretty rare.

We need proper market regulation for the same reason. Starting with the Reagan administration, we steadily dismantled nearly every regulation adopted during the Great Depression to prevent a recurrence. This reached a fever pitch during the Bush/Cheney years. All sorts of reserve requirements were lifted. Virtually every merger and acquisition was approved. Enforcement of securities laws was spotty and antitrust enforcement was completely non-existent. New financial instruments like credit default swaps proliferated with almost no regulation.

Corporate executives routinely exploited the moral hazard of bankruptcy by establishing highly leveraged positions where, if they guess right, they'd personally profit quite handsomely. But if they guess wrong, they simply have the corporation declare bankruptcy and leave its creditors holding the bag. (And some of these people have the nerve to complain about homeowners who default on their mortgages.) Our financial system got into a highly vulnerable state, and eventually all it took to trigger a cascading failure was a routine blip in the market.

Had we kept reasonable market regulations in place, none of this would have happened. Market regulation doesn't impair free enterprise; market regulation enables free enterprise to function by ensuring that its assumptions are actually valid, such as open information flows and meaningful competition. Right now I am much more concerned about what will happen after the stimulus, because that's (hopefully) just a one-shot affair. I really want to know how we'll keep this from happening again. We can't tolerate companies that are "too big to fail". If a company is too big to fail, it's too big to exist and we should use the antitrust laws to break it up.

The government must mandate that much more information be made available about consolidated financial instruments to judge their soundness as investments and the financial health of the institutions that issue them. (Power grid dispatchers can't do their jobs without current, detailed knowledge of what's going on in the network.) And it's possible that some investments, like credit default swaps, may have to be heavily restricted or banned altogether if it can't be shown that the market can remain stable with them.

The bottom line is simple: the financial libertarians have had their chance, and they blew it. It's time to try something else.

Socialism

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 03:58:13 GMT

The traditional American conservative is characterized by two viewpoints: a strong pro-military stance and an antipathy to economic socialism. I'm sure there are exceptions, but we can surely agree that these two viewpoints are very strongly correlated.

I've always found this amusing, because the US military is arguably the biggest and most socialist institution ever created in this country!

Don't believe me? Look at it this way. What does the military do? It protects us against invasion, right? They provide this service to everyone living here. How do we pay for this service? Through our taxes. Are you protected only if you pay? No, the military protects even the jobless who don't pay a dime in taxes. But the more you do earn, the more of the military's costs you're expected to pay. Yet you get no better protection than those who don't pay anything.

Protection to each according to their needs; from each according to their means. That's not just socialism, it's communism!

Of course, today's US military is in reality mainly about self-perpetuation and the enrichment of the "Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex", as Eisenhower originally meant to say. If it were only as large as it actually had to be to protect the country against invasion, as opposed to fighting wars of choice around the world, it could easily be a tenth of its size. Or smaller.

But the supporters of a strong military will insist that every dime we spend on the military is essential to the common defense. So we should just remind them occasionally that "common" is the root word for "communism".

I have a serious point here. Nearly everyone who argues against "socialism" as something inherently evil and un-American simply doesn't know what they're talking about. We have always had institutions, supported with tax money, that provide services to everyone regardless of an ability to pay. Besides the military, unfortunately the largest such institution by far, we also have public schools, libraries, roads, local police and fire protection, and so on. They're available to everyone at taxpayer expense because we've decided that it's in everyone's interest that everyone have access to these services.

So when you hear a wingnut or dittohead ranting about President Obama turning the US toward socialism, ask if they support military spending.

The real issue isn't socialism per se. It's what the government spends its money on. The wingnuts certainly disagree, but I for one would much rather have the government spend money -- even wastefully -- on roads, schools, hospitals, scientific research, mass transportation, alternative energy, healthcare for children, education; nearly ANYTHING but self-destructive and pointless wars in far-off countries.

Updated countries map

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 13:45:04 GMT

visited 24 states (10.6%)
Create your own visited map of The World or try another Douwe Osinga project

My most recent additions are from a 10-day cruise to the southern Caribbean that I took with my wife Kimberly, my sister Mary and my new brother-in-law Scott a month ago. This was our wedding gift to them, and it only took about 14 months to agree on the details!

We took Norwegian Cruise Lines' Norwegian Gem from New York to St. Thomas USVI; Antigua; Barbados; St. Maartens; and Tortola BVI before returning to New York.

This was the fourth cruise for Kimberly and me, and the first for Mary and Scott. NCL really hypes what they call Freestyle Cruising ^TM; it's even painted on the outside of the ship. Its main feature is the elimination of formal dinner seatings and letting you select from a set of restaurants (Italian, French, Japanese, American, etc) whenever they're open. Reservations are helpful but not essential. As a backup, one of the cafeterias is always open. Others may disagree, but I've always liked cafeterias: they're fast, and you can sample a little of everything if you want.

I have to say that NCL's hype is justified; this is a big improvement over our previous cruises. I dislike having to eat at fixed times and in assigned seats on most other cruise lines, and I truly loathe "formal nights". Vacations aren't supposed to be more regimented than your regular life back home! During our third cruise, on the Costa Mediterranea from Venice to the eastern Mediterranean in 2004, I went hungry more than once because the dinner food that night was so terrible and no other restaurants were open during dinner hours.

The ship has about 600 food service workers for about 2400 passengers. I don't know if that's a higher ratio than other lines, but if it is, it's worth it. Cruises revolve around food, so it has to be done right.

The Norwegian Gem is only about a year old. It's a monster, 90,000+ tons, typical of the newer cruise ships being built these days in Europe (this one was built in Papenburg Germany). I'm not all that fond of mega-ships, as the experience is somewhat like being trapped in a Las Vegas hotel, but I have to admit it's nice to not feel too cooped up when you spend several straight days at sea (it was 2.5 days each way from NYC to the Caribbean and back).

Partly because of those sea days, and partly because of the East Coast weather I wasn't particularly excited by our choice of New York as the terminus. But we did this as a wedding present for my sister and brother-in-law who live in the Washington DC area, and this made it convenient for them. We also bought last-minute photography supplies at B&H in New York. I lived in Northern New Jersey from 1982-1991 and often visited New York, but that place was still a new experience for me. The four of us brought back 6,100 pictures totaling 47 gigabytes. But why not? There's no more film to buy and process, so there's basically no cost to a digital picture other than the wear and tear on the camera and its battery. You don't (or shouldn't) bring back very many tangible things from a vacation besides pictures, and you can't go back and take the shot you wish you'd taken. No matter how many pictures I take, I often wish I'd taken even more.

Speaking of photography, on our first cruise (on the defunct Stella Solaris out of Athens to the eastern Mediterranean in 2000) I heard a talk by a very accomplished photographer who had traveled the world and had accumulated an impressive portfolio in National Geographic. He asked if anyone knew the difference between an amateur photographer and a professional. It's not equipment, not when you see what some dedicated amateurs carry around. No, the main difference is that the professional doesn't show every picture he takes. Wow. He really nailed it.

Perhaps the most exciting part of the whole trip occurred before we even got to New York. We flew into Newark airport (once my home airport) and took a cab into Manhattan where we would stay in a hotel before our cruise began. I remember thinking the cab looked especially beat up, but I figured it would probably make at least one more trip before expiring. On the approach to the Lincoln Tunnel, Kimberly and I began to get a little nauseous. Thinking it was the trucks in the next lane in the stop-and-go traffic, we asked the cabbie to roll up the windows. But the air only got worse. Suddenly we saw smoke pouring out of the dashboard -- it was our own car! Not knowing if this was from gasoline leaking onto the engine, I leaped out and had Kimberly dial 911. The cops came pretty quickly -- even though I didn't know exactly where we were, they could see us on TV. They told the cabbie to roll down the rest of the approach in neutral with his engine off and then pull off and wait for a tow truck. But when we got to the bottom, the cabbie waved off the tow truck and we realized that he intended to continue into the tunnel! We'd had enough of that, so we got out and the cop arranged for a NJ Transit bus to pick us up and take us to the 42nd St bus terminal where we caught a (different) cab to our hotel.

Even after converting a significant fraction of our hemoglobin to carboxyhemoglobin, the cabbie insisted on being paid! Needless to say he didn't get a tip. I still had no idea what was wrong, but my best guess was a faulty cooling system let the engine overheat and start to burn oil.

I have no idea how many taxis I've ridden in my life, but I've had only two especially bad experiences, and both were with Haitian drivers. (Kimberly's bad-taxi benchmark was the hair-raising race from the Shanghai airport to the city we took in 2002, but that one didn't bother me that much; we got there quickly, in one piece, and unpoisoned.)

I just don't know what it is about them. My previous (and first) bad experience was about four years ago in Orlando FL when I hired one to take me to a nearby hotel. The poor guy simply didn't know the area and quickly got lost. He repeatedly called his brother on the phone for help to no avail, and he even drove back to the airport at least once to talk to him in person. Finally, in absolute desperation, he stopped his cab in traffic, got out and started asking other drivers for help! I had a GPS, but I didn't know the location of the hotel and I didn't have any local maps loaded, so it wasn't too much help. Besides, one of the main reasons you hire a cab in the first place is to benefit from the drivers' experience and knowledge of the area, and that's something you really have a right to expect. Right?

More on Apollo conspiracy loonies

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 04:04:07 GMT

A few weeks ago I wrote that when I was a kid, Apollo helped inspire me to become an engineer. I've never regretted it. But, believe it or not, there's still a noisy band of people out there who, today, 40 years later, still don't believe any of it. Or at least they say they don't believe it ever happened.

There are always going to be a few lunatics in the world. But these lunatics are so outspoken, persistent and shameless that most of the general public has heard bits and pieces of their delusions. And unfortunately, the state of science education and scientific literacy in this country is so abysmal that many people don't just laugh it off. There are certainly many real cases of government incompetence and waste that people can be forgiven for developing an extremely cynical attitude about it. The Apollo hoax myth feeds directly to this cynicism and milks it to the limit.

The Apollo hoax myth is always the same: NASA just couldn't figure out how to go to the moon. They ran into some unyielding technical barrier, often but not always lethal radiation, and rather than openly admit failure, they faked a successful landing so Congress wouldn't ask for their money back.

First of all, an obvious sanity check. How often has Congress asked for its money back from a failed program, say a military weapons program?

Their "evidence" is almost always some imagined "anomaly" in an Apollo photo or artifact that reveals the hoax: there aren't any stars in the black, airless lunar sky; the flags seem to "wave" in the lunar vacuum; the lunar module descent engine didn't leave a crater; and on and on and on. They consist of "facts" that are provably wrong and naive expectations of how they think things ought to look from their own experience on earth that simply doesn't apply on an alien world like the moon.

Every single hoax claim is easily analyzed, explained and dismissed with some simple science and math. Quite a few web sites have been devoted to debunking these claims in methodical detail; one of the best is Moon Base Clavius, http://www.clavius.org. Every so often, a new "anomaly" appears and reverberates with lightning speed throughout the close-knit community of Apollo conspiracy cultists until it too is quickly shot down in flames. But that won't keep it from going on the standard laundry list. They're nothing if not persistent, and will never let the facts stand in the way of a good hoax myth.

Many hoax claims are just the kinds of questions you'd expect curious and guileless middle school students to ask, honestly seeking answers. In the hands of a good teacher, many can be the kernels of some nice little science lessons. But the Hoaxheads (what I call those who claim Apollo was a hoax) don't ask questions to get answers. They only say they do as they plug their ears with their fingers.

I've sparred with some of these guys on YouTube. I'm not sure why so many hang out there, probably because it's a ready repository of their home made "15 second moon undebunkable hoax proof" clips, often taken from one of hoax cult leaders Bart Sibrel's or David Percy's videos. More often than not, they'll block comments so viewers can't see their claims torn apart.

These people present such an alarming resistance to facts and logic that you're sorely tempted to think it's all an act. When they can't think of anything else to say, they'll label you a NASA "shill" or "fanboy" and ask how much NASA is paying you to protect the hoax.

These epithets are very revealing. The hoaxheads seem to think that the truth of a statement depends on who says it and why, as if statements can't stand or fall by themselves according to the evidence. This applies even when a statement is backed up by clear experimental scientific evidence. Apparently NASA is so powerful that they can even momentarily alter the laws of physics and make an experimental outcome prove whatever conclusion they like!

Expressions of personal admiration for Apollo are certain to attract swift contempt. You are a mindless sheep, fooled by NASA propaganda, to be pitied for not seeing the "truth" that is so obvious to them.

What's wrong with these people? Few people are ever stopped from offering their opinions on the mental states of others by not being a psychologist or psychiatrist, so I won't let it stop me either. The question is just too endlessly fascinating. If a psych student does explore this theme in a scientific research project I would love to see the results. I'm always open to better theories.

I think a typical hoaxhead has some very serious problems with acknowledging the accomplishments of others. Maybe they did poorly in school. Maybe they feel unaccomplished or unappreciated in their adult lives because of a lack of talent, motivation, education, opportunity, social skills or a combination of all these things.

It's a rare hoaxhead who can even describe in his own words and in any reasonable detail how Apollo "allegedly" worked, so he clearly doesn't have a clue how to go about it himself. Something like 400,000 people worked on the Apollo program at its height, so if they really did pull off such an amazing feat a lot of people were (and are) a lot smarter and more accomplished than our poor unappreciated hoaxhead. And that drives him nuts.

But if our hoaxhead can "prove" that Apollo never actually happened, then he no longer need feel inferior to all those people for something they didn't actually do. Everyone knows that conspiracies are wicked and conspirators will stop at nothing to hide them, so our hoaxhead can claim a position of high moral authority, a hero for selflessly revealing this wickedness at the risk of his own life. And of course he can feel quite deservedly accomplished for having "discovered", along with a small number of similarly brilliant and selfless people, a secret so cleverly hidden that it still hasn't blown wide open in over 40 years despite its vast scope and scale.

How do I think my theory has some merit? Tell it to a hoaxhead and watch the fireworks. It's cheap entertainment.

The terrorists have won. :-(

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 18:32:08 GMT

Osama bin Laden won. Hands down. It wasn't even close.

This is the inescapable conclusion of anyone with a brain after reading the total horror story of Star Simpson, the MIT student who caused a panic at Logan Airport in 2007 simply by wearing some cute flashing lights on heir sweatshirt when she went to pick up her boyfriend.

And most Americans don't even realize it. We think we're strong and safe now. We're "vigilant". Better safe than sorry with people like Ms Simpson. We flattened Iraq because we "thought" they were threatening us. Better safe than sorry, we keep saying.

We created a whole new federal bureaucracy at home -- the Transportation Safety Administration -- to keep us all safe in the skies, the source of all our nightmares on 9/11. They ensure that little old ladies can't take knitting needles on board. They make sure my shoes are off, my laptop out of its bag and in a tray, my CPAP out and in another tray, my liquid carry-ons in a clear plastic baggie, my boarding pass and government-issued photo ID at the ready. If I just had another dozen hands all this would be no sweat. Anything to keep us safe, right?

Wrong. All this security theater certainly doesn't make me feel safer. Paranoia is not vigilance! Every trip to the airport vividly reminds me of my government's utter incompetence. Everything is an unthinking, knee-jerk reaction. Some loser tries to light an explosive in his shoe, and we get to take our shoes off every time we go through security, in perpetuity. Some more losers concoct some harebrained scheme involving binary liquid explosives that chemists say probably wouldn't even have worked, and now we can't take more than a few ounces of mouthwash through the checkpoint.

A student wears some obviously harmless flashing lights, and she is made to apologize for having scared us because we're too embarrassed to apologize to her, the only one deserving of an apology. A big one. She didn't scare us, we scared ourselves. A rational people would be big enough to admit it.

It's great the TSA has covered a dozen or so of the ways that a truly determined and resourceful terrorist might get through. Certainly any would-be suicide terrorist will now think twice about wearing big flashing lights to advertise themselves. Now there are, oh, only about 988 ways left.

Face it, absolute safety is a chimera and we just look silly trying to achieve it. bin Laden must laugh out loud at each new story that shows just how ridiculously terrified we've all become. Life is full of mundane risks far, far bigger than terrorism, like car wrecks and heart disease, but terrorism gets all the fear and attention.

THAT'S WHY IT'S CALLED 'TERRORISM'!!

Throughout his term, George W. Bush repeated his mantra thousands of times: "Terrorist killers...trying to kill Americans for our freedoms..."

Look, George, if bin Laden only wanted to kill as many Americans as possible, he'd just buy a tobacco company or start another fast food franchise. Murder is just his chosen means to his end of making us terrified of our own shadows, to make us see terrorists under every bed, terrorists in our airports, terrorists behind every schoolyard, terrorists terrorists everywhere. He knew our weaknesses, he exploited them masterfully and he succeeded brilliantly, certainly far beyond his wildest expectations. All it cost him were 19 volunteer casualties and maybe $500K in expenses. No military operation in history had ever achieved that kind of leverage.

He wanted us to lose our heads and react without thinking. And react we did -- we launched an aggressive war, tore up the Geneva Conventions, the Conventions Against Torture, and much of the US Bill of Rights. We even gang-tackle harmless young women in airports because of Hollywood's notions of what a bomb must look like (has a real terrorist bomb ever had blinking lights?) bin Laden made us piss in our pants in front of the world. Whatever moral authority and respect we once had through our example is gone, probably for good. Even if we decide to do what's necessary to earn it back -- and we still haven't -- it'll take decades.

bin Laden could never have succeeded without George W Bush. He knew that Bush, like every authoritarian politician, knows that the "fear button" is the surest path to increased power. bin Laden handed Bush a whole pile of power/fear buttons and Bush madly pushed them until his last day in office. A real leader would have seen through all this. He would have insisted that we not become afraid as he quietly and thoughtfully took those few anti-terror measures that actually made sense. The single most important anti-terror measure, by far, is to refuse to be terrified!

Yet most Americans seem blithely unaware of it all. We've lost, and we don't even know it. We still think we're "vigilant". The rest of the world knows better.

Leopard calms down; switching to the Intel Mac; VMWare

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 12:20:40 GMT

A few months after my screed on Leopard and the PowerPC, when a few patches had been released, I tried again. This time it came up without a hitch on both my 17" G4 Powerbook and my wife's PowerPC iMac. Whatever problems were in the first release of Leopard (10.5.0) seem to be fixed now. Thanks, Apple. But I really should have heeded the warnings to not run .0 of anything, especially proprietary software on a hardware configuration the same vendor is trying to phase out because it's no longer making him money.

I've since set my 17" PowerBook aside and switched to a 17" Intel MacBook Pro. With Leopard, of course. I hesitated because my PowerBook was still working as well as it ever did, and I also didn't want to part with my last PowerPC machine. On general principles I hated to see the PowerPC go; I think the world is better off with a healthy diversity of general purpose CPU architectures. Those days now seem to be over. But I also got more and more annoyed with that damn spinning beachball. It would pop up for several seconds in response to even the most trivial mouseclick, or so it seemed. And there were more and more things that could only run on an Intel machine.

I was delighted to see that yes, the Intel Core 2 Duo, especially with its two cores, really is a heckuva lot faster than the G4. I liked the PowerPC architecture, I really did. It's just too bad it couldn't keep up.

The killer app for me was VMWare. It won't run on the PowerPC. It specifically emulates an x86 PC, complete with BIOS, and the only practical way to do that is to run on a real Intel CPU. (I bought SoftPC for my wife a few years ago that emulates an Intel CPU on a PowerPC. It's unusably slow. And to add insult to injury I can't extract the bundled copy of XP and use it somewhere else. Several hundred bucks blown down the Microsoft rathole for nothing. Grrr.)

VMWare is proprietary software, and normally I don't ordinarily like buying proprietary software.

It's not my having to pay money that bothers me. I really do like the OSX Aqua GUI as a user. It's gorgeous and fairly easy to configure and use. I turn it on and it works. It's certainly vastly ahead of anything from Redmond, and I don't mind paying something for that when it saves my time. Whenever a non-technical friend or family member asks what computer they should buy, I always suggest a Mac.

But I write open source code. Everything I do on my own, I release under the GPL or the LGPL. And I'm not going to require my users to pay money to someone else just so they can use my work.

I don't mind making my code portable to as many platforms as possible, including some that may be proprietary. But I'm sure not going to require somebody to buy a closed platform just to run my code for free.

I do make my stuff run on OSX's Darwin foundation (the command line, shell and X-windows) because, unlike Aqua, Darwin is just another flavor of BSD, a free version of UNIX, and an increasingly popular one. But Linux is most important.

So since I bought my first (PowerPC) Mac, I've used them as front ends to various Linux and Linux-like systems and servers. I mainly build various "engines": libraries for networking, digital signal processing, cryptography, error correction coding, digital RF modems and the like. Two things tend to characterize them: they barely even have UIs, much less fancy GUIs, and portability to other platforms is important.

I became so accustomed to having development Linux servers right behind my Mac that I really felt the need for one when I travel. And that's where VMWare comes in. It lets me carry a whole network of machines, each running whatever OS I need. That can even include Microsoft Windows for those increasingly rare but still painful occasions when I simply have no other choice. It is most satisfying to finally get to put Bill Gates in a box where he belongs, and from where he can't get out to screw up the rest of my machines. (Alas, I can't take credit for that line.)

So VMWare is now so useful that I've made it one of my few exceptions to not depending on proprietary software for my development work. But because VMWare merely emulates open and readily available hardware, my users aren't required to buy it just to make use of what I write.

I know there are other virtual machine hypervisors for the x86 architecture. Xen would be ideal if I specifically wanted a set of Linux virtual machines without any other operating systems. But the big win of VMWare is that I can run practically ANY x86 operating system with no extra hardware and minimal hassle, and that convenience has really been worth it so far.

The Controversial Survey

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 09:03:55 GMT

The Controversial Survey

The "Controversial" Survey - I didn't make this up... just reposting. =)

Do you have the guts to answer these questions and re-post as The Controversial Survey?:
Yes

Would you do meth if it was legalized?:
No. I'm not stupid.

Abortion: for or against it?:
I'm not for abortion. I'm for choice. If the pro-lifers really wanted to reduce abortions they would promote birth control. Heavily. To teens.

Do you think the world would fail with a female president?:
It depends on the female president. If it's Sarah Palin, yes. But the world is already failing with a male president.

Do you believe in the death penalty?:
No. Aside from the moral qualms, it's pointless. It's not a deterrent because most capital crimes are crimes of passion. For those that aren't, it might even encourage some who'd like to go out in a blaze of notoriety. We already have "suicide by cop".

Do you wish marijuana would be legalized already?:
Yes. Pretty much all drugs should be. Just because you think people shouldn't do something doesn't mean it should be illegal.

Are you for or against premarital sex?:
Um, yes. I am indeed for or against premarital sex. (Logically, (x || !x) = TRUE). If you mean "are you for premarital sex", it's totally up to the individuals if they're adults.

Do you believe in God?:
I'm an agnostic, which means the question regarding the broadest possible definition of "god" is unanswerable with the available information. I am quite sure, however, that the classic Abrahamic (Judeo/Christian/Muslim) god doesn't exist.

Do you think same sex marriage should be legalized?:
Absolutely. A no-brainer.

Do you think it's wrong that so many Hispanics are illegally moving to the USA?:
Morally? No. We go out of our way to outlaw discrimination based on accidents of birth like race and gender, and then we mandate it for those born outside the borders.

A twelve year old girl has a baby, should she keep it?:
No. It should be adopted by parents who can properly care for it.

Should the alcohol age be lowered to eighteen?:
Yes. It was 18 when I was in college. As far as I can tell, little has changed.

Should the war in Iraq be called off?:
Absolutely. Get the hell out ASAP.

Assisted suicide is illegal: do you agree?:
No, though there need to be safeguards to ensure that the decision is made competently and not on the spur of the moment.

Do you believe in spanking your children?:
No. It's child abuse. If you wouldn't do it to an adult (well, an adult who didn't like it) then how can you do it to a kid?

Would you burn an American flag for a million dollars?:
Sure. That's the recommended way to dispose of an old, worn-out flag (see the flag code).

Who do you think would make a better president? McCain or Obama?:
You're joking, right? Obama, of course.

Are you afraid others will judge you from reading some of your answers?:
Afraid? No. Will they? Quite possibly.

Want to take this quiz? -
Want to make a new one?

Don't upgrade to Leopard!

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 04:24:01 GMT

If you have a Mac PowerPC G4 or G5 (i.e., a pre-Intel Mac) and are thinking of upgrading to the new, heavily hyped "Leopard" (10.5) version of Mac OSX:

DON'T!!

Stick with Tiger (10.4) for now.

A quick Google search, or a perusal of various Mac-related blogs and forums shows that there are many serious bugs with Leopard on G4 and G5 (PowerPC) systems. It won't even install on my dual-CPU G5; it fails during installation with an error message about being unable to verify the "Essentials" package. Others report that it destroys their existing files, or renders their system unbootable, or causes it to take a very long time to boot.

Leopard seems to work okay on the newer Macs with Intel processors. It's working fine on my new Mac Pro with two Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs.

These bugs are so glaringly obvious that Apple could not have tested at all on the older PowerPC G4 and G5 systems, only on the newer Intel systems. So much for supporting their customers who don't throw away everything the moment it's no longer sold.

CIA torture

Tue, 06 Mar 2007 07:29:42 GMT

I sent the following email to my congressman today. These are my own words, not those of a form letter.

I would like to call your attention to the op-ed "I am not a state secret" by Khaled El-Masri in the March 3, 2007 edition of the LA Times. Mr El-Masri is the German citizen who was mistakenly captured and tortured for months by the CIA in 2003.

Mr. El-Masri's story turns my stomach. He wasn't the victim of the military dictator of some third-world banana republic, this was official American government policy! And now the Bush administration has succeeded in hiding its crimes -- and its incompetence at pursuing real terrorists -- behind a wall of legalistic "national security" claims.

I cannot express my anger, sadness and shame at watching my own country, once a beacon for the whole world of justice and human rights, stoop to such barbarism. And even the courts don't seem to care.

So Germany, once home to the most horrible regime in history, has to prosecute the CIA agents who deprived Mr. El-Masri of his fundamental rights as a human being. Germany accepts these rights because an earlier generation of Americans helped establish them during the trials of the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. The irony is overwhelming.

I am frightened. Our system of checks and balances is breaking down. But they're not gone yet. As a member of Congress, you have the power and the duty to investigate the Administration in this and countless similar cases at Abu Ghraib, Gitmo and elsewhere. You must make it clear that no one, not even the President, can ignore laws, treaties and the Constitution and hide his criminal behavior behind cynical claims of "national security".

Bread and Circuses

Sat, 03 Mar 2007 09:35:11 GMT

If anyone still has doubts that the United States is definitely well into its "Bread and Circuses" phase, the Anna Nicole Smith saga should dispel them.

I have never seen anything on TV that even came close to the nauseating spectacle of Judge Larry's courtroom last week. I tried to avoid it, but clips still made it to the only two TV news shows I watch, Countdown and The Daily Show.

Face it, this woman had absolutely no socially useful talents or constructive accomplishments whatsoever. She was an ambitious, self-centered, manipulative gold-digger with nothing more than a pretty face to her credit. She didn't deserve any of the national attention she got in life, nor does she deserve what she's getting in death.

No one should have to die young, especially from drugs as she and her son did. I feel genuinely bad for her family. But they just don't concern the rest of us. Thousands of ordinary Americans die tragically every day; where are CNN's Breaking Stories about them?

I see a far bigger tragedy in Anna Nicole Smith than her death or that of her son. It's the message we're sending to millions of young girls: if you act just like her, you too can become rich, famous and widely admired. Who needs brains, talent, education or hard work if you can just find a lonely old oil tycoon and give him a lap dance?

The best essay on terrorism I've ever read

Sat, 26 Aug 2006 03:30:45 GMT

This blog entry by Bruce Schneier is the best essay on the
subject of terrorism I've ever read. I won't repeat what Bruce said, because I can't say it better than he did.

Bruce is the author of the book Applied Cryptography,
the focus of my lawsuit against the State Department in the 1990s.

...and the countries I've visited

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 20:24:19 GMT

create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands

States I've visited so far...

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 10:03:48 GMT

create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.

I haven't had this much fun since Watergate

Sun, 26 Jun 2005 03:39:25 GMT

Some serious gerrymandering after the 2000 census made US Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham my local congressman. (It used to be Susan Davis, a halfway decent Democrat.) Recently a major scandal has erupted over the 2003 sale of his home for $1,675,000 to Mitchell Wade, CEO of defense contractor MZM, Inc. Wade, who immediately began to reap numerous secret government contracts, put the home right back on the market where it finally sold 9 months later at a $700,000 loss. Wade claimed he discovered the house "didn't meet his needs" only after he bought it. He must think that everyone buys their houses sight unseen. Or he must think we're all pretty stupid.

San Diego, even more than most places in the US, has been in an incredible real estate boom over the past few years; there's simply no chance that Cunningham's sale to Wade was at anywhere near true market value. In case I have to spell it out for you, here goes: B R I B E.

As if that wasn't enough, Cunningham has been living on a yacht in DC named the "Duke Stir", also owned by Wade. And now it seems that his new Rancho Santa Fe home, bought with the proceeds of his Del Mar sale, was bought well under market value.

For those not familiar with San Diego and its expensive real estate, Del Mar is a definitely upscale yet still crowded suburban area, with current average home prices somewhere around a million. (Cunningham's old house is actually in the Del Mar Heights area of the City of San Diego, just east of the beach city of Del Mar proper, but the locals just call the whole area Del Mar.) Rancho Santa Fe, on the other hand, is somewhere up in the stratosphere, with multi-acre lots and average prices now probably around $3 million. It's one of the richest communities in the United States. You may remember it as where the "Heaven's Gate" cult killed themselves in 1997.

Politically, Cunningham is somewhere to the right of Atilla the Hun. He rants about "homos in the military"; Rep Barney Frank says that Cunningham "seems more interested in homosexuality than most homosexuals". While speaking to a group of prostate cancer survivors, he flipped the bird to a WW2 veteran who commented that the defense budget was too high. He said Vietnam War protesters and "liberal leaders" in Congress should be lined up and shot. He voted for the "Communications Decency Act" and introduced the awful "flag burning" amendment that recently passed the house. So it'll be most gratifying to see this jackass go down in flames. He'll find it rather difficult to wrap himself in the flag when he's wearing handcuffs.