Staticfree Blog

Why does this still work? Because people were stupid and did not provide an escape for the escape sequence '+++' which would be used on all transmitted data. This is common knowledge: if you want to make '+++' mean something special, you have to make it so normal applications can still transmit '+++' without having that special meaning activated. Ug.

SGML and HTML do this: if you want to write a '<' symbol (which normally would be interpreted as meaning a tag) you write &lt;. And to write the '&' in &lt; you write '&amp;. It's messy, but it works.

The workers have been desensitized to a level that I've seen in video game players: you don't want to just kill the bad guys (or animals, as the case might be) you want to destroy them. You want to see how far you can go, how much damage you can do, and most importantly: show your superiority to them. After all, they're just dumb animals right? Who cares if you take some pleasure or fun in beating them instead of just going through with the standard routine; they end up dead no matter what you do.

The problem I see is that you can't solve this with regulation. You can try, but it'd take an enormous amount of effort to impose the level of regulation that would actually be effective — obviously not something that couldn't be done without a great deal of federal funding.

The other option is to change the people or more specificly: the way that people interact with the system. If you can somehow take those workers and let them be more sensitive, then you should end up with workers more like the rest of the population: where you treat the animals with more respect and not something that you must destroy. This could be done by means of having them do less within the system (or at least the parts that breed desensitization). Hopefully, automation will get to the point where this is feasible and where the automation can be designed to deal humanely. Of course, as we all know "mechanically-separated chicken" is something to be avoided and thus, technology isn't there just yet.

When it is, though: that's when the regulation is useful: regulating the technology. Technology is dumb and will never get pleasure from killing animals in ways that amuse it. Technology can't be desensitized: it already is.

Ooh... you can. Nifty.

I decided to add a few.

Oh, the joys of the ignorant and close minded. At least people like this provide decent web design and good entertainment value.

Hm. I've been up since 10:00 wednesday. I should sleep.

# dd if=/dev/hda bs=1 | tee /dev/dsp | hexdump -C&
# dd if=/dev/hdb bs=1 | tee /dev/dsp | hexdump -C&
# tcpdump -w - | tee /dev/dsp | hexdump -C&
$ say bible.txt&
$ say pi.txt&
$ for a in $(find . -name '*.wav'); do play "$a"; done&

Oh and artists who toy with society are cool.

On a related note, I have recently installed a barrage of Unicode fonts on my system. One particular one, Microsoft's TTF Arial, is 23MB in size. Sadly, X 4.1's modular TTF renderer gets quite slow when reading from it. It doesn't crash, but expect 10 seconds for a page to display that uses it.

Ah well, thanks to my generous neighbor, Bitch, I have a replacement power supply to borrow until I can scrounge enough money up to buy one.

Considering the test is from before I even started using computers, I'm quite impressed.

In my continuing email discussion with Neil Gaiman concerning the above collection, I put together what turned into a rather long delude of my beliefs when it comes to information and intellectual property. I'm still thinking a bunch of it over, so this is just my opinions at present (isn't that always the case?).

Anyhow on to the rant:

Well, although my implementation seems a bit misguided, the idea is this: information wants to be free. Not necessarily free as in no money, but free as in accessible. This is the nature of information on computers today: if possible, the information will move towards being unrestrained, unencrypted, and often duplicated. You see this all over: if there's a copy protection scheme that can be bypassed, someone will try and bypass it. This happened with DVDs, adobe's e-book format -- once it's been bypassed, there's no putting it back.

Now, books intrinsically prevent this type of behavior. Not that it's impossible, but it's (usually) impractical. Their physical nature prevents it.

Now the key here is why information wants to be free. It's not that people are out to steal intellectual property when "liberating" information, it's that the benefits of having information that is free are amazing. Blind people can have books read to them without having to hire someone to read for them. Someone could copy a book to a PDA and read the book wherever they are. People can play DVDs on computers that don't run commercial operating systems. People can listen to music in ways they never could before.

These are just a few examples that have been used in a great deal of arguments concerning intellectual property rights, and more specifically the (evil) DMCA. Personally, I think that the DMCA, SSSCA, and other such legislation is misguided (and horribly designed/implemented). This legislation and potential legislation assumes that people want information to be free so they can steal it. Most often, this is not the case.

Personally, I wanted the books I put up to be free (note again: free unbound-free, not beer-free) just for reasons I cited. I have had my computer read excerpts from books to me when I got tired of reading my screen, I have copies of books that I own in print on my PDA so that I can read them wherever I am. This is why I have them. I had them online so that others could do the same or use them in other such ways. Now, the problem here is: certainly not everyone who would download them from my site has paid the royalties to the authors that they deserve. And as you've noted, I do not have the legal right to do such.

Why do I want information to be free? Well for one, I run a free operating system, with free software and software I've written or enhanced. The only way to prevent information from wanting to be free on a computer is to lock it up, from screen to keyboard. The entire computer has to have information "security" built into it to in order to entirely prevent the information from being free (think of it as a ship that will sink if it gets a single hole in it). This is not the kind of computer I want to use. I hope that it is not the kind of computer anyone else wants to use, but apparently there are politicians and their corporate supporters that would love to see it common place.

Intermediately, if you cannot lock up the entire computer, you have to lock up a piece of software that the information can live in securely. Again, this is not something you'd ever see an open source advocate considering a viable option for a commonly-deployed system. Locked software means true security or security through obscurity (ala DVD). Sadly, the latter is easier and is the way that most "copy protection" ends up getting done. This means that corporations have the legal right to protect you from "abusing" the intellectual property you have purchased right to. (as trying to circumvent "security" is a violation of the DMCA).

It's good to know there're people like Gaiman out there who don't immediately lash out when they feel they've been defamed / disrespected / violated / etc. with a large legal hammer. It gives me hope for the world.

Coding + trance + coke == happy steve

Now, normally, when you do buffer->processor->buffer, you would use buffers that will handle everything flowing through them. Dish racks do not do this. A dish rack does not scale. Usually, they're under-powered for the given load of perhaps two meal's worth of dishes. Problem 2 is that they're not FIFO. You put a dish into the dish rack, it takes a specific amount of time to dry while in the dish rack, then you remove it. But, as you're washing, if the rack can't hold enough dishes, your're forced to either remove the dishes from the rackand dry them by hand or stack others on top of the dishes already in the rack. If you dry them by hand, the entire functionality of having a dish rack is lost. If you stack them, the same problem occurs as the wet ones drip onto the dry ones and make it so you can't take the dry ones out before the wet ones.

I truely hope there's someone out there, designing a dish rack that doesn't suck.