Toast442.org

Check out the image at the bottom of this post. It’s a segment of the main Comp USA website for the new Sony PSP handheld gaming machine. This is the first thing that someone sees when looking for the PSP on their site. The part not shown goes on about the screen size, colors, graphical capabilities and networking as you’d expect. But then at the bottom, there’s this paragraph about how cool Sony’s new UMD discs are. It then veers off into describing the “robust copyright protection system” developed for this unit. You know, the stuff that makes it harder to move content from one format to another and just generally gets in the way.

Why they thought that this was important enough to warrant a prominent place on the main PSP page, I don’t know. Looks like some moron just copied an industry press release from Sony. I mean, who wants to read about how their $250 gaming machine is going to restrict what you can do with it? It like advertising a new DVD player that only works with movies from Blockbuster or something. Very very weird - and unfriendly.

This opinion piece from Jay Mathews in the Washington Post is yet another in a long string of articles that have been appearing in the mainstream press over the past few months. Like the others, this piece has the author claiming that he sees no problem with teaching ID and the theory of evolution side by side. He says this is ok because students and teachers alike get a lot out of comparing and contrasting these two theories.

To be fair, Mr. Mathews seems like he comes down fairly on the side of science when talking about this, but it’s hard to tell here. He’s treating ID like it has some sort of near-equivalency with evolution. The problem is that, of course, it doesn’t. I’m cool with teaching the history of theories that didn’t make it when talking about evolution. Hell - go all Lamarckian on the little punks - at least it was a valid theory in it’s day. Heck, even where there is some real debate about the theories there is no real problem teaching all sides. But this ID crap is nothing but religion wrapped in pseudo-science. It’s not an alternate theory of how life came to be. Keep it out of the classroom please.

It’s happened: The Governor of Utah has signed HB 260, which creates a huge bureaucracy to keep lists of sites not appropriate for children and forces ISPs to block those sites for those who request it. Also, anyone who creates or hosts any content in Utah for profit must now rate it, or face criminal (3rd degree felony) charges.

Now come the inevitable lawsuits, and tons of state and other money wasted defending a bill that nobody really wants and that most agree won’t survive a challenge in the courts. A similar law in Pennsylvania was struck down in the courts last year.

Thanks lawmakers. Now I know what you do with your time: waste money. And to Governor Huntsman: No more votes for you.

Link to previous entry about the bill.
Link to CNet article.

Check out this article in the NY Times. It says that several IMAX theaters - including some in science museums - are refusing to show films that mention evolution, the Big Bang, or even the geology of the Earth. All for fear that there may be protesters against these films because they contradict Biblical teachings. Let me rephrase: Science museums are refusing to show films for fear of religious nutcases. Where the hell are we, the Taliban’s Afghanistan? From the article:

The number of theaters rejecting such films is small, people in the industry say - perhaps a dozen or fewer, most in the South. But because only a few dozen Imax theaters routinely show science documentaries, the decisions of a few can have a big impact on a film’s bottom line - or a producer’s decision to make a documentary in the first place.

This is getting out of hand. I think we need a hardcore gang of protesters that are funded to protest outside of these churches for teaching things that make them sound dumb. This country is going back to the Dark Ages.

I’ve always loved keyboard shortcuts. Using the mouse for me is a last resort in most cases. To that end, I’ve used two “small” utilities that help me navigate the huge number of files and applications that I use on a daily basis. I started by using LaunchBar v3, a commercial application that you can call up with a HotKey (usually Command-Space) and enter an abbreviated name, hit Enter and launch or switch to an app, open a document, Finder folder, etc. Cost me $20, but it worked great.

Along comes the new kid on the block: Quicksilver. It has a lot going for it, including some great graphical stylings, a very nice plugin architecture, and best of all: it is free. It works pretty much like LaunchBar, except it includes some new tricks. Use an abbreviation to find a document, right arrow and select mail and it dumps it in as an attachment to your favorite mailer. Nice. It has tons of stuff like this built in. So I switched. And I used it for months. Slowly, however, I discovered it’s dark side: Slow and a memory pig.

I was getting irritated: My machine was running slower, I was swapping: I wanted to launch Activity Monitor to see what craptastic app was killing me. I hit Command-Space, and after a slight pause, up popped QuickSilver, and I started typing actm, my custom shortcut for the aforementioned Activity Monitor. Unfortunately, QS was responding so freaking slowly searching for what I wanted, the pause between the t and m resulted in yet another search for something starting with an “m”, which gave me some random Word document and a whole instance of MS Word running. This is the first of the two failings with QS: searching, even under ideal conditions (on a 1.67GHz PowerBook) is ridiculously slow. I found that I was adapting my typing speed to accommodate the poor performance of QS.

When I finally did get Activity Monitor running, I discovered the second of QS’s failings: It was using more memory than ANYTHING ELSE IN THE SYSTEM, INCLUDING PHOTOSHOP. It had over 160MB of resident RAM tied up. Not shared - this is specific to this app. That was 16% of my system RAM dedicated to slowly searching for documents. This pissed me off even more.

I went and downloaded the newest version of LaunchBar, 4.01. Installed it, and indexed everything. It searches instantly. When you type, it reacts. No lag, even under severe conditions. Yes, it doesn’t do everything that QS does - but who the fuck cares? After running for a whole day, memory usage was a reasonable resident 40MB. It still finds what I need right when I type, and I don’t have to screw around waiting for a “utility” to respond to my keystrokes. Yes - I paid the $9.95 upgrade fee.

The author of QS would do well to spend a little time optimizing the search functions of his app. Something is slowing it to a crawl (I even removed all the plugins to see if it helped) and get rid of the massive memory leaks. Spend time doing this instead of adding new incremental near-useless features. If I have to baby-sit a utility, it isn’t a utility.

This article over on CNN gives some details about the constant hacking attempts that occur against the machines that control the nation’s electrical power systems. No telling how many of these “hundreds of daily attacks” come from dumb worms or are really crackers trying to gain access to these systems. Doesn’t really matter. My question is:

WHY THE HELL ARE THESE IMPORTANT SYSTEMS ON THE NET AT ALL?

Seriously. The article doesn’t even address this aside from this one paragraph:

The vulnerability of the nation’s electrical grid to computer attack has grown as power companies have transferred control of their electrical generation and distribution equipment from private, internal networks to supervisory control and data acquisition, or SCADA, systems that can be accessed through the Internet or by phone lines, according to consultants and government reports. That technology has led to greater efficiency because it allows workers to operate equipment remotely.

Stupid. Greater efficiency because they don’t have to go to an office at the plant. It isn’t greater efficiency if this wonderful equipment allows the takedown of our power grid by some script kiddie in the Ukraine. Want remote access? Run your own damn private network if you need this “remote” functionality.

The one hard and fast rule of network security: It can’t be cracked from the network if it’s not attached to the network.

You always run the risk of being hacked if you’re attached to the public network, regardless of the precautions you take. Any critical systems like this should never, ever, in a million years be in a position where an attempt to crack the machines can even be made. Anything less than this is completely irresponsible. Haven’t these jerks seen the newest season of 24?

Charles Townes has just won the Templeton Prize, a highly regarded prize “For progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities.” Charles Townes seems like an unlikely candidate for this prize at first - he won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1964 for his work on the maser and co-invention of the laser and is a UC Berkeley Physics Professor. Also in 1964, however, he gave a talk in which he laid out his ideas for the convergence of science and religion, a topic he still takes to heart today.

Townes is obviously a very smart individual, and nothing can take away from what he’s accomplished. However (you knew it was coming, right?) this merging of science and religion that he espouses is very problematic. He claims that science and religion are both looking for the same thing: the secrets of the universe. This doesn’t seem very problematic on the surface: both are (in a very broad general sense) doing just that. However, they go about this in two very, very different ways that are difficult, if not impossible, to fully reconcile.

For instance, on the radio this morning, I heard an interview with him in which he stated that both science and religion are both based on faith - that science has it’s postulates that may or may not be true, and religion has it’s own tenets. A fairly sensible statement. However, he doesn’t go one step further - science actively tries to prove and disprove its postulates. They are created and discarded with a rapidity that most would find surprising. Of course, the counter to this is that religion itself changes as well - new tenets are proposed, people are killed (I keed!) , and presto - new ideas are followed. The one key difference here is science *CAN* actually prove or disprove it’s ideas in the real world. They can be actually tested to see if they are true (and constantly are tested, for that matter.) This is not possible with religion. Religion is a (possibly necessary) social function where the primary “truths” cannot be realistically tested - they exist only in people’s minds. There is no objectively true statement in religion. Hence the vast number of differing faiths across the globe. With these two core principles of science and religion being so divergent, it’s hard to see how they could ever be merged in their current form.

Naturally, a lot of Townes’ talk is of the beginnings of the universe (”How do you explain that unique event” without God?” he asks.) If you go back far enough, everything breaks down - the Big Bang - everything. Unfortunately, there is no answer yet to these questions. There are some interesting lines of research, but nothing anywhere near conclusive. Here lies a prime example of the differences between science and religion - science is looking for the answer. Religion already “knows” - without proof.

Link to Yahoo article.
Link to Wikipedia article on Charles Townes

It has happened again: more personal data on US citizens were stolen from those companies that collect and resell this stuff. This time, LexisNexis, usually the above-board proto-Google, discovered that 32,000 records containing social security numbers, names, addresses, etc., were all taken. The good news, they claim, was that no personal financial or credit data was exposed. Not that it matters. With all the info they did get, the credit reports and whatnot aren’t hard to get.

This is the second major breech of these data companies we’ve heard about in as many months. And are they going to be held responsible? Well, probably not. Unless you get in your own personal civil suit against these guys, nothing will happen to them except for their two minutes of shame and their stern new resolve to never let it happen again.

With all of the scams out there fishing for your data, what’s a person to do when these jerks spew your data to just about anyone and everyone? The previous “break in” at ChoicePoint was even worse. It wasn’t really even a break in. Just someone with some fake letterhead and a stolen credit card who purchased information on 140,000 consumers. If that’s all it takes, there is really no way to prevent someone from opening lines of credit and whatnot with your ID. It’s just you haven’t won the stolen ID lottery - yet. It’s probably just a matter of time. The fact that you can purchase this “private” information from these companies is crap. This shouldn’t *EVER* be allowed without your express permission. These companies are little better than some thief selling your ID on the street corner.

When are we going to get real privacy laws in this country with some teeth? These companies should be paying through the nose because this information was leaked. Instead, they’ll go on their merry ways, with some lip service paid toward “better” security.

The nannies that make up the majority of the Utah legislature have gone off the deep end and passed House Bill 260. This requires ISPs in Utah to filter pornographic and “material harmful to minors” upon request of their customers. And just who determines what material that they are to block? Well, the attorney general’s office. Yes, now we’ll have a group of interns who surf the net looking for porn subsidized by the government. This piece of junk bill is one signature away from law - that of the governor Jon Huntsman. He claims he still needs his staffers to go over the wording before making a decision. He has until March 22nd.

But that’s just the beginning. It also requires “Internet content providers that create or host data in Utah to properly rate the data.” Does that mean that I have to rate the content of this blog because I write it in Utah? What damn rating system? Everything that’s published online now has to have some sort of code appended to it to make sure it’s ok for the kiddies? What a bunch of crap. This is a great way to keep tech companies out of Utah. Why the hell would they come here and have to jump through hoops (by rating their content) just to put up a damn web site?

Plus the “Service Provider” is defined pretty loosely. It would include your standard run of the mill ISP as well as the coffee shop down the street that gives away WiFi. This would probably effectively kill any small wireless operators, and may kill even the T-Mobile HotSpots that are all over the place here. They’re going to implement this just for the small number of customer’s in Utah? Yeah, right. They’ll probably just drop service instead of comply with the ridiculous provisions of this plan.

And who is going to be blocked? Would Google be banned? They provide all sorts of cached content and whatnot that wouldn’t be suitable for the kids. How about Yahoo? Hell, eBay sports auctions that aren’t very kid friendly. Are all these sites going to be blocked? Amazon provides books on topics you probably don’t want your kids to read. So is the local library (who *GASP* has their card catalog and excerpts posted online!)

The really, really dumb part of this bill is that there are ISPs in Utah which already censor net content for the families that want that sort of thing. They advertise these services as a feature. They don’t cost any more than anything else. There is no reason to pass a LAW that creates a huge bureaucracy just to do something that private companies are already providing to those few who want it.

The real deal here is that this isn’t about the kids - it’s about groups with an agenda against things they find offensive, and we all end up paying for it. If you leave in Utah, send Governor Huntsman a note about this.

Link to CNET article about the bill.

I just recently bought a new PowerBook. One of the new features Apple stuck in these new beasts is what they are calling AMS - the Apple Motion Sensor. Basically it appears to be some sort of accelerometer that can measure sudden changes in movement and automagically park the hard drive heads before something bad happens (like hitting the floor.)

However, it appears that it can also measure the attitude of your machine. That is, it can tell how “tilted” a machine is in all three axes. It uses this to unpark the heads when the machine returns to being level. It also can be used to do some really cool stuff, as this web site demonstrates. On this page, Amit Singh gives us some programs that retrieve the sensor values and do some cool things.

One is a small window with an OpenGL-rendered PB that rotates in conjunction with you’re rotating the physical machine. Very, very cool stuff. Another is a bicycle wheel in a window. When the PB tilts, the window itself rotates to keep it level relative to your (physical) desktop. If you have one of these new PowerBooks, download the samples - there is some cool stuff there to show your friends.