Flippin the Bits

While we all wait on hard drives with Perpendicular Recording that could increase data storage by up to 10 times, Seagate has some good news. They just announced that they have produced a desktop HDD with the traditional longitudinal recording method that stores up to 160GB on a single 3.5" platter. The drive sells for about $90 right now. Due to it's single platter, it will have lower noise levels and power consumption. This is good, I for one am sick of noisy hard drives. My most recent Maxtor SATA drive is noisy as hell. I can here it grinding whenever my gaming PC loads anything. In my experience Seagate and Western Digital drives have been much quieter. Anyway, on the subject of Perpendicular recording Hitachi has this hilarious Flash video about it. I must say, this is the first time that I have seen a HDD manufacturer have any bit (no pun intended) of humor.

In other news, I recently upgraded to Firefox1.5 and I'm quite happy with it. I hear 2.0 is not far away, and implements some cool new features. My only complaint about 1.5 is that my favorite theme, Lila, has not been updated for 1.5, and I've been using Lila since way before the 1.0 release. I hope it is updated soon. Another theme I wandered across while composing this is BlackJapan, which is quite nice if you like darker themes. And for all you slackers out there.... UPGRADE NOW!!!!

As for daily life, school is over for the semester, and it looks like it will be back to Ivy Tech for another semester due to a problem with which classes I need. Before this semester I sat down with my counselor to make sure I was going to be finished with my associates after this semester, and we thought we had everything taken care of. Last week he called me up asking when I was going to sign up for classes, to which I told him I was not. He informed me of the bad news, and now I must take one physical science to graduate. Since I will be there for one class I figured I might as well go ahead and take another. I choose the advanced OS Linux course over a digital photography class because my favorite instructor will be teaching it, Plus I need to beef up on my Linux knowledge.

I guess I'll end today with a quote...

For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.
- Alice Kahn

My New Bicycle

Well, I had to break down and finally purchase a decent bicycle. Before I rode this one I thought all bikes were pretty much the same, not the case... I wasn't planning on spending as much as I did on it, but it just hit the spot. Kinda sucks now that it is finally getting cold, but I still find ways to ride. Many people around the apartment complex give me wierd looks cause I'm out in the dark riding it, mostly because it gets dark now at 5:00 PM, which is rediculous.

Anyway... I'm working on another article, and will have it up tomorrow, if possible. Today, I'll be riding some trails.

Quotes Ahoy!

The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.
- Robert R. Coveyou

Another quote

In a mad world only the mad are sane.
- Akira Kurosawa


Anyways, I'll put some more articles up sometime soon. I have been a bit busy as of late due to class and other happenings in daily life.

Great Quote

Great Quote of the day today from my personalized google start page.

Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence.
- Henrik Tikkanen

And yes, I've been lazy recently and have failed to update this thing.

Lords of Kutztown

In the small town of Kutstown, Pennsylvania it seems that trouble has been brewing in the school system. Evidently the school had a deployment of Apple iBooks to the students in the high school. The students got to take these laptops to each class and home with them. The students wanted to do what every high school student wants to do, surf the web, IM friends, and download games. But soon after receiving them they found out that they were unable to do so, do to security restrictions on the laptops. Well, it seems that the system wasn't so secure after all. The students evidently seemed to find the administrator password on the back of each and every laptop. The word quickly spread and many students had unihibited access to the laptops shortly thereafter. I'm not going to type out the rest of the article, as many others already have, some of which are here, here, orhere. In the end it seems that 13 of the students were charged with Felony offenses of "Computer tresspassing".

Now, I will admit that these students did do something wrong, and that they did do much more than read the password off the back of the laptops. After the network admins found out that students knew the password, they did change the password on all the laptops they could. But evidently the password was not very secure, and one of the students used a password cracker to obtain the new password. The students did attempt to go around the system admins precautions, and I agree that a punishment for that should be given, but felony charges a bit much in my opinion. These are high school students, and a felony is going stick to them for a long time. Is this how we are improving the future by sending our thinking kids to jail?

To me it seems that the school got in over it's head when they figured out how much work securing these machines would be, especially when they are in the physical ownership of the students. The system admin got into something he didn't fully understand, and the students showed him that they knew more about the system than he did, by example. Now instead of the admin and school board realizing their mistakes, and trying to correct them it seems that they just went after the students. The articles state that the school deployed a revamped security system after these events took place, but I question exactly how much better this sytem is. Of course I doubt any of the students will test the security of the system since 13 of their classmates were charged with felonies.

If you feel inclined to contact some of the related parties in this incident, contact info can be found below:

Kutztown Area High School
50 Trexler Avenue
Kutztown, Pennsylvania 19530
(610) 683-7346

Kutztown Area School District
http://kasd.org/
District Administration
50 Trexler Ave.
Kutztown, PA 19530
610) 683-7361
fax (610) 683-7230

Several students and apparently some staff and parents have put together a website here that has more information, as well as ways to help the students.

Systm of a down

Cool little site out there for all you tech-heads called Systm. The owners of the site create how-to videos demonstrating various things in the computer and technology field. Systm is from the same people who brought us thebroken and you may have seen many of the people on the now non-existant TechTV. They use bittorrent for most of their file downloads as most of them are quite sizely videos. This is one of the few legitimate legal uses of torrents out there on the net. I'm sure there are several other sites that use it, but aside from linux iso's, this is one area which bittorrent was designed for.

Florida was great, but I think I got a bit too much sun. I basically spent 3 days on the beach. It rained every day, but only for a short amount each day, which was nice since it cooled the temps down quite a bit. I am sending my camera our for repair soon, and hopefully the warrantee will cover the expenses, but maybe someday, I'll post some photos.

Asta la Vista!

Well, finally saw longhorn first hand today. The only words that I could muster after seeing that was "It took 5 years for that?" Seriously it looks like XP with a new fancier theme (with some very interesting "similarities" with OSX!). If you are wanting to see some screens of it yourself you can see some here. I wasn't running it on a good machine so I didn't get to see the "glass" effect, but I will give it some credit by saying that it looks a bit better, even though many actions seem to involve way too much clicking.

As for the title of this post, Windows Codename:longhorn was recently renamed to "Windows Vista", which seems like a strange deviation from the other names. In any case it doesn't seem to have any significant improvements over XP.

Anyway, enough ranting, I should be getting back to packing so I can head out to sunny Florida tomorrow. Hopefully this trip turns out a bit better than my others recently....

Making a mountain out of a mole hill-ary?

Well, once again I have procrastinated and waited entirely to long to update this. Anyway, an article from the LA Times today that caught my attention was one regarding the recent controversy about the semi-new game Grand theft Auto: San Andreas. What interests me more than the calamity about the games content* or whether video games are better than football is the fact that Senator Hillary Clinton called for a $90 million study "on the effects of video games on children". Mind you that the funding for this is coming from our tax dollars. Is this really that big of an issue, when we are still occupying both Iraq and Afghanistan? Is this just another publicity stunt for Hillary to get into a headline to help in the polls when she is speculated to run for president? In any case, it seems like a joke to me.

On a tangent of this subject, I have a question that has had me confused for a while. Why is violence in video games such an issue with politicians/ parents /PTO boards /Grandma's? The same acts of violence are depicted on TV and movies regularly, yet when they take place on a gaming console or a computer screen they are influencing the childrens behavior. Is it because games are not a passive media? The article listed above points to evidence that we are at an all time low for violence among adolescents. Right now video the video game market is at an all time high, with sales around $25 Billion dollars. That's more than the movie industry, yet we America excepts that there are adult themed movies, but not adult themed games. If you are interested on further discussion on the matter, more reading/discussion can be found on /.

Anyway, in personal affairs, this next month or so should be fun. Many staffing changes at work will probably have me working weird shifts for a while. But even better than that, I just booked a flight to Tampa, FL to stay a while with my roomates parents(they just moved down there), my roomate, and a couple of friends. Nothing like a summer vacation in Florida. Hopefully this one will fare better than my last vacation here in Kentucky where my car was broken into and about $600 worth of stuff was stolen and a day was wasted haggling with the local athorities. Anyway, I will try to keep you updated. Don't expect any photos though, as my camera was recently involved in an accident involving an alcoholic drink, the other one we had was stolen when my car was broken into, and plus I'm to lazy to host the files anywhere.



*so far I have been unable to tell if the content is something that is actually shipped with the game or the explicit content is added to the game by downloading a "mod" from a website and adding content to the game. If anyone knows, please email me.

Tor - lok?

There is a program that has been in development for some time entitled Tor. Tor is basically an anonymous internet communication system. Many people may think that their internet activity is completely anonymous, but alas, it is not. Most internet anonymity is due to security through obscurity. Infact, many companies as well as governments monitor internet activity. While I know that Tor is not a viable option for most people's internet communication today, it could provide technology that will enable free speech and communication in the future, be it in this country(America, if you weren't aware) or in another (Ahem, China!). As with most technologies, this can be used for both good and evil (if you beleive in such conceps of course). So if you are at all interested, give it a try.

On another note, due to feedback from the few readers I have, I will be concentrating this blog with more personal entries. I will include personal updates as well as technological news (as it interests me). If you have any problems with that, too bad.

Anyway, in keeping up with the newer format, personal news. Shortly after moving to days at work, I moved into a new apartment, but this time we(as in my roomate, my brother, and I) grabbed a 3 bedroom. Moving, as sucky as it is, feels almost neccesary now, after moving every year for the past 3 years. Moving to another place of residence creates the needed chaos for creation. If you are interested in the idea of Chaos as a creation mechanism, I suggest you read The Age of Spiritual Machines. So hopefully, now that I have new added chaos, as well as some time on my hands, this blog will be updated a little bit more regularly.

Busy times

Well, since moving to working days, life has gotten much more busy. I have barely had a chance to even think about this blog for a while, hence the lack of any posts for a while. Anyways.....


A nice distro of linux I have recently been using is Ubuntu linux. Its a well polished, user friendly distro that is completely free. I highly recommend you give it a shot. There are even a few "live-CD's" which basically means that you can stick the bootable CD into your computer, restart it, and it will load the operating system without requiring you to install anything. There is no worry of writing over files saved on your hard drive.

Anyways... if you have never tried linux, then this would be a great opportunity to dip your feet into the open source waters.

Fun with pictures!

Camera finally came in. Takes decent pictures, a lot better in low light than the previous ones I have been using. It is a Fujifilm Finepix S3100. I'll be buying a lot more memory for it as it came with a 16mb xD card which will hold a measly 8 pictures as full resolution. It will hold around 120 640X480 pictures though. I will have to get some pic's online soon, but it takes a host...

Can I get one of them anime girl-cats now?

National Geographic has an article about animal-human hybrids they refer to as Chimeras. Their report includes experiments such as fusing human cells to rabbit eggs, pigs with human blood flowing throught their veins, and an expected experiment to create mice with human brains. While I agree with using experiment such as this to further the health of humans, some of these are becoming pretty scary. The goal for the mouse is evidently to have a 100% human brain and the researcher is going to look for signs of human cognitive activity before destroying it. Granted, he is not giving the mouse the ability to think like a human, he is merely seeing if the mouse could function if the mouse's brain was made of human brain cells.

What if it were one day possible to successfully create a living half human half animal? Would they have the same rights as us, the same respect? What are the implications of creating a humanlike intelligence in animals? I guess what scares me the most about this field is the possible danger to the human race. Will any of these chimeras enable virus's from animals to transfer to humans? Is it possible that some half human half animal with great intelligence and an increased aggression started conducting gorilla warfare on small towns everywhere? I know none of this is exactly possible now as they are merely working on a few cells, but these are definatly issues that need to be dealt with.

What are they thinking out there in California?

A Califorian bill introduced last week (article at Cnet) would, if passed, expose file-swapping software developers to fines of up to $2,500 per charge, or a year in jail, if they don't take 'reasonable care' to prevent their software from being used to commit crime.

Here's the definition of P2P (Peer to Peer) software in the bill:
"software that once installed and launched, enables the user to connect his or her computer to a network of other computers on which the users of these computers have made available recording or audiovisual works for electronic dissemination to other users who are connected to the network. When a transaction is complete, the user has an identical copy of the file on his or her computer and may also then disseminate the file to other users connected to the network."
Funny, seeing as IRC, HTTP, and FTP all clearly fall into this category under this definition. I'm sure all of them have also been used to tranfer files illegally. Several of these network protocols are used every day by millions of people daily. Microsoft has built in file sharing in their operating systems, will they be charged under this law? Also, under this law with this definition, a program that would make a simple change in the header information for the file when it is transfered would make the copy not an exact copy, and thus would not apply under this law.

Will this bill really accomplish anything? Are they planning on selectively choosing who will be prosecuted under this law? Will large corporations such as Microsoft and Apple be charged as their software can be used to transfer files just as these P2P networks? I don't see any restrictions on windows file sharing that prevents users from transfering illegal copies of movies, games, or music. Do the people writing this bill have any idea about the field they are governing?

Carnivore and it's big brother

The Carnivore project was officially dropped earlier this week by the FBI.Carnivore was a system that could monitor internet activity on individuals already under investigation. This is very similar to a wiretap on a phoneline. It was retired as they are now using other commerical software to conduct this type of investigation.

But apparently there is another system running that our government denies even exists, called Echelon. Echelon is the world's most sophisticated network monitoring system, and is designed and coordinated by the United States NSA(National Security Agency), and also used by British and Allied Intellegence agencies. The Echelon system is used to intercept ordinary e-mail, fax, telex, and telephone communications carried over the world's telecommunications networks. It is a network that captures massive amounts of data from satellite, microwave, cellular and fiber-optic traffic, including communications to and from North America. Echelon is a 24/7/365 monitoring network that can monitor several types of communication through many different networks. No search warrant or any other type of court order is needed in order for your communications to be monitored. Heck, they probably already are. There are not many details that have been released about the Echelon system so we have no idea if it is being used illegally to spy on citizens or not. There is much more information about the Echelon system out there provided through the links in this article, and I'm not going to repeat much more of it. I guess this is just a reminder out there to all those people who think their communications are really private...

Wired and Wierd

These just about have to be some of the wierdest photos I have ever seen. Bill Gates in 1983 in some wierd pose. No more comments....

Why I hate SUV's

Here's a little article written by Stephanie Mencimer that I read recently and basically sums up my hatred for urban SUV's.

A good read I thought, even if it is a bit sensationalist.

Petaling around?

Cool little test here that had me frustrated for quite a while until I figured it out. Have a go at it...

One clue is that the name of the game is a big hint!

Thank God for common sense.

Yesterday, January 13th 2005 an Atlanta, GA Judge ordered that previous stickers that were applied to the science textbooks for the Cobb County school District were unconstitutional and be removed. The judge said the disclaimers are an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.

It seems quite evident that the only reason for this group of parents to demand something like these stickers for the books is to push their creationist "propaganda" onto our youth. By placing this sticker on the cover it only serves to confuse the children by muddying the difference between the common usage of the word theory (aka. hunch) and the scientific meaning. It seems that the term theory has been coopted by religious fundamentalists, and twisted it to mean something it's not.

Also, evolution is a theory regarding changes of the genes of a population over time, resulting in new specie. Evolution however, does not explain the ultimate origins of life on earth, which these parents seem to be concerned with. If they claim the sticker should stay because it points out that this theorie is not ultimate truth, then where are all the other stickers pointing out that every other scientific theory is not ultimate truth. Remember gravity? Last time I checked it's still a theory? Heliocentric theory, Atomic Theory, and Electricity Theory are all only theories, we cannot in our current state prove that they are ultimate truths.

Anyways, didn't you find the title a tad funny?

Smart guns mandate dumb users?

According to Eurekalert this report claims that the new Smartgun technology works, but is it really so? According to the report there is a 90% success rate of recognizing the user, but I for one would not trust my life with a gun which would fail to work 1 out of 10 times. Another item that caught my attention was the fact that all the tests were conducted at a shooting range, which do not reflect many of the real uses of handguns. Will the device still have the same success rate after a law enforcement official has been involved in a scuffle and his hands are either dirty, sweaty, or effected somehow by the scuffle?

A law in New Jersey has already mandated that these guns be the only ones that will be able to be purchased 3 years after they first become commercially available. The report also recommends that the rest of the country adopt this legislation.

If the issue of guns being used by the wrong people either accidentially or purposly seems to drive us to such acts, I for one am appalled at the danger of buckets of water. Statistics from recent years whow that 115 young children died from falling into buckets of water and 174 children ages 0-18 years old died from being accidentially shot with a firearm per year. If we break down the statistics to only include young children ages 0-5 that would give buckets of water a death rate of still 115 since all children were young and 48.333 deaths/year to accidental firearm discharges. This proves that buckets are a real threat to our society (I mean hey, who's gonna pay for our Social Security when we get old if all our children are dead...) and I suggest we take immediate actions to prevent conventional buckets from being produced. A computer sensory recognition system needs to be added to all future buckets that will be able to detect all children around them and be able to "disarm" themselves (automatically close the lids) when children come within 50 feet of the bucket. Yes this will increase the price of buckets dramatically and decrease their usability, but for God's sake, think of the children!

Also in other news, it appears that drowning is a disease according to The World Health Organization.

Couple of new definitions...

Another couple of terms that people seem to throw around without any regard for the words' meanings are Atheist, Anarchist, and Agnostic. Linkage:

Agnostic - A person who believes that, at our present level of knowledge, we cannot know whether or not a God exists.

Atheist - a person who denies the existence of God

Anarchist - Anarchists advocate the overthrow of organized government. They sometimes see cooperatives and voluntary associations of individuals and groups as the best way to organize society.

Where the beer flows like wine...

If all goes well I should be leaving for warm (maybe?) and sunny(hopefully...) Florida at the end of the month. I'll try to bring back some pics and have them posted on here. I plan on spending about 8 days camping in southern Florida around the keys. Will stay at least one night in Key West hopefully. The last long vacation I had was last February, so this will be a nice vacation!

Your P2P is so small, you need tweezers to run a file transfer!

A P2P (Peer to Peer, such as KaZaA and Emule) file sharing application that was written in 15 lines in Python code is now available here. I do not predict this will be the next big P2P app but this is just an example of how easily and quickly P2P applications can be produced and distributed.

A bill such as the INDUCE Act could make any attempt to produce, distribute, or execute such programs illegal as it is overly broad and generalistic. Is this bill going to do any good? Will it put an end to copyright infringement on the internet? Will it be as successful as our "War on Drugs", which seems to be only letting the druglords make more money? Making something illegal does not make it go away, this attempt is futile. There must be a feasible way to execute this plan if they plan on introducing the INDUCE Act.

The backers of the INDUCE Act also do not seem to note that P2P also has other uses than copyright infringement. P2P applications can be used to also distribute legal files such as Linux distributions and copyright free media, both of which can be very large files. P2P can alleviate the problem with centralized file distribution. For more information on this see this Wiki article about BitTorrent.

Now go back to being counter productive....

Laser Wielding New Jersey Terrorists...

A N.J. man charged with aiming a laser at aircraft and may now face up to 25 years in prison and up to $200,000 is fines under federal anti-terrorism laws (AKA the Patriot Act). Sounds like a great use of the Patroit Act, good thing we are stopping those Laser Wielding New Jersey Terrorists with it. Granted, it was really stupid of him to shine this laser on multiple aircraft on different occasions, but why is the patriot act being used? He is not a terrorist. Does he deserve to be punished, perhaps... but 25 years?
Apparently he was using his daughters green laser(these lasers are much more visible to the human eye than red ones, see this link) to do this with. With headlines like this associating these new green lasers with terrorism, it might not be long before you can't buy one, so if you had planned on buying one, might want to do that soon...(Infact, you could buy one here at ThinkGeek.com!)

A link to the USA Today article.

*Takes off tinfoil hat*

Define Ironic...

Recently I had a discussion with someone about the meaning of the word "Irony". It seems to me that many people have been using it and "Ironic" for many different meanings. Well, here is a couple of definitions.

Irony - incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs

Irony - In literary criticism, the effect of language in which the intended meaning is the opposite of what is stated.

Now start using it correctly.

Genisis

The Beginning
1 In the beginning God created the fiber and the networks.

2 Now the internet was [a] formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the routers.

3 And God said, "Let there be data," and there was data. 4 God saw that the data was good, and He separated the data from the darkness. 5 God called the data "The World Wide Web," and the darkness he called "Internet." And there was good data, and there was bad data the first day.

6 And God said, "Let there be a protocol between the data to separate data from data." 7 So God made the protocols and separated the data from the data around it. And it was so. 8 God called the protocol "Hypertext Markup Language." And there was good data, and there was bad data the second day.

9 And God said, "Let the bad users of the internet be gathered to one place, and let pictures appear." And it was so. 10 God called the pictures "JPEG's," and the gathered bad data he called "AOL" And God saw that it was good.

...etc etc etc.....

26 Then God said, "Let us make the net in our image, in our likeness, and let it reflect how we see events over our lives and give access to this to the birds of the air, the livestock, over all the earth, [b] and over all the creatures that move along the ground."



27 So God created blogging in his own image,

in the image of God he created it;

good and bad he created them.


28 God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Record the events of the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground."

29 Then God said, "I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for insight. 30 And to all the bloggers of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground-everything that has the breath of life in it-I give every green plant for insight." And it was so.

31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning-the sixth day....

... Several years later this blog appeared out of thin air. Just catching everyone up on how this site came to be. Hopefully there will someday be some insightful and intelligent posts, but you may consider it allt o be utter rubbish. Hey, at least I think some of my stuff is good.