Month: July 2002

At $2 a question and an hour or more of research (who knew the Air Force’s Basic Training Manual was so obscure?), it’s going to take a lot of work to get anything from this. Since they won’t even send you a check until you earn $50, this is not going to cover a whole of my hobby budget.

TCPA / Palladium FAQ

Seen in these terms, TCPA and Palladium do not so much provide security for the user, but for the PC vendor, the software supplier, and the content industry. They do not add value for the user. Rather, they destroy it, by constraining what you can do with your PC – in order to enable application and service vendors to extract more money from you.

This is all being sold as making the personal computer more trustworthy.

The Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, or TCPA, was formed by Compaq, HP, IBM, Intel and Microsoft. All five companies have been individually working on improving the trust available within the PC for years. These companies came to an important conclusion: the level, or “amount”, of trust they were able to deliver to their customers, and upon which a great deal of the information revolution depended, needed to be increased and security solutions for PC’s needed to be easy to deploy, use and manage. An open alliance was formed to work on creating a new computing platform for the next century that will provide for improved trust in the PC platform.

If you want me to trust you, then let me see what you’re doing and answer my questions.

It’s an odd use of the word “trust”: it has nothing to do with users being able to trust their computers. It’s not aimed at end-users at all: the intended customers are the media companies who can’t figure out how to distribute their wares without worrying about someone getting more than they paid for.

Thanks to the hardware and software being devised by the Faithless Five above, it makes the whole digital lifestyle that we hear so much about seem less like freedom and more like some dystopian future, where everything you read or hear is billed, no matter where you are and what you’re doing. The Attention Economy doesn’t begin to cover this: instead of selling your interest in entertainment to advertisers, we get billed for the entertainment as well. Super Bowl Party? Better not invite too many friends. New CD? Don’t turn the volume up too loud: could be unlicensed sharing.

CAUTION: if you are at all alarmed by paranoia or fear-mongering, do not follow this link. You have been warned.

A CHRONOLOGICAL HISTORY OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER
Continue reading “where are we going and why are we in this handbasket?”

Syndic8.com – Welcome!

Welcome to Syndic8.com. This is the place to come to find syndicated news feeds on a wide variety of topics. There is a lot here; be sure to explore all of the tabs at the top of the page. Here’s what we have:

* A community-driven effort to gather syndicated news headlines…
* A readable master list of syndicated news content…
* An XML list of syndicated news content…
* Quality of server measurement of all feeds, with statistics and history…
* Complete statistics on every aspect of the site’s content…

* Reviews and pointers to syndicated tools and sites…
* A very complete set of XML-RPC services…
* A plan to evangelize sites to syndicate their content…
* A categorization system which uses existing schemes such as DMOZ
* Articles and tutorials on syndication…

Never heard of them before.

Earthworms, redworms, red wigglers, Eisenia fetida, nature’s soil aerators…

I have lots of the little critters: I can’t imagine buying them when a pile of wet leaves seems to spontaneously generate them.

Nicest of the Damned: Amtrak shutdown

Unfortunately, Congress has forced Amtrak to maintain nationwide service, and there’s not a nationwide commitment to the service. If Congress wants universal service, they need to pony up the sliver of highway funds that Amtrak represents.

If they’re willing to let Amtrak cut unpopular routes, it could be profitable right now.

And Amtrak would cease to exist outside the NE corridor.

National rail service is skeletal at best, with the interstate highway system’s spread over the past 50 years.

If you want to ride the rails from Atlanta, you can go to Washington DC or New Orleans, but not to Florida (at least not without a trip to one of thoee other cities).

I can’t imagine the scenario that would make rail service really viable without drifting off into the realm of outright fantasy. Care to join me?
Continue reading “should there be a national transit plan?”

If I could, I would abolish citizenship as a birthright. Make all who aspire to be citizens take the test immigrants take.

I don’t want to diminish citizenship, but to enhance it. I believe people take it for granted and should be reminded how valuable it is, how lucky they are, and how hard they should work to preserve and defend what they have.

One thing I hope to get rid of by this proposal is hyphenated citizenship, where people divide their loyalties between the country in which they live and some other country or region, often one they have never known. I’m all for acknowledging one’s family tree, but when origin or ethnicity is used as an argument against working for the common good, it’s wrong.

I’d also like to see a return to the idea of the commons, those things we all share but that can be ruined by the arrogance or ignorance of a few. From the air we breathe and water we drink to the roads we drive and the lands we all share, it would behoove us to stop thinking of it all as ours, singular, instead thinking of it as ours, plural.

The newspapers and magazines continually bemoan the lack of civic involvement, to say nothing of ignorance (quick: name your senators and house representative. Bonus points if you know when your senators are up for re-election).

But the only way to solve that is to make people earn the title of citizen. The founders of the republic risked the gallows for the ideas and principles we all claim to hold dear. In these self-interested times, people don’t even want to vote or serve on a jury, seeing these obligations as burdens rather than rights. Two hundred years ago, the notion of pure citizen democracy, where no one was born into privilege and everyone (according to the ideas of that time) was equal, was truly revolutionary, and millions flocked to this place where they could make a life for themselves. It seems quaint to think of these ideas now, but there are people willing to risk their lives, by crossing deserts or stowing away in freight containers, for the opportunities enshrined in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. In short, they’re willing to earn it or die in the attempt.

Say what you like about their actions, they’re willing to risk all for a chance. How many of us are?