I am a Vernor Vinge fan. One of my favorite books is his "A Fire Upon the Deep".

For a while I've been aware that there is an annotated edition of it on an obscure, totally impossible to get a copy of CD called The "Electric Science Fiction" 1993 Hugo/Nebula Award Anthology CD. The edition available on that CD claims to contain 500KB of annotations from the author. I, and many others, would very much like to see those annotations, but it seemed they disappeared, along with the CD itself.

About... wow, a year and five months ago!... I killed my hard drive. In the end, the most importent thing I lost was music I had written with my synthesizor, which was irreplacable in every sense of the word.

I could have sworn at the time that I had taken a backup of these things, along with a RedHat installation (back when it fit on one CD), but I could never find it, so I assumed I had mis-remembered. Especially after I found a couple of old RedHat CDs with other backups on them, but no music.

'Quite a number of us who participated in the early Internet protocol design were from the computer security research side, and did our best to make the Internet architecture secure from the start. But the NSA (I am told) told DARPA that any attempt to introduce security mechanisms into TCP/IP's architecture would be viewed very negatively. (This happened at about the same time that Rivest, et al. received a mysterious threatening letter from a senior military official claiming that their work on the RSA cipher must be stopped immediately)....'

I had a nicely researched article here a couple of days ago, but due to a bug in Mozilla and an over-aggresive mouse click, I lost it.

However, I hope to reconstruct it tonight.

In other news, this is a good article.

Copyright has become an interesting topic to a large number of people, so I'm going to assume for the moment that anyone reading this site is aware of Lawrence Lessig's case against copyright term extension, soon to be in the Supreme Court. I wanted to say a couple of things about that.

The news has been buzzing around for the last couple of days that Representative Berman, whose palm has been crossed with silver by the entertainment industry, would introduce a bill permitting copyright holders to hack or DoS people allegedly distributing their works without permission. Well, the bill has been introduced - read it and weep. Although the bill wouldn't allow copyright owners to alter or delete files on your machine, they would be allowed to DoS you in essentially any other way. Let me restate that: the MPAA and RIAA are asking that they be allowed to perform what would otherwise be federal and state criminal acts and civil torts, and you will have essentially no remedy against them under any laws of the United States. [Privacy Digest]

My analysis of the bill: Despite the obvious un-American nature of the bill, and the fact that the RIAA and MPAA are basically asking for permission to commit terrorist acts (that word has been tossed around a lot lately, but it's literally true here; they intend to "terrorize" their customers), the current incarnation of the bill is basically irrelevant. In order for a copyright holder to be allowed to get away with "disabling, interfering with, blocking, diverting, or otherwise imparing the unauthorized distribution, display, performance, or reproduction of his or her copyrighted work", the act must meet several criteria:

• must not cause economic loss to any person other then affected file traders
• must not cause an economic loss of more then $50.00 per impairment to the property of an affected file trader not related to the copyrighted material

"I can't help it," Rosenblatt said. "Even when I close my eyes at night, I feel myself deconstructing things in my dreams—random stuff like that two-hour Dukes Of Hazzard reunion special or the Andy Warhol postage stamp or commercials for that new squeezable gel deodorant. I'd say I'm going crazy, but that presupposes an artificial barrier between societally preexisting concepts of 'sanity' and 'insanity' which themselves represent another false dichotomy maintained for the preservation of certain entrenched elements of the status quo and... Oh, God. I'm doing it again."

House Majority Leader Dick Armey, in his markup of legislation to create a Homeland Security Department, yesterday rejected a national identification card and scrapped a program that would use volunteers in domestic surveillance.

Mr. Armey, chairman of the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, included language in his markup of the legislation to prohibit the Justice Department from initiating the Terrorism Information and Prevention System, also called Operation TIPS.

Mr. Armey's bill also would create a "privacy officer" in the Homeland Security Department, which he said was the first ever established by law in a Cabinet agency. Mr. Armey said this person would "ensure technology research and new regulations from the department respect the civil liberties our citizens enjoy."

I was watching TV the other day (I think it was on Pleasentville, which ABC recently ran), and I was shocked to notice someone on TV with a bemused (head tipped down, one eyebrow higher then other, small asymmetric smile) expression on their face.

It occurred to me how rarely I see the more complicated facial expressions on actor's faces. All actors can do fear, anger, happiness, all the basic emotions. But when's the last time you saw mystified (head tipped down, forehead furrowed and eyebrows closer together, slight frown)? Or realization (head slightly up, small nodding, open mouth, eyebrows neutral or slightly up in center)? Or recognition of fact that should have been already known or was obvious (eyebrows high, strong frown only at corner of the mouth, small nodding up and down)?

The Bush administration plans to enlist millions of Americans to spy on their fellow Americans for a program called Terrorism Information and Prevention System, or TIPS....

Even if it is limited to public places, the program is offensive. The idea of citizens spying on citizens, and the government collecting data on everyone who is accused, is a staple of totalitarian regimes. East Germany's infamous Stasi internal security system kept files on some six million citizens -- about a third of the country. Fortunately, TIPS is already facing opposition. The American Civil Liberties Union, not surprisingly, has denounced the program. But so, too, has Dick Armey, the House Republican leader. The "Postal Service" has already expressed serious reservations about participating. And the initial version of the bill to create a Homeland Security Department, introduced by Mr. Armey, includes language that would prevent TIPS from going forward.

'EFF was advised that Sen. Ernest Hollings has written a letter to the FCC advocating immediate implementation of a broadcast flag mandate -- even without additional legislation. Hollings apparently claimed that the FCC already has, under existing statutes, the authority necessary to require that all manufacturers comply with BPDG rules.'

I question the appropriateness and perhaps even legality (in an abstract theoretical sense) of a member of the legislative branch of the government urging a part of the executive branch to grab power it does not seem to have, because the legislative branch has not granted it. The legislator does not work by fiat, it's his job to legislate. Should he fail in that endeavor, as Hollings has up to this point, he should not go behind the scenes and try to get the executive branch to do his bidding anyhow.