Category Archives: General

General

Taciturn

Does being a Gold Medal Winner mean that you have to be effusively communicative with the people whom paid $600M to broadcast the games?

NBC’s interview with Shani Davis after he won the gold medal in the 1000 meter skating event was disgusting at best.

I don’t think anyone is obligated to provide the media with an interview (unless contractually obligated, I know that the pros can get dinged for not giving interviews, but I don’t think Olympic Athletes are supposed to qualify as Pros) and I don’t think the media should even attempt to prejudge why an interviewee may or may not be responsive to the interviewer.

General, Politics, science fiction

On hiatus

Well, it has been a while since my last post. I’ve taken to drinking liberally, at least on odd Tuesdays. I also helped run a small SF convention.

In retrospect, I am not sure what I’ve been doing. I’ve discovered soduko, amazing how that will suck out your time.

Playing with the computer, trying to get MythTV working. More on that later in a geek posting.

Trying to get the books in order for income tax time.

Following the trials and tribulations of Teresa Nielsen Hayden. Sometimes the system can be so wrong.

And watching football playoffs, preparing forthe 2006 baseball season and trying to rip my music collection using MusicBrainz. Amazing how many CDs I have that aren’t in their database.

And now, it is off to a Linux Users Group.

General

Making Sense?

I found this link at Making Light that addresses 13 things that don’t make sense.

Now, I don’t have problems with understanding why 12 of these scientific conundrums don’t make sense, but I do question number 2, the Horizon Problem.

Why is the uniformity of the expanding universe heat signature a problem? We can see 14 billion light years in any direction. The seen universe is 28 billion light years wide. The background heat radiation is constant in all directions because the same expansion physics happened in all directions. Why is this a conundrum?

And we are the center of the universe.

General, Politics

Organized Relations

I notice that Bush declares it legal to wiretap Americans without a warrant:

So, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, I authorize the interception of international communications of people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations.

from a Dec 19th, 2005 conference.

Evidently, Bush, sharp legal mind that he is, got this vetted by the same administration lawyers who think torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners is OK.

It is the last few words of the quote that worry me. Based on comments of the Vice-President, various administration officials and Republican lawmakers, over the past few years, I think the Democratic Party falls into the “related terrorist organizations” category, along with anyone who opposes the Bush and any of his policies. Good thing I’m not organized.

Geek Stuff, General

Column from PC Magazine: Pathetic European Attack on Google and the Net

Column from PC Magazine: Pathetic European Attack on Google and the Net

In a headline-grabbing comment last week, Pinto Balsemão, head of the European Publishers Council, said that the Internet cannot continue to be free, as it has been for the last decade. He wasn’t suggesting that publishers make all their sites pay-per-view, but that search engines could not and should not be able to search for content freely.

There is some concern that Google, and other search engines, can run rampant through a publishers library and start providing copyrighted works to the public, for free or a fee.

If this is a real concern, I can think of several ways to stop this.

  • Get off the internet.
  • Block the bots. I know what bots are visiting my web pages. I could set filters to stop them from accessing pages. Then they wouldn’t be collected, stored, mined, and indexed on the main site.
  • Get W3C to add a tag that tells bots that this page should not be indexed. Maybe even set the tag to allow some bots and forbid others, so internal search engines can provide a catalog for the Intranet. (Note: Intranet vs. internet)
  • Whitelist allowed users. Only allow valid, authorized IP adresses to access the web sites. In a closed community, this is a lot more manageable than a site that wants to be available to anyone, anywhere, anytime.

There are so many controls that a user can provide to limit access to files and pages on the internet. Folks seem to have forgotten them, or never understood how the system worked; just following the lead of what was done before, by a bunch of hackers who didn’t really want to restrict access to information, copyrighted or not.

Of course, it will require a lot more work to manage everything. An expenditure of time, money, and effort to limit access to a system that is a free-for-all in its natural state. But, it can be done.

Can I patent these ideas?