Saturday, March 22, 2003...

You know advertisements are annoying when they take up more than 25% of the screen. Kudos to Yahoo for their great usage of screen space for animated advertisements. >8^(

- Robert 5:29 PM [+] -

Many apologies for my lack of initiative!

Those who may recall (probably a scant few), I promised a lengthy rant on January 14th about systems administrators trying to obtain cracking rights on the machines of their clients in order to kill processes. Well... I never got around to actually writing anything, so I'll just post the point to my argument against such an idea.

We have freedoms in the United States, one of those freedoms is our right to own property. For instance, you, yourself, can claim no ownership to my computer equipment, or even my car (though the Bank has a pretty good claim in the form of a loan!). With the proliferation of Microsoft operating systems and such great Microsoft initiatives as a registration process for XP that is a blatant violation of your privacy. It seems logical to some that the next step is coddling an end-user along by remotely killing processes on their machine that may be "harmful" to the network. And some of these people are all for it.

Well, I find this insulting.

First off, I don't consider myself a mere consumer when it comes to computers. If that were the case then I would simply consume, I wouldn't interact. This is at the heart of the reason my broadband connection (provided through my cable company) came at a bit of relunctance on my part. The connection they provide is simply too "consumer oriented." But it is the only broadband solution I have right now in my area.

But what's to stop my cable company from claiming that since I'm connected to their system, they have the right to come in and kill a process on my machine. What if I'm doing some work on a server that I own and am conducting a portscan against that machine for security reasons? Can my cable company kill the portscan process on my machine? What if I'm pinging www.google.com, which I do sometimes to verify a connection? Can my cable company use an automated process to go in and kill my ping automatically?

How far can we go before we push the envelope of the 1984 scenario?

- Robert 12:00 AM [+] -

Sue happy...

United Press International: First Rhode Island fire lawsuits filed

Something struck me as only so much frivolity whenever I read this article. First off I'll let the article speak for itself.

Also named in the suit were the town of West Warwick, the town fire inspector Denis Larocque, the manufacturer of the pyrotechnics and the American Foam Corp., which sold the club the material used for soundproofing, which burned like gasoline.

Of course soundproofing burns fast because it is made of foam! Foam has lots of surface area. Soundproofing has been used for years and I have yet to hear of an epidemic where studios who use soundproofing have been stupid enough to use pyrotechnics around said soundproofing. It looks to me like this is a case of collective stupidity among the club owners and an 80's hair band. So why sue the manufacturer of the foam soundproofing? Well, we need to blame as many people is possible I guess.

Suing the town and it's fire inspector sounds a little more plausable, however ask yourself the following question. Is the town fire inspector an expert in mass hysteria and it's effects on a human being's capacity to reason? There were other emergency exits of course. When people run from a fire however, they run away from the flame. That means the farthest exit.

Oh, and another thing:

"Court officials also advised those who were considering filing suits to "use caution" when retaining lawyers. Some relatives have complained to the court that lawyers were being overly aggressive in chasing the cases, the Journal reported."

Lawyers when promised big money will do wild and crazy things. Who are the criminals anyway?

- Robert 10:31 AM [+] -

BROADBAND!!! Woohooo!!!

Finally I have broadband.

- Robert 12:46 AM [+] -

Shrinkwrapped stuff...

While at the local Borders the other day, I happened upon a shrinkwrapped computer book. Normally one would expect Microsoft to shrinkwrap their comptuer books However this book was not Microsoft press' special brand of toilet paper. This was instead a pictoral history of computers by some company I forget the name of. Well. I would have to take the book cover's word for it that there were pictures inside. See, shrinkwrapping makes it hard to get inside the book. I've always been fond of the way bookstores let you almost read the entire book before you decide if you are going to purchase it. Shrinkwrapping almost seems to say "put me back down, you do not want to buy me."

Oh the joys of capitalism!

- Robert 10:31 PM [+] -