Tales From SYL Ranch

Custom ROMs

2010-08-10T21:35:00.006-05:00

The Droid Saga

Episode III: Custom ROMs

It is a period of uncertainty on Bill's Droid. Having been tempted by the power of Android 2.2, he manually installed Verizon's pushed build of Android 2.2 FRG01B.

The networking stack was buggy and Verizon ceased the push immediately -- but the damage was done: the Droid was crippled. The Droid was eventually flashed back to Android 2.1 and then a "factory build" of Android 2.2 FRG22 was installed.

Peace returned to Bill's Droid, but rumblings of discord continued. The Droid was now rooted, and the enormous power this represented could not be ignored ...

The sheer utility of Wireless Tether on the Droid is obvious. Now, no matter where I go, I can get on the Internet via any device capable of WiFi.

I can't stress enough just how well this works. If the Droid is itself connected to WiFi, tethered devices use WiFi; connected to 3G, tethered devices use 3G. Bandwidth is limited by the Droid's upstream connection and/or the bandwidth limitations of WiFi.

This really works, something I had occasion to discover in a very concrete way.

As I mentioned previously, WiFi seemed a bit flaky under FRG22. It was better than craptastic FRG01B, but not as good as Android 2.1. It seemed possible that the networking stack was still buggy. To know for sure, the Droid would need a different networking stack.

Enter ROM Manager, a program that makes installing different custom ROMs on rooted Droids a dream.

I've flashed ROMs on other devices. It generally goes well, but on the occasions when it goes badly, it usually goes very badly. I've bricked a phone doing it, and I've no desire to brick a second. I certainly couldn't afford a new one right now.

Consequently, I've not flashed ROMs on my Droid. However, I'm now confident enough to at least bring it back to FRG22 that I decided to see if ROM Manager was as good as the Market description says.

It is. In fact, it entirely exceeds my expectations about what ROM management software can do. In fact, I'm not even going to post instructions for using it. They would be: download it from the market to your rooted Android device. Follow the instructions. It will reboot a few times when you make changes, usually warning you when it will do so.

Otherwise, just watch the text streaming past as ROMs install.

In a few minutes, the Droid was running the most recent release candidate of Cyanogen: version 6.0.0 RC2.

The utility involved in this ROM is fantastic. I have no idea how it stacks up against other ROMs, and I'm not likely to find out soon.

I might have, but after going to this ROM, WiFi was considerably better, but still not as good as Android 2.1. Furthermore, the 3G connection was really fast. Not HD video streaming fast, but much faster than under 2.1 or FRG22.

As I mulled over the possibility of a different ROM, there was another in a series of massive thunderstorms in central Iowa, USA. It was during this that I found the real culprit.

On two occasions, I've accidentally fallen behind far enough on my cable payment that the cable company cut my Internet connectivity. Because of how the network operates, this isn't immediately apparent unless you power-cycle your router.

The router (and everything else in the house) power-cycled repeatedly during the thunderstorm as power blinked or was lost for a period of several minutes. When it seemed stable again and I started powering on my computing equipment, nothing would connect to the Internet. A quick check of the router revealed I was now on the cable company's private network, which had only occurred before when they'd turned me off.

A quick check of my cable company's Web site (via my Droid-tethered laptop) revealed that yes, I'd allowed my bill to go unpaid that long. A quick check of my bank's Web site (also via tether) revealed what I already knew: that my unemployment-era bank account wouldn't have the money to pay for reconnection and the back balance until Friday morning.

The reality is that my home network was stuck without bandwidth for at least a week. I could survive if everything except my laptop has no bandwidth. However, as an IT professional, my work and employability is badly impacted without a near-constant Internet connection.

Leave it to the Droid to save the day.

With the newfound 3G speeds combined with WiFi tethering, my laptop now had access to the 3G network. It's not the 20MB of my cable connection, but it's good enough to do work.

In fact, it's so good that I've started to look at the feasibility of adding a second Android device to my Verizon account and dedicating it solely to WiFi tethering. With an Android device dedicated to WiFi tethering, I could eliminate the cable and its bill.

Technically, the drawback is significantly-decreased bandwidth. This has a drawback for me personally:

For more than two years, I've not turned on my TV except to use it as a monitor for a computer or game console. The only time it's used as a TV are when my daughters visit, and summer visitation just ceased. They won't be back in the house for months, so it's just me.

(I'm unclear: how disconnected with the TV culture does it make me that I was unaware that several channels considered important by teenage girls had really bad reception? Furthermore, that when I looked at it and realized the cause was physical connectivity upstream, that my first thought was that it was probably decreasing my bandwidth?)

All my entertainment is via the Internet. I watch YouTube and Hulu a lot. If I find something I particularly like, I typically acquire it. When the BBC airs new episodes of Doctor Who, Torchwood, or The Sarah Jane Adventures, I have new HD episodes within a couple of hours of transmission thanks to BitTorrent.

(I've even kept up on the K-9 TV series, but I've yet to force myself to watch all the episodes. It's not bad, just a bit too much of a children's show. The Whoniverse will work with a children's show like The Sarah Jane Adventures, but K-9 just feels forced.)

In any case, a decision to go 100% wireless means my sole entertainment source would be curtailed. I'm not sure I want to pull that trigger.

It's technically feasible, however -- possibly even financially so. If one purchased a newer, fastier, sexier Android device for personal use (Droid X, I'm thinking of you!), then the Droid could be flashed with a very simple, stripped-down ROM with only the WiFi tether app constantly running.

Oh, did I mention that the Droid can also do firewalling with DroidWall?

It's true that Verizon is basically giving away a wireless tether device, the MiFi 2200. Unfortunately, it's attached to their idiotic limited data plans. The smartphone data plan is unlimited.

The fact that this is so eminently possible proves the general utility of the Android platform. There's no technical reason that one couldn't produce a WiFi router using it.

In fact, if some bright cookie really thought about it, they'd mass-produce an Android device to do just that, only with one or more wired network connections.

At present, I'm crunching numbers. I probably won't go through with it, particularly if I find a job that will easily pay my cable bill. I prefer 20MB/s on a largely empty spur of a cable modem infrastructure. Short of a job, this is a high-utility, low-cost way for an individual have high-speed Internet connectivity at the cost of a Verizon unlimited data plan.

Would that my power company was so eminently exploitable in terms of reducing one's bill -- though I'm also crunching numbers for converting most of the appliances and lighting in the house to USB ...

Craptastically Fraktacular Flash

2010-08-08T14:28:00.006-05:00

The Droid Saga

Episode II: Craptastically Fraktacular Flash

It is a period of chaos on Bill's Droid. Having been tempted by the power of Android 2.2, he installed Verizon's pushed build of Android 2.2 FRG01B to his Droid.

The networking stack was buggy and Verizon ceased the push immediately. Nevertheless, Bill's Droid was bitten by the bug. Networking -- particularly wireless -- was almost impossible.

The Droid is crippled, and it seems no hope remains to return peace and freedom to the Droid ...

Having gotten sick of waiting for an official FRG22 to appear and fix my numerous FRG01B bugs, I decided to flash back to 2.1, then install FRG22 as blogged here. My results:

Upgrade

The flash/upgrade process worked like a charm.

Speed

Apparent speed of the device has increased dramatically. I'm not clear that it appears any faster than 2.1, but running craptastic FRG01B for a day has colored my perceptions.

Networking

The networking issues aren't as bad. They are not fixed, however. My guage for this is YouTube.

I watch a lot of YouTube videos. Prior to the upgrade they would all consistently stream virtually laglessly. This was always particularly apparent at home where I have 20MB virtually to myself on a fortuitous cable modem infrastructure spur.

After the upgrade, YouTube videos are timing out a lot. They'll first lag, then time out.

While YouTube is most apparent, it's not just YouTube. All Web sites seems sluggish, on either Browser or SkyFire. I'm hope that this is impacting my Flash experience (see below).

I'm installing some specific networking tools to see if I can determine exactly what's going on. I'll post more as I do.

Apps

The Gallery works as advertised. I find this interesting, considering how badly broken by networking issues it was in FRG01B. I would expect it to have improved, but not to appear totally lagless.

Apps that need Internet connectivity vary. None respond as rapidly as under 2.1u1. Google Voice is noticably sluggish. Even the mobile Google Reader site, which used to be instantaneous, lags.

One of the few apps that appears unaffected is GMail.

Trap! is still a bit slow, but nowhere near as horrible as under FRG01B.

2D Graphics Bug

On the positive side, the 2D graphics bug introduced in the 2.1 upgrade has been corrected. LagTest consistently shows 60fps with no sudden dips down to 20fps.

Flash

As mentioned previously, I have coined a new phrase to describe my experience with Flash on the Droid:

Craptastically fraktacular.

It's awful. Really, really awful. It's as though Adobe, Google, Verizon, Motorola, et al, rickrolled us:

Look, Flash on the Droid! It's frakking awesome!

It's definitely not awesome. It is frakked, however -- indeed, it's craptastically fraktacular!

Since the currently-available Flash 10 is still beta, I'll reserve final judgment. However, in the interests of science I can report my experience:

I dare you tou play Falling Girl on a Droid.

Users with desktop browsers are now glued to their screen by this strange, incongruous game. They can't help but click it and move the girl around. It's one of the oldest, simplest games on the Internet.

Droid users see a girl falling slow as molasses in January at roughly 2FPS.

The simple control of click-and-hold doesn't translate into press-and-hold on the handheld. There's no way to interact with the game.

Even if you could, it's so laggy as to be pointless. It's possible that this is to some extent due to networking issues, but there's also an unfortunate flaw in Adobe's basic implementation of Flash:

Adobe essentially made a browser plug-in like the ones they make for desktops. The problem is that the Flash content I've seen so far simply wasn't designed for a handheld device.

Unfortunately, heavily Flash-enabled sites that look amazing in a Web browser on a 15" display tend to look terrible on a handheld. Text becomes illegible, and zooming in and out to alternate between seeing the content and being able to interact with it becomes painfully tedious.

Worse, as mentioned with Falling Girl, there is no intuitive control substitution. Flash works great when you have a mouse to click and hold, or to hover over content for more information. It doesn't translate to a press-and-hold. I've no idea how to "hover" with my finger without also clicking.

After dealing with this craptastically fraktacular Flash on the Droid, I no longer have any interest in learning.

One of two things needs to happen with Flash-heavy sites:

Redesign the content to include a totally separate mobile interface, or stop using Flash.

All the Flash content sitting out there that's been around as long as Falling Girl? It's pretty much useless on a handheld. They're going to have to completely re-think everything.

Flash videos are another matter entirely. They lag in general, but this may be due to underlying networking issues. I'll forgo judgement until networking works again.

The problem with Flash videos is that the player is simply embedded into the Web site, the same as on a desktop -- complete with tiny, miniaturized, impossible-to-manipulate controls.

The only way to deal with embedded Flash video on a handheld device is the thumbnail-and-player approach used by YouTube. Tap the thumbnail and the fullscreen player launches, with appropriate handheld controls.

As it stands, embedded Flash video is useless simply because the video controls become too tiny.

I'm not usually much of an Apple supporter (please, let's not get started: it's a topic for another day, and my thoughts on Apple are more complex than you think). However, if what I've experienced in the last few days with Flash 10b3, Steve Jobs may have a really, really good point.

We'll see how it turns out, but unless the finally-released Flash 10 is dramatically different, it may pound some nails into Flash's coffin.I don't know how it's going to work out, but it will be an interesting show to watch ...

Summary

This proves to me that FRG01B's networking stack was indeed buggy as a cockroach nest. It's not clear, however, that FRG22 entirely fixes the problem.

As mentioned, I've installed some monitoring and networking tools to watch what's happening under the hood a bit more closely. I've also now become conversant with ROM manipulation. A side-effect of this was root access to the Droid, which I've lacked since the 2.1 upgrade.

This has had some interesting benefits, not the least of which was wireless tethering. I am extremely impressed that the next time I see my daughters, I'll be able to offer them wireless Internet for their laptops and handhelds. I plan to make the incredibly tedious drive from my ex-wife's Chicagoland home to my Des Moines-area house a lot more pleasant by allowing them to be constantly connected to the Internet.

The tethering works, too -- which is a bit of a puzzle, in fact. I had my Droid connected to the home router (20MB pipe). The Droid's Internet connectivity is laggy through this pipe. However, when I tethered my laptop to the Droid, the laptop's access speed was limited only by the wireless connections. It was by no means 20MB, but it was a workable multi-megabit connection.

Beyond the benefits of root access, ROM Manager makes the whole ROM replacement process so much simpler It's highly probable that I'll experiment with networking stacks by installing a variety of ROMs to see if networking is better under them.

I've flashed ROMs for other devices, but I've avoided it on the Droid so far. The device had so far outperformed all my expectations and I was in no hurry to be on the bleeding edge. However, having been forced to delve into it, I've become intrigued at the variety of images available.

I'm still experimenting, but as always I continue to be amazed at what the Droid can do.

Attack of 2.2

2010-08-05T14:01:00.065-05:00

The Droid Saga

Episode I: Attack Of Android 2.2

It is a period of peace and freedom on Bill's Droid. While no system is perfect, Bill's Droid is a model of efficiency and freedom.

Rumors have abounded about an upgrade to Android 2.2, said to be faster, squash many annoying Android 2.1 bugs, and most importantly to have Flash 10. When Android 2.2 was released by Verizon for the Droid, Bill investigated installing it on his beloved Droid without waiting for the OTA upgrade ...

Yesterday, I posted instructions to download and install the new, Verizon-pushed Android 2.2. Almost immediately, I was provided with a concrete example of why the bleeding edge is often a bad place to be. You'd think I'd've learned my lesson in January of 1996 when I rolled out Windows 95 to 300 workstations at nine sites.

To be explicit, I recommend that you do not upgrade to Android 2.2 using yesterday's instructions. I'll see if I can piece this together so you can understand why:

A couple of days ago, Motorola DROIDs on Verizon's network began being pushed an upgrade to Android 2.2. This was build number FRG01B.

Almost immediately, users began reporting problems. See this thread for examples, but they're best exemplified by these posts:

For the love of whatever you consider holy, how can I get back to 2.1?

I've had the 2.2 update for a few days now and it is horrible. My phone is slower and it will take more time than usual to open up any apps. Then when there are multiple apps running the phone slows down terribly.

Also, any of the apps that play music or podcasts (including the default media player) will randomly stop for no reason.

My phone will freeze if I am doing to much on it and will take about 5 mins for it to respond again, then it will freeze. The freezing thing is a new issue as of yesterday, so far it has happened three times.

I want 2.1 back! It ran so much smoother than this crap. I wanna roll it back and wait for the update next week that will fix any of the 2.2 issues.

If this is 2.2...it was NOT worth the wait.

And:

Mine too is very laggy and freezes, my gallery is not working properly, the net might as well be dial up (im barely getting 1mb download when before I was about 2.)

That JIT compiler is BS if you ask me it sucked the life right out of my phone.

I called VZW and they sent me to Motorola. I asked Motorola about rolling back to 2.1, they can't as of now but the customer service rep is looking into it and will be giving me a call back within 24hrs.

So to say I'm PO'ed at the moment is an understatement.

Anyway Motorola's number is +1 (800) 331-6456. I say call em and give them a piece of you mind like I did. Also I encourage everyone to call and email Verizon and express how them taking the usb tether off is ridiculous (yea we have easy tether but it's only a matter of time before that goes, in my opinion). Im sorry Im not paying 15 a month for 5GB, thats a rip. This is why people root their phones.

Motorola/Verizon/Google apparently saw the problem. The FRG01B push was halted -- but not before those of us on the bleeding edge had downloaded and manually installed the patch.

Almost immediately, Verizon pushed a second update that brought the Android 2.2 build up to FRG22. It's not yet known if this resolves the networking and other issues experienced by users.

Unfortunately, the FRG22 patch is not yet available in the wild. At least theoretically, it should eventually find its way to those of us who manually upgraded. Unfortunately, this may not occur fast enough to satisfy those of us affected.

After slightly more than 24 hours with the upgrade, I have observed the following issues. In large measure, they appear to be caused by networking problems:

Apparent speed of the device is slower. I've not timed it, and this may be more psychological than anything as I grow more frustrated. However, it does feel laggy. I'm not experiencing anything like the massive reported performance increase that Android 2.2 was supposed to bring.
I've got a 20MB pipe that runs a server, 1-3 laptops, and a variety of handheld devices as my daughters come in and out of the house. I routinely get 1.5MB torrent downloads for new HD Doctor Who episodes. My bandwidth is fine.

As of yesterday's force to FRG01B, the networking (wifi seems worst) has been at best slow. At least 25% of the time, it fails entirely.
YouTube is useless. I assume that because of the fouled network connection, the player simply times out on the stream.
The Gallery lags badly. I assume this is because of the fouled network connection attempting to load Picasa albums and ultimately failing.
Any app (and they are legion) that needs a good Internet connection is now unstable. Because the device can't get decent network connectivity, timeouts are reached and the apps tend to fail.
I play "Trap!" -- an addictive little game involving bouncing balls on the screen. The interesting thing about this app is that it's one of the few affected by the 2D graphics bug introduced in the 2.1 upgrade.

If anything, the performance of "Trap!" is worse under FRG01B than under 2.1.

To be a bit more scientific, I downloaded the LagTest app to check results, and it seems to show that the 2D bug may have been resolved.

It's unclear, then, what might be causing "Trap!" to lag.
I've coined a new phrase to describe my experience with Flash on the Droid: craptastically fraktacular.

It's just that awful. I tried playing Falling Girl, one of the oldest, simplest Flash games out there. The girl falls slow as molasses in January at approximately 2fps. The simple control of click-and-hold doesn't translate into press-and-hold on the handheld. There's no way to interact with the game.

Even if you did, it's so laggy as to be pointless. This may be due in part to network connectivity issues, at least with respect to streaming Flash videos. But Falling Girl is so simple that it ought to load very quickly with no further streaming. It shouldn't be so pointlessly slow.
I've not experienced any problems with local audio, which I tested by running a playlist of several hours duration. I'm testing video by playing Star Wars. In both cases, I'm using Meridian rather than the stock media players.

I suspect that the only way to deal with this will be some bright cookie rooting FRG01B. Once done, ROM Manager should work, and one can revert to 2.1.

Short of that, if the FRG22 update resolves these problems, then Verizon/Motorola/Google needs to get it into the wild ASAP. If there's an FRG22 that's been pushed to some users as reported, we need that file right the frak away.

Update: Thu Aug 5 21:22:45 UTC 2010

Per our friends at AndroidForums, there is a fix on the way. No doubt it will be in the wild in fairly short order. As soon as it's available and applied, I'll post more.

You know what it's like? It's like the Doctor's Sonic Screwdriver. You get used to it being able to do just about anything, flawlessly, no problem, every single time. Then it gets frakked up, and the next time you want to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow, it just makes a funky noise instead.

What the frak am I going to do if the Daleks show up before the fix arrives?!

Update: Fri Aug 6 16:41:43 UTC 2010

Having tired of the buggy FRG01B and there being no FRG22 patch in the wild, I decided to flash my Droid back to v2.1, then upgrade to FRG22 using the procedure outlined in this post. The procedure is as follows, modified for readability and taking into account my special circumstances.

Note that this procedure requires a Linux-based computer. I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit. The app referenced below is a 32-bit app, but should work provided you have the 32-bit libraries on your system. Ubuntu includes these by default.

Also note that, like it or not, this procedure will give you root access to your Droid.

On your Linux computer:

Download the 2.1 SP Recovery image (the file name is SPRecovery_ESE81.sbf)
Download sbf_flash
Download the Android 2.2 FRG22 release image (the file name is FRG22-Release.zip)
Open a shell prompt (Terminal). cd to the directory with sbf_flash and the .sbf recovery image.
At the shell prompt, type:
md5sum SPRecovery_ESE81.sbf

This should return 9b6a336cd8f067d4487935468c758d89. If it doesn't, stop now, as you have a bad recovery image.

On your Droid:

Connect the Droid to the Linux computer via USB cable.
Power off the Droid.
Press and hold the Up button on the Droid's D-PAD.
Power on the Droid. This will bring you to a black screen with white text on the Droid.

In the shell prompt on your Linux computer, type:

chmod +x sbf_flash && sudo ./sbf_flash SPRecovery_ESE81.sbf

You may be queried for your Linux user password. If so, enter it.
The Android 2.1 recovery image will be flashed onto your Droid.
After flashing, the Droid will reboot with a message that the battery is dead. Without unplugging the Droid from USB, remove and re-seat the battery.

This will cause the phone to immediately reboot. In order to complete the procedure, the boot process must be interrupted prior to boot. Therefore, when completing the re-insertion of the battery, immediately press and hold the X key on the physical keyboard.
When the Droid boots, use the D-PAD on the physical keyboard to navigate to mount options.
Select and choose Enable USB Mass storage. This will mount the SD card on the Droid as a flash drive on Linux.
Copy FRG22-Release.zip to the root of your sdcard.
Rename FRG22-Release.zip to update.zip.
On the Droid:

Use the Droid's D-PAD to navigate to and then select Disable USB Mass Storage.
Use the Droid's D-PAD to navigate to and then select Install
Use the Droid's D-PAD to navigate to and then select Allow update.zip Installation.
Use the Droid's D-PAD to navigate to and then select Install /sdcard/update.zip (deprecated).
This will install the "factory" Android 2.2 FRG22 build.
When the install is complete, use the Droid's D-PAD to return to the main menu.
Reboot the Droid.

When this is complete, you should be running a bug-free version of Android 2.2. It should be the same FRG22 build that will wind up on all Droid's via an OTA push.

It shouldn't be necessary to worry about the contents of your sdcard, nor any installed apps, nor settings. All customizations are retained during the upgrade.

I've performed this procedure myself. As always, standard disclaimers apply.

This build seems to fix most of the bugs listed previously, particularly the faulty networking stack.

Flash 10 remains craptastically fraktacular. If this performance is any indication, Apple is right: Flash is no longer appropriate on the Internet.

Disinformation Experiment

2010-07-28T13:00:00.000-05:00

Unless you've been living under a rock for the last few days, you know that our friends over at WikiLeaks have released an enormous amount of data regarding the US/Afghan War.

My initial reaction was to be both amazed at the sheer volume and impressed by the work done to make this information visible in a variety of popular applications. Specifically, the data available is:

The Google Earth version of the data is particularly impressive. Download this file, decompress it with 7-Zip, load it in Google Earth, and prepare to be amazed.

Unfortunately, while the presentation of this data set is impressive, as an IT Security specialist, I would be extremely remiss if I didn't point out that there is absolutely no vetting or fact-checking of this information. WikiLeaks isn't providing original documentation, but rather an organized, electronic data version.

In short, we have no idea if any of this data is valid.

Consequently, to prove the point, I'm trying an experiment:

After examining the files, I've discovered that the word "cache" appears frequently. I have taken the Google Earth version of the document and via a simple search-and-replace, have replaced all instances of "cache" with "nuclear weapon".

I'm now making this altered data set freely available to the public. Please download and distribute it as widely as possible.

The experiment is this: I'm curious how long it will take before the WikiLeaks data and my altered data are intermingled to the point that some idiot starts ranting about all the nuclear weapons found in Afghanistan.

It should be made clear that what WikiLeaks has stumbled across is the correct way to report news in the 21st Century: present it as a series of dates and times, corresponding to a location, and load it in Google Earth. Allow the user -- not the news organization -- to determine the relevancy of the incident to his/her daily life.

Beyond that, it's necessary to vet and fact-check the news incident and make that data also available so that the user can draw their own conclusions.

In short, what passes for "news" in the 21st Century is little more than heresay from sources that cannot be trusted. The only solution is to simply make the data available to the public and let the individual decide if it's relevant or accurate.

Unfortunately, what WikiLeaks has done is brilliant from the presentation perspective, but utterly useless as information. The sources appear to have been neither vetted nor fact-checked, therefore absolutely nothing they have presented is inherently valid.

Hence the explicit attempt to demonstrate this by making obviously-altered data available.

Note that no attempt has been made to disguise this file as the WikiLeaks version. File lengths are different, checksum hashes will not match, and the applications used to alter the data set may have left footprints of their use. No attempt was made to conceal the fact that this is a doctored version of the WikiLeaks data set.

This is intentional. A corollary to the point being made by this experiment is that even though the data set is easily distinguished from the WikiLeaks version, it won't matter.

Here is the link to the altered data:

All entries, KML format, the word "cache" replaced with "nuclear weapon"
16.4MB download, 169.7MB decompressed

Please download and disseminate as widely as possible. The point is to confuse the two data sets in order to make clear just how easily the original was altered. By extension, this should make clear that the WikiLeaks data set is no more reliable than simple heresay.

Please note: this file, in order to conform to the WikiLeaks release, is compressed in .7z format. You will need a program capable of decompressing .7z files. Such programs are freely available for all Linux distributions using the native package installer.

I've not used 7-Zip on OS X, but the code is UNIX-y, so I assume there is an OS X version.

For Windows, I recommend 7-Zip. It's free, small, fast, and can work with just about any compression format you care to mention. Note that in Windows, the command-line version is significantly faster than the GUI version, particularly with large files.

Independance Day Fail

2010-07-04T12:08:00.062-05:00

This is so tragically accurate that I'm embarrassed it had to be said by a non-American. At least it was a Scotsman.

What I find interesting is Deek Jackson's analysis of the American people. It tells volumes about how the world really sees us:

On the Fourth of July this year, the American people celebrated their independence from the monarchy of Britain by failing to throw out the fascist, evil, corporate-backed Nazi government that now rules over them with an iron fist.

As such, the American people are derelict in their duty according to their own Declaration of Independence which clearly says that:

"... whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends [Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government ..."

This is what bothers me: when the excrement hits the airflow device, what is the rest of the world going to want to do to us? At least one of them thinks that the American people are remiss in their duty to tear down this monster.

All I can say to the best and brightest of the world is this: it may look from a distance like Americans are given choices in elections, but we're not. For something like a century, those in power have colluded to bar even the knowledge of how to take back our Republic.

Here's an interesting fact that may help explain it:

In most U.S. States, a write-in candidate's votes aren't counted.

If you don't know what a write-in candidate is, it's a powerful concept: a voter can write the name of a person not on the ballot and cast their vote for that person.

This is a vital concept to maintaining a Constitutional Republic. A write-in candidate means that in theory, it would still be possible for the American people to take back their Republic. Even the explicit attempts of our governments to exclude candidates other than those of the current ruling parties couldn't overcome a real, grass-roots write-in candidacy.

Unfortunately, what's happened is that the current ruling parties have put up barriers to getting on ballots, ostensibly in the name of keeping frivolous candidates from finding their way there.

Ballot access laws are now so draconian that the candidates not associated with one of the ruling parties are forced to spend most of their time, energy, and money, just getting on the ballot.

This leaves them almost no time, energy, or money to campaign. They're barred from debates with the ruling party candidates, unmentioned in any but specialty press, and scoffed-at on the few occasions that they are.

What the ruling parties have done to write-in candidates is simple: made them subject to ballot access laws.

In most states, the minimum requirement to be on the ballot is collection of petitions. This is a process whereby you personally walk around to as many people as possible in your State. You get them to sign a State-issued legal document that says they think the candidate should be on the ballot.

This is painstaking and time-consuming. Usually it completely exhausts the resources of an individual or political party.

Unfortunately, the modern press being what it is, it does no good to have a name on the ballot if you can't effectively buy press time.

Now apply that to write-in candidates.

Consequently, write-in candidates have become politically meaningless. They're simply discarded.

This has been going on so long that my children consistently correct their Social Studies teachers that there are only two political parties. They cite me, a libertarian -- though they know there is a Constitution Party, a Natural Law Party, a Green Party ... even a Communist Party and a Nazi Party.

My daughters are unique. The overwhelming majority of the American people are utterly unaware that other political parties even exist.

What we're left with is a pair of "choices" that disagree only on trivialities. There are no grand debates about policy from a multitude of viewpoints; only the incessant, trivial squabbling of sociopathic narcissists fighting for all the power they can get their greedy little paws on:

As an American, I find it difficult to blame Americans for this situation. If several generations of people are taught that there are only two political parties, it's hard to fault them if that's what they believe.

Taking back the Republic at the ballot box simply won't happen. The populace has been made far too ignorant for that to occur.

We're also not going to take the Republic back by force. We might have a hundred years ago. Unfortunately, at the same time that the ruling parties were gutting the First Amendment with regard to ballot access, they also gutted the Second Amendment.

A hundred years ago, the arms available to individuals and their level of general training with them exceeded that of the country's military. This is clearly not the case today. Any attempt to take back the Republic by force will be met with the full military might of the United States Federal Government.

(Oh, and don't give me that crap about American soldiers not firing on American citizens. There's no doubt in my mind that the overwhelming majority would follow orders if they were framed appropriately.)

Ultimately, I ask the rest of the world some level of understanding when things implode as they now inevitably must. The American people were systematically barred from even the knowledge of how to take back their Republic.

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day

2010-05-19T22:39:00.008-05:00

My entry for Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.

Let's be very clear about this whole issue from the perspective of the Zero Aggression Principle:

Drawing a picture -- of anything -- initiates force against absolutely no one.

Now, you may not like the picture. If so, I would strongly encourage you not associate or do business with the cartoonist. Encourage your friends and family to do the same. This, too, initiates force against no one.

The moment you try and get a government to get involved, however, you are initiating force: specifically, you are delegating government force to achieve goals that you could not achieve with the means at your natural disposal.

Similarly, should you threaten or use coercion or violence against a cartoonist, you are initiating force.

That's the Zero Aggression Principle perspective. Allow me to offer my own personal view:

If you believe that a cartoon in any way threatens your religion, you're simply insane. The frightening thing, from a global perspective, is just how rampant this belief is -- and how it shines a million-candle spotlight on truly global insanity.

Make no mistake, the West has its own share of insanity, the primary one being a fanatical faith in government. However, so far, the West has managed to forge a civilization while the Middle East in particular has lagged well back into the Dark Ages.

I would strongly advise Muslims to, frankly, get over themselves. Christians have endured artwork portraying a crucifix in urine without doing more than protesting loudly. Their faith has not suffered. There is absolutely no reason that a Muslim's faith should suffer as a result of some crudely-drawn images.

If you honestly and truly cannot wrap your head around that simple notion, then you will bring about your own destruction. The civilized world will not be able to tolerate a religion so violent that it murders individuals over cartoons.

Get over yourselves. If you don't, we'll have to do it for you.

It's the Economy, Stupid!

2010-05-07T07:57:00.004-05:00

Contrary to what the talking heads are saying this morning, and contrary to all the finger-pointing and scapegoating you'll hear in weeks, months, and years to come, it was not a tiny computer glitch that caused yesterday's Dow drop of a thousand points.

I have worked in information technology for twenty years. I spent the preceding fifteen as a hobbyist. My father bought his first computer for business use in 1979, and from that point to today, I never used a typewriter again.

I've taken care of these systems. I was specifically in the banking industry for five years, taking care of banking computers, and occasionally did work for big financial companies.

It's certainly true that every program has bugs, and that in some cases these bugs can cause costly errors. Financial systems are no exception -- though there are both more and fewer safeguards that one might expect.

But a bug isn't what happened yesterday. What happened yesterday was psychological.

Ultimately, the problem is simple: a century of collectivist government policy -- worldwide -- has finally come asking for the bill.

It's just that simple. For a hundred years or so, every single nation on Earth has engaged in collectivist economic practices. The engine driving this foolishness was once the United States -- an economic powerhouse itself driven by an intentional avoidance of collectivism.

However, beginning with Lincoln, massively accelerated under FDR, and finally realized under Reagan, collectivism became the official policy of the US Federal Government -- and with its example, collectivism trickled into every other government. Then to companies and even individuals who should have known better.

The economic powerhouse gutted itself from within. Collectivist policy made innovation impossible unless you were a huge company that could pay government for exemptions. The only area that escaped regulation is the only area to see innovation -- and I'll give you one look at whatever monitor you're reading this on to figure out which area that was.

The US could only last so long on momentum from thirty years past. The momentum has run out. The US can no longer afford to pay for its own collectivist follies, much less those of the entire rest of the world.

Anyone with the slightest bit of sense can see this. That certainly includes the big players on Wall Street, most of whom have a lot of sense or they wouldn't be big players on Wall Street.

Those on Wall Street are totally aware that at any moment, now, the legal trickery that backs their fortunes is going to disappear out from under them.

No doubt they have plans in place to deal with that eventuality, which probably amounts to, "Sell everything I can before the market closes, and head for my mansion where I can pay people to guard me if I need to."

What happened yesterday was that the people on Wall Street thought that this was probably it. The big IT. They saw big selling happening and decided that the shit had hit the fan.

Then, just before the market would have been closed automatically due to volume of trading, they said, "Wait, is this really it? What's happening, exactly?"

It was decided that it could be milked a little longer, so naturally the market rebounded a bit. It's by no means over -- though it could go relatively dormant again for a while. Not long, a few months at best.

Understand that there was no secret cabal meetings. What happened yesterday was just psychology in action: individual Wall Street investors know things are about to go belly up, and they know what to do when it does. They just jumped the gun a little yesterday.

As always, Gerald Celente is saying it best:

An Interesting Idea

2010-03-13T12:42:00.033-06:00

I was reading this when an interesting thought hit me:

On my paternal side, all the blood relatives from my grandparents down to my daughters' second cousins, are currently alive and reasonably healthy. My grandparents (now nearing their nineties) suffer from any number of age-related afflictions, but they show no signs of going anywhere any time soon.

On my maternal side, all the blood relatives from my mother's generation down to my daughters' second cousins are all currently alive and healthy.

To my knowledge, neither my grandparents nor their decendants has had cancer problems. Not a single one. There are several instances of diabetes, but none so bad that it's permanently debilitating. It's possible that it contributed to my paternal great-grandfather's death, and I know it was worse for my maternal grandfather than other family members.

On my ex-wife's side of the family, she has access to no grandparents. Her grandmother and mother died of cancer. Her mother's siblings and their descendants are alive and healthy. I'm not sure who's available on her father's side. I believe that at least two generations (my daughters and their second cousins) are available. That may extend another, to my wife's generation. I believe that there have been instances of diabetes, but I'm not sure. In either case, it's a double jackpot because you still have a pool whose distribution may give you clues about where to look for the gene sequence.

I continue to assure my daughters my fervent belief that medical science is progressing so rapidly that new breakthroughs occur at an alarmingly rapid pace. No physician of one hundred years ago could have possibly dreamed the reality of today; our physicians will be utterly incapable of comprehending the combination of science and technology used by physicians of 2100.

Then I read items like this that only reaffirm my conviction.

What I'm thinking should seem obvious. I can think of no way to put this that doesn't make me sound cold-hearted and tactless, so I'll just say it:

With the genomes currently available in my family -- particularly my daughters' -- it should at least be possible to determine specific gene sequences for some kind of cancers, if such exists. As a bonus, maybe diabetes.

Like I said, cold-hearted and tactless. But, as the brilliant The Young Ones episode "Bambi" clearly illustrated so long ago:

Come now, Dr. Noththenineoclocknews, we're men of science. We fear no Earthly terrors!

(Which only sounds like I'm being pompous if you don't know what I'm referencing. Go on, you ignorant little frak-tards -- off to YouTube to learn that your elders were just as big a bunch of cutting-edge ignorami as you think you are. Yes, that is Hugh Laurie as Lord Monty.

(You're not impressing anybody -- especially not us, you pathetic, pretentious twits. Build the next Internet and then maybe we'll be impressed. Of course by then, you'll realize as we did: we had nothing on our elders in the telecom and micro-miniaturization fields. Without them, we'd've never been able to do what we did. Hell, some of them are still at work -- we've still got catching up to do.

(It's all part of the Great Circle of ... Stuff. Trust me, you'll get it. Until then, frak off. But I digress ...)

If gene sequences can be isolated, the potential for treatment skyrockets. All my close and extended family currently alive would almost certainly benefit from any kind of treatment that might be applied at the genetic level.

And yes, I'm totally aware that my daughters would benefit the most. I'm not above admitting I want them to live as long, happy, healthy lives as possible. If anybody else happens to benefit, the more the merrier. But my daughters being able to live without worrying about cancer or diabetes because they can get it treated at a genetic level? Damned straight. And having grandkids who'll never worry because the specific gene sequences in question can be restructured following conception but before the cells have divided beyond some critical mass. Hell yeah! And having great-great grandchildren who will never worry about it because no living human being retains the gene sequences in question? Frakking-A!

I know, genetic-level treatment isn't possible now. But it will be. Again, it will involve combinations of science and technology that will baffle the finest minds of today -- but it's coming.

It's just a question of taking samples, freezing them, waiting for the technology to arrive to adequately examine them, unfreezing them, and doing tests. Take a big enough sample from each person to do this a few times so you don't run out.

While you're waiting, take more samples, from any descendant of William and Sylvia Stone and ... well, I'm sorry, I don't know my ex-wife's grandparents' names. I'm probably an ass, but they were long gone by the time I met her. They were just shadowy sketches of someone else's description. The names didn't stick.

But their genetic legacy does. If we work reasonably fast on my grandparents in particular.

Please, some private firm with appropriate resources contact me.

And appropriate security. I have an IT security background and certifications: you have no idea what I'm going to require before I'll turn over my genome to somebody. All us Stones seem to be that way -- and yes, it did occur to me to imagine that you'd think being uppity about authority might be a genetic trait, you ethical cripple. Educate yourself and reconsider what you're asking for.

Hence the security requirements. We keep the data, you pay us to to study it. We decide when and if you get to poke your nose into our genomes. The physical security alone will involve redundant dead-man switches to completely obliterate all samples and their non-public data in the event of unauthorized access.

Oh, and one more thing: anyone may sign a waiver and their genome must be published under the GNU Free Documentation License.

I'm dead serious. We either make history, get all get our hometown high schools named after us (and in your case, a prestigious university or two), and get fabulously wealthy no matter how hard we try avoid it ...

... or you let it slip through your fingers and humanity suffers for generations more. Starting with my daughters.

Clock's ticking, get to work. Don't frak it up now.

Registering the C.L.I.T.

2010-03-06T17:55:00.010-06:00

This is quite possibly the stupidest thing I've seen come from a government -- and that's saying a lot, given the dimwits we've had running the Federal Government for the last hundred years or so.

The State of South Carolina actuallly passed a law requiring subversive organizations to register with the State.

For a five-dollar fee, no less.

This is why I have such a difficult time taking terrorist threats seriously. The gaping holes in logic that would allow the stupidest State legislator to spend more than a picosecond's time considering this legislation are so stark that it's not even worthy of comment.

Think of this for a moment: not only did it make sense to one legislature, it made sense to both the South Carolina House, Senate, and its Governor. Really. You can't make this up. No one would believe it if you did.

I want to be clear that I'm not in any way suggesting or condoning subversive activity, fraud, or anything illegal. That in mind, I'm curious what would stop someone from downloading the form, filling it out out with bogus information, and then mailing it in -- without the required fee?

Think about it for a moment: in a country in which we now have a KGB (sorry, that's Department Of Homeland Security here in the U.S.) what would the State of South Carolina be forced to do if they started receiving these forms?

Lacking the five-dollar fee, they couldn't file it. They couldn't just throw it away, either. It would need to be investigated, both by the State and then passed on to Federal officials.

I'm simply curious how much KGB manpower might be thrown at it, should the State of South Carolina suddenly start getting huge numbers of these forms?

It's just an idle thought. I'm explicitly not suggesting that anyone download the form; fill it out using an organization name like "Coalition for the Liberation of Itinerant Tree-dwellers"; use "Bubbles the Chimp" as the chief agent's name; and use the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals' mission statement for the organization's goals.

The reason I'm not suggesting that is because it would be fraudulent. And having mentioned the details in public, the next knock on my door would be from men in dark suits from the FBI.

So honestly, don't. Besides, 300 million Americans have a lot more creativity than anything I could suggest.

So don't do it. Really.

Do not download the PDF form that you can find at this link

And whatever you do, please do not send it to:

South Carolina Secretary of State’s Office
Attn: Corporate Filings
P.O. Box 11350
Columbia, SC 29211.

If for some bizarre reason you're a member of a subversive organization and you want to register, do not forget to include the five-dollar filing fee.

You also shouldn't wear gloves when handling the paper and envelope used to send the form. Don't mail it from a random mailbox or post office so out-of-the-way that you'd never been there before in your life and couldn't find your way back without a GPS.

Just don't -- because that would no doubt be illegal. After all, isn't everything?

Hey, Al, How's All That Global Warming Working Out For You?

2010-01-13T10:05:00.000-06:00

This is the most awesome thing I've seen:

This past week, I was having lunch at a restaurant in midtown Manhattan when my colleague noticed Al and Tipper Gore dining across the room with another couple. It was a frigid day, with record-breaking temperatures keeping most people indoors, and we were the last two tables in the restaurant.

As the Gore party started walking out of the room, my colleague called out, "Hey, Al, how's all that global warming working out for you?" Gore turned around and stared at us with a completely dumbfounded look on his face. He was speechless. With a smile, my colleague repeated the question, again to a hapless look of dismay.

Finally, Gore mumbled under his breath, "Wow, you sound awfully angry." I responded with a thank you, explaining to him that we were actually extremely amused. The encounter concluded with Gore's friend mouthing a very animated "f--- you" at us, and they skulked away. My only regret is that no one at the table asked Gore, "What's the matter? The polar bear's got your tongue?"

What struck me the most about this meeting was Gore's complete inability to utter a sentence addressing his life's work. The former Vice President, Nobel Prize laureate, and Academy Award-winning producer standing before us was a moron, unable to articulate a simple comeback to address all that he has stood for since leaving office. He could have simply ignored us and kept walking, as he does with reporters, but by stopping and standing there dumbstruck, he looked like a fool.

Would that everyone who saw him would do the same.

Motorola Droid Is Rooted

2009-12-09T12:35:00.013-06:00

Well, our friends over at AllDroid have succeeded in rooting the Motorola Droid. I have performed this operation successfully.

I don't endorse this procedure and no doubt it voids all kinds of warranties. If you do it and brick your phone, it's your own stupid fault for believing everything you read on the Internet.

If you don't know what rooting is or what it might be used for, please, for the love of Ghu, do not root your phone. There are a million ways for a n00b to brick a rooted computer or for the computer to be exploited.

If you don't know what this means, just don't do it.

The procedure is as follows:

Update to Android v2.0.1

Please note: if your phone has the Android v2.0.1 update, you do not need to perform this section. Skip immediately to Apply the Root Hack.

If you already have v2.0.1 and perform this section anyway, you won't harm your phone. It will, however, be a pointless waste of your time.

Download the OS update file.

Do not extract this file.

Rename the file to update.zip.

Connect your Droid to your computer via USB.

On the Droid, go to the Notifications bar and select USB Connected then tap Mount.

Once the device is mounted, the SD card will show as a removable device on your computer

Copy update.zip into the root directory of your SD Card (/sdcard).

Unmount the device from your computer, and turn the Droid off.

Hold down the "X" key on the physical keyboard and while doing so press the power button. Hold both of them down until you see a Triangle with an "!".

Press and hold the Vol+ button, then press the camera button. This will present a menu at the top of the screen.

Using the D-pad on the physical keyboard, select the option to update with the update.zip file.

This should take a little bit. Once it's done select the option to reboot the phone.

The phone will take much longer than normal to boot, don't worry as it is normal.

Apply the Root Hack

Download the droid-super_user.zip file.
(md5sum cf653352967253e99d967498ffd9ce69).

Do not extract this file.

Rename the file to update.zip.

Plug your Droid into your computer via USB.

On the Droid, go to the Notifications bar and select USB Connected then press Mount.

Once the device is mounted, the SD card will show as a removable device on your computer

Copy update.zip into the root directory of your SD Card (/sdcard).

This will overwrite the file placed there in the previous section.

Unmount the device from your computer, and turn the Droid off.

Hold down the X key on the physical keyboard and while doing so press the power button. Hold both of them down until you see a Triangle with an !.

Press and hold the Vol+ button, then press the camera button. This will present a menu at the top of the screen.

Using the D-pad on the physical keyboard, select the option to update with the update.zip file.

This should take a little bit. Once it's done select the option to reboot the phone.

When this is finished, you should be able to run a terminal emulator and enter the command: su -

There's an interesting theory on how it was hacked:

Look at the zip file. The file contents are only about like 300KB, but the file is 10MB.

About the same size as the actual 2.0.1 OTA update.zip

The OTA update zip file has some RSA certs in it, yet the droid root update lacks them. Somehow the hacker must have used this unused deadspace in the zip file to fool the Android updater into thinking the zip file was signed, when the actual contents of the zip file don't contain the update but just contain the su binary.

In any case, I'm one step closer to being able to SSH to my Droid ...

Motorola Droid Preview

2009-10-27T21:47:00.003-05:00

The Motorola Droid looks pretty much like the computer I've been waiting for my whole life.

Be A Servant??

2009-09-09T11:26:00.002-05:00

This is fairly nauseating ...

The Great Office War

2009-08-21T15:04:00.002-05:00

U.S. Police State?

2009-08-05T17:31:00.003-05:00

Facts indeed.

The relevant portion of the text:

There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Facts-Are-Stubborn-Things

Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day!

2009-07-31T09:22:00.004-05:00

Friday, July 31, 2009, is the 10th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. On this special international day, give your System Administrator something that shows that you truly appreciate their hard work and dedication. (All day Friday, 24 hours, your local timezone).

Let's face it, System Administrators get no respect 364 days a year. This is the day that all fellow System Administrators across the globe, will be showered with expensive sports cars and large piles of cash in appreciation of their diligent work.

The Emperor Has No Clothes

2009-07-31T02:08:00.002-05:00

Last year, in response to Congressman Ron Paul's attempt to adhere to the Constitutional requirement of declaring war before the President may act as Commander-in-Chief, Speaker Hastert declared that the Constitution was "no longer relevant to modern society."

Admittedly, he didn't intend to include the entire Constitution, simply that section that specifies that it is the function of Congress to declare war. The problem is that once you start being selective in your application of the Constitution, it becomes possible to ignore all of it.

Last week, in response to questioning by reporters, United States Supreme Court Justice Scalia announced that the Constitution was only a list of minimums. We can now expect, according to Scalia, that our liberties will be curtailed to be more consistent with those minimums.

One need not even mention President Bush. Even the dimmest bulb can perceive that he spends virtually all of his waking hours violating the Constitution that he swore to protect and defend.

We are at a unique point in the history of the Republic: all three branches of the Federal Government are now in complete agreement that the Constitution is no longer relevant.

Forget for a moment that a Federal elected official who ignores the Constitution is in violation of his Oath of Office. Forget that such a violator must by definition be a traitor. If you're religious, forget that in the majority of cases the Oath was sworn to God, placing the violator's immortal soul in peril of eternal damnation.

Instead, let's consider what it means if the Constitution is, in fact, no longer relevant.

The Constitution is the document that defines the Federal Government: it's powers and functions versus those reserved to the States and the People. The Constitution does not have a "spirit." It does not have an "intent."

I realize that there are individuals who call themselves "Constitutional scholars." I realize that they've been in existence since the founding the the Republic. With all due respect to them, the Constitution isn't a philosophical statement in need of interpretation. Rather, it's a rule book in need of adherence by those in office.

As a parallel, consider this: the company for which I work has an Employee Handbook written and maintained by the Human Resources department. In it are rules set down by my company. As a term of my employment, I agreed to abide by these policies. Failure to do so—even accidentally—can be grounds for disciplinary action, suspension, and even termination. I do not have the option to ignore the parts I dislike. I must either obey it in its entirety, or I must quit my job.

The Constitution is the Federal Government's "Employee Handbook." It explains how the Federal Government operates. Adherence to its edicts is not optional by those in government. If they find that they cannot abide by its rules, their only recourse is to resign their office or to amend the Constitution.

Were those wandering the halls of government not fixated on one goal above all others (the attainment and perpetuation of personal power), violation of the Constitution would carry with it disciplinary action: suspension, ejection from office, and imprisonment. For the better part of a century, those in power have slowly but surely inured the voting public to Constitutional violations. Today, the Speaker of the House can go on record saying that it is no longer relevant.

As I listen to the Republican whores on talk radio, it's becoming more frequent to hear them opine about what parts of the Constitution may be ignored, or to insist that the Constitution doesn't really mean what it says. I find this particularly amusing, because only a few short years ago, they made a pretense of being Constitutionalists in favor of limited government. When they whine about the Unconstitutionality of campaign finance reform in one breath and then declare that it's perfectly Constitutional to lock up American citizens as "enemy combatants" in the next, I tend to burst out laughing.

Just precisely what goes on in these idiots' heads? Admittedly, the best of them is a self-proclaimed half-wit, but does even he not realize that he's been reduced to the level of professional wrestling ringside commentator? When President Clinton was in power, it was easy for them: he was a traitorous pig, after all. When their own traitor is in power, the Republican whores turn into mindless raving cheerleaders, utterly bereft of any principles they might have had under Clinton.

Of course, in reality, the Republican whores aren't that stupid. They know perfectly well that what they're saying makes no sense. For them, the Constitution is something you root through like a pig at a trough, occasionally dragging out snippets in order to bolster an argument. Any leavings that don't support the argument are simply tossed back into the trough for later use.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. You can't selectively apply the Constitution. It either exists as a whole, adhered-to in all respects, or it's no longer relevant.

In point of fact, I agree with Speaker Hastert: the Constitution is no longer relevant. It hasn't been relevant for at least half a century. The only difference today is that all three branches of government admit it.

The Constitution defines the Republic. If the Constitution that defines it no longer exists, then the Republic itself no longer exists.

As a parallel, the V8 engine in my gas-guzzling SUV defines the vehicle. If I pull it out, I don't have a car any more: I have a very expensive lawn ornament.

Without the Constitution to define it, the Federal Government cannot exist. The Federal Government is no longer legitimate. The Emperor has no clothes!

Ponder this for a moment: less than one-eighth of the governed populace participates in elections. Less than one-half of registered voters show up at the polls; one-half of eligible voters register; and one-half of the governed populace is eligible.

Less than one-eighth of the populace actually supports the current regime—which itself no longer recognizes the document that called it into existence!

Speaker Hastert is right: the Constitution is no longer relevant. The Federal Government is no longer legitimate, and seven-eighths of the population knows it.

In the favorite words of President Bush, the Federal Government is an outlaw regime.

The pertinent question then becomes: what shall we do about it? The answer is simple:

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

This is exactly what we wish the FedGov to be doing. By ejecting the Constitution, those in power have ejected the Federal Government itself. This is a wonderful thing! It means that we may now begin the process of building a free society, in which individuals self-govern guided by the Zero Aggression Principle.

The Emperor has no clothes. All we need do now is point, laugh at the poor sap, and go on with our lives. We may ignore those pitiable fools in Washington and the befuddled one-eighth of those around us who think Washington's "laws" still have relevance.

Government has removed itself from our lives. Thank you, Speaker Hastert, Justice Scalia, and President Bush, for voluntarily returning control of our lives to us. Each and every one of your former subjects owes you a debt of thanks. We're about to embark on the most extraordinary period of freedom in the history of planet Earth, and it was made possible because you ejected the Constitution—and in the process, de-legitimized yourselves.

The Emperor has no clothes. Let's leave the naked fool standing in the town square and get on with conquering the stars

Law Versus Reality, Part III

2009-07-31T01:51:00.003-05:00

It's not often I'm called a communist. "Right-wing," "fascist," and "pacifist" are insults I'm more familiar with — though how someone could regard a gun-toting individualist as any of these is a mystery to me.

Nevertheless, I was called an "information communist" by no less than three individuals during the last week, all on the basis of my statement that there is no such thing as "intellectual property."

Allow me to reiterate my basic argument:

The purpose of any storage media (be it books, records, CDs, videotapes, stone tablets, or cave walls) is to augment the imperfect memory of human beings. The intent is either to store or to transmit information. If all human beings had an eidetic memory, storage medium would be utterly unnecessary.

For purposes of example, I'll continue with multiple Grammy-award-winning vocalist Shania Twain, whose music I really enjoy. Modern law holds that Shania owns the title track of her newest CD, "Up!" regardless of its storage medium. It doesn't matter if the song is spoken, sung, written, recorded on vinyl or magnetic tape, digitized to a bitstream on CD or MP3, or any other format. Regardless of medium, Shania owns "Up!"

Since that is that case, the only logical conclusion is that Shania owns my memory of the song. If the medium is irrelevant, then by logical extension, the medium of my brain is also irrelevant. The portability of the storage medium isn't an issue, nor is the fact that my brain cannot be replicated like an MP3.

At least, not yet. Though you can be sure that when the technology becomes available to record thoughts, memories, and feelings, government will decree that memories of Shania's performance are her sole property.

The distinction of the storage medium of my brain being unique from other storage medium is totally arbitrary and illogical. If Shania owns "Up! regardless of medium, then she must own my memories of the song.

Clearly, the concept of sole ownership of ideas collapses when the argument is taken to its logical extreme. If one objects to the notion of Shania owning the memory of the song in my brain, then logically one must object to the notion that she owns the song on other media that I also own, such as CD or MP3.

Shania Twain released three separate CDs with different mixes of her recent "Up!" songs: Country, Pop, and World. They're the same songs with different mixes for different markets.

In North America, only the Country and Pop versions were sold, and these were the ones I purchased in a local music store. I really enjoyed them. There literally isn't a track that I don't like, and I outright love most of them. It's the only CD I've not mastered myself that I can listen to from beginning to end without skipping tracks.

There are a whopping 28 tracks on two CDs, for slightly over twenty dollars. I don't know of another singer who's providing that kind of volume and quality of work at that price.

As much as I enjoyed the Country and Pop mixes, I decided to get the World version. However, as it was a European import, it was very expensive. I wasn't certain I wanted to pay the money before having even heard the mixes.

Enter Kazaa, the incredibly popular peer-to-peer file-sharing service. I've used this service to find old TV shows, music, and reading material.

One word of warning: if you're going to use the service, do not use the client from Kazaa.com — it's full of adware and spyware. Get Kazaa Lite K++ instead. I can't recommend a Linux client as of yet.

Using my Kazaa client, I ultimately downloaded all 19 tracks of the world CD at no cost to me beyond my Internet connectivity. Excitedly, I fired up XMMS.

I was shocked and disappointed. The Country and Pop versions were worth every penny I paid for them, but the World version really sucks — a word I almost never use in print. They suck badly. They're horrible. You really can't listen to them. They're mind-bogglingly and staggeringly revolting.

If you've ever heard "Up!" on the radio or watched the video on VH1, imagine that it was performed to a Reggae beat!

The other songs — with the possible exception of "Forever And For Always" (apparently not even an awful mix can destroy a song that good) — are even worse. I have no idea who thought this was a good idea, but I'm very grateful that I didn't spend my hard-earned cash on an expensive import.

People have a difficult time with this issue because they're so used to being told by socialist media outlets — that they otherwise shun — that "Up!" is Shania's intellectual property, and that only she has the right to dispose of it.

Forget for a moment that copyright law exists — divest yourself of the idea that since government defines a right, it must exist. Just sit for a moment and ask yourself: "How does it initiate force against Shania Twain for Bill Stone to listen to MP3s of her songs that he downloaded from a file-sharing service as opposed to paying for a CD in the store?"

The impact on Shania of my doing so is: it reduces her income and consequently makes her upset. That is all.

Negatively impacting Shania's income does not initiate force against her — all businesses routinely negatively impact each others' income. Making her unhappy does not initiate force against her — all businesses routinely make each others' members unhappy.

If one further examines the idea of "intellectual property" and asks, "Could this concept exist without government to enforce it?" The answer is, "No, it couldn't."

Functionally, it doesn't exist even with government to enforce it, something the very existence of the Internet proves. Show me something you think is intellectual property, and I'll show you ten Web sites devoted to it.

Other property rights do exist in absence of government. You can buy a diamond, put it in your pocket, and say, "This is mine, not yours." If I then initiate force against you by taking the diamond against your will, you can shoot me, cut me open, and take your property back.

You can't do that with ideas. The best you can do is initiate force against others by killing them in order to keep the information secret.

Not only is there no initiation of force against Shania to download and listen to her songs, there is actually a case to be made that she would be initiating force against me if she attempted to prosecute me for doing so.

Firstly, if the socialist argument is correct and medium is irrelevant to the status of ownership, Shania owns the memory of her song in my mind. This is a clear Initiation of Force. One of the underlying tenets of the ZAP is that homo sapiens is the most territorial animal on the planet, and that territory starts first and foremost with our minds and bodies. For Shania to claim ownership of my mind would initiate force against me.

Secondly, she would be delegating initiation of force to government, since this is clearly not an initiation of force that she could perpetrate on a wide scale without government to do her dirty work for her.

While it is not only not an initiation of force for two individuals to be in possession of the same information, treating information as property defies all physical logic:

What is the nature of property?

It has at least four dimensions: height, width, breadth, and it moves through time.
It is unique. You can hold it in your hand or put a fence around it and declare, "This is mine!"
Most importantly, real property has a one-to-one relationship of property to owner. One piece of property only has one owner. No piece of property may have multiple owners — a one-to-many relationship of property to owner.

Any property that appears to have a one-to-many relationship is one of two things:

Property whose "owners" are pretending they all own it, or property owned by no one.

Property jointly owned in marriage, "public" property, and "community" property all collapse without an external institution to force the one-to-many relationship. If a married couple divorces, the one-to-one relationship of property to owner becomes quite obvious, for example — the couple was actually simply pretending they both owned it. Similarly, if a government falls, the illusory nature of "public" and "community" property becomes readily apparent.

Ideas and information do not share the basic attributes of property. They do not have dimensions. They are not unique. They have a one-to-many relationship to those who are aware of the information.

Property is inherently unique. Information is not. Therefore the analogy of information as property simply doesn't hold up.

There are three types of information: known, unknown, and secret. Unknown information can be discovered, and if kept secret, it's functionally your property. However, one can't stop other people from discovering that information independently. Nor do you truly have ownership of the information as soon as you tell someone else about it. You can get them to sign an NDA and seek restitution if they violate it, but functionally, the information is outside of your control the moment you divulge it to another person.

This isn't even on the level of any moral issue. It is literally and technically impossible for Shania to have any control over the disposition of material she makes so broadly public, and it is nothing more than cognitive dissonance to behave otherwise. Once Shania released "Up!" modern technology took over, and thousands of teenagers the world over are able to burn CDs from the MP3s they download.

Regardless of the law, she has functionally given up sole ownership of her songs by virtue of singing them in public and by distributing them for sale. The only functional way for her to maintain "ownership" of songs released for public consumption is to institute a police state even worse than exists in the United States right now.

No doubt they'll ultimately get around to trying. When they do, the functional end of the United States will be reached.

One might question how an artist like Shania will continue to make money in a free society in which her work is not considered her sole property regardless of medium.

I don't claim to know precisely what the coming free society will look like. I have a lot of ideas, the most positive of which are based on libertarian science fiction author L. Neil Smith's extraordinary Galactic Confederacy series of novels.

However, one thing history teaches is that proprietary technology and information doesn't have long-term viability in the free market. The Beta videotape format and the Apple and Amiga computers, are all examples of extraordinary technology that died because it was proprietary. Open technologies create competition, and competition creates higher-quality goods and services at a lower cost.

Modern technology is forcing the entertainment industry back into reality and the free market.

In the case of CDs, I would predict that the coming free society will see a dramatic drop in price in order to compete with other technologies. We'll probably also see far more new works created, since the "shelf life" of the current one will be significantly less than we're used to. Where Shania now releases a CD every three to five years, in a free society, she may have to release new ones every six months.

Shania might add value to her songs by singing material she didn't write but that there is demand for. I have a grainy video (thank you again, Kazaa!) of a capture of some home video of Shania performing "Somewhere Out There." I would be thrilled to hear her sing this song on a CD, teamed with an extraordinary male vocalist.

Perhaps she'll add value with "collector" tracks. For example, the current release of John Williams Star Wars (the original movie, or "Episode IV" for you purists) include a "bonus track" with no less than six alternate versions of the main title music. One of them includes a mistake — ten points to the first person to e-mail me which take number it is.

It would be fun to listen to flubbed takes or orchestrations Shania didn't like as much as the "official" one.

Perhaps she'll release more videos, adding value through effective marketing or special features. It would be fun to watch her recording her songs in the studio — again, with mistakes and out-takes of the kinds seen in modern DVDs.

And these are just my ideas, from the armchair of someone who doesn't work in the industry. No doubt the unfettered creative power of millions of free individuals will come up with notions I'd never dream of.

What modern copyright law is attempting to protect is a flawed notion, something that modern technology makes readily apparent. There never was any intrinsic property right over known, public information: the best you can do is keep previously unknown information secret as long as possible, and exploit that information to your advantage.

Law Versus Reality, Part II

2009-07-31T01:47:00.002-05:00

In my essay entitled "Law Versus Reality, Part I," I made a claim that is no doubt startling to may libertarian thinkers:

"Intellectual Property" does not exist.

In all fairness, I should have written Part II of this article first, as an introduction. However, I was so incensed by the sheer gall of the money-grubbing socialist presently in charge of SCO that I believed his actions warranted immediate comment.

That out of the way, it's important to explain why, from the perspective of the Zero Aggression Principle, "intellectual property," patents, and even copyrights are nothing more than legal fiction. Ideas are not property. They never have been, they never will be, and it is a horrible mistake to behave as though they are.

Firstly, the Zero Aggression Principle states:

"No human being has the right -- under any circumstances -- to initiate force against another human being, nor to threaten or delegate its initiation."

As has been explained so many times previously, this is the sole defining philosophy that need be adhered-to by individuals who wish to interact peacefully. We can disagree about literally everything else: religion, sexual orientation, use of chemicals, etc. As long as we agree that the only moral use of force is as a response to someone else's initiation of force, then we can at least live together without killing each other.

It must also be pointed out that one need not have a "critical mass" of individuals who adhere to the ZAP in order for it to be implemented. I have adhered to this philosophy for nearly ten years while others around me may not.

If one defines basic morality to be the Zero Aggression Principle, there is simply no basis for any form of intellectual property. In fact, in the context of the ZAP, all arguments in favor of sole proprietorship of ideas collapse instantaneously.

We must first begin with basic principles: what is intellectual property? It is an idea, or more correctly information. Information is of three types: known, unknown, and secret.

Known information can be discovered -- or in the specific case of ideas or works of art, such information can be created. As long as the information is kept secret, known only to the discoverer, it is his or her sole property. The moment that the information is divulged to another individual, it is no longer the sole property of the discoverer and can never be returned to his sole proprietorship.

For purposes of argument, let's use the most common form of intellectual property on the market today, the music CD:

Firstly, why do music CDs (or any form of storage, from the printed word to the computer disk) exist? Simple: because the human brain isn't capable of retaining or recalling every piece of information to which it is exposed. The CD is an augmentation to our memory.

For example, I enjoy the music of Shania Twain -- particularly her latest CD and its title track, "Up!" If CDs, magnetic tape, or vinyl record albums were never invented, the only way I could hear Shania's music would be to attend a concert. If I wished to recall the song, I'd have to rely on my imperfect memory of the concert.

Fortunately, however, modern technology allowed Shania to bring her band into a studio and engineer a recording of what she felt was the optimal orchestration of her songs. This was then burned onto CDs by the millions and put into stores for public consumption.

Modern copyright law holds that Shania is the sole owner of the content of that CD. However, this copyright law is nothing more than legal fiction, and for one simple reason:

If Shania is sole owner of the song, regardless of its format, then by logical extension, she is sole owner of the memory of the song in the listener's mind.

This is clearly impossible. Shania cannot own someone else's mind or memories. By extension, she cannot own the contents of a CD intended solely for the purpose of augmenting the listener's memory.

Many libertarians would be outraged at this notion. Traditional thinking holds that since Shania went to the trouble of creating and recording the song, she is entitled to any income derived from that song -- hence copyright law.

The problem is that there is no basis for this in the Zero Aggression Principle.

Imagine that some other band were to sing "Up!" in a concert -- or even record it for distribution via CD. This does not initiate force against Shania.

Certainly Shania would not be happy about it. No doubt it would impact her income. Nevertheless, negatively impacting Shania's contentment and income do not initiate force against her. Many competing businesses routinely make each other unhappy and impact each others' income. It is not an initiation of force to do so.

This argument can be equally applied to any form of "intellectual property," from software code to CDs to books ... anything that in modern law may be copyrighted or patented.

Patents in particular represent a government initiation of force: it essentially grants to an individual sole use of a law of nature. There is absolutely no reason under the Zero Aggression Principle to prevent another individual from exploiting the same law of nature once it has been discovered. Exploiting the basic operation of the universe is the birthright of every sapient individual -- indeed, there is no way to survive as a human being if one does not exploit laws of nature.

Certainly this makes complete mincemeat of modern patent and copyright law, but the entire notion is flawed in the first place. It is based on an immorality, the idea that government may use force to grant rights that never existed in the first place.

Thomas Jefferson suggested precisely this same idea two hundred years ago in a letter to Isaac McPherson:

It would be curious, then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.

Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening mine. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature. When she made them like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

Since Jefferson's time, what limited copyright and patent law the United States had until the beginning of the 20th century allowed ideas and inventions to spread like wildfire. The action of those limited laws combined with the free market and millions of free individuals brought more prosperity and technological innovation in a mere century's time than had been seen in the entire preceding history of humankind.

Today, there has been a significant decrease in the level of innovation possible in the United States. This is, as I suggested in my essay, "Why Johnny Can't Get a Job," in no small part due to socialist regulations that have made it impossible to create new industries. However, a large measure of blame rests squarely at the foot of the country's ever-expanding copyright and patent laws.

Ultimately, of course, the increasingly unstable economic, social, and political realities of modern socialist America will cause the Federal Government to collapse. There is no socialist state in the world that has not ultimately collapsed, and it is self-indulgent folly to believe the United States is any different.

Some day, sooner than any of us think, the monstrosity our government has become is going to keel over dead -- there is, after all, only so long you can keep a thousand-pound freak of nature alive. When this occurs, there will hopefully be enough devotees of the Zero Aggression Principle that we'll learn from the preceding several thousand years' history and replace that freak of nature with nothing.

How will Shania make her millions without a government to sponsor an immoral monopoly on "ownership" of a song she intentionally distributed to millions of individuals? I don't know for certain. Perhaps she won't be as rich. Perhaps she'll come up with some kind of non-disclosure agreement regarding performance of her songs. Perhaps she'll add value to her version by being a more talented singer or by offering better recordings of other popular songs -- I can certainly think of many I'd like to hear her orchestrate and sing.

What will occur is that a quarter of a billion individuals, each 100% in control of their lives and destinies, will create all manner of new ideas and inventions. They'll use the free market to further their own separate interests, self-governing guided by the Zero Aggression Principle. It won't quite be a world we recognize, without patents and copyrights.

It will be far, far better.

Law Versus Reality, Part I

2009-07-31T01:46:00.000-05:00

Every day, it's becoming increasingly obvious that what is termed "intellectual property" or "IP" bears no more resemblance to reality than American capitalism does to the free market.

"IP" is bandied about a lot with respect to high-tech items like computers and computer operating systems. It's a hold-over from patent and copyright law, made at a time during which the printed word and machined parts were the most-high-tech form an idea could take.

The real problem is this: there is no such thing as intellectual property, and it's a denial of reality to behave as though ideas are property.

This position places us unquestionably at odds with many in the freedom movement who make their living creating works of art -- something generally considered an "intellectual property" -- but reality is reality. Ideas are not property. Thomas Jefferson knew this two centuries ago, when he noted in a letter to Isaac McPherson:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.

I would heartily recommend that one read the entire passage from which this is quoted, because it's utterly brilliant. Jefferson makes the case against IP far better than I could.

To sum it up in modern terms, "Intellectual Property" is a legal fiction. It does not exist. Information exists, and it is of three kinds: known, unknown, and secret. Unknown information can be discovered, and once discovered held secret. The moment you tell someone else about it, the cat is literally out of the bag, and you have no real control over it any more. You can ask -- even contractually require -- someone to keep it secret, and seek restitution should they violate their contract. But a contract won't stop someone from violating it any more than a law will stop someone from committing a crime. There is also no way to stop someone else from independantly discovering the same information.

For example, if you discover the means by which it is possible to split an atom and in so doing use its force for destructive ends, and then you blow up a couple of cities with atomic bombs, there is no way to prevent others from observing what happened and duplicating it.

In my "day job," I am a computer geek. I presently hold the position of Linux Engineer with a major computer manufacturer. It is the first time I've held a position that is exclusively devoted to Linux, something I've wanted for ten years, since I first ran Linux in production while with AT&T.

Linux, for those who are unaware, is a computer operating system, often abbreviated "OS." If you don't understand what an operating system is, there's a good analogy to be had with automobiles:
Imagine your computer was a car. The operating system is its engine. Without an engine under the hood, a car can look beautiful, but all it will ever do is sit in your driveway. A computer operating system is the same: without one, your computer is nothing more than an expensive paperweight.

The most common consumer computer "engine" is Windows, manufactured by the Microsoft Corporation. Any computer mechanic who's been under the hood of very many "cars" will tell you that Windows isn't very well-constructed. You can think of it as being a 4-cylinder engine that's been heavily tricked-out and modified to move an SUV- but it leaks oil, transmission fluid, and water from the radiator. Fortunately, in the computer world, oil, transmission fluid and water are all cheap and easy to replace, and the engine comes with virtually every car ever made. But the engine itself isn't a great engineering feat, and whenever UPS wants to make sure a package gets somewhere on time, they use something better.

In the computer world, there are two better engines. One is IBM's mainframes. You can think of mainframes as jet engines. When UPS wants to make sure your package gets from New York to Los Angeles overnight, they don't fill their cargo planes with cheap, 4-cylinder engines. They use big jet engines.

The other engine is UNIX, which is sort of like a diesel truck engine. When UPS takes your package from the airport to their sorting center, they don't put a 4-cylinder engine in the semi truck, they use a big diesel engine.

In the computer world, the car -- without the engine -- is incredibly cheap. It's also capable of holding either a 4-cylinder car engine or a big diesel truck engine. In fact, in the computer world, every land vehicle sold can almost as easily be a sportscar, and SUV, or a semi truck, depending on how you equip it. The real difference, however, is what engine you put inside it.

Not only that, but in the computer world, the price of parts for the engine is so cheap that it's now possible for people to build their own. Imagine it like this:

Three hundred years ago (in computer time), a company called AT&T manufactured the first truck engine. They called it UNIX. They wanted to sell it, but AT&T held an immoral government charter which forced every American to use them whenever they wanted to haul certain kinds of freight (e.g., make a phone call). The government (always underestimating the power of the computer) decided that as long as they were forcing people to pay AT&T for freight, they wouldn't let AT&T make money selling trucks engines, too -- that seemed like too much of an immoral monopoly in government "ethics."

AT&T found that making their own truck engine was a lot cheaper than buying it from someone else, and to make things even better, after they built one, building more was really cheap.

Since the government had forbid them to sell the engine, they decided to just give it away. They gave it to government agencies, government schools, and even some private schools. Mechanics could look at it in detail, see how it worked, take it apart, put it back together again, add things on, take them off, and so on.
People did this for a long time -- so long, in fact, that whole generations grew up being trained in how to take apart and put back together this engine. It's been so long (in computer years) that we call the engine that AT&T gave away "Ancient UNIX."

The inner working of Ancient UNIX are as well-known in computer circles as the general workings of the internal combustion engine are to mechanics. It's so well-known, in fact, that many of its processes are now an industry standard. Making a modern computer engine without using some of Ancient UNIX's components would be like trying to build a car engine without using water in the radiator.

Eventually, via many varied (and occasionally twisted -- click here for details) means, other companies copied the original UNIX engine or bought pieces of it outright, and started selling it. In fact, AT&T even stopped using its original UNIX, selling it to a company who sold it again to a company that bought another company whose management eventually took over that company.

It's been three hundred years, after all, in computer time.

Many companies who made UNIX came and went, and today there's really only two or three left:

IBM, who sells an engine called AIX.

Sun Microsystems, who sells an engine called Solaris.

There's one more company of note -- not because they sell any real volume of their product, but because they ultimately ended up owning the original UNIX made by AT&T: The SCO Group. SCO isn't a profitable company and hasn't been for some time. It's been through a couple of mergers and acquisitions, but has rarely turned a profit. It certainly has never competed meaningfully with IBM or Sun.

During the last century (computer time -- it's actually only been about ten years) the price of building an engine has gotten to be virtually nothing. Gear-heads sometimes do it in their garage, just for the fun of it, to see if they can think of some new way to trick it out and make it better. One such computer gear-head was Linus Torvalds, a college student from Finland.

Torvalds liked UNIX. He liked some of the other home-made, tricked-out versions. He had a brand new car -- a very popular model, and a direct ancestor to the most popular car today -- that the engine wasn't capable of fully exploiting. He thought it would be fun to build his own engine, and make the car that was originally a 2-door sedan into a semi truck. What Torvalds did different was that he had something most car gear-heads don't: the Internet. He told his gear-head friends on the Internet about his new, home-brew, tricked-out engine. Since a lot of those friends owned the same car, they saw that what he was doing could really make their cars smoke, too. Torvalds thought that it made a lot more sense to share what he was doing with everyone, let them make additions and changes, and eventually evolve the engine into something even better than he could make it alone.

There was another gear-head named Richard Stallman. For a long time, Stallman had been talking about how it makes sense for gear-heads to work together to make more efficient engines. Under the auspices of his organization (the Free Software Foundation), he sponsored GNU, a method by which lots of the pieces of the UNIX engine get tooled by gear-heads.

So with Stallman and his gear-heads working on the pieces of the engine and Torvalds and his gear-heads working on tooling up the pieces in a new way, the truck engine Linux (or GNU/Linux as Stallman prefers) was born. Linux looks and act a lot like UNIX, borrows lots of its methods, and maybe even some of its parts -- parts that have been available for three hundred years, computer time.

Now the thing about Linux is that no one actually owns it. There are maintainers, gear-heads who tweak the various individual pieces or make sure that the pieces fit together efficiently. Because of the Internet, the gear-heads don't live close to each other and they don't work for the same companies when they're not being gear-heads. Because of Stallman, the pieces they make are available to anyone to look at, re-tool, and make work.

This has resulted in a really slick engine that is currently going into 20% of the trucks being sold in the world. In fact, the likelihood is that the "truck" that lets you read this essay has Linux under its hood. Anyone who has the financial wherewithal can make CDs with Linux on it, add their own particular branding, and sell it.

Today, the two leading Linux companies are American-base Red Hat Software and German-based SuSE. Even UNIX vendors such as IBM and have made motions toward ultimately abandoning their own UNIX in favor of Linux.

Meanwhile, back at SCO, ( ... remember SCO, the company that now owns the UNIX AT&T sold off, way back when? The unprofitable company that doesn't compete well with other companies that sell UNIX?) CEO Darl McBride noticed that between IBM and their engine, AIX, and Red Hat and SuSE with their engine, Linux, the old, original UNIX isn't selling so well. In fact, it's selling badly. In fact, unless something is done, SCO is going to go belly-up -- probably sooner rather than later.

So what did McBride do? Did he improve SCO's engine so that it's clearly and obviously better than IBM's or Linux? Did he cut prices in order to entice customers to use SCO's engine? Did he adopt Linux the way other companies did and use lower prices and effective marketing to convince customers to use it?

No, McBride did none of that because that's not the kind of person McBride is. He has no interest in competing in the free market, because Darl McBride is a businessman of another stripe. He's a socialist. McBride decided that when you can't compete in the marketplace, you should use government to force the marketplace to come to you.

McBride noticed that American copyright and patent law bears no relationship to the modern world. Century-old law is being applied to modern computer "car engines" in a pointless attempt to protect IP rights that never existed in the first place.

McBride began a long campaign to stamp out Linux. He started claiming that the pieces and parts of Linux that look and act so much like UNIX are actually stolen from the UNIX that SCO now owns.

McBride didn't mention the fact that the UNIX car engine has been around so long that its methods, pieces, and parts show up in every other car engine in existence -- Windows included. He didn't mention that back when AT&T owned it, the pieces and parts were routinely handed over for free, and anyone could get under the hood to tweak it. He didn't mention that AT&T never tried to keep it secret. He didn't mention that so many people worldwide have been trained on it, played with the pieces, and tweaked the parts that his entire argument appears ludicrous to anyone who has the slightest knowledge of cars. He didn't mention that the people who originally designed and built his engine are dead or retired, the few who are still around think he's a money-grubbing little weasel who's using the law as an excuse for poor business management, and no one with any legitimate interest in the creation of UNIX thinks they're being harmed.

McBride essentially claimed that his company owns the intellectual property behind the diesel truck engine, therefore anyone who uses a diesel truck with an engine that resembles his should pay SCO.

Late last week, McBride actually started a lawsuit against two major companies, AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler. McBride claims that since both companies use Linux, and since Linux uses pieces and parts of the engine that was once given away free of charge by AT&T and now owned by SCO, AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler are violating SCO's intellectual property.

The tragedy in all this is that because people believe that knowledge and ideas can actually be owned by a single individual, the law in this case actually works in SCO's favor.

This is what happens when reality is ignored by the law. What will happen is simple:

Reality will win. McBride may be successful with his socialist money-grab sceme in the near term, but in the long term, the market will react and put his company out of business. In the long term, the Federal Government and State Governments that make his case possible will collapse of their own weight and inherent instability.

There will be a sudden -- and rather dramatic -- correction. We'll all be a lot more free, very quickly.
With luck, we'll learn from our mistakes, and understand that the American Experiment to limit government was a dismal failure. Government cannot be limited. Having "a little government" is no different than being "a little pregnant." You can ignore it for a while, but eventually it starts to show. There's a lot of screaming and pain, and then you get rid of it.

The only way to really avoid the effects of pregnancy is to not get knocked up in the first place. Similarly, the only way to avoid the effects of government is to not have one in the first place.

With luck, the next time we have an opportunity to get "knocked up" with government, we'll learn from all of prior human history and decide to abstain.

Revenge Of the Nerds

2009-07-30T23:32:00.003-05:00

The "Homeland Security Act" is the usual kind of atrocity that we've all come to expect from the would-be slave-holders in Washington. In an astounding violation of their Oaths of Office, lawmakers have passed a bill that violates every single one of the Bill of Rights.

In a marvelous display of ignorance (explained to me by a coworker who is a Russian expatriate), one of the Russian translations of "Homeland Security" is "KGB." For brevity's sake, the Act and the Unconstitutional, immoral Federal offices it creates will hereafter be referred to as "the American KGB."

Under the KGB, Americans no longer have any Constitutional guarantees. None.

Not that this comes as a surprise to anyone who's been paying even the slightest bit of attention to American political discourse over the last century. Federal officials have been in the process of murdering the Constitutional Republic since the Lincoln Administration. The American KGB simply pounds the final nail into its coffin, creating the de facto police state about which politicians have always dreamed.

What the American KGB proves – beyond a shadow of a doubt – is that we can no longer depend on government to safeguard our liberties. With the passage of this Act, it becomes clear that government is the primary violator of our liberties.

We can no longer believe that government will help us out of this mess. Government is the mess.

One of the central tenets of the American KGB is the creation of the "Total Information Awareness" (TIA) program. Masterminded by the aptly-named criminal John Poindexter, TIA will be a vast, centralized government database that will monitor the actions of every man, woman, and child in America from cradle to grave.

The American KGB will monitor all your financial transactions: credit card and white market cash purchases, ATM transactions, cash withdrawals or deposits, checking account transactions, investments, IRAs, etc. It will monitor your medical data, your travel habits, your Internet usage, and your phone calls.

It will monitor what books and magazines you read. It will monitor and store your private and business correspondence.

Particular attention will be focused on your defense choices, making the TIA program a de facto Federal gun registration database. The hobby of reloading is essentially over, as the American KGB establishes new rules for "explosive" purchases that will make it illegal for reloaders to obtain the necessary chemicals without a Federal license.

Is there be any doubt that the Republicans are just as dedicated to victim disarmament as the Democrats? In the name of "fighting terrorism," a Republican administration has single-handedly guaranteed more innocent deaths via "gun control" than every Democrat in the collective history of the nation. This in the face of the irrefutable fact that September 11 would not have been possible had the individuals aboard the hijacked aircraft not been Unconstitutionally prohibited from exercising their natural right to self-defense.

Once more, the Republicans prove that America doesn't have two political parties, but rather identical political cousins played by Patty Duke.

TIA is the "permanent record" that your grade school principle always threatened you with. That it is unspeakably evil is obvious.

Contrary to what most individuals believe, the FedGov does not presently have the technology to track this kind of information. As a computer nerd employed by a major credit card issuer, I can categorically state that neither my company nor any other financial institution is currently sending customer records to the FedGov. Similarly, your doctor, travel agent or airline, magazine, library, and ISP are not presently mirroring this information to the FedGov.

This means that all of the TIA systems – both those in the FedGov and those that providers will use to send the data – must be be constructed. This process, even using private-sector talent (invariably several orders of magnitude superior to that available to government) will take years.

This is where the FedGov has made its critical mistake in the attempt to create a police state. The systems won't just magically appear, they'll be constructed. Nor will they be constructed by laymen using Microsoft Excel, but by professionals.

Our hope – as always – lies in the individual. It lies in a place that should leave any government toady quaking in his boots:

Our hope now rests on the nerds.

Understand, please, that I intend no malice when I use the word "nerd." I myself am an Information Security professional, one of only two holders of the coveted "CISSP" certification in the state of South Dakota. I've proudly been a nerd since 1979, when my father bought his first computer for his business.

The TIA systems will be built by the nerds. We control information systems and the Internet, not some Federal agency. This evil abomination of a law is only possible if we nerds cooperate in creating it.

Do you hear me, Presidents, Senators, Congressmen, and your lackeys? We control these things, not you. Your systems exist solely because we choose to cooperate.

It's now time for you to learn the truth of that statement. It's time for we nerds to become the front-line warriors in the cause of individual liberty.

My friends, fellow nerds, we must refuse to cooperate.

If you work for a bank, as I do, when your employer assigns you the task of creating the system to mirror customer data to the FedGov, you must refuse.

If you work for an ISP, and are ordered to track and mirror Internet traffic and e-mail to the FedGov, you must refuse.

If you work for a travel agency, magazine, or library and are ordered to mirror information to the FedGov, you must refuse.

If you work for a gun store (or other retail store) and create the systems used to track customer purchases, you must refuse.

If you work for the FedGov and are ordered to create the systems to house the data sent to you, you must refuse.

Understand the consequences of non-compliance, potentially far more deadly than at any time in American history:

Under the American KGB, any refusal to cooperate in the hideously evil TIA program will brand us as terrorists under Federal law. We will therefore no longer be subject to normal proceedings, such as an attorney or trial. We will be termed "enemy combatants," meaning that the American KGB may do anything they like to us.

Many of us will lose our lives and fortunes. When my employer is ordered by regulatory agencies to comply with FedGov edicts, failure risks the end of his business. He will therefore want to fire me when I refuse to cooperate.

It may be that the KGB will want to make an example of me. They may whisk me away in the dead of night (as is common practice for gun owners, individuals with unusual religious practices, drug users, prostitutes, and other persons whose "crimes" harm no one but themselves). They may wish to beat me into submission and make me recant my words. They may simply take me out and shoot me. Under the American KGB, there are no pesky Constitutional guarantees to get in the way.

If they don't do it to me, no doubt one of my fellow nerds reading this column will become such a victim.

Know this, however: while we can and will lose our lives and fortunes, refusing to cooperate with the American KGB is the only way to retain our sacred honor. In the immortal words of Mohandas K. Gandhi:

"They may torture my body, break my bones, or even kill me. Then they will have my dead body, not my obedience."

My friends, my brother and sister nerds, my comrades-in-arms: we are called. This is our time. We must step forward to the challenge, to do our part to see that our children are not burdened with the chains of slavery our governments wish to place on them. We must stand together, united in our cause, and refuse to be the spineless lackeys that the FedGov believes us to be.

We are our nation's, our children's, our entire way of life's best hope. If we fail now, the only recourse our children will have is bloody revolution.

That is our choice: stand now or force revolution on our children.

I invite you to join me in a solemn vow, a covenant between ourselves and those we protect:

Come what may, we will not submit to this evil law.

The FedGov has just made this our war. Let them cower in fear before the revenge of the nerds.

When Star Trek Was New

2009-07-30T23:26:00.003-05:00

You know, I think I'm getting old.

I've had this feeling increasingly, particularly when talking with newer fen – the ones who find the original Star Trek (no bloody A, B, C, D, E, or NX-01) quaint at best and ridiculous at worst. I admit that it bothers me to hear the TV show that I've been following for my entire life dissed by kids who can barely remember the premiere of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The particularly surreal part of it is that it puts me in mind of when Star Trek – and Star Trek fandom – was new. It wasn't always fashionable or socially acceptable to be a Star Trek fan – a "Trekkie," as we called ourselves in those days.

(No, not "Trekker" – that particular fannish argument didn't come along until the mid- to late-1970s. In the beginning, we called ourselves "Trekkies," and it's still the term I prefer.)

Only with the advent of the Star Trek movies in the 1980s did it become acceptable to be a fan of an in-production movie series as opposed to a dead TV series.

Now we have to face social derision again – only this time not from our peers who don't understand what we see in a silly "sci-fi" show about a guy with pointy years. Now we face it from our own "offspring," the fans of the later series of the Star Trek Franchise, who don't understand what we see in a hokey-looking old show.

I think these youngsters lack something of a sense of perspective – not surprising or unusual, considering perspective requires age and experience in order to obtain it.

If you'll indulge me for a moment, let's step through the Guardian of Forever and take a peek at the world 1972. I choose this year because I, myself, am a member of Star Trek's "Second Fandom."

(By way of brief explanation, Star Trek's First Fandom is are those old enough to have watched the original show during its original broadcast on NBC from 1966-1969. Second Fandom are those Trekkies too young to have watched Star Trek's original run, but discovered it in the 1970s during syndication.)

In 1972, there are only three TV channels. Well, four if your count PBS – but almost no one does. PBS is considered children's fare for before or after school or highbrow stuff like Masterpiece Theater that almost no one watches.

The three TV channels hit your TV set after being broadcast through the air, and the picture quality is dependant on:

The distance between the TV station's transmitter and your TV.
Your antenna – specifically its orientation. If you have a good roof antenna, the three stations probably come in fairly well (except during periods of high wind when the screen will vibrate with the antenna). If you have rabbit ears (a portable TV antenna that sits on top of the TV), then you probably find yourself adjusting its position for clearer reception every time you change channels.
Local electromagnetic conditions, such as your mom running the vacuum cleaner. Broadcast TV is highly succeptible to electromagnetic interference, so during storms, high sunspot activity, or use of the vacuum cleaner, the screen turns into a mass of jumbled images and static.

There is no Internet.

There are no computers – at least, none outside the local college data center. As soon as I discovered them, I cultivated a couple of computer science majors as friends specifically so that I had access to computers.

Even if you're lucky enough to have a couple of older CS friends who get a kick out of the gradeschool kid who follows them around begging to be allowed to play with the computer on their user account, you don't have a screen, mouse, and keyboard. You have a teletype machine as a terminal – essentially an electric typewriter plugged into the mainframe.

This is state-of-the-art equipment. In 1972, you thank your lucky stars that you're not working with punch cards. If you thought hanging chads was interesting in the 2000 American Federal election, try dropping a box full of punch cards that must be inserted in the correct order for your program to run.

Any output the computer generates is printed, line by line, on extra-wide green-and-white computer paper. In the world of 2002, imagine being at a DOS prompt or Bash shell – only everything is typed out on paper rather than viewed onscreen.

(Also in 2002, somewhere in a landfill near Lincoln, Nebraska will be ream after ream of paper with "Super Star Trek" battles on them.)

A few years later in 1979 (shortly before the release of Star Trek-The Motion Picture), my father will purchase his first business computer. He'll let me use the word processor to write reports for high school and college.

His computer will represent the state of the art, inasmuch as the display will be a CRT – an actual screen and keyboard! Of course, the screen will be a portable black-and-white TV plugged into the computer via an RF modulator, but it will be far more advanced than a teletype machine.

The fact that it will have an actual display will open up a wealth of new games. I'll spend hours playing the ASCII version of "Tank."

And it will have two – count them, two – nine-inch floppy drives! No more having to keep print-outs of everything: I'll save files on my very own, portable, 180K floppy disks! There will be no hard drive (or DASD, as it's called in the early 1970s) because even the largest IBM mainframes can only be equipped with – at best – a 200MB drive. A pair of nine-inch 180K floppies will be wonderful, because you'll boot the OS from a floppy, remove it to put in the word processor floppy, and save your files to the other disk.

High school teachers and college instructors will be impressed when I turn in actual typed reports from a state-of-the-art dot-matrix printer. My classmates will be stuck with typewriters until the early- to mid-1980s, meaning that they'll have to manually type multiple drafts of the same document, correct mistakes with liquid paper, and generally engage in far more effort than I will in order to do the same work.

The word processor itself will be somewhat more primitive than UNIX's "vi" editor. Its name will be WP6502, used so often that the name will be burned into my memory at least until 2002. This demonstrates the superiority of using a word processor as opposed to a typewriter – even though the word-processor will be non-GUI and will require formatting codes that make HTML look simple.

My first formal computer training will be in the mid-1970s: a junior high (middle school) summer school class in BASIC. We'll all bus to one of the high schools, which will have a bunch of teletype machines in the computer lab, each of which will dial up at 300BPS to the public schools' mainframe downtown.

Of course, in 1972, all of this is in my future. Right now, I'm just a young Trekkie with a lot of life ahead of him.

There are no MP3s or CDs, and not even much in the way of cassette tapes.

Music is on vinyl. In the mid- to late-1970s, there will be a brief (and rather dubious) flirtation with 8-track tape before cassettes become economically viable.

There are no cell phones. Hell, there are no cordless phones. And no satellite dishes.

There are no malls. You heard me right, children of the new millennium: there are no malls in the world of 1972.

There are some places where a few stores have congealed more or less in the same place, and one day these may become malls. The largest such conglomerations will be found "downtown," where the taller buildings of your city or town are located. Later in life, I'll ask my father if I can go downtown with my friends. He'll ask why, and lacking any more constructive purpose other than "to hang out with my friends," he'll wisely forbid me from doing so. Just as "hanging out at the mall" won't an advisable activity for a teenager of 2002, "hanging out downtown" is no more advisable in 1972.

The concept of "anchor stores," food courts, and totally-enclosed walkways between stores is a concept for the 1980s. There is a McDonald's downtown, but it's next to the main bus stop and a haven for all kinds of disreputable individuals. If you want to get from one store to another, you use the sidewalk outside.

There are no convenience stores. There are no self-service gas pumps. There are "service stations" that employ a mechanic or two that pump gas in between performing tune-ups, rebuilding engines, and replacing trannies. You might be able to buy a map, cigarettes, soda pop, or candy bar at a service station, but that's all. Service stations exist to service cars – if you want groceries, you go to the local IGA, Safeway, or Piggly Wiggly.

There are no theater complexes. Movies are shown in huge theaters that were themselves converted from live theater. In Lincoln, Nebraska in 1972, the Grand Old Lady of such theaters is the Stuart Theater (by 2002, it will have become the Rococo Theatre), a beautiful, ballroom-style, three-balcony affair. In 1977, I'll watch Star Wars (what post-millennial fen will call "Episode IV" in 2002) from the first row of the Stuart with a packed crowd, and leave remarking that this movie was much better than Logan's Run.

On December 7, 1979, I'll stand in a line three blocks away at the Stuart's main competitor, the State Theater. I'll stand there from 2:30pm when school lets out until 6:30pm when the doors open for the primiere of Star Trek -The Motion Picture. By the time the doors open, the line wil extend all the way around the block – I'll be fifth in line and will be able to talk to the people at the line's end.

I'll also be in the first phases of contracting Chicken Pox. In the world of 1972 and 1979, there is no Chicken Pox vaccine, and it's a routine childhood illness. That I will escape it until almost 1980 will be something of an oddity.

In 1979, I will have a fever of approximately 101 degrees – a fact that I'll neglect to tell my parents. Over the course of the next two days, I'll susequently expose 1200 people to the virus by virtue of watching the movie four times to packed houses of 300 people each. I'll ultimately have to leave the fourth screening halfway through, by virtue of being too feverish and dizzy to stay. I'll spend the next week home in bed, with my mother remarking that I'm getting what I deserve.

In 1998, during a visit to my parents' house, I'll take my daughters to watch Episode I from the same seat in the Stuart that I saw Episode IV. I'll be astonished at the theater's dilapidated condition and sadly remark that the days of real theaters are clearly gone.

There are no VCRs, not even in TV studios. TV stations send out camera crews that shoot actual celluloid film that takes time to transport and develop. Hence, it's not uncommon for the local news anchor to tease a story during a station break by ending with the phrase "film at eleven." If they shoot a story in the afternoon, the film won't be transported back to the station

and developed in time for the 6:00 evening news, but will have to wait for the 11:00 broadcast.

If you want to watch Star Trek, you watch it the moment that it aired, or you don't watch it.

A few years later, when portable cassette recorders become viable, some of us will hang the recorder's portable condenser microphone down from the channel knobs to the TV's speaker, and thereby get an audio tape of the episode for later review. God help any family member who will make the mistake of speaking during an episode, because we'll have to wait the entire 78-episode cycle to get another crack at a good recording.

In 1972, all isn't lost, however. Since Star Trek was cancelled in 1969, the demands of advertisers have required local TV stations that show Star Trek in syndication to cut minutes out of the show. Since the stations use 35mm film to show the episodes, that means that they are literally cutting out pieces of 35mm film and throwing it away.

Enterprising fans discovered this, and by 1972 had approached local stations to help them dispose of the film. They snip the footage into single-frame sections called "film clips," bind it in a slide board, and then show the frames as part of a slide-show at the local Star Trek fan club meeting.

The local fan club in Lincoln is Star Base Andromeda, which I joined in 1972. I will remain a member for many years and will still be on speaking terms with some of the members until at least 2002. In 2002, the club will still be holding meetings. In 1972 and for years to come, there will be weekly slide-shows of episode film clips.

There is no SF on television. Well, there was some, actually, but it's Lost In Space, Land of the Giants, and similar fare that no self-respecting SF fan wanted to watch.

Between Star Trek ending in 1969 and Star Wars (Episode IV) in 1977, the only weekly TV SF of note will be Space: 1999. Gene Roddenberry will try to recapture some of his glory with Genesis II, Planet Earth, The Questor Tapes, and Spectre. One of these in particular (The Questor Tapes) will be excellent and provide the genesis for the character of Data in The Next Generation. None of them will every be anything other than a movie of the week, however.

The only SF movies of note will be the Planet of the Apes movies and Logan's Run.

Consider also the political climate of 1972, of which I'm largely ignorant (though I'll later ask my parents what President Nixon did wrong):

The Cold War is in full swing. The Cuban Missile Crisis isn't long in the past, and most people lived with the expectation that they would ultimately die by nuclear fire. The Kennedy assination is still very fresh in everyone's mind, and the news is filled with images of young American men being brought home in body bags from Viet Nam.

Such is 1972, when Star Trek is new.

For its time, it is an astounding TV show. By the standards and production values available in 2002, it will appear dated and occasionally childish, but in 1972, it's certainly no worse than any of the cop shows, westerns, and sit-coms on the air.

As far as SF goes, it is light-years beyond anything anyone ever cooked up for TV. Hard as it will be for the youngsters of 2002 to believe, its visual effects and set design are considered state-of-the-art. They won't be surpassed by TV SF until the advent of Space: 1999.

In 2002, some of the alien planetscapes look a bit hokey – like they were shot on a soundstage with a scrim behind it that was lit with an odd color.

In 1972, I can catch a rerun of Bonanza and watch Hoss and Litte Joe climb off their horses onto a soundstage that's just as obvious by 2002 standards.

In 1972, however, it's just not possible to have the kind of location photography you saw in Lawrence of Arabia. Viewers don't expect that from a TV show. What Star Trek gives them is at least as good – and often better – than what other shows do.

My first memory of Star Trek is of the Mugatu from "A Private Little War." In 1972, I watch the episode from the family room of my father's Lincoln, Nebraska house. I remember it from his 1967 Vermillion, South Dakota house when I saw it in it original run: the used color TV had black wooden case, wooden legs, and white channel knobs with glossy black lettering.

The Mugatu scared the crap out of me in 1967. But now, in 1972, I'm fascinated by the notion of a group of space explorers, far from human civilization, whose mission is to "boldly go where no man has gone before."

This in and of itself is a departure from a lot of TV and movie SF of the time. Consider Star Trek's major contemporary, Lost in Space: a story about a group of people who didn't want to be where they were at all. Even the later Space: 1999 – unquestionably a superior show on a production level (though hideously stupid scriptually) – will be a show about how stupid humans had caused the moon to be blown out of orbit, causing its inhabitants to wander the universe rather aimlessly.

For a high-quality SF show to go on the air and specifically say, "We made it past all that and got to the stars," is not only a breath of fresh air, it is a brief, hourly ray of hope in an otherwise dismal world.

How could you not be a fan, in a world like that?

The President Is Insane

2009-07-30T23:23:00.002-05:00

At one time or another, you've stared at someone and wondered, "What in the heck are they thinking?" More and more often, this happens when I see government functionaries: Presidents, Congressmen, Senators, their staffs and sycophants. "What are they thinking?" is not a frivolous question: in a very real way, no human being can ever truly see the perspective of another, simply because it is impossible to actually step into another person's shoes. We can imagine what the other person's life is like, but we can never truly know.

This is, of course, exactly why libertarianism and the Zero Aggression Principle works as spectacularly as it does. The ZAP as a personal philosophy recognizes that we cannot truly know what the other guy is thinking: all that matters is that he doesn't harm others in the process of pursuing his goals. Libertarianism as a political philosophy works because it is derived from the ZAP and applies it on a political level.

Nevertheless, the Statist mind refuses to accept the rather obvious fact that one person can never really get inside the mind of another. They believe that the complex problems, motivations, and goals of every individual are easy to understand, therefore it is the province of government to assist the individual in any way possible.

Statists simply cannot understand that individual lives are far too complex for anyone but the person living it to understand. For this reason, it is impossible for someone else's life to be as important as your own.

This is an important distinction between the Statist and the libertarian. Failure to understand this concept is indicative of a serious disconnection from reality.

Indeed, this marks Statists as insane.

To justify this idea, let's look at the leading Statist in the United States, the President.

The individual in the office is largely irrelevant. The chief executive has been insane since the ink was wet on the Constitution, though it's clear that in the last century they've become increasingly paranoid and psychotic. Nor is insanity specific to the United States: every President, Prime Minister, and King since the dawn of time has shared the delusion.

On the subject of the President, consider this: for the power afforded him by the office, the most powerful individual in the world is willing to become a prisoner for the duration of his term of office -- and for most of the rest of his life.

This is no exaggeration. Do you think that the President can hop in the Ford and run down to the local Seven-Eleven to pick up a six-pack at 2:00 in the morning if the mood strikes? Never mind that there are servants to perform this kind of task -- the fact is that the President cannot do it. Case in point:

During George II's reign, I worked as an international courier. As was often the case, one evening found me at Pierson International Airport in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It was about midnight, and I was lounging around the deserted cargo docks of the airport, awaiting my deliveries to clear customs. Bush had been in Toronto that day and was leaving at about the same time I was lounging around the outer customs door.

There was a helicopter circling overhead, which I knew was part of the Presidential security.

Ordinarily, a major airport like Pierson International has a constant background hum of jet engines, either idling, taking off, or landing. Suddenly, every jet on the ground cut its engines and the airport went eerily silent. I glanced up and around, wondering what had happened. I reflexively looked off toward the horizon and up into the distance, scanning for the line of aircraft lights that would be planes on final approach. There were none -- traffic was orbiting well away from Pierson. Neither were any aircraft taking off.

I took several steps out into the parking lot. The helicopter circling over me instantly halted and trained a floodlight on me. I had the good sense to freeze and keep my hand by my sides.

The noise of a single aircraft engine powering up, taxiing, and then finally taking off became audible. I watched Air Force One leave the ground. Within seconds of takeoff, the floodlight winked out, the helicopter sped away, and every aircraft on the ground powered up its engines. I glanced into the distance and could see aircraft lining up for landing again.

All of this was deemed necessary by the President's guards simply so that he could fly from Toronto to Washington. Hundreds of thousands of dollars lost due to the procedure, and force was initiated against literally thousands of individuals.

Clearly, the President is a prisoner of his office.

Further, in order for the Secret Service to adequately guard the President, they must know his whereabouts and activities twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for four to eight years.

Do you want to know why Bill Clinton was so keen to keep the Secret Service from testifying before the Grand Jury? Because they knew exactly what he was up to. They had to, in order to protect him.

Think of it: the President is watched and monitored -- for security reasons -- 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. No wonder King George III had absolutely no qualms about subjecting the rest of us to the kind of constant surveillance that he endures: he was inured to it himself that he doesn't understand that it's totally immoral.

It goes far beyond that, however: if you're the President, your guards know when you and your wife went to bed, how long you had sex, and -- in all likelihood -- if you were both satisfied. This is not an exaggeration. In my relatively small household of myself, my wife, and two daughters, it's difficult to keep the generalities of my sex life from the children. They don't even want to know what we're up to, yet they have inadvertently interrupted our activities on occasion. By comparison, the White House is filled with Secret Service agents whose sole job is to know where the President is and what he's doing 24x7x365.

These represent restrictions on freedom and intrusions of privacy that any normal, sane individual would find impossible to live with.

Anyone who wants the power of the Presidency so badly that they don't care who knows the details of their sex life is either power-mad or a potential guest on the Jerry Springer Show.

Why would anyone put up with such intrusions of privacy? Certainly sheer, raw, naked power is an important factor. If you derive pleasure from making life-or-death decisions that impact hundreds of millions of individuals around the world, then the Presidency might look attractive. Unrestricted access to sex with anyone at any time also drives them, something that Clinton so aptly demonstrated. He was hardly the first: a sizable percentage of elected representatives keep mistresses and/or have sex with their subordinates.

However, it's clear that some individuals aren't power-mad or sex-crazed -- at least not when they first arrive in Washington. What motivates them?

Insanity. They believe that human beings function best when they are given a list of rules and regulations to be followed. They believe that humans need to be ruled, either by individuals in the local town hall, the state Capital, or Washington. Their minds are so twisted that they block out a thousand years' worth of evidence to the contrary.

Politicians -- with only a tiny handful of exceptions -- overlook the evidence of reality in favor of a clever fantasy that they've devised.

They are insane.

What other word is there for individuals who block out and ignore reality, engaging in activities that are actively harmful to themselves and others? The fact that their fantasy is widely-accepted is irrelevant. Imagine for a moment that a sizable portion of the population believed that the Earth was flat, in abject denial of several hundred years' evidence to the contrary. Such individuals are clearly insane, since they reject reality in favor of fantasy.

Politicians are no different. They reject reality in favor of a self-indulgent fantasy. They are insane.

Remember this the next time some Statist gives you a list of how they will make your life better by all the laws they'll pass if only they're elected:

Laws don't make your life better: they make it worse. Any politician who promises to make your life better by making more laws is insane.

A New Strategy

2009-07-30T23:20:00.001-05:00

I'm not a very good member of the Libertarian Party. I'm a strict observer of the Zero Aggression Principle, and the current LP, sadly, is not.

Despite being a poor Libertarian, it hasn't escaped my notice that national Libertarian Party likes to talk and yell and rant, but never actually seems to accomplish anything tangible.

This is not to belittle the efforts of the dedicated people in the field who ensure donations and ballot access. Indeed, most of them work tirelessly, and their ultimate reward is to see their candidate lose, year after year.

From one perspective, the fact that the LP can't get even an endorsement from the National Rifle Association is perplexing. Almost any Libertarian candidate would be a better enforcer of the Second Amendment than a Democrat or Republican. Similarly, why are they unable to get massive campaign contributions from a company like Microsoft? Microsoft has every reason to want to halt unconstitutional harassment by Federal officials. A Libertarian President would do that, while the best they can hope from a Republicrat is to pay "insurance money" for four years.

In fact, there's a very simple reason the LP can't get anything meaningful from non-libertarian sources: they will only bet on proven winners. So far, the LP is a proven loser.

Assume for the moment that the NRA is anything other than the nation's largest gun control lobby. The NRA only has so much money to contribute. Their endorsement will trigger additional contributions from individuals who also have limited funds. Why should the NRA waste its money on a party with a track record of zero wins? Why should they ask their membership to waste their money on such a party?

And a waste is what it would be. I'm no fan of the NRA's stance on the Second Amendment, mind you: too little, too late, from my perspective. From their perspective, however, they're backing candidates who have the most chance of having the impact that they want. Libertarians can have no impact if they can't even get elected – and they've never been elected. Giving Libertarians money simply because they hope they'll get elected someday is a gamble the NRA isn't going to take.

Yes, I know the argument: "But, Bill, if we got more money, we wouldn't keep losing! We have to start somewhere!"

It's a valid argument. It's just not the way the universe operates.

The NRA and Microsoft are going to put their money with proven winners, period. It is an unfortunate fact of life that Libertarian Party members simply must accept: they are in a catch-22. They need money to win, but can't get that money without winning first.

You don't have to like this fact, but as Robert Heinlein noted, "The universe is what it is, not what we want it to be."

The National LP has chosen to want the universe to be something other than it is, with predictable results. It's time to look at the universe clearly. We must understand what we can't change about it, and then set about to change what we can.

This is not to say that we should compromise our principles. We must never compromise our principles. We must change our tactics to fit reality.

We cannot change our ability to field a winning Presidential candidate. We can change how we use what money and endorsements we have. We must focus on a smaller goal, something that's attainable with the limited funds and support available to Libertarians. We must focus on a Congressional seat from a low-population state with a libertarian culture.

Specifically, we must get a Congressman elected from South Dakota.

I'll even volunteer to run, if the LP will actually back the plan I'm proposing.

South Dakota is a good candidate for a number of reasons:

South Dakota is low population, with a single Congressman-at-large.
There are two population centers, on the Eastern and Western sides of the state. The larger of these is less than a quarter of million people.
There are only a handful of TV stations in the state, perhaps fifty radio stations, and two major newspapers.
The culture is largely agricultural, with a strong tradition of hunting and firearms ownership. It would be rare to find an adult male who does not at least own a shotgun, a deer rifle and a hand gun. Indeed, it would probably be unusual to find a male child over twelve who does not own a .22 rifle.
County Sheriffs will issue concealed-carry permits to virtually anyone, with essentially no paperwork necessary.
There is no state income tax.
Casino gambling is legal.

Clearly, South Dakota is a very libertarian place, particularly when compared to the megalopoli of the East and West. What's hampered Libertarian candidates in the past is lack of necessary support.

Freed from the necessity of actively campaigning for a Presidential candidate in 2004, the National Party would have the means to generate more campaign money than a Democrat or Republican candidate would ordinarily need to get elected in South Dakota. A couple of million bucks is all it should take.

The necessary funds would be used to hire political hacks, PR flacks, marketers, professional advertisements, prime-time advertising on every TV and radio station, and full-page ads in every newspaper. This is an attainable goal in a small population state.

If the National LP will face reality, we can elect at least one Congressman in 2002. If not, we will continue to be the party of principled losers.

This isn't to suggest that the LP not run a candidate for President. Far from it! A Presidential candidate must be run, if for no other reason than to maintain ballot access.

However, the LP must not run a human being, and must spend no more time and money than is necessary.

Instead, the National LP must run "None of the Above" for President in 2004.

Remember, no matter what candidate is run in 2004, they are going to lose – and probably lose huge. The Party does not "lose" anything by not fielding a human candidate. On the contrary, running "None of the Above," will garner more votes than in any previous election.

The 2000 election – like virtually every election in my lifetime – was a clear case of apathy. Bush was a fascist and Gore a socialist. Functionally, they were identical. As Bill Mahr noted in a recent stand-up routine on HBO:

"This country doesn't have two political parties. It has identical cousins played by Patty Duke."

The voters know this. The 2000 election clearly showed that they were well aware that it didn't matter which candidate won. Consequently, few people turned out to vote, and those that did were evenly split between the two candidates.

Imagine if they'd had "None of the Above" as a choice.

Also imagine the PR value of the LP running "None of the Above." The current Party Chair could spend half of every day just explaining to news agencies why the LP chose to do it. The sheer novelty would be worth more than all the national advertising in the last decade. Sure, there would be an empty podium at the third party debates, but so what? Aside from a few intellectuals and party faithfuls watching C-SPAN, who watches the third party debates? Or the socialist/fascist debate, for that matter?

Compared to, say, the Party Chair on Good Morning America explaining what the LP has done and why.

Now imagine that this occurs in the context of a Libertarian Congressman elected in 2002. By 2008, the LP might not look like such losers any more. They'd have at least one Congressman from South Dakota in office – and probably others from states like Wyoming, Arizona, Montana, North Dakota, and Nebraska. They'd have garnered significant votes in 2004 by running "None of the Above." The NRA might be forced to endorse the South Dakota Congressmen because he actually has a track record of winning. Major contributors might actually give the Party money because they have a track record of winning. News organizations would be forced to cover LP candidates as the best political story since the Reform Party. It could turn the tide.

But – and listen carefully – the tide won't turn as long as libertarians collectively ignore reality.

The first step every recovering drug addict makes is to admit that he's a drug addict. The first step that each Libertarian needs to make is to admit that the Party cannot run a winning Presidential race – yet.

I believe in this notion so much that if the LP will back me, I will be the next Congressman from South Dakota – the first Libertarian ever elected to national office. But I'll only do it if they back me. If it's done with the same blind ignorance of reality that's marked the last Presidential races, I don't want any part of it. Like Manny in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, I want good odds that I'll win before I even start.

It's a simple choice: choose reality and win, or continue to choose fantasy and lose.

It's Time To Be Free

2009-07-30T23:12:00.003-05:00

I argue that a free individual doesn't wait to be free, rather he wakes up one morning and says, "Today I am free."

And then a free individual acts like a free individual.

Today, in the shadow of September 11 and all that followed it, it is time for you to decide to be free.

Maybe you've been putting it off for some reason. Maybe you've been waiting for "things to get better." Maybe you've been waiting for more of your neighbors to "get it" on their own.

Maybe you're just plain scared of what the State will do to you if you actually show them how a free individual lives. It's a valid concern, particularly after 9/11.

Free individuals are absolutely antithetical to governments.

If you've been waiting to be free, I suggest you note the following:

"Things" are not going to get better. They're going to get worse – dramatically so.

Using 9/11 as an excuse, the State has already put additional draconian limits on freedom – and it's going to do more. It has already formed an Unconstitutional Office of Home Security that will be responsible for Browning only knows how many intrusions into our lives.

The mere idea of a Federal Office of Home Security should make a free individual's blood run cold.

The OHS will no doubt become one of the most feared and hated State agencies. Indeed, the OHS is poised to become the Federal Secret Police, in a way that the IRS, BATF, and FBI only dreamed of.

In the immediate term – and to the positive glee of every Congress- and Senatecritter on Capitol Hill – the idea of the national ID card is in the public mainstream.

An unsurprisingly large number of particularly foolish individuals are in favor of the idea.

Longtime Statist sycophant Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, has been motivated to throw in with them. Ellison has offered to donate the technology that would make it possible for the State to track the identities, movements, and whereabouts of every American.

Predictably, the would-be slaveholders of the 21st century (including such notables as Democrat Diane Feinstein and Republican Mary Bono) are euphoric. 9/11 was exactly the sort of excuse they've waited for. They're pouncing.

The handwriting is on the wall: ultimately the State will have mandated Unconstitutional and immoral electronic "travel papers" for every American.

The story of Statist sycophant Larry Ellison and Oracle is worth recounting for two reasons. Firstly, it says something of Ellison's background. More importantly, there's a moral to his story that free individuals should take away.

As this sort of debate often borders on religious discussions in technology circles, I'm going to tell you my biases right up front:

I'm a Information Technology and Security specialist. I have an extensive background in operations, particularly from the UNIX server, Internet, and security perspectives.

I'm a Linux-head: I'm no fan of Microsoft products because of my strong conviction that – on a technical level – Microsoft consistently produces software that is buggy as an ant farm.

However, I have enormous respect for Bill Gates for a number of reasons. Not the least of these is that his marketing skills are so good that he can become fabulously wealthy selling such technically flawed products. Only in the computing industry – one of the few areas left in the U.S. economy that approaches a free market – is this possible.

Gates' ability to out-market his competitors does not make him a monopoly – not even a de facto one. The State's efforts to destroy the company were simply the usual destructive vindictiveness government reserves for anything that it cannot control.

Which is why, of course, there are 20,000 immoral and Unconstitutional gun laws on the books.

In order to control us, the State must first disarm us. They and their sycophants have positively no conscience about this, as evidenced by Bloody Tuesday. Remember this, and remember it well:

Victim disarmers would rather see three thousand people dead in the rubble than a few airline passengers with guns in their hands.

As to Larry Ellison:

He is CEO of a company that produces a relational database server that is the back end of an enormous number of applications in the world. Their product, Oracle, is the target at which Microsoft has been aiming with its own SQL Server for some time. In recent years, Microsoft has shown signs of starting to outperform Oracle.

Larry Ellison may be a disgusting Statist, but he's no fool. He was one of the primary litigants in attempting to force Microsoft out of his market.

After all, if you can't beat 'em, have the State do it for you.

Note this important fact, however:

While he was spending unnecessary billions saving his company from the State's ax, Bill Gates ignored virtually every Statist edict as to how he was to run his business.

Gates' critics clamor that he has no respect for the law. A free individual should say, "Good. If that is the law, then the law is an ass the size of Rosie O'Donnell."

Free individuals must always remember the lesson that Bill Gates taught us:

The State cannot control you if you don't want to be controlled.

Less than two weeks after the massacre of 9/11, Larry Ellison was on record as saying that national ID cards were a necessity. He suggested smart cards with digitally-embedded photographs and fingerprints.

Oracle, (as L. Neil Smith noted of Smith & Wesson before it) must now die.

However, pulling Oracle's products from the data center is the least that a free individual should do today.

Remember this clearly: if you've not been living as a free individual, today is the day to start. Things are not going to get better. Your neighbors are not going to "get it" on their own.

The State is still going to be a terrifying, vengeful entity filled with alphabet soup agencies and jack-booted thugs.

This isn't going to change. It's going to get worse – unless you wake up tomorrow morning and decide to be free.

It is time for you to decide to be free in spite of how bad it is or how much worse it might become.

If not now, when?

It's time for you to wake up in the morning, stretch, and say to yourself, "Today, I am free. I will go out and do anything I like, short of initiating force against another human being."

Here are only some of the ways a free individual lives:

We seek out and get to know other free individuals. These are our friends and potential allies in times to come.
We seek out Statists and their sycophants. We try to change their views by showing them how free individuals live. Failing that, we are simply aware of who they are. They are our potential enemies in times to come.
We carry weapons appropriate to our self-defense and to the defense of those around us. If the State makes it illegal – under any circumstances – to carry weapons, we ignore the law.

This may mean that you need to carry a weapon that isn't visible without a search of your person. There are many choices – my own current personal choice is the Taurus Model 617 snub-nosed revolver in .357 Magnum. This is by no means the only choice.

We carry our weapon at all times, regardless of local law. By definition, self-defense is personal and cannot be delegated. In particular, it cannot be delegated to the State. If the State insists on searching us in order to disarm us, we avoid places where such searches occur. This may mean that instead of flying, we take a train or bus, or drive a car.

Is there anywhere that you need to be so badly that it is worth your life or freedom?

If, in the fast-paced business world, you find yourself in a situation in which you must disarm to avoid State persecution, follow the advice of Bill St. Clair: Wear the empty holster of your preferred sidearm. If asked, explain that particularly in light of 9/11 (and because it's the inalienable right of every man, woman, and responsible child – guaranteed by the Bill of Rights), a free individual should be prepared to defend himself and those around him.

The State makes this legally impossible in many areas. A free individual believes that there should be a loaded in that holster – and that every free individual has the right to a holster on his hip, also containing a loaded sidearm.

If the State outlaws our weapons completely, we hide them from searches and seizures. We maintain black markets among free individuals to keep weapons available to those who wish to protect themselves.

This is clearly not the moment to think of measures that are other than peaceful. Nevertheless, the State has made it clear that it may ultimately require us to spill the blood of Statists if we are to retain our liberty. We therefore must not give up our weapons. Not even the tiniest .22-caliber pistol.
We refuse to participate in fingerprinting, photographing, and any other State-mandated record-keeping of free individuals. If the State makes it impossible to travel without such records, then do not travel. Is there anywhere you need to be so badly that it is worth your freedom? We maintain "underground railroads" among free individuals so that if travel is necessary, free individuals may do so without State-mandated electronic "travel papers."
We use the highest level of encryption we like for whatever purpose we see fit. If the State outlaws encryption, we ignore these laws. We maintain black markets and "black networks" of free individuals so that we may communicate freely, without the interference of the State in our affairs.
We refuse to obey any laws that infringe on our freedom. We maintain "underground railroads" among free individuals so that those who violate unjust, immoral law may escape persecution by the State.
We go about our business – whatever it may be – guided by only one principle:

That we do not have the right – under any circumstances – to initiate force against another human being, nor to advocate or delegate its initiation.

If we initiate force against an individual – intentionally or accidentally – we must provide restitution to that individual.

If an individual initiates force against us, we may take whatever action is necessary to counter it. If a force initiator is a Statist or one of the State's sycophants, we are still ethically justified in taking action. The power of the State must always be kept in mind when contemplating action, however.
We go about our business openly whenever possible, showing our unfree friends and neighbors how free individuals conduct themselves – and thus inspiring new free individuals through our example.

The State seems intent on following a course that leads inexorably to tyranny. I am utterly confident that there is only one way to reverse this course:

A sudden proliferation of free individuals – starting when you wake up tomorrow morning and decide to be free.

Imagine that even a third of the adults (and responsible children) of the United States woke up tomorrow and decided to be free. The State – on all levels – does not employ enough police to enforce its will on so many individuals.

Remember this truth when you wake up at night, terrified by what the State may do next:

The State cannot control you if you do not wish to be controlled.