Isotropic

In desperate times …

While there are some big Hollywood players involved with this project, the inherent problem with making a movie out of Asteroids is that it doesn’t have a plot, or characters, just a triangular spaceship blowing up some oddly-shaped polygons. –Michael Thompson, Universal to bring Asteroids to theaters

image: NASA, (253) mathilde.jpg, Wikimedia Commons

I was browsing around Netflix and ran across this review, by ‘SK 1596697′, of “The Invasion” (yet another remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers“, this time with Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, et al):

I’m a research psychologist who studies alexithymia, which is a personality trait that involves difficulty in identifying and expressing emotions. This movie creeped me out completely, because I saw it as a vivid illustration of an imagined alexithymic world. (Either that, or they hired terrible expressionless actors.)

Hey, I thought it was funny.

Wow! Would you really want to work for these people?

The city government in Bozeman, Montana, isn’t content to cyberstalk its potential employees—they’re now asking applicants for their login information for any social networking sites. –John Timmer, City to job applicants: Facebook, MySpace log-ins please, Ars Technica, 2009-06-18

According to the article, a waiver form asks “Please list any and all, current personal or business websites, web pages or memberships on any Internet-based chat rooms, social clubs or forums, to include, but not limited to: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, YouTube.com, MySpace, etc.” … and asks for username and passwords for each one.

Here, let me give you my car and house keys while we’re at it — I don’t want to make things difficult for you. Arrrgh.

The city of Bozeman, Montana has decided to back off on its requirement that job applicants hand over their logins and passwords for every social network they belong to. –Jacqui Cheng, Bozeman apologizes, backs down over Facebook login request, Ars Technica, 2009-06-23

Merely because upon reflection they decided they were wrong. I’m sure the “bad press” and “widespread criticism” had nothing to do with it. Idiots.

I prefer “real” books over electronic ones.

So much of what I do is intangible: mere transient electromagnetic disturbances in a wire or chip, displayed on a glowing screen, precariously stored on whirring platters, streaming tape — all susceptible to destruction by emp, power failure, careless shell commands, or obsolescence of technology…

In contrast, a book has a physical presence with heft and texture, a relative permanence, a durability that withstands inordinate amounts of abuse short of fire, flood, or wood chipper. Even if we were thrown back into a stone-age existence, a book would still be accessible, the only requirements being eyes and a sound mind. I can expect a book to last a lifetime, with no fear that it will suddenly become unreadable — the text scrambled or suddenly incomprehensible, the covers locked shut, or chained to the shelf unable to be removed.

I can scribble in the margins, tag pages with yellow stickies, cram notes between the leaves. I can leave them open at interesting passages, stacked, or spread out on a table or floor, for hours or days, immediately available, concrete reminders just by their location and arrangement what I’m working on.

Now, there are certain advantages to most electronic forms: compact storage, portability, search, copy/paste, etc. Unfortunately, that form sometimes is an awkward, proprietary, OS-restricted format that won’t last through software upgrades or passing fads.

But the most damning aspect of electronic text is DRM. Last year, when Microsoft nuked the MSN Music Store, I said “Yet another ’service’ bites the dust, leaving behind more consumers who probably thought they owned something permanent, only to discover that use of ‘their’ stuff was at the whim of some entity that couldn’t care less.”

I was reminded of that yesterday by Megan McArdle’s “Rethinking the Kindle“, where she commented on a couple posts by Dan Cohen at Gear Diary:

• Kindle’s DRM Rears Its Ugly Head… And It IS Ugly
• KindleGate: Confusion Abounds Regarding Kindle Download Policy

The Amazon Kindle is a very nice device; I’ve been tempted to get one, but I’ve never been able to convince myself that it’s worth the cost. Experiences like Cohen’s reinforce my desire to avoid anything tied up with DRM. You can “purchase an electronic book” … but not really. What you really do is effectively “rent” the content, which may evaporate from your possession at any time. The use of DRM itself is annoying; the outrageousness in Cohen’s experience comes from the lack of customer support knowing what the restrictions are, nor even how to find out.

There’s a disconnect from reality when it is acceptable to tell a customer that the solution to your product suddenly becoming inaccessible is to just “repurchase it”. Arrrgh.

Thanks to Mark Dominus for today’s wonderful title, scarfed from the punchline of his post “A child is bitten by a dog every 0.07 seconds…“.

Postal Bulletin 22258, in a section about dog bites, says “Children are the majority of victims and are 900 times more likely to be bitten than letter carriers.” However, according to Dominus’s analysis of data from the Post Office and the CDCP, that would yield over 5 bites per child! He goes on to say that “So the correct statistic is not that children are 900 times more likely than carriers to be bitten, but rather that carriers are 6.6 times as likely as children to be bitten, …”.

“IE8 is pretty reliable. It finished downloading Firefox without a single crash.”

– a comment on Lifehacker’s Microsoft’s Browser Comparison Chart Offends Anyone Who’s Ever Used Another Browser

According to a media release, “Mississippi has reached a multi-million dollar anti-trust settlement with software giant Microsoft [...] worth up to $100 million”. The article goes on to say that “This is the largest cash payment made to a state government.”.

The state gets $40 to $48 million directly, while vouchers to just about any constituency you can think of will account for up $60 million or so.

Now, I’m somewhat gleeful that MS smacked MS[FT], but I’m disappointed in that the bottom-of-the-food-chain consumers only get a few paltry dollars (either $5 or $12). Well, actually, they don’t even get that; what they really get are vouchers good for buying “any hardware or software”. While the article says “any”, I wonder if that really means “any Microsoft” product. Oh … I wonder how the lawyers made out.

I’m also concerned that by the time the bureaucratic procedures mentioned in the article are implemented and all the vouchers are processed, that it will actually cost more than the cheap vouchers are worth — unless you’re a bureaucrat, of course. Honestly, I wouldn’t go through the hoops necessary to get a $5 Microsoft voucher. If the $60 million in vouchers aren’t all claimed, the state will only get an extra $8 million — that’s an interesting provision.

Finally, now that this is settled, MS & MS can go marching hand in hand into the sunset dawn of a new day: “[Attorney] General Hood further stated, ‘I now look forward to working with Microsoft on helping us on two of my most passionate issues: stopping intellectual property theft and cyber child pornography.’”

h/t: WJTV (Twitter)

It must be grouchy old man week at Isotropic. Anyway …

One of my favorite bloggers has this to say about the expectation of instantaneous response to text or email messages:

First: If you are the sort of person who believes that all your e-mails/texts must be responded to instantaneously or sooner, you may be a self-absorbed twit. John Scalzi, I’ll Get Back to You When I Get Back To You

Quite a funny post, along with the ensuing commentary.

I plead guilty to being excessively slow to respond to personal email in particular … as in days or weeks. It’s not really intentional, more that once it scrolls out of the current window I’m likely to forget about it until I happen across it sometime later. Particularly if I get a message during the day I’ll plan on responding to it “this evening”. I have little or no sense of time, so a day or a week seem about the same to me; thus, “this evening” may turn into “next month”. Sigh.

Text I usually try to respond to within a few minutes, but it depends on what I’m involved with at the moment. I do have my phone set to emit an obnoxious siren if I don’t at least acknowledge (to it) within 5-10 minutes that I received text/IM/mail. However, on my laptop I have IM set to no sound, auto-minimize, so those messages I may not even notice for minutes or hours. Occasionally I am even asleep or otherwise separated from my electronic tethers devices.

Sometimes the phone system decides to make things worse by routing your text via the Moon or Mars relay first; just yesterday I had a block of text messages delivered all at once that had actually been sent about 12 hours earlier. Kinda disconcerting until I realized what had happened.

By the way, I intentionally do not sync up my work, personal, and phone email accounts — they are all separate. I even have separate IM accounts for use on my phone.

That’s the tagline of Corrupted-Files.com. Yeah, right. All you students wanting to scam your professors should immediately go there and buy a document of the appropriate type and size. They guarantee that it won’t open on a PC or Mac. Riiight — if all you know is “double-click to open”. I’m almost tempted to buy one just to see how good a job they do with the scrambling. I’m particularly curious to see what the “strings” command would reveal, and if you get duplicate content across multiple purchases.

Most professors aren’t stupid (at least not the ones I hang out with, lol) and have seen a lot of scam attempts. You aren’t as clever as you think.

h/t:: Bruce Schneier

Or so I was called today by a panhandler in the grocery store parking lot. I think he was offended by my refusal to shake his hand and telling him to go away.

Do not come up to me cold outside the Quick Stop, in the grocery store parking lot, or anywhere else, with a smarmy smile, your hand held out for a shake, and saying “Sir! Sir! Could I speak to you for a minute?” Sorry, but I’ve heard all the heartbreaking stories about being from out of town with a broken-down car, no gas or food, … way too many times.

Once I was more kindly, and would in weak moments respond to these pleas. On a few occasions, even sensing a con, I gave something just to see what would happen — like the person “needing” some food inside a fast-food joint, who immediately left the premises when I gave up a couple dollars; so much for hunger pangs. I smirked all the way to my car.

So, yeah, I’m a cold-hearted bastard. First I’ll ignore you, so as not to encourage you. If you’re persistent, I’ll shake my head, say “no” with a glare, and wave you away. If you still haven’t given up, I will yell at you and maybe even do my berserk psychopath routine.