synaesthesia

Within the span of a month:

– The third replacement of a Maxtor 200GB drive died in my second workstation, one month out of warranty. Data corrupt but recovered somewhat.

– A Maxtor 40GB drive in my main workstation died a click of death while running. Total loss.

– An attempted upgrade of my main workstation failed because I have a MS-6905 1.1 Rev B, the revision that happened to be recalled by MSI at some point years past. Of course, the recall is no longer honored.

– Upgrading the fileserver with a used 3ware card and 250GB Seagate drives in RAID5. Of course, it doesn't work. (6410) Fortunately, the seller refunded our money even though he claimed it worked.

– Obtained a 3ware 7504. It was working fine. Tonight the driver reported that the controller was not responding and kicked the array offline, necessitating a reboot. Of course this meant all the AFS volumes with open files need to be salvaged. And I'm certain this will happen again.

The moral of the story is to expect that anything even remotely related to a hard drive will fail in spectacular fashion at the point when it would cost you the most for it to do so.

So-called medical marijuana users are addicted to marijuana in the same way alcoholics are addicted to alcohol or heroin users are addicted to heroin: if they do not get their “fix”, they will suffer or die. Furthermore, they are willing to do anything to secure a supply of the drug, including defying the law, and illegally manufacturing it in private. Such people are typically adamant in denying their addiction, while at the same time demonstrating an inability to cope without the drug's effects. Why would we want to encourage people to enter this cycle of drug dependency and the associated drug seeking behavior? Is the cure really better than the disease? We ought to be encouraging people to make better individuals of themselves rather than allowing them to add more problems to their situations.

I hate computers. Thinking it may be a good idea to consolidate some of our machines into virtual images under Xen, UML, or VServers.

Recently my workstation ran out of memory/swap at nearly 1 year uptime. It hadn't been rebooted since I moved into the house. Of course, Linux went crazy and killed the X server instead of whatever was responsible, so the console was unusable, and ssh couldn't fork a shell process, so I had no choice but to hit the reset button.

Today:
The power went out at home around 4:30 while I was at work. Eventually, the UPSes shut down, so I noticed a lack of network connectivity to my home machines at that point. The UPSes powered back on, but hardly any machine came back up correctly. The server console IBM keyboard was non-functional for some reason…

router: Couldn't bring up the network because of a malformed interfaces file that it had previously accepted. DNS server was non-functional, upgraded to latest version and re-did config files, seemed to fix it.
hydra: Can't find kernel. Of course, this machine has a non-functional PS/2 keyboard/mouse bus, so a console is impossible to use on it. The hard drive will have to be examined in another machine.
dbz: Couldn't log in because pam_krb5 couldn't find krb5.conf – even though pam_krb5 is optional! Sigh. I have the same problem on laptops since they are frequently disconnected from the network. Filed a bug.
zephyr: Came back up and auto-fscked after the outage. Spewing ATA errors all over the console because the Maxtor drive is all of a sudden dying, fsck continues blindly and “fixes” whatever it finds, probably trashing whatever I might have otherwise been able to recover. A SMART test on the drive fails out immediately. Applied for advance RMA. May have to send this one to a recovery house. fsck should not be so braindead when there is obviously a failing hardware. It should also not attempt to fsck partitions which are set 'noauto'. Just in case, I will be getting a new power supply for this machine because this is the third Maxtor drive which has failed within two years with it.
fileserver: Rebooted into 2.6 kernel with no RAID. ide-generic is not depended on by any IDE drivers, so it had to be entered into the initrd modules list or no hard drive was accessible. Apparently RAID and udev don't get along, so mdadm needs to create the md device nodes. CPU fan alarm was on, but this time it was not a false alarm – CPU2 fan had become clogged and noisy. Took it off the heatsink, blew both pieces off with compressed air, and oiled the fan, plugged the hole with lithium grease since it was previously capped with hard plastic. We will see how long it lasts.

blizzard,aurora,syrinx: since fileserver and DNS were down, these machines were very confused.
laptop: CD drive no longer responds correctly to ATA identify commands, so the drive is impossible to use.

I definitely need a supply of spare fans as well as a big enough hard drive to back up my 200 gig, two 40 gigs and 20 gig. Hard drive failures are ridiculously annoying.

DRM = Copy protection
Trusted computing = Treacherous computing = Hardware DRM
Trustworthy computing = Microsoft trying to fix its insecure software

The difference? Trustworthy computing benefits the user. Trusted computing removes the user's capability to exercise fair use rights.

Ad hominem attacks at the source of a statement do not serve in place of refuting the statement. Certainly, when a bias or interest in the topic is exposed, that may call the person's reasoning into question. But until the statement is refuted, it stands, regardless of who stated it.

Wise words from a fool's mouth are still wise words – or more succinctly – a broken watch is still right twice a day.

There is a supposed double standard in the political views of freedom of information types. It goes that, on the one hand we expect the GNU General Public License to be enforced, but on the other hand we complain when the RIAA sues people who are sharing music online.

There are a few gaping holes in this supposed contradiction. First of all, the RIAA is suing end users for disproportionate sums compared to the supposed damage they have done, in some cases $100,000 per user. They assume that they price of their CD is the value of that CD, in calculating the damages, which is an economic fallacy when a monopoly (such as any copyright industry) is involved. The RIAA also uses this money to lobby and/or bribe politicians for copyright enforcement rights that are in contempt of due process and unreasonable searches, and for arbitrary copyright privileges and lengths. In contrast, the GPL crusaders simply want the source code that they are entitled to by the license, not any sum of money to appease them – the freed information is the goal of the license and its adherents, not revenues.

The other problem with this is that the complaint involves the RIAA going after _nonprofit_ file sharers. Note that commercial pirates are not exempted from criticism. Of course, you could just accuse the freedom of information types of being communists, but also note that the GPL does not prohibit selling the software. GPL defenders equally lambast both freeware and commercial authors who are benefiting from the work of open source authors who were motivated because of the GPL, but refuse complying with the GPL by reciprocating the benefits to the community, which removes incentive for the authors of the GPL software to continue to develop it.

Copyright is supposed to be an exchange. In accordance with the Constitution, the federal government is authorized to provide “temporary” monopolies “to promote progress of the sciences and useful arts”. 100 year copyrights are not temporary by any definition that takes human life expectancy into account (is a 100 year sentence a “temporary” imprisonment?). Furthermore, it is arguable that such indefinite copyright lengths are actually counter to the promotion of progress. It is a myth that new works are borne entirely of some inspiration of genius. Every new work is both a combination of inspiration and standing on the shoulders of those who previously innovated. For an example, look at jazz to see how a healthy innovative environment functions, and compare the level of innovation to the humdrum commercial music that the RIAA promotes.

Another related problem is that the GPL crusaders are directly defending authors who are actually creating new material, while the RIAA is not. The RIAA claims to have the artists' interests in mind, but nowhere have they shown that they share the dividends of these suits with the artists. Copyright privilege already extends to the life of the author plus 75 years, so if the artist's contract assigns the copyright to an RIAA member company (as is frequently the case), they get 75 years of royalty-free mooching off an artist's life work. That's not a good deal for the public at all.

The original 14 year term is far more reasonable. To the GPL, this would mean that the source code is required by copyright to be shared for 14 years until the software becomes public domain. That certainly seems reasonable given the length of the typical software life cycle. To the RIAA, this means that artists would have to continue to innovate, and that the RIAA would have to support an enviroment that fosters innovation, instead of simply living off the fat of previous works.

So while the RIAA lobbies for and continues to obtain arbitrary copyright powers, I feel that nonprofit sharing of their work in violation of their copyright is justified.

Some compare this to Robin Hood and claim that it's just like trying to justify stealing from the rich just because they have something you don't. The fallacy there is that Robin Hood was not simply stealing from the rich, he was challenging the arbitrary authority of King John and the Sheriff of Nottingham, and returning freedom to the people that was removed from them when they had done no harm. Nonprofit sharing harms no one except producers of shoddy or trivial works. When shoddy or trivial works become the norm, nonprofit sharing helps those who produce innovative works, because they can be identified before purchase as opposed to the purchase being a gamble for the consumer. Nonprofit sharing thus promotes progress, and you'd think it should be a constitutionally protected right. Note that the authors would not be required to provide the mechanism for doing this – they are free to invoke whatever copy controls they want, but the consumer is free to bypass them at whatever expense or hassle it takes him.

As for who holds the moral high ground, the GPL advocates want the free dissemination of information and the legal ability to modify it to their own desires and share the result with others. The RIAA wants money for their executives, shareholders, and their legal war chest. Into whose hands would you rather place the reins of legislating incentives for innovation in society? Whose goals include the long term benefit of the most people?

A frequent argument of proponents of a strong central government with authority overriding locales is that if states had varying laws, the effect to travelers would be confusing and would lead to more people being jailed for doing things that they didn't know were illegal. Ignoring the completely asinine end of it, that not knowing otherwise, people might assume violent actions were legal, we are left with what to do about varying levels of legislation against non-violent acts. Generally these fall into two categories – economic regulations and moral regulations. I think the following strategy can address this problem:

If it can be shown that a nonviolent act was not illegal in
the subject's locale of residence, and if it can be shown that he had not been previously accused of the crime in the locale where it was committed, then the conviction can be thrown out on the basis of tourist ignorance. Nothing is said about acts which are committed in tandem with the excused act and that do not fall under this measure otherwise.

Yes, this does mean that tourists get one, and only one, ticket out of a nonviolent crime that they may not have had prior knowledge of. This would not excuse any violent crimes committed at the same time, or other nonviolent crimes of which the perpetrator was provably aware of their illegality.

is that the FSF and the Linux community mocked us, rather than mocking the closed vendors

That's a nice troll, but I've never seen evidence of this “mockery”. More truthfully stated, most people think going as far as demanding open-source firmware is unrealistic compared to the goal of having freely redistribute firmware so that OS installations from a wireless net are possible. I don't understand what problem the FSF would have with this considering open-source firmware would be included in their ideology. And Debian, the largest nonprofit Linux distributor, requires all programs to be open source in order to be in the main archive, and a firmware is a program that runs on a slave computer, so I don't see why this approach would be mocked there either.

Patent proponents assert that ownership of ideas is a natural property right that cannot be subverted in an economically functional society. Copyright proponents assert that ownership of ideas is a natural property right that cannot be subverted in an economically functional society.

This is where software patents are a problem even between these two groups. Software patents trump the natural ownership rights (if any) that were conferred by copyright. That's fair?

This is secondary to the core issue of software patents – the claim being that causing a secondary market failure (a monopoly) is less harmful than the primary market failure of uncontrolled copying of the idea (no scarcity). I think the patent pushers have yet to prove their case on this one.

I think there is a fundamental confusion about the role of government in many people's minds. The set of actions that government force should be used in response to is a vast subset of the set of all wrong actions. People seem to have this idea that the government exists to vicariously promote their set of morals, and all they have to do is convince enough fellow citizens of the validity of their morals in order to get favorable legislation passed.

This is _wrong_. The fundamental problem here is that people are mistaking their personal, subjective morality for the objective moral code that everyone must agree on for a free society. An objective moral code prohibits actions which bring measurable harm to another individual, and the punishment should be proportional to (and of greater magnitude than) the harm wrought.

Unfortunately, we have many laws which do not fit under that umbrella. One source of such laws is disagreement over where measurable harm begins. Another source is economic regulation – these laws are often necessary, but frequently legislate subjective morality under the guise of being primarily related to the economy. The biggest problem, however, is moral ambiguity. Moral crusaders/culture warriors seek to enact laws to promote their subjective morality, and use a posture of superiority or fear to convince others to at least not stand in their way.

However, even more difficult to detect than this is subjective morals that are held by a majority. It is very easy to fall into a pattern of group-think where the majority opinion becomes so accepted that it is regarded as truth, especially in a society where critical and objective thinking is often discouraged or even admonished. Confirmation bias is utilized as an excuse for not holding agreeable claims to a high standard of scrutiny.

It's similar to how Christians say “God wouldn't like that” or “Baby Jesus wouldn't do that” in reference to some non-harmful act. Actually, they are just judging you (using their subjective morality), and using their deity as a proxy so such a statement wouldn't seem as arbitrary and baseless as it actually is.

When subjective morals become codified into law, inevitably one of a few things occurs: a minority group is persecuted using that law as support, government is expanded further in order to enforce that law more effectively, or the law continues to be broken out of sight of the police, for example. Beyond that, the more subjective laws a society has, the greater probability of an individual breaking a law at any given moment; either because that individual didn't even consider that what he was doing could possibly be against the law, or because he feels the law is wrong and is defiant of it. Such laws open the door for selective law enforcement, since everyone is guilty of something – the police will just pick the most attractive targets to bring down. “Law and order”, a popular right-wing mantra, is actually undermined by excessively broad legislation, since people lose respect for the law when they break it doing something they do not regard as wrong.

Moral crusaders are spending lots of everyone's money to target groups of people they have demonized in one way or another, but of whom only a subset usually do anything that can be regarded as harm to another. They use the correlation between some action they dislike and a harmful action to justify outlawing the non-harmful action, or they even extend the definition of harm to extend to the individual harming himself through his own conscious choice. These laws undermine respect for the law, increase the power of government, increase the tax burden on the individual citizen who is paying for their enforcement, and ultimately undermine liberty by presuming to make people's personal moral choices for them.

Why does everything that is to be discouraged have to be a criminal act? Why not leave the job of determining the wrongful nature of acts that are not themselves harmful, and assessing the associated remedies, to civil courts where it belongs? Only acts of harm that are part of a direct causal chain with intent should be considered criminal acts. Furthermore, there must be evidence of harm. Where harm is claimed but cannot be determined objectively (i.e. psychological harm), there cannot be criminal prosecution.

In the name of being “tough on crime”, we have made some relatively very trivial acts into felonies, like drug possession or copyright infringement. Unfortunately, what many fail to consider is that many states have disenfranchisement laws for convicted felons. Is it really right to put someone in prison for an act that caused little or no harm, and then remove their right to vote against whatever politician was responsible? Mandatory minimum sentencing, three strikes laws, and asset forfeiture are all weapons of the culture warrior.

And this is assuming the states were able to be self-sufficient in their legal codes. I won't even get started on the federal government.

“Status quo” conservatives are simply people who have fallen for the slippery slope fallacy with respect to “social values”.