Diary of a Wolfeman

Yahoo! News reports on this almost slam-dunk for computer users across America. The House of Representatives voted 399 to 1 to impose fines on the bastards who write and distribute spyware.

Wouldn’t you know it was a Texan Republican who voted against it.

The most egregious behaviors ascribed to the category of such software – secretly recording a person’s computer keystrokes or mouse clicks – are already illegal under U.S. wiretap and consumer protection laws.

The House proposal, known as the “Spy Act,” adds civil penalties over what has emerged as an extraordinary frustration for Internet users, whose infected computers often turn sluggish and perform unexpectedly.

The bill, sponsored by Rep. Mary Bono (news, bio, voting record), R-Calif., provides guidelines for technology companies that distribute software capable of most types of electronic monitoring. It requires that consumers explicitly choose to install such software and agree to the information being collected.

Not surprisingly, an investigation revealed over 60 different varieties of spyware installed on the panel’s own computers. This bill adds civil fines to the toolbox authorities have for fighting cybercrime.

Law enforcement agancies operating under a wiretap order are, of course, exempt.

BOFH: How do you deal with authority? | The Register

Too priceless. Go take the test now. I said Now!

In a great decision for dinner-hour privacy, the Supreme Court backs the ‘do-not-call’ list. A group of telemarketers tried to get the Court to declare it an unfair restriction of commercial speech, but the Supreme Court has agreed with the over 11 million people who have signed up on that list that it is merely a pre-emptive opt-out.

I’d still rather have a device that allows me to send a high-voltage current back down the line.

CNN.com reports that Scaled Composites’ SpaceShipOne successfully completed it’s second trip to space within two weeks and has claimed the Ansari Z Prize for 10 million dollars, ushering in a new age in privately-funded space flight.

SpaceShipOne gets a ride to the upper atmosphere strapped to the belly of it’s mothership the WhiteKnight, then releases and fires it’s own rocket to soar into space. At the end of the flight, she glides back to Earth and lands on a conventional runway.

The current craft is only capable of three passengers, but Scaled Composites will now have not only the X Prize monies, but also a deal with the Virgin Group to launch Virgin Galactic worth another $25 million to expand the project and launch commercial space tourism over the next few years.

Anyone who has watched NASA’s budget go up and down over the years will be pleased to know that space exploration is no longer strictly in the hands of government, but rather in the capable hands of visionaries and pioneers who want to get off this rockball as much as I do. At the very least, it’s in the hands of people who know there’s money to be made out there, and only the bold can cash in. Either way, we win.

In another article at CNN.com, it looks like the best use for this new technology may be an even older problem: the ISS is filling up with junk.

With no garbage pickup by shuttles for nearly two years, the international space station is looking more and more like a cluttered attic.

“Room limited,” is how the affable astronaut Mike Fincke describes it.

The problem is, shuttle deliveries and pickups won’t resume until spring, and that’s if NASA is lucky. A barrage of hurricanes and their devastating blow to NASA’s launch site may well delay the next shuttle flight, by Discovery.

So the stuff will keep piling up and up.

Considering that SpaceShipOne launches out of the desert, I think the folks over at Scaled Composites might consider looking into designing a space-faring garbage scow. While certain items can be ‘tossed’ out to burn up upon re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, much of the clutter consists of broken or unused equipment left over from previous experiments. Kind of like my garage, now that I think about it.

Maybe NASA should hold a rummage sale to pad the budget.

If you haven’t had a chance to catch it yet, you need to tune in to PBS for Nova’s “Beginnings” mini-series. Gone are the days of scratchy documentaries – this is a four-star production with some spectacular graphics, and the script is incredibly well-written. I’m no science slouch myself, but this series is written so that someone with a less scientific background can get just as thoroughly sucked in.

The series deals with the appearance of life in our solar system, and the possibility of life elsewhere, both within and outside of our Sol system. More specifically, the chances of finding intelligent, technological life outside our system.

Intelligent life is actually pretty common here on Earth – many aquatic species have very advanced brains, and many have said for years that dolphins have their own language. The thing is, with over 30k species alive today and hundreds of thousands of extinct species, humans are the only tool-using technological intelligence on the planet. While there may be other life forms out there, the chances of finding an intelligent species for us to talk to look pretty grim. We’re damn lucky to be here, and that luck may not have been spread out evenly.

Now, this got me thinking down another line. Many sci-fi books have had the idea of a race of ancient peoples who travelled throughout the galaxy seeding planets with life or tampering with existing life forms in order to induce intelligence. These stories always posit that the Ancients are long gone, usually for millenia before we find any trace of their existence.

Here’s the thought that crept into my head: What if we are the Ancients? Who’s to say that we won’t eventually devise some method of travelling netween the stars in search of intelligent life and come up with nothing? Faced with the enormity of knowing that we are completely alone out here, we could decide to spread the seed ourselves on every planet we come across in the hopes of eventually duplicating the results of Earth’s happy accident.

So, here’s my question to you: take the role of an Ancient for a moment and think about what kind of message you would leave behind for your ‘children’ to discover, and how you would place it. You know the maturation process is going to take millenia, so what do you leave behind to let them know that they are not alone, that at least one other has gone this way before?

Me, I’d be leaving stuff all over the place, but I’d start with something big. I figure if I can cross the gulf of space, chances are I can do pretty much anything I want to the local solar system, like screw with the rotation or orbit of a planet. I’d do something on a pretty grand scale to make the curious wonder “what’s up with that?” Take Pluto, for instance. Pluto’s eccentric orbit takes it from all the way out at the edge of the system back into the 5th orbit, leading us to believe that it just wandered into the system and got stuck. Right there, we have the possibility of a message that says interstellar travel is possible.

I wouldn’t stop there, though. I’d set it up so that the oddity would always have one side facing the planet I seeded, so there’s the “what’s on the other side?” question as well. That’s where I’d leave the important stuff, the huge obelisk of some unfathomable material laser-carved with runes and heiroglyphs depicting a star chart with “You are here!” arrows pointing at the home system’s star and another pointing to my star of origin.

Careful study (and alot of poking and prodding) would reveal the hidden cubbyhole where I left the keys to the Buick Starlark parked in the gravitational eddy located halfway between this star and the black hole that keeps Pluto in it’s odd orbit :)

So, WWTAD?

Tonight I watched the Bush v. Kerry debate, and I have to say, I was pretty unimpressed with Bush’s performance. The main topic tonight was foreign policy, although some domestic policies were touched on briefly.

The first ten minutes of the debate seemed alot more to me like the debate management playing directly to Bush, and Bush himself seemed to be merely speechifying. As the debate moved forward, the questions (thankfully) grew more serious. Unfortunately, so did Bush’s inability to speak. He spent the entire debate hemming and hawing, stuttering, and falling back on silence while he scrambled to come up with a response.

Senator Kerry, on the other hand, was on the ball. He came off as much more prepared, more sure of himself, and just generally in control. I also liked his answers alot more than the President’s, but I had expected that going in. He was at a disadvantage prior to this mainly because the people haven’t heard exactly where he stands on some of the issues, and tonight he explained that he has plans for Iraq, he has plans to deal with North Korea specificaly and nuclear (not nucular) proliferation in general.

Both candidates made some veiled (or maybe not so veiled) attacks against the other, but Bush came out the loser there. Kerry kept his temper and his composure, so his comments were more simple criticisms than attacks. Bush, on the other hand, repeatedly went back on how “the Commander In Chief can’t say this is the wrong war at the wrong time.” Over and over again. Evry time Bush went there, Kerry came back saying he thought the war was started too soon, that Bush jumped the gun and didn’t go through all the diplomatic chanels before launching the attacks on Iraq. Now that we were in the war, however, he would support our war effort, and get this situation resolved as quickly as possible, perhaps even being able to start bringing troops home within 6 months.

End result? The CBS News team had 200 ‘fence sitters’ watching the debate from their homes across the country and using a WebTV device to rate the debate in real time. The highest rating point received was given to Kerry while outlining some of his 4-year plan, while the lowest rating went to Bush while he was hemming and hawing. According to these folks, Kerry won the debate, and as of right now 50% of those folks said they would be voting for Kerry, 20% sang for Bush, and the remaining 30% were still undecided.

Me? I’m still voting for Kerry, now I just feel better about doing it. Before tonight, I was voting for Kerry as the only way to get Bush out of office. Now, I think the Senator might actualy do a decent job of it.

Damn! You know you’re getting old when you really start taking politics seriously…

I think I have to admit now that the chances of me getting an industry job are too goddamn slim to mention. Time to go grab myself a McJob and pray for something better to eventually come along.

So, if you’re hiring, you know how to find me. Just about anything other than hard labor at this point. (I’d do that, but my knees and wrists wouldn’t take it for long.) My non-industry job history includes washing dishes, flipping burgers, pumping gas, running a deli and some light carpentry.

This kinda shit just really pisses me off. Here I am, an IQ close to 140, a decent education and a ton of skills and I can’t find a fucking job because the economy went to shit. Our glorious president has granted tax cuts to companies who ship jobs overseas and refuses to acknowledge the fact that he is in that office to serve the people, not the corporations and has no fucking regard whatsoever for the poor schmucks like me who just want to go to work every day and earn a living wage. I don’t need to be rich, I just need to feed my kids, pay my bills and got out to dinner a couple times a month. Is that too much to fucking ask?

So, while I’m not above taking charity, I’d much rather work for it. Support your local Techie From Hell: break a computer. Back up all of your data first, then just right-click on your antivirus tray icon and select ‘disable’. Now, open up Internet Exploder and do a websearch for pr0n – that should do the trick.

To the sales staff over at New Horizons Institute:

I can understand that you are frustrated in our current economy. Though the pundits proclaim the recession is over, unemployment is still on the rise, and people are not likely to be enrolling at your fine academy.

However, when you blatantly advertise on job-search websites offering ‘certification internships’ that do indeed cost money, without ever mentioning your tuitions, don’t be surprised when the folks you call are quick to decline. And when they do decline, don’t vent your frustration at your lack of sales by slamming the handset down in the cradle.

To the rest of you, this is what happens when you stupidly base your salary on commission: the economy takes a nosedive, everybody stops spending money, and you wind up with no sales. Get some skills and get a real job, salesfeeb.

Made some adjustments top the layout of the comments pop-up, justifying the text and losing the “HTML allowed” blurb. Let me know what you think about it.

Once again, commenter Casey has gone completely off the mark. To wit:

Comparing gay marriage to inter-racial marriage is not only ignorant, it’s offensive to people of color like myself. Banning inter-racial marriages was wrong not because it was unfair to people who wanted to marry across ethnic lines, but because ethnicity is an inherent, genetic characteristic trait that cannot be discriminated against by definition of the Constitution.

Homosexuality, however, doesn’t enjoy such a luxury. There is no such thing as a gay gene. There is no such thing as being born gay. Contrary to what you might read in Willamette Week or the Mercury, being gay is not an inherent, genetic characteristic. It’s a result of nurture and environmental factors.

HOWEVER… Read the rest of this entry »