Now for something that really gets me pissed. I am VERY tired of when normal ordinary nutjobs do normal nutjob stuff like killing people, the media blame the internet before the bodies are even cold. The implication seems to be that because knives are easily available on the internet that the internet is somehow to blame for the killing.
What the article somehow doesn't seem to grasp is the the purchase of a knife on the internet which generated a paper trail is one of the things that helped the stupid kids get caught so quickly. The paper trail wouldn't have been generated if the knife had been bought at the local surplus store and paid for with cash.

Now as a guy who really like knives, I am concerned about the attempt to regulate them already. not a day goes by that I don't use a knife as a useful tool. From cutting open a box to severing a sheet that is jammed on the winch and we need to tack right now unless we want to hit that boat and not only get hurt but far worse get disqualified. I have never killed anyone with a knife. I have at times been tempted to remove a person's thumb, toe, or other assorted appendage but again, I never have actually had to do such.
We are talking about a tool I carry daily and use daily. The fact that it is also potentially a weapon DOES NOT give you or anybody else the right to regulate its purchase or possesion. Period.

I once had a screwdriver put through the web of my hand. Believe me you would much rather be stabbed with a knife than an unregulated flathead screwdriver.

while I am on the subject. Migs were designed to suck the odd bolt or rock through the engines without any drama. None of our modern fighter craft could suck up so much as a washer and survive.
I have driven and worked on Ladas so Please don't misconstrue what I say here to mean that I think russian design is superior. It's not. Just plain not.

but some of their design criteria are.

If their aircraft could be knocked out of operation with a piece of steel pipe, some gunpowder, and a handful of gravel. we would have had The Taliban at least a decade earlier.

If they had designed their space program to get the cosmonauts down if anything ever went wrong, we would know next to nothing about repairing stuff in space.

Back to that Lada. There are certain situations where a vehicle that is noisy, smelly, inefficient but can be repaired with a kit of tools that will easily fit in your backpocket is a good thing. probably not in most places people live. but northern ontario is not so dissimilar to most of russia. shitty winter and the nearest place to get parts may be across several hundred kilometers of emptiness. but at least in canada when you make the trek you can find almost everything you could need at the Canadian Tire store.

maybe I am overreacting. it turns out that i am a mere 26 places lower in the google rank than this company when you search for magnetic sweeper. And it is plausible that somebody surfing from work might just click on a few other things that look interesting. But for crying out loud shouldn't the navy be using something to scrub their ip's? it's really not hard.

about two hours ago somebody searched my site looking for "magnet sweeper" when I say searched my site I mean my site specifically. I put up with a lot of wierd search queries as I am sure do most people who blog. I even have some small amount of compassion for the 8% or so of hits that come here looking for "forced cunnilingus". very small amount. The reason that this particular query bothers me is twofold.

They searched my site specifically.

the ip address resolves out in navy.mil

for a very limited time only!

some levellers tunes.

Another one of easily the top ten live acts in the world happens to be coming to buffalo. that's right boys and girls Black 47 is coming to the tralfamadore cafe. March 7!

Just in case there any fans out there.

Well for those of you who didn't go; The levellers show at Lee's was awesome. Worth the many years wait. The didn't bring the whole band. There were some ah er um passport issues, and some money issues. They paid for the trip out of pocket as they have no label on this continent. They are hoping to land a label here so they can afford to tour here more often than once a decade or so. So, if you are a record label with the patience of Job and the clout to make those little difficulties with customs go away, here is a band with a built in fan base that is just dying to get some product. go see them tonight in Ottawa, or Thursday in Boston, or friday in NYC.

In relation to the last post I am going to ask a very tall favor of you few people who actually read this once in a while. Please look over this questionnaire and email your answers at your convenience. It takes some thought and time and I don't expect it right away. It is almost exactly two years old right now but I believe in a hundred years it will still be a useful questionnaire. If you don't fill this out and you run into me in meatspace don't be surprised if I thrust a copy into your face and prevent you from eating or peeing untill you read it.

for those of you who have been slightly distressed by the fact that most of the handful of genes that separate us from mice seem to be remnants of viri and bacteria. here is a good hard scifi novel that will much more than disturb you. it has appeared in the also need to be updated and actually finished "reading list" for about ten months now. I made the mistake of reading it the first time while in the hospital with my wife giving birth to our youngest(now slightly over one year old). I heartily encourage you to read it but not while you have a pregnant wife.

Greg Bear keeps more up to date on molecular biology than many university professors in the field. It's one of the things that makes his work so real. He with David Brin, Orson Scott Card, Neal Stephenson, Gregory Benford, and many others, make a very compelling argument for something I have long said. Science fiction is the best place to work out the philosophical, moral, and ethical implications and applications of technology. Far better than working them out by trial and error. We are racing along toward thing that many people never even dreamed possible. Often I feel we are doing it without even looking where our foot will rest when next it touches down. While I don't think that we are rapidly approaching an abyss to fall into, we could be. My money is on a tree branch that we didn't see causing us to fall and break an ankle. Even then I always hope that somewhere along the line enough people will have had the minds open and looking forward to be able to shout "Look out for that Tree!!!!"

To go along with the desperately in need of an update "Some Things you should know about me", I am typing "Some Things you wish you didn't know about me".

In spite of the recent findings in the genome I believe in genetic memory. I first started thinking about it when my second cousin (who has in so many positive ways affected my life(he taught me to canoe, and the difference between being alive and not, why you alway spend a little more care cleaning out the blackpowder shotgun if you are gonna reload it right away, how to tell if you are an alcoholic or someone who just needs to relax, and the list goes on)) talked about an incident in which he and his daughter(then about six) happened across a farmer on Salt Road who was trying very unsuccesfully to retrieve his horse who had gone astray into the alfalfa field. The farmer lived far enough away from their house that he wasn't a neighbor, but close enough that they might run into each other in the supermarket.

My cousin decided to stop and help the farmer capture his horse. As he hopped out of the truck his Daughter said "Put it in the truck Daddy!!!" He shrugged. While walking into the filed and grabing the horse with absolutely no fuss at all grabbing halter if the horse that the farmer had not been able get he had a Fear. The base of you spine fear you get when the sniper has you in the scope and is just deciding if you are the target. Not really something you can put a finger but very powerful nonetheless. The sort of Fear you would get if you were borrowing someones horse from the moor and the landlord's lantern came on and you heard him slap closed that shotgun. Family legends being what they were; he never really believed the story of our family's arrival in the new world till that moment.

I understand where he was coming from these days. I notice these things I have taken to calling vestigial behaviors. Things I have always done or felt without really knowing why or examining it too closely.

Whenever a strong light shines on me I have a barely controllable need to put it out. This is why I never keep ranged weapons in the car or pretty much anywhere else.

Whenever I am anywhere but home I need to see all the possible entrances.

I also have as many immediate escape plans as possible for any room by the time I sit down with my back to a wall. I include my wife and kids in the escape plan and I try to minimize bloodshed to bystanders, but I can't help but notice how much simpler the plans would be without that last bit.

I am virtually never without at least one good knife on me and am slightly freaked out if it ever occurs. Which is occasionally an issue in airports when they crank up the sensors too high and they can get a buzzer off the spyderco.

I get nervous when I see my three year old eyeing the inside of the Armored car loading the ATM's at the grocery store.

And he says "Papa that guy is old, why are they letting him guard the money?"

Horses have pretty much alway done what I asked of them, even that crazy inbred Appaloosa my mom had that kept needing stitches after running through the fence.

No one in my family has needed these type of skills or fears for at least four generations or so, but at one time they were survival traits and somehow got passed on. (if you don't think fears are a survival skill then you try not teaching you kids to be afraid of the road. if nothing else it'll keep you out of the gene pool. it's muddy and shallow as it is) I have a friend who, after listening to some of my and my families exploits that we have attempted and fizzled out due to some unforeseen lack of actual ambition, speculated on my branch of the family lacking the ambition gene. He noted that with my family's particular type of creativity gene that the lack of ambition gene might just have been a survival factor.

Yeah whatever.

not that I have a problem with that. I like miata's too.

go ahead tell me that the miata wasn't a blatant ripoff of this car

There is something I have been meaning to post for the last two weeks. The commercial station that I listen to in toronto has one DJ in particular that has always been a special sort of geek. He has always been the guy who dug up the strangest stuff. Think popup video on lots of crystal meth. A few years back they actually gave him a show just for that stuff. It has been consistently good, sometimes awesome, but always at least good. He does hour long specials on hidden tracks, or three part history of bands like Joy Division. The last couple weeks he's been doing a series on electronic music.

It started with the electric harpsichord in 1759 and ran through the Theremin, the Moog, to Kraftwerk. The next weeks installment picked up there and ran through the introduction of reliable drum machines and sequencers and Howard Jones as the first one-man-band top40 act, and ended with the introduction of the Synclavier. This coming week will cover from there to around 1995. Which means skinny puppy and ministry! I hope! So if there are any readers who will be in Toronto or WNY sunday at seven eastern the dial is 102.1 fm. They also broadcast on the net but the morons at the station have switched off real player to windows media, thus requiring linux types to dual boot if they want to hear it.

While on this topic of 80's syth pop bands. Sometime in the early 90's I actually saw Howard Jones play at the El Mocambo with just a yamaha grand piano and accompanied on about half the song by a woman playing bongos. How did a man who can't stand synth pop wind up in that place?

As many stories of this type often start out, "there was this Girl,". It's really amazing what we menfolk will do when we see a woman we love mistreated. It makes the picture of the salmon swiming upstream right into the grizzly's jaws almost make sense.

For those of you who have not had the pleasure of seeing a show at the ElMo it's like this. The room is about thirty feet wide and about eighty feet deep. If they put the stage at one end of the room you'd feel like you were watching the performance in a tunnel. So they don't. The stage is right smack in the middle of the long north wall. Except for the bar proper there is no way to be more than 25 feet from the performer(s).

It's just plain an incredible venue. In addition to a variety of personal things that I'm just not going to share here, I learned something that day:

When you get rid of all the technology, sequencers, sythesizers, drum machines and stuff, Howard Jones is a much better musician than he appears.

And not too shabby a songwriter either
thanks(kind of) to Erratic (several months upgraded from nutjob) for sparking an all too vivid recollection.

While driving to work today I heard the nonsurprising news that the genome isn't as big as we like to think it is.( I am pretty damn tired of of people saying we have cracked the genome!!!!!!! we mapped it and as any crypto geek know there is a LOT of work to be done) and the sub cracking open the japanese fishing trawler, and yoshiro mori not even quitting his game of golf, and sharon and barak preparing to start a war, and the most wonderful news came over the radio. and none of it, NONE OF IT MATTERED because the greatest live performance band in the world is on this side of the globe for the first time since I've been married. At Lee's Palace no less. now I have to arrange a few days off on fairly short notice.

this is not a negotiable thing.
they'll just have to understand that.

From Declan McCullagh at wired

Admiral Tom Wilson, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, says the 74-year-old communist dictator may be preparing a cyberattack against the United States.

Wilson told the Senate Intelligence Committee during a public hearing Wednesday that Castro's armed forces could initiate an "information warfare or computer network attack" that could "disrupt our military."

The panel later went into closed session to discuss classified material.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked in response: "And you would say that there is a real threat that they might go that route?"

Replied Wilson: "There's certainly the potential for them to employ those kind of tactics against our modern and superior military."

Yeah. Our modern and superior military that is going to use windows 2000 to do Command and Control on our aircraft carriers. That one.
snicker

In the old days there were places on USENET where you could post anonymously messages that you had encrypted to someone's public key. Then you saved all the posts as a txt file and decrypted all of it against your private key. Anything that decrypted sensibly was for you. Anything else you didn't want to know anyway. Because everyone was always taking everything and because of the very nature of USENETand because of the encryption. It was nearly impossible to establish a record of communication taking place let alone the contents of the communication.

apparently bin laden's crew has been encrypting their communications and then stegging them into porn. Then they use some sort of free picpost to put it up. Can you imagine the feds having to track every visitor to the free pornsites?
And this is the really brilliant part: bin laden now has a leqitimate excuse to hire photographers and models, view porn, and other things that would be frowned upon by nutjob religious extremists like the Taliban, or AG Ashcroft.

What would you do with with Both Arafat's and Gates' credit card numbers?

tell me

How the hell did I get lumped in with the new aquarians?

then again how Jello Biafra and Rage Against theMachine get lumped in there too.

maybe it's just the name that pissed me off.

For Ev

Free tips on the drug trade.

1) find an ADDICTIVE product. Crack, Black tar heroin, Blogger, laundry detergent, whatever.

2) give it away free for a little while

3) establish a network of people to distribute for you. Dealers, web designers whatever.

4) Allow your dealers( or webdesigners) to distribute the product to their "customers". even let them private label it. you don't care as long as you get your cut.

5) Get filthy rich(think Medellin or Amway, you're at the top of the pyramid)

6) At some point you will have to start worrying about your distribution network making the leap to major multinational status. tuck away early profits to help pay for this.

7) Pray daily no one gives away the recipe (drug laundry detergent etc.) for free on the internet.

8) Apply "unfair business" practices if they do (think Medellin, or Microsoft)

And for crying out loud Dont skip steps 3,4 or 5. Us Addicts depend on your financial stability so we don't have to set up own private little crack factory.

Ok roll back to a decade or so ago. Under a different name ( no I won't tell you and don't bother to ask) I was in school. I was spending a lot of time doing interesting things on a vax/vms. Eventually I had to give it up and in fact for the sake of marital bliss I gave up using computers altogether from '94 to '98. (yes I know it was a pretty stupid time to get out of computers and the internet. trust me still having my wife was easily worth it.) but this is '90 or '91 we're talking about And I hadn't even met my wife yet. fat lot of good my Vms knowledge does me know( except as I learn the finer points of unix stuff and the light goes on in my head "oh yeah!! except it was easier in vms") Most of my hacking was done from or through the Internet or BITNET. Anyway I got through those years clean and without having caused a major fuss. Not everybody did and some of them I knew ( at least to the extent you know anybody that you only know online).

There are three books I would recommend to anyone interested in this time period and the hacking world. They are "the Cuckoo's Egg" by Cliff Stoll; "The Hacker Crackdown" by Bruce Sterling; and "Underground" by Suelette Dreyfus. The Sterling and Dreyfus books are also available for free online(Even in palm Formats!!!!)

They are all true stories, bizarrely intertwined and I will attest to the feel and ambience as being spot on for all of the books.

you can consider this to translate roughly to

"We just build them. It's your job to keep the police from abusing it."

for those of you that are curious the diesel outboard link is here

for a few hundred dollars more that a nasty two stroke you can get a diesel that weighs three times as much and puts out half the power AND has virtually no safety features of any sort. It can, however, apparently be repaired with nothing but a pair of locking pliers

Yes I know it's old but damnit I just found it and I think it's funny. so there. thpbtht!

Yesterday in a Scottish court on a US air base in the netherlands, a man was convicted of being able to commit a crime.
At no point did they prove his guilt.
They proved that he knew how, and they proved that he was a spook for libya, but in no way shape or form did they prove he did it.
He may actually be guilty but that is really beside the point.
They needed a conviction so the upset families could have some closure.
They live in a country where they didn't have to prove guilt.


Now ask me why I am scared.






Do you have any idea how many things they could prove I know how to do? Is having knowledge criminal?




I knew there was a reason my ancestors left Scotland.

well that and the small matter of the horses.

and canada seemed so much more attractive than australia at the time.

till it got twenty below.

and stayed that way for three months.

Now here is something to lose sleep over.

they confirmed Ashcroft. Brace yourselves.

Fucking raytheon. Another big brother award for those bastards

There are a couple posts that I dreamed up over the least few days that have vanished into the ether. nothing mindbending or spectactular just amusing. if i get up the ambition they had to do with diverse topics such as chinese diesel outboard motors and the wonders of visine. but other wise they are just gone don't lose sleep over it.