Tuesday, September 30, 2003

Sometimes ignorance is bliss. If I weren't involved in engineering I wouldn't know about the importance of patents and invention dates and yadda yadda yadda. So thats my deep thought for this evening, but rest assured that I have a really good idea, that would be really cool to read about, but I can't write it here. So blah!

Monday, September 29, 2003

Link Rip-off. My response: So? My first comment when I woke up that morning and my roommate (Briar C.) walked in and said somebody flew a plane into the world trade center and it collapsed was simply "Oh? I wonder what country we want to invade next is" (actually I think used the phrase: "f**k over for resources", but its the same idea).

The United States (since being the united states that is) has never gotten involved in the world without its own exacting intelligence prior to doing so. Therefore, I ask why would you think that we didn't let it happy? When have we not done something in our own political interest in anything at all? Name a single war that we have waged that was "legal" or "right." Of the top of my head the only war we've participated in that was justified would be the war of 1812. Think about all the others (I'll reserve comment on the revolutionary war...since in general its a very perspective oriented problem) say, the Civil War; Should states be able to succeed from a nation? (well of course they should, the country was founded on that idea). But the south had so many resources that the north so desperately needed to survive. And then you have any war during the manifest destiny era and the Pan-American push. And the others, like WWII? Korea? Vietnam? Desert Storm?

Simply put the United States is bred from a long pedigree of world dominating expansionist culture dating back to dawn of civilization. So get over it, since there is no changing it now, and you live the cushy life style you do because of it, if you want a stable non-expansionist culture go to India and be Hindu. Oh wait that would have only worked a couple hundred years ago.
Okay so the beginning of a new week. There was much rejoicing in the population. "yay"

Anyhoo. Anybody but me think that the DPRK did something really bad that they kinda regret?

Also there is this article. Yah its a whole bunch of old news, but the last couple paragraphs made me think a couple thoughts, but the primary one being wouldn't it suck to be an intergalactic explorer only to find yourself approaching an antimatter galaxy?

Well thats all folks!

Wednesday, September 24, 2003

Mad linking time: Today in the news

Last night I was stuck trying to fall asleep and started thinking about the state of things in this world (ya nice thing to fall asleep thinking). But there is several interesting things when combined together are somewhat interesting to think about.

Islam is an amazingly effective way of controlling people, even more effective than Hinduism. There are some key points I think that make it so.

  • Incredible amounts of routine through every single day that forces a person have to be precise, a constant reminder of its presence. Also keeps the people from thinking about other stuff, because it'll alway be there to interupt.
  • Easy to prove you are devout, simply do the above (helps that prayers are in groups).
  • Punishment is swift and harsh. People expect to be punished for a crime they commit. The longer you delay the punishment the less it means, the harsher it is the closser it is to proving to the individual the guilt they feel is justified. When all is said and done people prefer harsh punishment and only when they start getting off easier than they think they should that a criminal mentality starts to develop.
  • It contains a provision for violence.


Overall this makes for the most effective way to conquer people (uneducated and not already attached to a strong religion already) and make them feel good about it. In fact there are several cases in the history of Chrisitanity that several of the above points was used, and was very effective establishing colonies(especially when it came to "The New World"). However the technique failed in several places: China, India, and the Middle East. All which had very established "strong" religions already. In fact one could say that the violence felt now between Christian and Islamic worlds was our own damn fault and started with the Crusades.

Really there are about two solutions to the problem at hand:

  • Wipe them all out (the Machiavellian approch)
  • Remove the target of violence, remove the reason for animosity. Figure out a way to increase the freedoms and make their way of life easier. As soon as people start taking luxuries for granted the rote ritutual starts to seem more meaningless and then the control starts to languish. Figure out a way to make them greedy, have them make the translations of the koran canon as well. Increase the size, dilute the population, reduce the punishment harshness and speed. All this to induce rot at the core, and create more division. And then that would put all major religions an equal ground when it comes to controlling people.

The list of questions for the debate that is going to occur in California. They are fairlying interesting and are generic enough to work on a national and global scale. So here they are:


  1. How would you propose enhancing revenue and/or what specific cuts would you propose to achieve a balanced budget?
  2. Leaders in the business community are convinced that this state is losing jobs and unable to attract new businesses. If you agree, what are two things you would change to make this a more business-friendly state? If you disagree, what are the misconceptions you would like to correct?
  3. How are you going to ensure that all Californians have adequate health care?
  4. Everybody talks about wanting a colorblind society, but what does that actually mean to you? In other words, how do we know when we have succeeded?
  5. What should be the top priority for California right now?
  6. If elected governor, will you support the expansion of charter schools in California?
  7. What do you expect to accomplish in the time remaining on Gray Davis' term that he could not?
  8. What is the single most important piece of legislation either signed or vetoed during this past legislative session?
  9. Do you support reducing the Vehicle License Fee (car tax), and if so, where would you find the revenue to replace the loss to the budget?
  10. What services will your administration expect local governments to provide and what stable source of revenue will you give them to do it?
  11. Under governors Pat Brown and Ronald Reagan (news - web sites), California spent up to 20 percent of its general fund on infrastructure -- such as roads, bridges, colleges, hospitals and water systems. Now we spend closer to 1 percent. Proposition 53 on the ballot raises that figure to 3 percent. What are your positions on Proposition 53, and what will you do to invest more in California's aging infrastructure?
  12. As our population continues to age, the demand for government services to seniors will increase dramatically during the next decade. What do you intend to do to proactively manage this demand?

Monday, September 22, 2003

My soul is worth £19194. For your peace of mind, 50% of people have a purer soul than me.

Whats your soul worth?
Time Dismanagement: Intentionally neglecting all known time management techniques to only fulfill the essentials in life:
A) Accomplish those tasks that are most likely to bite you in the ass immediately prior to the biting part.
B) Accomplish as few tasks as possible
C) Spend the least about of time actually performing said task
D) Doing everything else.
I propose that we make a change to the work week. We should impliment a pre-monday and post-friday system. The pre-monday mainly for easing into the week so that way we then know whats comming up (since everything bad happens on monday, if me move it so everything bad happens on pre-monday, we can take the second half of the day off to relax, prior to having to address all those things on monday). And since all deadlines and bad news comes on friday then there should be a post friday which would also be a half day to finish up everything that was supposed to be done friday but just wasn't gonna happen. So instead of this drastic changes all the time, we could have a gradual shift from work to not-work, and stress to no stress.

Hence the new week is thus:

Sunday (Day of Recovery)
Pre-Monday (Day of half-stress)
Monday (Day of problem fixiness)
Tuethday (tuesday and thursday)
Friday (Day of failure)
Post-Friday (yah! happy hour starts a 12pm instead of 5 :)
Saturday (Party continues)

And this of course eliminates the horible wednesday hump :)

Thursday, September 18, 2003

Tuesday, September 16, 2003

Well I came across something very interesting this evening: BlogPulse (Mainly due to the fact that my blog is in the first block of sites on the page). This site seems somewhat interesting except for absolutely no explination as to where it came from, who maintains it, or what its for. AFter further investigation it becomes very obvious that it is in fact automated, however that still does not explain any of the other questions.
Okay so to update my previous post I found out some interesting things:

1. Windows 2000 encrypts files using DESx, which basically is a des algorithm, except using a longer key and a couple extra steps making it slightly more obnoxious but still easilly decrypted. (from what I can tell is DESx calls for three keys, first a 64 bit XOR pre-whitening key, a 56 bit DES key, and a 64 bit post whitening key). However microsoft says they use a 128 bit key (but only for us only copies) and 56 bit for export copies, which leads me to believe that while they use the DESX algo they don't actually generate three keys like they should but use zeros in the two xor operations making it plain DES.
2. That key is different per file.
3. That key is encrypted with an RSA algo.

So while it is concievable that I could decrypt each and every file though brute force I'm starting to look at seeing if EFS takes a file encrypts it and then attaches the coresponding headers to it, or if it modifies the headers. Because if it does the first of those two options then the file name would be encrypted (using the aforementioned DES algo) in the file. This of course would allow breaking into each of the encrypted files without having to obtain the private key used to encrypt the DES key on each file, nor the original plaintext file (which would be very cool because I could then recover all my data, not just that which I already have). Then again with the large volume of individual files I have it would be interesting to see if I can obtain the DES keys and their coresponding RSA encrypted pairs and then try to get the private key from those. Of course none of these tasks are particularly easy to impliment. So I guess I'll be spending many hours with matlab if I actually try to do this.

Sunday, September 14, 2003

Okay so a new episode in the dead computer thing. So after spending many many hours downloading the required updates to windows xp and office xp I decide to pull up some of the files I had saved on my desktop. Well lo and behold the dirrectory is encrypted, the only one that is, I guess at some point in time I had decided to try it out and see how the windows 2000 encryption worked, well I forgot this when I reformated my primary hard drive so bye bye encryption keys. On the other hand I have a huge number of the files still on my laptop in their non-encrypted form. Due to my lack of encryption knowledge I have no idea if what I'm thinking is possible to do, but I would think by comparing the encrypted and de-encrypted files one could regenerate the encryption key and then be able to decrypt the rest. Oh well I guess I'll just have do some more research on that, and make sure I don't hose another backup.

Moral of the story: if you decide to back up your files, don't encrypt the backup.

Friday, September 12, 2003

Well I put an offer down on a house, so lets see how things turn out. But for now here a few fairly bad pictures of it:

Due to an annoying lack of a real web hosting service at the moment I can't inline any images thus I am force to use thingy:
Yahoo Photo Album

So I'll make a page later on with better pictures and more details if I do actually end up getting it. I'm sure I will but I'm trying not to jinx myself here.

Monday, September 08, 2003

Okay so today I was thinking about some things (inspired by a large bribery scandal in san diego involving strip clubs, the city council and no-touch rules). So it got me to thinking about the computer game civilization in which when you reach republic or democracy units can't be bribed. In a perfect world of course people couldn't be bribed, but lets say in a less than perfect world which is more important: prosecuting the briber or the bribed? After all the briber of course would most likely be someone of dubious background and would be treated as such, whereas the bribed is most often somebody ascribed diginity, honour and trust. So which is the greater crime? I think most would agree that accepting a bribe is much greater than presenting a bribe. However if one were to think about evolution for a moment its hypothetically possible that by also eliminating the briber than an even smarter criminal would replace him. This whole concept could be applied to a whole slew of non-violent crimes, everything from prostitution to hacking. I'm trying to think of the greater picture here, about fixing the system that is broken by allowing such coruption to exist. It seems that in so many of these casses it is simply inventive individuals getting around whatever safeguards are in place and taking advantage of a weakness that should not exist to begin with.

Wednesday, September 03, 2003

Okay so after making my previous post I came across this.

WTF? Is everything to friggin retarded and greedy they can't see how stupid they are being? This sort of thing makes me believe that politicians aren't worth the air they breathe. Reasons: first they are so stupid that we happily keep on going along with the capacity we have without building new (preferably renewable sources, but even conventional would work for a while...until we run out conventional energy sources). Second they promote consumerism to get the economy going. And they get pissy when the lights go out. You notice how nobody cared when California went dark? Yah because politicians don't live there. When it comes down to it, everything that went dark in the "largest U.S. blackout" was for the most part inconsequential to the economy. So yah go ahead and blame one little power plant because you didn't get to live in air conditioned splendor for one day. Oh and the whole thing about making a super-grid? We isolated them for a reason, forcing it back into a super grid would be even worse then the days of regulation. Instead of a government protected monopoly (regulation is that by default) you would now have socialized power companies. What keeps you from "liberating" power plants and the grid like every communist nation would?
Today's good and bad.

Good: Under the Bush administration the U.S. has rejoined the I.T.E.R negotiations.
Bad: It may be too late. Afterall before we can obtain nice sustainable fusion we'd be dependent on some source of hydrogen (currently the largest source is natural gas), the hydrogen extracted from that is then bombarded by neutrons from a regular fission reactor to make deuterium and tritium.

Good: Bush seems to have stopped his world domination scheme for the moment.
Bad: He hadn't gone far enough yet. The whole natural gas pipeline from the caspian sea to pakastan kinda fell through when texaco and bp pulled out. Oh, and we can't get enough oil out of iraq yet to destabilize Saudi Arabia. That is if the idea was to lower oil prices to get the U.S. economy back on its feet.

Good: Iran is building nuclear power plants to give their people "clean" energy.
Bad: a) It probably means they're running out of oil, and have been for a while, but don't want to admit it. b) it gives the U.S. an excuse (poor now after the iraq fiasco) yet again only to find out that yes, they don't have oil but lots of islamic militants that hate us now.

Good: There is a relatively oil-independent country.
Bad: It's China.

Good: China is reducing its standing army size.
Bad: Its new army is/will be designed on the U.S. model. With the best of both Russian (thanks to Russia's economic woes) and U.S. (thanks to Clinton) technology.

Good: Air pollution will probably become a thing of the past.
Bad: Its because we won't have anything to burn.