Obituary for Janis Jagars (Disastry)

[Len Sassaman]

Janis Jagars, known to many people on the Internet by his handle Disastry,
was a prolific programmer who made numerous valuable contributions to the
Internet. I am afraid I cannot do his memory justice, having known him
only a short number of years and only through his work on privacy
enhancing programs, but he earned my respect and appreciation for his
achievements in that area.

I first "met" Janis Jagars while I was employed by PGP Security. In
preparation for the release of PGP 7, I located and contacted the people
responsible for other implementations of OpenPGP, in order to set up
interop testing. Janis was working on updating the DOS-aware PGP 2.6.3i
program to work with modern implementations of PGP. His work on that
program, and his presence in the IETF OpenPGP working group, helped to
smooth over a number of PGP compatibility problems. On the PGP newsgroups
and mailing lists, Janis helped many new PGP users get started using email
encryption, and tirelessly answered support questions for privacy-related
programs. To my knowledge, Janis operated the only anonymous remailer to
exist in Latvia.

Janis was, by the original definition, a true Cypherpunk. He believed that
privacy was a right that must not be denied to Internet users, and he
wrote code to help ensure that it could not be.

When he needed a way to easily send encrypted email through Netscape, he
wrote a plugin. When he wanted a way to mount PGPdisk volumes under Linux,
he wrote a conversion tool. When Windows users wanted a pre-compiled
version GnuPG, Janis gave them one. Janis understood that the fight for
Internet privacy must take place at the hands of programmers, and he rose
to the challenge of bring useful privacy-enhancing programs into
existence, and into the hands of the public.

Immediately after the terrorist attacks in September, 2001, I took over
maintenance of the Mixmaster anonymous remailer project. Mixmaster had
been unmaintained for over a year, and needed serious work. I was
delighted when I received email from Janis, offering his help. Over the
next year, entirely of his own initiative, Janis ported Mixmaster's server
functionality to Windows, brought Mixmaster's OpenPGP support from an
unstable "alpha" state to a solid, usable feature set, and established
himself as an invaluable member of the Mixmaster development team. The
upcoming Mixmaster 3.0 release features a number of crucial improvements
which would not have happened had it not been for Janis's involvement.

My last communication with Janis was on October 11th of last year. He had
planned a vacation in Nepal, and expected to return a month later. When he
did not return, we feared the worst. Sadly, it turns out that our fears
were true: On October 31, while descending from Lobuche summit, Janis fell
250m, and did not survive.

I am dedicating this year's CodeCon conference to Janis's memory. Janis
will be missed, but his contributions will still be appreciated and
utilized. It is my hope that Janis's work will serve as an example for
other like-minded programmers, who chose to give their time and code in
the name of free speech and privacy.


Len Sassaman
13 February 2003
San Francisco, CA


--

Janis's home page may be viewed here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010927055328/disastry.dhs.org/
News of his accident can be found here:
http://www.vertikalex.lv/minisurvey/Discussion/ShowMessage.asp?ID=4703

New York state AG succeeds in bank shakedown?

[Sleeping Vayu - Vayu Anonymous Remailer]

On 13 Feb 2003 at 9:50, Declan McCullagh wrote:
> BANKS AGREE TO BLOCK NET GAMBLING CREDIT CARD TRANSACTIONS
> Ten banks have reached agreement with N.Y. Attorney General
> Eliot Spitzer to begin blocking credit card transactions
> involving online gambling.  The banks agreed to pay the
> Attorney General's office $335,000 to cover costs associated
> with an investigation into the activity.  The Office said
> that the settlement is part of "a trend in law enforcement
> to focus on intermediaries in combating illegal online
> activity."
>  [Stamford Advocate]

Excellent.  The effect of this, and thousands of similar
measures, is to make US based banking slow, unreliable,
and expensive.  If you want good banking services,
look for a reasonably capitalist country that is as far
from the US as possible.

This measure will accellerate the adoption of GoldMoney,
and expand banking in places resistant to US regulation,
thus improving the liquidity of the out-of-the-US system.

RE: Hacking the Bush War Machine

[Bill Frantz]

At 1:21 PM -0800 2/13/03, Blanc wrote:
>(and how long are people supposed to stay taped up in their room, they
>haven't said, either.  And where would the bad gas go - over to somebody
>else's neighborhood?)

I guess beans are officially off the American diet.

Cheers - Bill


-
Bill Frantz   | Due process for all| Periwinkle -- Consulting
(408)356-8506 | used to be the | 16345 Englewood Ave.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] | American way.  | Los Gatos, CA 95032, USA

Re: Hacking the Bush War Machine

[Tim May]

On Thursday, February 13, 2003, at 01:21  PM, Blanc wrote:


From Tim May:



It's our duty as hackers to hack this war machine and shut it down.



Well, I'd like to see *that*.

But you know, if N.Korea throws a nucular at us, a gun will be as 
useful as
ducked ape.

(and how long are people supposed to stay taped up in their room, they
haven't said, either.  And where would the bad gas go - over to 
somebody
else's neighborhood?)

Last point first. You're uneducated about how chemical agents drift and 
disperse. Mustard gas, phosgene, even VX, disperse quickly. Simple 
physics of diffusion.

I had one nitwit over on misc.survivalism assuming that the "prepare 
for a 72-hour disruption," the standard earthquake/flood/hurricane 
advice, meant that we were supposed to seal ourselves up in an airtight 
room for 72 hours. The nitwits and chimps amused themselves yammering 
about how long the air would last...

As for nukes, even if a DPRK rocket could make it to the West Coast, 
what would it hit? Guidance of a ballistic (think carefully about what 
"ballistic" means) missile is very difficult. The U.S. had to spend 
tens of billions of dollars getting precise mascon and geomagnetic maps 
of the earth before they could plausibly target within a 10 mile CEP 
(circular error of probability). Slight deviations in the earth's 
crustal makeup, even ocean depths, cause ballistic objects to diverge 
from ideal trajectories.

Anyone, besides the yes men at the CIA, think the North Koreans have 
access to such maps--or if such maps have even been made of the the 
NK-U.S. path--as well as access to gyroscopes, precision thrusters, and 
so on? DPRK has not even come close to launching even a single 
satellite.

And if they do, so what? Missiles could reach many countries from many 
other countries for several decades. Did Russia go into a meltdown 
panic when Japan got missiles?

Sure, the North Koreans are practicing extortion: send us more money 
and Hennesy cognac or we will rattle our sabers.

If anything, it's for the South Koreans and the Japanese, and maybe the 
Chinese, to deal with this. No reason whatsoever for U.S. taxpayers 
like me to either give in to their extortion demands or to pay for 
another war with them.

Don't fall for the recent crap. It depresses me to see list members 
repeating the Big Lies.


--Tim May
"Gun Control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and
strangled with her panty hose,  is somehow morally superior to a woman 
explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound"

Re: M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...

[Eric Cordian]

Tyler Durden opines:

> Yo! Superstring theory is only "continuous math" because the proper 
> mathematical theory describing strings didn't exist. In the past, physics 
> has sometimes lagged (ca 1900) sometimes led (Newton) the development of the 
> needed mathematics. If Superstrings ends up describing "everything", it will 
> be apparent that Ed Witten was right: "Superstrings is really 21st century 
> physics that we accidentally stumbled upon in the 20th century". In other 
> words, progress is slow precisely because the math is so friggin' hard.

Perhaps it is so "friggin' hard" because you are trying to do the
equivalent of modular exponentiation with Roman numerals.

Manifolds are second countable Hausdorf spaces in which every point has a
neighborhood homeomorphic to the open ball in R^N.  I see no evidence that
the Universe may be infinitely magnified and still remain manifold-like.

If the small scale structure of the universe isn't manifold-like, then a
theory which says it is an 11-dimensional manifold is not a great leap
over a theory which says it is a 4-dimensional manifold.

Remember that Einstein, in the days when gravitation and electromagnetism
were the only known forces, spent a lot of time trying to incorporate
electromagnetism into general relativity by making it the skew-symmetric
part of a non-symmetric metric tensor.  Einstein found inventing the math
to do this "friggin' hard."  It was also "friggin' wrong."

> As for Superstrings being dead, I'd suggest that quite the opposite is true, 
> though a lot of the research in strings over the last decade has been done 
> by mathematicians. Read Hawkings' recent "Universe in a Nutshell"...as some 
> Superstring proponents have long suggested, it seems we are now coming very 
> close to experimental verification of one tiny part of this massive theory.

I didn't say it was dead.  I said it was a "dead end."

Whether something will ever produce something of value is orthogonal to
whether lots of people will work on it, and peer-review boxloads of
eachother's papers.

> "The manifold folks are never going to produce anything which obsoletes the
> big general relativity book by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, which will
> live forever as the apex of predictive power of the manifold approach to
> spacetime dynamics."

> I don't think any Superstring researcher believes that (at least the ones 
> I've spoken to don't, and I have spoken to some of the older big figures). 

Make me a machine that does something of practical value, for which string
theory predicts the machine will work, and general relativity and the
standard model predict the opposite.

Make me something that levitates, or transmutes, or forks off child
universes, or generates traversable wormholes, or takes pictures of
particles that can only exist if the universe is made up of strings.

That will impress me.  Protestations as to what the Priesthood of Tenured
String Magicians and Popular Coffee Table Book Authors believes or doesn't
believe will merely prompt derisive laughing.

> Hell, the whole point of Superstrings was to find a way to reconcile General 
> Relativity with a QM view, and Superstrings is still a very nice candidate.

Strings are little more than a trick to evade particle interactions being
dimensionless points in space time.

It's like saying that gravity can be combined with quantum mechanics if
all particles are tiny wiggling plastic bags full of Jello, so small that
they only appear pointlike to an ordinary observer.

Fuzz out the charge and mass of a particle, and some infinities go away.

The measure of the usefulness of a new theory is the increment in
predictive power over the prior way of thinking about it.  Not how many
pages you can cover with indecipherable equations that are "Friggin'
Hard."

> Hell, Witten himself said something like "The development of General 
> Relativity probably occurs in nonhuman civilizations as a corrollary to 
> Superstrings. The discovery of General Relativity on Earth prior to 
> Superstrings will probably be regarded as an historical accident".

I generally discount greatly any math or physics argument which has to
appeal to "nonhuman civilizations" in search of profundity.

Special relativity follows from the Lorentz Transformations, which follow
from almost any clueful research into electromagnetism.  General
relativity is a simple extension in which Lorentz invariance is a local
instead of a global property, and gravity and accelerated frames are
locally indistinguishable.

The notion that it is even remotely likely that a civilization, at the
point where it knows about only two forces and has not yet discovered
quantum mechanics, would invent superstring theory and then derive general
relativity from it, is wishful thinking of the highest order.

> Uh, no. Even if M-theory has nothing to do with reality, it will yield 
> interesting mathematics for decades. Remember, these branches of physics are 
> ferociously ma

Re: ABCNEWS.com : New 'Brain Fingerprinting' Could Help Solve Crimes (fwd)

[Steve Thompson]

 --- Jim Choate <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: 
>http://www.abcnews.go.com/wire/US/reuters20030211_157.html

I was under the impression that a standard technique
in use today was to gauge a `suspect's' reaction to
key words, phrases, faces, or even situations;
anything from whether someone responded to a trigger
via an involuntary eye movement, to changes in normal
daily patterned behavior might lead an `investigator'
to conclude that a series of correlated associations
tended to imply involvement in a crime or other
situation of interest.

Merely measuring spikes on a lobotomised
encephelograph hardly strikes me as being
representative of the state of the art, but then what
the fuck do I know?


Regards,

Steve

__ 
Post your free ad now! http://personals.yahoo.ca

[doug@joss.com: Re: [coldwarcomms] Digest Number 1106]

[Dave Emery]

- Forwarded message from Doug Humphrey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -

To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: Doug Humphrey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2003 20:45:06 -0500
Subject: Re: [coldwarcomms] Digest Number 1106

>
>Subject: Re: Sprint Hardened Sites
>
>Very interesting question!
>
>I came across this page, mentioning an underground backup NOC and suggesting
>it's the vicinity of Sprint's HQ in Kansas:
>http://www.dpstele.com/protocol/2001/jul_aug/sprint_pcs.html .
>
>Albert

they don't give any discussion of the other hardened sites
next door to Pennsauken - Pennsauken was not built for the
NAP, it predates that considerably as the "backend" for a
cable landing station - there is a big fiber loop from the
cable landing station (which is nearer to the atlantic
ocean) to Pennsauken where there is more room for gear.
The loop also incorporates an NSA facility that does
something (can't imagine what ;-) on the fiber.

Doug



 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ 


- End forwarded message -

-- 
Dave Emery N1PRE,  [EMAIL PROTECTED]  DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass. 
PGP fingerprint = 2047/4D7B08D1 DE 6E E1 CC 1F 1D 96 E2  5D 27 BD B0 24 88 C3 18

RE: Hacking the Bush War Machine

[Blanc]

>From Tim May:

>It's our duty as hackers to hack this war machine and shut it down.


Well, I'd like to see *that*.

But you know, if N.Korea throws a nucular at us, a gun will be as useful as
ducked ape.

(and how long are people supposed to stay taped up in their room, they
haven't said, either.  And where would the bad gas go - over to somebody
else's neighborhood?)

  ..
Blanc

Re: Degenerate Political Pressure (was RE: The Wimps of War)

[R. A. Hettinga]

-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

At 10:05 AM -0500 on 2/13/03, Patrick Chkoreff wrote:


> Is it possible to pull off a project like this in a
> crypto-anarcho-capitalistic society?

It's easy to imagine, whether it's possible, maybe you need bearer
transactions :-), a swarm of privateers, someday.

> Don't get me wrong -- I think the more Burger Kings in Baghdad the
> better.  I'm just wondering if the grand and literally top-down
> project  you describe can only be accomplished by an authoritarian
> state?

Nah. Think India. An entirely private operation until they merged it
with Headquarters a hundred years later.

"Your Majesty is now the Empress of India. One hopes you are
amused..."


Heck, go read some Patrick O'Brien Jack Aubrey Books. The Royal Navy
earned its own keep with prizes, etc., until long after the
Napoleonic wars...

Come to think of it, the rise of book-entry settlement cooincides
nicely with the end of war for profit.
 None *dare* call it conspiracy


Just unwind the ball of string, boys and girls, and see what's
inside...


Cheers,
RAH


-BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-
Version: PGP 8.0 - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com

iQA/AwUBPkwf48PxH8jf3ohaEQKP1gCgggi9UFrCVVZ5X1EtotUI/fwDqaQAoOpd
XJZGphjb8BSG7J8O6ZXc5AIB
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-- 
-
R. A. Hettinga 
Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism 
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"Stephen looked sharply round, saw the decanter, smelt to the sloth, and
cried, 'Jack, you have debauched my sloth.'"
 -- Patrick O'Brian, 'H.M.S. Surprise'

Re: M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...

[alan]

On Thu, 13 Feb 2003, Tyler Durden wrote:

> "The "M" in M-Theory stands for Moron."

I always thought it stood for "Mescaline". ]:>

M Stands for Moron? You gotta be kidding...

[Tyler Durden]

Eric Cordian wrote...


Continuous math is a dead end.  So are strings.


Yo! Superstring theory is only "continuous math" because the proper 
mathematical theory describing strings didn't exist. In the past, physics 
has sometimes lagged (ca 1900) sometimes led (Newton) the development of the 
needed mathematics. If Superstrings ends up describing "everything", it will 
be apparent that Ed Witten was right: "Superstrings is really 21st century 
physics that we accidentally stumbled upon in the 20th century". In other 
words, progress is slow precisely because the math is so friggin' hard.

As for Superstrings being dead, I'd suggest that quite the opposite is true, 
though a lot of the research in strings over the last decade has been done 
by mathematicians. Read Hawkings' recent "Universe in a Nutshell"...as some 
Superstring proponents have long suggested, it seems we are now coming very 
close to experimental verification of one tiny part of this massive theory.


"The manifold folks are never going to produce anything which obsoletes the
big general relativity book by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, which will
live forever as the apex of predictive power of the manifold approach to
spacetime dynamics."

I don't think any Superstring researcher believes that (at least the ones 
I've spoken to don't, and I have spoken to some of the older big figures). 
Hell, the whole point of Superstrings was to find a way to reconcile General 
Relativity with a QM view, and Superstrings is still a very nice candidate.

Hell, Witten himself said something like "The development of General 
Relativity probably occurs in nonhuman civilizations as a corrollary to 
Superstrings. The discovery of General Relativity on Earth prior to 
Superstrings will probably be regarded as an historical accident".


"The "M" in M-Theory stands for Moron."

Uh, no. Even if M-theory has nothing to do with reality, it will yield 
interesting mathematics for decades. Remember, these branches of physics are 
ferociously mathematical. Morons never get anywhere near these fields. Even 
I, a genius among mere mortals am a near-Moron in the presence of people 
working in these fields. (Want an example? I thought that generating the 
confluent hypergeometric functions using contours in the complex plane meant 
you were hot shit mathematically. Math-physicists refer to something like 
this as "arithmetic".)

-TD




_
Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online  
http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963

Re: Something conspicuously missing from the media survival lists

[Thomas Shaddack]

> Example: From the Declaration of Independence to the Sedition
> Act took only 22 years, and that was when the founding fathers
> still actively dominated political life. Today, a USA Patriot
> Act takes only minutes to enact, with neither debate nor
> hearings, and members of Congress don't even complain of not
> being able to read it before the vote.

This could explain the staunch anti-cloning stand of current
administration. Maybe they are afraid someone would clone the Founding
Fathers, who would then orchestrate a revolution?

Hacking the Bush War Machine

[Tim May]

Here's a post I sent out to a hackers list I'm on. Address and name I'm 
responding to have been obscured to prevent cross-replies.

From: Tim May <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Thu Feb 13, 2003  10:25:03  AM US/Pacific
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Hacking the Bush War Machine


Date: 13 Feb 2003 00:13:05 -0800
From: Robert xxx <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: DCI's testimony to Senate today

By now most of you have heard the stunning report that North Korea has 
a
nuclear missile capable of hitting the West Coast. Another report said
anywhere in CONUS.

Oh my! I'm scared. I need more duct tape and plastic sheeting. And more 
batteries. (But not guns, because Big Brother has conspicuously not 
said anything about how having a gun might be useful in the Armageddon 
he is warning about...just a lot of duct tape! Or as Bush no doubt 
calls it, "duck tape.")

The daily drumbeat of warnings about missiles being able to hit the 
West Coast, about suitcase nukes on the loose in Russia, about smallpox 
and Ebola, about India preparing to launch against Pakistan, about 
Chinese leaders unwilling to give up power, about "nucular terrorism," 
all this is designed, I think, to whip up a war frenzy.

Fact is, it took the United States a lot of testing of various kinds of 
rockets to get them to fly straight. And it took a solid decade of 
nuclear weapons tests, simulations, and refinements to get the size 
down to where they could be lofted by even a large rocket, the 
aptly-named ICBM. Even today we occasionally launch tests out of 
Vandenberg (I see the contrails/exhaust sometimes), and many fail. No 
nuclear weapon has ever been successfully launched from a U.S. rocket 
and then detonated, even in the years of above ground testing (1962 and 
prior).

To jump to the conclusion that the DPRK could successfully launch a 
nuclear-tipped ICBM and hit the U.S., without extensive rocket tests, 
nuclear tests, etc., is unwarranted. I've seen estimates that as few as 
one in three U.S. ICBMs could successfully hit their targets and 
detonate--with all of our expertise and decades of testing. (And there 
are solid reports that for about 5 years in the late 60s _none_ of the 
ICBM warheads were capable of detonating, until they could be very 
quietly and carefully modified to replace faulty components. If true, 
and I heard this from various sources including my Navy father, this 
was a critical secret at the time.)

You address some of these points in your throw weight calculations 
later in your post, but I might as well cut to the chase and not try to 
analyze your rocket calculations.

The press is riding this panic horse with great enthusiasm. "Cover your 
mouth with a wet cloth when the chemical attack starts!"

Reporters are out at Home Depot and Lowe's showing panicky shoppers 
loading up on duct tape and plastic sheeting.

The War on (Some) Dictators obviously needs the same "this is your 
brain on drugs" hysteria that the War on (Some) Drugs brought us. So we 
get the same disinformation the press delivered during the drug 
hysteria: "Art Linkletter's daughter took LSD and thought she could 
fly!" (A.L. later admitted his daughter was depressed and committed 
suicide...he thought he could make her life more meaningful by 
fabricating an anti-drug angle.)

"Soddom is an Evil Doer! His evil plans to dominate the world with 
nucular weapons are bad, bad! We're gonna lay a can of Texas whoop-ass 
on that bad boy!"

It's our duty as hackers to hack this war machine and shut it down.


--Tim May

Re: NYT: The Wimps of War

[Thomas Shaddack]

> I've been amazed that Bush's handlers didn't straighten him out on
> "nuculur" long ago.   Why are they trying to keep him looking ignorant?

Are you sure they didn't try? :)

ClearChannel memo "Preparing for war"

[Eric Murray]

Appropriate to the recent media thread, a leaked ClearChannel memo
on some station's war preperations:

http://www.internalmemos.com/memos/memodetails.php?memo_id=1329

They're clearly salivating at the prospect.

Eric

Why not log all firearm owners in a government database?

[Declan McCullagh]

Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2003 11:31:28 -0500
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: Declan McCullagh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: [IP] Researchers Work on Anti - Terror Program
Cc: ip <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,[EMAIL PROTECTED]

[for IP if you like]

At 10:23 AM 2/13/2003 -0500, Dave Farber wrote:

So terrorists can but assault weapons etc. That9s ok!!!


Dave,

I wouldn't have a problem with preventing terrorists from buying firearms, 
or for that matter forcibly disarming them with extreme prejudice.

The problem is that we don't know in advance who a terrorist is, and by 
all accounts very, very few people in America are members of Al Qaeda or 
other terrorist cells. So when crafting a rule to target terrorist 
gun-buyers, we're by definition applying it to law-abiding members of the 
community. (It would be like saying "record names of all encryption users, 
just in case.")

Creating a registry of all U.S. firearm transfers means that it would 
become illegal for a member of a family to give a gun to their brother, 
sister, or cousin without filling out a form. It would be illegal to sell 
a firearm without government approval, or at least government 
notification. And consider the privacy and other risks of having a 
national database of all (or at least recent) gun owners.

Such a rule would also encourage a black market in gun sales and bring the 
undesirable characteristics that black markets generally provide. Given 
that 60 million people (according to the BBC) in America own a combined 
total of over 200 million firearms, it would be very difficult to enforce. 
("When did you buy that firearm? Before or after the Domestic Tranquility 
Act took effect?")

Also, it's anything but clear that terrorists are relying on firearms to 
cause havoc. The examples of recent large-scale terrorism inside the U.S. 
that I can come to mind involve box cutters and quantities of explosives. 
Restricting "assault weapons" or recording their sale would seem to have 
little effect.

Finally, there's the Second Amendment, which the Justice Department 
believes protects an individual right, just as the rest of the Bill of 
Rights does:
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/guncontrol_010711.html

And an article about a new lawsuit challenging Washington, DC's gun 
control laws, which say the mere *possession* of *any* firearm without 
prior government approval -- even by security guards and people in bad 
neighborhoods hoping to defend their homes from predators -- is illegal:
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20030212-71671916.htm

Best,
Declan


-- Forwarded Message
From: Jonathan Goldstein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Thu, 13 Feb 2003 10:10:38 -0500
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [IP] Researchers Work on Anti - Terror Program


One small point.  It is currently illegal to build a registry of gun
purchases as the article describes:

18 U.S. Code ' 922

``(i) Prohibition Relating To Establishment of Registration Systems
With Respect to Firearms.--No department, agency, officer, or employee
of the United States may--
``(1) require that any record or portion thereof generated by
the system established under this section be recorded at or
transferred to a facility owned, managed, or controlled by the
United States or any State or political subdivision thereof; or
``(2) use the system established under this section to establish
any system for the registration of firearms, firearm owners, or
firearm transactions or dispositions, except with respect to
persons, prohibited by section 922(g) or (n) of title 18, United
States Code, or State law, from receiving a firearm.

--
Jonathan Goldstein
President
Urban Technology Group, Inc.
http://www.urbantechgroup.com
c: +1-215-266-5948
f: +1-215-569-1963



  Dave Farber
  <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>To:   ip
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
  Sent by: cc:
  [EMAIL PROTECTED]Subject:  [IP] Researchers
Work on Anti - Terror Program
  ox.com


  02/13/2003 06:53
  AM
  Please respond to
  dave








Reasearchers Work on Anti - Terror Program

February 13, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS






Filed at 1:47 a.m. ET

Financed by more than $20 million in government contracts,
researchers are taking the first steps toward developing a
system that could sift through the financial, telephone,
travel and medical records of millions of people in hopes
of identifying terrorists before they strike.

So far, the companies awarded contracts by the Defense
Department are using only fabricated data in their work on
the program, which is called Total Information Awareness.

The Pentagon's technology chief, Pete Aldridge, has said
the department is interested in tying together such
privately held data as credit card records, bank
transactions, car rental receipts and gun pur

Flat tire(s) cause of Shuttle mishap?

[Steve Schear]

The following is a link to NASA engineer Robert H. Daugherty's, Jan. 30, 
2003 email to David H. Lechner.

The Shuttle's tires are designed to withstand over 1000 psi before 
failure.  But if one were to fail during decent, e.g., from overheating, 
the resultant overpressure in the wheel well could reach 40 psi subject the 
landing gear door to 250,000 pounds of loading.  This "...would almost 
certainly blow the door off its hinges, or at least send it out into the 
slipstream... catastrophic.  Even if you could survive the heating would 
the gear now deploy? And/or also, could you even reach the runway with this 
kind of drag."

http://www.nasa.gov/columbia/COL_landgear_email_030212.pdf

Hawking (was Re: Wheeler)

[Dan McDonald]

> Jim Choate wrote...
> 
> "I think he kicks Wheelers ass (nothing personal to Wheeler)."

(Where "he" == Hawking.)

And don't forget folks, about Hawking's _other_ career:

http://www.mchawking.com/

Enjoy,
Dan

Re: Something conspicuously missing from the media survival lists

[cubic-dog]

On Wed, 12 Feb 2003, jet wrote:

> At 16:18 -0500 2003/02/12, cubic-dog wrote:
> >
> >The NRA is openly hostile towards the "embarrasing 2nd Amendment".
> >The NRA is mostly all about allowing the weathly wingshooters to
> >be the last to fall. The rest of us, like the armed citizens, get
> >bartered off everytime gun control bill comes to a vote.
> 
> Sadly, there doesn't seem to be any RKBA organization without some 
>sort of right-wing, religious, or loonie ties.  

How true.

Aaron Zelmans JPFO is pretty loonie, but at least he
is actually going after issues. It's pretty whacked
out, but have a peek at http://www.jpfo.org

RE: New York state AG succeeds in bank shakedown?

[Trei, Peter]

>   Declan McCullagh[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> 
> 
> BANKS AGREE TO BLOCK NET GAMBLING CREDIT CARD TRANSACTIONS
> Ten banks have reached agreement with N.Y. Attorney General
> Eliot Spitzer to begin blocking credit card transactions
> involving online gambling.  The banks agreed to pay the
> Attorney General's office $335,000 to cover costs associated
> with an investigation into the activity.  The Office said
> that the settlement is part of "a trend in law enforcement
> to focus on intermediaries in combating illegal online
> activity."
>  [Stamford Advocate]
> 
This reminds me of a local shakedown. Like many states,
MA has a serious budget shortfall. Last night on the news,
Mitt Romney the (Republican) governor announced that he
was thinking of legalizing casino gambling in MA, but 
promised not to do it iff the casinos in neighbouring states
(mostly Connecticut) each paid MA $20M.

At least one, (Foxwoods) has told him to pound sand.
(annoyingly, I can't find an online cite)

Peter Trei

Re: NYT: The Wimps of War

[Bill Stewart]

By PAUL KRUGMAN
George W. Bush's admirers often describe his stand against Saddam Hussein 
as "Churchillian."

Short, rude, drunk?  As far as that goes, sure, he's Churchillian.
But he's not even up to the standards of "meet the new Bush,
same as the old Bush, fool me...ummm...can't get fooled again";
Bush the Elder may have been evil, but he was somewhat competent.

Tim writes, on behalf of Shrub

"These Evil Doers have nucular weapons of mass destruction."
"I know I mispronunciate "nucular." My bad."


I've been amazed that Bush's handlers didn't straighten him out on
"nuculur" long ago.   Why are they trying to keep him looking ignorant?

Wheeler

[Tyler Durden]

Jim Choate wrote...

"I think he kicks Wheelers ass (nothing personal to Wheeler)."

Maybe in Quantum Gravity. But Wheeler's work spans a huge array of fields 
that Hawking is unable to match (although likely due to his disability). 
Wheeler is also every bit as iconoclastic a thinker as Hawking, perhaps even 
more so. Wheeler may be the "Tyler Durden" of physicists. (Or maybe Tyler 
Durden is the Tyler Durden of physicsts!)

-TD





From: Jim Choate <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: New Scientist - Joao Magueijo - Hero or Heretic? (fwd)
Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2003 23:49:46 -0600 (CST)

On Wed, 12 Feb 2003, Tim May wrote:

> > Does the common man read his Hawking's book? Did Hawking even write 
it?
>
> Second, I don't know about Hawking's books, but Lee Smolin is one of

I especially like his "300 Years of Gravitation" and his '73 work on large
scale structure in time/space.

> stuff. This was mostly old hat 30 years ago (which is when I took Jim
> Hartle's class on general relativity). Hawking doesn't get much into
> the newer theories, at least not in any of the books of his I've
> skimmed.

Then you should skim more of them. Hawkings really jelled black hole
theory in the '73 work. He's pretty much the real modern father to some
folks.

I think he kicks Wheelers ass (nothing personal to Wheeler).


 --


  We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
  are going to spend the rest of our lives.

  Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

  [EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED]
  www.ssz.com   www.open-forge.org



_
MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE*  
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus

Re: New Scientist - Joao Magueijo - Hero or Heretic? (fwd)

[Tyler Durden]

Tim May wrote...

"Hawking writes about fairly established stuff, the usual black hole stuff. 
This was mostly old hat 30 years ago (which is when I took Jim Hartle's 
class on general relativity). Hawking doesn't get much into the newer 
theories, at least not in any of the books of his I've skimmed."

Check out the last three or four chapters of "Universe in a Nutshell". He 
actually does a good job of descibing M-theory and some of the experimental 
work that is now going on to search for "missing energy" radiating from 
bodies such as the sun. (Actually, the book is a good gift for 
non-Physicsts---nice illustrations and the occasional gag from Hawking).

-TD


_
The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE*  
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail

New York state AG succeeds in bank shakedown?

[Declan McCullagh]

BANKS AGREE TO BLOCK NET GAMBLING CREDIT CARD TRANSACTIONS
Ten banks have reached agreement with N.Y. Attorney General
Eliot Spitzer to begin blocking credit card transactions
involving online gambling.  The banks agreed to pay the
Attorney General's office $335,000 to cover costs associated
with an investigation into the activity.  The Office said
that the settlement is part of "a trend in law enforcement
to focus on intermediaries in combating illegal online
activity."
 [Stamford Advocate]

Re: Something conspicuously missing from the media survival lists

[anonimo arancio]

On Wed, 12 Feb 2003 23:30:12 -0500, Declan wrote:

> Note by broad conservative community I do not include
> politically-active gun owners, who would like an actual principled
> stand on the 2A. Fat chance.

People who look for "principled stands" by a government, any 
government, aren't paying attention. Other than surviving and 
maintaining control over the governed, governments have no 
principles. That kind of thing just gets in the way of survival 
and control and potentially limits a government's options.

Example: From the Declaration of Independence to the Sedition 
Act took only 22 years, and that was when the founding fathers 
still actively dominated political life. Today, a USA Patriot 
Act takes only minutes to enact, with neither debate nor 
hearings, and members of Congress don't even complain of not 
being able to read it before the vote.

reasonable pledge

[david]

Initial draft of a reasonable pledge of allegiance:

I Pledge Allegiance to the cause of Individual Liberty and I 
neither recognize nor subject Myself to any Ruler or Higher 
Authority.  I swear to resist Tyranny on all fronts and to protect 
and advance freedom for Myself and other Sovereign Individuals.


David Neilson,
Gun-toting Anarchist

Re: Something conspicuously missing from the media survival lists

[Declan McCullagh]

On Tue, Feb 11, 2003 at 11:46:11AM -0800, Tim May wrote:
> He talks the talk, but his Justice Department continues to enforce 
> assault weapon laws (which are ipso fact unconstitutional, as the 
> language of the Second makes it clear that military-type rifles for the 
> citizen militia were the intent, not just "target pistols" and ".22 
> plinkers"). His DOJ continues to raid houses where "gun stockpilers" 
> are believed to be.

It is possible to come up with a reasonable explanation for the DOJ's
tortured and internally contradictory position by saying they're trying
to do as little as they can while still making the broad conservative
community reasonably happy. This is consistent with that theory:
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/guncontrol_010711.html

Note by broad conservative community I do not include
politically-active gun owners, who would like an actual principled
stand on the 2A. Fat chance.

The DOJ wants to have it both ways. Watch what they say about
Washington, DC's Draconian gun laws in this week's lawsuit. You can't
legally *possess* *any* firearm inside the city limits without prior
police approval. That's why the Republicans (and a good number of the
small number of libertarians here) live in Virginia.
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20030212-71671916.htm

-Declan

Re: New Scientist - Joao Magueijo - Hero or Heretic? (fwd)

[Tim May]

You fucking creep. I dredged through my Trash folder to find out what 
our Portugese friend was replying to and discovered this bit of 
deception:

On Wednesday, February 12, 2003, at 09:49  PM, Jim Choate wrote:

On Wed, 12 Feb 2003, Tim May wrote:


Does the common man read his Hawking's book? Did Hawking even write 
it?

Second, I don't know about Hawking's books, but Lee Smolin is one of


I especially like his "300 Years of Gravitation" and his '73 work on 
large
scale structure in time/space.

stuff. This was mostly old hat 30 years ago (which is when I took Jim
Hartle's class on general relativity). Hawking doesn't get much into
the newer theories, at least not in any of the books of his I've
skimmed.


Then you should skim more of them. Hawkings really jelled black hole
theory in the '73 work. He's pretty much the real modern father to some
folks.

I think he kicks Wheelers ass (nothing personal to Wheeler).



You snip my mention of Hawking and Ellis and then suggest that I ought 
to look at Hawking's 1973 book. Below is the relevant section of my 
post, the one you edited and then make a smarmy comment on:

--begin quote--

Hawking writes about fairly established stuff, the usual black hole 
stuff. This was mostly old hat 30 years ago (which is when I took Jim 
Hartle's class on general relativity). Hawking doesn't get much into 
the newer theories, at least not in any of the books of his I've 
skimmed.

(One of my texts 30 years ago was the Hawking and Ellis book, "The 
Large Scale Structure of Spacetime." This was heavy going, not the 
popular fluff he's been turning out lately.)

--end quote--

What a creep you are.

I've got saucer.ssz.com under Plan 9 r4

[Jim Choate]

Hi,

Just a quick note that I've finally got Plan 9 to load without a lot of
hassle (eg some temporary DOS partition w/ a image). It now sees the CD on
install. So, I'm ready to do the demo next Thu. We are hot and online
people, finally ;)

After that I'll put my energy into getting the Auth functionality working.
At that point we'll bring the 9P file server online (ie roswell.ssz.com).
It will be 80G.

After that I'll get igor (ie general purpose anonymizing remailer under
Plan 9) working so we can move all the mailing lists and such over
(that's going to take a little longer). In the interim I'll get a irc
server and webpage going on saucer. I should have much ready in the
next 2-3 weeks. At that point I'll be in a position to start managing
keys for other sites w/ respect to namespace/resource access. We need
somebody who can do graphics, for the webpage. All work would be
contributed in some sort of Open Source license (which we'll have
to work out).

We need machines with dedicated and reasonably high speed (>= 128kb ISDN)
connections. Process serves are probably needed first. I'd suggest that
anyone interested create their own public (and private) namespace and then
we can transitively mount it through any of them. It would also be nice
if anyone has the resources if we could keep a 'lazy update' going so
nobody would lose anything in the namespace (at least that stuff that is
reasonable to back up). Several archive sites would be even sweeter.

With respect to the number of connections per node, we're trying to make
this a 'small worlds' network architecture. That means that each node
should have ln(n) connections (this is backbone connections as compared to
users accessing via a server. Each pair of nodes on a connection should
act to minimize common connections.

Regarding the irc server we'll have the following channels:

#plan9
#inferno
#hangar18
#cypherpunks
#open-science
#cliology

We can make other channels on request, provided they seem
'reasonable'...;)

If you're receiving this it means that you're on a mailing list which is
set to be moved in the near future to a Plan 9 based server. If you're
intrested in Plan 9 then please visit:

http://plan9.bell-labs.com

http://open-forge.org

ps If there are any musicians out there, I'm interested in having a
   demo where muscians pipe their data via Plan 9 servers from
   distant sites where they each share the n-1 hardware feeds in
   parallel from the other sites.this means that any listener
   would mount the outgoing feeds under /dev/* and then dump them to
   their local sound card.


 --


  We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
  are going to spend the rest of our lives.

  Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

  [EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED]
  www.ssz.com   www.open-forge.org

Re: CDR: Re: New Scientist - Joao Magueijo - Hero or Heretic? (fwd)

[Jim Choate]

On Wed, 12 Feb 2003, Tim May wrote:

> > You still read science popularizers ?

> There's absolutely nothing wrong with reading popularizers.

Other than an clear block of time that could be better spent looking in
the horses mouth ;)


 --


  We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
  are going to spend the rest of our lives.

  Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

  [EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED]
  www.ssz.com   www.open-forge.org

Re: CDR: Re: New Scientist - Joao Magueijo - Hero or Heretic? (fwd)

[Jim Choate]

On Wed, 12 Feb 2003, Tim May wrote:

> > Does the common man read his Hawking's book? Did Hawking even write it?
>
> Second, I don't know about Hawking's books, but Lee Smolin is one of

I especially like his "300 Years of Gravitation" and his '73 work on large
scale structure in time/space.

> stuff. This was mostly old hat 30 years ago (which is when I took Jim
> Hartle's class on general relativity). Hawking doesn't get much into
> the newer theories, at least not in any of the books of his I've
> skimmed.

Then you should skim more of them. Hawkings really jelled black hole
theory in the '73 work. He's pretty much the real modern father to some
folks.

I think he kicks Wheelers ass (nothing personal to Wheeler).


 --


  We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I
  are going to spend the rest of our lives.

  Criswell, "Plan 9 from Outer Space"

  [EMAIL PROTECTED][EMAIL PROTECTED]
  www.ssz.com   www.open-forge.org

Re: New Scientist - Joao Magueijo - Hero or Heretic? (fwd)

[Tim May]

On Wednesday, February 12, 2003, at 07:36  PM, Andri Esteves wrote:


On Thursday, 13 de February de 2003 02:02, you wrote:

On Wednesday, February 12, 2003, at 05:04  PM, Andri Esteves wrote:

Everything that could go wrong in academia and science is in 
Portugal.

That is the background Magueijo comes from...

I sat in a bookstore and read most of his book several weeks ago. A 
few
comments:

First, I kept looking for a clear description of the theory, with
convincing details, support, etc. I didn't find it. I instead found a
lot of stuff about peeing outside a bar in some tropical place, 
stories
about his girlfriend, insults he delivered to editors at "Nature," and
on and on. Sort of a "Fear and Loathing on the Road to Quantum
Gravity." (Pun with Smolin's title intended.)

You still read science popularizers ?

If you like science you should go to the source. I can't read many 
tecnhical
articles, but good sinopses and conclusions give you an idea of the 
article's
inplications. Just have to build a field mind map of an area...

There's absolutely nothing wrong with reading popularizers.

Unlike you, I see great value in reading overviews by folks like Brian 
Greene, Lee Smolin, and John Barrow before digging in to the arXives at 
xxx.lanl.gov.

Second, I don't know about Hawking's books, but Lee Smolin is one of
the current popularizers who have done excellent jobs. I recommend 
both
of his books. His own "Three Roads to Quantum Gravity" is crystal 
clear
in describing several of the competing theories. Smolin also explains
what's really important. (Check the archives for my past comments on
Smolin and topos theory, for example, from last summer.)

Never heard of him... Books are very expensive in Portugal...
As the publishing houses in portugal mainly publish religious or 
black-magic
themes... I will probably read it in english...

He's one of Magueijo's collaborators on VSL, so if you have not heard 
of him you should not be commenting at all.

Third, I have no idea if the VSL theory is "right." Time will tell.


At least there is some experimental work on it. Wich tons of theorical 
work
in physics don't even try to achieve and with blessing of the 
establishment...

This is a silly comment. There are experimental results in many areas 
of physics, including at the frontiers.

What can i say... Career or science. Are you part of the problem or of 
the
solution??
...

Venal comments.

--Tim May
"As my father told me long ago, the objective is not to convince someone
 with your arguments but to provide the arguments with which he later
 convinces himself." -- David Friedman