AKMA's Random Thoughts

December 22, 2002

Voice of Sanity

Mitch Ratcliffe says the words that the public needs to hear about the Bush administration's heavy-handed bureaucracy to protect us from “digital doomsday.”

Let’s talk directly:

  • “Monitoring” will only protect us from something we know we’re looking for, and the more energy we put into barbed-wire barricades to protect us from what we anticipate, the more vulnerable we’ll be to what we didn’t expect. Did anyone in Washington learn anything from 2001’s disasters?
  • The capacity of protectors to protect will always lag behind the capacity of idsruptors to disrupt (this must be “Somebody’s Law” already, but if it isn’t, this may be my big chance to go down in history). It’s the hackers’ manifestation of entropy: order costs more energy than chaos.
  • The economic costs of illusory “protection” and the convulsions that will result if the illusion fails us amount to very much more than the cost of amplifying the Net’s capacity to route around disruptions. And back-up and redundancy don’t undermine the civil liberties of millions of citizens, or artificially constrain the growth of the single strongest economic engine that the United States presently can rely on.
On the other hand, outflanking problems doesn’t get the positive vibes and the tough-guy persona that wasting money with head-on confrontations generates. So we can expect the present administration to keep fear-mongering, wasting money, and reaping the benefits of high popularity and immunity from criticism.

Posted by AKMA at December 22, 2002 01:23 PM | TrackBack
Comments

The "monitoring" and other extremes are not well-thought out. Based on previous Government projects I think that this project would take more coordination than the Feds are capable of.

Hey, they can't even catch the Nigerian Fee Scammers or other illegal activities that take place within the US.

In addition, collectively, we are all smarter than they are and would quickly learn how to get around the spying. I'm not worried.

Posted by: meg at December 22, 2002 07:07 PM

That gives us a pretty good starting point to understand a lot more about variables, and that's what we'll be examining next lesson. Those new variable types I promised last lesson will finally make an appearance, and we'll examine a few concepts that we'll use to organize our data into more meaningful structures, a sort of precursor to the objects that Cocoa works with. And we'll delve a little bit more into the fun things we can do by looking at those ever-present bits in a few new ways.

Posted by: Etheldreda at January 13, 2004 09:07 AM

Let's see an example by converting our favoriteNumber variable from a stack variable to a heap variable. The first thing we'll do is find the project we've been working on and open it up in Project Builder. In the file, we'll start right at the top and work our way down. Under the line:

Posted by: Vincent at January 13, 2004 09:07 AM

Inside each stack frame is a slew of useful information. It tells the computer what code is currently executing, where to go next, where to go in the case a return statement is found, and a whole lot of other things that are incredible useful to the computer, but not very useful to you most of the time. One of the things that is useful to you is the part of the frame that keeps track of all the variables you're using. So the first place for a variable to live is on the Stack. This is a very nice place to live, in that all the creation and destruction of space is handled for you as Stack Frames are created and destroyed. You seldom have to worry about making space for the variables on the stack. The only problem is that the variables here only live as long as the stack frame does, which is to say the length of the function those variables are declared in. This is often a fine situation, but when you need to store information for longer than a single function, you are instantly out of luck.

Posted by: Lettice at January 13, 2004 09:09 AM