Author: Payam

Wired Magazine: Which ISPs Are Spying on You?

It is reassuring to know that some big Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are taking these questions seriously enough to attempt to answer them honestly. It is scary to think that the prospect of these gross invasions of privacy by the government just became routine, and even more frightening to think that many big ISPs don’t respect their clients enough to comment on matters of great import to their clients.

Boy, oh boy, if there were ever a time where the average consumer needed competition in the marketplace, this era is positively it.

Bananas, proof that God exists

Does anyone know if this is serious? I would really like to know.

Vista’s Suicide Bomb: who gets hurt? | The Register

Digital rights management (DRM) is something that Apple, Inc., (formerly Apple Computer, Inc.) had to implement into its iPod/iTunes scheme in order to convince the hopelessly dated Luddites that run the music industry to try the legitimate sale of digital music. The scheme is, of course, costly, cumbersome (though far smoother than any other DRM scheme) and unpopular with customers who are used to being able to copy or digitize (i.e., rip) their own CDs, but now find that they have even less freedom with the digital media that they buy.

It all comes to a head with Microsoft’s Vista operating system, however. According to the above theregister.com article, Vista’s DRM scheme is horribly restrictive. It is embedded at the firmware level in your computer and certain devices. All this means is that it is nearly impossible to use any software scheme to even allow yourself to play your own music on another computer that you own. Furthermore, the scheme propagates itself to mobile players, like Microsoft’s Zune, such that playing your music on more than one player becomes a chore.

The most terrifying aspect of this DRM scheme is that it can apply itself to music Continue reading “DRM, Microsoft Vista and NPR”

BBC NEWS | Health | Oral sex linked to throat cancer

Our brain trust at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the best American medical school, have managed to condemn the last form of intimacy: kissing. Damned be those ultrasensitive analytical methods and data mining methods that condemn everything from french fries (Chemical & Engineering News) to Ex-Lax.

Of course, the statistical strength of these studies is, in general, beyond reasonable doubt. Nevertheless, the question of whether these measures will effect real and measurable benefits in the longevity and the long-term well-being of the general populace persists. Are the correlations between diseases and these ingredients (like phenolphthalein, and acrylamide) real or chimerical? Will the measured benefits gained from their banishment be real or coincidental?

Statistics is an awfully powerful branch of knowledge, and its immeasurable benefits to everything from clinical medicine to inventory management and marketing are not to be denied, but it stands to reason whether the banning of ingredients that have been in consistent use during a century that saw unprecedented gains in longevity and well-being in the industrialized world will have any measurable long-term effects. One can only hope that the efforts in which we are investing heavily will tell, in due time.

Reaction to the DEC Spam of 1978

You want to believe that greed was never as intense as it is now, and that the lows to which salesmen of reputable companies stoop in order to make a sale were not always as the lows achieved by modern SPAMmers. Then you encounter articles like the one above, about the first incidence of SPAM email. You assume that it happened in the mid 1990s, just when email use was becoming prevalent. But, no. It was in 1978, very soon after email was born. And, the culprit was not some shady internet character trying to pitch something illicit or unsavory. It was a salesman from Digital Equipment Corp (DEC) trying to sell wares to the members of the then internet: mainly defense contractors and academics (who were probably acting as defense contractors).

The link above appeared in this Google history widget. It is amazing that a DEC salesman carried out the deed. After all, DEC was renowned as an engineering powerhouse that made due without any fancy marketing by relying on the strength of its products. (This ultimately led to DEC’s demise in 1998, when it was bought by Compaq, a company too inept to use DEC’s technology to survive.) In this context, it is perhaps sad that this salesman’s efforts were so horribly misplaced temporally. Ten years later, this marketing may have been of some use to DEC. After all, the ultimate irony is that DEC did not have this sort of aggressive marketing when it needed it.

Image from Doug Jones’ Collection of DEC Logos

Toyota to build $1.3 billion plant in Mississippi | Reuters

The account of the events contained in the above article is the final affirmation that Toyota will overtake General Motors as the largest auto manufacturer in the world. And, this prediction, of course, came to fruition in the last few weeks.

Given the tattered state of GM, one is left to wonder whether the word “Motors” belongs in the name. After all, the company’s most profitable division is its finance division, GMAC, and as of yesterda, May 2, 2007, even GMAC profits are slumping as a result of the bursting of the “sub-prime” mortgage bubble. As soon as GMAC is separated from GM, GM will become a company treading water: losing market share while it attempts to maintain pricing points that at least recoup its costs. It will be General “Motors”, for the motors are hardly high tech and barely selling. GM is a victim of its own arrogance (as documented in Roger & Me nearly 20 years ago), gross mismanagement and lack of foresight ( as documented by Who Killed the Electric Car).

It is a wonder, then, why anybody entertains GM’s or any American car maker’s laments about worker costs. American car companies blame worker costs for declining sales, while foreign automakers ascribe their increasing sales to the low cost of American auto workers.