Fernando’s posterous

Quick excerpt from funny (yet kinda-shocking) article from here:
 
http://unreasonablefaith.com/2009/06/22/i-needed-a-job-and-xenu-was-hiring/
 
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by Shéa Bennett
 
 
I recently had a job interview for an IT position with the Church of Scientology.
 
Let me explain. I wasn’t aware of my potential employer going in. The company in the advertisement was Narconon, who bill themselves as “the world’s most successful drug rehab,” and apparently have been in the business of narcotic rehabilitation since 1966.
 
I know, I know – some of you are screaming, “What!? How could you not have known that Narconon was a Scientology front?” Well, I didn’t. I have no real excuse – I simply did not know. You probably don’t know, for example, that there are four different models of the IG-88 assassin droid in the Star Wars universe.
 
Oh, you did? Ah.
 
I should have done more research. I did some research, but I didn’t look up Narconon on Wikipedia. My mistake — it won’t happen again.

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Here's thoughtful discussion on why Google may do evil in the future.
 
(Oh-oh, they got me.)
 
(From here, by the way: http://perpetualpost.com/?p=1728)
 
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Google is Great! OR Google Will Ruin Us All
By Ted Berg and Jillian Lovejoy Lowery
 
TED: There was a time when I thought a Goo-ocracy sounded delicious, some heretofore unknown form of government entirely based on Twinkie filling. But in 2009, I know better. The coming Goo-ocracy will not be nearly so sweet or creamy, though it may be just as bad for us. Soon, the world will be run by Google. They’ll start with information control; check out the Google Books project, for example. Put every book up online, and all of a sudden we don’t need print copies anymore. Then, once the print copies are gone, Google can rock some Fahrenheit 451 shit. You only get the books Google deems appropriate. And that’s just the beginning. Jill, try to convince me that putting so much power and so mucn information in the hands of a private company can be a good thing.
 
JILLIAN: Clearly, Google is benevolent, Ted. Are you scared of Amazon.com suggesting other books you might dig, based on previous purchases? Are you skeptical of your TiVo helpfully recording shows that it so considerately chose for you? Google is not to be feared, they’re just making life easier for us. Need a quick answer? Google. Want a free email account with a ginormous inbox? Gmail. Are you older than 17 and totally over AOL Instant Messenger? Gmail Chat. In fact, how are we corresponding? Via the aforementioned Google services. Google is not to be feared. Stop your conspiracy theories, take a sip of this Kool Aid and join me in Goo-topia.
 
TED: Here’s the thing, though: Amazon.com is just recommending some books and TiVo is just monitoring my TV-watching habits. Both are reasonably ominous, to be sure, but Google is ubiquitous. Yeah, they give me a free email account with a ginormous inbox. And what price do I pay for that? The cost of giving Google the right to read my emails for targeted advertising. But who’s to say it stops there? If Google can monitor my emails and my search habits and what I’m chatting about, Google can pretty easily know just about all there is to know about me. Yeah, maybe it’s not happening right now, but as our society becomes more and more of a panopticon — with all of us plugged into our cells — Google will increasingly represent the central overseer, peering out at our behavior whenever it sees fit. Color me creeped out.
 
JILLIAN: You might be right, but I simply cannot believe that Google actually cares what I’m doing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m fascinating — but I can’t imagine that the Google Gods care about my chats or the content of my email. And, besides, what does it matter if they do know everything about me? I’m a narcissist; I love having people interested in my musings, comings and goings. I suppose, when you really think about it, it’s a little intrusive. But where do you draw the line? Are any search engines/email providers safe? Will you renounce your cell phone, because your location can be tracked? Will you not purchase your Metro Card (or your city’s equivalent of a public transportation pass) with anything but cash for the same reason? And think about how many people use Google. Do you really think they’ve got their eye on you?
 
TED: Well of course I don’t. Not yet. But what about once our government inevitably crumbles, and has no option but to contract out its police force to the highest bidder, and the highest bidder just happens to be the company with the most money and the one that just so happens to be best set up for policework — your friendly e-mail provider? It sounds absurd, I know, but think of how efficient they’d be: This guy just searched Google for tips on hackey sack tricks, then Gchatted with his friend about how great Pink Floyd is, then Google-mapped his nearest Taco Bell. Book ‘em! I kid, but do you know how many people probably Google the illegal shit they’re about to undertake? Give it ten years, the term “G-Men” will have a whole new connotation.
JILLIAN: But isn’t that a kind of internet Darwinism? If you’re dumb enough to Google illegal shit from your home computer, you kind of deserve to be caught. Isn’t that what the computers at public libraries are for?
 
TED: Well of course, but I don’t know what public library you rely on for planning your heists — mine makes me swipe my card first.
 
We’re joking around, and rightfully so: It’s a bit ridiculous, as it currently stands, to assume sweet-and-happy Google has any nefarious intentions. But as we become more and more reliant on computers for everything, and as Google becomes more and more dominant in just about every electronic realm, I wonder how long it will remain funny. Information control isn’t exactly a laughing matter, nor is the way Google can — and to some extent already does — exert its will on the various aspects of our economy that now solely rely on the Internet.
 
A brilliant former professor of mine, Siva Vaidhyanathan, has focused his recent efforts on the notion, and for a much more in-depth and better thought-out study of the subject, I recommend his blog at www.googlizationofeverything.com. But before you head there, consider this: Google’s corporate motto is Don’t Be Evil. Just a little bit ominous, don’t you think? Yeah, they’re saying they’re not out to be evil, but just the fact that they’ve made it their mission means they’ve at least considered being evil. Slogans should be things like, “What can Brown do for you?” and “The quicker picker-upper.” Don’t Be Evil? I’ll give it 20 years before someone down at Google is reaching for a jar of white-out to rid the company of that inconvenient conjunction.

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Here:
 
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-06/ff_keymaster?currentPage=all
 
Highly recommended.

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É sobre as tentativas de transposição de censura em países com democracias fajutas. Aqui no Brasil caiu uma (a exigência de canudo para jornalistas). Aqui:
 
http://noticias.uol.com.br/midiaglobal/nytimes/2009/06/18/ult574u9443.jhtm
 
Se puder leia em inglês. As traduções dos grandes portais sempre são sofríveis.

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A quick excerpt from here ( http://nymag.com/news/business/55687/ ). Worth the read.
 
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My first assignment was to write a “machine-to-machine interrupt handler.” That was not exactly sexy in the world of finance, or in any world, and I won’t bore you by trying to explain. It was plumbing. As was all the programming, which, on the firm’s hierarchy, ranked somewhere above the secretarial pool but well below, literally and figuratively, the trading floor. I didn’t mind. To me, it was good, well-paying work. My manager, a former mathematics professor named Leszek Gesiak, an immigrant from Poland, became a friend. Neither one of us was on track, but we both enjoyed the challenges and pace of the job. We lunched at either Yip’s, a Chinese culinary cul-de-sac, or on Front Street, in the seaport, where you could get fresh fish cafeteria style across the street from the market. It was a different New York, still picking itself up from the seventies. Drug dealers loitered at the door of the brokerages, and taxis often smelled of pot from their previous occupants. Just a few years before, Michael Bloomberg had been fired from Salomon. He had the crazy idea that the data was as valuable as the firm’s capital.

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Look at how flowed this was:
 
(from here: http://technologizer.com/2009/06/14/fifteen-classic-pc-design-mistakes/4/)
 
---8 
The TI-99/4A’s BASIC was slow for a multitude of reasons. The machine really was a study in bottlenecks. I’ve studied its architecture somewhat and have spoken to some of the engineers that were there at the time.
 
It’s built in GPL interpreted language was partly a consequence of the fact that all of the RAM in the machine was connected to the video controller and not directly CPU addressable. This was a cost saving technique with horrible repercussions. The Home Computer team also wanted a custom CPU that ran GPL directly, and were forced to use the 9900-family CPUs instead. (There’s a long story there, too, about how the 9900 wasn’t all the CPU it could be either…)
 
In addition, the BASIC interpreter was *purposefully* slowed down. The BASIC had delay loops to slow down screen output so that it wouldn’t be too fast for children, apparently. If you turn up the volume on your TV set, you can hear the CPU drop into those delay loops after every PRINT statement.
 
TI Extended BASIC thankfully eliminated a number of those delays, though it still was far from being a speed demon since most of it was still double-interpreted. I still don’t know why it did a “prescan” (I’m guessing it had to do with the highly flexible and extensible nature of its implementation, since add-ons could link their own subroutines into the language), but I do (un)fondly recall shoving a dozen lines at the start of my TI XB programs bracketed with !@P+ and !@P- to turn prescan on and off so it wouldn’t freeze for 3 minutes when I typed “RUN”.
 
(That blob of code had to contain at least one instance of every subroutine and variable name used in the program. It didn’t have to be syntactically correct though. You could have line 1 be “GOTO 100″, lines 3 through 98 be filled with gobbledegook with the !@P+ and !@P- “comments” on lines 2 and 99. (Un)fun times.)

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http://danieltenner.com/posts/0010-a-tale-of-two-twitter-users.html

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