| Monday
May 20, 2002
X-Files Finale and Attack
of the Clones last week.
E3 this week. It starts with an XBOX press conference that is open only
to those who pre-registered. I am not sure I did. And the conference is
5:30 PM, and at 6:30 is a Lakers NBA playoff game: downtown is going to be
a madhouse and I don't intend to fight that traffic. Doubtless many who
are concerned with XBOX will go, and I'll find out what happened.
They have in theory incorporated all my galley changes into a final for
The Prince, and I will get the finals shortly. Meanwhile I need to crank
out at least a thousand words a day on Burning Tower. And I will
have to go to E3 later this week.
It's a great life if you don't weaken...
Two programs are driving me mad: Norton anti-virus, and WS_FTP. In both
cases they insist on popping up to tell me what they are doing. Norton is
worst because when it sees a virus attachment, it wants to tell me about
it, and it wants to stop getting more email until it deals with it. Since
the way it deals with it is invariably the same, to quarantine it or
eliminate the mail attachment or both, why can't I find a way to tell it
to DO that and not ask for my personal intervention?
And Ws_FTP! If I queue up a bunch of files for it to send, it pops up
in my work area every time is sends on, although there is no reason
whatever for me to know, and no action is expected. And I can't find any
setting to tell it to shut up and soldier and not bother me with reports
until it is DONE...
There is interesting mail today, and two particularly interesting
items, really truly hidden
windows files, and when is the next
terror attack with a clue as to when it might be.
But in case you are not sufficiently suspicious, here is this from
Chaos Manor Associate Dan Spisak:
Okay, this is it.
Microsoft has officially gone too far in my eyes.
In this article on eWeek:
http://www.eweek.com/article/0,
3658,s%253D701%2526a%253D26875,00.asp
Allchin basically states that certain parts of
Windows are so insecure that if the source code was released to public it
would threaten our countries national security and as such certain APIs
and code will be carved out under a national security protection clause.
This just makes me sick.
If anything happens now I think the DOD needs to
seriously reconsider its use of Microsoft products in any kind of wartime
environment.
-Dan S.
And you might want to think about that one...
And I am just weary of the Internet and the satellite and Page Cannot
Be Displayed without 5 retries thank you and the rest of it. The Internet
remains a conspiracy to see how many grown people can be made to watch a
screen on which there is no information and nothing is happening.
Stephen Jay Gould, RIP
I first learned of this from Roland, who sent the link
to the Obituary. As Roland observed, he was a man with whom one
could disagree and still have respect for.
We had our quarrels, a few of them open debates, one at a AAAS Press
Conference years ago. I did not always think him fair. He had a flair for
words, and he used that to wicked effect; but he was capable of arguing
from authority which, if you traced the authority's sources, turned out to
be himself. He was capable of dismissing disagreements with a wave and
sometimes with distortion of the opposing view.
His Mismeasure of Man was a work of propaganda posing as science, and
that was not the only such he ever published. One of my correspondents
says:
"I find it very interesting that they didn't
mention Gould's masterpiece of deception, "The Mismeasure of
Man". This is the only reference I could find in the essay to Gould's
war on IQ/race/sociobiology.
Maybe the author feels that putting the Mismeasure
of Man in Gould's obit would be similar to putting the Population Bomb in
Ehrlich's (eventual) obit. Both are publications that made their
respective authors famous, but both are (or will be) rightly scorned as
drivel masquerading as sober science.
Perhaps it is evil of me to say it, but I for one
will not miss a man responsible for the character assassination of so
many."
Perhaps a bit more harsh a judgment than I would render; certainly I
was the recipient of some of Gould's venom, although I would not call it
"character assassination" to say in a dry voice "Are you
not Dr. Pournelle the science fiction writer?" in a press
conference. He could certainly sound contemptuous of his questioners.
And for all that he was a fascinating man, who believed that ideas have
consequences, and that some matters are more important than others; and
more important than individuals.
The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with
their bones. I think that will not be the case here. I think his legacy
left the House of Intellect stronger, particularly where he was wrong but
made his opponents rethink their positions and sharpen their concepts. He
did that for me, and for that I will always be grateful.
Requiem aeterna dona eum, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eum.
Another correspondent says:
Many years ago, when just beginning graduate school,
I happened to discuss the 1970s attacks of Gould and his other friends on
the sociobiology theories of EO Wilson with a few friends at dinner. A
fellow graduate student in evolutionary biology mentioned that his own
professor had been shocked by the strange and dishonest nature of those
attacks, and asked one member of that circle with whom he was friendly
(someone other than Gould) whether he actually believed such nonsense. The
answer: "Of course not, but I did it in the interests of Marxism,
which was more important."
Now this is the most extreme sort of third-hand
hearsay evidence, but I think it's probably correct nonetheless, and
applies to Gould as well.
At the time, I wrote a letter to Gould,
dispassionately raising quite a number of detailed technical issues about
some of his evolutionary theories to achieve some credibility, then
recounted that the, challenging him to deny it, and condemning him in
extremely harsh terms if it were true. I closed the letter by pointing out
that I was quite young and he was not, and that scientists of my
generation would be shaping the historical perception of scientists of his
when the latter were merely dust and names in the textbooks. To my
considerable surprise, he sent a personal reply, never denied the charges,
but seemed quite hurt and pained at what I had written.
And although I myself have left the scientific
field, I still very much doubt whether history will be kind to Stephen Jay
Gould.
And see below
And in mail we have an explanation
of how the Dark Lords of the Sith operate...
And Stephen Hart says regarding WS_FTP:
options - session - turn off "show transfer
progress dialog"
This is with ws_ftp_LE (the freeware version), I
hope its the same or similar to your version.
and indeed that does it. Thanks! And
Sending Email through Earthlink's Mail servers when
not connected to Earthlink.
Outgoing Server: smtpauth.earthlink.net
Set your client to use authenticate ... "My
server requires authentication" Enter your email address for the
Account Name and your password.
-Justin LaVelle -Earthlink, Pasadena T.R.O.N.
(Vender Relations)
So now I know. I looked and never found that magic formula.. that is
the smtpauth was not before revealed to me...
While Bob Thompson tells me how to find the option to just delete
the darned virus if Norton finds one. I found it; it takes a certain
amount of faith that it's there, but if you know it must be there, you
will eventually find it...
Norton remains the right program for this. It's just sometimes a bit
confusing.
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