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Friday, February 07, 2003 |
Living in Fear.Is it an option, in America, to live without fear? To live without the consequences of the fear of others? I think not. As I write this, the FAA is about to drastically increase the size of the TFR (temporary flight restriction) around the Washington DC area. This is due to the increased threat level perceived by intelligence sources, indicating that terrorism is a possibility. The fact is, there just isn't really anything that you can do with a little plane. The TFR does not apply to larger aircraft -- you know, the kind that can actually smash into something and do damage. It only applies to little planes. I guess the TSA (Transportation Security Agency) thinks that someone could drop a dangerous chemical out of a plane, or something like that. Doing so would be suicidal. Any plane attempting something like that would be shot down immediately. And why would you bother? You'll attract far too much notice. Why not simply drive a truck around in a populated area, spraying your chemical? It'll just look like the exhaust on a truck anyway. You'll get a hell of a lot farther, and do a lot more damage. The thing is, small aviation is a simple target. It's also a perfect example of how those in power do not do their homework. They can and do make knee-jerk reactions. I find it far more probable that this restriction is a political response, so the administration can say they are doing something. It is a defense against the (stupid) charge of the democrats that this administration isn't doing enough to protect the American people. I'll tell you this. From where I stand, they're doing too much. Freedoms and rights are being eroded heavily. Due process is sacrificed because, well, you can't have too much security. And sometimes you just need to do bad things to good people if you're going to save the rest of us. And they're probably not good people anyway -- they probably have something to hide. It's the same thing over and over again in our society. People are for the death penalty, because they don't believe that they'll ever be wrongly accused. Yet in one state, fully 50% of those on death row were exonerated due to genetic evidence! Preventing pilots from flying their planes isn't going to affect most of the population, but for a dreamer who's sunk his entire life savings into the plane, it's completely unfair. We should never destroy the dreams and priviledges of a minority for the benefit of the perceived safety of others. It is unfair. I think that truth matters. I think that we have sacrificed far too much to these terrorists already, and that our slow descent into a conforming police state should be abhorred. The simplest and most effective way to deliver a weapon of mass destruction to a US city is by putting it in a car. Why are we not banning cars? Because that would affect a lot of people. If someone violates the TFR, there is significant potential that that pilot could be shot down. One view is, "well, he should have known better than to fly there!". That is callous beyond belief. I call it what it truly is: Manslaughter. It's an ugly word, and it's the right one. Imagine a schoolyard, filled with children. Draw a line down the center of the playground. Now, to fight terrorism, we explain to the children that they must all stay on one side of the line. There is some sort of valuable asset on the other side of the line. Now that we've warned the children, we set up a tripwire, loaded with explosives. Then we tell them to play like normal. Eventually, someone will stray. It just feels like the start of something horribly wrong, and I don't know what. 8:40:33 PM 
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Generate the Policy.
I think it would be cool if there was a flag on the Java runtime that just generated a policy file automatically as you ran the app...as the developer you could quickly get a nicely fine-grained policy file appropriate to your app and distribute it. As a user, you could look at the generated policy file and see if it makes sense to grant the application the rights it wants... 1:19:46 PM
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JDK 1.5 EnumsNo sir, I don't like it. Enums in JDK1.5 are a good idea -- they make your code a hell of a lot more readable. But doesn't anybody get that sets of enums are just great? Delphi had a set construct. Each enum gets a unique identifier. You can declare a set of enum. The compiler handles these very efficiently, and just uses numbers for them whenever possible. If the number of bits in an integer is exceeded, you can use a bit vector or something like that. Very fast set operations are possible (then again, Pascal had set operations built into the language).
Why does such a simple concept have such inefficient implementation in Java, and most other languages? |
Reading Things.I have a simpler reason why I like Radio better. It doesn't make the stupid assumption that practically every reader in existence makes. Who the hell wants to read things one at a time? I sure don't. You know those excessively broken up HTML documents you find on the web every once in a while? The ones that give you two sentences, then require you to click on the "next" button to see the next part? Why on earth can't they just load the whole thing? Some web sites make you do that stupid "click for the next page" crap. I hate that. I usually just choose the printable version -- I get the whole thing in one nice big article, and I can scroll through and read it at my leisure. Radio gives me nice weblog articles and lets me read them all at once. My wish list for a newsreader would include an "everything" view. This view simply builds one giant document of everything I'd want to look at, annotates it appropriately, and let's me get through it quickly. For newsreaders and that ilk, it's probably more effective to divide things by "topic". There are tons of ways this kind of thing could be presented visually.
12:07:14 AM
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Last update: 4/6/2003; 12:07:28 PM .
