Before the Apple II had floppy drives, however, it had an audio cassette interface for storing programs and data.  This was a very primitive system, requiring you to hook up a cassette recorder to your computer and fiddle with the volume knob until things started working.  To read data from tape, you specified a range of memory to fill, and hit the "play" button on your tape recorder.  If all went well, the computer cheerfully beeped at you and off you went.  Loading BASIC programs was even easier, because the start location was pre-determined, and the length was stored on the tape.  All you had to do was type "LOAD".

I recently found myself extracting software from cassette tapes purchased on eBay.  At the start of the project, I thought to myself, "it's awkward to get at the data, but at least there's no copy protection."  As it turns out, I was wrong.

A little walk down memory lane.

Early Copy Protection on the Apple II

Mexico enacted a controversial law on Thursday decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other drugs while encouraging government-financed treatment for drug dependency free of charge.

Mexico Legalizes Drug Possession - NYTimes.com

Can DDOS help nationstates manipulate international politics? Yes.

A colleague alerted me a couple of days ago to a massive DDOS attack against Kyrgyzstan ISPs www.ns.kg and www.domain.kg which essentially shut them down on January 18, 2009. There are only 4 ISP providers for the entire country so this attack was clearly sending a message. Since the attacking IPs were Russian, and since the Russian government supports the current Kyrgyzstan President, I’m thinking that its a message to the opposition party.

The Kyrgyzstan Cyber Attack That No One Is Talking About at IntelFusion

For additional commentary, you may read them on my blog here:

Napkin #1: The health care equation.

Napkin #2: It's not about health care.

Napkin #3: The plans on the table.

Napkin #4: What's it mean to me?

This is a pretty good explanation of the different healthcare options, although I wish more space was devoted to the pros and cons of the different options.

Digital Roam: American health care on (4) napkins. Now all together!

Two important memes have broken out:

1. Obama is weak.
2. Its cool to bring your assault rifle to Presidential speaking events. Everyone is going to be doing it.

Krugman:

On the issue of health care itself, the inspiring figure progressives thought they had elected comes across, far too often, as a dry technocrat who talks of “bending the curve” but has only recently begun to make the moral case for reform...

Meanwhile, on such fraught questions as torture and indefinite detention, the president has dismayed progressives with his reluctance to challenge or change Bush administration policy.

And then there’s the matter of the banks.

I don’t know if administration officials realize just how much damage they’ve done themselves with their kid-gloves treatment of the financial industry, just how badly the spectacle of government supported institutions paying giant bonuses is playing.

For the lastest on government supported institutions see AIG.

Benmosche told employees that he “had the luxury to say to the government, I’m not going to rush to do this. I’m appalled at how much pressure has been put on all of you to just sell it no matter what, because the Fed wants out, or the Treasury wants out. If they want out in a hurry, they shouldn’t have come in in the first place.”

These are the same people who can never, ever pay back all the money they owe tax payers:

Let’s not mince words: AIG is on the hook for $182.5 billion dollars to the taxpayers. And it high-grade, enzyme-free manure to pretend this is going to be repaid anytime soon.

The people who run the government are incompetent, the people who run corporate America are incompetent, and the people who run the media are incompetent. On the later point, intentionally creating a nation wide "bring you assault rifle to protest rallies" fad is the most blatantly irresponsible thing that I have ever seen the national media do. If you don't want to encourage people to do something, you shouldn't put a picture of someone doing it above the fold in your nationally distributed media outlet, you idiots! This is all going no where good just about as fast as it can.

Op-Ed Columnist - Obama’s Trust Problem - NYTimes.com

Preliminary work has revealed that only about 7% of women always have orgasms with sex alone, he says, while 27% say they never do.

In addition to doing research on the female orgasm this guy teaches a class called "unix tools for behavioral research."

Female orgasms and a 'rule of thumb' -- latimes.com

I've read the case and I don't think I'm over-reacting at all. There seems to be a serious disagreement of fact between the justices as to how substantial this person's likelihood of success is. Its impossible to evaluate without more information. But thats not wants important. What's important is the underlying question of whether a person who is actually innocent must be executed because the procedure says that is what is supposed to happen.

Scalia certainly seems to welcome that debate:

If this Court thinks it possible that capital convictions obtained in full compliance with law can never be final, but are always subject to being set aside by federal courts for the reason of “actual innocence,” it should set this case on our own docket so that we can (if necessary) resolve that question.

As I previously stated, there should be no debate about that. The answer is yes.

Stevens writes:

Imagine a petitioner in Davis’s situation who possesses new evidence conclusively and definitively proving, beyond any scintilla of doubt, that he is an innocent man. The dissent’s reasoning would allow such a petitioner to be put to death nonetheless. The Court correctly refuses to endorse such reasoning.

Good.

Hearing on innocence claim ordered | SCOTUSblog

Is this a crazy view?

Mr Sullivan,

I'm not sure what Conor Clarke's email address is so I'm emailing you. Mr. Clarke suggests that Scalia and Thomas are not crazy in holding the view that federal courts are powerless to help a convicted but demonstrably innocent death row inmate.

I think this is one of those moments when there is a clear division between right and wrong. The basic principle that the United States of America does not execute people who are demonstrably innocent should not be subject to debate. We must not become so committed to upholding our procedural rules that we contemplate killing innocent people simply because that is what the rules say that we are supposed to do. In such a case, it is the rules that must bend, and it is the responsibility of everyone involved to ensure that they are bent. The alternative is simply evil and history should have taught us all that lesson by now.

Reasonable people can disagree in such a case about exactly how the rules ought to be bent, but this passage in the dissent seems to reach toward the conclusion that they cannot and must not be bent, and that position is simply wrong and incompatible with life in a mature and free society that recognizes the fallibility of human institutions.

Thank you,
Tom Cross
Atlanta, GA

RE: Why Justice Scalia Wants to Execute the Innocent

Justice Scalia, in a dissent joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, said that the federal courts would be powerless to assist [a death row inmate] even if he could categorically establish his innocence.

“This court has never held,” Justice Scalia wrote, “that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”

Usually I've read Supreme Court cases before I go spouting off an opinion about them on this blog, and you can rest assured that I will read this case, but I don't have time to do it today and I don't think its necessary in order to form an opinion about this. There is enough prima facie evidence to conclude that the dissent was deeply wrong.

These guys are so wrapped around the axle about their procedural rules that they are willing to actually kill innocent people simply because their bureaucratic process requires them to do so?!

The basic principle that the United States of America does not execute people who are demonstrably innocent should not be subject to debate.

This dissent will be remembered for years to come as the moment when conservative judicial philosophy was utterly discredited.

Conservative Justices think its OK to execute innocent people.

The TI-83 result got me stuck in a wikihole in which I learned about this flag, which is a color coded representation of an HD-DVD decryption key that the MPAA tried to sue off the Internet.

Internet users began circulating versions of this image, calling it a Free Speech Flag, in blog posts on dozens of websites and as user avatars on forums such as Digg. The RGB encoding of each of the five colors provides three bytes of the 09 F9 key, with the sixteenth byte "C0" appended in the lower right corner.[47]

The attacks on DVD security aren't really cryptanalysis, in a classic sense, but they certainly involve an angry mob - angry enough and large enough to have a flag! The future will hold more and more interesting examples of this sort of cultural phenomenon.

AACS encryption key Free Speech Flag