thwartedefforts

Not that anyone seemed to have any trouble breaking the ice or starting up a conversation, but TECHcocktail should have some kind of bingo game, treasure hunt, or something like that. This way, people have another excuse to chat each other up, can check things off, gather points, and there can be prizes at the end that you can effectively “earn” rather than just get lucky and win.

To get things started, here’s a sample list of point generators and things to find:

• If you’re a recruiter, you get one point for each minute you accidentally talk to another recruiter thinking they are in technology and looking for a job.
• You get one point for each person who introduces someone else as their significant other.
• If you unexpectedly meet an old significant other of your own, give yourself 10 points.
• Getting interviewed by someone who is carrying a tape recorder nets you a point. If you have to spell out a domain name into a tape recorder, you get one point for each letter in the domain name.
• One point for each domain name someone drops like it’s a household name but you’ve never heard of it. Two points if you’re the only one within earshot who has heard of that domain. Three points if you’ve actually been to the domain in question.
• One point for each person who, apparently being so new to this Internet thing, appends every domain name with .com, no matter how many times you say .net, .org, or .us.
• One point for each founder of a company whose product is not live yet. Two points if they have a known/estimated release date. Three points if it’s next week. Four points if the product is already live.
• One point if someone says “web two point oh”. One point for “web three point oh”. Two points for “web one point oh”.
• Three points when someone utters “ontology”. Subtract four points if it’s immediately followed by “Sorry, I’m not sure who’s familiar with that term”.
• On your trip to the restroom, you acquire one point for each person talking on the phone in there. Two points if they’re typing into a blackberry.
• One point for each mention of “D&D”, “Star Trek” or “Star Wars” you overhear. Two points if it comes up in a conversation you’re having.
• Distribution of professions:
  • One point for each “project manager”.
  • Two points for each “founder” or “partner”.
  • Three points for any “designers”, “programmers”, “system administrators”, or “network administrators”. Bonus if they make known their “flavor” (Flash, Air, .NET, Cisco, Linux, Windows, OSX, PHP, RoR, Oracle, etc). Extra bonus if they’ve written a book.
  • Three points for each “lawyer”.
  • Zero points for recruiters.
• One point for each claim of “Internet Celebrity” status. One point if you recognize their name. Bonus if someone overhears and is awestruck.
• If you hear someone say “It’s my blog” and the person they are talking to responds with “What’s a blog?”, double your points (I kid you not, this actually happened).
• One point if a conversation you’re having gets cut short when someone needs to take a phone call. Two points if it was a legitimate phone call. Three points if they come back to continue talking after their phone call is finished.
• One point for each person who hands you a business card that is actually for the business they are talking with you about.

Overall, it was an enjoyable couple of hours. Free drinks are always nice. I’m told by those from Arstechnica who were there that the previous ones had more actual tech people and fewer, ahem, recruiters. I was kind of hoping to find some people to fill in the expertise gaps in the projects I’m working on or people to bounce ideas off of, but honestly I didn’t really know what to expect. I did definitely met some interesting people, people that I plan on following up with.

And then there’s this conversation August (aka Mayor Awesome) and I had:
“So, there don’t appear to be too many technology nerd chics here.”
“There aren’t even that many true nerds for that matter. But, yeah, it’s a sausage fest.”
“Shit, there’s even a sponsor for this sausage fest,” pointing at a logo for Poll Everywhere projected on the wall.
“See, even they know it’s mostly a big buncha guys.”

As an alternative to the creation of the .XXX TLD, the adult content industry can self-police by instituting the use of a defacto standard subdomain for adult content other than www, placing their content under adult.example.com, or further subdomains thereof, thereby cheaply and effectively labeling content on a domain basis without the involvement of third-parties.

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Roughly Drafted usually has some interesting things to say, but gets it wrong when it comes to DRM:

When DRM is created to serve the needs of both producers and consumers, it works to create markets; DRM creates a product that can be sold, creating demand for content that would otherwise be unavailable.
…
Without DRM acting to turn content into a product that can be sold in the same manner as other physical goods, there is no market because there is no way to establish a price using supply and demand.

If (I emphasize the if) DRM creates a product that can be sold, then this increases supply. Demand doesn’t just suddenly appear when something can be sold, when supply appears. Creative works have two things working against their supply side: the authors’ and creators’ drive to create and the infinite replicatability of bits. The lack of scaracity doesn’t change that. And it is useless to talk about price in this context, yes.

Techdirt has an ongoing series of posts about how lack of scaracity doesn’t mean anything new for economics. The problem is that the goods and services that once did map very neatly to the supply/demand economic curves do not necessarily do so anymore. This doesn’t mean an industry, like the music industry, is in trouble, it just means that, historically, the most obvious method of extracting a profit, forcing bits into physical form and selling those forms, no longer applies. The music industry may need to reinvent itself as a service industry (or find something else that they do/provide that does map to the supply/demand model) in order to still remain relevant.

Dirt farmers are welcome to try to sell dirt, but such a dirt-selling business will run into problems once everyone realizes they are standing on dirt. One would be stupid to enter the dirt selling business after everyone has already realized this. Just because you were selling dirt before everyone realized scarity was zero doesn’t mean you, or your product, deserve any kind of artifical protection. And providing such protections, either via laws, technology or artifical scarcity, produces an inefficient market. And an inefficient market is quite anti-capitalistic.

David Lightman just wants to play Duke Nukem Forever, and after reading about its pending release date on an Internet forum, decides to try to break into the 3D Realms website to play it. While war driving, he stumbles upon an interesting computer system and plays a game of “War on Terror” with it, thinking that it’s a demo release of DNF. Unfortunately, it’s no game, and the budget for the military is automatically increased. He realizes that something is up when he sees a Whitehouse press conference on television that mentions additional troop deployments to the Middle East. But the G-Men are on to him, so he tries to destroy his research notes by overwriting his harddrive seven times. When the FBI picks him up outside a local 7/Eleven, they fail to read him his rights before throwing him in the van. He’s taken deep into Crystal Palace, where he sees the WOPR, which is run in emulation on a Video iPod—the video being used to similate WOPR’s blinkenlights. At this point, we learn that the DEFCON system has been replaced with a series of color-coded warning levels, DEFCON 1 being called “Blackwatch Plaid”. After breaking out of NORAD using a DoS attack against the building’s security system, he rides a tour bus out, avoiding the ID checkpoint and metal detectors. He locates the supposed dead Dr. Falken on an IRC server that is only available during certain hours, and convinces him that he needs to help stop the “game” from being played. Back at NORAD, they teach WOPR that the only way to win is to not play at all by forcing it to play Star Wars Galaxies by itself (”How do you make it play itself?” “Just login.”). While playing and learning from SWG, WOPR tries to buy tracks from the iTMS by brute-force cracking the 2048-bit NORAD keyring that holds all the passwords.

This “updated for our times” remake of War Games would star either Mark-Paul Gosselaar (“Saved by the Bell”, “Hyperion Bay”) or Wil Weaton. Weaton definitely has the real-life and acting nerd background and experience, but Gosselaar has played a semi-technology role before on that WB Turd Ferguson Award Winner “Hyperion Bay”, and I think he’d play the necessary arrogantness better. Also, I bet Gosselaar could use the work.

The David Lightman character could be a script-kiddie so they could keep the flunking-out-of-school-but-tries-to-game-the-system stereotype, or they could make him the modern stereotype of a nerd (smart, sucessful) rather than the 80s stereotype (smart loner loser). Lame Hollywood style technology references like using war driving would seem more modern while keeping the Hollywood impracticability at a sufficiently high level (accessing WOPR in Colorado from Seattle through an unsecured wireless connection today seems just as plausible and yet unrealistic as WOPR having a direct modem connection in the 80s). Or maybe he could try ssh attacks against a domain list downloaded from a warez site. There’d be a number of DDoS attacks thrown in for good measure, maybe a closeup of a screen (scroll all the way down) showing an ssh exploit being used. No line printers with fan-fold paper, no green screen terminals (rather, 24″ LCD monitors), no 1200 baud acoustic coupler modems (left over piles of free-with-signup DSL hardware instead), no ASCII art representations of geography (they’d use Google Maps), and no 8″ floppies (USB keys instead).

OH MY FREAKING GOD! Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen have a (as far as I’m concerned) new show. They couldn’t pull themselves away from their busy schedule staring in Made-for-the-Mary-Kate-and-Ashley-Olsen-channel-FX shows, so this one is animated. The brainchild of some Disney executive, most likely, it shows on ABC on Saturday mornings at 10 (central). They star as secret agents in classic James Bond fashion (with Q, M, and Moneypenny-esque characters), with a sidekick robotic scottish terrier who could get them out of jams, but needs to “reboot” when his memory banks are scrambled. They travel the world in an airplane (”I still can’t believe you girls can pilot a plane and you’re not old enough to drive.”) and arrive at their destination via sky diving. They are known internationally due to the “international villian web site”.

Thankfully, this show is dripping with lessons to be learned. I learned that suntans may look healthy, but they aren’t. I also learned that solar eclipses don’t just happen randomly. The girls used what they learned by doing their astronomy homework to get out of hedge maze the villian had left them in (after knocking them out with his bad breath, but I’m getting ahead of myself). They also felt a need to tell us that the villian in this episode (whose name escapes me) is so bent on world domination and his plans, that sometimes he forgets to brush his teeth (and bath — YUCK!) — but I have a feeling that in the middle of writing this episode, a rewrite happened and they changed the odd waves of odor coming out of the villian’s mouth into the affect of eating cheese (his teeth were distintly white the entire show). This is good, because without cheese, the girls would have been unable to stop the villian from launching his rocket in which he was going to go into space to finish his sun force field — which blocked out the sun and made everyone pasty white (quote from the villian: “This will teach you to make fun of my pasty white skin — now no one will be able to get a tan!”). How did they use cheese to stop the villian, you ask? Well, the robot dog ended up in the basement rocket launcher room of the villian, and started eating the cheese the villian stored there. This gave the girls an idea. They stuffed the exhaust nozzels of the rocket with cheese, so it couldn’t blast off.

I know all that sounds like a dream I had, but I swear, I was awake the whole time.

Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen IN ACTION (the name of the show) was immediately followed by The Weekenders, which is about some junior high kids who do things on the weekends — fantastic role models for your kids, who should be out doing things rather than sitting in front of the television. Fortunately, these shows are relatively wholesome and are the kinds of things _should_ be watching, most likely, but the lessons are laid on so thick, the kids won’t be able to swallow it. Best lines from this (animated show produced by Disney!) were:

Carver: I wanna be CARP. Cool And Radically Popular.
Other kid: Too bad you don’t wanna be Cool Rich And Popular.

Mother: Group hug!
(kids mumble excuses and leave)
Mother: Jeez, I havn’t cleared a room of your friends since I showed that video of your birth.

I was awaken this morning at 5:19, as the moaning filtered into my dream state, and I sat up with a start once I realized what it was I was hearing. It sounded like there was someone else in the room with the moaner, there were faint voices in the background. Then I heard clear voices (both the woman that lives there, and that kid, the same voice who said “I see that smile on your face”) say “Are you still going to do this after graduation?” and “Shutup! No body cares! Shut up!” over and over. Some of the “Shutups” were coming from different parts of the house, like the person who was yelling them was walking around. At one point, the dogs were put out and I could hear their collars clink as they ran through the house and out the backdoor. The moaning kind of died down after than, but picked up slightly before finally ending around 5:50.