Blayne Sucks

Well, the new TV show on the Iraq war called “Over There” is going to be on tomorrow (well, tonight since I stay up too late). I’m not sure what to think about this. I haven’t really fallen into much of the hype, but it appears as if it’s very highly anticipated by a number of people. I suppose I’ll end up watching it tomorrow to see what I think.

That reminds me. I haven’t blogged about Battlestar Galactica yet. It’s actually something that I’ve sort of fallen in love with. I haven’t been this excited about a science fiction TV show since perhaps Star Trek: The Next Generation or The X Files. It’s near the beginning of season two now. I’d say more, but I’m exhausted and I still have a ton of things on my to-do list for the week.

I’m back from OLS and I’m hoping to get an update posted as soon as possible, but I’ve been really busy catching up on various things that always seem to lag when one goes away on a trip. For example, the 452 email messages I had waiting for me at work…

In the meantime, I thought I would point out two cool links I found out about. The Pacers have picked up another point guard and it looks like they are doing all they can to be a contender next year.

Also, I thought I would post a link to a place where you can download Steve Jobs commencement speech to Stanford this past year.

Ok, so I have been super busy over the last couple weeks and didn’t make the time to post here. I knew that I would have to approach this as something that I simply make five or ten minutes for on some days if I wanted it to be maintained regularly, but somehow I have failed to do that. Anyhow, here I am posting again and I wanted to update a few things.

The ESPY results are in. Peyton Manning won for best NFL player and best record breaking performance for his 49 touchdown pass season.

Lance Armstrong is about to win his 7th straight Tour de France. This was obviously huge news in Austin the past couple weeks.

Sandra Day O’Connor has commented on John Roberts Jr. whom President Bush announced as the nominee to replace her on the Supreme Court. Personally, this pick was an extremely good political move and fits well with me. It’s hard to say exactly how Roberts will be on the Supreme Court because of his lack of a record as a Judge, but you can say that about any potential Supreme Court Justice. I also tend to like picking a younder justice, not just because they can serve longer, but also because this particular court is so old.

I’m currently at the Ottawa Linux Symposium and having a fantastic time. Yesterday I went to the talks on the Novell Linux Kernel Debugger, Len Brown’s presentation on ACPI, TWIN, Martin J Bilgh’s presentation on memory mapping, and of course Jonathon Corbet’s presentation about a roadmap for the 2.6 kernel. Today I went to the nfsim talk, Trusted Computing and Linux, Building Murphy-compatible Embedded Linux Systems, eCryptfs, Kdump, and an impromptu session on Embedded Linux concerns. Obviously, this is a lot to talk about and I hope to be able to post some of my impressions of this process later on when I have more time to reflect.

If you haven’t voted yet, you should go vote for Peyton Manning in the ESPYs!

Justice Sandra Day O’Conner is retiring from the United States Supreme Court. This is easily the story of the summer as far as politics is concerned.

I remember writing a paper about the United States Supreme Court when I was in high school. It was probably the first time I had ever really thought about who the people were that presided over the SCOTUS. Since then I have kinda always had this curiousity about the least well known third branch of the United States government.

Personally, I believe strongly in finding someone believes in the original wording and the original intent of the authors of the Constitution. I would not consider myself an expantionist, but I do think that there have been some new technologies that require more careful consideration of the intent of the authors of the Constitution.

There are a few hot button topics that are always mentioned when people talk about potential nominations. One of those is separation of church and state. I recently read George F. Will’s thoughts on this issue and I have to say that I really like his phrasing at the end of the article when he says, ‘Here is a one-sentence opinion that should suffice in such cases: “Because the display on public grounds does not do what the establishment clause was written to prevent — does not impose a state-sponsored creed or significantly advantage or disadvantage one sect or sects — the display is constitutional.”‘

Another hot topic is Abortion. I am pro-life. I am against the death penalty. IMHO, we shouldn’t kill anyone, including babies and convicts. Now, is this the be all and end all topic for me? No, there’s a lot more to being a good Supreme Court Justice than simply having a good idea on one or two topics. I wouldn’t eliminate anyone simply off of one opinion. (Incidentally, I would like the courts to at least be consistent. If women have the right to abort their children without consent from the father, then men should never have to pay child support for children they didn’t consent to having.)

Environmental protection and property rights are also another issues that seems to come up a lot in these discussions. Personally, I am rather protective of the environment. But I think there are a lot of rediculous laws out there. Mostly, I think this sort of thing should be handled as much as possible at the state level since they all have varied environments of their own and it should be up to the citizens of those states how they want to treat their diverse environments.

As for property rights, I believe that people shouldn’t be able to have their land taken from them if they don’t consent unless it’s deemed vital to the Federal government or national security. It’s rediculous for people to lose their homes so that the state can build a strip mall or something similarly stupid.

Civil rights and civil liberties are of course and important topic here. I think that things like Affirmative Action have gone too far and out lived their usefullness. It only perpetuates discrimination to have laws and policies that require specifically looking at those things. I would hate to see someone who is an ethnic minority added to the court purely or even mostly because of their race. Race shouldn’t be a factor at all in things like this. Gender shouldn’t either.

Anyhow, I’m sure this won’t be my only post on the Supreme Court seat that just opened up. Thanks Justice O’Conner for your years of dedicated service!

I recently read Crypto by Steven Levy. While I really enjoyed the whole book, I particularly enjoyed the epilogue. It was extremely well written and organized such that all the things I was scared could happen to be mentioned were avoided.

Essentially, the epilogue is about the folks in the British government who originally discovered public key encryption, or as they called it: Non-Secret Encryption. The things that you fear could be mentioned are things like who’s discovery was more impressive, important or in some way distinguished. You fear to find that the folks working on these things could become jealous of the people who are profiting off of them in the private sector.

Envy is a very hard thing to deal with at times and it’s certainly not something you want to have people who are spending their lives on national security issues to have to deal with. With luck, prescreening and testing, those who are able to work in areas sensitive to national security simply don’t have that temperment. Personally, I feel a key to this is that folks in the public domain don’t hold things like this over the heads of those who worked to achieve essentially the same thing secretly for the government.

As such, I’m really glad that Steven Levy didn’t leave his book without telling the untold story of James H. Ellis and his co-workers who worked on public key encryption. It was a very beautiful story, in my opinion, but then, I think I side more with that temperment. I don’t really need massive public recognition or wealth to be happy though at times I’m sure I wouldn’t mind them. Even if there was something where I felt I did really want public recognition, I can’t picture myself breaking my word to achieve it. Of course, it’s easy for me to say such things since I’ve never been put in that position.

Thus, I am glad that there’s a book out there that shows the character of James Ellis. He wanted to be recognized in some form, but he died before it could happen. He spent years of his life knowing that he was the first person to come up with an idea that was independently discovered and used by someone else to revolutionize the world of cryptography and yet he never broke his word and confirmed his discovery. He is an intellectual martyr in that sense.

Of course, now his discovery is public knowledge and anyone who reads Steven Levy’s book will know about it. I hope that everyone can appreciate how well written that section of the book is and I certainly hope that everyone sees James Ellis and everyone else who works on secret projects for the governement just a little differently as a result.