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May 17, 2008
Future Compliant, May 17, 2008
I was having a debate with an old high school friend a couple years ago about the war in Iraq. We hadn't seen each other in quite a while, and he'd grown up more than a little right of center and I'd drifted far to the left, so our points of view were quite different as you might imagine. Still, he's a smart guy, and it was a spirited debate, but soon it became frustrating. He was smart enough to see the obvious - there was no defending the war as a good decision, not even strategically and in no possible way morally. It had been a disaster. So he didn't try to win that argument. Instead he decided to continually shift the grounds of debate. I tried not to let him draw us away from the topic at hand, but he kept coming up with more and farther afield digressions. The last one was a "fact" that I'd never heard before. That the suffering of innocents in the Iraq war paled in comparison to the tens of millions who've died from malaria as a direct result of the ban on the pesticide DDT in Africa. I'd never heard that, didn't know anything about it, and so couldn't argue with him. Given the source and how slippery he'd been all evening, I didn't believe him, but without any facts at hand I wasn't prepared to say as much. And so the debate ended. Well, maybe we argued about nationalized health care after that, I'm not sure. That might have been before.
So I went home and looked it up. Surprise, surprise, it's a whole load of BS. I wanted to call him up and tell him, but that felt petty and might seem well, a little obsessive on my part. Besides, he didn't really care about the truth of it or not. It was just a debating point. As it turns out, the central premise is false. DDT was not ever banned for malaria control, and is indeed in use in some countries to this day. There were calls for restricting its use in agriculture as a pesticide, not just because of the health effects, but also because overuse would cause strains of mosquitoes to evolve that were resistant to DDT (which is what ended up happening in any event). Even the numbers quoted by the DDT "supporters" like my friend were inflated beyond the actual malaria deaths. A whole bunch of baloney. But it gets better. As this recent article outlines in fascinating detail, the whole DDT myth was caused not by some pro-DDT interest per se, but rather by people funded by tobacco companies as part of a larger effort to call legitimate science into question and thus help them in their various battles against smoking regulations and law suits.
This inanity is the very opposite of being future compliant. This is trading in a reality based world view, stirring up needless controversy, and accusing innocents of mass murder all to make more money. It's driving the world backwards as fast as you can so you can pick up the money that falls out of their pockets as they slip back down the mountainside. What idiocy, what monstrousness. And then there's the minor, but annoying collateral damage - it gives right wingers like my old high school friend bogus arguments to bolster their prejudices against environmental regulation. It gives them false outs in their thinking that let them somehow thing that killing hundreds of thousands of people isn't so bad because the environmentalists killed tens of millions. It's just galling, isn't it?
So again, read the articles - Here's the published version and here's the longer version on the author's blog.
Last week I talked about the nasty business of customs agents assuming the right to search through the data on our hard drives when we cross borders. I also mentioned that there were more than a few ways to get around this ridiculous privacy invasion. Well, one of them is TrueCrypt, a free, open source encryption program that you can use to encrypt all or part of your hard drive. I'm going to install this on my laptop sometime this week, and I'll get back to you when I've played with it some more. Until then, here's a description from the company's Web site describing in part how it works:
"Files can be copied to and from a mounted TrueCrypt volume just like they are copied to/from any normal disk (for example, by simple drag-and-drop operations). Files are automatically being decrypted on-the-fly (in memory/RAM) while they are being read or copied from an encrypted TrueCrypt volume. Similarly, files that are being written or copied to the TrueCrypt volume are automatically being encrypted on-the-fly (right before they are written to the disk) in RAM. Note that this does not mean that the whole file that is to be encrypted/decrypted must be stored in RAM before it can be encrypted/decrypted. There are no extra memory (RAM) requirements for TrueCrypt. For an illustration of how this is accomplished, see the following paragraph.
Let's suppose that there is an .avi video file stored on a TrueCrypt volume (therefore, the video file is entirely encrypted). The user provides the correct password (and/or keyfile) and mounts (opens) the TrueCrypt volume. When the user double clicks the icon of the video file, the operating system launches the application associated with the file type - typically a media player. The media player then begins loading a small initial portion of the video file from the TrueCrypt-encrypted volume to RAM (memory) in order to play it. While the portion is being loaded, TrueCrypt is automatically decrypting it (in RAM). The decrypted portion of the video (stored in RAM) is then played by the media player. While this portion is being played, the media player begins loading next small portion of the video file from the TrueCrypt-encrypted volume to RAM (memory) and the process repeats. This process is called on-the-fly encryption/decryption and it works for all file types, not only for video files."
Posted by rdakan at May 17, 2008 03:55 PM