I think what’s even more important is the ability to learn from other peoples’ experiences.

You are only one person making mistakes. It would take forever to gather enough experience from just your own life. The true power comes from being able to actively grow by absorbing the experiences of others — even fictional characters — while watching T.V., movies, reading books, and observing the lives of those you meet.

Become that person and make the mistakes they make. See where it gets them and incorporate that knowledge into your collective experience as if it were your own. This gives you the wisdom of many.:

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p align=”center”> Click for larger image…

Hmm…a single open TCP port (62078) with tcpwrappers, interesting OS detection results, and a scary TCP sequence prediction finding. More analysis to follow…

Saying duhb-ool-you three times in a row should require effort and cause you to go slowly. If it doesn’t, you have special powers and need to be isolated from the rest of us.

p align=”center”> weber.edu

Unopened reddit stories are noticeably more interesting when viewed from a mobile device than from a system with a full display and adequate bandwidth. This is for the same reason that any movie in your DVD collection is less interesting than the same movie playing on TV.

With the mobile reading scenario I know the story might take a long time to load, or that my lame little mobile browser might balk at it — so there’s a decent chance I won’t be able to see it. With the movies, the one on TV is interesting because it’s going away soon.

It’s the same with relationships; your wife is Braveheart in your DVD collection, while the woman in line at the grocery store could very well be Battlefield Earth on cable (with commercials).

I think we are wired to be highly attracted to opportunities that are fleeting or difficult to attain, regardless of quality.

I figured something out just now. When I experience something that provokes my interest or pulls at my emotions, all I can think of is calling a friend to talk about it. I want to appreciate these things with someone. From that I realized that my overall goal was simple:

All I want in life is to have amazing experiences with great people.

All that remains is to define “amazing experiences”. The short answer, I suppose, is that of exploring the world and discovering things. That’s on the intellectual side. On the primal side I suppose it equates to tapping into as many rewarding emotions as possible without being dangerous to others.

If you only had two paragraphs, what would your life’s goal be?

So the main danger, critics argue, of the National ID system is that as it becomes prolific it will get used for more and more purposes. I think this will include private industry before too long. We already send copies of drivers licenses to do credit checks, for example.

Well imagine what will happen when we understand genetics better — all the way to the point where one could have a test done and a computer could map out the person’s tendencies and weaknesses. We’ve all heard about the fat gene, a propensity for violence, being vulnerable to alcoholism, depression, etc.

Well what if that data were to be stored in people’s files? What if it were to be converted into an individual risk matrix (IRM). So on your card (and in the database) would be everything about you up until that point. Obvious things like age, race, height, weight, etc. But also things like country of origin, who your parents were. What affiliations they had (think semantic web), etc.

Now imagine this information being at the disposal of local law enforcement. They stop the Arab kid down the road and run a “query” on him. Hmm…missing school a lot. He’s been going to the local Mosque quite a bit. Oh, and he’s genetically prone to religious devotion by a margin of 2.6 deviations. And he’s walking out of a hardware store with a bunch of mechanical-looking stuff.

Or how about your insurance agency doing a “query” on you. Credit score, genetic risk factors for suicide, depression, heart disease, current health records, etc. And all this information gets run through an algorithm that decides whether you get a policy and how much you’ll be charged.

Or a local redneck at a bar late at night when the cops show up. Ok, he’s at a bar. His father died in a drunk driving accident, he’s divorced, and he has no ride home. Genetics indicate he’s likely to fight if we attempt to arrest him. Call for backup.

The scary thing is that all of these things could be used for good. Some other ideas that open up once the genetic material is easy to attain and replicate:

college admission, dating sites, ordering brides…

Thoughts?

Most guys know about the nice guy paradox. It’s where they’ve been told since they were young — both by women and by society in general — that women like “nice” guys. And because they’ve been told this over and over, most guys grow up trying this approach only to have reality kick them in the groin.

This bothers guys. A lot. Why would women claim to want someone who will treat them nice, but then repeatedly turn down or mistreat those that give them exactly what they claim to want? Well, I have the answer, and like most major truisms it’s pretty simple:

Women like when guys are nice to them, but only when they don’t have to be.

Think about that. Most guys exclusively using the “nice” approach are doormats, and many are so because that’s all they can be. They lack the attributes to attract a woman based on pure gravity (physical size/strength/prowess, ambition, sexuality, intelligence, money, etc.). As a result, these guys are essentially forced to grovel in order to attract a mate, which is patently unattractive.

Quite simply, women like powerful men to be nice to them, not feminized pseudo-men. A weak man being nice to a woman is essentially an act of submission, like a beggar bowing his head and calling you sir. Sure, they were respectful to you, but they just asked you for money so it’s not as meaningful as if it came from a peer or superior.

To get the true benefit of “nice” in the way that women enjoy, one has to be able to attract that same woman without being nice, i.e. by the sheer force of masculine character. Only once that foundation of primal respect is in place can the higher-order offerings such as kindness be appreciated. It’s counter-intuitive and it’s unpleasant, but we’re dealing with nature here. Don’t fight the rules. To do so is as pointless as picketing gravity or boycotting inertia.:

The first thing it makes me realize is that we won’t be around for long. Why? Because the ease in which a single person can harm the entire world is going up exponentially. I’m going to name this value, actually (if it doesn’t have one already).

That factor, combined with increasing inequality will yield not just individuals, but entire groups bent on destroying the world. And when you can polymorph a human pathogen that can kill millions with the same ease as creating photo album on your computer, uh…we have a problem.

Doom and gloom. We need something more positive than this. How about this. How about you guys tell me what forces will counter these rogue elements and their ability to inflict massive harm at will.

Anyway, check out the concepts of memetics; it’s pretty cool stuff, although I’m not sure I agree with one of her key premises, which says that language was developed not for the benefit of humans, but so that memes could spread more successfully. I disbelieve.

I digress. Today’s task is to introduce this “Memetracker” theme here on the site. When I happen to notice a particular meme I’m going to make a note of it here (if I remember).

So, as my first one: TEH

This is a misspelling of “THE” and it’s been in use for some time online. The interesting thing I’ve been noticing about it, however, is it’s use in elite Internet culture recently — specifically at Reddit and Digg. Here’s a comment from Reddit:

Oh yes I keep forgetting that teh muzlimz is out to get all of us!!!. LULZ. You funny!

I can’t help but wonder if this is linked directly to the now famous, “ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US.” This type of speech has now become something of a common, humorous way to sarcastically enthusiastic about something.

Anyway, that’s my first meme. Take notice if you see it somewhere.

I remember one day being at 7-11 getting a Super Big Gulp. I was holding my cup while my buddy was filling his (also a Super Big Gulp) with ice. As the ice fell into his cup a couple of feet away, I could feel my cup vibrating as if it were filling with ice as well. I tried it with a different sized cup and it wasn’t nearly as pronounced. I had just recently learned about resonance, and I was quite impressed.

Anyway, it strikes me that resonance is a lot like understanding. I imagine we’re being exposed to information and knowledge (potential understanding) on a constant basis. The various things we’re exposed to as we move through life are essentially frequencies of experience and knowledge. The real question is whether or not you resonate at those frequencies.

This is especially true when it comes to experiencing things that are alien to you, such as different foods, different customs, and different types of music. Think of gangster rap vs. Motzart. These are very different frequencies indeed. And you’ll usually find that those who can tune to one frequency and be affected by it, are not able to really feel the other.

I think cultures determine what frequencies we oscilate at, and that most are bad at nurturing people who are able to oscilate at many. Most people are like the walkie-talkies from 20 years ago. They had a single crystal in them that did maybe 1 to 3 channels. There were THOUSANDS of other radio signals flying by those radios — so much conversation to be heard — but those old systems could only hear three little channels. And that’s how most of us are.

I think we should try and “understand” as many frequencies as possible. Spicy food. Ice cream.  Yoga. Isolationism. Compassion. 50 Cent. Cheese. Faith. Environmentalism. Salsa dancing. Hunting. Martial arts. Mars Volta. Cooking. Hopelessness.

The more frequencies we can adjust ourselves to resonate at the more we can undertand other people, and the world in general. From those vantage points we can then try and help others resonate at our favorite pitches, and vice versa.:

I hate the idea that I could be using something like vim in a sub-optimal fashion. I want to do things the best way possible; it’s an obsession that extends to much more than just vim.

I do realize it’s a major flaw. It breaks the fundamental Zen rule of not letting the best be the enemy of the good. Well, I don’t know if that’s a Zen rule, but it seems like it would be. Do you guys have similar obsessions, and if so, how do you handle them?

(long sentence)

I can think of two reasons not to do this off the top of my head:

1. Security: It’s not going to be easy to convince anyone (including myself) that I should edit a vulnerability assessment report online, and maintain a copy somewhere in the Googleverse.
2. Outlook. Even if you could replace Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, email and calendaring (Exchange) is absolutely essential to business for most people. I don’t see anything replacing a fat client as the ideal interface to this resource in the foreseeable future.

But other than that…err…those, just general, personal documents and such seem ideal for web-oriented replacements. Not enough people use PowerPoint away from work, so that leaves spreadsheets, email, and word processing.

Wait a minute here: let’s do this for the two realms: business and personal.

Business:

• Email’s likely to stay in-house due to the company tie-in.
• Word processing will stay in-house due to privacy (unless Microsoft does it).
• PowerPoint (privacy again?)
• Excel (privacy again)

Personal:

• Email (already largely online)
• Word Processing (very good market for Google Docs)
• PowerPoint (not many users)
• Excel (very good Market for Google Spreadsheets)

Interesting. So the main growth areas are getting home users to not buy Microsoft Word or Excel for home use. Other than that, Microsoft is sitting fairly comfortable. Forget that you read this post; it’s been little more than a typing exercise.

I guess I just started thinking about this because I’m strongly considering dumping NewNewsWire as my newsreader and going with Google Reader. I could see that being followed up with using Google Docs and Spreadsheets as well. Anyway, I’ll put a bit more thought into it…

Thoughts?

From Marcus’s talk:

1. Q: What does a packet filter do? A: Looks at a few parts of packet headers and decides if it is bad. If it is, it drops it.
2. Q: What does a stateful firewall do? A: Looks at a more of a packet and decides if it’s bad. It uses the loose concept of “state” to help it. If it’s deemed inappropriate, it gets discarded.
3. Q: What does an IDS do? A: Looks at a bunch of stuff in the packet and decides if it’s bad or not based on signatures and/or some heuristics. If it’s bad, it notifies you.
4. Q: What does an IPS do? A: Looks at a bunch of stuff in the packet and decides if it’s bad or not based on signatures and/or some heuristics. If it’s bad, it drops the traffic and/or notifies you.

Marcus went on to ask: what’s the difference between these supposedly fundamentally different technologies? The answer was clear — not much. They’re all doing some sort of detection and then performing an action based on the result.

(Here I’m going off on my own tangent so I’ll leave Marcus out of this)

So, ultimately there’s very little difference between a rudimentary packet filter from 10 years ago and a modern IPS. I see all these devices becoming one; I think a good name would be a “Security Check Point”, or a security “Gateway”.

The point is that in the future you won’t have to isolate these different technologies. You’ll just lay down a diagram of your environment and decide where you want filtering. Virtually every device on your network will be able to do all of these functions. All the way from the border router to the workstation.

This is the next evolution in the security space, I think. It’s even more advanced than NAC. Essentially, all pivot points and end hosts in the enterprise are part of the collective. The SIM/SEM functions as the brain. If there are performance issues then one type of security or another can be disabled on various pivots as needed, but in general all pivots will be able to perform all functions.

When an incident occurs, the system will simply isolate the problem by implementing ACLs on the nearest pivot point. If it wanted to, it could even push security information down to all other systems in the enterprise. To the security system, routers, firewalls, workstations, servers — they’re all the same. They’re just security nodes with various properties. Imagine object-oriented programming.

Using this model a security engineer could look at their network and simply assign logical security zones based on trust. The software would do the rest. The hardware at that point becomes transparent. It’s just carrying out the conceptual wishes of the engineer. I imagine an interface like the one in Minority Report, with a large view of the network infrastructure being displayed:

These here are all trust level 3… (dragging and dropping with arm motions). This here is a priority filter (points at a central hub, holds, and selects from a dynamic context menu). Trust level 0 resides here (pointing at a cluster of server nodes). All surrounding filters move to sensitivity 9 and associate reporting procedures with the existing standard.

So basically, you design how you want it to work, and the devices just make it happen. There’s no need for this kind of firewall or that kind of IDS — all security devices will merge into one — with each of them being able to do all filtering. The only reason they were separate was because they came into existence independently and there were performance issues. As these issues fade away there will be no reason whatsover to keep their functions separate.

Anyway, just a few thoughts…

Another way to look at it is to view happiness as being about relative changes, i.e. becoming more or less content with your situation. If you accept that view, it becomes important to maintain relatively modest and static expectations if you want to be happy. Then, as your material situation improves it will continue to pull away from your expectations, and you’ll become more happy. But if you let your expectations follow you as you progress, you’ll always be in search of the elusive duo — better and more.

Tom The Cool Guy

A good example of this is Tom the cool guy who has a beautiful wife, a nice C-Class Mercedes, and a 3-bedroom house in a good neighborhood. He’s quite happy with this situation because he’s never had these things before. But now he’s getting a promotion and a whole lot more money. He decides to move to the “really” nice neighborhood.

Suddenly, all the wives are better looking — so he’s not as happy with his anymore. His C-Class Mercedes is now being laughed at by people as he drives by, and all the houses in this area are at least 4-bedrooms. Now his baseline has shifted; what he was happy with just two weeks ago is now sub-standard. That would have been fine if he wanted it to happen, but the odds are that it was completely subconscious.

As a result, Tom won’t be ever be happy again until he “upgrades” somehow, and that is the never-ending road to an empty, shallow existence. He’ll always be looking at the houses up the hill — pining for them. He’ll get a 5-Series BMW and hate it within a month because some guy up the street (with a prettier wife) has a 7-Series.

Enough

I think the trick to capturing “enough” is to not let it change without your permission. Enough should be relatively static, and should only change after a long, hard internal debate. This is important because if enough is less than your reality then you tend to be happy, but as soon as it creeps up above reality you have problems. Don’t let it creep.

Imagine an application that spends 24 hours a day optimizing your life. It will probably run from some sort of hosted provider in order to benefit from specialization, but it will be marketed as “living” on your personal system, i.e. the single, mobile device that everyone will have. Let’s call it your “companion”.

The basic functionality will essentially work like this: you start by going through this in-depth enrollment process with the system. It’ll greet you, you’ll skin it (most will likely turn its interface into a beautiful woman) and it will proceed to ask you about yourself. You’ll tell it what kind of news you like, your favorite holidays, your top 10 foods, the kinds of products you care most about, who your friends are, etc.

A Hassle Proxy

Using all this information it’ll organize your life. It’ll sit in between you and the digital world — filtering emails, fetching pertinent news for you, organizing it according to your preferences, etc. It’ll learn who you want to be interrupted for when a call comes in. It’ll learn who to put on or remove from your spam list. It’ll learn your preferred way of receiving news. Should “she” read it to you? Send you an email? Build a web page for you to read an aggregated summary from?

Here’s how I see it being put into practice: you wake up in the morning by some sound she makes for you. Rooster, soothing voice, whatever. She proceeds to ask you questions about whether or not you want your news now, do you want to hear who sent you email while you were asleep, etc. At any time you can modify the application’s behavior by giving commands like, “Don’t ask me about news in the morning anymore.”

Based on your tone the app will answer back with stuff like, “Sorry…no need to be grumpy about it.” Imagine the customizations here. This will be THE killer app. The life manager for business people, and the digital companion for consumers. More ideas:

1. “Let’s review my news interest items. I don’t want to hear anything else about the new Playstation 10; I don’t have time to monitor that anymore. Show me everything cool about building patios — and I’m going to use oak, by the way.”
2. “Hold calls from Julie from now on and give them to me in my daily summary.”
3. “Go and collect everything there is to know about spaghetti sauce. I am making it tonight. Focus on the Italian approach.”

You, Times Ten

So the idea here is that this application will then go and run through all these pseudo-intelligent algorithms (that are constantly updated and improved) in order to do what you want it to do, not just what you told it to do. The difference is massive. And as technology evolves, it’ll become better and better at it.

For consumers this will do everything from fetching the best recipes to collecting porn for you for when you get home from work. “Here’s the stuff I found for you while you were gone.” And it will be with you all day as well, chiming in when something major happens. “Breaking news, Daniel…Toyota just bought Ford. You want me to connect you to CNN’s video feed?” “Oh, Michael just sent an invite for dinner tonight, should I voice him or just reply with a yay or nay?”

Humans Are Better, But They’re More Expensive

Personal assistants make powerful people ten times more powerful, but so few people can afford to hire someone to manage their lives in this way. This will be the killer app because it brings at least some of that functionality to everyday people. It’s going to be so sick. Think of the marketing. Japan will have it first (of course), and the major updates to the products are going to be insane.

Imagine the skinning options alone. As the apps avatars get better and better people are going to become “attached” to their companions. It’ll be a new disorder, there will be new experts to talk about how someone’s DC (digital companion) ruined their marriage, etc.

Yeah, this is the future. Hell, I should talk to some people and see if anyone’s moving in this direction yet. I’d love to contribute some ideas to such a product. Not only is it cool to potentially improve the efficiency of millions of people, but the consumer side has billions of dollars of potential. This is the “must have” application.

Those who can do this effectively end up doing like a tenth of the work while yielding double the output. Those who don’t spend their lives reinventing simple tools, and as a result achieve just a fraction of the results.

Being successful is largely a matter of having a better system for doing things, and this is a major part of it.

The vast majority of “opinions” are nothing but echoes of peoples’ latest influence. They are parrot songs that were particularly catchy for whatever reason. I think a true opinion is one that stands on a solid base of knowledge and then branches from there.

I was struck with this while debating a friend about the fall of America. I found myself giving the whole “fall of Rome” argument. I’ve heard the argument a number of times, and it’s always made sense to me, but what do I really know about Rome? Not much of anything.

So do I really have an opinion about what caused the fall of Rome? No. No I don’t. What I have is the ability to echo a very small portion of someone else’s opinion, which I find rather intellectually hollow.

Don’t make that mistake, and call others when they make it. It’s not a real idea until you’ve already benefited from existing knowledge and then have something new to add based on that understanding. Until then you’re just posturing.

I hit many of them, and it bothered me greatly. I swerved to avoid quite a few, but some were just so bent on suicide that they basically jumped right in front of me.

The irony was that I was listening to Danzig at full blast through all this. So I’m singing along to “satanic” music being pumped through the car at a deafening volume, yet I am getting upset because I’m inadvertently killing little frogs on the highway.

The real question at hand, though, is how most other people feel about killing frogs on the highway. Especially those who would judge me for listening to Danzig. I can’t help but think they wouldn’t care much.

You’ll find that the mistakes nuances you hear in the way they speak English are precisely those that you’ll need to emulate to sound authentic in theirs.