dimator | head

I was talking with a friend about the old AOL days, and he said how much he missed them. I didn’t understand what he meant. It was slow, it took forever to connect, and since you only had 30 hours to burn, your AOL bill grew slowly until it was a hundred dollars.

But as we talked, I realized what he was talking about. We talked of the old AOL days, circa version 2.5, and all the bad things people did when the words “network” and “security” were never even grouped together. People “phished” accounts, traded pirated material using AOL’s inboxes, used external programs to talk “leet” and gain access to features in AOL users weren’t meant to see, “punted” other users, used accounts with the words “AOL” in them (before AOL disallowed these accounts) to fool users into doing all kinds of things, used credit card generators to create fake accounts, etc. Wow, great times. He says he has most of the old programs on a CD somewhere. It would be great to put all of that stuff up somewhere with screenshots, as a little stroll down memory lane.

Wow. I’ve been reading Mark Cuban’s blog for a while, but this is the most interesting point he’s ever raised.

He argues that once upon a time, in 1985, when the U.S. economy was not so hot, there was born the digital revolution, created and envisioned not in board rooms but in garages in Silcon Valley. This energized the U.S. economy to the point that we could again feel comfortable as the world’s most powerful nation. But while the government stayed out of the way then, it is very much involved now:

In October of 1998 the Digital Millenium Copyright Act was passed. The DMCA was basically a law that set a very un-nerving precedent. That the government would do what it could to protect the interests of content owners at the expense of technological development.

Now, with the upcoming MGM v Grokster case, the Supreme Court is primed to set a very bad precedent. The media companies are hell-bent on stopping technologies they don’t understand, such as P2P. Cuban argues not for the now of music and movie swapping, but for the future, in which the content we produce and consume is 100% digital. We’re close to giving the media cartels the keys to this digital future, all for the sake of protecting their profits.

We’re coming to a point now where, similar to 25 years ago, our economy is not the clear powerhouse it was, and many other countries’ economies are building and maturing very quickly. What if the same revolutionary thinkers that begat the tech revolution in the eighties may no longer legally create and imagine? Even worse, what if they are in jail, as is becoming quite normal?

This scares the shit out of me. To me, it is another example of how special interests run this country. We are not citizens. We are cash cows. We exist to buy, and the government has made it clear that they will legislate the extraction of the maximum amount of cash from our pockets.

“Free country”? I’m not so sure.

I just saw that the Fantastic Four trailer is available. It’s cool that Julian McMahon (the womanizing pimp-doctor from Nip/Tuck) is playing Doctor Doom.

The only thing I can say is, where do I sign up for a lifetime subscription to all Marvel movies? Other than Daredevil, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed every one. They know how to do a summer blockbuster right.

I do a fair share of contract work. It’s fun because I get to work with different technologies. My problem is that I never know what to charge, and since clients want quotes up front, this can be a problem. Sometimes I get halfway through a project before realizing I charged way too little.

The root of the problem is that I have no clue how long a project will take ahead of time. (If I knew that, I could slap an hourly rate on it, and be done.) I can enumerate the steps involved, usually, but I am notorious at underestimating the difficulty involved. I’d like to think that there is some guidelines or tutorial I could read, but I am convinced that it can only come with experience.

In the meantime, I plan on doubling any quotes I think of charging.

Based on all the nominations, I finally had to go see The Aviator. I thought it was very good, but certainly nothing overly impressive. For a 3 hour movie, though, I will say that I was never bored. It seems like each scene was just long enough to be meaningful.

After watching it, I’m really interested in seeing the movies Hughes made.