Still, at least I'm part of the digital underground.

Interesting to see that eMule seemed to handle it a lot better than BitTorrent. Tried three .torrents, but in each case the tracker had gone down under the load. EMule handled it nicely though, achieving near-BitTorrent download speeds.

Wondering how much of the slowness of eMule is due to the existence of BitTorrent: with everyone grabbing torrents of the newest files, all that's left on eMule is the obscure stuff without many sources. (They both use similar trust/reward systems).

There's a K5 Story on the MS sourcecode, and slashdot reports the first exploit: a buffer overrun on images in IE5. Wonder if that works for embedded images in Outlook HTML emails too (Outlook uses the IE control). Nice.

Star Wars nerd
The key sign that someone has crossed that terrible border from semi-cute geekery to offensive nerdishness is use of words like "real", "really" or "reality". Fiction is different to real life: someone can legitimately complain about something being undramatic, boring, unconvincing or implausible, but when you hear them talk about what really happened, or about how Kirk and Spock are really gay; you know that they have descended into madness.

So, let's cross that line and look at this comment about the extended celebration scenes in the special edition of Return of the Jedi.

I hadn't thought about it, but those scenes do actually bug me. First that as he explains, it doesn't make sense that the whole galaxy would immediately burst into spontaneous celebration. Second, that the whole thing seemed indicative of Lucas' descent into egostical self-indulgence. You wonder who they're supposed to be cheering: the Rebel Alliance or George Lucas.

On the other hand, the whole ending never made any sense to me. As I recall it, the whole point is that the rebels walk into a trap, caught between the Death Star and the Imperial Fleet. Admiral Ackbar even says "we won't last long against those Star Destroyers", though they decide to attack them anyway. So, after the Death Star is destroyed, surely the next thing to happen is that the rebels get obliterated by the fleet and the Empire keeps going under a new leader. Instead we just cut away into the victory celebrations. It's like:
"Oh my God, we're trapped in this cabin with a rabid wolf and a bear! What can we do?"
"Don't worry! I shall kill the bear with this bear trap. CLANG!"
"Hooray! We're saved!"
Cut to victory celebrations.

Why set up the problem for the heroes if there isn't a cunning way to escape it? It's just sloppy.

Skiffy nerd
In Trillion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss talks about the implausibilities in Asimov's Foundation series. One of his objections was that it wasn't possible for all the millions of inhabitable worlds to suffer the same decline into barbarism. But while his other criticisms are valid, I don't think this one is.

First, you have to think about what Asimov actually meant by barbarism. "Back to oil and gas" is one thing that Salvor Hardin says when he finds out that the Four Kingdoms have lost the secret of atomic power. He finds it out by mentioning plutonium as fuel, when that hasn't been used for thousands of years. On the decayed Trantor, it's explained that they have returned to farming rather than hydroponics because hydroponic systems need an industrial base and are vulnerable to attack: not because the technology has been lost. So while other author's declines into barbarism, with swords replacing guns aren't plausible, Asimov's barbarism is roughly equal to his contemporary level of technology. More advanced in some ways, as the barbarians can invade in (presumably oil-burning) spaceships.

That again makes me think about whether a level of technology can only be sustained by a civilisation of a certain size. I suspect that an artifact like my mobile phone could not be produced by an isolated country, and requires a globalised civilisation. For a start, some of the rare earths are only available from a few parts of the world. The different components may be manufactured in various places. The Java and software are the result of a global software development community. Vast and specialized chemical plants are needed to produce the various plastics. The plants that make the chip use vast and sophisticated machinery, it's only possible to produce them at an affordable price because there is large enough market to make the plants profitable.

So, if you assume a civilization with more advanced technology, maybe the specialization has spread beyond a single world. Maybe to make an Atom Blaster or an Analytical Rule the resources of many worlds must be pooled together, and without trade they would fall back into the barbarism of oil and gas bases technology. Given that Preem Palver carries out an interstellar trade in fruits and vegetables, it does seem that production is likely to be specialised in this way.

Audio nerd
OK, in spite of the problems of fast-forwading through hour-long MP3s on my archaic player, I found it quite handy to listen to the Foundation series on the way to work and back. So, I decided to look for other audio books on P2P. Soulseek was disappointing: a couple of dozen books, but mostly unavailable. Emule has a bit more, but still not many, and again there are few sources. Most of the books are awful-looking self-help stuff too.

Then it occurred to me that the libraries I go to seem to have a hundred or so audio books on tape, some of which look pretty listenable. Then it also occurred to me that cassette players allow you to fast-forward and re-wind very easily and accurately. And that they be can switched off and have the batteries changed and they remain at exactly the same place. And that the sound quality is easily good enough for voice recordings.

So, it does seem like I'm actually going to have to go out and buy one of these state of the art cassette-playing "Walkmans" for my portable audio needs.