Charles Platt

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• Commented on Woman jailed, charged with felony camcordering after recording 4 mins of sister's birthday party in a movie theater
  According to the original report (which Cory Doctorow chose not to quote), the movie theater managers were the ones who insisted on pressing charges. Therefore it would be appropriate to blame them for over-reacting, wouldn't it? But, since the mission...
• Commented on Bad Times Spur Entrepreneurship, But There's a Catch
  Gilmore's post is the most tenuous justification I have ever seen for socialized medicine. I have been self employed for almost my entire life, and was uninsured for at least 20 years. Anyone who burns with a desire to start...
• Commented on Wil Wheaton vs. Authors' Guild vs. Kindle
  People are already selling "spoken word" texts on eBay (via download, or on CD-ROM) that use speech synthesis. I find it unlistenable, you may find it unlistenable, but apparently some people can tolerate it even now, at its most primitive...
• Commented on Bruce Sterling's The Caryatids, my pick for best book of 2009, a novel of clear-eyed hope for the future
  I wasn't suggesting that science fiction "should" be predictive. I was responding to a post that made rather lyrical claims for the significance and importance of Bruce Sterling's new book. The post seems to suggest that the book has something...
• Commented on Bruce Sterling's The Caryatids, my pick for best book of 2009, a novel of clear-eyed hope for the future
  Stand on Zanzibar is definitely high up on the "successfully predictive" list, but I don't find it especially dystopian. I don't see it as a disaster scenario. My point is that since we haven't actually lived through a global catastrophe...
• Commented on Bruce Sterling's The Caryatids, my pick for best book of 2009, a novel of clear-eyed hope for the future
  Of all the thousands of dystopian or doomsaying science-fiction novels that have been published, can anyone name a single one that has been really successfully predictive? I can't think if any, but am quite willing to believe I may be...
• Commented on UAE plans ban on negative economic reporting
  Maybe they'll also discourage any news reports suggesting that global warming may be partly or wholly a result of natural causes. That might receive more favorable coverage at BoingBoing....
• Commented on What Digital Britain would look like if it was based on fact, not special pleading
  "Heck, would people let the post office open their letters, read them and then shut down their post boxes if you're getting too much post." Muddled analogy. Privacy is one issue, and of course we should have the right to...
• Commented on Signing off
  "Not only are his ideas unsupported and reactionary," That's the first time this adjective has ever been applied to me. I thought "reactionary" meant reacting against change. My greatest desire throughout my life has been to see faster change. Hence...
• Commented on Signing off
  "I, for one, would have enjoyed seeing Mr. Platt defend his controversial posts from time to time instead of disappearing when questions were posed he obviously didn't want to answer." Actually I would have been happy to answer, and did...
• Commented on Signing off
  Just saw this from moderator: "As moderators, we generally intervene less in the threads of guest bloggers because we don't know their preferences for how they want to engage critics" This is very interesting, since it may imply that each...
• Commented on Signing off
  For those who read only the bottom of the thread: I will reiterate what Mark said, what David said, and what I previously said. No one asked me to stop guest-blogging here....
• Commented on Signing off
  Regarding four posts in a row on the same topic: I had no idea that this was a taboo. I had already done four posts in a row on the Motorola Museum, four posts in a row on Arizona, four...
• Commented on Signing off
  "just between you and me; how much of your posting selections were designed to prod buttock with malignant intent aforethought, to make people think, and how much was just kicking the beehive?" I prefaced my posts with the reason for...
• Commented on Signing off
  "You obviously wanted to make very controversial political points but didn't honestly state that intention," On the contrary, if you check back, I stated twice that I wanted to venture into areas where there might be some dissent, and I...
• Commented on Signing off
  Platt "linked back to people whos qualifications were ripped to shreds by simple googling." This is the only kind of criticism that I find annoying, because it smears without specifics. *Which* people were mentioned, whose qualifications were ripped to shreds...
• Commented on Signing off
  I appreciate the friendly comments, and the couple of unfriendly ones too. Of course I was not asked to leave! I certainly never meant to create that impression. I meant what I said (as I usually do). I am grateful...
• Posted Signing off to Boing Boing
  I've decided to wind up my guest blogging a couple days early, but I want to thank Mark Frauenfelder for offering me the unique and wonderful opportunity to post here. Thanks Mark. If any BB readers wish to contact me I am easily findable through makezine.com. --Charles Platt...
• Posted Easy Encryption to Boing Boing
  (Charles Platt is a guest blogger) Back in the mid-1990s, the successful fight for the right to use strong encryption seemed hugely significant. Some of us believed that within just a few years, all emails would be encrypted, and no one would be able to snoop on anything. (Of course, this would have interfered with the evolution of Gmail, since Google scans messages to create its context-sensitive ads.) Strong encryption from trusted sources such as PGP and TrueCrypt has been available free for more than a decade, now, yet people seem to find that installing it and using it is just complicated enough to be a disincentive. In any case, many people seem to feel that they’ll never be hassled, even while grandmothers are hauled into court for copyright infringement and federal agencies gain increasing power to monitor just about anything. Well, at least there’s no excuse anymore not to encrypt external hard drives. (Note, I'm not an expert on this stuff, just a consumer, and there may be other products that I don't know about.) Maxtor’s BlackArmor series has strong encryption built into hardware, so that all data is automatically protected as you save it. As soon as power is disconnected from the drive, it secures itself. Now you don’t have to worry if you travel with sensitive corporate data (or other embarrassing materials) and you leave an external storage device behind in an airport or hotel room. This system is password-activated, not fingerprint-activated. I dislike the idea of fingerprint scanning, because I do a lot of shop work, and have been known to cut a finger. I'd hate to be locked out of my hard drive by a band-aid. The Aegis Vault is another hardware-encrypted USB drive, but I had difficulty installing and using it. Maxtor’s system seems better thought out to me, and its 320 GB version retails for less than $150. This means I can carry with me every piece of text that I have ever written, every email that I have ever sent or received, and every photograph that I have created during the past 15 years, without worrying about someone digging into all that stuff if I leave it lying around. In fact I have moved all my personal data off the internal hard drive in my laptop computer, onto a pair of BlackArmor drives (for redundancy). I normally keep the drives at separate locations, in case of fire or theft. The only problem I’ve had is that if I try to run both drives simultaneously to do incremental backups from one to the other, the bundled software doesn’t support this. Still, my favorite primitive backup software, Xxcopy, handles it without any problems. Of course you do suffer a speed penalty when saving to a USB device, but far less than I expected....
• Posted Name this Insect to Boing Boing
  (Charles Platt is a guest blogger) No doubt some BB reader can name this far-fetched creature, which I found pinned to some styrofoam in a display case at the Butterfly Museum in Boca Raton, Florida. Picture yourself camping somewhere in the wilderness and seeing one of these six-inch weirdos zooming into your tent. I have to wonder why such a thing should evolve the way it did, especially with that weird extra pair of wings, like the canard on one of Burt Rutan’s composite airplanes. The museum is a fun place to visit, allowing you to walk through giant cages full of freshly hatched butterflies. Watching people trying to photograph them is highly entertaining, since butterflies move chaotically while flying and then, as soon as they land, most of them close their wings. It was much easier to take pictures of the insects that were dead....
• Commented on Climatic Heresy: 1
  "Funny that publications like this are released while the Northern Hemisphere is in winter." You mean it only happens in the summer?! Seriously, isolated data points don't tell me much. I could tell you that last month, we had unprecedented...
• Commented on Climatic Heresy: 1
  "1% of GDP at most." That would be about $28 billion....
• Commented on Climatic Heresy: 1
  "When should we, as a society, change our ways to prevent the collapse of the ecosystem?" I believe intelligent conservation is necessary and desirable. Nothing new there. But using CO2 as a justification doesn't make a whole lot of sense...
• Commented on American Institute of Physics' history of the science of climate change
  "It is an epic story: the struggle of thousands of men and women over the course of a century for very high stakes. For some, the work required actual physical courage, a risk to life and limb in icy wastes...
• Commented on American Institute of Physics' history of the science of climate change
  Cory, I have two responses to your immediate posting of three (so far) rebuttals to my questions about climate change. First, you are not responding to any of my specific points (such as Al Gore's undeniable conflict of interest). Instead...
• Commented on Climatic Heresy: 3
  "Wait a minute, didn't you say just an article or two back that cutting carbon/etc. would be really expensive, and now you're arguing that it would be quite profitable, and that said profit is the motivator." I believe it will...
• Commented on Climatic Heresy: 3
  "But your chart is ridiculous." Can you please be more specific? Are there any links that you dispute? Or are we just arguing about motivation? I made it clear that I am open to the idea that Gore is sincere....
• Commented on Climatic Heresy: 2
  "Surely it's papers published in peer-reviewed scientific journals that matter." Yes, they matter, and some skeptical papers do exist, but publication of skeptical material is now hazardous to one's scientific reputation and funding. I believe there is a significant chilling...
• Commented on Climatic Heresy: 1
  "99% of scientists that think it is man made" Source for this number is? "If Climate change isn't caused by humans and we try to lower CO2 and other emissions there's no big loss." Huge financial loss....
• Commented on Climatic Heresy: 1
  That would depend on whether my house was also being threatened by other catastrophic events, and how many resources I had available to allocate among them. It would also depend on how reliable I felt the evidence was that the...