Code Monkey Ramblings

The writer of this article should probably be forgiven his ignorance of the advances in technology lately when it comes to energy consumption. After all, he writes with the sort of triumphalist tone so common to those who take it as just a foregone conclusion that the United States' days as a world superpower are numbered, and rapidly failing.

I wonder how many Britons smugly assured themselves that they would never be the target of their country's CCTV network because they are not criminals. So, it's always amusing to read that those people who earnestly declared that they had nothing to fear because they are not criminals, now face the prospect of having their dog walking habits monitored by the government.

When you don't control your own manufacturing, it's only a matter of time before you run the risk of having someone mess with your products without your knowledge or control. However, since they are far more concerned with shortterm numbers than keeping control of their business over the long haul, that lesson is going to remain lost on Cisco: 

Counterfeit products are a routine threat for the electronics industry. However, the more sinister specter of an electronic Trojan horse, lurking in the circuitry of a computer or a network router and allowing attackers clandestine access or control, was raised again recently by the FBI and the Pentagon.

The new law enforcement and national security concerns were prompted by Operation Cisco Raider, which has led to 15 criminal cases involving counterfeit products bought in part by military agencies, military contractors and electric power companies in the United States. Over the two-year operation, 36 search warrants have been executed, resulting in the discovery of 3,500 counterfeit Cisco network components with an estimated retail value of more than $3.5 million, the FBI said in a statement.

The FBI is still not certain whether the ring's actions were for profit or part of a state-sponsored intelligence effort. The potential threat, according to the FBI agents who gave a briefing at the Office of Management and Budget on January 11, includes the remote jamming of supposedly secure computer networks and gaining access to supposedly highly secure systems. Contents of the briefing were contained in a PowerPoint presentation leaked to a Web site, Above Top Secret.

The military maintains a large list of IT products that are approved for use by its employees and contractors, and almost all of the products on the approved products list are "American-made." However, one of the areas where this falls short is that very few products are entirely American-made today, and a lot of the products are made by companies that routinely use immigrants heavily such as Oracle and Microsoft. While that shouldn't necessarily be a cause for alarm, it is food for thought when considering the fact that there are employees of these companies who have no clear-cut reason to be loyal to our country when writing code that will go into the products the military uses.

Things only get a lot worse when products like routers, which are small embedded devices that cannot be easily examined for tampering, get made overseas in countries like China. Those who automatically dismiss any suggestion of danger as conspiracy theory mongering may blissfully ignore this issue, but it is one that has potentially devastating security implications because it is so much harder to effectively update compromised embedded systems. While a company with a competent IT staff may be able to quickly roll out updated firmwire from Cisco, that's not the case with small businesses, homes and an enterprise as large and diverse as the military. People tend to forget that the Department of Defense is by a wide margin the largest employer in the United States if you count up active duty servicemen, reservists, national guard, civilian employees and contractors. Its infrastructure is massive on a scale that few can come close to matching, and throwing in compromised, counterfeit routers has a high probability of them not getting discovered.

This is one of the parts of the government that is supposed to keeping you safe from terrorism as part of that "a little essential liberty in exchange for a facade of security" bargain the public made with Bush after 9-11: 

It has surfaced that the US State Department can't account for up to about 1,000 laptops, perhaps as many as 400 of which belonged to the department's Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program.

Maybe we will find out that this part of some super-secret plan that the neocons have been cooking up to scare the terrorists into abandoning their plots via a "shock and awe" display of how much information we have on them. They'll be so shocked and awed that, rather changing their plans, they will just give up.

By now many people have heard of the case of Tracey Roberson being sent to prison for manslaughter for the death of her lover that is said to have been caused by her accusing him of rape. The facts may later vindicate her, as her husband may be proved to have never believed her claim that she was being raped, but on principle, this ruling should not be controversial with anyone.

Rape is a very serious offense, and you don't need to be guilty of it in order for it to hurt your reputation. Even if her husband had called the police to get them involved, Roberson's lover would have had his life ruined by the damage to his reputation. He would have probably gone to a medium or maximum security prison filled with violent offenders, and his family would have lost him for several years if they were lucky. Objectively speaking, her charge was, for this very reason, indefensible.

It may not bother some people that she is being sent to prison for her false charge of rape, but it is a good precedent and one that will serve a lot of women in Texas well. By actually holding women who falsely claim rape accountable in court, it will hopefully discourage women from treating this issue lightly. It may come as a surprise to some, but there are actually women out there who will claim that an equally drunken hookup is rape or will claim that a man they never even had sex with at all raped them, just to be spiteful. About the latter, I would know from personal experience, because I dated one of those in high school (fortunately, she had few friends).

It is true that no one forces a man to behave violently when his wife accuses another man of rape. However, it is a fact of human nature that most men, being neither pathological wimps nor sociopaths, will not be so detatched that they will passively deal with the situation. It is also a fact of nature that allowing women to manipulate this natural tendency in men is a license for vigilante justice. Those who denounced Roberson's husband on principle for "vigilante justice" would do well to consider the fact that a woman who cries rape to cover up her infidelity is far more likely to solicit vigilante justice from her husband than in situations where the woman doesn't try to cover up her infidelity once it's exposed.

Two and a half years in prison for manslaughter is an awfully low price to pay for saying words that most women know are enough to make even most mild-mannered men become homicidal out of chivalric fervor for their wife's well-being and security.

The way that modern law works itself into such a convoluted knot trying to define everything down to the smallest detail possible, categorizing everything in intricate detail will ultimately be our undoing, I think. As a corrollary to Cicero's dictum "more laws, less justice," "the greater the scope of the law, the less freedom and justice there will be." As if our system didn't already suffer from weakened bright lines testing for rape, if this law goes through, it will completely pave over the bright line test for rape altogether, almost completely putting the definition into the hands of the plaintiff and out of the hands of the judge and jury:

Massachusetts is the latest state to consider putting a new crime on the books: rape by fraud. Currently, a sex act only qualifies as rape if physical force is used. We talk to a woman who was tricked into having sex with her boyfriend's brother, who pretended to be her boyfriend - and unable to convict him of rape because of this limited definition.

Under the new law, such forms of deception would be a crime. Some say the law goes too far, however, and could criminalize lies like, "Really, I'm divorced!"

There are many women out there who would love to be able to get back at a lover by seeing him get charged for rape by "deceiving" them about what his intentions about the relationship were. These women will benefit from the law, but every woman who is raped, in the objective sense of the word, will lose in Massachusetts should this law go through because of the way that men and more level-headed women will become even more cynical and skeptical about claims of rape.

At What's Wrong With The World, Zippy Catholic wrote that every type of liberalism must adopt unprincipled exceptions to the political freedom that it claims to advance. That is definitely true of feminism in how feminism is quite willing to undermine or outright destroy basic due process rights in order to make it easier to convict men of rape. This is a truly profound inherent contradiction of modern liberalism, which is why when you combine all of the "liberal issues" together you get a bag of exceptions that effectively rips apart every trace of political freedom that liberalism claims to offer. For this reason, it's important that not only should the personal not be the political, but that in most cases, neither should the sociological be political either.

Read these excerpts from this article, brought to you by El Borak, very carefully and fully absorb the raw decadence that is on display here: 

The last thing Marti Tracy wants to do on a Saturday is clip coupons. But last month the 34-year-old Bowie resident felt she no longer had a choice. She'd already given up organic meat and decided to buy organic milk only for her 2-year-old son, not for the whole family.

Tracy and her partner also stopped buying the cereals they like in favor of whatever was on sale; stopped picking up convenient single-size packs of juice, water or crackers; and, in order to save gas, stopped going to multiple stores. "I find the whole thing a huge hassle, but I've reached a tipping point," said Tracy, a government human resources specialist who is pregnant with her second child. "Clearly, I'm not unable to feed my family. But I just can't feed my family the way I'd like to feed them."

"We are in shocking new territory," said Todd Hale, senior vice president of consumer shopping and insights at Nielsen Consumer Panel Services. "With the exception of the very affluent, everyone is looking to save by altering where they shop, how they shop and the brands they buy."

The price hikes have hit home for Nicole Gindraw-Parrott, a 29-year-old trainer at an Atlanta gas utility and a mother of two. Since January, she said, she's been transformed into a "coupon-clipping, price-matching monster."

Other shoppers, like Kathleen Holly, are coping by visiting fewer stores and shopping closer to home. The Congress Heights senior said she hadn't yet made big changes to what she buys. Instead, she's conscious of "making a circle" when she gets in the car. "If I'm driving, I go to the bank, the grocery store, the cleaners all in one trip. That way, I can save money on gas and keep buying the things I'm buying."

You would think that these women think that they exist in the same universe of financial suffering that the majority of the world lives in, based on the way that they bemoan their now miserable existence of bargain shopping and coupon clipping. Sweet mother of God, you might have to buy at Costco and Giant now, instead of Wegmans and Trader Joes. How ever will these poor ladies ever live with themselves having to condescend to buying mayonaise in large jars, and doing more dishes because they pour juice into a glass now instead of drinking it from small, one-serving size juice boxes.

The main reason that Rachel and I don't get hit badly on our groceries is that we bargain hunt. Lunch costs me $2 a day because I will buy enough Lean Pockets to get me through at least one work wee when they are on sale. When large cases of Deer Park water were on sale for $3.50 each, I bought 4 cases. I rarely go to Starbucks, and most of the time brew my own latte in the morning for a fraction of what it would cost me at Starbucks; $10 buys a tin of Espresso grind and a gallon of milk. I swear, sometimes I think this country deserves a great depression part deux just so that a lot of the American people can finally appreciate the fact that right now, what we call "poverty" in America is called a middle class lifestyle in much of the world.

"Clearly, I'm not unable to feed my family. But I just can't feed my family the way I'd like to feed them." explains pretty much every complaint that Obama and Clinton have about food and healthcare in America. Let me put it another way: "Clearly, I'm not unable to get medical care for my family. But I just can't get treatment for my family the way I'd like to get it and from the doctor of my choosing; having to file for bankrupcy over medical bills is not that different from dying in the third world because the treatment isn't available".

I saw Iron Man on Saturday and thought it was quite possibly the strongest Marvel comic adaptation made so far. Robert Downey Jr really does bring out Tony Stark in a way that I don't think anyone has accomplished except, to a lesser extent, Toby Maguire through his rendition of Peter Parker. The special effects are the best yet of any Marvel movie, and if nothing else, the scene where Stark goes to Afghanistan to personally take care of the problem that his company created over there is worth watching.

If I were brought to this country to screw men that American women won't screw, at a much cheaper rate than American women, and I had a vagina, I would be angry too.