I wonder how many people on the left are going to tell us that we are still practically paleolithic compared to Canada in light of this:

In a ruling handed down this morning, Canada's Supreme Court has declared it is legal for clubs to provide opportunities for group sex. As long as consent is given, the area is somewhat private, and no payment is directly involved, partner exchanging or "swinging" and group participation in sexual acts is not considered illegal.

"The decision is certainly in line with the tendency of this court to throw out any restrictions to behavior," said Gwen Landolt, vice president of Real Women of Canada. "The courts are gradually reducing public concern about morality and behavior that is offensive. Judges don't have legitimacy."

"There is a real trend to break down moral principles in Canadian society. Those principles have been built based on human experience about what is in the best interest of society."

With sex clubs now protected by Canada's supreme court, the potential social repercussions are staggering. The age of sexual consent in Canada is 14. Canadian teenagers can now legally participate in group sex offered by clubs (so long as alcohol is not sold on the premises).

Isn't that just grand? Now they can practice all of the things that they have been taught about how to have safe sex in a warm, welcoming environment where they will have plenty of assistance and mentors available to them. Isn't Canada such a progressive country? This is such an ingenious way for them to bolster their welfare state by encouraging a sharp increase in their birth rate, so now all they have to do is get rid of abortion and they can successfully ensure that it will last another generation, unlike those European countries with their 1.17-1.90 birth rates.

It's easy to rag on the New York Times because, chances are (in fact it's almost certain that), they really don't give a rat's posterior about the security of the United States. However, there is a legitimate concern about the way that Bush has worked against the checks and balances. Yes, it's true that hitherto the abuses have been dealt with, but there has been a dearth of long-term planning about the way that the counter-terrorism powers can be used.

I think it would do a lot to assuage public concerns about these programs, and pre-empt the groups like the New York Times who are acting almost entirely out of a hatred of Bush (as opposed to a genuine concern about civil liberties) if Bush actually imposed real, transparent controls on these powers. He and his lawyers have done a lot to undermine "cumbersome restrictions" on his war powers, but there is valid historical precedent to be scared of the melding of law enforcement, military and intelligence that has happened under Bush. How about Bush start with the following:

• Pass an executive order and draft legislation to reinforce the executive order, that creates a new legal regime that prohibits any criminal investigation unrelated to terrorism to arise from evidence gathered by the intelligence agencies. No exceptions, even if it's a capital murder or child molestation case. War powers cannot intrude upon the normal criminal justice system.
• Change the law so that intelligence agencies not only can legally refuse to follow an order to conduct surveillance on American citizens if they have sufficient reason to believe that the motive is political, not terrorism-related, but make it a legal ground for impeachment of the President. Raise your hand if you oppose this and like the idea of Clinton II having access to these powers, instead of just a few FBI files.
• Create a two-part regime for detaining terrorists: "militant" and "material aid." If the government can prove to a court that an American citizen has actually participated in a military operation against the United States, he or she can be detained as a foreign combatant without any legal rights. If the government can only prove that they have provided material aid and comfort, they must instead be charged with treason and can only be subjected to a secret trial if the government can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they are capable of providing material aid to militants if the trial is conducted publically.

It's disheartening to see a lot of conservative bloggers let their passion for seeing the less than patriotic editors at the New York Times go down, get in the way of appreciating the need to rein in some of the police powers that Bush has grabbed. Even if you think that Bush has done a good job, there is no denying the fact that he won't be President in the next few years. We cannot have a set of laws and powers created with the assumption that someone like him will be the one employing them.

Conservative bloggers ought to also be asking the Bush Administration why they have done so little to clean up security problems such as the illegal immigration problem that compound the terrorism issue. Bush has lost a lot of his authority as a leader because he has pulled some very PC stunts such as labeling the minutement vigilantes. I don't think it takes a big leap of logic to question a leader who invokes war powers on some issues, but has a rather disturbing apathy toward more basic wartime concerns such as border security. If Bush had treated this like a war from the very beginning, he wouldn't come off as such a hypocrite to dissenting hawks.

Others:

Gateway Pundit.

Tim Chapman Blog.

Real Clear Politics.

Mark in Mexico.

4 Right Wing Wackos.

The Anchoress.

Solveig Singleton of IPCentral and I sort of got into it over the Sony issue a while back. Now, there is new evidence to show that Sony has gotten even farther than previously expected. It has been discovered that Sony disregarded its users requests should they have clicked "no" on the end-user license agreement window and installed their little rootkit anyway. In light of this new discovery, the Attorney General of Texas has added yet another offense to the list of complaints against Sony.

The Texas attorney general said on Wednesday that he added a new claim to a lawsuit charging Sony BMG Music Entertainment with violating the state's laws on deceptive trade practices by hiding "spyware" on its compact discs.

Attorney General Greg Abbott filed the original lawsuit in November, accusing the company of violating state anti-spyware laws by embedding software in its CDs and media player to monitor users' habits.

The new charges brought by Abbott contend that MediaMax software used by Sony BMG to thwart illegal copying of music on CDs violated state laws because it was downloaded even if users rejected a license agreement.

"We keep discovering additional methods Sony used to deceive Texas consumers who thought they were simply buying music," Abbott said in a statement.

From the very beginning I knew that Sony would not play this game by civilized rules with their customers. This case is important for a few reasons, despite what Solveig seems to think, because regardless of the amount of damage Sony enabled, they effectively committed electronic trespassing and they damaged the normal functioning of their customers' operating systems. When their customers rejected the end user license agreement, that should have been the end of it, but Sony violated their wishes and installed software on their computers that had a harmful impact on them. I agree in principle that if their customers agreed to the end user license agreement that Sony should be idemnified from any reasonable harm, but in this case Sony went ahead and did what they did in violation of an explicit instruction by their users to reject the agreement and not install the software/play the CD on their computer. Surely any reasonable person can see why it is a very good thing for Sony's customers that the Texas Attorney General is not sitting on his laurels in light of this development.

I for one am quite willing to reiterate my pledge to not buy a Playstation 3 as a result of this case. Consider me a Nintendo Revolution or XBox 360 owner in the making thanks to Sony's wanton disregard for their customers' property rights. The best protest that anyone can do over this is to go out and buy a XBox 360 or Nintendo Revolution and then, if possible, contact Sony and let them know that because they saw fit to shaft their customers this badly, that they have permanently lost a Playstation owner as a future customer.

The Roman emperors spent lavish sums of money to keep the public thoroughly entertained with wine, bread and circus for everyone to enjoy. Today's plutocrats have found a similar, and even cheaper means of keeping their base of power pacified:

In the last session of the year, the City Council of New York passed legislation that creates a special broadband commission to advise Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the city council on how the resources of city government can be used to help roll out broadband throughout the city. The goal of the commission is to educate the general public about broadband and the newest communication technologies, and to give New York City residents the opportunity to comment on how to close the digital divide.

"Broadband is a fundamental civil right and human right," Bill de Blasio, a city council member, said during the session on Wednesday. "This legislation will start us down this road."

And the following things are a brief subset of things which are not fundamental civil rights in the magical land of New York City:

1) The right of self-defense thanks to their near one hundred percent disarming of the people.
2) The right to keep the majority of the product of one's labor thanks to their taxes.
3) The right to work for whoever you want to thanks to their pro-union laws and policies.

But hey, at least you can get your porn at 1.5mbps. That's got to count for something, right? All I want to know is that if I can get full speed cable internet access out in rural Virginia what the hell is their excuse for not having something even better in an area as dense and rich as New York City. Oh wait, thanks to their stupid policies, they've probably made it nearly impossible for anyone making less than $80,000 a year to even dream of broadband service, let alone acquire it.

The transit workers initially sought a 24% wage increase over three years; the MTA offered them 10%. State officials also want future transit employees to pay for part of their health benefits, a proposal the union staunchly opposes. No money is taken out of workers' paychecks for healthcare now.

Those poor, poor down-trodden union workers were only offered an average annual increase of 3.3%. How could they ever survive? Why, you'd almost think that 3.3% is about normal for most employers to give each year! Seriously, it's very common for good employers in Northern Virginia to only pay around 3-4% for salaried employees such as human resources, software developers, engineers and other white collar positions after the first one to three years. For that first year to three years, five to six percent may be reasonable... but eight?! Think about this for a second. That average increase of eight percent a year for three years would jack a $50,000/year salary to nearly $63,000/year and with the cost of living being what it is New York City.

Ever argument that can be used against capital monopolies can be used against these labor monopolies. They come in and keep other workers from selling their labor to an employer and for what? To keep their power and control. Is it any wonder that union jobs were the first to go overseas? Of course not, when you have the kind of extreme price-gouging that is the hallmark of unions like the United Auto Workers. Don't even get me started on how much I oppose the unionization of government employees. The job security that the average government employee alone is worth a great deal, yet many of them are just never satisfied with what they have, and every additional concession that they get comes at the expense of the taxpayers.

Thank you Difster for getting me worked up about this. here's the original article.

If you were to read the reactions of many conservative bloggers regarding the revelation that Bush ordered the NSA to conduct potentially illegal wiretaps, you'd get the impression that the majority of terrorists are dumb as a box of bricks and get all of their ideas from our "treasonous, commie, liberal media." It's as if they never had an original idea and were always just getting their ideas from the New York Times. Does that really sound right? We have a terrorist group, Al Qaeda, which blew up two embassies, nearly sunk a destroyer, hijacked two airplanes and blew up two of our most impressive commercial buildings in the financial seat of our country.

But really, they're just too stupid to come up with anything original without the help of the New York Times. Can you see it now? "Hey Ahmed, the New York Times says the NSA might actually be spying on us. Can you believe this?" "Allah be merciful, may it not be so for I could NEVER have seen THAT coming!" Given how paranoid much of the world is about the American military and intelligence agencies, wouldn't it kind of naturally follow that they are pretty sure that the NSA and CIA are at least trying to spy on them? All the New York Times actually did was confirm that yes, we really were spying on you and chances are there is a nice man with a high-powered rifle who is just dying to reach out and touch you.

We underestimate our enemies all the time. Look at all of the conservatives who cannot accept the fact that it is an unforgivable flaw in our national security policy that we have open borders in this dire "time of war." Who wants to take bets on the probability that the next terrorist attack on American soil will be the result of a terrorist waltzing right past our almost non-existent border security with a full case of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons? But then it would never occur to our enemies to try to get across the southern border, just as it would never occur to them that we might have compromised their communications when we took down a bunch of their people and they "mysteriously" never heard from those guys after American troops entered the area. Oh no, as I said, our enemies never have original thoughts and are simply too stupid to think that they may be at any given moment in the crosshairs of our spy network.

This is how wars are lost. Stop ragging on the New York times and start going after the Bush Administration for engaging in such gross negligence on the border security that daily threatens our country. Of course, just wait until 2008 when a Democrat is elected and these same conservatives will be screaming bloody murder when the police powers they fiercely defend for Bush are turned against them. That's when they'll dust off their civil libertarian clothes and rediscover the joys of principle.

I knew that one day Google would not be able to resist the urge to tamper with what had been hitherto a nearly fool-proof method of making advertising work well for their search engine. Now it would seem that they have gone down the path of the dark side already and are following right in AOL's footsteps with flashy, graphical advertising on their main search engine:

Users of Google's search engine will soon see something they are not used to on the notoriously spare site: advertising with logos and graphics.

And the advertisers will not be limited to America Online, whose talks with Google prompted the change in policy, according to two executives close to the companies' negotiations.

They've been offering graphical advertisements for quite some time for their Adsense users, but that was because it could make sense for many of their Adsense users to allow graphical ads to be displayed on their websites. Personally, I like to keep my blog very sparse on the graphics to make it easier for a wider variety of devices to display comfortably and I'm not too happy with the gaudy, graphically-intensive look of many blogs. That said, this move, while not immediately disasterous, could be the beginning of the end for Google's big lead in search because it will distract from their original formula which was based around the concept of search results first, targetted ads second and integrated conveniently among the search results in a way that wasn't intrusive. Flashy ads are often very intrusive to the casual user.

I've been wondering lately if Google is going to really make it in the long run. Their business model is built disproportionately off of advertising and the online market for ads has crashed in the past pretty badly. If they cannot build up their search device revenues to the point where they can survive on just the sales of their search device products, I wonder if they will be able to survive the eventual next blow to online advertising. Let's also not forget the fact that Microsoft is still doing extremely well in their core markets and has the capital to hire the best talent out there when it comes down to a matter of buying the best talent.

If I were in charge of Microsoft at this point, I'd be making peace with Firefox, Apache and other open source web products and would be actively moving into to push Google into the online sea by genuinely open sourcing Microsoft's search products and building a community around them. There is no reason why Microsoft couldn't do this since the dual-license business model has worked fairly well for MySQL. It might not generate several billion dollars a year for Microsoft, but if it brings Google to their knees and protects Microsoft's core assets and prevents them from moving easily into markets like the mobile computing market that Microsoft wants, it's a sacrifice that will easily pay for itself and then some.

It's finally over, I am about to graduate from JMU with a B.S. in Computer Science. No more teachers, no more (text) books. That's all I'm going to promise for right now.

If Google were in fact to buy out Opera it would be a tremendous gain for the browser market because of the increased competition that it would provide. Some of the comments from the News.com blog post seem to miss the potential benefit to Google and Firefox here.

Given how close Google is with the Firefox community, this one just doesn�t make sense. However, Google could benefit from Opera�s strong presence in the mobile space, where it is beating everyone to the punch. Nokia bundles Opera in most of its new phones including the red hot N-Series phones. In Japan, the ultimate mobile society, Opera is beginning to have an impact. Jon von Tetzchner, CEO of Oslo-based Opera Software in an interview with Business 2.0 had said that wireless was the area of focus for the company.

Since Google is paying people to push Firefox, this doesn't make any sense, right? Well if you look at it from Google's perspective then it actually does make a lot of sense. Google would be able to push an alternative to Internet Explorer in the beginning and take more control and influence away from Microsoft. With the money that they get from the Google Toolbar bundle, they could probably stand a good chance of being able to pay for the cost of developing the new versions of Opera which they would then push for the mobile market, one in which Firefox has effectively no presence at all in. Yes, there is a project to port it to these smaller devices, but Opera already has a very strong presence there so it makes a lot of sense for Google to put their money there instead.

What would be very nice to see is Google sponsoring work on KHTML/WebCore as well. With money going into all three major non-Microsoft rendering engines, we might be able to avoid another bipolar browser war and actually have some real standardization for a change. Regardless, the real reason that Google has thrown its weight behind Firefox is that it needs a vehicle for pushing its search services over MSN Search, and that would be all but impossible to do with a market overwhelmingly dominated by Microsoft.

How do you separate the well-trained software developer from the ignoramus with a flashy set of credentials from the dotcom era? Here's one little discriminator: the latter will actually judge a programming language's utility by how "cool" or how "hip" it is, rather than based on how well-suited it is for a given task. Java for kernel-level code? Hey, it makes sense because it's easier to hire a Java coder than a C programmer. PHP for a massively complicated web application? Of course, J2EE is simply too "software engineeringish" for such a task. Then you have the cheerleaders like Business Week:

Here's a look at a few of the seismic shifts underway. For one, many of the now-large companies built from the ground up to operate on the Internet don't make Java a major piece of their tech strategy. Those include Google (GOOG) and Yahoo! (YHOO). The new generation of lighter-weight programming tools, including AJAX and PHP, are immensely popular with the Web 2.0 startups, including the likes of Friendster, Flickr, and Facebook. The new tools allow programmers with less training to build applications rapidly.

AJAX is not a tool, it's a methodology, but don't let that stop you from comparing an apple to a catalytic converter. Believe it or not, but if you are good at JavaScript, a prerequisite for using AJAX in the first place, you can write AJAX applications more easily using simple JSP scripts than in PHP. Here's a tale of two scripts, one written in Java using JSP and Apache DBTaglibs (yes, I know it's deprecated) and the other written using PHP:

Here's the Java/JSP version:

<%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" language="java" import="java.sql.*" errorPage="" %><br>
<%@ page import="java.io.*" %><br>
<%@ page import="java.util.*" %><br>
<%@ taglib uri="http://jakarta.apache.org/taglibs/dbtags" prefix="sql" %><br>

<%@ include file="include/config-include.jsp" %>
<%
     String owner = request.getParameter("owner");
     String plString = request.getParameter("plID");
%>
<response>
     <% if (owner != null && plString != null) { %>
     <sql:statement id="stmt" conn="conn1">
          <sql:query>SELECT media_library.id, song, album, artist FROM <%= owner %>_playlist_<%= plString %>, media_library WHERE <%= owner %>_playlist_<%= plString %>.id = media_library.id ORDER by artist ASC, album ASC, song ASC</sql:query>
          <sql:resultSet id="rs">
               <song id="<sql:getColumn position="1"/>" title="<sql:getColumn position="2"/>" album="<sql:getColumn position="3"/>" artist="<sql:getColumn position="4"/>"/>
          </sql:resultSet>
     </sql:statement>
     <% } else { %>
          <error>You must supply an owner and a playlist id</error>
     <% } %>
</response>
<sql:closeConnection conn="conn1"/>

And now for the PHP counterpart:

<?php
     header("Content-type: text/xmlnnn");
     include("includes/config.php") or die("I forgot the config script, George!");
     $link = mysql_connect($host, $username, $password);
     mysql_select_db($db, $link);
    
     $owner = $HTTP_GET_VARS["owner"];
     $plID = $HTTP_GET_VARS["plID"];

     $getSQL = "SELECT * FROM media_library m INNER JOIN users u WHERE m.owner = u.username ORDER BY song ASC";
     $results = mysql_query($getSQL);
     if ($results != false)
     {
          print "n";
          while ( ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($results)) != false)
               print "";
          print "n";
          mysql_free_result($results);
     }
     mysql_close($link);
?>

For the unitiated, those are two scripts that support an AJAX process' backend processing. Now, which of those looks easier to read, the one written as a JSP or the one written in PHP? Don't even get me started on how much uglier PHP is than Java from both a syntactic point of view and from a design perspective. Java is a beautiful and elegant language compared to PHP. One need only compare the two languages' string processing functions/methods to get a very basic understanding of what I mean.

I have nothing against PHP, I really don't, I just wish that people would realize that it is not the well-designed language that it is made out to be. It's also time for a little bit of honesty here about J2EE for website development: it's really not an expensive and difficult thing to do. Personally, I would much rather have to debug a JSP than a PHP script given how much better the error messages are in Tomcat than in Apache/PHP. With free Java application servers like Tomcat and Geronimo, one can easily write inexpensive J2EE-based websites, and JDBC has very mature drivers for MySQL so it's not like the world of cheap databases is in any respects off limits to Java developers. In fact, one of the many reasons why Java is so much better for this sort of development is the fact that if you are using properly-designed SQL, it is much easier to switch a Java program from one database to another than it is for PHP. In many cases you simply change the JDBC driver that you are using, update the connection string and there you have it, a fresh new database server. PHP's database connectivity features are all database-specific so you have to actually change code that accesses the database rather than simply changing a driver which manages all of the server-specific features. Only now are they finally getting serious about this major deficiency with their creation of PDOs.

.NET is a credible threat to Java in that it is very feature rich, robust and quite versatile for all manners of software development. However, given that MySQL is only now gaining features that its bigger competitors have had for a very long time and that PHP is more of ad hoc kludge than a coherent language, it does not represent a real threat at this point. The moment that the PHP team decides to get serious about dropping all of the cruft that has come to be euphemisically called a function/object library is the moment that we Java, and .NET, developers will have any reason to really worry. PHP has a very valid place for prototyping big applications and implementing smaller applications, but in very large applications it still is too immature to be a good consideration unless you have some outstanding developers who could do well with any language.

Anyone who decides to stop using a language based on its age is a fool. Has anyone stopped to complain about Microsoft using large amounts of C and C++ in Windows, considering the fact that C is well over twice Java's age? C has been in practical use for over thirty years now, Java was released to the public a little over ten years ago. By Business Week standards, C is to PHP what caveman grunts are to modern English, but for some mysterious reason no one is using these new fangled languages to develop low-level operating system components. Hell, virtually no one is using them for even the configuration utilities at this point!

Of course, the reason why is very simple. The companies that actually know what they are doing understand that a good developer should be conservative with his or her use of languages. A developer that chooses languages the way that a teeny bopper chooses pop idols is a liability, not an asset, to the company that hired them. Maybe if corporate America would be a little bit more hesitant to buy the latest snake oil promise of One Language To Rule Them All And In The Server Room, Bind Them^tm, there would be fewer problems with security and quality than there are today. If you keep jumping from trend to trend, you cannot build up the kind of maturity that is required to make the software actually work as needed. It's a simple fact of life that is quite often lost on those who know just enough about technology to be dangerous, and have enough ego to think that they know more than the engineers they hired to write their systems.

Ok, since this is may come up again, I have a simple primer for atheists that is intended to be the brief explanation of why "atheist morality" is a joke in the eyes of Christians. From your perspective, there is no God, gods or any other divine or hellish spiritual power capable of enforcing good and evil independent of humanity. With me so far? That means that humanity is left to enforce its morals, and ultimately morals have to be defined by someone so if not by the gods or God, then they are defined purely by people. So what's wrong with this? Well, it's very simple. With no threat of divine retribution, just what precisely is supposed to deter a very nasty individual who has good reason to believe that they won't get in trouble for acting maliciously toward a weaker person?

None. No God, gods, etc., nothing but mere man standing between the strong and the weak. So from the atheist libertarian perspective, let's look at it like this. A weak man says to a strong one who wants to steal from him, "you have no right to do this, you have no natural right to tell me what to do." The strong, evil man responds with a loaded gun and says, "I see no one capable of stopping me or punishing me." So what is the weak person supposed to do? Appeal to an inner sense of goodness that carries absolutely no value to the evil strong person? Oh yeah, be so very good when there is nothing but a warm fuzzy feeling that you can get out of it.

Your foundation for morality offers nothing to deter these people. None, not even a moment's consideration. The only thing they are worried about are the cops and the opinions of others. Maybe. There is no reason to fear punishment by a divine authority, thus if they get away with it, who cares, right? Of course in a society with a strong religious backing for its morality, that person might get to thinking that raping and pillaging might come back to haunt him or her when God is tapping his feet saying, "I hope you enjoy the temperature, I raised it a notch on the thermostat just for you."

The moral vacuum that you have from the lack of God means that no, I have no right to steal from you, but it also means that there is nothing that says I cannot steal from you. It's called a vacuum because there's nothing there. I like to call it the abyss, because to paraphrase Nietzsche, when you are exposed to it too long, it gets inside of you. You start to think, "why should I do what I want?" Do what thou wilt, quite rapidly becomes the whole of the law. It's a double edged sword, people, it cuts both ways both in defense of the little guy's rights and it can just as easily spill their guts all across the public square. It is in this absence that the only way a moral view will stand up is if it is imposed by someone over another.

More proof that when you poke a caged tiger, you're liable to get your hand bitten off:

In the first U.S. case of its kind, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday rejected Cecilia Gonzalez' arguments that she was merely "sampling" downloaded music to see which CDs she might want to purchase--and that her sampling was protected under copyright law's "fair use" exception.

Well when they found her hard drive they found well over one thousand songs on it that she claimed were from CDs that she owned. Now, as someone who happens to have over on thousand songs on his hard drive, I call bullshit on that. If you look at my CD rack and compare it with my iTunes collection, you won't find any difference between them. And why the hell do you need to use a file sharing network for songs from CDs that you actually own? You could quite easily download iTunes or MusicMatch and rip them to your hard drive and save yourself the trouble. If you actually own the CDs, then you really don't need to be using a file sharing network to get the songs you already have access to, don't you?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco digital-rights group, has published a list of suggestions on how not to get sued by the RIAA.

Here's the quick summary: don't share songs you don't have the publication rights to. Go out and record your own music if you want to give it away for free, but don't go whining about "fair use" when it comes to getting busted for downloading songs you didn't buy. If your copy of the album was smashed to pieces, that would be one thing, but sampling is not in fact a fair use right. Sorry, but if we are going to protect the concept of fair use, it must be distinguished from the blatant free-loading of individuals like this one.

I just got back from NoVA to find Vox ripping apart Aaron Kinney over this:

Good luck supporting that statement, Vox! I would pay money to see a "might = right" moral code that is truly derived from the negative claim of atheism. Again, atheism has nothing to say about morality; atheism makes no positive claims. Vox is in the land of straw men. The sad part is that I think he isn't even aware of his straw men. His understanding of atheism is woefully inadequate, and here he is shooting his mouth off. I wonder if Vox even understands the difference between a positive and a negative claim?

There is a fundamental problem with atheism and its negative claim. Without a law-giver, there is no rational basis for "ought to." The very concept of what we "ought to do" is the fundamental foundation of morality, it is the guiding force behind all morality, atheism cannot provide a coherent foundation for it because it leaves the question of "what ought we do" to each individual. Ironically, it is the process of leaving basic morality up to individual interpretation which has caused most of libertarianism's hurdles because it leaves people wiggle room to violate the rights of others for causes that are perceived to be good and worthy.

In the Judao-Christian tradition, God is the lawgiver and ultimate source of "what we ought to do." God directs us to respect the life, liberty and property of all of humanity, something that atheism cannot compel the degenerate to do. No offense, but you have to have little more than a pop culture education in biblical theology to think that God is a fascist; His true nature is quite liberal and far more so than most people. God generally doesn't tell us what to do, think, wear, eat, etc. The vast majority of the theological laws attributed to revelation by the prophets and not Jewish cultural traditions can be summed up as, "and do no harm to anyone shall be the whole of the law." God commands us to live in peace, and there are chunks of the New Testament that direct Christians to seek compromise, not to force others to conform to their personal standards. That's for personal tastes, etc., but the bottom line is that the message is one of accepting others differences when they are not immoral or go against the flow of nature. I suppose we could get into an entire discussion about the doctrine of grace, but that would be lost on the average atheist.

Regardless, it all comes down to the question of what we ought to do, and atheism provides no basis for finding that. It should be rather telling to many of the radical atheist libertarians that classical liberalism derives much of its roots from the doctrine of predestination that came out of the reformation. I've met more calvinists that hold libertarian sentiments than I have met atheists, and it always astounded me when I was an agnostic how many atheists were often even more eager to push their "rational" decisions on others. I have never met anyone as convinced that they have God-given special dispensation to force others to conform to their standards than an atheist socialist. Whereas the Bible commands the believer to be respectful and mindful of the individuality of others as it is a reflection of God's greatness, His creation and His depth of wisdom, character and personality.

Let's not forget one thing, Aaron, humans are religious animals as Umberto Eco rightfully pointed out. Political ideologies in the 20^th century were made the de facto replacements for organized religion by millions around the world, and the result was a bloodbath so horrifying that it made the previous, nominally religion-inspired problems seem like nothing by comparison. This is the crux of the matter, the heart of the problem. When God is "killed," people will invent a new god that is more to their liking and I would like to see an atheist seriously dispute my claim that atheism-inspired idols and false gods like the Soviet and Nazi states aren't far worse than anything in Judaism or Christianity.

Atheism's negative claim creates a vacuum that nature or humans will fill. Despite the claims of a few liberty-minded atheists, the net result of atheism has not historically been faith in the efficacy of the individual, but the efficacy of the state. This happens precisely because of the simple fact that without God imposing His plan on humanity, what we ought to do becomes a question settled between the weak and the strong and the strong always win in an atheist world because they have no advocate in a divine power. So no, atheism is not explicitly might-makes-right, but it does have the problem that in nature, without God, the strong win and the weak lose. In that framework, the only morality that would survive the test of time is a relativistic morality based on the whims of the strong, not the weak since there would be no natural check on the strong.

Atheists, you can deny it all you want, but if you put a strong person in a setting with a weak person, the former will usually in some way dominate the other unless there are moral checks in place. The problem is that when you take God out of the picture, the strong person has no inherent reason, and when I say inherent I mean a priori to the existance of states and their laws, to respect the rights of the weak person. Atheism forces morality to work by standing on the good graces of the strong, and leaves the weak with no universal rule that they know will be upheld on their behalf. Even if the foundation of Christian morality is false, at least we have a framework in which we can confidently tell the strong that they are bound by the same laws as the weak and thus must respect the rights of the weak as though they were their own.

As part of his post about Vox, Libertarianism and Christianity, Aaron Kinney made the claim that God is ultimately justified by might makes right. This is of course in direct contrast to the system that God has actually put into place, but here is his point:

Well put, Franc. I couldn't have said it better myself. So much for Vox's absurd claims of which ideology subscribes to "might = right." Vox's God has all the might, so to Vox, whatever his God says is right. Vox is a really confused Christian. He projects "might = right" onto atheism, when in truth it is part of his own belief system, then he expresses his inherent distaste for it, which is especially ironic. Someone should let him know about this contradiction of his. When he finds out about his mistake, I wonder what conclusion he will come to, that his God is immoral, or that "might = right" is ok after all? But Vox still has more to say:

I do believe that the Bible actually says something quite to the contrary. God is fit to judge us precisely because He created us and lives up to the very standard that He holds us to. What Aaron falls into here is a common trap of the atheist which is to assume that without a superior arbitrator that law and morals mean anything. The very reason that Christianity morality works is that there is at least the belief that there exists an inescapable moral arbitrator capable of and willing to enforce said morals. At best, the atheist can only offer a system of government or personal will power, two things that are very unlikely to deter a person who is amoral at the core of their being.

It's a very common misconception that Christians obey God's law out of a fear of, well, getting their asses kicked by God. Yes, there are some who are like that, but the real reason that most Christians obey God is out of a desire to please God, and I can firmly say that I have never met anyone who could say the same about laws handed down by a legislature and few would say the same about moral pontification by a philosopher. The point that Aaron seems to miss is that there really is no genuine consensus on what Hell is actually like. All we know is that it is a plane of existance utterly devoid of God's presence. No common grace, nothing. A world of total depravity that knows nothing of God except through His absence. Damnation is really nothing more than God choosing to no longer associate with you, and if humans can choose to not associate with one another, why can't God do the same with certain individuals that He no longer is interested in being acquainted with?

Ultimately the reason why God is necessary for morality is that morality needs a justification, and a theoretical enforcer. The atheist can only offer the strong arm of the state or a quasi-nietzschean ubermensch capable of protecting himself/herself from harm. Without God in the picture, society gradually loses its ability to decisively condemn anti-individual actions and that ability to condemn is very important because its the foundation of enforcing basic civil rights. Its what lets us say to the wouldbe Stalins, Hitlers and Husseins, "you cannot do that because we have our natural rights."

The power of our founders' vision for civil rights came from the belief that humanity was endowed with rights by a benevolent God, and that we were. If one separates the legalese and tradition from the actual moral demands of the Bible, Jesus was absolutely right when He said that His yoke was lighter than that of man's; God's actual requirements are far fewer than man's. The core of the actual divine law is, "do no harm and love your neighbor." Compared to that, the non-initiation of force principle is a sad, slave labor-made knock off sold in Wal-Mart's discount bins. According to the Bible, God actually handed down an underlying command to respect the life, liberty and property of everyone.

The Bible gives us the right to freedom of speech, and remember that blasphemy is nothing more than the religious equivalent of slander. If you freely say "Christ was a male prostitute," and you know the truth, then you are slandering Him which is what blasphemy ultimately means. You have the right to defend yourself and your property, if you view the Old Testament tithe in its original context, as a tax, you see that God's standard for taxation is democratic and light. Yes, God has granted these rights and more, and yes, God does in part rule by "might-makes-right," but then all government ultimately is based on that. The difference is that God is consistent to His word, never acts out of character and part of that means that we have security with our rights. We know that God isn't going to arbitrarily hand down a new edict saying that some people must be stripped of their rights "for the greater good" because God always follows His principles to their bitter end if necessary unless mercy is called for in His mind.

With God, human civilization becomes a sort of federation. If you view the world biblically, you see all of humanity subjected to God's rule regardless of religion. Yes, from the biblical perspective muslims, atheists, buddhists, etc. are all subject to God's rule as much as any Jew or Christian. There is a higher government above the temporal governments and that government is emphatically pro-individual, reserving the right to come down on and condemn the temporal government on behalf of the abused and agrieved. The result is that the relationship, on this world, between governed and government can be flattened a lot because the governed and government can easily end up in Heaven or in Hell depending on how God chooses to act. Suddenly the king goes from a larger than life figure to a man with power on loan from a true king who can take it away at anytime, including by choosing to summarily execute the king if the true king is angered with the human king's treatment of the true king's people.

With God, people begin to see passing good laws as important, they see respecting the rights of those that they could easily overpower a moral duty as God is infinitely more powerful than they and can come down very harshly on them on behalf of the weaker person. Yet, in the atheist world this doesn't work because there is no God and thus the only natural reason to respect the rights of the weak is out of fear that they may band together and overpower the stronger person together. Forget all of God's laws that are ingrained in most Americans, whether they believed or not, and view this from the perspective of a world governed totally by rational self-interest as the moral light. I say rational self-interest because without God, there is no afterlife and thus no reason to sacrifice oneself for anything other than one's mate, offspring or family. There is no "it's the right thing to do" because there is no difinitive reason to act in a way other than rational self-interest and there is no threat of spiritual punishment in death. Effectively, if you can get away with it, it's not going to hurt you since you've got no threat of meeting a pissed off God once you're dead. The only reason then to respect others' rights and lives is to foster harmony and to not get sent to prison or killed since God is, to paraphrase Nietzsche, dead. Of course, if God is in fact alive, then the murderer, thief, etc. gets to face a God who is quite willing to bring justice to the agrieved. Thus, there is a reason to not do something, even if they know damn well that no human will catch them.

To be very blunt, though, there is a dire consequence to an atheist world and that is the rise of would-be Nietzschean ubermenschen. To put them in the proper, original context, these would be the power-hungry beasts with no moral center of any persuasion who are quite willing to rape, murder, steal, etc. to gain power and dominate. They will always win in a world dominated by morality that has no threat of true enforcement, and invariably they will take over the reigns of power if society doesn't have the underlying moral safeguards to prevent their rise to power. If these individuals grow up in a Godless world, they will have society in their sights, and the only way to prevent many of them from fully maturing into their natures is the restraint that comes with divinely-inspired, or revealed if you prefer, morality. These individuals cannot be persuaded with arguments that do not ultimately come down to, "God or someone else can force you to comply or else." Atheist morality, with its enforcability inherently limited to just the state and strong individuals, offers no protection because history has shown that these types rise to power as real despots. The only counter to them is the belief, whether it is true or not, that there is a God and that He will punish them for their evil when He sees fit.

Every few months it seems Slashdot has to post some article that explains why modern games are sexist and what must be done to attract a female audience. Now, it seems to me that if you are going to complain about the almost farcical imagery that gets taken way too seriously by the professional feminist agitators, you might as well complain about the role that is imposed on men. In video games, the male character is invariably a tale, chiseled man of action who is daring, willing to risk life and limb to Make the World Safe For Democracy^tm, kittens and puppies. Oh and he does all of this usually with no concern for his own well-being.

Does that sound realistic to you? Besides, let's be realistic about something. There's a bigger reason why many women hate Lara Croft once they get to know a little bit about the character: she is the feminist ideal. She's drop dead gorgeous, incredibly intelligent and more capable than most men. Lara Croft is what these women who cannot deal with the "sexist" imagery are not. She is a pixelated repudiation of them. You'd have to be daft beyond being able to function in society to play Tomb Raider and not realize that her looks are only part of the reason why Lara Croft got so much celebrity among horny young male gamers. She's sexy, she's a major gadget nerd, she loves guns, especially big guns, and would probably not settle down with some stupid jock. Chances are, she'd settle for a geek who spent a good amount of time at the gym.

I'll give their complaining a little bit of credence when I see them enthusiastically demanding and pre-paying for games featuring balding, overweight men steeped in credit card debt and who seem vaguely pussy-whipped. People of both genders don't want that sort of character because of the very reason we call them avatars in many games: they represent us in the game world. Who would want to be that middle-aged fat man when they could be a chiseled hunk? Who would want to be a pre-menopausal heroine with forty pounds of fat hanging on her hips when she could play a beautiful, intelligent woman who could give wyatt erp a run for his money with a pistol? Only someone with a very low sense of self-worth, and I'm sorry, but I am not one of those people nor would I have much desire to be acquainted by such shallow, thin-skinned individuals of either gender.

Who would I rather be in a role playing game, a character that looks similar to me or Cloud Strife? I hope you didn't strain too much mental power thinking of the answer for that one. And one last thing, this whole issue presents a false dichotomy that encourages the view that looks and brains are mutually exclusive. That can't possibly be a good thing for women, and if people fail to notice the very blunt assertions of Lara Croft's education and intellect, how can they be expected to notice the education and intellect of a beautiful, but shy, girl that sits in the back of the room?

Note: the link in the title was put there because some people might think that running dog is a sexist expression, when in fact it is one that is of a political origin and usage, commonly used as "capitalist running dog."

Apparently Java's number parsing methods don't like strings that contain null ('') characters in them. This was something I noticed when I was writing my file system project for CS450. It creates a formated simulated file system that is nothing but a bunch of null characters and then overwrites them. Wellll when I was writing the code that would read the pointer to the next cluster, there would typically be a number of null characters that had to be read along with the pointer. Needless to say, it wasn't until I filtered out the null characters that it actually worked.

For the newbies out there, here is a simple code example to show what I mean:

public class NullTest
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        String x = "512\0";
        try
        {
            Integer y = Integer.parseInt(x);
            System.out.println(y);
        }
        catch (NumberFormatException n)
        {
            n.printStackTrace();
            Integer z = Integer.parseInt(x.substring(0, x.indexOf("")));
            System.out.println("Now I get " + z);
        }
    }
}

It's really stupid since null characters are not used by Java for the same thing that they are used for by C. This seems to be a really idiotic bug for them to have not fixed yet. Of course, in their defense, I suppose that very few Java programmers would have occasion to actually use null characters in the first place.

and it is saying that I must get back to work! Well one major project is out of the way, and another is going to be done with by tonight. The presentation of the media player went very well, and tomorrow it is presentation time for the file system simulation that I developed for my operating systems class. If I do pretty well on it, it should be enough to bring my grade up from around a D-/D to a D+/C-. Sound bad? Well keep in mind that I actually got a D-, a passing grade, on the midterm which most of the class actually failed. In other words, I'm fairly firmly passing pre-curve in the class right now.

After that, I have one little programming assignment to get out of the way and then it's exam week. Joy oh f$%^ing joy, right? I can't say that I'm expecting it to be too bad, I should have blogging time during that week, when I'm not packing up my stuff and getting ready to relocate. And yes, that blogging time should include enough time to write another 10-20 page long fiction post. Stay tuned.

The European mainstream media is starting to get uppity about losing their role as the primary source of news, in the wake of services like Google News which stand to make them nothing more than mere content vendors like the record labels supplying Apple's iTunes Music Store. Me thinks that the lady doth protest too much.

According to an Associated Press article, Francisco Pinto Balsemao backed French news agency AFP, which is suing Google for including its content on its news site.

"It is fascinating to see how these companies 'help themselves' to copyright-protected material, build up their own business models around what they have collected, and parasitically, earn advertising revenue off the back of other people's content," he said.

They are well aware of the fact that Google does not actually resell their content and is not violating any copyright laws by offering their services. The reason that they are raising a stink about this is because Google News threatens to cripple their advertising if people end up using it over their websites. There is not a whole lot of difference between a blog post and an online version of a newspaper article and thus they are much more conducive to being accessed via RSS and other aggregation methods than through the monolithic "go to our site and browse a lot first" approach that they need to get good advertising.

Ultimately that's what this is all about: advertising. If they simply feed aggregation services, they will not be able to reliably command the kind of pull that draws in the big advertising dollars/euros. The only way that they would be able to command strong advertising revenues would be to get such a strong reputation and pull from media buyers that they can get advertisers to be willing to take the risks associated with selling on a more article-to-article basis. The newspapers are currently accustomed to selling an entire paper, not articles. The advertising works on that basis and things are changing. Advertising will now be based much more on an article basis than a "total content" basis as exists with paper news sources.

There comes a point in time where you read about someone who did something so amazingly stupid and so patently obvious as a bad idea that you cannot help but wonder if it really happened. Take for instance this soon-to-be-felon who thought it would be really slick to pass off an iPod as something less expensive than a big pack of batteries:

Baldino was detained by Target security Wednesday after he purchased a $150 iPod with a bar-code label of $4.99.

Baldino, a freshman electrical-engineering student at the University of Colorado, told police that he made phony bar codes from real bar codes taken from inexpensive merchandise, then glued those bar codes on to big-ticket items at Target, according to the police report.

You don't suppose it ever occurred to this guy that even a ditsy cashier, the type that he allegedly sought out, would kinda scratch her head when she saw an iPod getting marked down to a mere $4.99? There are only three types of people that would allow that to slip past them: those who don't care, those who are too busy to notice or those who are part of the scheme to rip off Target. You have to believe that a stereotype blonde cashier is dumber than a box of bricks to actually think that she'd see an item that normally retails for a few hundred dollars being sold for $4.99 and not get suspicious.

Now I leave it with these two excerpts from the bottom, to show what kind of mind you have to have to actually think that this was a smart idea in the first place. Be warned, chances are if you read these statements you will grow a little bit less sympathetic to the human condition.

"I will NEVER EVER DO THIS EVER AGAIN and I am once more terribly sorry," Baldino wrote in a statement for police. "Please let me go for I am terribly sorry!!! I'm only a kid! Help me out. I just want to go home. I did this not knowing of the serious penalty that lies behind it. Please! Please! Please!"

Baldino could not be reached for comment Thursday. In a follow-up statement to police, he wrote: "I am extremely sad now, and I just want to go to bed," he wrote. "Please let me sleep in my own bed tonight."

I couldn't make that stuff up if I were trying...

Thanks to Fraters Libertas for this:

any recommendations of what book i should buy a man who doesn't know very much about feminism and the oppression of women, etc...but i want to help him become more familiar with these facts in a nonthreatening way? kind of a "here are the ways in which women are oppressed throughout the world" and "here are some things you can do about it, as a man" (at least in opening up his thinking?)

If you observe Christmas for the sake of worshipping Jesus Christ, then this is indirectly something to keep in mind of this sacred day of celebration. However, we shouldn't stop with women who are oppressed. The spirit of Christianity is the spirit of the chains of bondage being broken by God who became human specifically to liberate us from tyranny. That is why I say that if you truly care about women are oppressed around the world, you have to care about the people who are oppressed. Oppression, like hatred and cancer, must be dealt with in a universal manner otherwise it just retreats to a corner until it can strike out and retake what it has lost.

There are many good charities that you can give to that will help people out around the world, but if you want to give to a charity that fights oppression on the home front, the Institute for Justice is a damn good one. Even though they lost the case, they were the ones who fought the good fight in cases like Kelo v. New London which was precisely the sort of case that feminists should be calling true oppression; a woman got her home taken from her to be sold off for cheap to a land developer by her local government. If that is not a true example of a woman being oppressed, then I don't know what is because it was a clear cut message saying: "in New London, Conn. you have no property rights." So while the "enlightened" government of New London, Conn. might not regard women as property, they have been effectively reduced back to the dark ages of women not being able to truly own their own property.

Of course, I have to admit, that if a woman bought me a book like this except as a joke or as an interesting insight into the minds of academic feminists, I'd be quite scared. There's nothing like being force-fed propaganda of any sort via a Christmas "present" to make you want to gag and run for the hills. With the sheer volume of oppression that goes on in the world today, oppression that affects both genders even if a bit disproportionately, I find it hard to take seriously someone who wants to single out just women. The most obvious example is that women are often the perpetrators of the very female circumcision that is justly despised in the West. It's a very complex world, and to draw simple lines like "women are oppressed" whittles away at the true victims who can be from any category and lets many of the victimizers, such as the older women who force their daughters to be circumcised, get away with their crimes using usually very poor excuses.

There is one thing that I truly despise about many bloggers, and that is the tendency to say "I can say what I want, leave the comments open and then choose to block you for simply disagreeing with me." Just because it "is your blog," doesn't mean that you should be immune to criticism or those who disagree with you, and limiting the opinions of others is nothing more than a form of mind control no matter how badly executed. You have people, especially on left-wing blogs, who say that certain opinions just aren't acceptable such as "victim blaming." Now what the fuck is victim blaming in most cases? It's a relative point once you get beyond the absurd like "that serial killer's victim sure got what was coming to him for daring to leave his house at night!"

I am not one to cheerlead for Vox, but it is amazing to me how stupid people get when they disagree with him. The vocalizations of a gibbering monkey are more articulate and erudite than their "rebuttals," and I use that term so loosely that if it were a hooker, the class nerd would be getting laid every night like clockwork for free. I actually disagree with him on the issue of date rape, having been in a situation where a girl really did try to force herself on me and committed what amounted to sexual assault against me. Yet how on Earth can anyone respect trash like this?

I proudly wear the title of elitist because I have for a long time rejected the notion that all opinions are equal. Such barely educated nitwits are a perfect example of why many geeks have a loathing of blogs in general. What do you call a single line, based entirely on uneducated opinion? In the blogosphere, among the majority, you call it a rebuttal, but in the real world it's called a half-assed quip. Where is the deconstruction of the words that are to be rebutted?

Just like a rite of passage it seems, many bloggers and people in general don't even bother to back up their assertions with bonafide experience or evidence. Take for instance, the feminist argument that women are to be barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen as subservient maid-whores for their husbands according to the Bible. Ephesians 5 says that a wife's role and a husband's duties to her are exactly the opposite, but don't let the Bible's actual teachings get in the way because what really matters are the people who wear the title of Christian, but don't have any intention of practicing what they preach. Extrapolate this to all of the sacred cows, even on the right, and you'll get what I mean.

My comment policy is very simple. Disagree with me as much as you want, and I won't even delete trolls because I reserve the right to mercilessly mock you, regardless of your state of mind at the moment. If you accuse me of being hateful for example, and I rebutt you, your next comment better be able to provide counterparts. "U r teh hateful" is not acceptable, and I will probably end up showing your commentary all the respect that a foreign policy statement made by a small child would receive at the State Department. Also, there is nothing I hate more than the habit that some people have of rejecting transcendental morality, and then holding up their personal views as though they have the authority of a divine being attached to them. I despised that when I was an agnostic and still despise it as fervently today as I did then. Opinion has merit where things like personal taste come into play, but opinion, without education and facts, has no merit when it is a matter of truth.

This is in response to this post.

After the debacle with the black pens, someone might well have been instructed to try again, and this time make a DRM that wasn't so easy to get rid of. Someone else thought he had a bright idea to take a page from the hacker tech manual. And so that product was delivered to Sony. It seems unlikely to me that there was a conversation along the lines of "you know that this is basically hacker tech that makes customers vulnerable to viruses and whatever, right?" Not impossible, but... implausible. So at this point it seems to me quite possible that this was a case of someone "should have been" more aware of security issues with the stuff. And so the line that one might draw between a bug and a deliberate attack can be more blurred than one would want. How many bugs "should have been" caught?

But see, here's the underlying problem. Root kits are typically only good for screwing with low-level actions in the operating system. That's what they are typically deployed for, and employers are no exception. For example, they want to be able to have even deeper control over what processes can be run, what files can be accessed, and I am totally cool with employers restricting their property.

DRM and rootkits, however, should never be mixed because DRM needs to hook into the operating system quite differently. It should be built into the I/O systems of the operating system and operate transparently, if it is supposed to be integrated into the OS. Personally, I would not want DRM integrated into the core I/O systems if I were an OS designer, but that's another debate entirely. The problem is that this form of "DRM" is basically a hack that gets cozy with the OS, without really integrating in a way that the designer intended. Anyone now see what that is a Really Bad Thing?

The problem with system-level DRM is that it really must be implemented by the OS designer if it is going to be done right. Kernel modules can be unloaded, rootkits killed and so it's pretty obvious that if DRM is going to work at the system-level, it must be implemented in such a way that it is the underlying philosophy behind how the hardware and software interact.

I think Solveig misses the point here, which is that people freaked out because Sony bought what amounted to a hacker tool, installed it surrepitiously and then didn't even bother to make sure that it worked right. Quite frankly, the security hole was not even the biggest beef that I've seen people have with it, but rather the fact that Sony installed a rootkit on peoples' systems because of how fundamentally invasive that is for the OS. The fact that it also made them very vulnerable to security flaws certainly didn't help things, but I suppose in Sony's defense, if you're using Internet Explorer (and thus can be hit by ActiveX flaws) you get what you deserve knowing its security model.

Set aside the intent issue for a second and look at the tech. Is it really always clear what is a "pure" hacker tool and what is not? Isn't it likely that in future programmers might well continue to experiment with "hacker tools" to see if they can use principles in those tools for a useful purpose? Isn't the argument that there is such a thing as a purely useless and bad tech usually made by advocates of tech bans? Are we saying that all software always has to be easily removable and detectable? By everyone? What about security software or content filters used by parents or schools or employers? Suppose experts could find and remove it but not beginners? Suppose a DRM system was hard to find or hard to remove, but didn't create a security vulnerability to outsiders? Or suppose it did, but was easy to find and remove? There are a million possible permutations of technology here--hard to imagine the legal system coming up with a top-down rule that makes sense for all of them, especially at this early stage of the game. Markets adapting after the fact are much more flexible.

I do not know of any law that would preclude companies from adopting "hacker tools" provided that the intended use is lawful. While there is a bit of a strawman inherent in fretting about the legality of "hacker tools," we'll just let that slide and address the other points here.

To the best of my knowledge, practically no one has brought up the issue of the software being removable, and I certainly would not make an issue of it. There are too many variables, including sheer user stupidity, that can get in the way of good software packaging for us to actually regulate this. The real problem is that Sony tried to conceal a tool that altered the proper operation of their customers' operating systems. A good solution to this would be to require that they very clearly detail what they are going to do to their customers' systems, and ideally they should be required by law to label this on their products ahead of time to allow people to avoid having the software installed on their systems.

When someone goes out to buy a filtering system, security program or something of that nature, they go out with the expectation that system modifications may be part of the process of using the software. It's an acceptable risk that they freely accept. However, most people do not think that their music CD may contain a program that will undermine the proper functioning of their operating system and expose them to problems. By the way, part of the problem too was that this rootkit could be used to conceal all sorts of files, provided that they followed the naming convention of the DRM tools.

I am not willing to let the market decide on this matter because of the fact that Sony barely repackaged a rootkit and based their DRM strategy on it. They also used it to control their customers' computers against their knowledge, which is not the case with other DRM systems such as Apple's FairPlay. I wonder how many objections there would be to an employer surreptitiously doing this to an employee's home computer in the name of preventing them from stealing company documents and intellectual property. Probably none. Other major DRM systems are non-invasive and well-designed, Sony's was a warmed-over rootkit and they knew it and used it without their users' permission.

Bottom line: No, I don't think the root kit should be regulated, in the usual sense of the word, as broadcasters or telecom companies are regulated. But then I don't think my critic meant that either. I do think that under some circumstances legal remedies would be appropriate for software that does damage. But in the meantime the legal system (to which market forces do not really apply) is more out of control than any DRM (to which market forces do apply). It is not clear to me what work is left for the legal system to do in this case.

It's not so much the production that should be regulated or eliminated, but the use. The issue is not the quality of the software, but what the software actually does that matters. Properly implemented DRM would not have to work like a rootkit as either the OS vendor would build it themselves into the operating system, or it would run peacefully in user space. Dare I say it, if you aren't the OS vendor then you have no business implementing a system as potentially invasive to the OS as DRM at the OS level.

Sony should be taken down here because of their actual use of the rootkit. The sneaky manner in which they installed it smacks of a more than slightly guilty conscience. Other DRM vendors have no problems with being up front about it, and don't do things like screw around with the process manager or the file manager. The first thing that comes to my geek mind to describe their actions from a technical perspective is hacking (or cracking if you're a nerd). But then, if it keeps the regulators from going nuts and regulating us to death since they are usually totally ignorant of all technical matters, I suppose the lesser of the two evils is to let Sony get away with it by law. Ultimately though, the technical and legal aspects are closely related. We need regulators who can craft finely-tuned laws to outlaw things like Sony's DRM system while protecting Windows Media and FairPlay.

Regardless, I'm still not buying a Playstation 3.

To make an awfully short story long, I tired of the way things were and decided that I needed to start over. Part of me figured that since I am now close to hitting the Real World^tm (not the MTV show, thank God), that I need to start over with my blog. So, what you see here is an effort to "get things right this time." I want to be more focused on writing fiction, writing about programming and things like that than I was before.

Updates will of course be rarer, so I don't expect most of you to rear your ugly heads around here very often anymore. If you want to keep up to date, here's my RSS feed. Some easy ways to keep up with this are Mozilla Thunderbird, RSSOwl and Google's Interactive Homepage. Everytime I post something that gets updated, so SUBSCRIBE! :)

Sun has found a good customer for its x86 servers, for once:

Sun has sold hundreds of its new "Galaxy" line of x86 servers to eBay to power the auction site's search technology. eBay is using the X4200 and X4100 machines, which use Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron processor, as well as Sun StorEdge storage systems, the server and software company said Monday.

Well it's about time that Sun started to recover from their post-dot com bust. Granted, this deal isn't really the kind of mega dollar deal that they really need. Each of those servers costs between $2,500 and $7,500 according to Sun's website so this is worth just a few million dollars in sales to them. Then again, their stock is down to something like $3.90/share so just about any news is good news at this point for Sun.

A stronger Sun is of course a good thing for Java developers, in fact it's probably what would end up saving the future of Java development. Eye candy aside, if the divide between IBM with SWT and Sun with Swing is any indication, if IBM were to take the lead in steering the future of Java development, .NET would end up winning hand over fist.