March 2006 Archives

Amazon.com, leading the way on innovation with blogging patents!

An electronic catalog system provides an interface for users to author and post pieces of content, referred to as "blurbs," for viewing by other users. The blurbs submitted by a particular author are made available for viewing in an author-specific blog (web log) format. Blurbs may also be obtained from external sources, such as from blogs hosted by various web sites. A personalized blurb selection component selects blurbs to present to users based on histories of catalog items selected by such users, and/or based on various other criteria. The blurbs selected for a particular user are presented within a personal log or "plog," which may be updated daily and will typically contain entries from many different authors. User feedback provided on specific blurbs is taken into consideration by the personalized blurb selection algorithms.

So basically each individual author may have a blog tied to their products, the users will be presented with blog posts ("blurgs"), Amazon.com may pull these blurbs from other web sites that they do not own (aggregation, not that's new...), the blog can be personalized by Amazon.com customers, group blogs on Amazon.com will be supported and users can *gasp* *drumroll* leave comments! This astonishing series of innovations is brought to you by Amazon.com, best known for their patented "One-Click" technology which allows customers to actually buy just one thing at a time, rather than make one large order.

Now, those of you who support the patent lobby so much, what good can come of this patent being enforced? Does this sound like a novel and innovative idea? If it does, then apparently you've never used the web pre-2000 because all of this technology was around, and in use in some form, back then. So what do we get here now, "idea integration patents," patents on slapping previously mundane technologies together in ways that probably would be obvious to a practitioner in the technical field, but not to a lawyer or a patent examiner?

No patriot can read this and not feel that there is something bordering on treasonous the way that the FBI's management systematically bungled the investigations that could have prevented 9-11. No, this is not a Bush or a Clinton problem, but a cultural problem that has existed for quite some time within this agency's wretched leadership. This excerpt puts the whole thing into perspective for those that might like to know where their tax dollars going:

Minneapolis, Phoenix, New York. Three different Bureau offices were hot on the terror plot in the days leading up to 9/11 and all were stiffed by Washington. If that is not institutional incompetence, Stalin purge-worthy stuff, heaven help the next 3,000 martyrs to J. Edgar Hoover's uber-suits.

One exchange from the Moussaoui trial makes clear what happened in the weeks running up to 9/11:

"You tried to move heaven and earth to get a search warrant to search this man's belongings and you were obstructed," MacMahon said to Samit.

"Yes sir, I was obstructed." Samit replied.

Agent Samit was systematically obstructed from doing his job by the upper management, for whatever reason. I don't claim to be a law enforcement expert, but there is no reason for the upper management to interfere with a field agent's investigations. The agent is out there, collecting the evidence, identifying potential suspects, etc. The management is not. For them to so completely, systematically and nonchalantly blow off the investigative work of a field agent who is bringing this information to them is unconsciable. It is the sort of thing that makes me a libertarian; it's what made me lose faith in government itself.

Some of you out there may be so inclined as to claim that it's simply bureaucratic bungling, but it's not. When three field offices are coming to the Washington headquarters with independent information showing that there is a real threat of a terrorist attack, and all three are rebuffed by the Washington establishment, that is no coincidence. It may not be outright treason, but it is a fundamental betrayal of the public's trust.

At this point, the public needs to start talking about potentially disbanding the FBI altogether. They are a large, slow-moving, incompetent bureaucracy, in no small part due to the management. There are so many talented agents whose skills are wasted by their managers' inability to get their act together and do their job.

The bare minimum that should be acceptable now is a complete culling of the FBI's management. The stakes are so high, and the corruption is so deep, that virtually everyone in the management should be fired. No exceptions. There simply is not enough time to sort out the good apples from the bad ones. What we need is a complete, unconditional purge of the entire management. Then, to finally bring so much needed clarity issue, the CIA needs to be given final control over all FBI operations involving terrorism so that there is an outside agency that can override the FBI's management if the status quo ever returns, and thus allow the field agents to do their damn jobs.

Everyday that I interact with a blog that uses Movable Type, especially when I try to comment or ping one, I'm glad that I switched back to WordPress because the Movable Type system of comment, rebuild, reload is revolting. Who in their right mind thought it would be efficient to have a CGI app rebuild a text file everytime that a comment or trackback is made? With WordPress, all it has to do is open a connect to the database server, send it a SQL INSERT command voi la. There is no page rebuilding because the HTML is generated on the fly and overally, it's a very fast system. Sure, Movable Type is theoretically faster, but how many Movable Type-based blogs out there actually allow trackbacks and comments once they start getting very popular? There aren't that many, except those on hosts that can really take the beating that comes from having several simultaneous attempts to rebuild the page.

I can see the argument that Movable Type kicks ass for those that want a simple engine for generating static content, but for a blog I think it is starting to get severely lacking compared to WordPress 2.0. Not being dogmatic about it, but there are just fewer and fewer reasons these days to use Movable Type.

Authorities said the boy in the picture is 17, while the girl is 16. According to prosecutors, the age of the girl makes the sexually explicit picture child pornography under the law.

Zylstra now faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted of the most serious charges, which are felonies.

Protecting the kids from... each other? This, my friends, goes well above and beyond being over the line. The prosecutor just had to walk into the courtroom and throw his/her weight around prove how much of big kid he/she is. All they had to do was say, "look, there is no state interest in prosecuting you for real child pornography creation and dissemination because of the ages involved so, tell you what. We'll drop the charges if you agree to do 50-300 hours of community service. We have to give you something here, just to keep more teens like you from giving dirty old men more masturbation material."

Look, I understand the whole child pornography ecosystem concept behind the major penalties for even possessing the crap, but this is ridiculous. They're risking ruining the guy's life over a few pictures of an event that took place in front of a bunch of minors. This wasn't some six year old getting raped in some pedophile's room, but a public sex act getting recorded for posterity, and on top of it that po widdle kiddy was sixteen when she let the guy in the picture have his way with her. Two years away from being a full adult. Any smart jury would nullify this case with extreme prejudice if the prosecution doesn't slap the guy on the wrist over it.

Between Bush's out of control spending, Ted Stevens' pork barrel spending for Alaska ("bridges to nowhere") and now, Trent Lott's attack on the appropriations reform, who is actually getting excited these days about the Republicans having a permanent majority besides cheerleaders like Hugh Hewitt? There are no real competitive advantages that the Republicans have anymore. They have lost the limited government credential, they have lost the effective government credential and the immigration issue has put their whole national security credential in question for those who didn't already see right through it.

Cut the starry-eyed true believer crap people. It's time to get serious about this. If you care about abortion, civil rights, taxes, national security and all of that jazz, you are wasting your votes on the Republicans because they have governed to the left of Bill Clinton. Dubya has done the same things as Bubba on immigration, has spent ridiculously at a time when we cannot afford it and has mismanaged our military operations in Iraq to an unacceptably disgraceful level. It's time to put that tired mantra that the Republicans must be elected because the Democrats are worse aside, and stop lying to yourselves. The only difference between a typical Democrat and Republican in the Congress is that the latter go to church more often. That's it.

We have well over $1T of new national debt thanks to Bush, debt that was totally unnecessary for the military operations against our Islamist enemies. Bush overspent so much that he "couldn't find any money" for 10,000 new border patrol agents for the southern border. I'm sick of the excuses like Kerry or Gore would have been worse. No, they wouldn't have been worse. If Bush lost in 2004, it just might have caused the Republicans to become a little bit conservative again. They might have gone attack dog on Kerry for the border issue, and found a way to get those 10,000 new border patrol agents.

Finally, there might be some cathartic or educational benefits associated with many video games. From the Bible to Beowulf to Batman, depictions of violence have been used not only to teach lessons, but also to allow people - including children - to engage in a sort of escapism that can have a therapeutic effect on the human psyche.

Adam Thierer missed one of the best explanations for why people advocate the regulation of video game content. It is a form of escapism in and of itself for many, typically older, Americans. They are escaping the reality that violent people are that way by nature, and that nurture has very little impact on changing an aggressive nature.

Healthy societies throughout the history of human civilization have recognized the propensity of young men to engage in armed struggle and regarded it as a useful tool for safety and stability. It is the weakened, failing, emasculated civilizations that have always come to fear this aspect of young men. A society that seeks to stifle it, rather than release it in constructive and harmless ways, is a society that has grown afraid of the very tendencies in young men that make them able to fight wars for the defense of the civilization.

Like many young men, I have a tendency toward aggression, not pacifism. I like my video games violent and mildly sexual. I enjoy video games where the objective is to go to war, kill people in horrific ways (chainsaw or rocket launcher is the usual method) and I like seeing things blow up. Ironically, most young men share this exact same attitude toward video games. Why else would Halo, Quake, Unreal, * Wolfenstein and other first person shooters be so popular?

The ones you have to be worried about are not the ones like us that get giddy over seeing another player get blown up by a missile, but the ones who cannot get giddy over that because they are the ones who are not finding any constructive outlet for their male aggression. There's a very simple rule to follow for diagnosing these types. Those that cannot laugh or cheer at fantasy are the ones who typically have a hard time understanding subconsciously that it is in fact fantasy.

Now that the illegal immigrants have finally started to make their demands known to Lilly White Dumbass America (also known as Urban White Liberals and Country Club Republicans), let's get down to a few, minor problems with those who defend the illegal immigrants. There are a lot of urban legends about them, so let's get started.

With today's mechanized labor forces, there is no way that more than 5% of them are working in American agriculture. 5% of the estimated illegal immigrants would mean that there are 600,000 migrant workers, a generous and probably too liberal number, but we'll give them the benefit of the doubt. So what jobs are the other immigrants, all 11,400,000 and some odd, doing? Apparently a lot of jobs besides fast food, like joining our military. So now, can we please put a stop to the lie that illegal immigrants have the civility to only do the jobs that no one else would do?

So now, how are we going to integrate these fine, upstanding citizens of other countries into our multicultural beef stew-I mean melting pot? That is a relevent question since unlike the European, Asian and African immigrants, the illegals from Mexico don't seem to have much of a desire to integrate peacefully. In fact, a lot of them are making outright demands to have the country all but turned over to them. I don't recall the Poles, Vietnamese or Nigerians making similar demands when they started arriving on our shores. A lot of these people don't want to give up on their Mexican heritage, and that's fine, but they're on our side of the border. Just imagine what our country would be like today if the Irish immigrants' descendants still spoke Gaelic, the Germans German, the Poles Polish, Japanese Japanese, etc. instead of English and retained all of the culture of their forefathers.

If you're a typical establishment liberal or Republican, you are no doubt about to start squeeling "RACIST!" with the disgust of an Islamist forced to watch Ariel Sharon's bar mitzvah. Well, if they're so misunderstood, then explain why these types of people were the ones who pushed for the demonstrations in the first place. Funny, I'm not European, but the color of my skin (white) makes me European, not American. The best part? These Mexicans actually have the audacity to claim solidarity with the Cherokee, Sioux and other American Indians that are from areas far away from their Aztec ancestors and who have no more in common with them culturally than the Galicians have in common with the Russians. They want solidarity on nothing less than the repatriation of all whites to Europe and presumably all blacks to Africa, all Asians back to Asia, etc. Even though they claim to not advocate violence, they want a continent that has been racially sterilized of everyone but them.

Of course I don't think that all illegal immigrants are like this, but most of them have an entitlement mentality. Some rich asshole hired them to trim their lawn, babysit their latch key kid so that they could pursue that new beamer, process their poultry, etc. Therefore they think that America invited them here. Here, let's give them the consolation prize of watching their rich employers get sent to prison for hiring illegals and evading Social Security taxes. There are still large communities in many areas of the North, even a century later, that are still defined by immigrant identity. The last thing we need is to take on 12,000,000 illegals, many of whom have no plans to ever give up on their Mexican identity.

There are only three types of people who think that we have no immigration problem. Those who are benefiting from the cheap labor, the real cost of which is born by the other classes of society through higher property and medicare taxes, those who support illegal immigration, and those who are too stupid to see the danger in allowing 12,000,000 illegal immigrants from a country as old as ours that has been a consummate failure as a nation and government since nearly day one.

Y'all can thank Difster for getting me worked up on this.

Is the Jesus of the Gospels too mundane for you? Does that long hippy hair in classical renditions of him turn off your Republican sensibilities? Are you frightened that Jesus might not approve of your "lifestyle choices?" Well, I have great news for you. That's all about to change.

Introducing, My Buddy Jesus. He's a one of a kind Son of God tailor made to you so that your relationship with him is unchallenging, always non-judgmental and always on the drinking buddy level. Can't understand those Zen-like parables of his? Well My Buddy Jesus can be made to talk just like any good ol' boy so that you too can understand the mysteries of Heaven and Earth. Think that Jesus was against The Man^tm? There's nothing like seeing Jesus sporting a Che t shirt and an AK-47 to really make you think that Jesus really meant that the poor mentioned in the beatitudes were just those at the poverty line. Or how about Republican Jesus who doesn't just hate homosexuality, but hates the homosexuals themselves and supports bombing any country back into the stone age just for looking kinda funny at Uncle Sam?

Yes, boys and girls, there is a Jesus for everyone. You are no longer limited by the Jesus of the Gospels and his message of salvation, repentance, mercy and submission to almighty God. If you feel that your excrement smells like petunias, think that the Pharisees got a bad rap for their confidence in their position before God or that Jesus was a flaming liberal who'd make Howard Dean look like a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, we have a Jesus for you!

Order your personalized messiah for $19.95 plus shipping and handling. Call, and we will throw in an option for Buddhist Jesus, Hindu Jesus, Pagan Jesus, Rostafarian Jesus or whatever syncretic Jesus you believe is the true Word of God Made Flesh. Don't wait, call now! Call 1-800-CUSTOM-CHRIST.

If you've ever wondered why the mainstream media is struggling with making the Internet work for it, the very real possibility that this might go through is proof that the executives don't know a bloody thing about how it works:

Facebook, the Web site where students around the world socialize and swap information, has put itself on the block, BusinessWeek Online has learned. The owners of the privately held company have turned down a $750 million offer and hope to fetch as much as $2 billion in a sale, senior industry executives familiar with the matter say.

Okay, I can actually see this happening for a very good reason that doesn't apply to the trashy MySpace. Facebook is a very tightly-designed product. It has the potential to be pretty useful, but not two billion dollars useful by any reasonable estimate. Still, unlike MySpace, it has several things worth noting:

• Facebook is exclusive. You have to have a .edu email address to sign up for it, something that doesn't apply to MySpace. This automatically filters out most of the prepubescent crap that litters MySpace like a Tornado in a junkyard. It also keeps most of the stalkers out because Facebook goes one step further by making your profile by default inaccessible to those outside your school who you haven't authorized. That also cuts down on the potential base of stalkers dramatically.
• Facebook is targetted. There is no hodge podge of different groups to target. It's pretty much exclusively available to those in college or who have graduated from college. Targetting is very good for advertising, and it helps that college students these days are one of the top niche markets in terms of disposable income.
• Facebook draws from the Google school of user interface design. Light weight, easy to use, intuititive and just simply a straight forward design. Take a look around MySpace and you'll swear that by comparison the guys who designed MySpace had barely cracked a book on proper web application design. Not to mention the fact that most MySpace users don't have the decency to use good templates designed by other people who actually know how to make one (why I used a template I found online for my blog).
• Facebook started with a good design. This is the most important aspect of the whole thing aside from the marketting aspect. MySpace has terrible design and security and will have to graft good design on. Facebook started with a solid user interface and design and is working on that foundation. Most major headaches are the result of bad planning and design, and Facebook is a lot slicker in that respect than MySpace.

As I said, I would never, ever call paying even one hundred megabucks a good price tag for something like this. Show me the profit sheets, show me the growth data, and maybe I'd be willing to pay five to ten times the annual revenue for this web property. Last I heard, MySpace only made around $60M in advertising last year, and they were bought for only $600M or so. Facebook is going to have to find either a really stupid executive or a cash cow to justify $2B.

For all of their claims to be hard-headed realists about human nature, there are a lot of social conservatives out there who simply cannot understand the fact that young men have a propensity for, on some level, enjoying the thought of killing people and breaking things. It's the basis of our military recruitment system. There's a reason that 18 year olds, not 48 year olds, are drafted and it doesn't have to do just with the strength of their knees. Combine that with video games that let them run wild in a virtual world, without getting in trouble, and you just might have a means of catharsis, not indoctrination. Rebecca Hagelin proves, however, that many social conservatives cannot grasp this possibility:

With the ever-expanding use of technology by our children, such hearings are critical. We must determine if Moore and other murderers like him are anomalies or if ultra-violent video games dangerously warp the psyches of our youth. Those tempted to scoff at the connection between video games and behavior should bear a couple of things in mind. First, video games are not passive or spectator media. While playing the game, teenage boys and young men - the largest users of video games - actually become the characters who cut up their victims with chainsaws, set them on fire, or chop off their heads.

According to Dr. Elizabeth Carll of the American Psychological Association (who also will testify tomorrow), this active participation enhances the "learning" experience. And video games are often played repeatedly for hours on end - so, hour after hour, teens playing games such as Grand Theft Auto "learn" how to kill police officers and earn points for their barbarianism.

The second fact to keep in mind is that teenagers' brains are still developing and are extremely impressionable. The parents of teens hardly need reminding that for all their joys, teens often lack judgment, critical thinking skills and foresight. Some are better than others, yes, but many (like Moore) are startlingly deficient. In short: Put a "murder simulator" in their hands, and you just might be asking for trouble. But don't put words in my mouth - I am not saying that every kid that plays a violent video game will become a criminal.

Now, let's say that someone were to create a first person shooter based on the War for Independence where you could shoot, stab and beat the hell out of British red coats and tax collectors. Even better, if you shoot them in the head or stomach, you got some sort of feedback like how Unreal Tournament eggs you on when you kill several fighters in a row. How many people would have any problem, in this country, with a video game that lets you tar and feather British government agents? Probably very few, and they'd be too afraid of being called unpatriotic for suggesting that British agents got anything less than what they deserved for keeping us in the Empire.

So what makes British government agents so much more deserving of an ass whoopin than local, corrupt cops in GTA? Is it because they are a symbol of an allgedly democratic, local government as opposed to a monarchy based several thousand miles away on another continent? People like Moore are unstable, hence why they used GTA for "training" and not leisure and a little catharsis like most young men do when they play GTA. I guess I'm in danger of beating my girlfriend because I have snickered over being able to beat up Marge and Ralph Wiggum in Simpsons Hit and Run, if GTA makes others (I never got into it) want to murder cops and prostitutes.

Besides, video games are good for national security. Without proper training on those "murder simulators," how are our fighting men and women going to get used to handling those remote controlled robots and UAVs?

I'm sad to say, but I am now forced to depart from my Nokia 700 now. What has happened? It has been a little schizophrenic from time to time, but tonight it really got to me in a big way. First it was a problem with it not powering on. Then there were problems with the UI randomly screwing up. Finally, it has decided to stop running one of my favorite apps. To put it quaintly, it's not quirky, it's just outright defective so I am left with no choice but to return it. To say that it increasingly doesn't work as advertised would be an understatement at this point. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted I suppose.

I really want one of those Origami devices, but they are just too expensive for me. At $1190 for that Samsung Q1, there is no way that I can afford that at this point. The gadget geeks have been failed by Nokia, Samsung, Microsoft, etc. because they have done an all or nothing approach. Either you get a slow, low-end device with half-baked GTK-based software or you pay out the ass for something at least twice the size of your pants' pocket and end up wondering if it's really just the love child of a PDA and a laptop.

This is what I want. I want a 1Ghz or so Pentium M. A really low end Pentium M, and I want it in a tablet PC form factor. I want 512MB-1GB of RAM, a 4GB-8GB hard drive, a Radeon Mobility or portable GeForce chipset. I also want it to have the sort of inputs that are conducive to mobile gaming, but hidden under retractable plastic guards. Doesn't matter if it's a little too big for my pocket. I wear cargo pants, and as long as I can carry it in my lower leg pocket safely, I'm fine with that. But what I don't want is this extremism. I want a PC that can play SNES, Genesis and even N64-level games, but that also can act as a PDA and run a full suite of Internet apps.

Proof that persecution is the worst thing that Muslims can do to keep the Word of God from reaching those that would believe:

The majority of emails are negative and many are abusive, coming from Muslims who felt that Rahman and other apostates -- including Andaryas himself -- should be severely punished.

But there also are many messages of support, he said.

And then there are emails coming from Afghans wanting to know more about Christianity, asking where they can get a Bible in the Dari or Pashto language, or sharing the news that they had become believers in Jesus Christ.

Among the most stirring messages are those from Afghan Muslims marveling about a faith for which a man was willing to die and wanting to study the Bible further.

"I strongly believe God is using this situation for His glory," Andaryas said. "One man's bold step has shaken the world."

It is much easier to die in the heat of battle or in a savage, lust-driven attack on non-believers than it is to stand trial and risk a slow process of execution (trial, then execution) for one's faith. This is why I have always held the Muslims who are willing to "die for their faith" in deep contempt. They don't know the first thing about what it truly means to die for one's faith in God. Anyone can die in an armed battle, but it is a special breed of believer who is willing to calmly stare death in the face and know that they will be unarmed as they face it.

Penraker provides a great list of terrorists who have failed to be Westernized by the "enlightening" experience of a Western college education. I had a similar experience in my first year in college. I was living with a student from Pakistan, and pre-9-11 the guy was one hell of a nice, laid back guy who wasn't particularly religious. He made some of the overtures of being religious, but often couldn't even bring himself to pray five times a day. Then, after 9-11, he started becoming extremely religious and radical, to the point that he all but wanted me dead.

The educational establishments are not culturally capable of handling this sort of thing. They simply do not appreciate the threat that these people can pose to their other students. Even though my roommate was starting to threaten me with violence, the Office of Residence Life refused to let me out of my living contract, and was terribly slow in processing my request to leave the dorm for a new one. They simply did not take it seriously until my parents called them up and more or less threatened legal action if they didn't expedite my leaving the dorm.

It just goes to show how parochial most "educated" Americans really are. Those that are so arrogant as to believe that a proto-radical will be saved by a mere four years of fancy education and partying are hardly a different breed of chauvenist than those who simply outright admit that they believe that America is the best culture and that everyone can and will submit to it. They may not come out with obvious statements like everyone should speak English around the world because we do, but they certainly believe that all other cultures are so weak that they simply get washed away in the face of American culture.

I have no problem with us educating students from other countries, but they shouldn't be paying out of state tuition. Rather, there should be an international tuition that is based on the assumption that since they have paid no tax to support the system, all of it must be paid up front. We can't screen out these bad apples most of the time, but we can acknowledge that their parents are typically the very wealthy from Islamic countries and charge them every penny we can get accordingly. My roommate came from a very wealthy family, as did all of his Pakistani acquaintances. I don't see why we shouldn't be charging them full price, knowing that there is a chance that this education might be used against us.

After I read through some of Patrick Ross' comments about Tim Lee's paper on the DMCA, I felt that it was necessary to set a few things straight about DRM, since Ross seems to be oblivious to causation vs. correlation. Take this, for example:

On this issue of interoperability, the anti-market nature of this paper is truly present when the author actually complains that there are three video streaming formats -- Real, Windows and QuickTime -- and then acknowledges that Google is adding a fourth. This is a bad thing, we're told, because some content will only play on that player, and apparently open-source programmers have been frustrated in their attempts to break through these proprietary walls. How does this relate to the DMCA? "The reasons are complex, but the DMCA is clearly one of the culprits." Yes, shame on the DMCA for giving us four video formats, with providers experiencing market incentives to offer the fastest, highest-quality, most streamlined content. That's a terrible thing. Better all the standards be forced open so any open-source programmer can fiddle with them. That will produce far better products for consumers. Again, this is the Cato Institute we're talking about here, advocating the obliteration of a growing market to enable the "freedom to tinker."

These are not, I repeat, are not, DRM systems, but rather file formats. Several open source media players can, and do, support these formats in a pretty high quality fashion, not the least of which is VideoLan, which is by far the best so far. Providing interoperability here with the DRM is non-sequitor because one can provide full compatibility between open source and closed source implementations of Windows Media without even scratching at the DRM aspect of Windows Media. Relying on making it extremely difficult to reimplement a technology in order to make it secure is a piss-poor method of securing the content. The real security in the Windows Media DRM exists not in the file format, but the encryption and access controls which are independent of the actual VFW codec itself.

The DMCA, despite Ross' ignorant claim to the contrary, did not "give us four media formats." These formats predate the DMCA in one form or another. RealAudio is actually three years older than the DMCA, QuickTime is 7 years older and MPEG4, the basis of Windows Media, is the same age as the DMCA. The DMCA might have reassured uneasy record executives, but it did not create these formats because a market for them goes back far beyond the time when online distribution of music was technically feasible. There wasn't even a market for portable devices that could play back MP3 until the Diamond Rio was released in 1997, and MP3 players didn't even really become popular until the iPod. Before that, while MP3 players were gaining acceptance quickly, they were nowhere nearly powerful enough or reliable enough to form a key component of online distribution of music.

The freedom to tinker might not be important to Ross, but given the fact that he and his cohort James DeLong are lawyers, not engineers of any sort, his opinion on this is akin to a construction worker having a strong opinion on the dynamics of brain surgery. Anyone who has gone to an ACM meeting, knows that the freedom to tinker is a key part of a real technical education in Computer Science. To even seriously deride the freedom to tinker as some ivory toweresque, childish pursuit reveals a stark ignorance of how software engineers learn their trade. I can tell you this, right now Ross, there are very few good programmers who have left the bulk of their education to the sanitized curricula of most Computer Science departments. Most of my peers in college who were any bit good at programming did things ranging from mod chipping their game consoles to hacking together wifi antennas with dead Pringles cans. Other, more radical schools, had people who seriously dove into understanding how the XBox itself worked and catalogued its every technical benefit and flaw.

The freedom to tinker, Ross, is what gave you Perl, the langauge that powers Movable Type, your blog suite. Since you have such a distinct disgust with those of us who believe that the right to tinker with one's property is God-given, not government-given, do the right thing and stop using Movable Type. Switch your web servers over to Windows 2003, install IIS and get a blog suite that uses ASP.NET, not CGI. You and James DeLong are using the tools that came about as a result of those that like to tinker, yet you whine, bitch and moan about how childish it is for anyone to feel that they need to be able to tinker with software.

And this would be why we have "No Child Left Behind." Clearly, we cannot have any child escape the mandatory poisioning--I mean healing powers--of vaccines:

At the end of last year, President Bush signed the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREPA), granting blanket immunity to pharmaceutical companies for vaccine-induced injuries. The measure is a carte blanche for industry, allowing it even to reintroduce mercury in vaccines that are currently clean, and under the behest of the World Health Organization, to continue shipping tainted vaccine to the "developing world."

The federal government has known enough to stop the use of mercury in vaccines for more than a decade. Industry has known of the dangers of thimerosal since at least 1991.[1] But using the preservative made the sale of vaccines more profitable. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has at times seemed just as concerned about these profits as the companies themselves! Cynics have noted the "revolving door" between industry and government that seems to alter the perspective of both.

The next time that someone tells you that without the FDA, we'd all be poisoned by bad food and drugs, show them this and this. When I have kids, I'll be damned if they are going to get any vaccines that have even a trace of themerosal in them. Oh, but it's the government and they'd never, ever knowingly let you get hurt, right? Then why are they allowing the pharmaceuticals to put a known neurotoxin into your kid's vaccines?

Lest television viewers be allowed to make their own choices, one of the contributors from the PFF's IPCentral is now suggesting that they need shepherds:

Tom Giovanetti provides the only criticism that I think has some merit. In my paper I point out that technologies can be harmful if they weaken property rights. My Star Trek Transporter was such an example. For non-advertising based markets, like a box that unscrambles pay-TV signals, this would also be a correct analogy. For advertising based markets this might not be the best analogy. I put the term "property rights" in quotes in the second sentence in the offending paragraph of the original paper to indicate that it wasn't exactly a property right but I neglected to put it in quotes in the first sentence, which is my omission. Nevertheless, it doesn't really matter what you call it. This paragraph could easily have been removed from the article and nothing else would change.

We could say that the hypothesized TIVO should be banned because it leads consumers to an inferior position (without mentioning the term property rights) and that cable descramblers should be banned because they lead to inferior positions because they destroy property rights. Both are parasitic, as described.

No matter how you look at it, TIVO does not send the consumer into an inferior position. If anything, it gives them the best of all possible worlds, even if their use of the features might end up having damaging consequences for advertising-based markets. The primary problem here is precisely the fact that TIVO is a disruptive device that has the ability to rip gaping holes into the business model of the content producers.

The argument comes down more or less to a simple standard. If the ends justify the means, then do it. The case for banning cable descramblers is that they enable you to steal access to a service that you did not pay for. Please, spare me the legalistic contortions about implicit contracts and all that other poppy cock that IP lawyers love. I do not recall signing a legally binding contract to not time-shift and watch all of the advertisements in the programming that I like to watch. There is a clear property rights reason for banning the descramblers, but to ban TIVO would be a violation of property rights in the name of expediency, which is hardly any better than the arguments behind the Kelo ruling.

The only inherent efficiency in the advertising model is that it produces vast volumes of trash that appeals to the lowest common denominator. Niche markets such as science fiction and fantasy are largely barren save for what can be shown on the Sci Fi channel because the advertising model forces content producers to derive their funding from mass appeal. Niche, cult classics in the making stand little chance because of this. Firefly is a great example. The series would probably do a lot better today if it were operated by a coherent management strategy (the idiots at Fox reordered it so the debut was the final episode of all things) and followed Battlestar Galactica's lead and put each new episode on sale online a day after it was shown. Instead, Firefly was watered down and forced to appeal to the masses, whose idea of Science Fiction begins at Star Trek and ends with Star Wars.

It's ironic to me that the IP professionals at the PFF can see the obvious possibility that tiered consumer access to the Internet might be the only way to advance that market, but are unwilling to admit the distinct possibility that people might have to actually pay per show for what they like. I watch very little TV, but my service costs me $30/month. Another user who watches several times more TV pays the same rate. Why is this any less of a free-rider scenario than unlimited broadband access? How is my paying the same rate for very little content I like, any different than someone paying the same rate for very little use of the Internet? It's not different at all.

Apparently someone didn't get the memo

Jyllands-Postens revealed today that a French TV Station France-2 has undercover video of the Danish Cartoon Faking Imams threatening to blow up a Moderate Danish Muslim politician and the Ministry!

Ahmed Akkari the lying Imam behind the Danish cartoon riots, and accused child abuser, is currently out of the country at a Islamic gathering in Bahrain on Western attitudes towards Islam.

The poor Muslims just can't help themselves. They have a condition known as Suicide Bomber's Tourettes, a condition where they uncontrollably make threats to blow up anyone who disagrees with them. Instead of getting pissed off at them, it is clear that the only humane response is to send them to get doped up on the finest Amsterdam hash and heroin so that hopefully we can calm their nerves.

This is a genuine disability that affects numbers well into the tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of otherwise decent people in the Islamic world. Do not be prejudiced toward them, it's only words caused by an uncontrollable twitch. There is no reason to be alarmed that they actually mean what they say and are bonafide psychotics. Please, move along. There is nothing to see here or worry about.

Richard Stallman is beyond any shadow of a doubt the Pat Robertson of the free and open source movements. He has consistently voiced opinions that are poisonous to a peaceful and cooperative relationship between commercial enterprise and open source development. Rather ironic since the biggest reason that his software ever got so popular was because many of its maintainers were hired by software development corporations. This, however, shows that the man has simply gone off the deep end and no longer even pretends to care about allowing others to make money:

Would it be ethical to steal lines of unfree code from companies like Microsoft and Oracle and use them to create a "free" version of that program?

It would not be unethical, but it would not really work, since if Oracle ever found out, it would be able to suppress the use of that free software. The reason for my conclusion is that making a program proprietary is wrong. To liberate the code, if it is possible, would not be theft, any more than freeing a slave is theft (which is what the slave owner would surely call it).

I really wish that were just being quoted out of context, but it isn't. The question is too blunt, and the answer too long and consistent from start to finish. After Wozniak got the transcript thrown right back at him over his assertion that he never said half of what he was alleged to have said, I'm not about to give Stallman the benefit of the doubt here.

The man really does have communist inclinations. He would freely steal that which does not belong to him, rather than convince the developer(s) to release it to him. I cannot respect a man, regardless of his accomplishments, who seriously says that the only reason he doesn't steal the work of others and appropriate it for his own work is that lawyers and men with guns (police) might take exception to that.

It should be worth noting that the most popular non-closed source software that is not the stuff written by the "free software movement," but rather the open source stuff like the Apache web server, PHP, Perl, the Jakarta tools, OpenOffice and Mozilla. Stallman is like the Canadian socialized healthcare purists who seriously believe that it is good that private healthcare is illegal in Canada. It really irks him that people can do stuff that doesn't jive with his vision for how things ought to be, even when they aren't infringing on his rights. In fact, this is one of the most amusing things about it all. Here's the netcraft analysis of www.gnu.org's web servers:

Apache/1.3.33 Debian GNU/Linux mod_python/2.7.10 Python/2.3.5

There are a lot of components that GNU created in there, but Linux, Python, mod_python and Apache most certainly are not GNU components.

TCSDaily.com is making a very convincing case that the solution to poverty in Africa has nothing to do with the amount of foreign aid that gets to it, but rather the culture of corruption which has crippled the ability of the economies in Africa to operate:

If Obasanjo is right, African leaders embezzle three times more revenue than Africa was promised in foreign "aid" at the Gleneagles summit. The size of corruption in Africa makes a mockery of the arguments for foreign aid that have been advanced by Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University in his 2005 book "The End of Poverty." In Sachs's view, poverty in Africa prevents accumulation of domestic savings. Low savings result in low domestic investment and low investment impedes economic growth. Foreign aid, therefore, is needed to fill that apparent gap between insufficient savings and the requisite investment in the economy.

In fact, Africa is quite rich. As the economist Walter Williams of George Mason University wrote, "In terms of natural resources, Africa is the world's richest continent. It has 50 percent of the world's gold, most of the world's diamonds and chromium, 90 percent of the cobalt, 40 percent of the world's potential hydroelectric power, 65 percent of the manganese, millions of acres of untilled farmland as well as other natural resources." What Africa needs is not "aid," but less corruption.

I don't believe in taxpayer subsidized, but if we are going to do this, then there is a very simple way to deal with this. Any country that is going to receive foreign aid that is sponsored by the richer countries has to agree to one very simple condition. If your leaders attempt to embezzle the aid money, and don't use it precisely as we allocated it, then the rich countries reserve the right to assassinate everyone in the country's government who was responsible for the corruption and to bar their families from fleeing to first world countries for life.

All it would take would be for these countries to not be able to account for a few billion dollars of aid money, the US Marine Corps and special forces to land in the capitol and publicly execute everyone in their government who embezzled the aid money to make the would-be criminals think twice about abusing foreign aid. Brutal, perhaps, but eloquent in the language of these brutal despots. It would send them a clear message that if they think they're going to oppress their people on our dime, they will pay in blood.

Chomsky is dead set against tax havens and has railed against trusts as tools for the rich to perpetuate structural inequality. And yet, "A few years back he went to Boston's venerable white-shoe law firm Palmer and Dodge and, with the help of a tax attorney specializing in 'income-tax planning,' set up an irrevocable trust to protect his assets against Uncle Sam." When questioned about this, Chomsky told Schweizer, "I don't apologize for putting aside money for my children and grandchildren."

The author replies with what becomes a well worn refrain by the end of the book: that Chomsky "offered no explanation for why he condemns others who are equally proud of their provision for their children and who try to protect their assets from Uncle Sam."

It's trite but true: If you go looking for hypocrisy, you'll usually find it. Moralists and moralizers of every stripe make for particularly plump targets, because they often fail to live up to their creeds. This should not be surprising, but Schweizer often treats liberal hypocrisy as though it is shocking. A little subtlety would have made Schweizer's argument more appealing, if not more persuasive.

Jeremy Lott writing for Reason does make a pretty persuasive case about why left-liberal hypocrisy is good for the country, but misses one of the key differences here between the different types of moralists. There are libertarian moralists, like me and several of the libertarians on my blogroll, who are personally inclined toward social conservatism while maintaining a libertarian view of politics. One can, for example, agree with the Parent's Television Council on most issues as they pertain to morality, but be completely opposed to enforcing those moral standards. That's an important difference.

 

Left-liberalism is first and foremost a purely statist ideology. There are left-leaning libertarians, but a true modern left-liberal is far more statist that even many conservatives. Where conservatives can see and appreciate a need for the different spheres of authority that different institutions have such as church and family, the left sees authority beginning in the masses and ending in the state. Many liberals now are so bureaucratic in their beliefs that they have eschewed a belief that authority comes from the people to embracing the state as the sole source of legitimate authority. That's why leftist hypocrisy, while having a limiting influence on their actions, is still a problem.

Consistency would require Noam Chomsky to admit that he is wrong and then either divest himself of all of that property or to change his views. Ultimately, his views and actions are a problem because his attitude toward property is precisely that of the old Soviet Nomenklatura. Good enough for us, too good for you. He's not even trying to live up to what he purports to believe in, and that is a much more malicious form of moral hypocrite than a fire brand preacher who likes a prostitute or two on the side.

I have always conceived of the God of the Bible as an engineer before he is a king. Unlike any other king, he is the maker of his realm, and as a perfect being, he must clearly put perfect thought into perfect design and then into perfect form. I admit that I believe in the creation story, if just not quite the timeline that is literally associated with it by young Earth creationists. For certain reasons, reasons I won't go into, I can conceive of how it is possible. Perhaps it is only fitting that the Vox mob is crowing about polygamy.

As a sort of liberal, lay calvinist, I am naturally not going to see eye-to-eye with most of them. I believe in unconditional election, total depravity, predestination and all of the other calvinist doctrines. I also believe in the doctrine that is typically called something like "the two wills of God." The mistake that arminians, and they dominate Vox's blog by a wide margin, make is that they assume that God actually likes most of what happens. God allows a lot of totally wicked stuff to happen because God respects our free will, though within the limits that our wills are bound to our natures. In the very depths of my soul, as a Christian and an engineer, I see in Genesis the fundamental truth about the relationship between human mates. One to one, and only one to one, as the preferred will of God. Our birth rates reflect this too, as we are born almost 1:1 male, female.

This makes perfect sense to me, as a lay calvinist, because scripture makes it clear that this world we have today is a perversion of God's natural order. The world, itself, is a perversion of God's design. Yet even a total perversion retains some connection to what it originally was. The existence of polygamy in ancient Israel does not mean that God approved of it. In a state of grace, monogamy would be the only relationship possible because Adam and Eve were 1:1, and the purpose of salvation is a return to grace. Yes, I know that in heaven there will be no marriage, but in a theoretical state of grace here and now, it would be one woman for one man because that was the original design.

It's fine by me for anyone who wants to, to live according to the Law, but they should do so with the understanding that it is the Spirit, not the Law, which brings salvation. There is no salvation for those who satisfy themselves with making feeble attempts to live just by the literal basics of the Law. There will be greater mercy for the man who gives up a hypothetical freedom to have more than one wife, and who struggles terribly with lust, for the sake of pleasing God, than there will be for a man who takes multiple wives and satisfies himself that since he is marrying the women he desires that he is not a sexual sinner. In theory the two are not mutually exclusive, but only a blind man lives with the expectation that he is the exception to a rule.

The mainstream media has come up with a new way to fund its operations. So-called "metered fact-checking" will be provided to customers. Articles will vary in their accuracy based on how much the customer paid for from the newspaper. The following tiers of service are expected to be provided, ordered from cheapest to most expensive:

1. Complete and unadulterated b.s.
2. Rumor mill
3. Ripped from the New York Times
4. An intern was assigned to it
5. A full time reporter checked on it during a lunch break
6. A full time reporter spent the entire day checking it
7. Guaranteed accurate or your money back

Since free-riding bloggers have been taking advantage of the free content provided by reputable newspapers, the New York Times and others have decided that they will only offer the lowest tiers to their non-subscribing customers. It is expected that they will outsource the fact checking of these stories deep into the jungles of Africa where packs of endangered apes will be given full protection from poachers and hunters in exchange for writing and fact checking the lowest tiers of stories.

Apparently a lot of conservatives are going apeshit over V for Vendetta. Some are even going ballistic because they see it as an attack on that poor fascist Tony Blair. Yes, I called Blair a fascist. He has openly said that he doesn't believe in due process of law. The surveillance regime that he has sought since the push for the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which actually makes it a crime to not hand over one's encryption keys among other things, is the most extreme in the Western world today. Not only that, but the police increasingly harass people there for holding politically incorrect views. Blair has lead the way on attacks against freedom of speech and his government has subjected gun owners to kangaroo courts. Oh, and he's a member of the Fabian Society, a movement dedicated to the spread of socialism.

It is very telling to me that so many conservatives feel pity for the destruction of a symbol of a national government, simply because of its age, and feel very defensive about a suggestion that Tony Blair is a very bad leader. Anyone who finds common cause with Tony Blair cannot be considered a rightist because the man stands for almost everything that the right is supposed to be opposed to. He is anti-civil liberties in a way that if Bush is (not saying he is), he could never admit without giving the Democrats fertile grounds for impeaching him. He is also even more of an open traitor to Britain with his attempts to push European Unionization on the British people.

Have conservatives gotten so sick of Bush that they are now pining for the days of Slick Willy? Why sympathize with the Blair government? It was, and is, the British kissing cousin of the Clinton Administration. Don't let his funny accent fool you, Blair may be a friend of the United States now, but what he represents is pure poison.

I just got my Nokia 770. It's a great little PDA that runs linux. The mini version of Opera that comes with it is good enough for blogging amng other things. Give it a look. They cost about $350 in the US.

After my recent dealings with the proudly "childfree," it's time to show a little solidarity with those who have gotten in trouble with the forces of political correctness for having a free mind on an "offensive topic." Read this in particular as this deaf woman's little rant is both amusing and honest compared to the whiners that went after Lee. Read their posts as a way of telling the thin-skinned weaklings to piss off with their petty attempts to silence that which makes them uncomfortable.

People say that the news media likes to scare people away from the Internet in order to protect their business, and there's a lot of truth to that. The New York Times has just given some pretty good proof of that with their latest summary of the action by the Department of Justice against Google:

SAN FRANCISCO, March 17 (Reuters) - As expected, a federal judge ruled on Friday that Google, the Internet search engine, must turn over some search data including 50,000 Web addresses to the government for a study of child pornography online.

But the judge, James Ware of the Federal District Court for Northern California, denied a government request that Google be ordered to hand over keywords that customers use to search its database.

For a much clearer report, read this from CNet's News.com. The actual case has nothing to do with child pornography, but rather with child access to pornography. I think it's pretty safe to say that if this case were about child pornography, then the DoJ would have come in swinging with a hell of a lot more than a civil suit against Google if they refused to cooperate. They'd at least have warrants that would have passed the usual muster to get access to some of Google's records.

The next time that someone tries to tell you that professional journalism is heads and shoulders above blogging in terms in quality and accuracy, remember this. I'm sure that a number of bloggers made this same error for one reason or another. Even if it's just an accident, it does prove once again that you cannot trust any news source at face value. Sadly, one must actually look at the data given and check the facts/analyze it themselves. Yes, I know, it's tough, but you have to use reason and cross-reference every so often...

While I cannot support the so-called porn tax that is part of the proposal, there is much to be said about the need for a .XXX domain:

The new legislative proposal has met with opposition from the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian advocacy group that has charged that .xxx domains would grant yet another opportunity to flood society with pornography. The Free Speech Coalition, which represents the adult entertainment industry, also voiced disapproval, saying the relocation project was unnecessary and would lead to the "ghettoization of protected speech."

This is why conservatives cannot get anywhere on the pornography issue. They choose the all or nothing approach to controlling it. Pornography does not to be controlled because only adults should have full access to adult pornography. Sorry, my fellow libertarians, but if vice is going to remain legal, there must be some effective controls in place to at least make a pretense that all punishment for offenses related to it are levied against adults that freely chose their actions. You cannot punish a drug user if they're 11 the same way you could if they're 25 for a crime committed while under the influence. Once they're adults, if they want to risk warping their minds and becoming sex offenders or ruining their sexualities, an admittedly small possibility, that's their choice, but the whole punishment regime is torn down when kids aren't effectively blocked from access.

Now, who wants to bet that the content filtering companies have been helping things along by trying to stir up anti-.xxx sentiment since an international agreement on .xxx would mean that there'd be little market for their products?

I've been a skeptic for years of the Atkins diet, but now I feel vindicated since it really has been shown to pose potentially fatal problems:

Urine and blood analysis showed she had severe ketoacidosis, a condition in which dangerously high levels of ketone acids build up in the liver as a result of a depletion of the hormone insulin.

Ketoacidosis, which is more usually seen among diabetics and victims of starvation, can lead to a coma.

The patient responded well to rehydration and glucose infusion and left hospital after four days.

"Our patient had an underlying ketosis caused by the Atkins diet and developed severe ketoacidosis," say the researchers, adding that mild pancreatitis or stomach infection may have contributed to the problem.

Just one of the many reasons why people really should just accept the rule that nothing worth having is easy to come by and move on with their lives. If you want to not be obese, you have to find ways to limit how much you eat, and you have to exercise. You cannot look good and be in good shape while eating like a pig. Model-gorgeous people, especially women, have to jump through hoops in almost every case to maintain those kinds of looks.

That, and I cannot take seriously a diet that tells people to eat fatty meat products as the bulk of their diet without telling them to exercise fanatically everyday to burn off the cholesterol. Why not just call it the heart attack diet too while we're at it? Apparently the primary beneficiary of this diet is the medical profession because of the increased business that it brings to them.

I know that this story is a little old, but it needs to not be forgotten. Deputy Webb, the guy who shot Airman Carrion did so in cold blood, regardless of whatever excuse can be given for him. Adrenaline is not an excuse for ordering someone to stand up and then shoot them three times, once in the chest, once in the shoulder and once in the thigh.

"I went to the crime scene, and I saw the car and I saw his clothes there. And at that point, I just felt, 'Oh, my god. What happened?"

If a passerby hadn't happened to take the video, asserts Mariela, "They would have let my husband bleed to death, and they would have switched that whole story around.

My dad worked for the Newport News Police Department in the 1970s and saw some truly wicked things happen there. One of the deciding factors for his move to federal law enforcement back then was that he couldn't be around people that used to beat stray animals to death for fun. Despite my problems with my father, he was one of the few cops there that genuinely understood that it can taint and break a good cop's soul to be around such scoundrels.

The next time you think about trusting your right to defend yourself with a firearm to the government, think about Airmen Carrion and realize that it could happen to you. Not saying it will, but it could. It means that by surrendering your right to keep and bear arms in any form to the government along with your right to defend yourself, you are possibly trusting your security to men who, badge and uniform notwithstanding, are just criminals at heart. That's why when it gets right down to it, I don't trust cops for my protection. I just trust them to help pick up the pieces afterward. Sometimes.

This applies doubly to women. No woman who values her safety should rely on law enforcement for daily protection. Cops cannot protect you from a criminal, especially not one that is dedicated to hurting you. He'll find a way to get between you and the cops. Guns may be big and scary on one hand, but a six foot tall, muscular man with a distinct desire to do you harm will be a lot scarier than carrying and using a gun. A gun is a woman's best friend in a fight. It's what gives her a leg up on a man who is coming at her to do her serious harm.

Remember this rule of thumb if you're ever tempted to rely primarily on law enforcement for protection. Just as a college degree does not inherently make you qualified in your field, a restraining order is just a piece of paper when there is not a cop around you who knows to enforce it.

The mainstream media hopes to push attention away from its identity problems onto others, when there are more important questions to be asked:

"But, in the blogosphere, there is no accountability. The identity of the messenger and the integrity of the message are never called into question."

One can only conclude at this point that Mr. Blacker is being willfully obtuse - he certainly can't possibly be as naive and uninformed about blogging as he appears. Does he really believe that nobody questions the "integrity" of what's written on a blog?

And yet no one asks why it is that major media outlets often own the newspapers and news channels for multiple cities. As I recall, the Wilmington Star of North Carolina, the paper for the town I lived in before moving to Virginia, is owned by the New York Times. But no one sees any problem with that! No siree, the fact that local opinion in towns and cities hundreds of miles away are shaped by one central corporation is no problem at all! People think that it is a local paper when in fact it is no more an independent, local company than the Warsaw Pact governments were independent of the USSR.

Of course, if this doesn't seem to be an overriding problem, then you probably got the mildly tongue-in-cheek tone of my "outrage." The original story, the one that Daily Ablution was critiquing, was suggesting that bloggers also have undue influence. How is Walmart working with some of them any different than the New York Times shaping the news in a relatively large town in a red state? Not only that, but it can be construed as them releasing their news under an alias when the real corporation is in fact the New York Times.

And if you're worried about bloggers spreading a few, mostly harmless rumors about you, you might want to be terrified at the fact checking skills of the mainstream media. Even after Dan Rather, they continue to have the adaptation skills of a dinosaur.

Yet another editor has been fired from a student newspaper for having the audacity to publish the Danish cartoons that have outraged Muslims around the world. Who the hell do these student newspapers think they are by fostering debate? Didn't they know that Islam and the feelings of Muslims are beyond question and that there is no room for debating this very clear moral point? My God, the kids today actually think that the university is supposed to foster a free exchange of ideas by offering a forum for discussion and allowing people to freely post controversial material in order to educate others on what a controversy is over. What philistines!

As Glenn Reynolds notes, this is just part of a dangerous and increasing trend in the academy that has been going on for years. First it was harassment of conservative and libertarian students in "social sciences" classes, now it is the outright assault on debate because it might offend others' sensibilities. Well, it offends me that they are wasting tax dollars on protecting the feelings of others at the expense of an open environment for academic debate.

I would love to throw one of these thin-skinned people down, strap them to a chair and give them the whole Clockwork Orange therapy that Alex received. They can substitute in some rap or urdu techno for the soundtrack if they want. These thin-skinned people have no place in the academic system. They're anti-intellectual barbarians who clearly show that they don't have the mental fortitude to engage in the sort of passionate and rational debate that is the mark of a democratic state that is still brimming with vitality. That, and many of these people are foreigners! They're coming to our country, getting taxpayer-subsidized education and they have the audacity to try to control our system as though they were citizens.

The people who pull this crap are not interested in debate. They want to have their way and have no one else get in their way of having it all. Being tolerant of those expressing offensive ideas, not the SAT, should be the first prerequisite of being admitted to a college. If you cannot stomach ideas that offend or challenge you, you are too parochial and weak-minded to be able to attend a real university. You aren't committed to debate and can't handle ideas that might be bitter and hard truths. That automatically makes you unworthy of participating in any field that seeks to uncover truth and beauty.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is considered the holy grail of the content industries. In theory, it is a type of technology that allows for a variety of uses and transaction types for their copyrighted goods. The idea is that a content buyer could purchase or rent access to either a part of a copyrighted work or the entire work. The iTunes Music Store is the best example of DRM available today, and it represents the best hopes of those who support DRM.

Unfortunately for many advocates of DRM, the recent lawsuit against Samsung over its failure to properly implement the encryption algorithms that form the basis of the DVD standard's DRM reveals a fundamental weakness in DRM. The more open DRM is to implementation by competing vendors, the more likely defects and security holes are to be introduced, either due to failure on the part of the engineers or due to a managerial decision to try to one up the competition by allowing illicit copying of copyrighted materials.

Since the late nineties, many of the more savvy DVD player buyers have known that occasionally manufacturers from Asia, especially China and Korea, would sometimes leave "debugging" modes open in their products so that many of the restrictions could be lifted by the user if they knew the right combination of buttons to access the special areas of the player's software. The restriction features that could be lifted ranged from simply ignoring the odious region codes to allowing complete and unfettered access to the content of the DVD. For usually less than a hundred dollars, it was very easy to find a DVD player that would play unprotected DVDs, a prerequisite for viewing personal copies of rented movies.

To make DRM work, in theory, the market for any good that could be used to allow access to DRM-protected copyrighted goods would have to be a heavily controlled one. All consumer electronics would have to be subjected to a rigorous standardization certification process, the source code that implements their playback functions analyzed with a fine-toothed comb for any backdoors that might have been put there to entice consumers and competition in general would have to be scaled back. The DRM technology would only be as strong as the worst product that takes advantage of it because all it takes is for one bad implementation to provide a workable method to circumvent the whole DRM standard's protection capabilities.

Each new competing product would represent a new potential gap in the DRM technology's security. Instead of thinking of the market for competing electronics as an open field, one must think of DRM-enabled goods as being like a fence between consumers with pirate tendencies and content sellers. This is why competing implementations must be controlled by not only a private sector standardization party, but also by the force of law if the impact of bad implementations is to be at all contained.

If one product that implements a major DRM standard has a problem, it is an easy way for people to circumvent the security mechanisms of the content, regardless of how well the DRM technology might be in theory. Like links in a fence, DRM is only as good as its worst implementation, which is why choice must be tightly controlled to make it work.

Open source development would be one of the first victims of this process because it would be excluded from hardware specifications for new DRM-enabled computers. To do anything other than this would defeat the whole purpose of trying to implement DRM in the first place on that hardware because the open source software could be patched to not use the hardware's capabilities. It is not, as some have argued, a matter of a sponsor, such as IBM, licensing the patents. Rather it is an inherent incompatibility between the security needs of DRM and the open source development model. Access to the source code is nothing short of a crater in the middle of the DRM fence.

The most significant blow to the idea of open DRM is that there is little historical evidence to support it being a realistic possibility. Electronics and software buyers tend to standardize, rather than buy competing products, even if they are nearly one hundred percent compatible. A DRM provider that is in the lead, such as Apple, has two choices. Either they control the market with an iron fist or risk being reduced to a niche player. The fact that Apple, a company that knows all too well that the desire to standardize trumps most computer buyers' other concerns, should give DRM advocates pause about just how interoperable the future DRM will be. If Apple has their way, their FairPlay DRM product and multimedia DRM will be synonymous, not one of many major players. Since they control the market for portable media players and content delivery, interoperability offers them nothing more than good feelings with "consumer advocates," a trade off that Steve Jobs would never be willing to make.

They say that if you repeat a lie or some propaganda enough that people eventually start to believe it. That looks just like what the New York Times is doing once again with the Electoral College:

The Electoral College is an antidemocratic relic. Everyone who remembers 2000 knows that it can lead to the election of the candidate who loses the popular vote as president. But the Electoral College's other serious flaws are perhaps even more debilitating for a democracy. It focuses presidential elections on just a handful of battleground states, and pushes the rest of the nation's voters to the sidelines.

This is only valid if you believe that the United States is a single homogenous nation state rather than a collection of fifty member states who have their own local economies and preferences. Despite the appearance that America is "one nation, under God with liberty and justice for all," America is increasingly a divided country. Divided along ethnic lines, religious lines, rural versus metropolitan. The more weight that is given to the smaller regions, the less likely they are to rebel and tear the whole system apart.

Yes, it is true that the electoral college is anti-democratic, but so is the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights extends the right to speak freely or own a firearm to all people in the country, even if a white-dominated region doesn't want blacks to own firearms or a Muslim doesn't like the idea that Jews can freely practice their religion with government protection in America. There have to be limits to democracy lest it become the tyranny of the majority. If the minorities are not included in the debate and assured some basic, irrevocable rights and protections, then human nature will kick in and they will assert them through even more undemocratic means.

The blue staters who are still smarting over the electoral college handing Bush the 2000 election would do well to consider the possibility that it is the only thing that has kept this country together since the South was forcefully reintegrated into the Union. You people may be so parochial as to think that the smaller red states are just like your quaint small towns in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York or California, but that is anything but the case. If the last fifty to one hundred years had been filled with the red states consistently being overruled in Congress and having little impact on electing a President, then there would have been open talks of secession on a level that would have made the Confederate States of America look small by comparison.

While we're at it, why isn't anyone bitching about the fact that California only has fifty some representatives in Congress? The Electoral College is based on congressional representation, and if there is a problem with the Electoral College then it exists in part also in the Congress. Why not a better compromise in the form of increasing the legislated limit on the House of Representatives to between 800 and 1,000 representatives while shifting the system over to proportional representation within each state? We could start by adding 65 new seats in 2008, bringing the total up to 500 members of the House and then adding an additional 100 new seats every election cycle until we hit the 800-1000 member limit. That way, the blue states get better representation, and the liberals in the red states can actually stand a better chance of electing legislators that agree with their views.

Maybe it's just me, but one would think that it'd be absolutely necessary for the President to carry the political support of as many entire states as possible. Part of the reason why the war between the states happened was that the South played no role in electing Lincoln. Ideally the President needs to represent as many states as possible and in that sense, California is equal to South Dakota. Can anyone imagine a federal Europe where the Italians, Greeks and Scandanavian countries had no assurance that they would have an automatic, real say in who lead the federalized European Union just because France and Germany were much bigger countries? Don't let the fact that America is a mostly linguistically homogenous country fool you. When smaller countries or states feel like they have no real power to control what happens to them, they tend to want to have no part in what the bigger states want. The fastest way to break up America would be the direct election of the President, especially if the election fraud by illegal immigrants in the blue states doesn't get resolved.

Now that I have completed the Sun Certified Java Associate and am studying for the Sun Certified Java Programmer exam, I thought it would be a good time to post a mini-review of the SCJA exam. Don't get your hopes up, I'm not going to reveal to you what you need to know to pass it because Sun did actually get that part entirely right when they wrote up the exam objectives and provided the list of reference materials.

The exam wasn't hard, but it was not easy either. It is a very, very nit-picky exam and it is very important that you read each question very thoroughly and take the time to look at all of the answers because it is a real stickler for detail. Read what it is asking, not what you think and you should be fine. The average question is just like the practice exam questions, so if you do fine there then chances are it will be easy for you.

If you get the practice exam, which I did because it was going to be paid for as part of my continuing training, then you will get to see what the exam is like in most areas. However, it will in no way prepare you for the sometimes extremely asinine programming questions. I got almost all of them right without any problems, but if you are not like me, and don't have some real programming experience and/or a Computer Science degree, they may be what fails you. Anyone who can make it thorugh the freshman year of a Computer Science program should be able to fully grok thse questions and get most of them right. This is primarily a stumbling block for the ITT Tech types who want to just buy an education and get a few flashy certs.

The exam is good for teaching you the basic style that Sun uses and the potential disparities between the practice material and the actual exams with future certifications. Beyond that, this certification is basically a weed out exam that proves that you have some idea of what different Java technologies are for, which is a much needed skill. Too many people want to overly complicate Java development, and this exam at least marks you as someone who has a strong idea of what most major Java technologies were good for according to Sun and its partners in the JCP.

Certifications like this are good for people with professional programming experience and those looking to get started, but it should go without saying that you need to have additional credentials. Just because you can pass one of these exams doesn't mean you know how to write a good EJB, it just means that you know what an EJB is and how to write one. At best, think of these as a wedge that can be used to prop open the door for you, but in practice be a little cynical and treat them as nothing more than a supplement to a full four year degree in Computer Science or a related degree.

Somewhere along the way, a bureaucrat decided that since a debt-free America might collapse the banking and credit system, that paying off your debt constitutes an act of soft terrorism. This is the kind of stuff that, as a software engineer, makes me wonder if the bureaucrats that come up with these rules aren't just a bunch of punk teenagers who sit around all day thinking up ways to screw with older people:

They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. And the money doesn't move until the threat alert is lifted.

Yet more proof that the USA PATRIOT Act and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security were general power grabs rather than a specifically anti-terrorist measure. Only the most idiotic of terrorists would actually be caught by this police power. Think about this one for a minute. Weapons are very expensive, and a bank isn't going to easily hand over a $15,000 or higher credit card. Not only that, but some credit card companies already have anti-fraud filters in place that deactivate a credit card if a large amount of money is used up in a single transaction or a small period of time, unless the owner calls and verifies with a live representative that the transaction is actually theirs.

Even if this were to have some use in anti-terrorism cases, the number of law-abiding citizens that would be subjected to harrassment would not justify it. Say what you will, those of you who insist that Bush is some fearless warrior instead of a toothless nation builder, but you cannot justify this system. Not only are the odds low that most terrorists would even use an American bank or credit system in the first place, but they aren't stupid. They are simply not going to go buy a dirty bomb on a Visa. Not only could they not easily get a credit card with enough credit to handle the transaction, but a single transaction registering upwards of $100,000 on most credit cards would immediately shut down the card at the bank.

This whole thing is just a waste of time. The number of false positives and the amount of wasted manpower are nothing but distractions from the real problem, which is that we continue to have a bumbling system of state and federal authorities that can't even get a driver's license system working. Who is actually stupid enough to trust the DoHS with vetting their financial transactions when they can't even get the airports and docks properly secured? And don't even get me started on the state-level drug warriors. The day that the state governments actually put some teeth into the security with their drivers licenses is the day that I'll have any faith in their ability to fight terrorism.

Apparently the administration at Century College, like an increasing number of colleges, feels that students are not getting a proper taste of fascism so that one day they can appreciate their civil liberties and franchise:

(CNSNews.com) - A part-time professor at Century College in Minnesota is under fire from students and the school administration for posting copies of the now-infamous Mohammed cartoons on a college bulletin board.

Karen Murdock, an adjunct professor of geography, first posted the cartoons on a community board on Feb. 7, along with related newspaper articles about the controversy and blank paper for students and faculty comments.

According to Murdock, the cartoons were torn down repeatedly, and she was told by college administrators not to repost them.

There are two realistic ways that one can look at this from the bigger picture view. Since these colleges are usually willing to discuss Mein Kampf, the Communist Manifesto and some even have sociology discussions that cover white supremacy, either they are not concerned with the sensibilities of their students in general, or just afraid of having Muslims go nuts on them. The former is, of course, a given, and the latter is the most likely explanation for why they would give such a unique status to the Muslims, even though unlike the Jews, they have never been subject to a true campaign of genocide by any government. Yet, we still discuss Nazism, including the stereotypes that are portrayed, and I can't imagine many Jews find those comfortable. Somehow, they've just grown thicker skin...

These campus Muslims are the consummate whiners, bitchers and moaners today. They take the cake from all of the other professional victims. No group around the world is as responsible for as much religion-inspired bloodshed as they, but the fact that Muslims of one stripe or another are the preeminent victimizers of every religious and non-religious group around the world that they encounter doesn't seem to give these thin-skinned losers even a moment's pause. Searching online for accounts of what Christians and pagans of various stripes have dealt with at the hands of Islamists can be enough to cause violent revulsion in any remotely decent human being. These are the radicals, the starry-eyed true believers, and what they do to Christian women in Egypt alone would make every feminist want to burn down Yale's administrative offices in outrage over letting a campaigner and shill for the Taliban, the poster child of radical mysogenist Islam, get admitted if they actually believed in defending human rights for women around the world. Emphasis on that if because it's easier for these restless daddy's girls to guilt trip liberal colleges and corporations into subsidizing childcare than it is to admit that women in many countries around the world are treated lower than dog excrement compared to them.

There are three groups that benefit from this sodomizing of academic freedom. The Islamists who get to change our way of life by scaring the limp-wristed crypto-fascists in the academic bureaucracies, the trade schools who will suddenly find that many people find no compelling difference between them and many colleges and universities, and finally, the universities and community colleges that still have a vague notion of academic freedom. Yes, all five of those universities and community colleges will benefit from this. What any student with an open mind at Century College should be asking themselves at this point is what will their degree be worth at this rate, and is it too late to get a refund?

The media is trying to make a smalltime case out of a recent alleged rape and abduction of a thirteen year old girl in New York. Now, there is some evidence that the policy are beginning to doubt her story. According to the Calgary Sun, her story might actually be starting to fall apart:

"The credibility of what happened here is in doubt but we'll give her every benefit of the doubt to make sure that if anything happened, she'll get the help she needs," Troy said.

Police said the girl did not have serious health problems.

New York police were investigating the rape allegations and it was not clear whether the girl went to New York willingly.

"We believe the majority of things she's done since she went out of the house has been voluntary," said Capt. Jack Wisely.

Presumably in a case like this, they would include a mental health diagnosis as part of it, given the severity of her claims. She is not claiming only rape, but rather she is claiming that she was subjected to being kidnapped and locked in a dark basement by her kidnappers. That, combined with being raped by two men, should be sufficient to at least noticeably shake her up, if not mildly traumatize her. The fact that the police are beginning to suggest that she might have a normal bill of health is troubling because the police rarely make comments about a case in public that is this bad, unless they are trying to warn the public that the case is much more complicated than meets the eye.

The fact that the police made an arrest, does not actually verify the charges that she has brought because of the statutory rape angle here. At her age, even if she did consent to having sex with him, she could not legally do so and he would be charged for that crime. What the media has not been forthcoming with is the kind of family that she comes from, any additional speculation from the police based on the evidence they have and most importantly, any examples of her being a "troubled youth."

Something tells me that this case very well may come out as just another Tawana Brawley incident. No doubt the police have that possibility in mind considering the last time that a girl came out with a seemingly outrageous rape claim. If that is how it ends up being, the police she prosecute her without mercy to send a clear signal not just to women who make false accusations that rape is a serious claim and false claims will be punished severely, but also to send a message to men, who badly need it especially in the defendant's age group, that the system will punish women who falsely accuse them. Nothing makes a man more cynical about rape than to see some woman cry rape and get away with it because she was "troubled" or "trying to make a statement." Since men are half the population, increasing the cynicism of half of the potential jurors in rape cases couldn't possibly advance the cause of punishing bonafide rape cases.

It's almost sad to see the number of people who are struggling with their wireless Internet access. It's really not rocket science if you bother to actually read the manual a little, but that's asking too much of the average highly impatient computer user. Not even cars are totally "Plug N Play," but for some reason many computer users expect their computers to require absolutely no knowledge to be able to use.

Let's put it into non-technical terms for the average user. How are you going to set up basic security on your router, which involves setting up a password, if you never read the documentation on how to configure the router in the first place? Isn't it just a little bit difficult to have a secure connection if you are just relying on default settings? Sure, it wouldn't be too difficult to manually feed the password to your computer, but how would the router know that your neighbor in the next house, apartment or that creepy guy off the street isn't on the list of people that can get access?

Most of this stuff would be common sense to the average user if they had ever developed some critical thinking skills. This is not to say that ignorance is stupidity because it is not. There's nothing wrong with saying that you know nothing and recognize that you need help getting your stuff working. That's... just not what most of these people do. They refuse to acknowledge that maybe they need to read the frickin manual or get someone with real working knowledge to help them.

If you cannot figure out how to use a Linksys router without help, and then are too proud to figure out how to use it with the manual that is provided, then you shouldn't have wireless Internet access. It's for your own safety. People can get on your wireless connection and use it for their own, possibly nefarious ends. Do you really want to be the grandma or grandpa that has the creepy pedophile use your unsecured wireless router to download child pornography? How about be the yuppy whose punk neighbor unleashes a devastating worm or a breaks into some financial systems using your wireless connection? If you don't even have 128bit encryption enabled on your wirless connection, this is a risk you take. While I don't use WEP, I do use very strict MAC filtering, which means that no one can actually talk to my router period unless I have actually looked at their ethernet card and manually authorized access.

Realistically, it can't get a whole lot easier than what we have today. Maybe with some biometrics support, people can do some damn good security, but we're still a long way away from being able to buy a $39.99 fingerprint scanner and use it to send more secure information to the router which then verifies that one has access. The short term solution might be to convert it into a very long password or to make a very large has value out of it, but for now we are stuck with what we've got, and these things do require a little bit of education in order to use properly. It wouldn't hurt people to actually sit down and learn a little bit about networking because it would teach them valuable strategies for how to identify potential scams. For an increasing number of people, it could make the difference between getting scammed and being able to trust their credit history and banking institutions.

They said that they didn't want to lose a student of Hashemi's "calibre" again. I wonder just what standards they were using when they were gauging his calibre? His extreme ability to engage in at least half-assed sophistry? Or was it the possibility of bringing in a relic of a regime straight out of the bowels of the dark ages to be put on display in a Political Science class? All I know is that even most Americans would get reamed by all but the most hard left-wing professor of logic and critical thinking for making an argument this abysmally stupid:

A person with a bad past may deserve a second chance. Yet Hashemi's recent statements show a consistent tendency to whitewash his former masters. He suggests that the Taliban regime went bad because ''the radicals were taking over and doing crazy stuff" -- as opposed, presumably, to the sane and moderate early days. On the public executions of adulterous women, he explains to the Times of London that ''there were also executions happening in Texas."

There are waves that reach several feet high along the shorelines of the southern Atlantic states all the time, but no one would seriously argue that those shorelines are as dangerous as the surfing areas of the Pacific where they are closer to tidal waves than the gentle waves of the Atlantic. This is a perfect example of why many leftists are not worth debating. See how ludicrous his argument is on its face? You have Texas which gives due process of law to even the worst offenders, and you have the Taliban which would dispense "law and order" on the streets without even so much as a kangaroo court. Not only that, but in practice, there are virtually no juries that would be willing to send a woman to prison for adultery, even if it were the law of the land in a particular state. So, why am I so disgusted toward leftists in general? Take this excuse for logic:

One striking aspect of this controversy is the reaction from Yale's liberal community. Della Sentilles, a Yale senior, recently wrote a piece for the Yale Daily News denouncing such manifestations of rampant misogyny at Yale as the shortage of tenured female professors and poor childcare options. On her blog, a reader asked Sentilles about the presence at Yale of a former spokesman for one of the world's most misogynistic regimes. Her reply: ''As a white American feminist, I do not feel comfortable making statements or judgments about other cultures, especially statements that suggest one culture is more sexist and repressive than another. American feminism is often linked to and manipulated by the state in order to further its own imperialist ends."

In other words, she flat out refuses to engage her critical thinking skills because it might force her to come to two conclusions. First of all, perhaps the United States is not repressive toward women, or as close to being non-repressive toward women that a society can be without causing an inevitable backlash by men that swings the pendulum dangerously away from women's rights. Second, is it not clear that a society which allows women to work in all industries and professions, seek the same education as men from all but a handful of private universities, places no restrictions on their clothing except those that apply equally to men and that allows women to engage in the full scope of civil liberties and civic participation that men are able to, is a society far less repressive toward women than one like Afghanistan under the Taliban?

There is no exercise of reason, no basic sense of proportion, nothing in this feminist blogger's refusal to judge the Taliban for what it was. If you cannot bring yourself to condemn a regime as brutal as the Taliban for what are blatant assaults on basic human rights, then you have no moral authority on anything, and probably no morals in general for that matter. In fact, I would go so far as to say that Della Sentilles is a traitor to any movement that claims to actually want an environment that is free and liberal toward women because she refuses to support condemnation of the Taliban, a regime that waged armed aggression against free women in Afghanistan. As George Orwell noted:

"Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me.'"

And that applies equally to the "War on Terror", even if you, like me, bitterly disagree with the Bush Administration on how to fight it or what the scope of the conflict really is. By refusing to condemn the Taliban, she has objectively said that she is not against what they stand for. The present tense there is no coincidence because we have not yet won the conflict in Afghanistan; the Taliban are still a small, but real threat to the new Afghanistan's security. The enemy is still out there, plotting a way to return to power in Afghanistan and wash away the modest gains that women have made since the Taliban was ousted from power in a wave of bloodshed and terror.

In hindsight, I think Orwell might have actually missed a third possibility. Perhaps the pacificist who refuses to fight what they claim to be against is nothing more than a bitter, selfish opportunist. Maybe Sentilles and other "feminists" like her are not actually concerned with building a world in which women in general are afforded basic civil rights, property rights and allowed to work in all professions, but rather they are just concerned with "their plight." As if the "plight" of allegedly educated, (typically) white women at Ivy League schools was anything other than a figment of their own imagination, especially when juxtaposed with the very real plight of women in countries like Afghanistan under the Taliban.

There are some really good things about being a software engineer, not the least of which being that you've got some measure of job security if for no other reason than most people know so little about your field. Sure they know you "write code," but damned if they could tell you what that code even looks like. The downside to all of this, is that they also tend to have little understanding of what differentiates software engineering, and other types of engineering, from other white collar jobs. CNet does a very good job at proving this point, even though it's supposed to cover the results of software engineering fulltime.

Maybe if things had not ended badly for Fiorina and HP. I got an earful after writing a couple of columns in Fiorina's defense. She was being unfairly singled out because of her gender and I said so. More than a few e-interlocutors told me in no uncertain terms that Fiorina was little more than a marketing bimbo out to destroy a venerable Silicon Valley institution.

At a time when HP was getting its ass kicked three ways across the computer industry in the desktop and server markets by Dell, yeah, I would say that the merger with a sloth like Compaq was a bad idea. A. Very. Bad. Idea. HP was, and is, a research-driven company. Tying them down to a company with barely any research and development that sold primarily commodity computers, and that was getting beaten down by a major rival, was a blatantly stupid decision. I remember being in high school at the time, reading the tech news and thinking it was one of the dumbest things that I saw a tech CEO do. Granted, SGI doesn't count because they didn't have a reality distortion field. They were a reality distortion field in search of a company with a business plan and products. But anway...

Supposedly she did some good for their printer division by making them produce results faster, but that doesn't overcome the damage that she did with her idiot merger idea. If anything, she should have considered splitting the company apart, taking the innovative, research-driven side away from the slowly failing computer side of the business. Let Dell have that market and focus on the strengths. This was not a stupid decision that you needed a lot of analytical skills for. They were slowly losing to Dell on this front

If anything, what Fiorina did was she put a distinctly bad taste in the mouths of board members and their wannabes for women who are so head strong that they'll make business decisions that everyone in their right mind are bad, even though they have a number of smart people telling them not to do it. That would seem to me to be another aspect. Would any business want to hire on a female CEO who is so inclined toward her way or the highway because she's going to "prove it to the Old White Men^tm" that she's a woman and her roar will be the mightiest in the land, that she won't listen to reason? I think that a much simpler explanation here may be that the men who run these boards of directors are very conservative, establishment-oriented people who want team players they can control and it terrifies them to think that they might get a female CEO who will do her own thing because she doesn't want to be controlled by the old boy network. Most corporate manager types are risk averse, and I can't see anything but risk in that.

As for why I am inclined to think that the women who make it to these ranks would not be nice, good-spirited women who are hard workers and great coworkers? Studies show that you wouldn't be entirely paranoid to pack heat around a disturbingly large amount of the "management material" in corporate America.

Apparently Arnold Kling's suggestion that patent law get a fair use doctrine doesn't sit too well with some of those who stand to benefit from a more rigid patent system:

Moreover, as an economist, Kling surely appreciates the genius of the market for determining what is worthwhile - and he must also appreciate the unpredictability of the market. Many inventions create the market which they come to dominate. The BlackBerry might be a perfect example of that. The owners of the BlackBerry idea should not be penalized for being ahead of the market. (Indeed, the feuding parties finally came to agreement late last week).

Indeed, it is crucial not to employ hindsight, especially in evaluating patents. Of course, once something has already been invented, it's easy to see its practical implications, its marketability, its appeal, its usefulness. It is the genius of the U.S. patent system that it rewards inventors without forcing them to be fortunetellers.

The problem with this argument is that something which is not obvious to a member of the general public or a patent attorney might be quite obvious to an experience professional or tradesman in the industry that produced the patent. To a patent attorney, the idea of the Blackberry might seem breath-takingly innovative, but it is actually quite derivative from the perspective of a computer hardware or software engineer, but then I seriously doubt that the U.S. Patent Office employs anyone with any real experience in either of those disciplines.

Portable, hand-held devices are not a new concept. The Nintendo Gameboy was available in the late eights to early nineties, and had most of the rudimentary components of what any engineer would recognize as a bonafide computer. This is why the Blackberry patent is so problematic. Toss in feature after feature on a foundation like the Gameboy and what do you get? You get a Blackberry. Add a faster processor and more memory. That's one major step. Add in a portable storage mechanism. That's another major hurdle out of the way. Add in wireless communications technology. What do you have there? You have the hardware that can form the foundation of a new portable computer that works for more than playing games distributed on read-only portable media.

Perhaps it is the fact that the services that the Blackberry provides work over a wireless network that makes them seem so innovative to a normal, non-engineer person. However, what exactly is so innovative, in the mildly revolutionary as opposed to evolutionary sense, about adding increased, hardware capabilities which are the norm or becoming the norm for standard PCs and then bundling standard PC applications on a handheld device? The email functions there have existed long before the Blackberry was anything even close to a realistic invention in the mind of the people that patented the idea on creating it. Web browsing is not innovative in and of itself because the World Wide Web and HTML were created and released as open technologies back during the heyday of NeXT. There is nothing particularly patent-worthy in a small, limited functionality computer that can provide these functions in the palm of your hand. It is nothing more than an extension of existing technologies with a different form factor and concise user interface.

What we really need is in fact a discriminatory patent process that allows certain industries to receive longer protection than others. Pharmaceuticals could probably do well to have their terms actually increased by a few years, whereas software engineering is hardly the bastion of radical innovation that it is made out to be. In fact, many ideas in software engineering that are popular today have their roots in technology that is as much as thirty years old. The idea of running a program in an intermediate, platform-independent bytecode representation inside of a virtual machine with a "just in time compiler" goes back to the Smalltalk language (first real language to run inside a virtual machine) and P-Code for Pascal (the intermediate, platform-independent bytecode format). Both Microsoft's .NET and Sun's Java platforms are based on these designs, and even a significant amount of their design goes back to innovation that was done in the areas of design patterns by the Xerox PARC team that developed Smalltalk.

Given the fact that competition in computing exists primarily through interoperability, there is also a clear public interest in weakening patent protection for software and hardware companies. The tendency in the computer industry is that if buyers do not have interoperable choices, they standardize on one platform or technology and then competition rapidly begins to dwindle. Three of the four largest markets, desktop operating systems, office suites, web browsers and stanalone email clients illustrate this all too well. One vendor controls them very well, and it is only the web browser market, which has little room for money making because the two most popular browsers are completely free, that competition is genuinely returning to.

It's also worth noting that software in particular is very cheap to develop compared to many IP-intensive industries. There would not be so many successful software companies of all sizes if it required the sort of extremely intensive material investment that many manufacturing businesses require. Consumers can best reap the benefits of competition if we are afforded the chaotic innovation of allowing companies to fudge on respecting each others patent rights in the name of interoperability. No company in their right mind would license patents such as the patents on the Microsoft Office file formats without trying to cripple the competition. Unfortunately, without being able to use one another's file formats and network protocols, networking and other important evolutionary innovations will take longer to implement because of the "standards wars" that will, and often have, resulted from companies competing on the basis of patents and not superior products.

As the Volokh Conspiracy and Instapundit both point out today, the real problem with the USA PATRIOT Act is that it is not a specifically anti-terrorism piece of legislation. This is the key part that the supporters of this legislation do not want to deal with when they defend it. Most of the opponents of the USA PATRIOT Act who are not hand-wringing ACLU types are not specifically against the powers that it grants for antiterrorism cases per se, but rather we are opposed to it on the grounds that there are no limits on who in the federal law enforcement apparatus can actually use the powers. If there were strong safeguards that allowed it to only be used in pure, or almost entirely purely, anti-terrorism actions, that would be quite different, but the USA PATRIOT Act has been used by federal agents against non-terrorist criminals.

Article IV, Section of the United States Constitution is quite possibly the most powerful anti-terrorism package in the federal government's practical arsenal. Here's the full text:

The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence

Article IV, Section 4 would allow the President to take on emergency powers to defend the states against terrorism and illegal immigration. Bush could, without congressional approval, use this section of the Constitution to shut down the borders with federal troops, order the deportation of all Saudi, Iranian and Syrian nationals from the country and shut down the visa lottery for any country that is producing large number of anti-American terrorists. Since the U.S. Constitution supercedes federal law itself, the President can appeal to the Constitution and say that he is constitutionally obligated to do these things, regardless of the sentiment in Congress.

Instead, consider what President Bush has not done. He has not secured the border, which is a major problem, in fact a fundamental flaw in his national security program. He has not stopped immigration and visits by foreign nationals from countries that are producing large numbers of terrorists and he has not threatened to use his constitutional powers to shut down the DMV offices of the states that refuse to provide adequate background checks for their driver license application processes. All on the grounds that these state governments' actions constitute a clear and present danger to the other states in the union and make enforcing federal security obligations impossible in many strategic port operations.

Terrorism is very often one of many crimes that are committed, which is why the USA PATRIOT Act was by design so broad. You cannot easily empower the government in specific acts of law to take actions against terrorists without providing sweeping general police powers. Terrorists have their hands in drug dealing, the slave (sexual and otherwise) trade, weapons dealing, money laundering, illegal immigration and much more. Their other activities run the gamut of state and federal crimes. They're terrorists, not church ladies. The odds that you're going to find a major terrorist who has not committed other major crimes are unlikely. Hence why there is so much appeal for federal agencies to support the USA PATRIOT Act. It makes their job a lot easier in many areas, terrorism only being one of many. Anyone watching the DoJ's case against Google should take note that even in this allegedly most dire of struggles, one in which the fate of America depends on our government's ability to throw out certain constitutional protections, the government can find time to go after the pornography industry.

From Slate:

Dismantling a tradition and carving out a new one can be far more confusing than adjusting to glitches in the status quo. Progressive women find themselves navigating marriage as a choose-your-own-adventure story, which raises the chances of feeling that they perhaps made the wrong turn along the way. A progressive-minded woman doesn't just have higher expectations; she's more likely to pay attention to every setback, and see her husband's failure to listen at dinner as evidence of larger inequity. Meanwhile, the paradox of rising expectations can make real differences seem bigger even as they grow smaller.

I have never understood how so many of the women that I have known could be like this and not understand why they make themselves unhappy. This is precisely the sort of judgmentalism that we ought to not be encouraging, but it's the one that cannot be touched because it is the "progressive" women that are doing it. The women who do this should look at their own lives and seriously consider how they would feel if they were on the receiving end of this treatment.

The excuse for this behavior is usually some sort of half-assed whining about how they're just trying to make him into a better man, or he's always inconsiderate. Something stupid. Any woman that complains and nags on a regular basis about people who are really not that bad is automatically a nonstarter for me when it comes to dating. I'm much more up front about this than most men are. Try to nag me to death and you're going out on the curb. I don't try to control my women, and I expect the same courtesy from them.

And the most screwed up part? That women do this to each other more than they do it to men. Guys, we're usually the ones getting off easy here. A lot of women out there do things to each other that would get a man killed if he did it to another man. Maybe that is part of the problem, and a possible solution. Maybe if catty, snarky women who pull these games lived under the threat of physical harm the way that men do with one another, they'd think twice about abusing other women and men.

Some of you "childfree" people might be thinking that I have closed down the old post for comments because I couldn't stomach your scathing and erudite criticisms. To the contrary. Like ADHD children, y'all have chosen to run off on wild tangents, ranting and raving about things that I have never said, nor do I support.

Unlike the majority of the commenters, I can separate what someone supports intellectually and what they support through force of law. I have no desire to force you people to have children. In fact, based on your comments, I'm more inclined to say that the law shouldn't allow you to have children based on how nasty some of the comments on my blog and BratFree are toward children in general. But, again, I don't actually support that stance either. You people mistake your prediliction for controlling others with my suggestion that with freedom comes responsibility.

Contrary to popular belief amongst the freely infertile who have come to lambast me for my alleged stupidity, I do not believe that any woman should be forced to give up her career for her kids. I said that in most cases she ought to. Ought to. In other words if she cannot do so, or is in a position where there is a great deal of value to her career beyond a need for fullfillment pushing papers in an office, then that is perfectly understandable. I, and many others of both genders, am not going to give up a belief that being a housewife is a good role for women and that it is preferable that most women should try to be as much of a fulltime mother as they possibly can. You might as well stop now if you're going to try to convince me that it's perfectly fine for a woman to demand that a man give up his sports car, nights with the guys, video games and beer for a minivan, a regular schedule that focuses almost exclusively on his family and little for himself all the while she gets to have a career for her own fullfillment when she probably doesn't need it. And yes, ideally I would say that any man who could quit his job to work close to home to be more supportive of his wife and kids ought to do so to take a more active role. But the sad little fact of life is that women by and large, even most "enlightened" feminists do not respect men who stay at or near home rather than focus on the office.

So, to recap, as I close these threads off, I am not in favor of forcing women to do anything in terms of their lifestyle choices. I am not in favor of letting fraud, waste and abuse go unpunished. I am for reduction in the scope of government to reduce the cost of government to all of us. You and I constitutes us. That means I agree with you people that you shouldn't have to pay the taxes you do because I believe that everyone's taxes are too high, except those that don't pay taxes. Just don't start on that "I'm subsidizing your little shit" routine, unless you're willing to forego that "little shit" being obligated to pay for your Social Security, Medicare or any other benefits, including a government pension. If you don't like property taxes, which I personally despise, then replace them and/or fix the spending problem so that they aren't necessary at all. Education is only 3x higher than the fraud, waste and abuse known as corporate welfare spending. With that gone, you'd barely even notice the loss.

You've been a great and merry band of trolls, but the amusement has worn out now. I would have been willing to debate some of you, but then you did that which I hate the most. You put together strawmen of epic proportions that had no resemblence to me, and then proceeded to lynch them. I can't debate a mob, and sadly, that's what y'all are since pretty much every last one of you has refused to read my posts and comments for comprehension. Go ahead and deny it, but any honest person would be able to step back and realize that I am not arguing for forcing women to do anything in regard to starting a family, save for my opposition to abortion, which is based first and foremost in logic, not religion.

So as you have no doubt guessed by now, the comments and trackbacks on these posts are closed now. Any attempts to post comments to other posts will result in them getting unceremoniously labeled as spam in SpamKarma 2.2, which happens to be a rather thorough and vicious spam filter. Besides, why waste your time anymore beating these strawmen to death. Surely by now y'all have grown fatigued by the attavistic revelry that has been shown on that one threat in particular.

Thank you, members of BratFree, for gracing my blog with your abandonment of fertility and hatred of humanity in general. I didn't even get all of the way through your forum because of comments like this:

OMGosh.....what is a single, CF lady to do? ?Trying to find a companion/Husband ?who is also CF is like a needle in a hay-stack. I have a reasonably good job, I work out, I don't smoke or drink, I even started going back to church! ?I have tried several computer dating sites, even put a personal ad in a newspaper, and both times, wrote ?EXACTLY what I am looking for, ?"Childfree woman seeks Childfree Man for companionship" and I can't believe what IDIOTS Duh's are! ? Some DUH wrote me and said ?"My little snotley is sooo smart....you would fall in love with him...why not take a chance and meet us"? ?Another Duh replied and said how speshul his DNA is and I would love to meet him....

And of course, this:

I'm sorry, pot...I couldn't hear you because kettle was so loud. ?The only thing worse than a dumbass breeder is a dumbass fyooture breeder.

Well, guess who is going to be the one to leave a legacy behind. That would be me. The fyooture breeder. Not you, Mr. Smartypants Freely Chooses No Children. Or is it because you're such an asshole that even women like the one quoted before your juvenile comment won't date you? Even if I hated children, I couldn't imagine wanting to be in any possible way associated with idiots like the ones that seem to congregate around BratFree. Here's a little hint. Maybe you'd find meeting intelligent mates, oh wait, life partners, to be a lot easier if you'd learn to write like an adult instead of a teenager frantically text messaging during class.

Just a thought, from someone stupid enough to consider a biological imperative with both religion and science emphatically agree which, to generally be a good thing to listen to.

If Japan could figure out a way to have three baby girls for every baby boy, they'd have the most successful way to colonize the intelligentsia of other countries every discovered in human history.

It must be so hard for the willfully childless to watch all of those icky breeders spreading the genes. Who do they think they are? By what right do they repopulate the society that gave birth to them? Have they no shame that they would impose upon the world replacements for themselves so that they are leaving a country, not a mere geographic region, behind when they die?

If I have incensed you willfully childless whiners, then good! I do not begrudge you your chosen path, but I do begrudge you your simultaneous feeling that you ought to contribute nothing to the betterment of the next generation, but be able to receive a lot of the short term benefits of the next generation's labors through increased investment values, lower taxes, etc. Feel free to stop supporting property taxes for education. I don't support them either. I'd much rather pay an increased income tax instead rather than pay rent to the government for my property.

You people just don't get it, do you? Your taxes that don't go to the education of my generation go to support things that you benefit from and to support older generations. The fact that you have paid into the Social Security system is non-sequitor to your relationship with my generation. The generations that came before you, paid to support your generations' educations which is what allowed you to support the older generations through your Social Security taxes and the increased value you added to the economy. They enabled you to become productive, and in turn you contributed something back.

But my generation, I'm in my early twenties, will likely see no benefit from Social Security and you begrudge us the education money that goes toward getting the education we need to support you. In other words, you want us and our parents to foot the bill for our part, and then contribute to support you. This is not what those who came before you offered you. They offered you an education in exchange for productive investment into the economy that supported them. You accepted, and now you want to short change the next generations and have the audacity to tell us that we're the problem.

I have no kids right now, thank God, but I don't mind paying for educating more kids. The only thing I complain about is having to support the terribly inept public schools. I'd rather pay additional taxes to support vouchers because of the increased quality of education that it'd support, which would in turn mean more opportunities for people to advance themselves, ultimately resulting in a better economy for me. Don't even waste your time arguing tax fairness with me because I vote straight ticket libertarian in every national election. You liberals probably have nothing on me when it comes to supporting limited, fiscally-responsible government and fair tax policies.

For those of you that want fairness in taxes and spending, consider this. Vote for people who will spend responsibly and not wastefully. It is perfectly fair to make you pay to ease the burden of raising a family because raising kids, whether they're yours or adopted, is not a lifestyle choice. It's not like being homosexual, going to a gay bath house, getting AIDS and then demanding that your lifestyle choice be supported by the taxpayers. Rather, it is a civilization choice. No children, no future generation of Americans. Get it now? Do you really want to bring in immigrants to replace you, knowing how well that has worked in Europe? It sure has worked so well for France. Look at all of the wonderful pyrotechnics skills that those immigrant children brought to the table in Paris a little while ago for what, two weeks? Why would they want to integrate when they know that in another generation, there won't be a culture left to integrate into? All they have to do is wait and eventually they can continue to live as they want, as foreigners, in our country. What a great fate you would leave us to, if you people had your way.

We need tax reform, we need regulation reform. We need a hell of a lot of reform. What we don't need is a system that provides no benefit to having a family. I don't mind helping to support others' kids, even though I'm a young man in the target age group (college/post-college) that typically wants to have the least responsibility to care for others outside their friends and family. It's a rational decision, on my part, to continue to support programs to support the education of others. A society that doesn't breed enough replacements and doesn't educate them is a society that is going to end up making me work harder for less of a return on my labor and capital. And in all seriousness, I wouldn't mind not paying for your Social Security in exchange for you not paying for my future Masters of Science in Computer Science or my future kids' education. The other expenditures, we're all getting screwed on. We're all getting screwed over on the fraud, waste and abuse. It's a matter of degree, not who's the victim here. So stop acting like you people are the only ones getting the raw end of the deal on that.

It seems customary these days to compare our current War on Terrorism to America's previous great struggles in World War II and the Cold War, despite the ample evidence that they share little in common. One of the key differences between the terrorists and the Axis powers of World War II is that that the Germans, Italians and Japanese were very clear-cut enemies. They had militaries, borders, civilians and clear division of responsibility, well-defined roles in the war against America and her allies, and of course, there was as clear point where victory could be declared. Take over the territory of an Axis power, and the war has been won, even if the peace is still up for grabs.

The terrorists that we faced today, on the other hand, are not so clear cut. They have no uniforms, have no conventional divisions to throw at the United States Army and Marine Corps. They have no borders, and in fact Al Qaida in particular is an internationalist armed group. What do they look like? An Arab, a Pakistani, a Malaysian, a Frenchman and even Americans, white and dark-skinned Hispanic so far. They are a shadow army, who when successful, hits us in a spectacular way that leaves the public shocked. We are left with periods of complete peace and normalcy punctuated by moments of extreme carnage. The embassies in Africa, the USS Cole and finally, the twin towers and the Pentagon. They are an entirely new threat, and one that we cannot prepare for unless we abandon old methods and analogies and adopt an unapologetic willingness to defend our people at the expense of our enemies, not our own country's freedoms.

Even if we overthrow all of the state sponsors of terrorism, that will not be enough to stop the terrorists because of what they represent, namely expansionist Islam. I prefer to use the phrase expansionist Islam, as I feel it is a more appropriate way of grouping together not just the radicals, but anyone in the Islamic world that is sympathetic to their aims. It's a mistake to assume that secular words can win a war of ideas against the words that zealots believe come straight from the mind of God.

Time and again, Western civilization has been under assault by the forces of expansionist Islam, and it is time that we consider the possibility that there is a fundamental flaw in Islam itself as a religion. We can explain away radical Islam as some bastard child of revolutionary Marxism and Islamic religiosity, but how does that explain the Islamic conquests of Egypt, Spain, much of Eastern Europe, Persia and India, all of which happened before the time of Marx? Surely there is something deeper here than mere mixing of radical left-wing politics and religion.

Using force to "jump start" a culture of freedom and democracy is ironic, as coercion is not something that should mark the beginning of a new, (classical) liberal order. Kern seems to forget that Japan and Germany are staunchly collectivist societies today and that Italy has been a royal mess among Western democratic states for most of the time since World War II. Simply saying the words "French Revolution" suffices to demonstrate that outside of the Anglosphere, even the Western democratic states have a long history of failed attempts at democratic, liberal government. The only reason that America's revolution was successful was that the culture was already in place and the revolution was a nature outpouring of that sentiment.

As a libertarian hawk, I sympathize with Kern's desire to liberate others, but do not share his optimism, given the difference betweens between our past conflicts and the one we face today. The War on Terror is not another Cold War, rather it is another chapter in an ancient armed struggle between expansionist Islam and the rest of the world. What we fight today is not a political ideology, but a religion, and religions are an entirely more difficult beast to defeat than a popular political ideology that can collapse simply due to an inherent inability to produce the promised goods.

Heaven on Earth was what the leftist Nazis and Communists offered on this side of eternity, and that's why they failed. Expansionist Islam offers Heaven on the other side of eternity, and that is an idea whose roots go back to the heart of mankind in the darkest regions of antiquity shrouded in the mists of time. We won't be able to win a few, humane battles against them and cause them to collapse as they see their economies fail to produce on par with our more efficient capitalist methods. Rather, I fear that we may end up having to so thoroughly crush our enemies' faith in their god that they abandon him once and for all if we are going to end this war once and for all.

This got me thinking about the actual contribution of childless people to society, and I think that there is a very simple way to end this little problem once and for all. If an adult has neither adopted a child nor raised one of their own, nor made a sincere attempt to do either of those, at the age of fifty they are given two choices. Either they renounce their welfare benefits, remove themselves from social security and medicare, as well as accept having any government pension frozen at current cost of living levels, or they take a major income tax hike.

Since they're not meaningfully contributing to the next generation of workers who will be able to support that system, they ought to be forced to either pay their share or withdraw. Give them a choice, since the only way that most people could actually produce enough economic value to justify their state benefits is to have children. Yep, I said it. You have to actually be productive to be worth society paying for your benefits.

If the childless people out there who brag about not having kids think that I am being unfair, then I have but one simply question. Why should I have to pay social security and medicare taxes to support them since I'm only twenty two years old and will never see any personal benefit? They complain that they see no benefit from the taxes that go to pay for the education of my generation, so by that same logic I shouldn't have to pay any taxes to support their state benefits. It's a fair trade, but then I doubt that the people who are predisposed to this thought process really care much about fair economic exchange.

Lately I have been writing a program that uses SQLite 3 and ADO.NET 2.0 for local information storage, and so in the spirit of sharing, I decided that it would be a good idea to provide a simple example of how to use the ADO.NET driver. Nothing particularly fancy per se, just a simple example to show how to start the connection and all that.

Reference the namespace:

using System.Data.SQLite;

How to actually set up and use the connection/command.

SQLConnection connection = new SQLConnection("Data Source=mydatabase.db");

connection.Open();

SQLCommand command = new SQLCommand(connection);

command.CommandText = "create table users (id integer primary key autoincrement, username varchar(32), password varchar(128))";

command.ExecuteNonQuery();

Will, I never felt I was "swiping" anything. I merely posted a copy of each photo with a link back to the photographer's site. The members at my blog used the links to go look at each artists portfolio, which you would know if you had read the comments. I am not playing any kind of card here. The first I knew of the anger some of you felt was from Mr. Turrill who never had any his photos on my blog. He threatened me with all kinds of lawsuits and then came here to stir up more trouble.

You just don't get it, do you? There was never any intent to "steal" anything. In fact, the intent was quite the opposite - to promote the artistic efforts of yourself and the other photographers here. I don't expect you to believe that. It is obvious to me that you all have your minds made up and nothing I could say or do would mollify any of you.

As for "class", at least I have the courage to face my accusers in an attempt to address your grievances with me in a rational manner.

Well, consider me someone who will never be a customer of any of the members of photo.net ranting and raving like lunatics about their photos getting "swiped" by Allen from BMEWS. Believe it or not, but I do have a dog in the hunt/race that we call the copyright wars and it's on the pro-copyright side. I am an aspiring author and a software engineer by trade and hobby. My future success will depend not only on my ability to make products that people want to buy, but on the existance of a system that is able to protect me from people who are ripping me off. However, I do not consider people posting my content on their blogs to be ripping me off as I have made clear in my new copyright policy. In fact, I am pleased whenever someone reads my fiction and posts comments about it that help me do better.

Exposure is good, obscurity is bad. Didn't you guys at photo.net ever figure out that basic lesson about selling art? Yes, screw with Allen and make asses out of yourselves. That's great. Parade around your Bern Convention copyright powers like a Soviet military parade intended to intimidate anyone who might actually, well, like your work enough to say "hey look at this amateur photographer! His stuff is great, go check him out." Did you ever think it would be easy, that you could simply put up a few pictures and not have to make hundreds of high quality products to sell as you increase your name recognition, ie your brand?

I don't begrudge them their right to be self-destructive, but my only logical question for them is, if you're struggling to make a name for yourself as an amateur trying to go professional, is it really a good idea to get in a pointless pissing match with the owner of a large blog who really likes your work and is trying to direct his readers to your works that you have posted online, sans DRM? Yes, mark your first baby steps into the world of professional photography by your inability to be civil and thankful that he is a big fan and wants others to appreciate your work. Did it ever occur to you guys that a civil discussion might work for both sides, and might make his readers want to buy prints?

Just because you can do something, doesn't mean that you should do it. As a matter of fact, sometimes it is the worst thing you can do. I'm sure that Allen will end up with a lot of grief over this, and I will be sure to let my art-buying friends and family know that photo.net is not the place to go for good pictures for making prints online because of the temperment of its contributors. Oh wait, chances are I won't have to do that because your work is so small scale that they'd only find it through blind luck anyway. You can complain, whine and even threaten to unleash your flying monkeys on my household, but it won't matter. You've lost a potential customer.

I am not a materialistic person in many respects, thus I do not expect that any compensation or advanced permission requests to reproduce any content that appears on this site. I believe in sharing information, building non-coerced free communities in the libertarian spirit that the privatized Internet was aimed at creating. As long as you do not blatantly rip off my content to try and sell it as your own content, all I ask is a link in return to the original content. That, and maybe some sort of contribution via PayPal if you're so inclined. Regardless, as long as a modicum of respect for my work is displayed, I am not going to get into a tizzy about it because the religion that I try to follow does not look kindly on people who threaten others' futures over bad manners. To be quite clear about it, I find the behavior of the people in this forum to be disgusting and reprehensible. They are, in terms of behavior, the antithesis of what I hope to be like in every respect.

So, here's the content license in a nutshell. You may copy anything from this site that is my original work provided that you do not sell it without my permission, nor do you publish it in an exclusive, private collection without my prior approval. I exclude "friends-only" LiveJournals and things like that. I'm talking about exclusive forums and things like that that are not availible for public consumption and for which there is quite frankly little reason that you should be hiding from the public. Also, I do not consider AdSense ads and things like that to be count as commercial reproduction, provided that credit is given to me along with a good faith effort to link back to my site, especially where the content was originally taken from. I will always try to ask nicely for anyone to be in compliance with this condition. I am a software engineer by trade, and the thought of litigation over mere mistakes or bad manners is asinine and the sort of behavior which I think people should be punched very hard in the face over.

One last thing. If I find out that you have reproduced my content without asking, and then threaten anyone with litigation for doing the same, I will, for the rest of your natural life that you remain unrepentent about your hypocrisy, revoke your right to reproduce my content. Don't give me any of that bullshit about what the laws of men let you legally do to others because I am a conservative Christian and quite frankly could care less about what the statutes on copyright infringement say that you can do to others. I believe an eye for an eye is good justice from a governmental point of view, and that $30,000-$150,000 for reproducing a single photo is a slap in the face to my God whose righteous decrees demand that the penalty be exactly equivalent to the crime. Not several orders of magnitude worse.

I know that most people out there are just trying to be good participants in the process we call the World Wide Web. Mistakes are human, and don't worry, I make them and couldn't care less how many times you've infringed on my copyrights by accident. Unless you go well above and beyond anything that can be construed as a mistake or blatant rudeness, I won't make any demand other than a citation of credit. I hate hypocrisy, so do not be a hypocrite. Extend the benefit of the doubt to others that they wish to promote or critique your work for your improvement. Otherwise, pitty them that they take it to profit themselves. Always, be civil.

Between Internet access, cable tv and telephone service, I pay about $100 a month if you exclude the taxes. My service is a little bit on the atypical side in that my apartment complex has contracted out to provide Internet access and cable tv for the entire complex at a discount price since we cannot choose our own providers. With a price that high, if it were all funneled into a large monthly Internet access bill, there is no justification for why the telecoms would need their "toll road" to ensure that they could get me solid bandwidth for all of my services. $100 a month from the average customer should provide them with more than enough funds to invest into their networks to build an infrastructure that is capable of consistently providing at least 5mpbs-6mpbs for both uploads and downloads.

Maybe it is not so terribly obvious to some, but the telecoms are trying to become mini-AOLs from the olden days of the closed, AOL service. They want to provide the content to their customers. They certainly don't like the idea of Apple selling high quality movies over their networks, even though Apple does pay very large amounts of money for the bandwidth that provides that service. The telecoms want the entire pie now, and don't want to share it with anyone.

If I were an enterprising telecom executive, I wouldn't want to be part of the content business. I'm not one, but let's say I was. Why wouldn't I want to be involved in the content business in any way except as a facilitator? The business is too flaky for most companies, and being the facilitator has the natural advantage of not getting one bitten in the ass as ratings fluctuate. If I were the CEO of Verizon, SBC or any of the other whiners, bitchers and moaners, I'd be looking at Google, Vonage and Apple as natural, strategic allies. They provide the content that makes my infrastructure worth using, and could help sell the content.

Here's a scenario for you. Apple manages to negotiate for an IPTV service called iTunes Online Cable. It would make a lot of sense for a telecom to work with them to turn the iTunes Online Cable service into a component of the internet service that the telecom provides. It totally screws over the cable broadband providers by taking a nasty chunk out of their core business, and it makes the telecom's Internet access have more value. Pay $100-$150 to the service provider and get everything. And the best part about it is that the telecom can focus on what it does best which is provide infrastructure while pulling in a lot more money each month.

Right now a lot of broadband providers in the United States have very spotty reputations for actually providing the service that they sell to their customers. I don't see a compelling reason why they are owed any sympathy, when they cut their prices to unsustainable levels and then whine that they cannot provide the services that they sold. Verizon's $15/month for DSL is ridiculous. There is no way that they can provide quality service, consistently, at 1.5mbps for that cheap except as a promotional deal for new customers for a limited time. Hyper-competitiveness has caused them to forget the fact that they actually need to make money on the core service itself in order to be able to be able to provide the real service. A lot of times cable companies sell 3mpbs connections when they know that in practice they cannot provide that service consistently. Imagine how the public would react to telephone service that intermittently became incomprehensibly garbled or was often unable to get a dial tone because service was very badly oversold in a bid to undercut competitors.

Unlike many free marketers, I remain dubious about the willingness of these companies to really invest in their networks to build up their capabilities thanks to my experiences with broadband, as well as the experiences of friends and family. Lost in this discussion, in many instances, is the fact that the broadband providers did not price their services originally as anything other than a faster way to get web pages and send email. This should serve as a good reminder of what will be expected of their services when online sales of media really start to sky rocket.

600GB is an astounding number on the surface, but not too unrealistic when one considers how much would be flowing through the network. As I write this, I am in the process of buying the second to last episode of Battlestar Galactica, Season Two from the iTunes Music Store and it will weigh in around 200MB-210MB just like other episodes that I have bought. Four times a month, for just that show, and you've got nearly one gig of bandwidth. The kicker here is that none of this content is "high definition" in the HD-DVD/Blueray context. If a typical DVD quality of movie is just eighty percent of the size of a typical DVD (due to only have to provide one language track and no trailers), then a typical movie download that meets the standards of DVD buyers would require around 3GB-7GB. Then you factor in VoIP, which will require solid upstream bandwidth so that it can be used at the same time as the movie service and regular web access.

One thing remains abundantly clear here and that is that the telecoms are not doing their job, nor are they structuring their business in such a way that they will be able to get the requisite cash from a regular service fee to be able to meet the growing needs of America's Internet use. In order to provide the kind of service that will be needed in order to truly enable the next generation of Internet applications, it will be necessary for them to tap all of America's dark fibre and make 1.5mbps DSL seem as quaint as dialup. In the mean time they seem satisfied to complain about free riders who ironically happen to be paying their way through fees established at fair market prices, all the while contemplating new ways to extract more money from existing services instead of creating new ones that are worthier of our financial support.

COSTA MESA, Calif. - A middle school student faces expulsion for allegedly posting graphic threats against a classmate on the popular MySpace.com Web site, and 20 of his classmates were suspended for viewing the posting, school officials said.

"With what the students can get into using the technology we are all concerned about it," Bob Metz, the district assistant superintendent of secondary education, said Wednesday.

Metz said the students' suspensions in mid-Febuary were appropriate because the incident involved student safety. Some parents however questioned whether the school overstepped its bounds by disciplining students for actions that occurred on personal computers, at home and after school hours.

Normally it's the schools who are complaining that they are having to be parents for the kids, but then these fascist bureaucrats turn around and say that they can punish kids for what they do in their own homes under their parents' supervision when it in no way involves school property. The article makes it quite clear that this was a matter best resolved by law enforcement, not the school district. It was one of many cases where the schools in bigger states have overstepped their boundaries and tried to run kids' lives even while the In Loco Parentis argument no longer applies.

This is why I can't stand the idea of public schools that are empowered to act like government bodies. Publically-funded schools have no business dictating what their students can do on their own time. If they view something illegal, it's a matter for law enforcement. These schools aren't teaching a new generation, they aren't socializing them to be good citizens, they're just wasting tax dollars throwing their weight around. And they're able to do this because they have the certainty of a non-competitive stream of dollars from the public. Break up the monopoly and toss these pompous and petty little tyrants to the curb where they belong.

There is nothing so dehumanizing for students as the metal detectors, random drug searches, lockdowns, assertion of universal authority and all of the crap that the public schools pull on students. I for one will never let my kids be subjected to the feudalist autocracy that is our modern education system. This outrage should serve as a good example of why a growing number of people are getting militant about not supporting the public schools.

After reading this, I feel that it is somewhat important for me to explain to some of the people whose blogs I frequent where my generally libertarian thinking is very different at a fundamental level from many libertarians. I am a software developer and part of my profession's curse is having to make idealized abstractions conform to the cold, inhuman reality of a world inhabited by humans. We generally don't talk about it, but it's taken as a given by many more astute code monkeys that human models are usually poor abstractions because humans are rarely good at grasping the full, concrete nature of a thing. More often than not, complex rules and principles look less like basic laws of physics and biology and more like mental frankensteins.

It is my personal philosophy that reason is 75% principle, 25% pragmatism. You lean toward the former because you wish to establish a rule of how things are and what new things ought to be. However, since our knowledge is finite and our ability to cobble together discrete rules that try to compare two things whose natures are really not comparable is even more limited, we must sometimes resort to the latter. Principle in the face of pure reality that contradicts it is not rational. If you have a profession whose relationship with both the market and the government is genuinely unique to it, then you cannot really apply a principle to it that is made for either government or private sector employees. You must, in order to be rational, regard this as an exception requiring an exceptional rule.

I do not dislike the legal profession, I believe that a good lawyer is a genuine asset to America, but the legal profession has a very lethal combination. It has many people who want to get rich quick, and getting rich for a lawyer genuinely comes at the expense of a member of the productive class of society. Ideally the legal profession has a symbiotic relationship with society, but in past decade or two, it has become increasingly parasitic, and reforming this relationship will necessarily require a rational look at the relationship between this unique profession and the rest of society.

Despite what my comments may have implied, I emphatically do not support income earning restrictions on lawyers, however I do support limiting the amount of profit they can make per lawsuit. Being a cynic, and in the opinion of some, cold-hearted toward many self-professed victims of economic malfeasance, I also support drastic limits on how much can be awarded. I simply do not believe that lawyers should be able to jump from a comfortable position in the middle class to the upper echelons of wealth while possessing no superior skills of investment, engineering, artistic endeavor or even blind luck save for litigating in the right jurisdiction with the right jury at the right time. I think there is something terribly sick and evil about a lawyer making a billion dollars off of a company, even one as loathesome as the infamous tobacco companies.

And lastly, consider this. Lawyers generally make up between 40% and 50% of the Congress in any given term. Their profession depends on making it so that the laws are sufficiently obfuscated that we need their services. Walking into most criminal or civil cases without a good lawyer is akin to walking in front of a firing squad as far as your life, liberty and property are concerned. Part of the reform has to be the complete prohibition of the legal profession from serving in the legislatures. It's a terrible conflict of interest and it blows my mind that many people cannot grasp how fundamental this conflict of interest is. They get to make the very laws that we will need them to help us interpret. Why don't we just hand them a blank check and get it over with?

I have more respect for human resources busybodies than I do for the lawyers who become rich fat cats off of the wealth created by the productive classes of society, like the lawyers who took down the tobacco companies. The reason is simple. I'm inclined, but not ideologically dedicated, to libertarianism. In my ideal world, lawyers would generally be as common as prostitutes in Jerusalem during the days of the Pharisees. To me, the material success of the legal profession is a sign of the progress or congress (con == !pro) of the push for limited government in America. The richer they are, the more we're losing because it means that there is too much government if we're seeing lawyers generally becoming some of the richest people below the billionaire ranks.

I can admit that maybe I'm wrong about capping their take, but I will not concede ground on drastic cuts on lawsuit awards. Too much money is awarded to make mere statements. Well, I have news for you. You still have freedom of speech. John W Busherry hasn't taken that away from you yet. I'd rather risk giving not quite enough in an award than letting the system become a back alley method of income redistribution for the college-educated.

There are times where you really wish that you could give someone the benefit of the doubt that they are being sarcastic (lest a flame war accidentally get started), but this doesn't look like one of them. I'm desperately trying to keep from writing something that is snarky and sarcastic because I'd have to slap the hell out of someone who seriously believes this:

Good for Yale! They've admitted someone who is clearly intelligent, curious about the world, capable of doing the work, and eager to learn. If you read the NY Times article about the man, you'll learn that he never fought against the US - in fact, all he ever had was desk jobs. He became disenchanted with the Taliban long ago, and is now absorbing all the knowledge a great university has to offer. There is no doubt that his experience studying at Yale will change the man, and it is quite likely that he will return to Afghanistan after he finishes his degree and make his country a better place because of his experiences here.

Well, let's see there's the fact that he was an ambassador for the Taliban, up until 9-11, and even though he claims he has changed, he still holds to a deeply Islamist worldview. It's not like the Taliban was some great utopian government that went wildly awry all of a sudden. While he was the ambassador for the Taliban, they were murdering homosexuals right and left and imposing a series of restrictions on women that can be most euphemistically described as barbaric.

This line of thought reminds me of the "educated men" in From Hell starring Johnny Depp that couldn't believe that Jack the Ripper might be an educated man. Education has nothing to do with moral caliber. One does not join up with a regime as depraved as the Taliban, then go around the world on a publicity tour without having a pretty good idea of who they are and what they are doing. He freely represented a regime that he knew was totalitarian and oppressive, and that speaks to the very core of his outlook on the world.

There is no excuse for allowing this guy into our country on a student visa, nor is there any excuse for Yale to have even considered him. None. There are plenty of Indians and others that are more than qualified to stomp this little tyrant-lover into the ground academically. This is nothing more than an academic institution that cannot bear the thought of not being edgy and controversial, and all they have succeeded in doing is proving that they are a bunch of amoral bureaucrats out of touch with reality and society.

The politically correct administration at Yale just couldn't stand the thought of losing a jihadi to another school:

Don't expect a word of protest from our feminist and gay groups, who now have in their midst a live remnant of one of the most misogynistic and homophobic regimes ever. They're busy hunting bogeymen like frat parties and single-sex bathrooms. The answer Hashemi gave five years ago when asked about the lack of women's rights in Afghanistan, "American women don't have the right not to find images of themselves in swimsuits on the side of a bus," is the sort of sophistry likely to curry favor among Yale's feminist activists, who make every effort to paint American society as chauvinistic while refraining from criticizing non-Western cultures. To do so would be "cultural imperialism," and we cannot have that at an enlightened place like Yale.

It's always been easier for those who derive part of their identity from being part of an "oppressed class" to go after the groups who are least likely to seriously oppress them. Deep down inside, no gender feminist can really believe the notion that America is as "oppressive" toward women as Afghanistan was under the Taliban without being literally insane. The disconnect from reality required to make even a comparison between the two is so deep and severe that no one in their right mind could take them seriously, and the comparison is in fact quite offensive. It'd be like comparing the brutal treatment of blacks under Jim Crow without the genocide campaign against black Muslims by Arab Muslims in Darfur. Yet, many people do take them seriously which is precisely the problem.

The reason that the homosexual activists and the feminists will not go after their university's administration for allowing a member of the Taliban to study at Yale is obvious and transparent. To admit that the Taliban was far worse in its treatment of women and homosexuals, on a level that goes well above occasional common criminality, to a level that is viciously inhumane, would be to admit that not all cultures are cut from the same cloth. Naturally, that'd give ground to those who argue that America is morally superior to many other countries. Even though admitting this would be in the best interests of homosexuals and women, as it would galvanize support for a strong moral support for Western culture, it would force these groups to admit that they are ideologically wrong because it'd mean that they aren't really oppressed in America.

This has always been about pride. Any feminist or homosexual activist who actually admits that there are many cultures that are certifiably barbaric toward women and homosexuals has to admit that America is "as good as it gets." These groups don't really have the best interests of those that they claim to represent in mind as they continue their little half-assed attacks in the name of freedom and equality on the groups that quite frankly oppose neither. The Taliban was the starkest reminder for these groups that there are forces out there who are not moved by childish insults and labels. An Islamist is not going to be brow-beaten by a feminist as he clubs her for showing her cleavage, hair or ankles, nor would he be intimidated by a homosexual who calls him a homophobe. To him, they're just the last acts of defiance by the infidel, and thus are meaningless to him.

The Islamists have declared a culture war on us, and this war has been going on since the founding of Islam. By us, I mean anyone who is not one of them. Hindu, Christian, Jew, atheist, does not matter. At this point, insisting that their culture is inferior is not cultural imperialism, it's cultural self-defense. Cultural imperialism cannot exist without an overt expansion of peoples through immigration and military occupation and the Islamists are doing a fine job of the former as they make a half-hearted attempt at the latter. If the first world nations do not get serious about the Islamic expansion around the world, then one day women in these nations will find themselves genuinely oppressed, and it will have happened because a few shrill and proud individuals could not bring themselves to insult and stand up against the one religion that is worth insulting and denigrating.

'Would you write the name you'd like to use here, and your real name there?' asked the girl at reception. I had just been driven to a hotel in the Hague. An hour earlier I'd been greeted at Amsterdam airport by a man holding a sign with a pre-agreed cipher. I hadn't known where I would be staying, or where I would be speaking. The secrecy was necessary: I had come to Holland to talk about Islam.

It's no secret that radical Islam has had a violent and chilling effect on many European countries as of late. With their large Muslim minorities, they can ill afford to continue on as though the Muslims were just a quaint and novel minority group that is overall just harmless. The violence against Western embassasies and the rioting around the world has served to make them very cautious about what they do even in their own countries now.

Even if you happen to be one of those holdouts who seriously believes that the majority of Muslims around the world harbor no sympathy for the rioters, you have to admit that this is a very bad sign for the West. When people in countries like the Netherlands are accustomed to freedom of debate end up in fear for their lives for participating in their own native culture, the longterm will be a very bad one for the immigrants.

Forgotten by those who think that the Muslims will end up having carte blanche authority to remake the West European societies in the long run is Eastern Europe. Does anyone seriously think that a Poland that was recently freed from Communist tyranny, that is desparately trying to become a vibrant player on the world scene, is going to sit idly by for too long as Germany is overrun by Islamists? If the Western Europeans don't solve these problems on their own, the only real solution being mass deportations of Muslims back to their home countries, the Eastern Europeans will solve them for them.

Let's just hope that when they finally do get around to solving their immigration problems, that the Western Europes don't do so by a devolution into fascism. Deport them, do not kill them. They may be unrepentant barbarians with no respect for freedom of speech, but that does not justify a return to mass bloodshed.

I was really looking forward to the announcement of a new generation of Mac Minis based on the Intel Core processor series, but after reading this, I am starting to wonder if the Mac Mini isn't going to get hurt in its first generation sales. I own a Mac Mini G4 with a 1.25Ghz G4, and it's got some major performance problems so for me, the extra cost wouldn't be so bad, but Apple is really risking their niche with this. The Mac Mini is supposed to begin around $500 in price, and they missed that mark by $100 in a market where $100 matters. For an iMac or PowerMac, $100 is no big deal. People who buy those systems expect to pay serious cash for them. The Mac Mini is supposed to be entry level, and hopefully Apple will remember that and push aggressively to get prices back down before they're accused of going back to the days of the Macintosh platform being a very expensive one to own.

I could easily see myself buying one of these in a few months, but it'd have to be the more expensive one because that's where the value is.

Reading over Wired's commentary, How to Code a Constitution made me realize again why I am a software developer by profession and not a political activist, lawyer or any other creature of the political system. The average talking head or general member of society has no education on security or history so they tend to completely miss the greater historical overlap between discressionary power in politics and discressionary power in IT. There has not been a single government in the history of mankind that has been granted discressionary powers without at some point using them, and then in turn falling victim to the corruption and violence that ultimately plagues those with unconstrained power.

So, here's my modestly educated opinion on the matter from both a historical and a technologist perspective. Our government will not survive anymore than two or three waves of expansion in police power. At the most our system will implode on itself if we have another two or three Bush Administrations. The President has already exerted an unconstrained right to suspend the civil rights of those he deems combatants indefinitely. The next waves of police power will have to come at the expense of the core freedoms of the public at large. The next Presidents will, in the name of homeland security, talk about prior restraints on freedom of speech, the complete elimination of a need for warrants, and then ultimately will go about disarming the public with a law that makes private firearms ownership illegal. The rest, well, is, to use a Marxist cliche, a historic inevitability.