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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

At first I thought that my Nokia 770 was going to end up as one of those devices that is really cool to have, but that you don't really need. Then, I discovered DejaPim and ports of Gnumeric, AbiWord, BlogLines, XTerm and Python for it. That, and the video playback so far is pretty damn good, all things considered for how small of a device it is.

So far, it's been worth every penny of the $350.00 that I paid for it. I'm contemplating buying a 1GB RS-MMC card for it from ZipZoomFly.com because that's enough memory to store a good amount of video for the road.

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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."

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 n