April 2007 Archives

You can basically set your watch to the frequency that a post on some blog or an article in some rag about how we can get more women to do X when it comes to geeky things if we just did Y and Z. After reading this I was vaguely amused that the author did not realize that what she was basically calling for, despite claiming to be a "geek girl," is a complete redefinition of what "geek" means. Sounds a lot like the latest (soon to be aborted) trend to change what constitutes Computer Science to try to get more women to sign up for it as a major in college.

What's stupid about this argument to change what makes Digg, Digg is the fact that this is how most young men behave one way or another. They love of gadgets, blowing stuff up, "objectification of women" (hey Cosmopolitan magazine...) and stuff like that is normal for young men. The insulting comments that she thinks are poisonous are just normal bantering among young men. When juxtaposed to the faux civility that masks the backstabbing, chicanery and such common between women, it's not that big of a deal. Being engaged to a bonafide geek girl, I've just about seen it all in that respect.

So what should change to make Digg and geekness in general more appealing to women? What compromises should be made? What should get watered down? That's what is basically on the table here. A better question is why should Digg cater to a demographic that is largely apathetic to the things that Digg focuses on?

And when you get right down to it, no one has ever even stopped to see if geek girls even care about these things. I've never known one to get incensed about these things, to even pay them the time of day. It seems to me more like there are a lot of people who are uncomfortable with the idea of geek men being geek men, having sites that cater almost exclusively to them.

I knew you could be counted as a rape victim if you are severely mentally handicapped, but apparently being really stupid now counts as a way to commit rape as well:

A Syrian-born airline pilot allegedly tricked a schoolteacher from Haverfordwest into having sex with him by pretending he had to administer ointment on the end of his penis, a jury heard yesterday (Tuesday).

Fadi Sbano, 38, even pretended to know a gynaecologist who advised him on how often to have intercourse with her and whether to thrust "slowly or quickly". And, on the "doctor's advice", he kept a clock on the bedside table to time the sessions.

The teacher put up with the treatment for nine months before telling her doctor.

Huw Rees, prosecuting, told Swansea crown court: "The allegations here are of rape by deception."

Were it not for the fact that the "victim" was a schoolteacher, I would have a hard time believing that any woman seriously fell for this and was stupid enough to admit that she had bought into something so obviously fabricated as to believe that he needed to have regular intercourse with her in order to apply an ointment to his penis. Now, how many men are going to end up getting thrown in prison for deceiving women about their true intentions if this case makes its way through the British legal system successfully? All of those lies about love, marriage, etc. are really going to come back to bite a lot of men in the arse.

Almost as idiotic as this, are the hundreds of wealthy Japanese women who clearly cannot tell the difference between sheep and poodles. Not that there is any functional difference mind between the two, mind you...

What the f$%^ is this douchebag talking about?

Blogs are known to be a free-for-all for "expressive" content, but according to a new report by ScanSafe, a vast majority of blogs host content that is considered "offensive" and potentially "unwanted." ScanSafe's Monthly "Global Threat Report" for March 2007 says that up to 80 percent of blogs host offensive content, ranging from "adult language" to pornographic images. The company suggests that businesses should be aggressive about preventing users from accessing some or all of this material. And of course, they'd hope that you'd use their products to do so.

ScanSafe says that it discovered the "offensive" nature of blogs by analyzing more than 7 billion web requests coming from their corporate customers. In doing so, they apparently learned that the so-called blogosphere is a lot like a George Carlin performance: diverse, sometimes entertaining, and loaded with "bad words."

Is anyone actually surprised by this? Well, I guess in our defense, Bane has not exactly been a good ambassador to the rest of the world, seeing as how his blog is single-handedly responsible for half of the depravity on the Internet. This would be a good time to educate the mainstream media about what the world of blogging is really like. It's not really all that profane, rather it's just filled with a lot of hot air and navel gazing.

The real knee slapper in the "report" was that you can lose sensitive data by going to the wrong website. Well gee, if you use an outdated browser, specifically one that supports ActiveX (we don't know any of those, do we?) then you might have a problem. You might have it because you never bothered to keep your software up to date enough that people can't totally pwn your computer. *Sigh* It's self-serving propaganda like this which makes you stand back and realize just how much crap there is that passes for "news" from the tech press.

Robert Cox thinks that the right has a "Web 2.0 problem." I have said before about the Web, this is not really the case. To a large extent, what Cox is upset about is propagandizing at Google, but that has nothing to do with Web 2.0. That is nothing more than an application of old political methods to a new technology, and not even using the newest one at that. There is little difference between much of what gets lumped into "Web 2.0" and what could be called "Web 1.0" except for the style of the delivery, but I digress.

Let's say that the right does what Cox suggests and admits that it has a "Web 2.0 problem." It isn't going to find an easy solution because conservatives are generally not prone to being attracted to the fields which would enable them to do something about this hypothetical problem. Even if that were accounted for, I don't think that it would be easy to get people on the right to actually build something better and more reliable than Wikipedia. Aside from religious apologetics websites and such, the right is not very well known for building online resources of that nature.

Personally, I think the backlash in schools against Wikipedia may end up alleviating whatever problems might arise from this. Many schools are already blacklisting it, as they regard Wikipedia as garbage.

So Mr Drug Czar, how's that War on Drugs working out for you now?

About 20 tons of cocaine -- seized in the largest maritime bust in U.S. history with a street value of $500 million -- was unloaded under heavy guard Monday at Coast Guard Island in Alameda County.

U.S. Coast Guard Capt. Charley Diaz said the bust took place in the waters off Panama last month.

"The bust was pretty amazing," Diaz said. "We were told to go identify a vessel that had been spotted by a Coast Guard C-130. We found the vessel and sent a boarding team aboard. There were some inconsistencies between what the master was saying was in the containers and what the crew manifest said."

For a group that claims victory in the face of defeat, the Office of National Drug Control Policy seems to be finding itself deep in a quagmire right about now. If the United States were winning the War on Drugs, drugs would only be able to be realistically shipped into the country in small, extremely expensive quantities, not shipped in to the tune of forty thousand pounds of cocaine. That's akin to saying that we are winning the battle to control the flow of arms into Iraq with the announcement of a bust of enough ordnance, firearms and communication equipment to outfit an entire brigade's worth of insurgents.

Half a billion dollars. That's $12,500/pound of cocaine. Adjusted to the metric system, that's $27,500/Kg. According to this set of statistics from the, the average street price of Cocaine in the US in 2002 was $90/g. This seizure, divided per gram, was $27.50 per gram. Free market economics works, even when the government doesn't want it to.

Such a wunderkind:

As per Nigerian-German Business group, a 12-year old boy Allwell Worgu repeated a record of Nigeria repeated a record set six years ago by a Pakistani girl in mastering the SunÂ's Java Certification exam. First, let me congratulate this kid, as itÂ's quite an achievement.Now let's take a look at this fact from a different perspective. To me, itÂ's just another fact proving that Java certification does not bear much value.

And what noble reasons for trying to take the test!

The kid "strongly believes that blacks are more intelligent than the white", which does not stop him from considering Harvard, Oxford and MIT. I wish him good luck in getting into one of these schools. But there is a really long way between passing a Java certification exam and getting accepted by Harvard.

If it weren't for the fact that Africa is such a backward continent, this would be mildly offensive rather than a joke. My experience with the SCJA, which I took as a practice exam to see what the real exams might be like, was not so positive. These certifications are a good way to demonstrate some sort of basic knowledge of how to write code in Java and use various Java technologies, but they are not even close to the education that you would get in a real Computer Science program.

What's ironic about this is that far from being proof of "blacks are more intelligent than whites" as he put it, it inverts that goal into a sort of talking dog exposition. Passing a single Sun certification exam is far removed from actually doing something meaningful with the knowledge that one allegedly possesses with it.

It's always a sure sign that you are talking to a liberal multiculturalist or reading their crap when something as extreme as suggesting that a dissident should be killed for her beliefs gets euphemistically labeled a debate over freedom of religion. I don't think you could call that a "debate" anymore than you could call what recently happened at Virginia Tech "a day off from class." You can't have a debate with someone who thinks that God has handed down the order to kill you the moment that you freely, of sound mind and body, decide to leave the faith.

And yet there will be many people who will say that Islam is a religion of peace, despite the fact that it commands its followers to do many things which in the context of a purely secular political movement would be labeled psychotic. I guess that's just another sign that most secularists really don't take religion seriously to the point that they are unwilling to apply any of the standards to religious beliefs that they would to political beliefs.

In around September to October of last year, some yahoo driving in an older model Volvo nearly knocked my old CR-V out of my lane while I was driving to work. I got written up for failure to yield or something like that because while the cop believed me, he didn't have enough evidence to back up my story. Obviously I was quite pissed because I got four points added to my license that I didn't in any way deserve, since I was almost entirely in the lane when this jerk decided to change lanes.

Today on the way to Harrisonburg, I actually saw the same thing happen to someone else, and was able to actually tell the state trooper that I not only saw the van drive the victim out of her lane, but saw the van drive off down the highway, fleeing the scene of the crime. I would assume that she's not going to get a ticket because of what I and another guy who saw it were able to tell the state trooper who showed up.

Google, do no evil, just enable others to do it instead:

Google's announced acquisition of DoubleClick has raised considerable concern among privacy advocates, who argue that combining the search engine giant with a major online advertising firm puts too much information in the hands of one company.

The launch of Google's new Web History product should send those fears into overdrive.

The new service allows you to search and view your entire online life, including what pages they visited online and when. Google will also analyze your online travels, revealing which sites you visit most frequently and what your top searches are.

Combine that with data retention policies and you have a sure fire way of making sure that the Internet becomes the most heavily and successfully surveilled communication medium in the world. Granted, only half of that would apply to the Internet as a whole, but the web in particular would be completely naked, exposed and monitored. In theory, anyway. There are always cryptographic solutions, anonymous proxies and things like that--which also happen to not be on the radar of the average person who would find their habits caught up in this surveillance!

When you combine all of the features that Google is trying to provide to the public with its hunger for dark fiber networks, you can get a pretty scary picture of where they are trying to go. I'm almost tempted to say that it's AOL 2.0 based on open standards instead of a proprietary set of technologies. Even though they release so many freebies to the public, there is more than a little bit of easy comparison between them and other companies that feel that to be safe, they have to do everything.

Sidenote: for a while now I have decided that as soon as Google cuts me a check for the money that they owe me for advertising on my blog, I am going to stop allowing AdSense ads on my blog. I would encourage other bloggers to do that as well, to do their own small part to not directly fund what is turning out to be a company that makes mid-90s Microsoft look like a paper tiger in terms of potential for mischief and mayhem.

Random thoughts...

I think now that the media has had its fun with the VTU shooting, all bloggers should stop writing full fledged posts about it except where it is genuinely relevent. In the scheme of things, it's really no different than other shootings at high schools and colleges, so it shouldn't receive that much attention except as a footnote in future conversations.

I bought an upgrade for my laptop the other day. A 2GB RAM kit from Crucial.com, so I can now disable virtual memory in Windows and possibly see a modest peformance increase in my increasingly aging laptop.

If you are looking for a distribution of Linux to try out, I would suggest the new version of CentOS. I just installed it a few days ago on a few spare partitions and it works really well for a Linux distribution. Very polished, though still not quite there for many people. I've got installed on my laptop and in a VMWare image. I'd upload the latter... but it's about 1GB compressed ;)

I have some ideas about how to expand blogging, at least with Movable Type. Only problem is that I don't know Perl well enough yet. Fortunately my copy of Perl for Dummies arrived and I will hopefully soon have time to start playing around with it. Some of the ideas are about inter-blog communication.

Sometimes I wonder if I am going to reach the point where when I get bored and do a few blogthings quizzes, I'll end up repeating entire posts. Speaking of blogthings...

The British Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has egg on its face now over the realization that no one thought that maybe, just maybe, many of the people prosecuted under Operation Ore were victims of fraud. The investigators apparently never even thought that it was possible, and according to one report sneered at a respected businessman when he told them that he had been the victim of credit card fraud. With police and detectives like that, it's no wonder that Britain is having problems with violent criminals because, as we all know, people who buy illegal goods never, ever commit white collar economic crimes like credit card fraud! Still, it's great news that this operation has been exposed as an imbecilic one, so maybe many of these guys can now point out that they really were telling the truth when they said that their credit cards were stolen, and that it wasn't them.

The best argument I have seen on how to handle this, actually comes from a Slashdot comment. In a situation like this, the judge should have the authority to issue an order demoting the relevant law enforcement officers, and to convene a disbarment trial for the prosecutor who brought the charges.

Radley Balko reminds the timid public that in order to keep the peace with violent, murderous psycho/sociopaths, we need to walk around on egg shells:

He's right, you know. Video games + psycho/socioppath _+ dose of rage = potential mass murderer. Here are some other recipes for potential mass murders:

Baseball card collecting + psycho/sociopath + dose of rage.

Furry fetish + psycho/sociopath + dose of rage.

Only eating orange foods + psycho/sociopath + dose of rage.

Napping + psycho/sociopath + dose of rage.

In other words, the idea that people are basically good really doesn't apply that well in real life. As I have said before, a lot of Americans are "optimism junkies." They need to believe that everyone is basically good, at least in the beginning, and that there is no such thing as a fundamentally warped, depraved human being who is as different from them psychologically as a dog or cat is from them physiologically. This is where a lot of the common support for gun control and regulation of violent media comes from. The fact is that both the violent video games that Jack Thompson and Dr. Phil are blaming for this shooting, and the guns that are being blamed by others, are enjoyed on a regular basis by millions of normal, reasonably healthy people without violent consequences for society.

These people are by definition predators in the most pejorative usage of that word. The only broadly effective method for controlling them is to appeal to their predatory instincts by making it clear to them that any serious violence on their part will result in serious injury or death.

In related news, here are a few bits of news and commentary that are, well, interesting to say the least:

• The liberal solution? More education! As we all know, more firearm training, not less, would have made this shooter less of a threat to the public. It's only a matter of time before our enlightened liberal establishment calls for mandatory moving target shooting practice for everyone who buys a gun, so that in the event they go hunting, they are more likely to hit an animal than another hunter. Everyone who buys a gun could benefit from such mandatory training!
• The Phelps Clan are going to try to protest the funeral. I think it is a testament to how reliable our culture is with weapons and the use of force that these people haven't been brutally murdered by a grieving relative gone nuts at the hateful rhetoric and protests. In fact, with the sheer number of people they have attacked at such a vulnerable time in their lives, I am really impressed that no one has gone off the deep end and shot the dead out of grief-driven rage.

Destroying Computer Science, one pet cause at a time:

"The nerd factor is huge," Dr. Cuny said. According to a 2005 report by the National Center for Women and Information Technology, an academic-industry collaborative formed to address the issue, when high school girls think of computer scientists they think of geeks, pocket protectors, isolated cubicles and a lifetime of staring into a screen writing computer code.

This image discourages members of both sexes, but the problem seems to be more prevalent among women. "They think of it as programming," Dr. Cuny said. "They don’t think of it as revolutionizing the way we are going to do medicine or create synthetic molecules or study our impact on the climate of the earth."

Like others in the field, Dr. Cuny speaks almost lyrically about the intellectual challenge of applying the study of cognition and the tools of computation to medicine, ecology, law, chemistry - virtually any kind of human endeavor.

Geeks, isolated cubicles and staring at computer screens writing code (or making systems behave) is pretty much what we are and do outside of the ivory tower. It's not fair to say that it really discourages men, other than the sort of men who probably would never get involved with it in the first place because men in general tend to be less intimidated by group pressure when there is something they really, really want to do (provided it's a masculinity-friendly profession). When I was in college, though, there was no automatic loss of social status for being a science or engineering major, and I graduated in 2005 so it's not like I lack recent experience here.

The idiocy about this change in curriculum is that they are proposing to do with the sciences and medicine, what Computer Information Systems proposed to do with business--and failed. I highly doubt that a group like the Pandegroup would agree that programming skills are even remotely optional to develop an application like Folding@Home. If anything, the more intense scientific computing requires a very strong understanding of how to use a mathematically-oriented language like Fortran or Matlab. One thing I wonder is, without that sort of programming experience, would such women even understand why they should be using a language like Fortran and not one like C or Java for their scientific code? (Hint: it has to do with floating point accuracy)

If you want to do computing in an area like genetics, you need to get a double major in Computer Science and Biology, then probably follow on with a master's degree in either the hard science or a combined field such as Bioinformatics.

***UPDATE***: I found this comment from Digg to be very amusing in light of the seriousness that ideologically-driven women in Computer Science want more women in for the sake that they want "gender parity." Not everyone agrees:

I am a female Computer Science student. I run Ubuntu. I have at least 6 computers in the house and two laptops. It sucks that my classes have a ratio of 2 or 3 women to 30 men. Oh wait.. Did I say that sucks? Heh heh.

The gender disparity actually works to the benefit of the women in these programs because as long as they keep themselves in decent shape and don't dress like old grannies, there are more of them than there are of us men in the same classes.

Since everyone else seems to be talking about the Virginia Tech shooting, I figure why not join in on the "fun." It's attitudes like this one which went a long way toward creating the sort of legal environment that made this rampage feasible. Many Americans are actually deeply afraid, to the point of paranoia, of their neighbors owning guns. I don't know that blogger's circumstances. Maybe their neighbors are total nutjobs, but statistically, you aren't likely to get into a violent confrontation with your neighbor, and there are already so many guns out there that it is possible to prove whether or not America would be a killing field if every Tom, Dick and Harry could carry.

The fact is that we are one of the most heavily armed countries in the world. Anyone who wants a gun can buy one, steal one, or find someone who can fabricate one without difficulty. And yet... America is a generally a safe place to live and work. All gun control accomplishes is making it impossible for people like these students to even try an effective self-defense. It's not enough to say, "well they might fail." Well, they might succeed too, but that option was legally taken away from them because many Americans are so bloody paranoid that they assume everyone is out to get them.

As this editorial reminds us, the police failed to protect the students. That is to be expected because the police are not numerous enough to come even remotely close to being able to credibly handle the general public's security like that. With neither firearms of their own, nor police protection, the students were at this man's mercy. People should think about that, the next time they say "oh we'll just let the police protect us, we don't need a gun!"

Others:
Difster.
Pablo.
Thoughts and Ideas.
Arielle.
Bane.
Erik.

Why I consider libertarians who have a romantic vision of a libertarian/left-wing alliance in politics are either stupid or traitors to the very liberty that they claim to be defenders of:

Ryan Chiachiere was. A 26-year-old researcher in Washington, D.C., for liberal watchdog organization Media Matters for America, he was assigned to monitor Mr. Imus's program. Mr. Chiachiere clipped the video, alerted his bosses and started working on a blog post for the organization's Web site.

That highlighted part is enough to send a small shiver down the spine of anyone who cares about freedom when they contemplate what a left-wing government would look like. For the left, it's not enough to apply brownshirtesque attacks on people who say things that they find offensive, they must destroy their job and try to generally drive them out of employment in their field altogether if possible. On slashdot, some leftists were trying to point to the Dixie Chicks as an example of similar behavior from the right, the difference is that it was mostly Bush supporters who engaged in that behavior, and it was also motivated by a belief that the Dixie Chicks were trying to do their part to undermine our foreign policy (even if that's not saying much, the outrage was still over their intent).

Since being nominally removed from power, many left-wing groups have adopted a very authoritarian attitude toward dissent. Well, it was there in many respects all along, but it has become more prounced. Generally the people pushing speech codes and trying to use coercion to shut down their opponents, are those who have "liberal" views. As bad as many conservatives can be, their views on civil liberties tend to be far more enlightened than their left-wing counterparts.

The culture of hypersensitivity is one that needs to be ruthlessly assaulted, with a great, passionate fury by those who value liberty. It has already compromised most of the politically active left-wing groups, and is in danger of doing the same to the right. Liberty won't survive a society that acquiesces to the hurt feelings and brownshirt tactics of emotionally weak pissants.

Kutless is one of my favorite bands. They're one of the few harder Christian rock/quasi-metal bands like Skillet that really kick ass. On a tangentially related note, when I clicked preview, one of the Google ads was for a "Are you gay quiz." I think it's about time to stop using AdSense. I'm just a few dollars short of being able to get my payment from them, and be done with the whole thing...

Apparently, they're also a really good live act:

You know, this is something that I hadn't even considered before about the dangers of making kids authenticate themselves reliably in a place like MySpace, but it's the singlest best argument against mandating age verification:

We are at a roadblock because Internet-scale multi-factor authentication of children is simply unworkable from practical, operational, technological, and cost perspectives. Left with relatively weak password authentication, we must ask: how long will it take for a black market of "age verified" credentials to surface? How long until children begin to share or lose their "age verified" credentials? How long until child predators become skilled in guessing and phishing for children’s passwords? How long before enterprising children begin to sell their "age verified" credentials? In the frightening case where a child predator is also a parent of a young child, we must assume that the predators will use their children’s "age verified" credential. If failure rates are similar to adult username/password failure rates, we will not have solved the problem and added a tremendous expense and burden managing literally hundreds of millions of children’s usernames and passwords.

It makes sense when you think about it. By creating a "trusted environment" through these credentials, you would end up creating an environment where the prevailing assumption is that no one can really be a wolf in sheep's clothing because they have authenticated as a young person. Most parents would naturally assume that such an environment would be almost, if not completely, safe for their kids and young teens to participate in without any meaningful oversight, which would only further increase the danger that would come with spoofing credentials.

At a minimum, parents would run into the problem of their children and teens being more likely, not less likely, to reveal their personal information in such an environment. After all, why would they have any reason to doubt that the person they are talking to is who they say that they are based on the information provided to them? Take the dangers that come with divulging information on MySpace, and increase it by giving the predator the certainty of knowing that the person they are talking to is someone they would like to target, and that's a good picture of where these proposals would leave children and young teens.

I think Vox just got beaten by a girl:

Here he is, not even their official dad, and he gets weepy when he doesn't talk to them. This is the stuff Hallmark TV specials are made of, yet you're turning your relationship into an episode of "Prison Break." You admit, "It's not that I can't trust him." No, it's that you're irrational and insecure, and making his life hell is probably your way of controlling how much of it he diverts to people who aren't you. Come on, after five years, you don't know what he's made of, or whether he still has the hots for the last lady in his life? If he is running away with her, he's an awfully slow runner. Like, at this rate, he might be able to beat Stephen Hawking across my living room rug.

Sometimes it takes a woman to really speak the hard truth to another woman who is behaving irrationally(in fairness, the same thing applies to men). From the way that the Advice Goddess posted the woman's email, it sounds more like she's dating a real family man who has a hard time letting go of being a father figure to the children of his previous lover. Considering the way that many men are, it would behoove this woman to sit back and try to encourage him to be more like a god father than a real father, while encouraging him to stay the way he is in case she wants to have children with him. Not that many men out there who are willing to sacrifice for children like that, you know.

On a related note, it is very sick how many states will not protect men who are victims of fraud from child support payments. I just don't see how you can argue that it is good for a child to make a man who isn't the biological father, and who was deceived by the mother, pay a small mortgage's worth of money to support that child. Such a thing is only more likely to alienate the man, making him regard the child more as a financial parasite, than as a child he can still be authority and father figure for. By not holding the mother and biological father accountable for the full cost of the child support, all that is being done is making a man who used to be a father, regard the child he once thought was his own, as a financial liability that may prevent him from having his own children.

Man born in poverty, who works his way to being a successful business man, wins lottery worth $315M. Goes on to live in the same small town that he had established himself in all of his life, not a bad choice per se. He then goes on to set up a charity that instead of doing a social good, ends up making him a big sugar daddy to moochers. His business also gets hammered to the tune of about three million dollars a year in frivolous lawsuits. Out of misguided generosity, he gives his granddaughter four cars and two thousand dollars a week to spend however her teenage heart felt was appropriate. The drug dealers moved in, and got his rich granddaughter hooked on drugs. Man looks around and wonders why everything went to hell when he didn't set up his assets to be handled correctly, and why no one likes him after he became known as the "rich, miserable, violent drunk."

That's three pages of ABC news story in a nutshell, "nuance-free" and insured for Maximum Bluntness Or Your Money Back^tm! I can't say that I am lacking in sympathy for the man, but he should have known better, especially given his background. He should have known that it wouldn't do him or anyone else any good by just handing out money like that. It'd be one thing to have set up a massive college fund and trust fund for his granddaughter, it's quite another to give her enough money to become a great target for drug dealers.

As usual, ABC misses the point. The moral of this story is not that money breeds misery or that being rich is actually dangerous for you and your family, at least in America. The real moral of the story is that being overly generous is in fact quite dangerous for the people you are trying to help. If you really want to help them, make them work for the money, and allocate most of the donations in such a way that you encourage them to develop themselves as people. All this poor guy did was become the unofficial private welfare agency for his community. His intentions were noble, such as all of the money he gave to the church and trying to give people something nice, but the reality is that just giving money away is not the answer. Never has been, never will be.

Consistency, fairness and making people learn to deal with hurt feelings like grown ups. These are not values for the bloggers that follow Tim O'Reilly's guidelines:

We define unacceptable content as anything included or linked to that:

• is being used to abuse, harass, stalk, or threaten others
• is libelous, knowingly false, ad-hominem, or misrepresents another person,
• infringes upon a copyright or trademark
• violates an obligation of confidentiality
• violates the privacy of others

We define and determine what is "unacceptable content" on a case-by-case basis, and our definitions are not limited to this list. If we delete a comment or link, we will say so and explain why. [We reserve the right to change these standards at any time with no notice.]

Not all of those bulletted points sound that bad, do they? Who could be against a blanket ban on abuse, harassment, misrepresentation, violating confidentiality, violating intellectual property rights and the privacy of others? Only a certifable cad, that's who, right? That's the way it would seem on paper, until it actually is time to implement such a comment policy. Some of these things are in fact highly subjective. Many a female blogger has complained that pointed criticism is obscenely abusive. If you need a reference point, check this one out (her comment about readers from Vox Popoli). Whether or not this is a function of the increasingly thin skin of the average person, is a matter I leave up to others to ponder, but it serves an illustrative point nonetheless. I think the greatest danger that stems from the people that hide behind moderation policies and other rubbish like that, is that society is conditioned today to not say "shut up, and deal with it" when the "offensive behavior" does not rise to the level of dangerous or uncontrolled vitriol. Our schools and business environments even teach most people to cater to the most thin-skinned and those quickest to complain of even perceived slights, and then to make like Chamberlain and seek peace, no matter how dishonorable it may be. Such policies, as encouraged here, would simply enable such people to hold conversations hostage and provide legitimacy to such bloggers, who probably shouldn't be blogging in the first place if they are that lacking in intestinal fortitude. Then there's the whole issue about the case-by-case basis and the changing the rules as we go. That's really a nice way to say that we'll provide you with a basic guideline, but reserve the right to arbitrarily shut you down. And yes, I am arrogant enough to say that my comment policy is vastly superior to this proposal! Here's one for self-aggrandizement!

4. When we believe someone is unfairly attacking another, we take action.

When someone who is publishing comments or blog postings that are offensive, we'll tell them so (privately, if possible--see above) and ask them to publicly make amends.

Which is to say that if we take offense for any reason, we'll tell you that you should change what you say, how you feel, etc. to conform to our arbitrary standards of what is acceptable and what is not. Nevermind the fact that people frequently find opinions that disagree with them to be highly offensive. To a lot of people the personal is the political, and to a large extent, the opposite of that is true as well. You cannot make sociological, political or religious observations without deeply offending the sensibilities of some people, and in general, the more you question the "prevailing wisdom," the more people you will find who take personal offense at comments or posts that in and of themselves are not at all offensive or attacking anyone personally. One might call this the Sacred Cow Rule of Public Discourse. You fail to genuflect at your own risk; you barbeque at your own imminent peril. There's also the fact that many bloggers are, quite frankly, tone deaf when it comes to reading blog posts written by others who have cynical and sarcastic writing styles. Here's one for the record that involves my blog. Cathy Young linked to an arbitrary blog post of mine, which was largely tongue-in-cheek, and then proceeded to semi-evicerate it as though it were written with all of the seriouness of the sort of recycled drivel that dominates the conservative commentariat about the same subject. She missed the facts that a)I'm a libertarian, b)my libertarian is often more radical than most regulars at Reason, c)that the post was lampooning left-wing behavior and d)the Nazi quip was a jab at them, using one of their preferred attacks against them. As with all things along these lines, this rule will end up being used to protect the mainstream, the average, and not protect the views of others. The moment that someone finds another's views to be offensive, they'll cry foul and the badged blog police will go to work.

6. We ignore the trolls.

We prefer not to respond to nasty comments about us or our blog, as long as they don't veer into abuse or libel. We believe that feeding the trolls only encourages them--"Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, but the pig likes it." Ignoring public attacks is often the best way to contain them.

It would be nice if the mainstream definition of troll, but it's not. As point number four goes, to many people a troll is also someone who passionately disagrees with them, holds the "wrong views" or who get them into a corner in an argument. *************** Now then, I think the rules of blogging could be made a lot simpler if the following rules and expectations were rigorously enforced:

• You have a right to not be subjected to slanderous and libelous behavior, but you have no right to be shielded from comments and postings that might offend your sensibilities.
• If you criticize someone on your blog, you have an obligation to provide them with a reasonable platform on your blog to engage in a right of response. This can be a comment section or a prominently-placed trackback listing. Corollary: technical ignorance on your part is no excuse to not provide this; you opened your big mouth, now let them defend themselves.
• Most of us are adults, and there shall be no histrionics over juvenile sexual talk and threatening behavior by trolls. If such threats are brought offline into a blogger's life, we will actively encourage them to actually defend themselves rather than piss and moan about the unfairness of it all.
• Any on-topic comment, that is not filled with expletives and ad hominems shall enjoy a right to remain on the blog post because censorship is last resort, not a method for winning an argument.
• Comments will only be deleted as a last resort, and as a general rule, only to protect the blogger hosting the blog or a commenter who has revealed enough information about themselves that their life may be threatened.
• Thin-skinned individuals who cannot stomach criticism will be actively encouraged to stop blogging, stop commenting and in general, stop holding opinions.

This post inspired by ArsTechnica.

This is why I always, always, fear the government, before I fear anyone else, when it comes to issues like privacy and my personal information. The fact is, that if a private business conducted its data storage the way that the IRS has allowed its employees to behave, it would be bankrupted within a business quarter by the mountain of lawsuits that would come down on it. That is what should happen when you have an institution that has gone beyond isolated incidents of such behavior, toward fostering a culture that allows for the loss of vast volumes of personal information. Unfortunately, we are not likely to see any action, that is worth mentioning, against the IRS for what it has allowed to happen. Our standards for corporations are bad enough as it is. Holding federal employees and agencies accountable for the same offenses, is by comparison, practically unheard of.

Remember this, the next time that someone tells you that you should be terrified about your grocery store knowing your buying habits, and that we need the federal government to protect our "consumer privacy."

Narrator in Underworld Evolution: neither Vampire nor Lycan, but a hybrid.

Rachel: I bet he gets good gas mileage!

You've seen the Chuck Norris facts, well here are some about Bruce Schneier. Who is he? He's one of the experts on computer security; he's basically the Chuck Norris of security.

There is a long Slashdot conversation about "How to deal with Venom on the web?". I'm surprised that a board full of that many geeks didn't get the obvious answer: call Peter Parker and tell him that Eddy Brock is blogging.

I could have told you this...

A commonly heard defense in the arguments that surround U.S. companies that offshore high-tech and engineering jobs is that the U.S. math and science education system is not producing a sufficient number of engineers to fill a corporation's needs.

However, a new study from Duke University calls this argument bunk, stating that there is no shortage of engineers in the United States, and that offshoring is all about cost savings.

There will, however, be a major problem with finding jobs for domestic entry-level workers in the future if the jobs are sent abroad in order to save a little bit of money. Let's put this all in a different scenario, to make it more easily understood by those who "just don't get why outsourcing is long-term stupid." Some countries in history outsourced much, or all, of their military might to mercenaries and neighboring tribes. The Romans paid dearly when their foederates, whom they came to depend on, no longer liked the idea of working for a foreign power. The result is a textbook case of what happens when one nation becomes dependent on another nation for a critical area of labor or economic productivity. American dependence on foreign labor today, can easily translate into American national weakness tomorrow.

Outsourcing wealth production, unlike H1B visas, is destructive to our labor force. The H1B brings foreigners who are ostensibly competent at their jobs, into America to work here. With some modification, the H1B visa could become a citizenship track visa, so that foreigners who come to work here today, are American citizens tomorrow. This results in the pool of Americans who can work at technical jobs increasing, not decreasing.

The simple fact, in fact, so simple that egghead academics in think tanks, public policy groups and business colleges can't get it, is that senior technical workers are made, not born. Everytime an entry-level job is sent abroad, without a new one being created here, represents a potential loss of an opportunity to train up a newly minted entry-level American engineer to seniority. The common refrain is that they need to learn a new profession if they can't get by. No pressure on the businesses to cut the ridiculously overvalued salaries of the upper management instead.

A funny set of comments from Digg:

Did you ever stop and think that the women took advantage of him? By bearing their breasts, they forced an obligation upon him to film their breasts and sell them at retail. Do you honestly believe he wanted to walk down this path of debauchery? He had no choice.

If women would simply keep their tits covered, he would be a fine addition to American society. Instead, he's a smut peddler, and I'll pray that women will leave him alone.

I see where you're coming from, but read the LA Times article on him and see that he DID take advantage of women. There is a lot of innate power in a white male that goes unnoticed by a lot of us as well.

Innate power by being a white male?! ROFL!

Please, tell me more about this innate power. Can I use it to have girls show me their tits too? What can I do with this power? I shall use my innate power to crush you!

Yeah, I knew that would get knocked down. I'm a social worker so I don't expect everyone to see things the way I do, but I have an easy way to show you.

Go to a restaurant with your girlfriend/wife/whatever. And take note of who the server talks to when they ask if the meal is ok, if you need anything, or if you are ready for the check. The majority of people will talk to the white male if he is present. Just try it.

*********

Sometimes it takes a little bit of humor to really knock a liberal do-gooder down a peg or two like that. I know that I have innate powers as a white man. In the words of Lightning McQueen, I create feelings in others that they themselves don't understand. The only problem with this power is that it is something that we don't really have control over, it's sort of like an aura that we naturally radiate out, that makes others so embittered by our mere presence that they are too consumed by hatred to make anything of themselves (thus resulting in our inevitable victory bwwahahahaha!)

If you have to ask, then you probably won't survive:

Apr. 5, 2007 - They may differ in the details, but the crimes follow the same depressing pattern.

A woman is physically or verbally harassed by an ex-boyfriend, obtains a restraining order, changes her phone number and moves to another residence, but she still ends up getting killed by him.

In the last two weeks, two such killings on opposite sides of the country have made headlines for their brutality and poignancy.

And, in their tragic inevitability, such crimes raise the question: Even with a restraining order, what can you really do to stop a violent ex-lover who's determined to harm you?

Well, let's see here. First, you can learn how to use a weapon proficiently, and keep several of them on your person, in your car and in your home. To this extent, if you genuinely believe that someone is going to murder you, you have three choices when it comes to a job that won't let you have a firearm on your person. You can can quit your job, you can refuse to carry a firearm of some kind illegally and risk becoming a victim, or you can carry one and deal with the consequences later. That researcher, Rebecca Griego, mentioned in the article could have carried a concealed gun illegally until the threat blew over. Better to be charged with illegally possessing a firearm, after you have shot your deranged, murderous ex-boyfriend dead, than be a goody goody two shoes and six feet under, but that's just my opinion. Aside from the firearm issue, you can get two good, strong dogs like Doberman Pinschers and secure your home by checking all of the locks, putting a security system in and things like that.

The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of things that women can do to protect themselves. There is no guarantee that they will be successful, but that is life. The real reason that many women end up getting hurt in these situations is that they have an inability to assert themselves, coupled with an ingrained obedience to authority that prevents them from reaching such conclusions as "it is better to break a gun law, than to be murdered." Anyone who tries to convince a woman that it is unconsciable to break every gun law on the books to arm herself for own self-defense in such a situation is morally an accomplice to the estranged lover when he does the deed.

Random thoughts...

Being engaged, but not married is hard on both your time and your wallet. Not only is it hard not being married to the one you love, but it really cuts into your time because you have two apartments to clean and pay rent on. I think my free time is going to double when I get married, and the rent is going to get a whole lot cheaper. It went up to $1,595.00 a month because I'm on the month-to-month lease. That's for a one bedroom apartment, and more than Rachel's two bedroom apartment!

I'm still waiting on my new copy of Perl for Dummies so that I can get a good reference point for starting to write some add-ons for Movable Type. There are some features that I would like to write, such as a policy-driven download manager and some monitoring tools, but my lack of Perl skills kinda makes that hard. If only Movable Type had been written in Python!

I don't know how many people know this, but this blog in some form is actually closing in on being four years old if it is not there already. I started blogging in 2003 (maybe 2002 when I had Blogger for a little while?) and has actually had a total of well over 245,962 hits. I got the 245,962 number from my Google Adsense stats, which have been active since 7/8/2004.

One of the guys that I know thinks that the Playstation 3 is going to end up trouncing both the Wii and XBox 360 due to the sheer power that the thing brings to the table. While I think that's possible, I wonder if the PS3 will have enough momentum within the next year to get enough big name titles to really, really use all of that power to make the sort of games that will make or break that system. My guess is that if Final Fantasy XIII comes out for the 360, it'll be a terrible blow for Sony.

When thieves are not thieves:

Eight city police officers who used World Series tickets seized from scalpers were suspended without pay for 14 days and may lose up to $20,000 each in wages from reduced rank, Chief Joe Mokwa announced this afternoon.

He said what they did was "intolerable" but added that they are "not thieves" and "can be redeemed."

What caught my eye about this story is that the officers involved, when they are demoted as part of their punishment, will be reduced to the rank of probationary officer. This means that you have a bunch of young officers who have already started to build their career on stealing and enjoying seized evidence. That is the sort of behavior from young officers that should have the police chief just saying, "hit the door, don't come back." Nip that crap in the bud before they get a chance, as officers with more seniority, to handle far more titilating evidence such as drugs, illegal weapons and other valuable goodies.

I can't think of another profession where someone, especially a young employee, would be treated so fairly. If I stole anything from my office, I'd be fired, and rightly so. It's that double standard at play here which is what ends up corrupting many police departments.

After reading this, I feel strangely compelled to write about my understanding of mercy, grace and justice. I have been scolded in the past because my views toward people like this have been called unChristian because to some, my views are cold, violent and ruthless. I do not deny that my views toward them are cold and ruthless, and I do not deny that they are somewhat violent, but then I find it ironic that people in America today are willing to extend "grace and mercy" to cold-blooded psychopaths, effectively protecting them from the justice that is due their victims, while the act is happening.

My reading of these scriptures is that it is a personal issue, not something that we can or should do for someone else. If I see something like this happening in front of me, I'm not "turning the other cheek" or "not resisting evil" in the "give them your coat as well" sort of way, but rather simply standing by as someone else is violently attacked. To which I say, whatever happened to the concept of being your brother's keeper or being that good samaritan neighbor? I think Jesus would have had absolutely no problem with the same samaritan beating the crap out of the robbers who attacked the injured man that he found, so that he could take the man to safety. In modern terms, I don't think Jesus would have any problem with a man wielding a firearm in a situation like the one involving that gang of bike riding nutjobs.

See, the one thing I find conspicuously missing from Jesus' teachings on peace is any sympathy for those caught in the act of victimizing their fellow man, especially when they show no repentance or remorse. I think God would be actually quite angry at a Christian who stood by and allowed another to be attacked, raped or murdered on the grounds that they didn't want to harm someone. Rather, I think the moral teaching is quite clear. We are to forgive the attacks on us, and on our own, and be gentle toward those doing them where we can be. That, however, has no applicability to when it happens to others.

In simple terms, a man rapes your wife, you must try to forgive him in your heart, no matter what happens to him in terms of punishment. You catch a man raping another woman, and he won't stop and be brought before the law peacefully, you are free, nay required!, to use whatever level of force (including shooting him dead) as is necessary to render him fully incapable of continuing his attack on the woman.

Ok, further following in that random thoughts meme...

I've noticed that the less I have bitched about things on my blog, the fewer comments I get. Maybe it's just my imagination, and it's not like my daily hits are that much worse for wear. It's just a curious observation. I guess I'm giving people less to get riled up about.

The thing about being in IT that really sucks is when you get a project where you end up doing a lot of jobs that you were never hired to do. Then you have to worry that someone in management, who has no clue what the distinctions between the jobs are, will self-righteously demand to know why you cannot perform at a job they didn't hire you to do. I'm not REALLY in this position right now, but for a software developer, I tend to do too much system administration and integration for my tastes and credentials...

Caffeine is a spiritually dangerous thing if you get hooked on it like I have. It can make me really aggressive and nasty to deal with, if I'm not careful. That's with not too much sleep and about 6-9 shots of espresso in my system, plus maybe a Rock Star energy drink at lunch time. I actually find that I have problems across the board more often when I let myself consume too much caffeine.

My poor Dell laptop has recently had its DVD-RW drive die, so I have a new one coming in in the next day or two from Dell's hardware support. Everything else seems to be working fine, so I'm just going to swap it out. I need that drive because I cannot boot off of the external USB drive that I bought recently to replace it. Once I get it set up, I'm going to toss BeOS and ZetaOS on my laptop, and will probably put together a new distribution of HaikuOS if I am able to, that includes some goodies like Python and the development tools.

On Sunday, I discovered that Best Buy is selling each DVD of Full Metal Alchemist for $19.99. This was a very bad thing because FMA is so good that my best friend, who normally hates anime, was practically screaming "DUDE WHERE ARE THE OTHER DISKS?!" when I told him that I only had the first three at the time. I've now got six of the fifteen DVDs from the series, and then I have to buy the Conqueror of Shamballa >:)

And you know, now that I think about it, I am firmly convinced that many recruiters really don't read resumes. Why? I left my resume on Monster for a long time, and today I got an emil for a "Transfer Manager" The job description sounds practically like a money laundering operation for a drug operation. It's posted below. It's an ironic hit for a resume that says "software engineering."

We have found your resume at monster.com

We would like to suggest you a job of a Transfer
Manager in our



company.

Your goal will be to process payments between


our company
and our clients through the
bank checques with remote


Internet operations.
There will be detailed instruction with each

Network Working Group R. Fielding
payment
order. It
is a commission based position. We guarantee that

Request for Comments: 2068 UC Irvine

you will get about 10%
of each processed payment.

Category: Standards Track J. Gettys

This job allows you to:

J. Mogul

- Get financial independence working only 3-5 hours
per day;

DEC

- Efficiently work at home;

H. Frystyk

- Get additional free time;

T. Berners-Lee

- Develop high selfrespect and esteem.

MIT/LCS

Common requirements and abilities:

January 1997

- Internet and e-mail skills; Experience in online
work;

- Prior customer service experience is a good benefit,
but not a must;



- Ability to create good administrative reporting;

Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1

- Willingness to work at home and take the responsibility
to set up and

achieve goals;

Status of this Memo

- Effective interaction with customers;

Salary: $700-$1300 per week

This document specifies an Internet standards track protocol for the

Current Vacancies: 5
Internet community, and requests discussion and suggestions for

If you are interested, or if you need some more information,
improvements. Please refer to the current edition of the "Internet
please contact me directly at via my personal email address.

Official Protocol Standards" (STD 1) for the standardization state

I will need
and status of this protocol. Distribution of this memo is unlimited.

- your full name

- mail address

Abstract

- your mobile telephone number

so I can send you the contract and other paperwork
necessary for

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application-level

you to get started. I am looking forward to hear from
you soon

protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information

as possible.

I didn't even realize how much information was left there embedded into the text until I highlighted it.

Maybe we are in fact related to monkeys, since some of us seem to have received the habit of poo flinging from them. As the principle snapped, and just couldn't take it anymore, she reverted to her ancestral ways and let fly a torrent of excrement upon a student or two who really got under her skin. Kinda makes you wonder what attracted her to the job of teaching kids in the first place...

Then, under the guise of fighting gang activity, one poor student got busted for wearing a Florida Gators shirt to class. Sorta makes it a little harder to wonder why some public school systems are really having a hard time keeping students...

Well, I know that I feel more comfortable with sending my future progeny to the public school systems where I live. If my sons can put up with literally having shit thrown at them, and my daughters can handle that sort of fashion policing, they really will be socialzied for the real world...

I have always had a major problem with homeowner associations, and this only reaffirms my belief that there is virtually no good reason for contract law to protect their existance that isn't already provided for in existing laws that apply to everyone. It's also a perfectly good example of how morality and legal authority are often not nearly as close as the "it's the law, stupid" crowd would indoctrinate the public to think that it is.

So you have a case where the grandparents are forced to break the rules to keep their grandchild from being thrown into a foster home because she has an irresponsible, untrustworthy, drug-addicted mother. It is clearly an exigent circumstance, that anyone who is a decent person would be quite comfortable with making a policy exception for. Now, since the homeowner's association is allowed to enforce its rules, I am not suggesting a wholesale suspension, but rather a grace period to leave the community with no hard feelings attached.

This is one of the reasons why freedom of association is so important, why store owners and employers should be allowed to discriminate. Store owners, doctors, etc. should be allowed to tell the employees, president and lawyer of the homeowner association to leave their businesses over this sort of behavior. Communities need this sort of ability to exert social pressure against malcontents like these individuals.

Now perhaps I am wrong, and there is a really interesting other side to this story that was not reported. Hey, it's possible. I'm just not going to hold my breath because the people who initiated it clearly are not convinced that they have been wronged, their leniency exploited, etc. because they won't make any comment about the case. Yes, I know they may be worried about tainting the case or something like that, but when the president of the association won't even say, "look, we had a frank discussion, and they refuse to comply, we've tried to be fair, but they won't play ball" you have to wonder.

Sorta, kinda building on the random thoughts stuff from Pablo and Heidi's blogs, there are some random geek thoughts that have been on my mind...

I also bought a license of Zeta a few weeks ago, but then I decided to grab it off of a bittorrent because there are no easy answers on how legal that code really is. After reading this, I am glad that regardless of how legit it is, I decided to grab the CD images off of bittorrent rather than plunk down a good $140-$200 for the licenses (ZetaOS 1.21, then ZetaOS 1.5 upgrade license). Hopefully they'll be able to legally integrate some of their work, like their device drivers and libraries into HaikuOS like they're talking about. HaikuOS is getting along pretty well, but that would be a great shot in the arm.

Also, apparently it is true that violent video games really don't cause violence in most kids. Apparently, you have to already be psychologically unbalanced to want to kill normal people after killing monsters, zombies and other video game targets. I am incredibly shocked; my whole worldview has been rendered null and void.

Speaking about violent video games... Are they laughing because they think it's funny or because they're afraid I really believe this? Only one person who modded me up took me seriously by modding me "Insightful" instead of "Funny." Regardless, I was being serious.

Now this is what it's like when world's collide...

What I find funny is that America is the big bully country which stands ready to invade in to protect "freedom"(or oil), for our flag, on account of our national pride, etc. etc. yet, without a doubt, we are raising the biggest bunch of wimpy, prescription drug-dependent, depressed and neurotic children on the planet. The two situations are on a collision course destined for disastrous results.

This comment on Dr. Helen's blog summarizes something that I have thought about for a while when it comes to the way that so many Americans are raised today. A significant number of Americans today not only have no clue about how the world really works, but are for all intents and purposes incapable of actually accepting reality outside of the safe confines of their comfortable communities. Many will not really defend themselves anymore because of the indoctrination from the public schools. Many others think that shedding blood in self-defense is barbaric. These are the sort of useless people and useless ideas that will cost America dearly in the coming years. The only tragedy is that many Americans who are not like this will have to be injured or lose their lives for their fellow citizens who have allowed themselves to become so sheep-like that they will roll over and die at the first signs of aggression.