June 2007 Archives

Inspired by Roci. Rachel did better on it than I did. She got 100%.

And now for some positive news...

German scientists have developed an enzyme that will cut the DNA from the HIV virus out of human cells. It's not ready to be used in any sort of drug yet, but it is a good start. It's the first major step toward a real cure.

A bill is now going through Congress which would make it a crime to spoof CallerID. Hopefully it won't have any sort of loophole in it that allows the caller to block the information instead of spoofing it.

Taking "prostitot" to a whole new level:

Kid-magnet chains, including Limited Too and Abercrombie Kids, as well as discount stores such as Target are focusing their marketing efforts on a much younger demographic, luring young girls into ensembles that in years past had been reserved for their teenage sisters.

GapKids recently featured a white, crocheted string bikini you'd likely see Anna Kournikova wearing on the cover of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. The bikini was for a 12-month-old.

A company with as big of a market as The Gap would not be making these if they thought there was no market for them. The market speaks and companies listen, after all. It would be interesting to do a test of customers from The Gap. Stand outside the store, and ask them how they would feel about people who patronized a store that sold string bikinis for toddlers. Then show them, when they have their The Gap bags in hand, that they just patronized a store that is aiding and abetting child molestation.

Yet another example of why it is imperative for good policing, that the public be allowed to videotape police officers arresting people:

HOT SPRINGS, Ark. (AP) - Hot Springs police have placed an officer on administrative leave while they investigate an Internet video that appears to show him choking three teenagers who were skateboarding.

Mayor Mike Bush said investigators have talked with passers-by and business owners who saw Officer Joey Williams stop the teens on a downtown sidewalk Thursday. A YouTube video shows Williams apparently choking one teen after forcing him to the ground, while later chasing and wrestling two others while holding them in a headlock.

If more routine cases of police acting out were caught, there might be something to Scalia's "new professionalism" among police departments argument. Regular exposure would encourage them to behave. That is, after all, the foundation of the "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" argument presented by the government these days. While it is true that the kids did, in large part, bring this on themselves by breaking the law and flaunting it in front of the officer, the officer did overreact. Videotaping banal examples of the police acting out is going to be the only way that the behavior can overall be refined to a moral professional and controlled state so that things like this become less common.

Enter the Princeps Civitatis:

WASHINGTON - President Bush, moving toward a constitutional showdown with Congress, asserted executive privilege Thursday and rejected lawmakers' demands for documents that could shed light on the firings of federal prosecutors.

Bush's attorney told Congress the White House would not turn over subpoenaed documents for former presidential counsel Harriet Miers and former political director Sara Taylor. Congressional panels want the documents for their investigations of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' stewardship of the Justice Department, including complaints of undue political influence.

Don't you wish that you could just stick your middle finger up in the face of the system like that? Who are those Congressmen, thinking that their subpoenas carry the force of law or anything so crazy and outlandish? This will be a real test for the Democrats, and one that they will probably end up failing. They really do need to stick to their guns on this one and draft articles of impeachment if Bush continues this game of pretending that he is above the law.

Once again we find ourselves with a pathetic excuse for a leader who has been rendered impeachable by showing contempt for a "minor offense." Conservatives should be finding themselves experiencing a sense of deja vu over this, and agree that Bush should be removed on the principle that he has broken the law.

The reason I find myself largely despising Bush as a man and a leader is that Clinton, who I hold in similar contempt, at least never had the cajones to hold himself above the federal perjury statute. He wiggled and squirmed to manipulate his way out, and in doing so implicitly recognized that he had committed a felony and should have been removed. Bush is simply telling the whole system to kiss his Texas-transplant ass, and that the rules don't apply to him.

The next time Big Brothers, Big Sisters has a hard time recruiting men, it might want to think long and hard about the dangerous effects of hysterical morons like these workers at the Virginia Department of Health. It's not that men are more selfish than women. Rather, it's that things have gotten so absurd that government agencies are running propaganda ads that not so subtly suggest that holding a child's hand, if it doesn't make you feel right, is a sign that the child is being sexually abused.

It is a testament to the sickness of modern America that these people will be perceived as moronic do-gooders rather than as malcontents who ought to be turned into pariahs in their communities.

They're only now starting to understand the problems that staying loyal to the establishment Republicans has created for them:

President Bush's immigration bill has created a rift between right-wing talk radio and Republican politicians that threatens to rupture the conservative coalition, according to a nationally syndicated radio host.

"If [the bill] is jammed through before, ironically, Independence Day, I think we will have been witnesses ... to the end of the old conservative coalition," Laura Ingraham said on Monday. "I truly believe that it is over if this happens, and it's time to rebuild and restart."

Conservatives should not be surprised by any of this because it is the natural consequence of their own collective myopia. When the conservative tent became so big that it came to encompass people who have virtually nothing in common, aside from a common hatred of elitist limousine liberals, it was doomed. On the one side, you have rabid statists like Michelle Malkin who can seriously defend FDR, a man who should by all rights be one of the great devils of conservatism, and on the other you have people like Lee who are mostly libertarian.

Conservatives also have only themselves to blame for the current immigration bill issue. They are the ones who continue to sheepishly support candidates for office that they know have abysmal voting records. When it comes election time, there is little doubt that nothing short of voter fraud or a truly charismatic, principled candidate running in the primaries will keep people like Trent Lott from receiving the majority of their conservative base's support. For years these people have been conditioned to uncritically assume that a Democrat is worse, even when the Republican they have been electing could not be picked out from the Democrats if you put their voting records side-by-side without any personal identification.

As much as I would like to, and probably could get away with, indulging in some libertarian triumphalism over this schism, it threatens us as well. There is a deep divide between "cultural" and "political" libertarians, the former being more concerned with being able to consume vice than political freedom as witnessed by their tendency to sympathize with overt fascists like Rudy Giuliani who have soft spots in their platforms for certain "freedoms" like state-sanctioned gay marriage. We too are ripe for a movement-destroying schism if we are not careful, which we won't be because of the snarky, self-absorbed nature of the cultural libertarians.

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In the immortal words of one commenter on digg, I wish my lawn were emo so it would cut itself.

Looking back on teenage life, which has been behind me for a few good years now that I am turning 24 in less than a month, I feel even more pain. It's sharp... intense... it's... the pain of looking back and thinking "OH MY GOD! What a bunch of losers we were!"

I see goths, punks, emos, etc. walking around NoVA today and laugh at them. It's all so pretentious. It's only worse now that they can just got spend their parents money (same parents they hate for not understanding them) on designer "underground" clothing.

Pah... puhhhhlease. It ain't rebel if it's sold for $40-$50 next to Nordstrom in the mall (which it is in Dulles Town Center)...

Spent all day today in orientation at the new job and so far, so good. At least I can get the paperwork done right. Tomorrow should be the fun part because that is when I will finally be meeting with the team, and starting to work on our product. Not much information at this point beyond that. Everything has been hectic. Between moving into Rachel's apartment, been working on getting ready for the new job, and Rachel has been sick now for the past few days.

A series by the Washington Post about Dick Cheney's tenure as Vice President. I did some preliminary scanning through it and some of it really sticks out in a bad way to me. So far, this was one of the things that really got my blood boiling:

Stealth is among Cheney's most effective tools. Man-size Mosler safes, used elsewhere in government for classified secrets, store the workaday business of the office of the vice president. Even talking points for reporters are sometimes stamped "Treated As: Top Secret/SCI." Experts in and out of government said Cheney's office appears to have invented that designation, which alludes to "sensitive compartmented information," the most closely guarded category of government secrets. By adding the words "treated as," they said, Cheney seeks to protect unclassified work as though its disclosure would cause "exceptionally grave damage to national security."

To even suggest that his talking points should be treated as TS/SCI material is absurd and insulting to every intelligence officer wounded or killed in pursuit of goals that were covered under TS/SCI-classified operations. On top of that, it is about as bad as the security breaches themselves because it undermines the importance of the definition of top secret material. Once again, the they show no shame in carving out hypocritical exceptions for themselves.

Found this via Rachel Lucas:

Mingle² - Online Dating

Interestingly enough, when I put Bane's blog in, it was rated "G." I didn't know that "G" stood for Gehenna (I kid)...

A little pressure can go a long toward making them do the right thing sometimes:

A case that attracted nationwide attention has ended with the dropping of a felony wiretapping charge against a Carlisle man who recorded a police officer during a traffic stop.

Cumberland County District Attorney David Freed said his decision will affect not only Brian Kelly, 18, but also will establish a policy for police departments countywide.

"When police are audio- and video-recording traffic stops with notice to the subjects, similar actions by citizens, even if done in secret, will not result in criminal charges," Freed said yesterday. "I intend to communicate this decision to all police agencies within the county so that officers on the street are better-prepared to handle a similar situation should it arise again."

This should come as no surprise considering all of the bad publicity this case had gotten. The part that is out of the ordinary is the fact that the district attorney badmouths the law so much in the article. It was a smart decision since a jury would probably have found it very hard to understand why a law on wiretapping would apply in a case that happened out in the open, since the public has been told for years that there is no legal expectation of privacy in public by the legal system.

Still, it might have been good for a case like this to go to court so that the law could be ruled unconstitutional. I'm not going to hold my breath on whether or not the Pennsylvania legislature will revisit this law as the district attorney says needs to be done.

And now for some good news....

A carjacking was foiled, and ended with the carjacker seriously injured, though still alive. Naturally, the sheriff said that it was a stupid, but lucky stunt, and that it would have been better for the teen to have allowed his mother to be carjacked. Still, he's being hailed as a courageous guy by everyone else for having the guts to stand up to an armed criminal.

Ron Paul has introduced legislation to repeal the Federal Reserve Act. That's not likely to go very far, but it is the sort of legislation that if Congress could actually bring itself to pass, would help bring our spending back under control. Without "free money" from the Federal Reserve, Congress would actually have to balance the budget among other things.

If the video ever gets pulled, I have a mirrored copy of it here.

Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one. -Friedrich Nietzsche

To what end does political and sociological blogging actually benefit us? I'm not sure. I see a lot of bitterness that can come from it. In myself, in others too. Sometimes I cannot help but think that when you look at the sort of vitriolic anger and rage common in parts of the blogosphere, that engaging it is a subversive way for it to infect you. Maybe I'm just feeling crappy tonight, but I look at some of these train wrecks like Pandagon and see more gore than amusement right now.

Alcohol is touchy subject in the church for some generally good reasons. I can see why a lot of Christians do not look fondly on it, but my perspective is different. I came by it when I got saved in a Presbyterian church. The pastor said, "go to dances, drink alcohol (responsibly), listen to rock and roll... none of that will damn you to hell; only failing to accept Jesus and follow him will."

His point was pretty clear. None of those things in and of themselves are sins. I drink on a somewhat frequent basis. When we go out, I often have a mixed drink. I probably have about two glasses of wine a week. I have even come to appreciate a good beer, especially a hefeweizen or something close enough to that type of beer. The catch is, I follow the general principle from the Bible and practice pretty strict moderation. I'll enjoy it, but won't be mastered by it.

In their efforts to help others, a lot of Christians condemn things like alcohol. For some it is pure legalism. For many others, they genuinely believe that alcoholics are good people who have been taken over by demon rum/beer/wine/absinthe/etc. I can't say that I agree with that. In my experience, people who become alcoholics do so because of either a fondness for vice or a personal demon that they are trying to drown out with alcohol. Always, there is a deeper spiritual issue.

Personally, I plan to drink alcohol in front of my kids, especially if I have sons. My reasons for this are pretty simple. I can hopefully set a good example for them, to show them that a Christian man doesn't drink to excess, but enjoys it in moderation. That lesson will hopefully carry over into other areas as well. Additionally, I have no illusions that there will not be a lot of opportunity for them to drink once they are outside my home. Many of those opportunities will be with people who will encourage them to do it well outside of what is acceptable. Again, hopefully my example would set them straight and provide a very vivid counterexample that would encourage them away from that.

I don't care that this was part of a spammer's defense, this is an unqualified victory for basic privacy rights, and will probably end up being overturned by the Supreme Court...

A federal appeals court on Monday issued a landmark decision (.pdf) that holds that e-mail has similar constitutional privacy protections as telephone communications, meaning that federal investigators who search and seize emails without obtaining probable cause warrants will now have to do so.

But a district court held that the SCA violates the Fourth Amendment by allowing the feds to secretly seize e-mail without probable cause warrants. Under the SCA, the government is required to get warrants for any e-mails that have been stored on third-party servers for less than 180 days. (the SCA came into effect long before the days of eternal Gmail storage.) After that, it can use an administrative subpoena or a different court order, provided it notified the target of the investigation. (the feds missed their legally mandated deadline for notifying Warshak by nearly a year.) To make matters more complicated, the government argued that the definition of "electronic storage" in the statute meant the feds only needed warrants when e-mail had yet to be opened or downloaded.

Now that the feds have their National Security Letters, it is already a moot point in some cases. The feds can just whip up an excuse to send out a NSL, and if anyone mentions that they received one, they're getting some good time in the pokey. Still, this is one more good ruling, and it really is common sense. Why should the feds simply be able to get around the fourth amendment just because it is an electronic communication? It's not like it is the least bit difficult for law enforcement to be able to pull electronic records if they act fast enough. Nor for that matter is there any fundamental difference between an electronic message and any other type of message that they might want to sieze by court order.

Does this bother anyone else besides me?

Though the first novel is the great expose of Lucifer, Wendy says it really is God the Father's story, not Lucifer's. She feels that the veil was lifted and she had the Father's permission to reveal some heavenly truths. She studied scripture and added the fictional parts, such as the archangels Michael, Gabriel, and Lucifer being brothers.

She had to ask the Lord for permission write this and each part of the book. Wendy was very careful with her choices of writing and where the novel has gone. She always was seeking God's approval on everything.

Wendy wrote it in the fear of the Lord and feels that it is a commission to write these stories. While it's a work of fiction, she wrote it in under the anointing of the office of the prophet and seer, and she considers it a more revelatory work. Wendy would be in a mode of worship and she would write and she would find herself weeping while writing this.

I don't even come close to saying that any of the fiction I write is inspired by God on the level of prophecy. Maybe hers is, or probably isn't. I don't know. It would just bother me to no end if I claimed that it were true except where it overlaps with scripture. What do you think about this, those of you who read my blog and such?

There is no excuse for a case like this. The police had no excuse to get the wrong house. They knew they were looking for #82, not #74. How did they know? They made several undercover purchases from the right house. Then, on top of it, the police treated the old woman in #74 like dirt until they realized that they were in the wrong home. They threw a 77 year old woman on oxygen to the ground and started to handcuff her. The fact that they raided the home and found a surprised little old lady, should have been the first clue that they were not in the right trailer.

What pisses me off about cases like this is the rudeness and complete lack of respect and decency toward the individual they've wronged. How hard would it have been for the officers to ask her what her address was? Surely one of the cops who made the purchases was there and would have had an idea that they were in fact in the wrong place. Why couldn't they have just apologized, told her to get away from the windows in case there was shooting, and hit the place next door which was #82? I guess that would have required too much common sense and manners from those present at the scene.

Why I generally don't give a damn what someone with a law degree says is constitutional or should be legal:

Thank you. Note, though, it has been almost nine hours since we made the request, yet the posting is still up, with the number of hits growing logarithmically.

A logarithmic curve would actually be an ideal scenario for this attorney. Too bad, it's not a logarithmic curve.

Now for some positive headlines:

According to new research, human bones can be used to transmit data if sound waves are projected through them. Apparently the data loss is very low. Imagine the future applications for this. We could have full-blown TCP/IP networks going through our bodies without resorting to the same sort of radiation that is used in current wireless networking.

Read this story about how a woman actually chased down and caught the bitch who stole her identity. Sort of a mixed story because of how lenient the system was on the perp, but it's a good story in that she caught the woman in the first place and got her end cleared up.

Sometimes it is good to embarrass the hell out of the legal system. Since Kathryn Johnston's murder, the Atlanta PD has face a lot of scrutiny from judges when they issue warrants. Six months after, the rate that they have gotten drug warrants is done to less than 20% of what they had before, and they've been denied on every application for a no-knock warrant. Sometimes some real positive change can happen with greater scrutiny.

Once again, Bush demonstrates his love of liberty:

"The definition is just so broad that it really includes anyone who wants to post something to the Web," Rachel Brand, assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy, said at a House Judiciary Committee hearing here. She also argued it would protect "a terrorist operative who videotaped a message from a terrorist leader threatening attacks on Americans."

And this is a problem for... what constitutional reason? In the case that they try to use to garner sympathy, the "terrorist operative" would already have ample reason to hide behind the fifth amendment's protection against self-incrimination. With the way that things are going today, anyone involved in a terrorist group would have to be insane to cooperate in a court of law if the fifth amendment provided all of the protection they would need to foil the prosecution. That is what this example presumes. It presumes the ability of the federal government to detain people indefinitely, until out of desperation, they turn over their sources, something that the Constitution does not allow on American soil.

This objection by the Bush Administration doesn't even make sense because the terrorist groups that are facing off against our government are doing so overseas. That is also where their propaganda videos are created. Presumably, any propagandist we capture overseas is already an enemy combatant. It is clear that the objection to this law has nothing to do with capturing the propagandists who record in Islamic countries, but that it would provide real protections to American citizens from prosecutions. Presumably, anyone videotaping a terrorist leader on American soil would also have committed other crimes. It shouldn't be hard for law enforcement to find charges that can stick, since they are so good at that in other types of criminal cases. I would assume that it would be as simple as filing conspiracy charges.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? It doesn't matter because they weren't watching to begin with:

An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism.

The new audit covers just 10 percent of the bureau's national security investigations since 2002, and so the mistakes in the FBI's domestic surveillance efforts probably number several thousand, bureau officials said in interviews. The earlier report found 22 violations in a much smaller sampling.

If over 1,000 incidents of breaking the law were uncovered in just ten percent of the national security investigations, it is not at all unrealistic to assume the possibility that in all one hundred percent of the cases, there might be a total of at least 10,000 violations of the law and agency policy. That is pretty damn serious when you think that that could easily work out to being several violations per special agent involved. One of the things that has been proved over this same time as well is that it is not possible to trust the government, as an institution, with the security of our records and to comply with its own laws that cover acquiring that data.

We often make too much of reports like this, thinking that transparency itself is going to wipe away the crime. That is terribly naive. Despite all of the negative publicity on the New York City and Atlanta governments for the Albert Spruill and Kathryn Johnston cases, there has been little reform. Even now, they're trying to renege on them. All transparency has accomplished is laying bare the fact that the system is getting increasingly screwed up. No one in the system is doing anything about it, from selectively bleeding heart liberals to law-and-order conservatives.

My infatuation with JavaFX came to a rude and abrupt end when I tried to create a frame and assign a window listener to it. I subclassed WindowAdapter and tried to set an instance of that object as the WindowListener for the frame that I had just created. It was like this:

class ThreadAdapter extends WindowAdapter { operation windowOpened(w:WindowEvent) {

}
}

When I tried to set the winListener property, the interpretter screamed and cussed about ThreadAdapter not being the right fit for a WindowListener property. WTH?! It is a subclass of WindowAdapter, which is an abstract class that implements stubs of all of the methods declared in the interface WindowListener! That means that all I have to do is subclass WindowAdapter and implement the methods I need in the subclass, to have everything good to go--in Java, anyway.

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Now you know what they're selling:

"If we continue to aspire to nothing more than diplomas, positions, salaries, pensions and the raising of our children, there will be nothing but humiliation in store for us, our children and our grandchildren," he argued. "If, on the other hand, we are happy with killing, captivity, emigration, losing one's spouse, orphanage, and losing one's wealth, homeland and beloved in the path of Allah, then with Allah's help, no power on the face of the earth can defeat us."

Zawahiri ironically made it clear to many black would-be converts that the path of observant Islam, once you are lead to the inevitable jihad, is one of suffering with no benefit to you or those you love. On the one side is the chance for black men and women to live in peace with their fellow citizens, raise up families, start businesses, obtain wealth and prestige. On the other is war, losing your children, fleeing your home, being separated from your spouse, losing the products of your labor and watching your loved ones possibly killed for no good reason.

What a very stark picture these Muslim true believers paint of where their path ends. Death, misery. Hopefully Allah will be pleased enough to spare you from hell. No wonder their apostates hate their former god so much.

I never thought that I would be getting married a few days after my twenty fourth birthday, but that is exactly what's happening. I never thought I would find the wonderful woman that I have come to love so soon. I figured it would happen in my thirties or something like that. Well, here I am. Just about a month and a half or some from getting married!

You know, as I look back on where I was when Rachel and I started coming together as a couple, and where I am now, I think it's an understatement to say that she has been a good influence on me. I have had to grow up a good deal in some areas, and still have a way to go in some others, but her presence in my life has helped me become more of a real man. I don't think a lesser woman could have done much of anything to inspire me to make some of these changes. In fact, I really just don't see it happening without her.

(Non-)Thinking Girl discovers what every nice guy knows:

So, this is what we're dealing with out there in the world of hetero dating. Predators teaching men to be predators. And getting paid very well to do it. Maybe I'll start a business of my own, and I'll call myself a date doctor, and instead of teaching men sleazy tricks to get into a woman's pants, I'll teach them how to actually treat women with respect. But, oh, wait - a business like that won't make any money! The ones that make money are the ones that teach men to trick women. Because apparently, some men would rather learn how to trick a woman than learn how to be respectful and genuine.

There are two major issues at play here. First, it is common knowledge that "nice guys finish last." This is something that goes back through recorded history. No one debates this except idealists and morons (excuse the repetition). Second, what it means to treat women with respect, in the eyes of most feminists, is entirely different from what it means to actually treat a woman with respect. A few things it means:

• Never suggesting that because you are the father of the child, that you should have an equal input into whether or not the child is aborted. It is, however, your duty to respect her decision and be financially on the hook if she never considers your opinion to be worth anything and keeps the child against your wishes instead of using one of the legal methods that would not leave you financially on the hook.
• Never suggesting that she dress in ways that you find attractive, even if they are tasteful, if they go against her personal preferences. This generally includes blue moon occassions, also known as humoring you and throwing you the occasional bone.
• Never suggesting that it is disrespectful to you for her to become extremely obese with neither a demonstrable thyroid problem, nor having given birth to a child.
• Never telling her what to do, even when a decision has to be made, and she won't give you a usable opinion.
• Finally, never suggesting that if she loves you, she won't withhold herself from you, just as she expects you to be emotionally available when she wants or needs you.

These are observations that I have had after reading feminist blog posts on Pandagon and elsewhere about what these sort of women (modern feminists) think constitutes respect. By no means would I savage the fairer sex by suggesting that, in general, they share this sort of detachment from reality and basic fairness.

Want men to not go to predators for dating and hook up tips? Think about what could be motivating men to emulate that behavior. Clearly, being a predatory asshole works whereas being an honest, respectful nice guy doesn't.

Every so often, you see someone post a story on Digg or elsewhere about becoming a "better blogger" or "getting more traffic to your blog." These tell you to do incredibly obvious things like "write good content." In that spirit, I present something different. Five facts of life about blogging for the vast majority of us:

1) Blogging almost exclusively about yourself won't ever make you famous. Unless, of course, you are already famous, are sexy and post a lot of pictures of yourself and/or turn your blog into an Internet version of a train wreck. Without anything about topics that matter to others like religion, politics, technology or even cat blogging, your only readers will be people close to you, celebrity fans, perverts or people who want to laugh at you to make themselves feel better. Unless Paris Hilton is your role model, don't even bother blogging if this applies to you.

2) The "A list" is a clique, get over it. You can demonstrate insight and intellect well beyond the the bigger bloggers out there. Unfortunately, there is generally not much of a corellation between readership and insight/intellect. Odds are that you will labor in relative obscurity. This is not to suggest that all "A list" bloggers are stupid, that they are the blogging illuminati or that it is hopeless for you to get that big of a name. It's just that you are unlikely to ever get there.

3) Blogging should just be a hobby for most people. Let's say that you are really good and have a really large audience, which is a lot more than most bloggers could ever ask for. The amount of time you would have to spend to live exclusively on advertisements on your blog would probably still not be worth quitting your day job. If it is a strong supplement, chances are the hours spent on it are approaching that of a real part time job. Stop neglecting your significant other, your pets and other hobbies.

4) You are not a citizen journalist. The only way you can be a journalist as a blogger is to do your own journalistic work, such as calling sources and investigating leads. The fact that the mainstream media may not do this much anymore does not change the fact that you are not a journalist. If the police demand to know information from you about a source or a commenter, you are not protected by journalist shield laws. I highly suggest you drop any pretense that you are, get a lawyer and know your "normal citizen rights."

5) To the powers that be, you are a talking dog. Oh look, the little guy has an opinion too! He's so cute when he is "boldly expressing it online." The "powers that be" are not intimidated by bloggers. The relative influence of the so-called blogosphere over the political process is a largely a function of how the leading parties are operating. Bloggers are not king makers, unless the real king makers in the political process push policies and candidates that are so unappealing to the public that public looks elsewhere for ideas and names. You are a talking dog to the powers that be because whatever power you as an individual have is going to be a freak of nature or the result of institutional incompetence, all things considered.

Raise your hand if you think they would accept this if it were a 14 year old and a 20 year old:

"She dared my son to touch her breasts," says Michelle Grosbeck, the boy's mother.

After hiring the teenager to baby sit, Grosbeck got the feeling something was wrong.

"It was just that sense that something wasn't quite right with this 14-year-old girl," she said. She asked her son what had happened. "He just came right out as if nothing was awry, and just started talking about what had happened."

Grosbeck went to police and child protection workers, and the case went to the district attorney, after which her son, age eight, had been charged with an act of lewdness with a minor.

Grosbeck says the Salt Lake County District Attorney told her both the child and teenager were equal participants. But Mrs. Grosbeck didn't believe that.

This may seem absurd, until you realize that this is not the first time that something like this has happened in Utah. While they dropped the charges in this case, in this one, they kept the charges against the two minors involved. In that case, they were both charged with sexually abusing a minor, even though they were 12 and 13 years old. I'm starting to get the feeling that Utah has a very messed up legal system, since it seems to allow charges like these to be handed down without the slightest hint of irony. In this case, the boy's charges were dropped, but only as a realization that no jury in its right mind would agree that an eight year old boy is the sexual equal of a pubescent, fourteen year old girl.

Do we need further proof of the double standard that exists in prosecution of sex crimes cases? If the roles were reversed, there is not much reason to believe that they would have seriously tried to charge an eight year old girl with touching a fourteen year old boy in a sexual way.

We hate you for agreeing with us:

Jan Markell, who has been with the Olive Tree Ministries since 1977, has written eight books and hundreds of articles about Christians and their beliefs, at first wondered why she would be listed among ministries hated by a Hindu organization.

Then she remembered a series of articles warning Christians against participating in yoga, a Hindu form of worship.

"I'm big on [opposing yoga for Christians]," she told WND. "I talk about it on the radio, and I write about it. And the irony of it all is, like Hindus, we don't want Christians practicing yoga either.

"Hindus are saying basically, 'Wait, this is our thing, this is not for [Christians],'" Markell told WND. "The Hindus get it more right than the Christians on this issue."

The organization that is making the big stink about the anti-yoga statements is also the same Hindu organization that all but blames Hindu violence in India on the peaceful conversion tactics of Christian ministries. So, take it for what it's worth. It is rather amusing, though, that the Hindu extremists flail around like that when traditional Christians agree with them that Christians should not be practicing Hinduism.

The real irony of it is that the tolerant nature of Christianity can be seen in places like the Christian communities of America, and the intolerant nature of Hinduism and Islam can be seen abroad. Hindus can come here and practice their religion freely, including gaining converts, without worrying about government interference or roving bands of Christian extremists beating their priests half to death for trying to win new adherents.

Despite all of the alleged bigotry sent their way, Hindus in America do not face anywhere near the same prospects for violence that Christians in parts of India face.

Ok, I feel stupid. I accidentally deleted the contents of my blog's database when I was trying to clear out the database for my testing installation of Movable Type 4.0. I have almost all of the comments restored; only one or two should be missing now. Hopefully it's mostly back to normal. The moral of this story is, I should probably make database backups several times a day if I am going to be playing with a new version of my blog software. Oh, and forgive me for the dates on those comments being a bit screwy. I put them back up, but the order of them is not intact.

Some of the affected comments were on posts that were the center of some debate, so I don't want anyone to think that I delete comments except in rare and necessary cases. This is my comment policy, in case there is any confusion.

Our patent system, protecting the art of extortion, if it isn't helping the "useful arts:"

Security researchers, are you tired of handing your vulnerability discoveries over to your employer, as if that were what you're paid to do? Helping vendors securing their products-for free-so that their users won't be endangered by new vulnerabilities? Showing your hacking prowess off to your friends, groveling for security jobs or selling your raw discoveries to middlemen for a fraction-a pittance-of their real value?

Take heart, underappreciated, unremunerated vassals, for a new firm is offering to work with you on a vulnerability patch that they will then patent and go to court to defend. You'll split the profits with the firm, Intellectual Weapons, if they manage to sell the patch to the vendor. The firm may also try to patent any adaptations to an intrusion detection system or any other third-party software aimed at dealing with the vulnerability, so rest assured, there are many parties from which to potentially squeeze payoff.

Intellectual Weapons is offering to accept vulnerabilities you've discovered, as long as you haven't told anyone else, haven't discovered the vulnerability through illegal means or have any legal responsibility to tell a vendor about the vulnerability.

If nothing more, it is telling that such a business was able to get off the ground in the first place. That is a sign of either monumentally stupid investors or a patent system that is so broken and inefficient that this was deemed to be a very good risk by the parties involved. The biggest hurdle that I could see, and perhaps the only one, would be the issue of having to prove that their intellectual property doesn't infringe on that of the writer of the original, affected algorithms. If they can pass that hurdle, which is something that can't be dismissed outright, then the door will be open for them to investigate and litigate to their hearts' content.

On the bright side, though, if this becomes a real business, then there will be greater pressure on businesses to get security right the first time. With the sheer number of security patches that some of the larger vendors put out, it would also only be a matter of time before they push for more serious patent reform.

Sometimes the memory hole doesn't work:

HONG KONG (Reuters) - A young clerk with no knowledge of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown allowed a tribute to victims slip into the classified ads page of a newspaper in southwest China, a Hong Kong daily reported on Wednesday.

The tiny ad in the lower right corner of page 14 of the Chengdu Evening News on Monday night, read: "Paying tribute to the strong(-willed) mothers of June 4 victims".

The older generations will always remember the crimes of the past committed by their government, no matter how effective the propaganda is on the younger generations. Things like this are inevitable with authoritarian governments. Just when they think they've won, one generation directly or indirectly teaches another generation about the things that the government wants to remain hidden from them.

You know what would be a brilliant game to play on these people? Break into any systems that control their printing presses, and change the content on pages two and three to be full page reminders of the violence at Tiananmen Square in the middle of the night while the presses are running.

A question for atheists who happen to stop by here. When a group of atheists in power attempts to use state power to forcefully disband or suppress organized religion, how is that any different from when a group of religious people attempt to use the government to compel people to believe in their religion or to persecute them for not believing? If you need examples, revolutionary France and most Communist regimes come to mind. Those groups were overwhelmingly represented by atheists. Another question, if a regime like the Soviet Union officially teaches atheism as a counter to theism in its mandatory public schools, how is that any different from schools in other countries teaching religious indoctrination through their public schools? Are they not both using the state to suppress the other's beliefs?

And now, for a little bit of geek news. Apple has integrated ZFS into Leopard, which means that the most advanced file system on the market is now going to be part of MacOS X 10.5. This is a file system that is capable of storing so much energy that it's been said it would take enough energy to heat the world's oceans to power the storage devices that would allow it to reach its limits. That in and of itself, isn't what's so impressive about it though. Check out some of the features on the Wikipedia page. One of the ones I'm looking forward to is being able to seamlessly create snapshots of my file system when I buy a new MacBook in about another six months to a year from now.

Hopefully we'll see more of this in the future. Sun makes some seriously powerful computer products. It'd be great to see Sun make something like this, then have Apple bring it to the masses. Such a partnership would be really powerful.

This man is uniquely qualified to compare the failures of communism with the success of capitalism:

WARSAW (Reuters) - A 65-year-old railwayman who fell into a coma following an accident in communist Poland regained consciousness 19 years later to find democracy and a market economy, Polish media reported on Saturday.

"When I went into a coma there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol queues were everywhere," Grzebski told TVN24, describing his recollections of the communist system's economic collapse.

"Now I see people on the streets with cell phones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin."

To him, it no doubt feels like he woke up in wonderland. His last conscious memory was living under Communist rule, where his people had little wealth to call their own. He then wakes up, and it feels like the next thing he knows his whole country has been completely transformed into a thriving and growing nation that has been completely freed of Communist oppression.

The only thing that sucks about this story is the fact that he is probably too old to really enjoy the benefits of Capitalism the way that most of his countrymen can. Maybe someone should start an online collection to buy this man a new phone, a Mac, a Nintendo Wii and a Honda Civic to let him sample many of the wonderful consumer goods that his country could never have had under Communism.

Via Right Thinking from the Left Coast.

It couldn't happen to a better bunch of people:

The Internet was supposed to be a tremendous boon for the pornography industry, creating a global market of images and videos accessible from the privacy of a home computer. For a time it worked, with wider distribution and social acceptance driving a steady increase in sales.

But now the established pornography business is in decline--and the Internet is being held responsible.

The online availability of free or low-cost photos and videos has begun to take a fierce toll on sales of X-rated DVDs. Inexpensive digital technology has paved the way for aspiring amateur pornographers, who are flooding the market, while everyone in the industry is giving away more material to lure paying customers.

There is so much free content out there today that it really makes no sense to every buy porn unless you are a hardcore pervert. You could build a porn collection pushing on at least half a terabyte easily by going to free sources. Whether or not that content is legally there is not really relevant to the fact that there is so much free and bootlegged porn online that it makes no sense to buy volumes of it on DVD. With a simple broadband connection and a DVD burner, you could build your own DVD library for peanuts if you wanted to.

The explosion of amateur porn is not exactly a positive sign either, but I would far rather see the porn industry destroyed by flooding the market for porn with cheap or free content than through legislation.

Now that I am trying to get back into shape, I have to count calories. Today I bought a double meat, sweet onion chicken teriyaki sub from Subway. The non-double meat version weighs in at 370 calories. I also bought a double chocolate cookie. That was 210 calories. What a waste of calories, though not of about $0.50. Still, it wasn't worth it. No wonder we Americans often have weight issues today. They try to sell them in groups of three cookies. That's 630 calories!

I was also surprised to see that Starbucks lattes and Starbucks breakfast sandwiches are not particularly bad for you.

This post of Vox's reminded me of one of the common illogical attacks on Christians by atheists. Many of them call us "intolerant" because we believe that non-Christians will all go to hell, regardless of how they live their lives. This is a load of rubbish because in principle this teaching is a universal rule in our religion that we have no control over. People who make this attack are basically saying that we wish hell on others without reservation, including beloved friends and family, as well as lovers in many cases.

It is, of course, incomprehensible to such people that our outlook on such things are fundamentally different. We believe that there is a metaphysical side to reality, where morality and things like the rules on what happens to us when we die are defined. That is why to us, these things are not personal. If you have this faith, you believe that it is a rule of the relationship between man and God, not something subject to your opinion anymore than gravity is subject to your opinion.

Some of the talk about the Crusades has got me to thinking about one of those other secular complaints about Christianity throughout history: the establishment of Christianity as an official state religion. This is the sort of thing that cannot be backed up by scripture, and is in fact indirectly condemned by it. Take for instance, Luke 9, which is clearly against the use of force to make people be Christians or to punish them for rejecting the Gospel:

51As the time approached for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem. 52And he sent messengers on ahead, who went into a Samaritan village to get things ready for him; 53but the people there did not welcome him, because he was heading for Jerusalem. 54When the disciples James and John saw this, they asked, "Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them[c]?" 55But Jesus turned and rebuked them, 56and[d] they went to another village.

State religions are in fact a cultural, not religious, issue. People who make this complaint about Christianity tend to forget or ignore the fact that the newly christianized nations did not have cultures that respected what we know as freedom of religion. Before being officially Christian, they were officially pagan. When they were pagans, their governments often persecuted Christians; when Christianity took over, the same peoples simply went to persecuting pagans.

This issue is one that goes into the heart of their cultures' views on religion and freedom thereof. A better focus would not be to criticize religion, but to criticize cultures which deny their people freedom of conscience.

The more I look at it, the cooler JavaFX looks to me. It's capable of doing a lot of things that Flash is used for, and it runs on the Java platform instead of inside a closed source, proprietary platform like Flash. I'm hoping that over the next two weeks I can learn enough about it to be able to write some interesting sample applications with it.

Yesterday I put in my two weeks notice at my current job. In two weeks I will be starting my new position which is supposed to focus on research and development into commercial software development. Greatly looking forward to that, not just because the work sounds better, but there is going to be a pretty big pay increase because I'll be getting a promotion from Software Engineer I to Web Developer II. Fortunately, they understand that I'm no graphics designer, so in reality it's focusing on web applications, not pretty websites.

Rachel and I have managed to get most of our wedding plans taken care of as of yesterday. We talked with the pastor, and he's now got a firm idea of how the ceremony is going. The rings came in too and are perfect fits. She's very happy with her selection for a wedding dress. Apparently it's going to look amazing. I wouldn't know, since I haven't seen it ;)

Saturday? What the hell is that? This week it's just been another work day. Several hours in the office, helping a friend of mine move... By 6PM or so it's just starting to look like Friday night! Well, I'm not complaining. I still have make up time from being sick and such. That and I have to find ways to burn through as much of my remaining overtime hours as possible before leaving hehehe >:)

lujlp demonstrates that not only are religious people and atheists theoretically equally capable of behaving morally, they are equally incapable of reading for comprehension and understanding differences between different things they're arguing about:

I emphasize society because it is one thing to create a secular, very limited state. It is quite another to create a secular society, in which religion has been all but purged from public life as though it were something monstrous. Ironically, there has never been a religion or theocracy more murderous and oppressive than many of the secular states of the 20th century. The Soviet Union alone, probably systematically murdered more people in the 20th than could ever be attributed to the catholic church and Islam put together.

That was me.

This is lujlp:

MikeT you're obviously not using your brain. The USSR existed from 1922 to 1991 - a total of 69 yrs, do you actually think that one country in 69 yrs was responsible for more deaths then the combined 3500 yrs that Islam and Christianity have been around?

The inquisition, more than 10 crusades, the eradication of tens of millions of American Indians in the 1500s.

Do you even bother to think before you make such monumentally stupid claims??

1) Arguing about religion on the basis of combined age actually reduces the average fatalities that could be blamed on them. For example, let's say that official Christian and Islamic bodies wiped out 300,000,000 people for having the wrong views and things like that. Let's say that the Soviet Union killed 30,000,000 when you combine all of its citizens massacred in all of its state-sponsored killings such as Stalin's purges and the Ukrainian famine. Do the math. Which is a worse deaths/year ratio? 300,000,000 (which is unhistorically high)/3,500 or 30,000,000/69 years? Atheists, you silly overachievers! 300,000,000 divided by 3,500 is 85,714 people murdered by Christianity and Islam every year of those 3,500 combined years. 30,000,000 divided by 69 is 434,782 people murdered every year by the Soviet Union. What's worse, is that if you add up the total number of people murdered in every great, coercive communist experiment, it comes out to around 1,000,000 people per year, and that's being generous by giving the atheist communists an extra 17 years of the 20th century to dilute the damage.

Even if you bring the impossible death toll of 300,000,000 down to 2,000 years and attribute it all to Christianity, that still comes out to nearly 300,000 fewer deaths per year than those that could be attributed to the great atheist communist experiment in the Soviet Union.

Adding to the irony is the act that there are scriptural commands against virtually all of the evils attributed by many atheists to Christianity. In other words, the religion itself cannot even be blamed because the scripture itself, which is the religion, is against the very actions that are being condemned.

I fully recognize that you cannot attribute all of these murders to atheism either. I am simply using many atheists' own game against them. I am merely observing that if you can blame all of the deaths carried out by misguided and nominal Christians, and people pretending to be Christians on Christianity, you can logically blame atheism for all of the evils carried out by officially atheist regimes and atheist individuals.

2) The infamous Spanish Inquisition was initiated by the Spanish Government. Sayeth Wikipedia, that oh so religion-friendly body of social production: Ferdinand II of Aragon pressured pope Sixtus IV to agree to letting him set up an Inquisition controlled by the monarchy by threatening to withdraw military support at a time when the Turks were a threat to Rome.

3) Measles and Smallpox, those infamous religious zealots conspired to wipe out the poor American Indians. What? Smallpox and Measles are diseases, not people? Guess that answers that question. You can no more call the millions of disease-inflected deaths in the New World a religion-inflicted crime than you can call AIDS "God's Cure for Homosexuality."

4) I bother to think and learn. That is why I can speak with more authority than your average atheist who sounds like he got his education from the backs of cereal boxes.

Then, there was this gem in the previous post:

I have asked many actvly religious people this same question. Only phrased slightly differently ie "if you could kill (the anti-christ/Hitler/Stalin/Jusda Iscariot) as a child to prevent the evil they did would you?

Many said yes, more than half infact. Seems "moral" religious types fail is peice of crap senario as well as those "immoral" atheits

A fine example of failing to read for comprehension! And a healthy dose of jumping to conclusions as a wonderful side benefit. Such generosity is seldom seen in this dark age. The post had nothing to do with saying "atheists cannot be moral" or even "atheists aren't moral." It had everything to do with what you can logically base your moral arguments on. In other words, you can base your moral logic on the habits of chimpanzees, and if you still avoid attacking others, that makes you a moral person in that respect. It doesn't mean that it makes one iota of sense to base your moral reasoning on the habits of chimpanzees.

See, this is why I look at a lot of these people and say to myself, "how can you honestly call yourself smarter than any of the religious people you call 'brainwashed?'" Add on that the fact that many religious people would fail that question being irrelevant to the blog post itself and you've got yourself a specimen of not reading for comprehension at all.

In fact, the Bible argues that atheists do know what is right and wrong on some level because God put that knowledge there. It's just been warped. Far from believing that everyone who isn't a Christian is a wild-eyed animal lacking any sense of morality, we believe that they know what is right and wrong. Paul speaks of this a lot in both Romans 1 and 2.