October 2007 Archives

As I look back on my blog, I see a bunch of weeds and neglect. It's been an interesting past week at work. Things have come crashing down on our heads because of management. I feel like I am living a Dilbert comic right now, in part because when we finally got the requirements for our products out of our management, it turns out that there is no way in hell that we could actually sell them (just the products, not the management as well, unfortunately). Now, I could be wrong about part of that because the requirements could become something else today, but then they could be something else on Friday for that matter. Flavor du jour requirements. Lovely.

I'm not bitter, despite the fact that I clearly have better business sense at 24, having been out of college now for less than two years, than people who have been in the industry now for over twenty years. This only reaffirms my belief that age only creates wisdom in those predisposed to wisdom, and only compounds foolishness in those prone to foolishness. And people wonder why I give no automatic extra respect for those much older than I am, until they prove that they are in fact more mature and wise than I am.

Last week I got an 8GB iPod Touch from Amazon. I cashed in $150 worth of rewards points from MyPoints to get the thing down to about $166. For those that don't pay attention to such things, it is a lobotimized iPhone, not your average iPod. In other words, I can listen to music and surf the web on it at the same time because it runs a slimmed down version of MacOS X. So, naturally, I have left my computer converting dozens of DVDs that I have into MPEG4 movies that can be put on my iPod. All you need to do this is download a good DVD ripper like DVD Decrypter or DVDShrink, and download a copy of Handbrake. Rip the DVD to your hard drive, open it in the Handbrake GUI, and in the menus at the top, look for the presets, and select one of the presets for iPod videos in order to convert a DVD that way. Takes about 1.5-2 hours to convert a ripped DVD. I never said that it wouldn't take time...

So, between the iPod, planning how to code for it when the SDK comes out in February, and dealing with on-the-job bovine excrement, I have been derelict. However, after reading this, and seeing this comment on my blog post about scaling back and outright abolishing of certain college programs, I am compelled to write once more...

**UPDATE**: Nothing like getting sucked into four hours straight of meetings to make you feel too drained to write a long blog post, which you said you would...

The neocons never think that far:

And why are some of the most ardent supporters of the 'War on Terror' and of the war in Iraq the most vehement opponents of deporting or excluding Moslems? Does that make sense? It's 'mean' and hateful to deport or exclude, but sending an army into their countries is just dandy?

In the neocons' deranged fantasy world, it is no crime to wage war on, and conquer another country in order to democratize it, ostensibly to make our country safer from their extremists. Every civilian who dies along the way is just a beautiful sacrifice to the neocons. However, God forbid that we peacefully deport their resident aliens from our country, and leave them to run their own country. That, would be a true crime against humanity.

There are only two true crimes in modern America: being judgmental and fucking little kids. These are the only things you can do that will bring an entire community together, unequivocably, to condemn you as a human being. Even with murder, you will have half of the bleeding hearts looking for an excuse to parole the perp within a few years for good behavior, rather than give them life in prison. The corollary to this rule is thus, it is far better to kill tens of thousands of Muslims in other countries, and who would never have even come here in the first place, than admit that their religion is not compatible with our civil society, and deport them before we risk a clash of civilizations on our own soil.

One other thing. This sort of case also emphasizes the inherent contradiction in the way police justify these raids. You'll notice in the article that the police say they conducted the no-knock, middle-of-the-night raid to catch the suspect and his family off-guard. They then turn around and say the woman who fired the gun should have known they were police officers (she's in jail on attempted capital murder charges). You can't have it both ways. You can't say nighttime SWAT raids are necessary to catch people unaware while they're sleeping, then say they "should have known" that the men invading their homes were police. [Emphasis mine]

-Radley Balko on his blog, The Agitator

Dennis Prager thinks that if you have something to say, that you can jolly well hand over as much personal information as needed to track your trollish hide down and berate you about civility:

Sexual images and prose for the purpose of sexual titillation are not new. But the ability of anyone in society to debase public discourse is new. Until the Internet, in the public's best-known venue for self-expression - letters to the editor published in newspapers and magazines - people either expressed themselves in a civilized manner or they were not published. And overwhelmingly, even those letters that were not published were written in a respectful manner because the letter-writers had to reveal their real names and their addresses (though only names and cities were published).

Do I detect someone bemoaning the lack of gatekeepers now? Prager
would certainly not be the first old school pundit to think that what
is really lacking about the Internet is that there is no way for people
like him to control the content of what is published online. The
downside to the olden days is that many viewpoints were voiceless
because "respectable" publication would publish them, and letters to
the editor are always at the mercy of the company that is going to
publish them. They can be cut to make room, and subtley altered in ways
that fit the biases of the editors of the publication. If you think
anonymous comments are bad, how about having your well-thought out
letter to the editor changed in such a way that makes you sound like
either an idiot, or agreeing with something you don't--with your name
and address on it.

That is why people - even generally decent people - tend to act so much less morally when in a crowd (the crowd renders them anonymous). That is why people tend to act more decently when they walk around with their names printed on a nametag. That is why people act more rudely when in their cars - they cannot be identified as they could outside of their car. There is no question but that most people would write very different entries on the Internet if their names were printed alongside their submission.

Anonymity is the norm in many social situations, yet you don't typically see much rudeness in public places where someone can be seen, and subjected to scorn, regardless of whether or not those present can identify them. You are anonymous in a new restaurant, but that won't stop someone from complaining about your behavior if you are being rudely disruptive. The restaurant might agree with the aggrieved guests and kick you out. In fact, if enough people ostracize you, it is pretty much a foregone conclusion that they will ask you to leave. The rule is, you don't have to be identified to be punished in a group setting for acting out.

One need only look to the way that many radio and cable news hosts treat their guests to see that it is not just the Internet that is coarsening things. The behavior of many of radio and cable commentators is as deplorable in its own right. Bill O'Reilly is a perfect example of how Prager's thesis falls apart. The man is insufferably rude, violates virtually every manner applicable to his show on a routine basis, and yet has a huge following. The dialog online may be worse, but that is only because it involves a wider audience and doesn't have the FCC regulating online speech--yet.

Some might argue that anonymity enables people to more freely express their thoughts. But this is not true. Anonymity only enables people to more freely express their feelings. Anonymity values feelings over thought, and immediate expression over thoughtful reflection.

You mean like the writing of the Federalist Papers by our founding fathers under the nom de plume, Publius? Anonymity online provides imbeciles the opportunity to act according to their nature without reservation. It also has lead intelligent, articulate people to write more freely than they would if their identity were known. In fact, Prager's solution would be downright deadly for many liberty-minded people around the world, especially in the Islamic world and places like China.

Perhaps the real problem here is that Prager is only now beginning to realize that the average person is incapable of participating in a meaningful conversation about politics. Many people are all but driven by emotion. It is only natural that these much of society, perhaps most of society, would only be capable of expressing themselves with emotion when communicating anonymously.

It would be interesting to find out how many websites continue to encourage anonymous postings. Presumably, they would pay some financial price by insisting on posters identifying themselves. I don't know why, and I don't know how big a price that would be, but it is hard to imagine that it is higher than the price society pays when hate, anger and irrationality become the normal way of citizens expressing themselves. And even from the websites' own perspectives this policy is probably self-defeating. I doubt I am alone in reading fewer and fewer comments sections because of the low level of so many of the postings. Just as bad money chases away good money, moronic postings chase away intelligent ones. I have come to the point where I even read fewer comments posted about my own columns.

What is, and what isn't, a moronic comment is in the eye of the beholder once it gets to a certain threshold. The litmus test that I use for determining how worthy someone is to engage is their willingness to break down arguments and attack them. It is practically a scientific law of debate that anyone who boldly disses an entire comment without a thoughtful explanation, or who says that they are not going to bother doing so, is a pure, unadulterated moron.

The federal government, casting one hell of a wide open net in search of terrorists:

WASHINGTON - The government's terrorist watch list has swelled to more than 755,000 names, according to a new government report that has raised worries about the list's effectiveness.

The size of the list, typically used to check people entering the country through land border crossings, airports and sea ports, has been growing by 200,000 names a year since 2004. Some lawmakers, security experts and civil rights advocates warn that it will become useless if it includes too many people.

And as always, the media and its sources seem to be behind the times. 755,000 names in only a few years, with an average rate of growth of 200,000 names per year is absurdly high. At this rate, by the time that Bush is out of office, we will be realistically looking at having around one million people on the watch list. It is perfectly clear that the list is a monumental failure, and the whole system should be rebuilt from scratch. Nothing this half-assed can do anything to keep our country safe.

I just passed the test Sun Certified Java Programmer exam. Barely, but praise God, I passed it on the first attempt! Apparently, a lot of the people around here who have tried to get it fail it it on the first attempt. I only spent probably a total of about three to four hours studying for it too.

Posts like this are the reason why I still have Wizbang in Google Reader.

The post got me thinking about a few things. I am not an alpha male,
but neither am I a gamma either. I am more of a lone wolf, for lack of
a better pack title to put myself into with respect to a subject like
that. I don't mind leading, I don't at all mind following competent
people, generally I prefer to just do my own thing. That said...

I am not the sort of man who most of these "strong, independent women" who are the subjects of such stories could understand. My attitude toward working women is generally like that of the man who was featured as the archetypal patriarchical villain in the Daily Mail story. Yet I married a woman who at this point in our careers makes a good deal more than I do, is older than I am, and more established than I am.

The reason it works is because my wife is a good woman who tries to be a nice person. She is not a competitive bitch like many of these women who don't mind having their romantic foibles published before an audience of millions. While she does want to stay at home when we get the means to do so, the fact of the matter is that by the logic of these women she should intimidate me, but in reality she does not. If anything, she makes me feel at ease when I am with her. It's a character difference, and not one that these corporate skanks are likely to grok.

One of the things that I inherited from my mom's side is a very strong will. You cannot match up two strong-willed people and expect it to be pretty unless they agree on the majority of things. Any male above gamma in the pack hierarchy is going to be assertive on at least a few things that matter to him; it is simply insane to expect many of these "alpha women," who seem to expect to get their way at all times, to be able to deal with hearing "no" from a man. It can only get worse when it comes from a man who is stronger, and more assertive, which is why the desire of these "alpha females" to have an "alpha male" is so ridiculous. It is pretty much a given that an alpha male will, by nature, give them only two choices in the broader context of the relationship: submit or separate.

The latest version of Ubuntu, version 7.10 aka, Gutsy Gibbon, was released four days ago on the 18th. It does bring some minor updates to Feisty Fawn, like default eye candy from the Compiz Fusion group which is working on bring Vista-like 3D effects to the desktop. Some of you have in the past expressed interest in using Linux, so here are some thoughts from playing around with it.

The installer seems to work very well when it comes to resizing
a Windows partition to make room for Linux partitions, making it
possible for anyone who wants to try to it to do so without having to
buy a partition utility. Obviously you would want to backup everything
on that Windows disk that matters to you. You might want to go a step
farther and image the whole drive so that getting back to where you
were, if it fails, isn't so painful. That said, I had no problem
resizing my laptop's main NTFS partition to make room for Ubuntu. Dual
booting works without any problems for me. Unless you passionately hate
Windows, to the point that you are ready to burn bridges, dual booting
is a must in the beginning.

The new eye candy worked for me
while I was running the LiveCD, but didn't work once Ubuntu was
installed. Since GNOME, the default desktop of Ubuntu, is a pretty
heavy weight desktop environment, it wasn't worth it for me to use the
stock Ubuntu distribution. Therefore I chose Xubuntu. Xubuntu uses Xfce
which is similar to GNOME, but much more lightweight. I have some GNOME
libraries installed in order to run Rhythmbox and a few other programs,
but that's about it.

In terms of resource consumption, Xubuntu
seems to be fine for me so far when I don't have business using
Windows. It still has some process scheduling issues, but it is a
positive step forward. If you are going to switch away from Windows XP,
and not use a Mac, you could do a lot worse than switching to Xubuntu
7.10.

How can she expect to get Christ out of society if she can't even get him out of her own name? Now that's irony.

-El Borak commenting on my post, We're Angry.

I don't know how many of you have seen this website before, but they have really cool women's products. My Little Carbine looks like a great gift for girls that are at least ten years old.

I'm surprised that this hasn't been shut down yet by the groups that complain about toy look alike guns. My Little Carbine in particular looks a lot more like a toy than a real weapon at first glance.

This atheist screed got posted on Digg the other day. Why atheists are angry? Is it because they are almost invariably boorish assholes? How about we turn it around and say why Christians should be angry at atheists, even though many of us are merely saddened by their inability to believe:

• Communist atheists murdered by some estimates as many as
  150,000,000 people in the 20th century. Atheists in the communist
  movement, in one century, murdered at least as many people as had been
  murdered officially in the name of every world religion combined in the
  prior 4,900+ years of human civilization.
• In light of that
  fact, the majority of atheists insist that they are as lilly white as
  fresh snow because "not all atheists are communists." The same people
  draw no such nuanced distinctions when it comes to organized religion,
  especially Christianity. To them, any evil committed by a Christian, or
  someone who claims to be a Christian, is almost axiomatically
  attributable to Christianity.
• They tend to demonize us as
  irrational fools, while simultaneously treating all religions as
  equally capable of tearing apart society, and creating deranged,
  violent lunatics purely on the basis that they consider religion to be
  dangerously irrational, regardless of what it teaches. This is despite
  the fact that there are easily observed differences in the teachings of
  said religions, and the outcomes of those differences can be seen by
  anyone who cares to juxtapose them.
• Many of them making
  wildly illogical statements like blaming the Roman Catholic Church's
  teachings on birth control for the spread of AIDS in Africa, as opposed
  to blaming such practices as raping virgin girls in order to "cure AIDS" and engaging in sexual
  promiscuity in areas known to be heavily infected with AIDS.
• As
  a sort of corollary to the previous point, they will not acknowledge
  the fact that even if there is no spiritual basis to the Roman Catholic
  Church's teachings, that if most Africans followed its teachings on
  marriage, sex and birth control, AIDS would not be a particularly
  serious issue in Africa.
• Many of them tend to have a near
  religious devotion to science, and will defend the latest scientific
  theory of origins as vigorously as any religious true believer. For
  people who claim to be defenders of science and reason, many atheists
  are completely close-minded to any debate on the flaws in what they
  believe. However, they entirely expect the religious to be open to
  having every perceived flaw in their beliefs shoved in their face with
  impunity.
• Many, perhaps most, atheists will repeat pure
  rubbish like "religion is the cause of most wars." When asked to
  explain that statement, they generally can name only the crusades and a
  few other conflicts. On top of that, they cannot even guess as to how
  many of the crusades had official church sanction, nor for that matter
  are most of them willing to even hear that the Spanish Inquisition was
  started by the Spanish government, against the wishes of the Pope.

You will note that I used generalizations in there such as many, the majority of, and most. I have to point that out now because if I don't, I know that at some point I will probably get some atheist who insists that I am saying that "all theists are like X." However, given the ability of many of the shrill idiots to read for comprehension and pick up on such a not-so-subtle trend in the entire post, I may be expecting a bit too much.

Grab it here. Bugs? Leave me a detailed description of what went wrong, including error messages.

 

It is as though Steve Jobs read my mind:

P.S.: The SDK will also allow developers to create applications for iPod touch.

The rest of his announcement:

Let me just say it: We want native third party applications on the iPhone, and we plan to have an SDK in developers' hands in February. We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users. With our revolutionary multi-touch interface, powerful hardware and advanced software architecture, we believe we have created the best mobile platform ever for developers.

It will take until February to release an SDK because we're trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once-provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones-this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous. And since the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever, it will be a highly visible target.

Some companies are already taking action. Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer. While this makes such a phone less than "totally open," we believe it is a step in the right direction. We are working on an advanced system which will offer developers broad access to natively program the iPhone's amazing software platform while at the same time protecting users from malicious programs.

We think a few months of patience now will be rewarded by many years of great third party applications running on safe and reliable iPhones.

Steve

The iPod Touch is pretty well positioned to be a PDA if Apple makes the SDK powerful enough to create the same sort of applications that they ship with it and the iPhone. I have no intention of going over to AT&T for many reasons, ranging from their brown-nosing of the Bush Administration on wiretapping issues, to their attempt to cut off the Internet access of any of their customers who criticize them and their affiliates. For people like me, the iPod Touch is just about the next best thing that you could get to the iPhone, and having a full SDK for the thing would really allow for some cool capabilities. I'm wondering how hard it would be for someone to put a RSS reader and stuff like that onto an iPod Touch with this SDK.

The Safari web browser that comes on the iPhone has had some stability issues, but it rendered web pages beautifully on an iPod Touch that I played with in the Tyson's Corner Apple Store. It was about as good as I would have gotten on a desktop PC. With features like that, and a high quality SDK, Apple could easily bring in a lot of users who want a PDA into their iPod user base.

Has another conservative been born? Apparently not:

Air America radio host Randi Rhodes is temporarily off the air, but
claims she was brutally attacked near her Manhattan apartment are
bogus, her lawyer and a police source said today.

Fellow host Jon Elliott claimed on the liberal radio network that
Rhodes had been mugged while walking her dog, Simon, on Sunday night.
Elliot, who said Rhodes lost several teeth in the attack, waxed about a
possible conspiracy.

"Is this an attempt by the right-wing, hate machine to silence one
of our own?" he asked on the air, according to Talking Radio, a blog.
"Are we threatening them? Are they afraid that we’re winning? Are they
trying to silence intimidate us?"

If conservative talk radio behaved like this, it would have gone off the air a long time ago. Conservatives, for all of their philosophical problems, at least tend to unequivocably despise the sort of person who would stage something like this. I don't know which is more disturbing, the fact that Air America is still solvent, or the fact that there are many left-liberals out there who would have initially bought in whole hog into the idea that this might have been a right-wing conspiracy to shut down a third rate talk show host on a network that barely shows up as a blip on the radar of right-wing talk radio.

Anyone who was surprised by this has not been paying attention to the way that the left works. Apologies and excuses fly left and right when it turns out that a woman faked that she was raped, for whatever demented reason she had at the time. I see no reason why it would be any different when they try to claim a "lesser crime" like mugging in order to win a few cheap seconds in the limelight.

It would seem that George Will is only now starting to figure out that there is only one way to reign in the excesses of the academic left:

In the month since the NAS released its study, none of the schools covered by it has contested its findings. Because there might as well be signs on the doors of many schools of social work proclaiming "conservatives need not apply," two questions arise: Why are such schools of indoctrination permitted in institutions of higher education? And why are people of all political persuasions taxed to finance this propaganda?

The fastest way to simultaneously kick the academic left in the balls, while making colleges more effective would be to either cut the humanities and liberal arts programs budgets by 50% or outright abolish them, while transfering the left over cash to the science and engineering departments. In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest a breakdown that would work well for the taxpayers and society in general. Here's the breakdown:

• Philosophy and Sociology -> Computer Science
• All of the ** studies programs -> Electrical Engineering
• Political Science -> Mechanical Engineering and Civil Engineering
• Pre-law -> Physics
• Education -> Math
• Social Working -> Biology
• 50% of Psychology -> Chemistry

That is my simple plan for how to fix things.

One of these days conservatives will realize that people like Ron Paul, who advocate wholesale elimination of government bureaucracies that no longer work, are not radicals. They are realists. This applies in every direction, from local school boards, to university departments, to federal agencies. You don't try to repair cancerous tumors; the same principle applies to bureaucracies that have completely lost their way.

Who got 33% of a conservative straw poll, over two times what Mitt Romney, the second place candidate, got. Giuliani and Thompson only got single digit scores. Yeah, those front runners really know how to bring the base together, don't they? It's no wonder why Ron Paul did so well against these guys. Considering the fact that he is a plain-spoken, died-in-the-wool, small government conservative, he'd be the best person for energizing the conservative Republican base against Hillary Clinton. Hell, just look at Thompson. The dude is boring as hell as a speaker. He can't keep even his own supporters excited. His campaign reminds me of the final scene of El Cid where the Cid's supporters strap his dead body to a horse, ride it out into battle, and pray that it simultaneously serves as a rallying point for their people, and scares their enemies into fleeing.

Female politicians invariably refer to their being a mother, a grandmother and/or some other typical female role in society as a basis for why they have authority. The simple fact of the matter is that being a mother is not a qualification for the Presidency, or any other post for that matter. If anything, the fact that a woman would think that being a mother, a position which teaches her to sacrifice for her children, rather than to possibly have to sacrifice some of her children for the sake of the rest, makes her unqualified right off the bat. That is precisely what the commander-in-chief of the armed forces must do in a time of war.

Now, what a woman could do to make herself President would be to come forward with clear-cut ideas on how to improve the government's operations and make it work better for the people. Instead of turning that motherly instinct into an excuse for nannystatism, she could turn it into a zealous drive to protect her country from abusive government bureaucrats, courts and prosecutors.

The catch is, you don't see any of the leading female politicians doing that.

Am I just too cynical and jaded to be surprised?

Still, I am shocked that Republicans are willing to signal their utter disregard and disrespect for social conservatives by considering Giuliani as a tenable candidate. They used to think we were a force that had to placacted. Now, they have gauged our resolve and realized they can treat us with impunity since we will set aside our principles in the name of pragmatism.

The black vote is much the same way in the Democratic Party. When
you all but unquestioningly support a political party, they will take
you for granted much the same way that a spouse that is allowed to
outright abuse another spouse with impunity will take the abused
spouse's acquiescence for granted. Social conservatives are only now
starting to find out what the more libertarian wing of the Republican
Party has found out the hard way in the last seven years of Republican
ascendency. The other wings of the party are simply fed up with both
libertarians and conservatives. Nothing more bitterly shows this than
the way that so many "mainstream Republicans" revile Ron Paul. They don't just simply disagree with him, but acknowledge him as a good Republican, but rather they hate him and much of what he stands for.

Together, social conservatives and libertarians probably don't make up even half of the Republican vote. It is probably closer to thirty percent. We are, in many respects, the "black vote" of the Republican Party because so many of us just give the Republican Party what it wants, when it wants, without consequences.

Libertarians, however, are smarter than social conservatives. We will at least often go out and register a protest vote for the Libertarian Party when all else fails. Social conservatives, as a general rule, will either sit at home or "hold their nose." There are only two outcomes from that. Either their voice will not be heard at all, or it will be heard in support of someone who stands at odds with their stated beliefs. It never occurs to most social conservatives to go to the polls and vote for a third party like the Constitution Party, so that their voice is heard, while still not supporting either a Democrat or Republican they cannot support.

No one respects someone who says that if they cannot immediately get their way, that they will shut up, stop negotiating and go home. This is what social conservatives do. If they do not get their way from the Republican Party, they shut up and go home for a good cry.

Recently, several Christian conservative leaders attempted to fire a warning shot by making it clear that Giuliani is a completely unacceptable candidate. And how did the social conservative movement respond? By denouncing these committed pro-lifers and reassuring the GOP that, though we may not like it, we'll willingly vote for a pro-abortion candidate since he is the "lesser evil."

It is hard to take someone seriously when they simultaneously rant about societal evils, and then vote for someone who they admit they view as a bonafide evil in office. Guiliani's list of reasons for being unqualified for social conservative and libertarian votes is a mile long, and a mile wide. Anyone who would vote for him, under the guise that he is substantively less evil than Hillary Clinton, is either delusional or a hypocrite. The only answer to such a nomination is vote, in record numbers, for a minor party like the Constitution or Libertarian Party. That is the only way to say that the social conservative vote still matters.

**Joe's post.

Kill the fuckers:

Oct. 15, 2007 issue - The colonel was furious. "Can you believe it?
They actually drew their weapons on U.S. soldiers." He was describing a
2006 car accident, in which an SUV full of Blackwater operatives had
crashed into a U.S. Army Humvee on a street in Baghdad's Green Zone.
The colonel, who was involved in a follow-up investigation and spoke on
the condition he not be named, said the Blackwater guards disarmed the
U.S. Army soldiers and made them lie on the ground at gunpoint until
they could disentangle the SUV. His account was confirmed by the head
of another private security company.

I am not suited for being an officer, an NCO, or probably in the military in general for that matter. That is for damn sure because if a group of these assholes did that to men under my command, it would require divine intervention for me to not walk up to the contractor in charge who ordered such a thing to be done, put my sidearm to his temple and blow his brains out. They had no business disarming American soldiers in the middle of a warzone for the sake of their arrogance and convenience. The military ought to take that entire unit from Blackwater and summarily make an example out of them by machine gunning them to death, and throwing their rotting corpses out into the desert to be eaten by wild animals.

Apparently, the Russian mafia doesn't like spam anymore than the rest of the public does. In fact, one Russian mobster got so angry over his spam that he found a very simple way to make sure that his email never gets hit with Vagra spam again.

I can't say that I am too terribly surprised by this. It is appalling that school administrators are now starting to read the contents of the cell phones they seize, and put them into the student's permanent record, but it is not surprising. Public schools do stuff like this, and worse, routinely to their students. If you are shocked, then you haven't been paying attention. If you haven't been paying attention, aren't shocked, and are a parent with kids in public schools, then you are part of the problem.

Robotic spouses? I don't see it working. They were talking about this on the radio today, and saying that emotion would be the killer application for robotic spouses, aside from the working genitalia. The problem I see is this. Divorce attorneys could hire people to hack the robotic lovers of rich people, and make them seek a divorce. On top of that, they could do things like program them to record tons of embarrassing details, all of which they could rip out of the robot's memories, and post on YouTube.

The Army is facing more social breakdown now, and especially in the future. Having never been in the Army myself, I don't have firsthand experience with this, but my best friend is currently serving in Iraq, and having major spiritual issues with dealing with the vice present around him. I suspect that if what he has told me on numerous calls and emails is true, there is much to the accusation that the culture is once again breaking down.

Selfish bitch cocktail... it sounds like a mixture of equal parts Aristocrat vodka and turpentine...

I'm in sort of a predicament right now. I want to write some code that should normally run on a LAMP stack, but I run Windows primarily. There's XAMPP, but that doesn't work nearly as well as running all of the software on Linux in my experience. So, I have been trying out different Linux distributions in VMware, to see which one can run the best in that sort of environment. So far, I think Xubuntu is the best. Its desktop environment is Xfce, which is a very lightweight, minimalist desktop. Unlike GNOME or KDE, Xfce, is designed to just provide a simple desktop interface, which makes it the best pick for running a GUI on a Linux server in a virtualized environment. Xubuntu is the best variant of Ubuntu to run, in my opinion. It doesn't go hog wild with features the way the standard version of Ubuntu does, and thus doesn't have some of the performance issues. Still, I wouldn't use it as a desktop until the latest version of the Linux kernel gets integrated, and the new process scheduler gets a chance to prove whether or not it can really beef up desktop performance to at least what Windows XP can do.

Since we're still sitting idle much of the time, I've started preparing myself slowly for the Sun Certified Java Programmer certification. I am not going to pretend that this certification will buy me anything in terms of a pay raise, but it will be just another little notch on my belt that I can show for having done **something** while we wait for work to do. I'll know that it is time for me to give up on my current group, and search for a new job when I have gotten so bored that I have not only passed the SCJP, but I am finishing up the two-part Sun Certified Java Developer certification. The Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist certifications look like they might be useful for helping me get into an entry-level .NET development position, but I don't know if I want to go that route right now.

One of the great strengths of the Ron Paul is the fact that he is pulling support from a very diverse group of potential voters. He is, in many respects, the candidate for those who are fed up with politics as usual, and want to vote for a man who is principled. As a candidate, he is the closest thing the libertarian movement will ever have to elect one of its own to the Presidency. That has not earned him any good will from the Republican establishment, many of whom would be no less comfortable in the ranks of the Democratic Party, than they are among the Republican Party.

We've seen Ron Paul subjected to many attacks from these sort of people. Many of them are ostensibly conservative, but beyond their facade of conservatism, they are nothing more than party apparatchiks. In fact, it is downright disturbing to see some of the criticism, some of which has bordered on pure slander and libel. Right-wing bloggers in particular have been guilty of this, accusing him of having ties to the "9-11 truthers" among others, even when Paul has openly distanced himself from them. You know who you are, I don't need to point fingers.

Given the nature of the Internet, it is impossible to know how many Ron Paul supporters are "9-11 truthers" and other such conspiracy theorists. It is equally impossible to know whether or not they are even Ron Paul supporters at all. For all we know, they may in fact be operatives from other candidates seeking to knock Ron Paul's candidacy out of the way, they may be establishment players or the deranged individuals who feel the constant need to slam Paul's candidacy at all costs, when they should be finding common ground with him.

We have been accused of spamming polls, we have been accused of many nefarious things. The accusers frequently get away with not publishing even rudimentary evidence, such as giving access to audit logs that would put to rest any fight over whether or not this is happening. This is the stakes that we, the majority of Ron Paul's supporters who are not unhinged lunatics, have right in front of us. There is a general consensus that Paul must be discredited at all costs among many in the "conservative" press, the right-wing blogosphere, and the Republican Party. It's not a conspiracy, as it is neither criminal nor secretive. Rather, they have openly, bluntly, made it clear that they will say anything and do anything, to keep him out of the running.

So, this is what I ask. Do not acknowledge the shrill, paranoid supporters as anything other than raving fools. The sort of people who believe that the federal government actually planned and executed 9-11, even if they are in fact correct (God forbid...) only fuel the effort to suppress Ron Paul's candidacy. Do not engage in questionable tactics, be above board. Be calm, extra calm, where possible, when talking about Ron Paul's candidacy and principles. Even be honest if you have had reservations. I even questioned him for a while due to his handling of the first debate he was in. Such honesty and I dare I say it, sanity, is needed, if he is to be able to stand toe-to-toe with bigger candidates. Otherwise, he will be dismissed on the basis of his supporters, not on his message.

OTB Beltway Traffic Jam.

It is scary how much things have changed:

The 17-year-old, who was arrested in the Dewsbury area of West Yorkshire on Monday, was given bail after a hearing at Westminster Magistrates' Court.

It is alleged he had a copy of the "Anarchists' Cookbook", containing instructions on how to make home-made explosives.

His next court hearing has been set for 25 October.

The teenager faces two charges under the Terrorism Act 2000.

I don't think there is a geek or nerd worth their salt who hasn't at least heard of the Anarchists' Cookbook. Every wannabe tough guy in middle and early high school had heard of it, tried to get ahold of it, or claimed to have read it. Some had even boasted that they had not only read it, but had made use of some of its recipes for bombmaking. I never got involved with that myself because some of the descriptions I got from people who I trusted when they said they read it were pretty dubious to me. My favorite one was someone talking about making a bomb out of a 3.5" floppy disk. I seem to recall it being primarily based on putting lighter fluid on the platter, and then accessing the disk so much that it would heat up and ignite the lighter fluid. Even in my late preteen years it seemed pretty suspect to me that half of those "bomb recipes" would pan out.

But then, this is Britain we are talking about here. It is easier for them to go after some punk who is reading an outdated, sketchy manual on bomb-making than to go after their Muslim citizens who go abroad to places like Pakistan to take intensive training in all of the black arts associated with terrorism. God knows, Britain's problem today is geek extremism, not Islamic extremism.

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

2 Now the earth was [a] formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

3 And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morning-the first day.

6 And God said, "Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water." 7 So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. 8 God called the expanse "sky." And there was evening, and there was morning-the second day.

9 And God said, "Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear." And it was so. 10 God called the dry ground "land," and the gathered waters he called "seas." And God saw that it was good.

11 Then God said, "Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds." And it was so. 12 The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. 13 And there was evening, and there was morning-the third day.

14 And God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth." And it was so. 16 God made two great lights-the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth, 18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening, and there was morning-the fourth day.

How long is a day when you have no reference point to go by? Genesis 1 makes it clear that before the "fourth day," there were no extraterrestrial bodies to use as a reference point for saying what a day was. How can you say that a day is a 24 hour period when there is no sun for the Earth to revolve around? The first three days could have been 24 hours long, or they could have each been over a billion years as we now know a year to be. Agree? Disagree? I'm open to feedback and criticism on this one, but as I see it, there is no way of knowing how old the Earth actually is because Genesis 1 says that there were no stars until the 4th day that could give us a 24 hour day.

Why it is hard for me to respect the legal profession:

The real reason for Souter's conclusion is clear: because government intimidates and abuses property owners so often that allowing such lawsuits would overwhelm the courts: allowing an "action to redress retaliation against those who resist Government impositions on their property rights would invite claims in every sphere of legitimate governmental action affecting property interests, from negotiating tax claim settlements to enforcing Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations." To allow citizens to sue government agents who are "unduly zealous in pressing a governmental interest affecting property [that is Souter's euphemism for stealing land from innocent American citizens] would invite an onslaught of [lawsuits]."

I was completely unaware that there is a clause in the United States Code that says that when the average bureaucrat's behavior is so contemptible and borderline, or outright, illegal, that basic rights go out the window because it would be damaging to the government to hold its people accountable for their actions. I would be willing to stake good money that such an actual law does not exist, nor is there any such basis in the United States Constitution to make a claim like that. No, it was just invented out of whole cloth by "Justice" Souter.

The judiciary and much of the legal profession in general don't abide by what the laws actually say and do. No, they're just "guidelines." No wonder our system often looks like it was thrown together at the last minute by an ad hoc committee of morons. There is little consistency, little rational thought about how the system should work, and most of all, there is little respect for working inside of it, even if the results aren't always pretty for the judges and lawyers. And people wonder why I say that all you need to be a lawyer is to be able to read the law, understand what it means and work within it.

Chicken or egg, which comes first?

He said "the problem is not that we make drugs a crime; it is that drugs are catalysts to crime." And he said what "the facts really say" is that Milton Friendman's criticisms of the drug war were "untrue -- demonstrably untrue."

Drugs may sometimes be a catalyst to crimes, but that does not excuse the lengths that drug warriors have had to go to in order to even partially disrupt the drug trade. One could argue that in practical terms, the War on Drugs, can be at least as invasive in the lives of ordinary citizens, as any aspect of the drug trade, from sale to use. I can't even buy Claritin D because moralizing do gooders are afraid that some idiot will blow his brain out on Meth made from the pseudoephedrine contained in small quantities in such legal medicine. So, naturally, I have to publicly register much of my identifying information everytime I buy powerful antihistamines.

Anyone who would use the crime excuse, must weigh the cost that the crime would inflict on society with the cost that laws, police power and government corruption caused by the War on Drugs will have on society. It's in the interest of drug warriors like Walters to dismiss these concerns as marginal because people might start to suspect that the general police powers gained under the guise of fighting drugs have made the government in general a more fearsome institution, one that they might have to take a second look at in general. As I have said to some homeschoolers who are pro-War on Drugs, the SWAT teams that they support being beefed up may be used against homeschoolers who firmly resist efforts to send their kids to public or private schools accountable to the state. Government power is not compartmentalized.

It is foolish to think that the police and legal system can protect us from a society that would go to hell in a handbasket if drugs were legal. There are simply too few police officers, prosecutors, judges and prisons to go around to stop society from undertaking the "great experiment." We can reasonably conclude today, with the prevalence of drugs in spite of the War on Drugs, that most people do not fancy a cocaine or heroin addiction anymore than they desire risky sex with cheap hookers who probably have had sex with hundreds of disease-infected men. Say what you will about the intelligence of the hoi polloi, but they (we?...) are generally not so stupid as Walters and his ilk reckon.

The reason that drug-induced crime is a problem is a function of our weak legal system. If people who drive drunk and commit violent crime were consistently, harshly punished, fewer people would risk those behaviors. Here's another thing to consider. If drug users knew they could be tried for a capital crime for killing someone while stoned, that too might change everything a lot faster than all of the drug law enforcement to date.

Anti-trust is very rarely ever needed in industries that evolve at a moderate or fast pace. Some of the developments in the past few years with web applications prove that point with the software industry. Adobe has come out with a new free toolkit called the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) which is getting some good press for how it will be able to help web application development really start to mature. Granted, it is much more for Flash/Flex developers than people who are just making websites, but I think someone will eventually start work on replicating AIR the way that Gnash is working toward a completely open source implementation of the Flash player.

If Adobe is smart, they will recognize the fact that open source generally has a pretty hard time competing against very solid, well-managed closed source applications. Sure, there are exceptions, but in general companies that make excellent closed source products tend to do very well in the market no matter how much direct competition they face from open source products. So, as Gnash becomes a mature product in its own right, and developers move toward reimplementing AIR under the GPL or some other license, Adobe has nothing to worry about. In fact, if Flash and Flex remain as good as they are, many people will still prefer to use Adobe's very expensive products that developers currently use to make Flash-based web applications.

Microsoft is now facing a more credible threat to its desktop business because the marketplace has evolved, not because of government regulation. As the tools for developing web applications, and applications that go beyond the web, continue to mature, many of the benefits of developing for Windows will be abstracted away into the new layer that sits between the operating system and the network/web applications. Time, not government regulation, is the monopoly's worst enemy in an industry that keeps moving.

Since I haven't had much else to do at work, I have learned a lot about Java and Perl lately. I've been reading Java 5.0 Tiger: A Developer's Notebook and Pro Perl mainly. Good books, especially the former. The Java book is a God-send for those of us who were too lazy to keep up with the new features introduced in Java 5 because it condenses all of the topics down into a loose collection of chapters that is about 170 pages long, none of which take more than about 10 minutes of skim-reading to pick up so far.

I don't know why Americans trust billionares who act like populists. If there is one thing that people should be afraid of in politics, it is a rich person who believes in large-scale welfare services, nationalized healthcare or some similar scheme with education. Why? He or she, but virtue of being rich, while simultaneously espousing these views, proves that they have he or she has no intention of setting an example. In fact, if every person with more than several million dollars of liquidatable assets would put their "excess" to public use, there would be absolutely no need for welfare or public schools, nor would there be any respect for those calling for nationalized healthcare.

One of the guys in our small group had been a bit of a hardcase for a while, and even dropped out for a good month and a half to two months. He came back last night after I'd been praying that God would kick him in the ass a little because I could sympathize with a lot of what he's gone through. Sure enough, God seems to have kicked his ass a little bit because he came back last night, and not only did he seem to be more grounded now, but he had traded up for a better job!

Back to the software development topic, I've realized that part of my problem with picking up Perl is the simple fact that I don't think like a scripter. I write code much more deliberately, which means that I tend to forego terse code, and go for code that is very readable, even if it is a tad slower and not quite like what others who use the language do. I'm sure that when I publish my first Perl project on my projects blog, there will be at least one Perl coder who will sneer "you write Perl like a Java developer."

This is something you don't see everyday. State waste inspectors in California had targeted an organization that finds new uses/homes for outdated, donated computers. Their argument was that it was a hazardous waste dump! If that be the case, then I suppose public schools should be (literally) called prisons for anyone under 18! The good news, though, is that this case got circulated over the Internet very quickly, especially on Digg, and the California government has received a lot of negative publicity about this legally dubious action against a charity that is actually performing a public good for the environment. The result was that for now, at least, the state has backed off due to public pressure.

Eternal vigilance, and all that.

Disproving the argument that secession is unconstitutional using simple college logic:

• The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved for the States respectively, or to the people. --10th Amendment
• The power to force states to remain in the union when they have carried out a popular referendum on secession is not an enumerated power of the United States.
• Ergo, The United States Government does not have the constitutional authority to force any state that conducts a popular vote on remaining in the union, to stay in the union.

This legal argument brought to you by Modus Ponens.

On a related note, I'm reminded once again why I rarely read RightWingNews. It is a cesspool of idiocy that makes Slashdot and Digg look normal when you get into the comments.

MLK, self-hating black man? You decide:

While King died before the Roe vs. Wade decision, and, to the best of my knowledge, made no comments on abortion, he was an ardent supporter of Planned Parenthood. He even won their Margaret Sanger Award in 1966 and had his wife give a speech entitled Family Planning - A Special and Urgent Concern which he wrote. In the speech, he did not compare the civil rights movement to the struggle of Christian Conservatives, but he did say "there is a striking kinship between our movement and Margaret Sanger's early efforts."

There has gotta be some sort of posthumous award that can be given to a man who ostensibly fights for the betterment of his people, but whose actions are such that they are given an award by an organization founded by a woman who wanted to see his people largely wiped out through eugenics. Margaret Sanger's position on eugenics is pretty well known by now to anyone who has read up a little on Planned Parenthood. Martin Luther King Jr, race traitor.

Perhaps this could be followed up by some neo-Nazi group giving Noam Chomsky a lifetime achievement award for his services as a self-hating Jew...

Isaac Schrodinger starts, but doesn't entirely finish, an important thought about how Muslims often create a dubious comparison between anti-black racism and prejudice against Muslims due to the teachings and history of Islam:

Of course. That era of 'blacks are stupid, incompetent, and deserve to be kept separate so as to keep the white race pure' is no different than writing and reporting about the countless crimes and cruelties committed by Muslims in the name of their vile God.

Most people who think along these lines are not at all squeemish about holding prejudiced attitudes towards religions that are unapologetically evil and/or barbaric. Even in most politically correct settings, one would never get the sort of criticism for being upset about having to work with a fundamentalist Muslim that one would get for being upset about having to work with someone who openly worships Satan or who claims to be a follower of the original Aztec religion. Most people would have no problem judging the beliefs of such a coworker or associate, nor would they be begrudged their discomfort with spending time close to someone who, regardless of how they behave, is an adherant of such a religion.

Religion is something that is freely chosen. Blacks do not choose to be blacks; Muslims, however, choose to remain Muslims. This is not even up for debate in the West, a region which is known not only for its religious diversity, but for how it is socially acceptable to just make up your own religion as you go. In the West, there is no compulsion in religion that forces Muslims to remain Muslim. The fact that they voluntarily adhere to a war-like religion that preaches ghastly things on this side of eternity for non-believers who won't convert, is enough to call into question what kind of people they are.

We're right, we're never wrong; we're the government:

But not only had Mayfield been far from Madrid at the time of the bombing, he hadn't even left the United States since 1994. The FBI, however, insisted that his Army fingerprint matched a digital photo of the print from the Madrid bag. The Spanish police, who had the original fingerprint, were never convinced that Mayfield's was a match. But that didn't stop the FBI from swearing to a judge that it was.

Despite a lack of physical evidence placing Mayfield at the scene of the crime--or even the country in which it was committed--the FBI insists that it did not make an egregious mistake. The FBI also testified that they are firmly convinced that Mayfield exercised a complex sequence of remote sensory perception and telekinesis in setting off the bomb. When asked what scientific evidence they had to support their claim that psychic powers actually exist, they gave the court and reporters a 1-900 number, and said that their expert witness would be able to corroborate everything about the case.

Will they prosecute this? Of course not...

Jennifer was alone with her two-year old son, Derek. As she talked to an investigator in the front yard, she noticed a deputy nearby approaching her two dogs. She said Duke, the Basset Hound, was barking, Eddie, the Terrier Lab, was lying in the grass growling.

"The dog was down, he didn't try jumping at him," said Stiernagel, "he didn't do anything, as soon as I turned around, he shot him right in the head."

Derek watched from the front deck 20 feet away.

From a tactical perspective, that's really smart. Instead of saying in a hushed voice, "ma'am, can you call your dogs in, we think a bank robber may be hiding around here, and we need to search your yard" the guy blasts the dog. Well, good thing for him the robber wasn't there because if he was, he would have run for it after hearing that gun go off. Now, imagine the roles are slightly different.

Imagine a new neighbor walks over to say hi. The dog growls because the family's 2 year old is only 20 feet away, and the dog has no idea who this stranger is. The new neighbor then unceremoneously blows away the dog, killing it in front of a toddler who is in easy shooting distance of the dog. You can guarantee that even in most parts of Texas and Louisiana, that if you, a normal person, shot a person's dog because it growled at you, while you were on its owner's property, the police would be all over you for unlawful discharge of a firearm, cruelty to an animal, and anything else they could stick to you.

Funny how many big bloggers end up becoming just like that dreaded "MSM" once they get a little too big for their britches:

NEW DEAL: Pajamas Media editors have noted that the number of weekly votes in our poll has diminished drastically from the tens of thousands cast at the outset. For months now, many readers have been complaining to us about the increasing inutility of the poll because of vote-swarming by second tier candidates. Many voters have lost interest and are not participating. Websites that had run our widget were no longer doing so.

Something needed to change.

Therefore, especially since the campaign itself appears to be narrowing its focus to front-running candidates, henceforth the Pajamas Media Poll will be restricted to those first tier candidates listed on the front poll page of the leading online poll aggregator Real Clear Politics. As of now, that is four candidates on the Democratic side and five on the Republican. We will change our lineup on the Sunday after RCP does, if it does.

"Vote-swarming." Is that a nice way of saying that they pulled in like-minded people in droves, or what? PajamasMedia and its ilk have never been shy about calling Ron Paul supporters spammers, so I can only assume that their language choice reflects something other than a series of spambots hitting their polls. It is pretty clear that PajamasMedia, far from being an independent outlet, is, like everyone else, taking its cue as to who the front-runners are from the New York Times and other "MSM" outlets. They are ignoring the polls and his fund raising successes, which show that far from being a complete nobody, Ron Paul might actually be gaining the sort of grassroots support that is needed to put an actual libertarian-minded conservative back into office.

This says everything that needs to be said about the price of non-violent confrontation when confronting a group that has no moral qualms about using violence against its opponents. It is a lesson that is often forgotten by those who look to Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. as role models. The only reason their protests worked the way they did was because they were staring down governments that had no intention of ever committing mass murder, openly, in the streets. Just imagine if the British had been quite willing to kill the protesters in India, and southern police had indiscriminately fired on the civil rights protesters, killing hundreds of them at every rally. It could have changed everything. There is a time for peace, there is a time for war. In Burma, to paraphrase Ecclesiastes, it is now time for the people to declare war on their government. Their government has taken a bold step in the wrong direction by murdering many of the people it was founded to protect. The time has come, in Burma, for the leadership who ordered this crime to be put to the sword.

Why is it so hard for people like John Hawkins of Right Wing News to see and denounce Bush's enthusiastic support for the Law of the Sea Treaty, but not believe that the same man might be working toward a North American Union?

WASHINGTON - For the second time in three years, the Bush administration is putting on a major effort for Senate ratification of the United Nations' Law of the Sea Treaty, a wide-ranging measure critics say will grant the U.N. control of 70 percent of the planet under its oceans.

With Democrats in nearly unanimous agreement with the treaty and the Bush administration behind it, it will be up to a handful of determined Republican senators to derail it from getting a two-thirds vote in the upper house.

President Bush announced his intention to seek reintroduction of LOST for ratification to a small group of trusted Republican grass-roots organizers last week - an announcement that was met with horror and scorn.

One of the most commonly repeated fallacies used by the ostensibly conservative pundits and bloggers who think that the North American Union is pure conspiracy theory nonsense is that it would require constitutional changes. The Law of the Sea Treaty explodes that myth wide open as it uses existing constitutional mechanisms to create a sovereign body that has unaccountable power over the American people, American commercial interests and American military power. It does that in part by using a legal sleight of hand in the form of defining certain types of air pollution as also being ocean pollution, since air pollution often ends up in the ocean. Thus the United Nations gets indirect regulatory power within the borders of the United States.

I would submit that you would have to be a moron to see Bush's support for the Law of the Sea Treaty, and then find it hard to believe that there might be eventual unionization plans in store after the work done under the SPP is accomplished. You wouldn't necessarily have to agree whole-heartedly, but I can't see how you could function with the congnitive dissonance it takes to recognize what Bush is doing with LOST, and then dismiss fears that he has similar sovereignty-threatening plans as paranoid delusions.

At any rate, the fact of the matter is that the U.S. Constitution is just a piece of paper in and of itself. The only protection that it provides against globalist efforts of all sorts that threaten our national sovereignty is the force the American people put behind upholding it against the globalists. Therefore a constitutional amendment is entirely unnecessary to advance globalist goals if the courts uphold their treaties and laws, and the American people remain complacent.

This is also true on other issues like gun bans. With the way that the 14th amendment has been interpretted by the courts, gun bans should be illegal at the state and local levels just as blanket restrictions on speech and establishment of religion are illegal. Hasn't work that way in practice, now has it?...

As I said, the Constitution only has the legal authority that the American people give it, which is apparently not much in practice, except on the few issues they care about.

College continues to get more expensive:

The near doubling in the cost of a college degree the past decade has produced an explosion in high-priced student loans that could haunt the U.S. economy for years.

While scholarship, grant money and government-backed student loans -- whose interest rates are capped -- have taken up some of the slack, many families and individual students have turned to private loans, which carry fees and interest rates that are often variable and up to 20 percent.

Many in the next generation of workers will be so debt-burdened they will have to delay home purchases, limit vacations, even eat out less to pay loans off on time.

Kristin Cole, 30, who graduated from Michigan State University's law school and lives in Grand Rapids, Mich., owes $150,000 in private and government-backed student loans. Her monthly payment of $660, which consumes a quarter of her take-home pay, is scheduled to jump to $800 in a year or so, confronting her with stark financial choices.

There are a lot of things that are just wrong with this. First of all, there is no non-technical education worth $150,000USD at the current value of the US Dollar. This is especially true of liberal arts programs and law school. Think about this, for a second. Why on Earth should someone have to pay $150,000 or more for an education that consists primarily of reading and analyzing books? Even more relevant, would someone pay that much for an education that they could just as easily get from spending 5-6 hours a day, every work day, at a public library?

What Cole and others aren't asking is why you even need to have a law school education to become a lawyer. Why isn't passing the bar exam enough to do it? The obvious answer is that that would be too meritocratic, and would open the door to more talented people who have their primary education in other fields, and who study law for other reasons. It would also make it so that spending $100,000-$200,000 on a law school education in your early twenties would seem about as bright a move as buying a mid-range Italian sports car in your early twenties when you don't have the money or job to support it.

Are college educations even really needed for most jobs today? I seriously doubt it, personally. There are very few professions where you need the sort of educational rigor that a university can provide. In fact, in many cases, it's just a way of weeding out socio-economic undesirables from some positions, and in other cases, making it easier for Human Resources to scan resumes. Hell, I don't even need a college degree to do what I do for a living! I have used barely any of the upper-level Computer Science classes that I took. Everything that I have used to write software at work has consisted of a basic, but solid, understanding of Java or Jython programming, some database development information, and some of the 200 level course work that covered recursive algorithms. In other words, by the end of my sophomore year, I no longer needed to continue on with my CS education to be able to do what I would end up doing 2.5 years later! I would thus submit that most jobs that are less technical than mine can be accomplished by a young and eager-to-learn employee with no college education at all, provided that they get on the job training.

I'm not surprised to see that the article didn't even get into the issue of having employers pay for advanced degrees. I sure as hell won't be paying for my master's degree if and when I can go for one at a state university. Rather, my employer will be picking up at a bare minimum a significant chunk of the tuition. In exchange for being locked into working for them an extra year after graduation, I will have paid almost nothing for my master's degree.

"I could never buy a house. I can't travel; I can't do anything," she said. "I feel like a prisoner."

A legal aid worker, Cole said she may need to get a job at a law firm, "doing something that I'm not real dedicated to, just for the sake of being able to live."

Boo hoo. God forbid that you have to work at a place that will probably give you a significant pay increase, thus giving you the freedom to buy a house, travel and do many of the things you want in exchange for not saving the world. Such a modern day tragedy it is to have to go to work for someone who will pay you more to work for them in the same profession, when many others are having to take pay cuts.

It doesn't even seem to cross her mind that working for a private law firm might actually give her the opportunity to make a real difference. She has just as much opportunity, if not more, to take on good cases where valuable precedents can be set, and if she gets employed by a law firm that is generally inclined toward her worldview, she might have some powerful backing to take on cases that would otherwise have been inaccessible to her.

There are two reasons why I am debt-free from college. The first reason is that my family started saving when I was very little, so they had about eighteen years to prepare slowly. I fully intend to do this for my kids, so tuition costs don't make me have to work a second job. Second, I chose a cheaper, state university, James Madison University, over more expensive and prestigious ones. It still blows my mind to think that people will pay as much as $50,000 a year for an undergraduate education that can had for as little as $2,800/semester at a state university.

I'm not entirely unsympathetic to some of these people. A lot of universities blow money on stupid, useless things. There is a lot of room for them to tighten their belts and reduce costs. Still, you cannot end up with a mortgage-sized college debt by accident. It is entirely possible to work around that at a young age. Just go into the military for four years, live on base, use your other stipends to your advantage, and save every paycheck. Between that and the GI Bill, you can easily afford to have as much as $100,000 saved up by the time you're out. I know that is possible because a friend of mine has been doing that while he plans to go to medical school on the military's dime. Even now, there are good options which don't involve mortgage-sized debts.

If there be one thing, <em>one thing</em> that could drive me to no longer work in an office, it would be fluorescent lighting. Like a number of office workers who have to sit in front of a computer for the better part of the waking day, my eyes get badly strained and I get a headache because of this "energy-efficient" lighting. In fact, as I write this blog post, I am doing so with my Oakley sunglasses on because I am at my wit's end today between the severe allergy season in Northern Virginia, and these God-forsaken torture instruments imposed upon us by environmentalist do gooders.

I hate environmentalists because of things like the fluorescent light bulb. I would be sorely tempted to support the outlawing, and persecution by state authority (I know, how libertarian) of every environmentalist organization in the United States if they succeed in outlawing the incandescent light bulb. After several hours of dealing with an entirely unnecessary headache, and feeling my eyes grow terribly sore, I could give a damn less how much energy we are saving by using fluorescent light bulbs. If energy consumption is a problem, here's a novel thought: punish employees who leave computers on overnight without a business case for doing so. A typical PC left on overnight would use probably several times more energy than switching the entire office space that it is located in, to incandescent light bulbs. And that's just one PC!

At the first office where I worked for my current employer, I managed to actually shut off almost all of the fluorescent light bulbs in a healthy perimeter of my cubicle. What kept me from going all the way? An older coworker complained that he couldn't see his incredibly bright LCD that well without the lights! Sheesh. I don't know Rachel deals with it sometimes. She and another coworker manage to turn off all of the lights altogether, only to have another one come in, turn them back on and leave. I think I would have had a nasty confrontation by now if I were in position.

You're damn right I'm in a bad mood over this. It's the result of waking up with allergies that were so severe that even a Claritin D didn't do more than cut them down by half, and then having to sit under pinkish-grey, flickering light bulbs for several hours straight.

If even half of the facts of this case are true, it is a good example of why the public needs laws in place that allow private citizens to confidently use force against police officers they believe are violently breaking the law. If it is true that he was repeatedly tasered, and then shot in the back, that is an unjustifiable use of force. The excuse is that, as he was running away, it looked like he was reaching for a gun in his pocket. The officer shouldn't have had any reason to worry, though, because unless the suspect was a crack shot with a hangun, it would be extremely unlikely that he could just whirl around and get off a shot before the officer could accurately aim, and fire at least one round into him. I can't say that I am too impressed with the defense here because of the way that "normal people" are not--ever--allowed by the system to shoot someone in the back, no matter what they are doing.

Congress has agreed to raise the limit on how much money our government can borrow rather than, you know, cutting spending, increasing taxes, and generally taking other, normal measures to make the government get out of financial trouble. Oh, and this would just so happen to be the fifth time that they have had to raise the limit since George Bush took office in 2001. Could this have anything to do with his dramatic increase in social welfare spending, coupled with a badly managed war/occupation in Iraq? The Republicans have really done a bang up job of proving that they are indeed better than the Democrats.

AT&T is really starting to show their true colors. Maybe they are bucking for the position of being nationalized and made the official telecom of the United States when Hillary Clinton wins office. Why else would they be so quick to not only spy on their users, but add terms of service that say that you agree to never publish anything online that disparages them? I just don't get what kind of moron would stay a loyal user of such an abusive ISP.

Is there no end to the ways that Giuliani will attempt to use 9-11 to his political advantage? Quite frankly, this little quip of his makes him sound more like the sort of wuss who is scared out of his mind about terrorists that we don't need for a President. If 9-11 is on his mind that often, he has serious issues.

Weird! You have to be some kind of klutz to fall out of your SUV at a drive through, then get run over by the vehicle as it slowly rolls forward. I'm going to assume that it was probably an automatic, at which rate, I just don't get why the woman didn't put it in park if she had to take off her seatbelt and open the door in order to place her order. I wonder if I am giving her too much credit on that part too...

Engadget has a pretty fair article that attacks both sides in the fight over the iPhone. Come to think of it, it's pretty obvious what Apple should have done to get around this. They should have released the iPod Touch as a full-blown PDA based on the iPhone. Hell, bundle a complete SDK with the device so that every hacker who wants to tinker with it has all of the tools right at their disposal. As long as it is not a phone, Apple doesn't have to worry about people writing software that crashes AT&T's phone network. Not only that, but turning the iPod Touch into an open, programmable iPhone sans phone software would have been a major coup for them, bringing in many more customers than would have been interested in the iPod Touch normally. I've held an iPod Touch in the Tyson's Corner Apple Store. It has everything one would need to make a great PDA. Why Apple hasn't done this is beyond me.