Taser use does seem to be getting out of hand these days, doesn't it? I don't think any case more appropriately illustrates how Tasers are treated more like toys, than potentially lethal weapons, than the good old case of this guy who got tasered in his own house while he was asleep because he didn't immediately wake up when the police arrived. Turned out that the guy was who he said he was, that he had every right to be where he was, but that didn't stop the cops from repeatedly tasering him. The use of a taser should not be lawful except in cases where you fear imminent injury, and any use of it outside of such circumstances should be considered physical assault of a private citizen.

In my opinion, the blame for a lot of cases like this comes down to a trend in our society to freak out and overreact. I think people are often not too upset about cases like this because they can fearfully relate on some level to how a police officer might fear for his or her life, despite having a superior position in the room, and an armed partner present. Dare I say it, it's a downright effeminate attitude toward violence. Security over freedom; better to be safe than risk the small possibility that you might be sorry.

What's interesting about this trend is that it flies in the face of the claim that the police are professionals, who are better capable of using force than private citizens. A truly professional user of force, should be able to use the most minimal amount of force to accomplish the job because they are assumed to be an expert at such things. Of course, the reality is that in many cases the cops are as bad, or worse, shots as your average armed private citizen, and at least an unhealthy minority of them display little common sense in how they wield force. In light of such systematic deficiencies, doesn't it make sense to heavily restrain how these people wield force?

I found this link on Digg, and couldn't resist to find out what sort of geek cred these women had. I didn't expect much, and not surprisingly, I didn't find much. The list seems to be composed mostly of women with gadget geek tendencies, and women that can blog. Other than that, they're just hot women. You would think that a site like AskMen.com wouldn't need an excuse to post a list of hot women, but apparently it did in this case. Perhaps this should have been left up to Playboy; give them the task of finding really hot women who work in engineering positions (they of all people could do it).

Maybe my standards are a little high given the fact that I am married to a software engineer, and my second to last girlfriend before her ended up becoming one of the officers of our university's Unix User Group. Anyway, these women may be "in tech" in some sense, but no more than my writing a few chapters here and there of fiction makes me a novelist.

Rachel and I had dinner with a conservative Christian woman that we know from church on Sunday night, and the conversation turned to the election. Now, this particular woman is a typical "Christian conservative" in most respects, even down to her prediliction for "mainstream" candidates such as Fred Thompson. She is vehemently opposed to all things Clinton (ironic, considering Thompson's history of voting to acquit him), and is firm on many of the social conservative stances held by traditional conservative candidates.

After a long discussion about Ron Paul, with both Rachel and I pointing out that Ron Paul's stances on these issues are the strongest in line, over all, with everything this woman stands for, she chickened out at the last minute. What was it over? The issue of bringing the troops home. Like many conservatives, she will talk about supporting the lesser of the two evils, but as happens in so many cases, she irrationally throws that out the window on a subject that is really not one that we can afford idealism on.

Both of us pointed out to her that what she wants is a candidate who will keep the troops there, but use them very effectively, and then get us out of there quickly once we can leave. That is what most conservatives want, but where Rachel and I part ways with her, and pretty much all conservatives like this woman, is that we accept the fact that this candidate isn't running in 2008 for President. You have two choices: bring the troops home, and have them kept there by a President who will not use them wisely due to politics.

What you can learn from discussions like this is that Christian conservatives will invariably chicken out on their principles at the last minute, and choose the lesser of the two evils when choosing good is still an option. They are defeatists, political sloths and spoiled brats by nature; when they aren't automatically dismissing the best candidate in favor of the one who sucks the least, they stay home and shut their mouths because they didn't get their ideal candidate (invariably because they dismissed him during the primaries).

Huckabee, a man who seems to be the ideological and personality spawn of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, is already gaining a lot of support from these voters. This is despite the glaring warning signs that the man is cut from the same cloth as the last two presidents. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me so how many times I have lost count, what does that make?...

All I know is this. I just got my voter registration card, and plan to call the State Board of Elections to find out how to vote in the Republican Party's primary in Virginia for Ron Paul. I, for one, don't intend to keep repeating this stupid cycle.

A few things that piss me off about driving in Northern Virginia:

1) The parking spaces that are so small that they make my Civic coupe feel like a tuna boat when trying to pull into them. (God help you if you are driving a SUV or truck) And every year they get painted smaller to make more parking spaces.
2) The drivers who cut you off, then flick you off for no reason.
3) The road raging, predominantly white men, who act like psychopaths for no good reason. I can say with certainty that if I am ever driving with Rachel and one of these guys not only rages at her, but gets out of his oversized AssholeMobile, and comes at us, I will throw him head first through his windshield.
4) People who slow down to a crawl in "slight turn" lanes. You know what I am talking about. Those turn lanes that are so lazy in how they turn, that you shouldn't have to drop down more than 5mph-10mph, or not change speed at all, in order to smoothly drive around. Nothing short of a big rig should have to slow down for these in normal weather...
5) People who drive in the middle of a busy parking lot.
6) Pedestrians who walk together in such a way that they effectively block an entire lane in a parking lot, and don't move when they realize that lo and behold... THERE IS A CAR BEHIND THEM! In a world that actually believes in natural selection these people would have a simple Common Law designation: Human Bowling Pins!
7) Parents who think it is cute and acceptable for their children to play in the street in their apartment complex. Nothing says hyper-tension after work like having to wait a few extra minutes to get to your parking space because you have a bunch of lazy-brained school kids making you zig-zag like a rabbit in your car through your apartment complex.
8) People who make no attempt to gauge how fast oncoming traffic is when they pull out. Double the aggrivation when they are crossing from a shopping center, across one multi-lane road, to the other side where they are trying to merge into oncoming traffic.
9) People who make terribly stupid, and highly illegal decisions while driving like turning illegally into oncoming traffic, merging into another lane in heavy traffic without looking, flying through a red light because the traffic that has the right-of-way hasn't started moving yet. It only "gets better" when they cause multiple car pileups or flick off every driver who has the right-of-way.
10) People who merge into a turn lane, then fly off back into traffic at the last minute. Nothing will add a little spice and flair to your driving experience like having a woman, talking on her cell phone, while intermittently screaming at her kids, jam her huge SUV back out into traffic half a car length in front of you.

I think the best experience that Rachel, and I have had so far between the two of us was when she was sitting on the side of the road, waiting to pull out of Tyson's I mall, and a whole family flicked her off. Nothing says good breeding like having the wee ones jam their middle fingers up in the air while mommy dearest shows them how's it done right.

Maryland to Virginia: please take thousands of our IT jobs from us... we don't need them anymore.

Maryland legislators have approved a new tax on computer services.

The state's decision to add computer services to the state's new 6% tax rate, which takes effect in January, has raised the ire of computing industry representatives.

The measure increases sales tax by 1% and adds computer support services, data center support, custom programming, consulting, and disaster recovery services to the list. Legislators approved the change as part of a tax package they passed early Monday morning.

The Computing Technology Industry Association said the move "will bring cascading harm" to the state's IT industry, small local businesses, workers, and consumers.

A significant amount of federal contract work for IT is based in two states: Maryland and Virginia. It is only logical for a cash-strapped state government that is too lazy to force its workers to be more efficient and creative at finding ways to use existing tax revenues to try to tax something as lucrative as IT contracting. You have tens of thousands of workers for companies ranging as large as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, to SAIC, to small teams of contractors, to self-employed IT contractors who are making a big wad of cash. You figure that in general, the markup on a contractor's hourly wage, charged by their employer (and now taxed by the state) is between three and five times, and damn that is a lot of money they could immediately get their hands on. It is also an indirect way to tax the federal government.

Applying the sales tax to this work won't really hurt federal contractors much, but it will hurt commercial contractors because it will raise the cost of doing business with them by six percent. Every IT worker in Maryland who loses his or her job to outsourcing should now look at their state government as part of the reason they lost it. I am not sure how much it will hurt small businesses that just do things like repair work, but it probably won't be as great as the damage done to commercial contractors that do custom programming and O&M (operations and maintenance) work.

Sun Microsystems seems to have been broadsided by the release of the Android platform by Google and its partners. I downloaded the Android SDK and installed it into Eclipse, and it is a really slick platform for mobile Java development. Sun is pissed that Google decided to develop Android completely independently of the standardization process behind Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME). They're afraid that it might cause headaches for developers.

You know what has really caused a headache for developers of wireless Java applications? J2ME and its fractured, incomplete implementations. If J2ME were more than just another good idea from Sun, Android would be built around it because for all of their faults, one of the things that Google is consistently good about is supporting open standards. The fact that they had to go it alone, and create their own platform basically says that J2ME has failed.

There are two ways to look at Java: language and platform. Sun only wants people to look at Java as a platform. It's almost like the actual language is an afterthought to them sometimes. The Java platform that runs on Android is very different from the one specified by J2ME, but it is still the same <em>language</em>. Google did not add their own proprietary extensions to the syntax; all they did was write their own libraries to replace the standard ones.

Bitch all you want Sun, but Android makes writing mobile Java code interesting. Those of us who have always avoided J2ME, are starting to find that Android is at least several very bold, positive steps forward for mobile Java development. Android is open source already, which is more than could be said of the mainstream Java runtime for most of the time it has existed.

Now, what would be a really awesome battle for developers' support would be Java/Android from Google and ObjectiveC/iPhone from Apple. Two very cool, open languages to choose from. You know who would be the biggest loser? Microsoft because most Windows Mobile phones and devices are crap, and the ones that are good are still squarely behind the iPhone/iPod Touch and are at risk from the phones that will soon be running Android.

It's the thought that counts:

A court officer who was asked to inspect the cell phone could not find
any photographs of either the undercover officer or any of the other
police officers, and couldn't even determine whether the phone was
capable of sending e-mail messages.

That led Casiano, 37, to be additionally charged with witness intimidation. (A local news report
says he pleaded guilty to and went to jail for trespassing charges
related to his original drug charges. Court records say the jury
returned a not-guilty verdict on the original drug charge.)

In other words, he scared the undercover cop a little. It doesn't matter that no photos were found, nor does it matter that they could find out whether or not the phone could even send the pictures to his house. He sent a shiver down the undercover cop's spine, and that was enough to get him charged with intimidating a witness.

The FBI scuttles a method of evidence gathering--and then still stands behind it in order to protect the convictions that it got using the method. If the Rule of Law were something other than a pipe dream in modern America, the FBI would have a legal obligation to track down every case that got a conviction based on this evidence, and file a court brief recommending at a minimum, a retrial for everyone who got nailed by this. The FBI should be able to admit its wrong, and make amends, and it should do so as that is the only moral thing to do here.

But that's not how it's working out, now is it?

Don't read on if you haven't played Halo 3 (but want to) and/or don't want to have plot of Halo 3 revealed by references to it...

Is it just me, or did Bungie leave Halo 3 open for one last Halo game? Think about this. The Flood are destroyed, and the Covenant is badly damaged and divided, but it is not really defeated. I know Cortana told Master Chief that he had defeated them, but had he? The Covenant's civil war was still raging at the end.

So it is revealed to that the human race is the true identity of the ancient "Forerunners." What I think would be a cool way to truly end Halo once and for all would be to take that and run with it. Start the game a few years after the end of Halo 3. Master Chief is recovered, and wakes up to find that humanity has found some way to quickly absorb the knowledge of their ancestors, and has radically rebuilt Earth in only a matter of years.

Then, humans, armed with rough-around-the-edges versions of their ancient technology, enter the Covenant civil war on the side of the Sangheili, the Elites. Think of it as the "revenge of the Forerunners" on the covenant for nearly wiping them out again.

Anyway, I think it would be cool to play a game where humanity, not the alien races, is the true technological superpower. Stargate SG1 did that successfully, when it was revealed that the gate builders were a branch of the human race that evolved to being demigods.

Imagine... one last Halo game where Master Chief is fighting with weapons that make the Arbiter's weapons look like rocks and sticks. The Covenant watches in horror as humanity reclaims its position as the ancient power that dominated the galaxy, and crushes the Covenant loyalists under its boot.

It would be one hell of an ending.

And please, the ending where Master Chief goes into the cryo-pod just begs for a true series finale.

Don't even try to deny it.

Their great, great, great grandmothers struggled to even own property among other basic rights. Now, women are faced with the dire threat of waiting one third of a minute longer for a cup of coffee than men. It just goes to show that today's women are still struggling for equality:

I'm a real cappuccino lover myself, but many of my female colleagues don't seem to go for the stuff. I'd never thought too much about it until recently. I suppose I carelessly assumed that men and women have different tastes, probably as a result of different social influences. Now I know better: My female colleagues don't go to coffee shops because they're shabbily treated when they get there.

The rudest behavior I have personally witnessed at a coffee shop happened to me. Anecdotal, obviously, but then the "data" that is used by social scientists for things like this tends to barely rise above base hearsay. Since Tim Harford doesn't sound like an exotic foreign name, I am going to assume that he is trying to get us worked up about the illusory plight of American women at Starbucks, not women going for coffee in Saudi Arabia...

You know what? The only people I've seen treated badly at a coffee shop are the sort of people who bring it on themselves. You know the type. The obnoxious, in-your-face hoity toity for one. How about the person who orders a drink with more adjectives and noun modifiers than an imperial king of Europe had titles during the age of conquest and discovery... only to throw it back at the barrista if they get it slightly wrong with the same sneering contempt that Brahmin might have for an untouchable.

That's the conclusion of American economist Caitlin Knowles Myers. She, with her students as research assistants, staked out eight coffee shops (PDF) in the Boston area and watched how long it took men and women to be served. Her conclusion: Men get their coffee 20 seconds earlier than do women. (There is also evidence that blacks wait longer than whites, the young wait longer than the old, and the ugly wait longer than the beautiful. But these effects are statistically not as persuasive.)

Eight coffee shops in Boston. Eight coffee shops in one city. That's... very indicative of... nothing when you get to a scope as large as even New England, let alone the United States. Just for some perspective, according to Starbucks' website, they have at least 120 stores in Boston.

So let me rewrite that last paragraph:

That's the baseless insinuation of American economist Caitlin Knowles Myers. She, with her students as research assistants, selectively picked out an insignificant statistical sample body to work from (PDF) in the Boston area, as opposed to even taking the time to go to a neighboring town for at least one of their targets of character assassination, and watched how long it took men and women to be served, in order to find fault with something. Her conclusion: Men get their coffee 20 seconds earlier than do women, even though most coffee shops take their orders on a first come, first served basis, without regard for prioritization based on the complexity of the drink. (There is also evidence that blacks wait longer than whites, the young wait longer than the old, and the ugly wait longer than the beautiful. But these effects are statistically not as persuasive, primarily because people would tend to see right through them, and call the person making a stink about them a blithering moron without a second thought.)

See, the blogosphere isn't totally lost when it comes to providing editing services.

Bottom line is, most coffee shops run their operations as a batch process without prioritization based on job complexity. Discrimination is simply not possible in such conditions. There are other things that these "scientists" cannot control for like the energy level of the workers, the speed of cashiers at getting orders taken, the skill of the barristas, or whether the workers may not even give a damn about their job. Yet, these are variables that very much matter when trying to establish a scientific analysis of human behavior about job performance.

(Rachel is sick and not feeling well after eating dinner)

Me: This little piggy went to market...

Rachel (interrupts): This little piggy's guts are about to explode all over the laptop...

It takes way too long to get managers at larger companies to act on your resume. That is something that I am feeling the effects of right now. My job has left me a bit burned out emotionally because I work for a two-bit toddler of a manager. One of those guys who would actually wreck an entire successful project because his ideas weren't the ones that made it successful. Needless to say, I've been more focused on finding a new job than much else this past week.

On top of it, one of my relatives by marriage has come down with cancer of a particularly terrible sort. For the sake of familial privacy, I'm not going to say much more than that, but he could use prayers and such.

Now, on a somewhat more positive note, I noticed that my iPod Touch's headphones easily reach out to the front of the ellipter that I use at the gym. So I can put it down in front of me and watch movies on it while I work out.

Lastly, depending on the way that Apple does their iPhone/iPod Touch SDK, I may look into drafting up my own small business in the near future. The way that a lot of software is developed around here is just not doing it for me, and I have some product ideas that might be doable depending on how the SDK works. I already know that that will end up being a biiiiig time sink for me.

On a different note:

Read up on the issues surrounding AT&T's involvement with the National Security Agency. It is scary to think that we are fast approaching a point where traditional notions of privacy are almost completely non-existent. Give a round of applause to Mark Klein for having the cajones to come forward with the information he has before Congress so that this doesn't get buried by the Bush Administration so easily.

If the telecom immunity fails, and the case against AT&T goes forward, expect the Bush Administration to try to pull some sort of stunt to force it out of the judicial system altogether. If that should happen, what can the courts do, to stop unconstitutional interference by the executive in the legal system? The unwillingness of the courts to be jaded toward the "state secret" argument bothers me greatly for this very reason. It's a lack of backbone.

We live in interesting times, don't we?

(We're watching our church's last sermon online, and the pastor is talking about how some people come looking for divorces on their spouse's spending habits)

Me: They should at least get those credit cards on a rewards program...

Rachel: Great... so when they have $2M in credit card debt, they'll at least have a $150 gift card to show for it.

(Sad part is, based on some of them, like Capital One's rewards program, that's not far from how much they'd have to show for it in that situation...)

Reputation matters

When we squared off with Saddam Hussein in the first Persian Gulf conflict, many of his troops simply surrendered to our military. There was no fight, they just gave up. For much of our history, it would be largely unthinkable to do such a thing. To simply lay down your arms and surrendered would be a sign of cowardice and might, at the very least, prompt your enemy to decimate your people for not even trying to fight. But, for some reason the Iraqi troops felt confident that they would be well-treated by our military, in no small part because our military has (or is that "had") a reputation for being highly civilized in dealing with conquered, weaker enemies.

America has already lost a great deal of face because of its twentieth century antics. Ranging from abortive attempts at building an empire that have caused us lasting animosity in Latin America, to the number of shady dealings in the Cold War that rendered us hypocrites in many cases (supporting tyrants who were ostensibly anti-Communist being chief among them). Adding on the acceptability of torture to the list will only serve to muddy the waters even more between us and every tinhorn dictatorship. It's hard to take a state that tortures seriously when it lectures others on human rights abuse.

The balance of evidence shows that torture does not work. None of the "great" totalitarian states of the 20^th century used it except to get forced confessions for political crimes. Clearly many people think it does, so why not bring it into all areas where it might save lives? Terrorists in the Middle East can't do a whole lot to hurt Americans at home, but murderers down the street can. If the threat that those terrorists pose, even though it is practically non-existent, justifies going down this path, then so do violent crimes.

Why would you not waterboard a teenage school gunman, if witnesses said he had an armed and dangerous accomplice who escaped, but would waterboard a gunman in Baghdad connected to a terrorist group? The advocates of torture have already shown their contempt for the constitution elsewhere, as many, perhaps the vast majority of them, support things like the unconstitutional and illegal detention of Jose Padilla without a trial. The "constitutional rights" excuse is not theirs to use anymore. Allowing them to use it is two steps away from allowing the devil to quote scripture in his defense.

I know that comparison will seem extreme to a number of people. If they stopped to reflect on what they are actually proposing, though, it wouldn't seem so far off the mark. Most people have never stopped to think that it is precisely moments and debates like this that poisoned every culture that went down the path of darkness in history. It is otherwise "good men" who propose barbaric things that took them there.

(Inspired by Joe Carter's recent post on torture.)

The University of Delaware's mandatory class that teaches that all whites in America are racists is the sort of "science" that only a social scientist could respect. If there is one thing about the so-called social sciences that damningly reveals their tenuous connection to real science, it is the fact that they do not allow observation to get in the way of the hypothesis. According to real scientific procedure, one counter-example is sufficient to tear down an entire hypothesis and require the one making the hypothesis to go back to the drawing board. How many times has a sociologist or political scientist admitted that their left-wing, politically correct bias might be similarly faulty and reevaluated their own hypotheses?

Just going on the sheer number of such people who are devoted to
these pathological and unfounded worldview, not many. The bulk of the
work done here is little more than after-the-fact justification for
pre-existing biases and beliefs, not honest scientific inquiry. There
is a lot of room for quasi-scientific work in these professions. There
is a lot of room for honest gathering of raw data to do some spot
checking on the health of society, and maybe figure out ways to make some
things work better. Nothing involving the human heart will be able to
fall into that, however. We can have a reasonable guess as to how many
crimes committed are motivated primarily on racism, but never know how
many people have a deep-seated hatred for others based on their being
of a different race.

What we do know is that these self-styled scientists are among the sort of men and women today who commit very real intellectual violence against real science in the name of their pseudo-science. There is a delicious irony that their ideological peers brutalized one of the biologists who discovered the dual-helix nature of DNA simply because he expressed an educated opinion that runs contrary to what they believe to be true. Whether Watson is correct or not is beside the point; their actions reveal how disconnected they are from honest inquiry into the world. The professors who run the University of Delaware's mandatory class on racism are the same sort of vermin who shut down Watson before he could even explain himself and reason with others about why his hypothesis might be valid.

Sometimes it takes an apostate to show you the way things really are:

Here are only a few events from the life of Muhammad -- the moral gold standard for every Muslim for all times:

(1) He banned interest on money.
(2) He objected to the use of pictures that depicted humans or animals and refused to enter the premises where such works were present.
(3) He married a six-years-old girl and had sex with her when she turned nine.
(4) He approved the killing of all the post-pubescent males of a Jewish tribe called Banu Quraiza.
(5) He then took all the young males and women of that tribe as slaves and distributed them among his companions.
(6) He married multiple times and kept sex-slaves.
(7) He loathed dogs and ordered that they be killed.

Here's how a modern Westerner would likely describe the above.

(1) Idiotic
(2) Irrational
(3) Pedophilic
(4) Genocidal
(5) Monstrous
(6) Misogynistic
(7) Heartless

Is it bigoted to think that a follower of this man is likely "pro-terror, narrow, extreme, irrational and has a blood fetish"?

Note: Of course, not every Muslim completely follows the example of Muhammad. He or she would be an utter moral degenerate if they did. Though, Westerners do have a cause for concern when Muslims passionately parrot the "perfection" of Muhammad.

Normally I don't quote nearly an entire blog post, in part to
encourage others to go visit the original post, but I had to do that
because this was worth providing a quasi-mirror of on another site in
case anything happens to it.

And people wonder why I say that I would vote for a man who is an adherent of the Church of Satan before I would vote for a Muslim (admittedly, I'd only vote for one of them if I had a gun to my head). At least Anton LaVey and his followers teach that you cannot harm children except in pure self-defense. That is a step up from Mohammed's example.

Dawkins admits that his fundamental truth about the world is pretty ugly when society lives according to it:

As irksome as Richard Dawkins can sometimes be, one must nevertheless admire his occasional outbursts of honesty. Over at First Things Fr. Ed Oakes refers to an interview Dawkins gave to an Austrian newspaper, Die Presse (July 30, 2005), in which he said: "No decent person wants to live in a society that works according to Darwinian laws... A Darwinian society would be a fascist state."

Atheists like Dawkins really show with statements like this that they are a very schizophrenic lot. They believe a fundamental truth that is cruel and cold toward human life, then suggest that we simply ignore it (assuming Darwinism be true). This is itself like a form of heresy when you think about it because it requires an atheist to acknowledge an unpleasant, but true, fundamental truth of Darwinism, and then preach against it. Now, when a Christian goes out and espouses the killing of the poor, he or she is being a heretic. When an atheist "knows" that Darwin was fundamentally right, but then advocates fundamental equality between the best of society, and the very worse, he or she is committing the same sort of act, only in a way that is less obviously damaging to freedom.