December 2007 Archives

The powers that be still haven't learned from the results of their tampering with the CIA's human intelligence apparatus and over-reliance on information technology that there are somethings that inherently require a lot of manpower in the field:

The Homeland Security Dept. is responsible for keeping the country safe from such breaches, and it has been spending billions of dollars on information technology to accomplish that mission. But the department's investments have come up well short of the country's needs, according to a growing chorus of critics. When you talk about the Department of Homeland Security, it's not only a loss of money but it may well be a loss of our national security interests if we don't have the work done that needs to be done, says Rep. Henry Waxman (D.-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight & Government Reform. All told, some $3 billion in information technology contracts, accounting for 60% of the agency's 2008 IT budget, are underperformingâ€"whether because they're behind schedule, over budget, or lack a qualified project manager or definable parameters. In dollar terms, Homeland Security accounts for about half of the troubled government IT projects tracked by the Office of Management & Budget, which helps prepare the federal budget.

Bush had proposed to add 10,000 new Border Patrol agents to the agency over five years, but it couldn't find room in the budget to hire on more than a few hundred. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that if that money had been allocated to hire more personnel for the Border Patrol, the group in the DoHS that needed it most, that Bush wouldn't have had any problems getting that many new agents added.

It's simply not practical to even debate the idea of using information technology as a substitute for manpower in the field for something like border enforcement. What the United States desperately needs is to have an addition 10,000 border agents on the southern border with Mexico. With manpower as stretched as it currently is down there, and the volume of illegal immigrants so high, how will having more gadgets there make things better? I've never understood the arguments for UAV in particular. Nothing short of a macabre policy of having the drones gun down entire families will make them more than boondoggles for border protection.

The only way to have an effective response and deterrent to things ranging from smuggling weapons across the border, to illegal immigrants, is to have an effective, armed presence at the border.

Blogging has been slow primarily because I have been working on learning the ins and outs of how Movable Type's innards work in between slowly working on a plug-in for Movable Type 4. The more that I look under the hood, the more impressed I am with the way that Movable Type was designed. Aside from the still fairly confusing user interface aspects of developing with Movable Type, the framework is really tight. Therein lays the "damned if you, damned if you don't" nature of writing software that extends either WordPress or Movable Type.

WordPress is, in my opinion, better documented. Maybe this is a function of the fact that WordPress is much simpler and less powerful than Movable Type, but it is easier to hit the ground running with WordPress. The problem with WordPress is precisely the fact that it is not as complicated and powerful once you get the hang of it. The plugin development process for Movable Type is, in my opinion, simply a better software engineering process by design. Now WordPress does have its advantages, namely that it is still easier to get up and running, and it has a far, far more active community of content designers than Movable Type has these days. You might say that these two suites are, when compared across all criteria, evenly matched insofaras they beat each other in an equal number of different categories.

Personally, if I were to suggest the next killer feature set for Movable Type, it'd boil down to two features: an entire release devoted to fully fleshing out every aspect of the developer and designer documentation, and creating a flood of good styles. Six Apart should at least hire a good intern, and task them with making at least two new good styles every week and adding them to the free repository on Six Apart's website to gain back a little bit of the ground lost there.

On a different note, Rachel and I were playing Acme Arsenal on our Wii and it's proven to be pretty addicting. CNet gave it a 3.0/10.00, but I don't think that's very fair. It may be frustrating sometimes because they didn't put too much thought into the camera system, but as of the end of the first level, it's a fun, light-hearted game. Lego Star Wars The Complete Saga for XBox 360 is another good game to play with the spouse. Rachel and I are going to work on getting every achievement (something I am normally far too lazy to do) once we get the strategy guide. She's also convinced me that we must pick up a copy of the upcoming Lego Indiana Jones when it comes out for XBox 360, and all I can say is, how can I turn down my wife when she wants to spend time playing video games with me?

After checking out the Brussels Journal in Google Reader, I came across this article about the increasing decentralization of government in Spain, which may lead toward the breakup of Spain altogether. I think it would be stupid for a country as small as Spain, with its provinces even smaller, to breakup when a move to a true federal government is possible. This is especially true at a time when the other players in the European Union are more unified. While a federation has its problems, namely that it is an artificial binding of different peoples, the advantage of a federation is that it allows those different, but related, peoples to come together with one military, economic and foreign policy that they can project outside their borders. At the end of the day, the provinces have the natural right to secede from Spain, but it would be terribly stupid for them to do that first, without insisting that the Spanish state be formally remade as a federal government with limited, constitutional powers.

The poor babe, she never saw it coming:

They have been especially quick to focus criticism on Aguilar for asking this two-time shooter: "Are you a trigger-happy kind of person? Is that what you wanted to do, shoot to kill?"

They conveniently disregard how she balanced her hard line of questioning by following it with the sympathetic: "So basically you were scared for your life?"

The last thing Aguilar expected after such a routine interview was that her professional career would be at risk

Let's imagine this a little differently. A white male reporter leans into the car of an old woman who has been similarly traumatized, making her feel like her space is being violated. On two separate occasions, she managed to kill a man who broke into her home with the intent to rape her. Maybe one of them actually did rape her. So you've got a woman who's been nearly sexually violated, or has been violently sexually violated on up to two separate occasions, that weren't far apart. The reporter asks "so, you're a murderous old woman, quick to take out a man's throat with a steak knife? Is that what you intended to do, give him a Colombian necktie?" But it's ok because he says, "well, they were trying to rape you, so basically you were scared out of your mind.

There would be only three realistic outcomes for the reporter who behaved like that after the mainstream media and blogosphere were done with him:

• Change his name, move out of the area, get plastic surgery and switch professions
• Leave the country
• Suicide

Because there would no way that he'd ever be a reporter for any mainstream media group short of him coming out of the closet, saying 10,000 hail Marxes and promising to scoop the poop for every major feminist blogger's cats for life.

Huh. You mean to say that Jayson Blair was not an isolated incident of the New York Times behaving in the thoroughly fact-free and libelous manner that bloggers are often accused of?

A post in The Medium that appeared on Monday about the Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul and his purported adoption by white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups contained several errors. Stormfront, which describes itself as a "white nationalist" Internet community, did not give money to Ron Paul's presidential campaign; according to Jesse Benton, a spokesman for Paul's campaign, it was Don Black, the founder of Stormfront, who donated $500 to Paul. The original post also repeated a string of assertions by Bill White, the commander of the American National Socialist Workers Party, including the allegation that Paul meets regularly "with members of the Stormfront set, American Renaissance, the Institute for Historic Review and others" at a restaurant in Arlington, Va. Paul never attended these dinners, according to Benton, who also says that Paul has never knowingly met Bill White. Norman Singleton, a congressional aide in Paul's office, says that he met Bill White at a dinner gathering of conservatives several years ago, after which Singleton expressed his indignation at the views espoused by White to the organizer of the dinner. The original post should not have been published with these unverified assertions and without any response from Paul.

In other words, the New York Times was a party to libel against Ron Paul. If I were a member of the Ron Paul campaign staff right now, I would urge him to strongly consider a lawsuit against the New York Times that could be settled on the condition that the New York Times print a prominent front-page correction, admitting every detail of their mistake.

Christmas was great for Rachel and I. We managed to divide up the time very evenly between both families, and the contrast between both was one of the good things that came out of it. I think this ended up being the geekiest Christmas we've ever had, since we got seven games for the Wii and XBox 360 between the two of us. One of the pleasant surprises for me two nights ago, after we got home, and Rachel went to bed early (she had to get in to work early so she could take off the rest of the week) was that I started figuring out some things about how Movable Type works that had vexed me for a while.

I am a big fan of Movable Type in case you can't tell. I switched to WordPress for a while, wrote some plug-in code and found that I couldn't stand using it. The attitude of some of the developers also played a role in that. I have some details on my project blog (aka, mostly disposable code that I release for those who might have a morbid fascination with it) on a project that I am slowly pursuing with Movable Type. It's goal is to build up a plug-in for Movable Type that allows Movable Type blogs to stop using SiteMeter and other such services. Once you get the hang of the Movable Type APIs, it doesn't seem quite so daunting.

Now, back to Linux again. I installed the proprietary "restricted" drivers for ATI video chipsets, and the performance has improved to the point that I don't have a whole lot of a need to go back to Windows. All I'm doing is writing Perl code for Movable Type and surfing the web, but it's fairly pleasant. It also helps that I am running a nightly build of Firefox 3, not that memory hog Firefox 2. That alone makes a difference on Linux because version 3 is much tighter so far in how it uses resources than version 2. I'd recommend that Windows users download one of the latest installers.

Benazir Bhutto has been killed by a suicide bomber in Pakistan, proving once again that the Islamic world is ready for a peaceful, democratic system of government. We can now fully expect the moderate majority of Pakistan to cooperate with its fine, upstanding police as they prevent any further violence. Already the extremists are on the run, as they get no love or quarter from the common man in the Land of the Pure because this is not how things are done there, let alone in the majority of the Islamic world.

**UPDATE**: There was a well-deserved WTF from Matt Mullenweg when I accidentally linked the "attitude of the WordPress developers" text to the story about the murder of Benazir Bhutto. While there are a number of WordPress users who love WordPress that passionately (and likewise, hate Movable Type that passionately), I would never suggest that the developers have that sort of character.

And people think Ron Paul can make an ass out of himself sometimes when he speaks in public...

Christ mass is a reminder to us that we have been given a gift that means so much: the gift of salvation through Jesus Christ. God's grace doesn't just make itself known through the obvious like the fact that anyone who places their trust in Jesus Christ will be spared from God's judgment. Rather, it manifests in other ways like peace in society and prosperity. God's grace through Jesus Christ wasn't just a promise of a future pardon, but a promise of protection for those nations that embrace it. As you celebrate Christmas, think about that, and realize that you might have more to be thankful than just what we are normally told to give thanks for.

It is common for people who oppose an activist foreign policy based around military intervention into other countries' affairs to be denounced as the sort of people who allowed Hitler to come to power. They see a potential rearmament of the Rhineland territory in every despot's rise to power, saber-rattling or armed skirmish. This is all part of the unhealthy obsession with World War II and comparing every current political situation to something from World War II that dominates politics in America, but that is a large topic in and of itself.

One thing should be abundantly clear to every rational American, and that is that at this point in American history, there is no foreign power than can stand toe-to-toe against the full strength of the United States military in all-out war. Even China, with its numbers, would fall under the technology-driven onslaught of the United States if it fully committed itself to a modern war fought with the sort of commitment and ruthless that was given in World War II and previous major American wars. It might be a painful first few years, but after a few years of putting the military on a war footing, no country could absorb the losses to its military and trade.

The other big objection is that such a policy would leave America's allies out to dry. This is a red herring because under a policy of minimal or non-intervention, the United States would avoid military alliances in the first place, thus it would only be leaving trade partners to deal with their own issues in most cases.

America's policy of providing substantial military protection to Europe, Japan and Korea has not helped those countries develop a means to protect themselves in a mature fashion. Of these, Japan is only now beginning to realize the danger of relying on American military protection in the face of an increasingly aggressive China. Ironically, many of the same people who clamor about leaving allies stuck to fend for themselves, will lament the fact that some of these same allies who have received substantial American military protection have cultures that are almost completely atrophied in the area of defending their nation.

Now, if America has an ally that is under serious attack, in most cases it would be fairly trivial for the United States to remove the threat to that ally, even with a non-interventionist foreign policy. Israel is a perfect example that those who support an interventionist foreign policy cite. If, God forbid that the IDF were defeated in battle by its neighbors, it would only take a few days for the United States to land an invasion force on Israeli soil to repel the attack. With permission to land and refuel American transport aircraft in European airports, it would be possible for the Air Force to transport thousands of elite Army Airborne soldiers to Israel within twelve hours of hostilities' onset, and the IDF showing signs of folding. A few days later, Israel's neighbors would be dealing with more than just a few thousand soldiers sent as first responders.

There is one last danger that a intervenionist foreign policy presents. It makes it so much easier for America's enemies to rally their people to fight the "imperial Americans." To borrow from the example of Israel again, many of Israel's enemies are able to maintain internal cohesion in no small part because they can focus their peoples' energies on foreign targets of anger such as the United States. America's foreign policy of sticking its nose where it doesn't belong is a lightning rod for such anger.

It's about time that the Ubuntu team started merging in the latest kernel changes into their baseline for the new version (8.04, Hardy Heron). The second alpha release of the distribution has been officially available for a few days now, and one of the biggest changes is that it includes one of the recent kernel releases that, as far as I know, contains the new patches which should really help out desktop Linux users. I've set up my laptop for dual-boot and am going to be seeing how well it works. Here's hoping that it will make it that much harder to want to stay with Windows most of the time!

I've added a new category to my blog, Defending Minarchy. Part of the motivation for the category is arguments like this one where a  candidate is hammered for not wanting an activist, interventionist foreign policy. I think foreign intervention is a natural way to start the category, anyone disagree? The other motivation is that I am not a libertarian, and there are a significant number of libertarians who are, in my opinion, every bit as much of an enemy to freedom and civil society as your average socialist or extreme social conservative. Minarchism is a broad category that ranges from those who have much more classical liberal values, to secular libertarians. We are all minarchists, but we are not all interchangeable because on some issues, we hold very different views that are almost irreconcilable. A good example is immigration and the borders; classical liberals want the borders controlled, libertarians in general do not.

Apparently the Dominionists are getting a little media time because Huckabee was stupid enough to do a little fundraising with them. This, though, is just priceless. You have to admire a liberal who can denounce someone as a fascist, for opposing legislation that would get the government into the business of punishing people for not just committing crimes, but having the wrong motivations for committing them (as if there is a right motivation in the first place):

Christian Right in the US are fighting hate-crime legislation in Congress.  If this doesn't suggest they can be compared to fascists, nothing does.

If you are not smart enough to see the irony that you are whole-heartedly advocating a platform eerily similar to the very thing you passionately hate, then you are too stupid to participate in politics in any fashion. Stop. Don't pass go. Don't even waste the paper and ink needed to scribble your diseased rantings into an off brand notebook you dug out of a dumpster behind Office Depot. The notebook deserves better than to be defaced like that.

Anyone else think that America would be better off without most of the think tanks, political activist groups and other policy engines that we have? Even many "free market" ones that cannot tell the difference between an ideologically diverse group like open source developers, and Marxism?

**UPDATE**: Question about Dominionism for the Christians who come here. If the Dominionists ever reached a critical base of support where they could organize and attempt to fundamentally change or overthrow the constitutional system, what would you do? Join them? Fight them peacefully? Take up your sword and cross, and kill them in the streets if necessary? I admit that I am quite willing to kill those who claim to be my brothers and sisters in Christ if their goal is an armed overthrow of the constitutional system, but how do the rest of you feel about these theocrats (y'all know I don't throw that term out lightly)?

**UPDATE** 12/24/2007 1PM: My wife is restarting her blog and admitting to its existence. Her first post is about why it's not a good idea to continue the tradition of teaching little kids that Santa really exists.

I think this has got to be quite possibly the worst argument against the gold standard I have ever seen, bar none:

Commodities, almost by definition, are not stable. The price of gold looks as if it used to be stable, because the dollar was fixed relative to an ounce of gold. This does not mean that its value relative to other economic goods was unchanged. You could fix your currency to the price of a bushel of wheat, and suddenly "wheat bugs" would be claiming that wheat is the only reliable, stable commodity in the world whose price never changes. That wouldn't stop fluctuating wheat supplies from whipsawing your economy back and forth.

This is true, aside from the fact that wheat is a crop that can be mass-produced, and gold is an atomic element that we won't ever be able to produce on our own short of developing a mastery of the processes of nuclear fusion. Is it really so hard to imagine why gold is a good standard to use for our economy, since it is a very limited resource, unlike wheat, banana leaves or seashells? I guess it is not obvious to Megan, that since the only gold we have right now, is the gold we can dig up, that the ability of gold to fluctuate in value is significantly minute compared to fixing it to a bushel of wheat, which by comparison, any Tom, Dick and Harry could grow in their backyard.

The reason we have the issues with inflation that we do is that our currency policies put so little stable commodity value behind the printed dollar, that it would be charitable to say that it has been pegged to a bushel of wheat.

People often make the mistake of thinking that there is some magic line that separates economic liberty from "personal liberties." It's easy to see why that tends to happen. Most people do not make their own products and services. They're just cogs in the machine of a company or government agency, therefore the most contact they regularly have with economic liberty is in their property rights and what they can buy off the shelf at a store. There are a few fundamental rights that go beyond that, that are part of economic liberty issues, that these people tend to miss, but which they should care about if for no other reason, than it benefits them:

• The right to productively and peacefully make use of one's talents and ideas. (The right to produce a product from your own labor)
• The right to work together toward a common goal. (A key aspect of freedom of association, which is traditionally a "personal liberty" issue)
• The right to better oneself in ways that aren't at the expense of others.
• The right to explore new territory in the fields of art, science and engineering. (If the government heavily regulates how and what you can build, it controls the ability to explore the arts, sciences and engineering.)

Economic liberty is not about corporations. In fact, corporations are often strident enemies of economic liberty. They often fight for restrictions on the ability to research and produce products that affect them. The key to a freer society where governments and corporations do not run rough shod over the rights of the common man, is to push back the encroachments on individual freedom, especially economic liberties, for all law-abiding citizens to the very maximum that society can tolerate.

A post on Dr. Helen's blog that started as a discussion about alimony has degenerated into a fight over paternity fraud and child support in such cases. Now I know that there are a number of women out there who won't like my suggestion, but that's not relevant. My solution is simple, humane and constitutional.

1. Require paternity tests within two weeks of the baby being born.
2. If the husband is not the father of the child, then the father can immediately be granted a legally-binding divorce on the spot if he so chooses.
3. Unless the husband has a criminal record involving serious crimes against people and property, the husband will be granted the option to be the sole legal guardian of the child on the grounds that a woman who would commit paternity fraud is automatically unsuitable to be a mother.
4. For those who have already been victims of paternity fraud, the father may be given exclusive custody of the child if he chooses. It would be either a class six (or equivalent) misdemeanor or a class one felony for the mother or biological father to ever visit the child short of a bonafide emergency or with the step-father's permission.
5. If the biological father of the child is married, his wife must be immediately informed about her husband's actions. If she has never committed paternity fraud herself, she may simultaneously divorce him and take possession of seventy five percent of all of the marital assets if this is her husband's first offense; after one offense, she may take possession of all valuable marital assets.
6. In the event that the mother of the child cannot identify the father of her child, she may be compelled by the courts to seek as much gainful employment as is needed to pay for her child support. In compliance with the 13th amendment, she will be compelled involuntarily into this work until she has payed in full, all child support due. In the event that the biological father is later found, he shall be required to split all child support costs with her if there is probable cause to believe that he knew of the pregnancy.

Bet you weren't prepared for this. Taken shamelessly from Morris:

While you're at it, read this too.

Remember, people, Mohammed taught his followers that it is only okay to have sex with prepubescent girls once they've reached the right old, wizened age of nine years old. Years people, not days. After all Allah just wants their first time to extremely painful, not life-threatening... (Ok, I can't keep being sarcastic like this with a straight face)

Interesting that Allah gives his followers permission to do something that is so unnatural that not even the "unclean animals" do it. When was the last time you saw a dog, the most haram animal this side of a giant American wild boar, doing to a puppy what Allah allows to be done to infants? Kinda puts it into perspective, doesn't it?

I swear, Islam makes Scientology look normal sometimes...

Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go report to my Commissar to find out how many Hail Marxes I have to perform before the Altar of Non-Judgmentalism for this post.

Wes and I had a disagreement over the language of the 14^th amendment. It would seem that he is right, and that "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" had a different legal meaning when it was enacted, than one would commonly read it today. Senator Trumbull, one of the men who wrote the 1866 immigration law, had this to say about the definition as the government understood it back then:

The provision is, that "all persons born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens." That means "subject to the complete jurisdiction thereof." What do we mean by "complete jurisdiction thereof? "Not owing allegiance to anybody else. That is what it means.

It makes sense when you think about it. Americans, by virtue of being American citizens, are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, even overseas. Their children are also subject to the laws of the United States by virtue of being the wards of American citizens. Consider the 14th amendment:

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

You have a two-part test to determine who is really a citizen by virtue of being born here:

1. Are they born here?
2. Are their parents citizens, and thus subject to the jurisdiction of the United States?

Number two is the one that really matters here. Technically it could apply to a legal immigrant if the United States declared that legal immigrants on a citizenship track are subjected to the full jurisdiction of the United States when they travel abroad, the way that actual citizens are, but that's beside the point. The fact is, an illegal immigrant is only subject to the jurisdiction of the United States while on American soil, whereas an American citizen is lawfully subjected to the jurisdiction of the United States regardless of where they are located. Don't believe me? Live abroad for two years, and claim that you have no more obligation to pay your federal income tax because you don't live in the United States. The federal government asserts legal authority over Americans no matter where they live.

Now, the only question is whether or not the courts will respect this language and deal with it if the federal government moves to strip the children of illegal immigrants of their illegitimate American citizenship. If the answer is no, then the President should simply ignore the court order, and follow the constitutional process anyway.

I wrote my export script a while ago, back when there was a real need for it for WordPress 2.0-2.1 and Movable Type 3.3. Movable Type 4.X includes an importer for WordPress' content that is exported as RSS data. Anyone switching to Movable Type from WordPress really ought to give that a shot, as it is going to be a lot better supported by Sixapart, than my export script is going to be supported by me these days.

He calls it as he sees it:

Huckabee may not be Mussolini, but he sure is no Jefferson or Madison either.

Aren't you forgetting something?

Any mandatory changes to consumer behavior is going to rankle some critics. But looking back in history, most become widely accepted and appreciated in time for their wide benefits to society. Think of leaded gasoline, radium dinner plates, mercury thermometers, seat belts and child-proof containers. A few decades from now, people may look back on incandescent light bulbs as relics so inefficient that they are dangerous.

Like the 5mg of Mercury in those CFL lightbulbs? Yeah, we'll be saving a lot of electricity, right as we dump literally tons of Mercury into the soil and water supply. You know people won't recycle these things, and even when recycling efforts get ramped up years after this ban and people realize the danger these CFL lightbulbs pose to public health, most people will still have a hard time recycling for a long time. That still does us no good when it comes to the millions of these bulbs that are already sitting in landfills.

Even with Chavez turning Venezuela into a banana republic, it is nice to see that there are still people there who are willing to call a spade, a spade. It takes courage to call out a high-ranking official in a country like that for being such a contemptible hypocrite on national television. That is real courage, unlike the "courage" it takes to criticize the Bush Administration, a regime that couldn't silence its critics if it tried.

Nintendo Wii shortages may cost Nintendo as much as $1B in lost sales opportunities. I think it may be even higher than that when you factor in all of the money that Nintendo may be missing out on from casual gamers who won't buy many--or any--of the bigger titles that cost over $19.99-$29.99. It'll be interesting to see who wins this season between Microsoft and Sony. Between Mass Effect and Halo, which have already sold 1M and 5M copies respectively, I suspect it will be Microsoft.

A perfect example of why it can be so hard to get used to Perl:

die "failed!" if scalar (@myArray)==1 and not defined $array[0];

The algorithm is pretty self-explanatory, though the code is one heck of a run on sentence as far as source code goes. Someone who comes from a language where such terse code is not commonly accepted or possible would probably write:

if ( scalar(@myArray) and not defined($array[0]) )
{
     die("Failed!");
}

This is part of the reason why at best I am still just dabbling in Perl. It can be so hard to read so much of the code written by seasoned Perl developers. This is the only language out there which can break the encryption on a DVD in 7 lines of code.

I agree with this take on Mike Huckabee. He shows many of the signs of being another annoying nannystatist Christian politician, just like Jimmy Carter. We need a President who isn't folksy; we need a President who is very well-educated, experienced and principled. A man or woman who is well above the rest in terms of character, education and knowledge of the issues facing America. I have never understood the logic behind the populism that prefers folksy candidates, since they tend to screw up at least as much as the "elitist" ones.

This is right up there with the zero tolerance policies for being just plain stupid. Giving a student detention for using Firefox instead of Internet Explorer. The student didn't get in trouble for installing software that he shouldn't have, but rather because the teacher was too stupid to realize that Firefox was a web browser, and that the student was using it to do the work that he had been assigned. **UPDATE**: Apparently this was an elaborate hoax. Given the way that most public schools behave with respect to logic, common sense and decency, can you blame most of us for falling for it?

Now it looks like humans were not to blame for the extinction of the Mammoths as previously thought. Turns out that it was trees, yes, trees, that caused the extinction of Mammoths. Forests took over much of the terrain that used to be the grasslands where the Mammoths grazed, causing their numbers to dwindle due to starvation and population pressures.

You'll die from a Heart Attack during Sex.

Your a lover not a fighter but sadly, in the act of making love your heart will stop. But what a way to go.

'How will you die?' at QuizGalaxy.com

Got this from Roci.

One of the guys from my small group and I went to see I Am Legend last night. I had read the book, and my friend had not read the book. Objectively speaking, it's a good movie. The script is reasonably close to the book, and Will Smith did a great job portraying Robert Neville, the last man alive on Earth. Well, he's supposed to be the last man alive on Earth, but that is one of the departures from the book.

If you are a purist, you will be kinda disappointed by how Hollywood departed from the story. Stop reading now if you don't want to know because I will spoil the plot for you. Don't read past the kitten, if you don't want to find out how Hollywood screwed up the story, especially the ending.

Are you sure you want to keep reading?

I mean, really sure?

OK, I guess you really do want to see what happened. In the book, you find out the hard way toward the end that there are two types of survivors. The true blood-sucking monsters that, while still humanish, are just blood-crazed feeders. There are others who are essentially humans who have a vampire-like vulnerability to sunlight, and that's about it. In the end, the latter group reveals to him that he must die because he has been killing both sides, and they're terrified of him. The long and short of it is that he says "I Am Legend" in the end because he has become a legend to the latter group, the way that Dracula and vampires were to true humans. Just reverse the time of day when the hunt would happen.

The woman who was supposed to betray Neville is just a Brazilian woman who is taking a kid to a survivor colony in Vermont. Neville dies while defending the cure for the disease that caused the vampirism epidemic. The woman and the kid make it to the colony, which is essentially a farm with a modern day castle wall surrounding a huge area of the land, that appears to be one huge impenetrable wall of steel and stone. How they built that up is anyone's guess. Neville is a legend because he found and saved the cure, not because of the irony that he had become to another group of sentient beings the same sort of monster that he feared attacking him.

As I said, it's a pretty good story. Will Smith plays a very good military researcher, and the movie captures enough of the essence of the book to say that it was not the result of some moronic Hollywood screenwriter thinking that he or she knew how to tell the story better than Richard Matheson. However, once you get to the last ten minutes of the film, you might as well be experiencing a total departure from the story. I suppose this is because the book's ending is bittersweet. Humanity is in much better shape in the book, than in the movie. It's just mutated. In the movie, humanity is barely still in existence, and there is little reason for me to believe that if that "survivor's colony" is any indication that there are enough different pairs of people to keep up basic genetic diversity in the human genome (unlike in the book).

Don't be hatin'...

 

 

 

Me for posting this.

**UPDATE**: I think I found her daddy...

I might have to upload a copy of the FLV file for this video so that it can be preserved in the event that YouTube yanks it.

Digital Brownshirt linked to this article, a very interesting one, about the controversial research done by a sociologist originally from Nigeria. Read the whole thing obviously, but this is a perfect example of his opponents' reactions, and illustrates very well why they are so poisonous for the black community:

Although Fordham did not want to comment on Ogbu's latest work, it is clear that her beliefs are almost exactly opposite from those of her former colleague. She believes school pressure to speak Standard English and "act white" is the very thing that makes black students fail. "What I found, the requirements in school compelled them to act in ways as if they weren't living in black bodies but who were essentially white or mainstream Americans," she says. "Kids found it difficult to deal with that and they found strategies to deal with it. They had to speak a certain variety of English in order to be successful. They had to buy into the ideas that dominate mainstream America. ... Black kids couldn't just be who they were."

There are many reasons why it is imperative for a black student to be able to speak Standard English, as opposed to Ebonics. The most important one is that it is the language of the educated and successful classes of society, irrespective of race. It is absolutely impossible for a black person who speaks a gutteral bastardization of English like Ebonics to be taken seriously in positions of importance in the business and scientific communities, unless they are otherwise brilliant and accomplished well beyond most of their peers. Standard English is also easier by a wide margin to translate into foreign languages, no matter where they are from. I can't even imagine the difficulty of getting an Ebonics-addled brain to be able to learn even languages related to English like Spanish, French, Dutch or Italian, let alone African or Asian languages. Finally, there is the fact that Ebonics does not have same ability to communicate and parse intellectual ideas that Standard English does. This means that jobs in law, medicine, engineering and science, among others, are effectively cut off for blacks who do not speak Standard English.

Now go back and read that paragraph I quoted as though I, a white guy, had written it about young blacks. There is a not so subtle suggestion that whites naturally act one way, while blacks another, and that that behavior is based in biology. If not biology, then something similar enough to suggest that "blacks just don't naturally behave this way." You'd be right for thinking that I am a racist if I had written that. Therefore, shouldn't it be suggestive of the possibility that someone who could write something like this has some sort of perverse sociological Munchausen's by Proxy issue?

Roci gets us started with this comment:

Police should be limited to carrying stun guns, tasers and battons only. In states that permit it, they should also get to carry concealed firearms, if they submit to the same restrictions and liabilities that the rest of the population does. JUST LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE.

It would be a lot harder for the police to abuse their authority if the law presumed that they could not carry a weapon in public without qualifying under the same standards that a private citizen would be able to qualify for carrying a weapon. There are several major advantages of going this route:

• It would subject the police to the same restrictions on carrying firearms that apply to private citizens, effectively ending the militarized police experiments.
• It would take control over a cop's ability to use a deadly weapon on the job away from police shooting boards, and into the normal legal channels that apply to every private citizen, while subjecting their discretionary use of force to the same standards that would be used to judge a private citizen.
• It would force law-and-order and gun control advocates alike to strengthen the right to keep and bear arms for private citizens.
• It would restrict the ability of police forces to carry certain types of weapons altogether.

I ran across this entry on Wikipedia, and thought it was worth preserving because it says a lot about Mexican politics:

While captive in Texas, Joel Roberts Poinsett U.S. minister to Mexico in 1824 offered a harsh assessment of General Santa Anna's situation, stating:

Say to General Santa Anna that when I remember how ardent an advocate he was of liberty ten years ago, I have no sympathy for him now, that he has gotten what he deserves.

To this message, Santa Anna made the reply:

Say to Mr. Poinsett that it is very true that I threw up my cap for liberty with great ardor, and perfect sincerity, but very soon found the folly of it. A hundred years to come my people will not be fit for liberty. They do not know what it is, unenlightened as they are, and under the influence of a Catholic clergy, a despotism is the proper government for them, but there is no reason why it should not be a wise and virtuous one.

Here is the source that Wikipedia cited to back up the quote from Santa Anna.

Santa Anna was truly a prophet when it came to predicting how his country's future would end up.

I didn't realize until a few minutes ago that there were a number of attempts to sign up for an account for commenting that were still pending. As far as I know, all of them are good to go now. I also fixed a configuration mistake in my blog software that caused me to not receive an email warning me that I had pending account requests. Timm and Roland were the only two I recognized off the top of my head.

In other news, Germany proves to still have some real life left in after all when it comes to domestic technology production. A German company has leapfrogged its French and Japanese competitors in the market for batteries large enough to power a card. Their batteries are said to be 30% smaller than the ones in Toyota's hybrids, and able to provide a lot more juice to a car than their French competitors. Ladies and gentlemen, it looks like the civilized world may have taken a real bold step, even if it's just one step, toward true energy independence.

A point about abortion that I made here, that pro-choicers ought to consider when debating people who are "generally pro-life," but not fully "pro-life:"

[The other blogger said] 9. He holds extremist views on abortion: Even many pro-lifers would agree that a 15 year-old mentally retarded girl who was raped by her stepfather should be able to get an abortion. As governor of Arkansas, Huckabee blocked Medicaid funding of just such an abortion.

[I said] As to the abortion issue, if you believe that abortion is murder, refusing to allow that abortion makes sense. It's about the child in the retarded girl's womb, not the retarded girl, if you believe that abortion is murder. Do you really want a candidate who believes abortion is murder, but then allows it when there is no medical necessity? Congratulations, you now have a President who thinks that cold-blooded murder should sometimes be legal. Even if you disagree that abortion is murder, you have chosen someone who thinks that abortion is murder, but is cool with allowing it outside of medical necessity, to be part of the apparatus that is supposed to uphold the Constitution and protect you and your liberties.

I mean really, wouldn't it bother you if someone said that they believe that abortion is at a minimum "kinda like" murder, but then were totally cool with allowing it under certain, non-medically necessary conditions? When you get down to it, you can't get around the fact that that person said that they think that something which is at least in some way meaningful similar to murder, ought to be allowed at private citizens' discretion.

**UPDATE**: I was going to write a separate post about this story, but after trying to do so, I found that I couldn't comment on it without feeling the desire to camp outside this poor old man's door with a shotgun over Christmas. Before you think it's about doing him bodily harm, it's not. Rather, he is a perfect example of what can happen when a sex offender list is not updated properly. He has been harassed and terrorized by vigilantes. If this were my grandfather, there would have been some very, very ugly things said and done to such people if the police wouldn't arrest them.

Sex offender lists are a load of crap. Why do we limit them to just sex offenders? Roci pointed out something very relevant here a while ago. Aren't all serious felons a threat to their neighbors based on the logic behind these sex offender lists? Wouldn't you want to know that your other neighbor is an axe murderer, and that that accountant around the corner who lives a little above his means has been convicted of running pyramid schemes to defraud the elderly of their life savings? I would. The majority who support these lists apparently do not feel the same way.

As I've said before, there is no reason why a dangerous predator with a high possibility of recidivism should be allowed out of prison. We don't allow dogs that have gotten a taste for human blood to live, we put them down. Being more humane toward our own species, we can at least give such people life in prison. Damn liberals keeping you down on this issue? Not my problem. One problem doesn't justify creating another one for the sake of convenience because you are too lazy to fight for change.

Let this permanently get rid of any illusions that the police are the only ones who should be allowed to freely carry a firearm and use it in public:

New York City police statistics show that simply hitting a target, let alone hitting it in a specific spot, is a difficult challenge. In 2006, in cases where police officers intentionally fired a gun at a person, they discharged 364 bullets and hit their target 103 times, for a hit rate of 28.3 percent, according to the department's Firearms Discharge Report. The police shot and killed 13 people last year.

In 2005, officers fired 472 times in the same circumstances, hitting their mark 82 times, for a 17.4 percent hit rate. They shot and killed nine people that year.

In all shootings - including those against people, animals and in suicides and other situations - New York City officers achieved a 34 percent accuracy rate (182 out of 540), and a 43 percent accuracy rate when the target ranged from zero to six feet away. Nearly half the shots they fired last year were within that distance.

Were it not for gun control advocates' efforts to give a monopoly on the ownership of firearms in civil society, I wouldn't find this particularly bothersome. Last count I saw, there are about 770,000 police officers among all local and state jurisdictions in the United States. By definition, in any group that large, the majority of people are going to be mediocre at some aspect of their job.

Obviously, most untrained shooters are going to score even worse than this, but then they don't have to qualify with at least one firearm every so often in order to keep their job. Many people who own firearms are decent enough shots, probably as good as your average cop is.

Gun control advocates would say that more training is the obvious answer, but it isn't the right answer, to what is at issue here. The majority of cops are just not sharp-shooter material, anymore so than the average citizen. All more training and time at the range would do is either pull more cops off the street, or require them to do more time at taxpayers' expense on the job.

HT, Evangelical Outpost.

For those of you who might want to have a copy of this to share with others, I saved a copy of the Flash Video (.FLV) file here.

They say men tend to fight with their fists, while women tend to fight with words and manipulations. It's not surprising that this ended up so explosive the way it did:

ST. LOUIS - A woman blamed for an online hoax played on a 13-year-old
girl who committed suicide may be the first person protected by a local
law against Internet harassment that was passed in the wake of the case.


Lori Drew's attorney said she is not the writer of the Megan Had It
Coming blog, in which someone identified as Drew purports to explain
why she created a fictitious 16-year-old boy to chat online with Megan
Meier. The messages turned ugly hours before Megan hanged herself.


The writer says she created the boy to see if Megan was saying nasty
things about her daughter, a former friend, and to "give her a taste of
her own medicine." The writer spars with some of the more than 1,500
angry commenters.

There are only three blog entries, one where Lori Drew gives her side of the story. When you read it, you'll be left with no real choice but to conclude that this was one big clusterf!@$. Drew manipulated the hell out of a "mean girl" who suffered from Biploar Disorder, if I read her right. The girl who killed herself was equally guilty by manipulating everyone around her with rumors to try to destroy her former friend's reputation. Her parents even apparently knew that their 13 year old daughter was trying to hook up with a 16 year old on MySpace (who happened to be a fake profile), but didn't shut her down. Why does this strike me as probably not that hard to believe?...

The only one I feel truly sorry for in this case is Drew's daughter, who will have to deal with the aftermath of the stupid, evil choices of her mother and her former friend. There is enough tragedy to go around here, but the true victim here is Drew's daughter.

One of my pet peeves about legislative bodies is that there is no constitutional system for holding them civilly and/or criminally liable for when they create laws that break the constitution or that put people in impossible positions. An excellent example from Reason:

The Glendale, California, Fire Department ordered Ann and Mike Collard to trim trees on their property to maintain five feet of vertical clearance between tree limbs and the roof of their house. So they hired a tree trimmer and paid him $3,000 to bring them up to code. The tree trimmer was almost finished with the job when the city arborist drove past, noticed him and ordered him to stop. It seems that in meeting fire department regulations, the Collards had violated a city ordinance protecting indigenous trees. Then came the really bad news. After reviewing the case, the city fined them $347,600. Once the story hit local media, however, city council members said that when they increased fines for violating the tree ordinance recently they never expected anyone to, well, actually receive large fines. They've put collection of the fine on hold. But the Collards say they are not resting easy.

Legislators, a significant number of whom are educated in law, have no problems handing down punishments for engineers who create products that mess up like this. Imagine a car that, when you speed past 80mph (entering wreckless driving mode in probably every state), immediately engages the emergency break the moment you start to decelerate. You'd have a congressional hearing denouncing the engineers involved. What happens when the local city council passes ordinances that make it so that by obeying one, you break another to the tune of a fine that would bankrupt a typical law-abiding family? Not a peep from the state legislature or other bodies that normally hold others accountable for such sloppy work that hurts peoples' lives.

Hypocrisy, plain and simple.

Bill Buckley misses the irony that, unlike the case with tobacco smoke, none of the victims of Zyklon gas were actually willing to expose themselves to it:

Stick me in a confessional and ask the question: Sir, if you had the authority, would you forbid smoking in America? You'd get a solemn and contrite, Yes. Solemn because I would be violating my secular commitment to the free marketplace. Contrite, because my relative indifference to tobacco poison for so many years puts me in something of the position of the Zyklon B defendants after World War II. These folk manufactured the special gas used in the death camps to genocidal ends. They pleaded, of course, that as far as they were concerned, they were simply technicians, putting together chemicals needed in wartime for fumigation. Some got away with that defense; others, not.

Those who fail to protest the free passage of tobacco smoke in the air come close to the Zyklon defendants in pleading ignorance.

It takes either a lot of emotion or a lot of abject stupidity to think that there is a logical comparison between tobacco smoke and a poison gas used to slaughter people quickly and efficiently, in large numbers. Fortunately, it is still probably the former explanation, not the latter, that can be attributed to this article. It is entirely forgivable and understandable that someone might be driven to such an emotional aberration of their beliefs when they lose a spouse that they were married to for so long.

That said, the banning of smoking is the height of puritan politics. It is to the political left, what drug use is to conservatives. Either way, they are just a way for the government to gain more unwarranted control over our lives. I don't smoke, and in general, I tend to not like smokers, but they're easily avoided. Try lighting up in many workplaces and restaurants today, and see what happens. It's not a smoker's world because many people today don't want smoking on their private property or their place of employment.

Banning smoking because you don't want to deal with it is like banning strong content from cable because you don't have the discipline to either not watch it or not buy cable services.

"Black on black crime, drug and alcohol abuse, and a stubborn proclivity towards embracing the most ignorant and juvenile, criminal and self defeating culture and mentality, has done more to to hurt blacks than anything ole Whitey ever did..." -- Mr. Bill Cosby

I cannot confirm that Bill Cosby said this, but it sounds like something he would say after some of those "controversial" editorials and speeches he gave not that long ago.

This explains a lot:

Now you know why Master Chief is a true Army of One...

I've had the pleasure of enjoying a good bottle of Moscato D'Asti lately. Over the past several months, I've taken it upon myself to start looking outside the usual types of wines (Chardonnay, Shiraz, Merlot, Chianti, etc.) and got this one based on it being an Italian wine (almost always a good choice) that I had never tried before. Even Rachel, who normally doesn't like wine, said that it's a pretty good one.

Blogging fatigue has been nipping at my heels lately, mostly because of the way things have been going on the job. This week, I'm going to be meeting with someone who may have some better work for me at a new company. With any luck, it'll be a little more money, real work for a change and a lot more money for things like education. I've spent too much time at home since losing my cubicle... I lost my cubicle because my department manager hired me on without enough work to do to actually, and so naturally one of the first symptoms of the problem was that he didn't have enough money to pay for my cubicle.

Another example of how recording the words and actions of the police while on duty can lead to exposing corrupt behavior and help to clean up the system.

If the mainstream media were the responsible, civic-minded watchdog it touts itself as...

• It would hold all politicians equally accountable. Doubly so during election debates. It would mercilessly hound the politicians that use cheap tactics like planting sympathizers in the audience.
• It wouldn't hesitate to call a spade, a spade.
• It would not give serious airtime to provactive, socially destructive men like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Fred Phelps.
• It would spend more time reporting on problems with how the government is doing its job, than airing pointless stories about rich white girls who've gone missing, and whose parents have the resources to do a good job searching for them.
• It would do prominent follow up reports to show the government fixing its own problems, when it has done a prominent story about the problems existing in the first place.
• It would make a greater effort to separate out "just the facts" when reporting, before editorializing on a subject.

If it were a responsible, civic-minded watchdog, which it clearly is not.

Don't be fooled when they tell you that the founding fathers intended the "freedom of the press" to mean the freedom of the mainstream media to operate. The "press" in the first amendment is more fundamental: the printing press. It is a right to not just speak your words, but to publish them. This is a right that everyone who has published something has enjoyed, and does not belong to the mainstream media.

Suddenly the Swiss suspicion that if an immigrant Muslim family won't turn on its radical members, that the whole family ought to be deported for the sake of public safety doesn't sound too extreme:

The daughter of a British imam is living under police protection after receiving death threats from her father for converting to Christianity.

The 31-year-old, whose father is the leader of a mosque in Lancashire, has moved house an astonishing 45 times after relatives pledged to hunt her down and kill her.

The British-born university graduate, who uses the pseudonym Hannah for her own safety, said she renounced the Muslim faith to escape being forced into an arranged marriage when she was 16.

She has been in hiding for more than a decade but called in police only a few months ago after receiving a text message from her brother.

In it, he said he would not be held responsible for his actions if she failed to return to Islam.

But when she opted to get baptised, while studying at Manchester University, her family were incensed and the death threats began.

Her father arrived at her home with 40 men and threatened to kill her for betraying Islam.

"I saw my uncle and around 40 men storming up the street clutching axes, hammers, knives and bits of wood," she said.

"My dad was shouting through the letter box, "I'm going to kill you", while the others smashed on the window and beat the door.

"They were shouting, 'We're going to kill you' and 'Traitor'.

This is of course, very common in America. We Christians frequently get together and march on the dorm rooms and apartments of our apostate teens and threaten to murder them for losing their faith when they leave high school, something which is very common among "Christian teens" today in America. So it is only natural that the Western mind would regard the fact that incidents like this are increasingly common among Muslims in the West as much ado about nothing. More of the same, you might say.

As we all know, this has already been handled by the vast majority of Muslims who are peace-loving, law-abiding, patriotic moderates. Armed groups of moderates stormed into her families home, and detained these violent criminals while they await the police to arrive, so that none of them could get away. All of them have agreed to testify against the mob, and many have volunteered to act as bodyguards to defend "Hannah" from their coreligionists who don't understand that Islam is a religion of peace in general, not just "peace of the grave for all who deny and/or abandon it."

We all know what trees would do if they could speak...
<br /><br />
But what if bacteria could speak?<br /><br />...

Some insight into the neocon mind:

No friend of liberty would oppose the USA taking down a regime that declared its enmity to freedom, that cooperated with terrorists over and over again, that subsidized suicide bombers and embarked on a many-branched program to develop weapons of mass destruction which it could give to those terrorist groups. It also tried to take over the most important oil supplies of the world, threatening our free economy. The USA is the home of freedom. It has the right, nay, the obligation to defend that freedom. No war is perfect. This one has the great advantage of being right and effective. By the way, we're winning!

The majority of Islamic states in the Middle East have ties to terrorist groups. Iran is the driving force behind one of the most powerful ones, one that is essentially a small standing army in terms of size and armaments. Al Qaeda did not operate from Iraq, nor did it get most of its funding from Iraq. All Iraq had was a convenient relationship with Al Qaeda.

Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in Islamist hands? That would have been Saddam Hussein's worst nightmare. Not only would that have sparked a declaration of war from the United States if they were used against us, but there would be a large probability of them being used against his own secular regime. In the neocon mind, the Ba'athists and Islamists are blood brothers because of their shared hatred of the United States, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Most of our oil comes from places like Alberta, Venezuela and the Gulf of Mexico. We have ANWR, and Russia is capable of shipping us oil through Alaska if we have anymore needs.

The United States does things like designate people as terrorists, with little proof, and ships them off to foreign countries like Syria to be tortured. You might know this quaint practice as "extraordinary rendition." Things like this make a mockery of a title like "home of the free." A free country does not resort to such tactics.

I have suspected for a while that I might have asperger's syndrome. I fit a lot of the symptoms pretty well. If I do have it, it's probably not particularly severe, nor would it be surprising since there is a very, very high rate of Asperger's Syndrome among people in technical professions, especially engineering and scientific ones. Software engineering, naturally falls into that category. Let's see, according to this list of symptoms from Web MD.

1. Problems with social cues. Yes, when they are not blunt.
2. Dislike changes in routine. No, but I do have a strong natural, passive inertia toward change.
3. Appear to lack empathy. Yes, in most cases.
4. Difficulty recognizing changes in pitch in someone's voice. I recognize them, but often am not sure if I read them right.
5. Formal style of speaking from an early age. Yes! To put it lightly, my brain has almost no natural inclination toward slang (this has helped me when studying Spanish and Italian, as my default language choice is High/Standard English).
6. Avoid eye contact. Yes. In fact, I often find myself almost physically incapable of doing so, even though I tend to be assertive by nature.
7. Have unusual facial expressions or postures. No.
8. Be preoccupied with only one or few interests, which he or she may be very knowledgeable about. Yes. Software engineering, history and languages.
9. Talk a lot, usually about a favorite subject. One-sided conversations are common. Yes..
10. Have delayed motor development. No.
11. Have heightened sensitivity and become overstimulated by loud noises, lights, or strong tastes or textures. Yes! My eyes are very photo-sensitive (and I work better in darker spaces) and I generally hate loud, non-ambient noise; Few things irritate me more than loud animals (especially birds and dogs).

What is painful and frustrating about it, is that it the symptoms that I do share with that list make it hard for me to know what sort of person I am, spiritually. I learn in and know from logic and patterns. I cannot look into another Christian's heart and juxtapose it (formal vocabulary teehee...) with my own to see what is true or not. It scares me, even though there is no real doubt in my mind that the Gospel is true.

Birmingham public schools are talking about buying up at least fiteen thousand of the XO laptops that the One Laptop Per Child program is selling to third world countries, to the tune of $200 each. That's not that bad of a deal, I suppose. It sure beats the price that Maine had to spend to buy real laptops from Apple... There is also the nagging question of whether or not this purchase request is a tacit admission that Birmingham is a third world city, but I digress...

For those that don't know, the XO laptops are terribly weak laptops. They sport a 500mhz processor that is barely used by anyone, 256mb of RAM, and 1GB of flash memory for internal storage. To say that they are not exactly cutting edge devices, as laptops go, would be an understatement. Let's face it, the odds are slim that any wunderkind is ever going to engineer something cool on these, and that leaves the rest of the functions of these laptops suspect.

Pen and paper is plenty good enough for most writing assignments. Schools have computer labs for those rare times when it is not. What sort of educational videos can you watch on a device that is probably way too weak to handle most modern video codecs? Small devices like the Nokia N800 can display Flash video, but do so poorly on a good day. This is all despite the obvious fact that most boys will be more likely to watch pornography or youtube videos than anything the teacher wants them to be watching in class. So its value as a pen and paper replacement are dubious, and its utility as a video player is almost gone.

So, is it supposed to be a glorified calculator? Why not just give every school kid a TI82/83 and get it over with if that is what you want them to use it for?

The single biggest retort to all of this that I have seen so far is the idea that kids will use the 802.11 connectivity to learn from the Internet. Now, maybe things have changed significantly in the seven to eight years since I graduated high school, but I really do think you would have to be an idiot^H^H^Healist to believe that the majority of students are going to be ignoring their teacher's boring lectures in favor of pouring over the Internet in search of knowledge. Just wait till someone ports Pidgin over to the XO interface. It'll be all over.

I do have to hand it to the Birmingham school system for at least realizing that there is no way in hell their students would make good use of a real laptop that costs more than a few hundred bucks, and not even suggesting such a thing. $200 per student goes down a whole lot easier than over $1,000 per student.

Especially when it comes to a device whose only common, practical applications will be instant messaging, surfing the web and watching porn.

Roci, if you are stilling coming by here, I didn't mean any offense by any of the comments I left. Apparently I offended you, which was not my intention. I can't remember the exact words I used in that comment you seem to have gotten upset about, but I wasn't try to imply anything about you or your wife. All I was trying to say is, for the sake of reconciliation between you and your wife, and since I don't know anything more than what you've posted, that I hope there is no one else who is causing your wife to be "unhappy" with your situation. As I said, I don't know the particulars, and that's y'alls business. I'm just hoping, for your sake, and since I don't know any of the details, that that is one detail you don't/won't have to face because it does make reconciliation harder.

Some of us are just not good at creative tools like Flash, that's why there is Flex. If you are pretty good at writing code, it will fill in a lot of the gaps, so you can create things that have the potential to be at least mildly useful. After playing around with Flex Builder yesterday, I was able to put together this user interface for submitting comments within five minutes or so. It doesn't do anything yet, but it is amazing just how fast I was able to put together a very solid, usable interface with Flex and Flex Builder. I think I am going to start working on making it do something really soon. Projects like that are a good way to get familiar with a new language or environment.

Digging up a little bit of information about the Joe Horn shooting incident, I stumbled upon this comment:

i am horrified at the number of people here who view joe horn as a hero. i am more horrified at the number of you who feel that the criminals in this case deserved to die for their crimes. they robbed a house people!! when did theft become a capital offense? and somehow, it wouldn''t surprise me at all to find that most of you consider yourselves christians and think that you are superior to the "barbaric" muslim terrorists. sadly, you can''t even see the irony in that...

Home invasion is right up there with one of those things that you really don't want to do if you are risk averse when it comes to your own life. It carries some rather potent occupational hazards with it, if you will. One of which just so happens to be the possibility that you will be gunned down by the owner of the home who, fearing for his or her life, will generally be considered justified by the law in doing so. Therefore, it can be reasonably assumed that anyone guilty of this offense against society is implicitly saying that this is a risk they are willing to take in America.

Did they deserve to die? Well, since the original commenter mentioned Christianity, I would like to point out that the one thief in that famous story clearly thought he got what was coming to him, and he was hanging from a cross. Death-by-shotgun would have probably seemed pretty frickin sweet by comparison to him. Jesus also didn't argue with the thief about the justice issues involved with putting a thief to the sword for thievery. I'm not sure Jesus would be too sympathetic to two men who got wasted while robbing someone blind.

Bottom line: people who don't break into other people's home, or act like they are in the process of doing so, don't get shot for trying to break into someone's home. This is about as obvious (or should be as obvious) as saying that people who abstain from bathing in A1 steak sauce, and then laying down in a lion's cage at the zoo have an almost perfectly 100% chance of facing no danger from the lion exhibit.

Rachel and I just started watching 24 last night. After watching it for half of yesterday, and the majority of today, we are nearly halfway through disc five of six of the first season of 24. Before that, I watched 28 Weeks Later. Both of them are really good overall, but there are some things that I just couldn't let go of and had to blog about...

28 Weeks Later was obviously written by someone who is, despite being a great writer, nearly pathologically stuck in a liberal mindset. There is no way in hell the kids and their mother would have been brought back alive in the beginning of the movie by the U.S. Army. The troops that caught up with the kids, after they broke through the containment area, would have gunned them down on sight in real life, or in a script that reasonably follows real life. I say this because in any objective reality, human rights go out the window in dealing with people who might pose some sort of risk in exposing the public to a disease that turns its infected into wild, psychotic animals in less than a minute upon initial infection, and that has an almost perfect 100% infection rate. This is not the cold; this is not even ebola. This is a disease that makes an airborne strain of AIDS look like a mere flu epidemic, it's that bad.

But out of basic decency, rather than protect the rest of the survivors, the army will out of bleeding-heart compassion say "kids will be kids, and kids do break quarantine sometimes!"

Then there is the ending with Paris being overrun by the infected. Excuse me. How the hell is that happening? The rage virus takes away so much high-order thought and coordination, that the infected cannot even swim. I understand the possibility that one got on a rowboat and managed to drift across the channel onto French soil, but the end shows them coming up through the sewer system. Huh? The French government would have blown up every tunnel connecting the continent and Britain, and covered it with half a kilometer of concrete, reinforced with at least half that much solid steel in order to keep the infected out. That, and every NATO navy and air force would have so thoroughly blockaded Britain that nothing could have gotten across. You would have had at least half of the entire U.S. Navy surrounding Britain, all of the European navies, and probably then some. Please... that virus isn't going anywhere unless we personally escort it off the island.

Now, WRT to 24, great show. It's just incredibly painful to listen to the writers talk about anything related to computers. I throw up a little inside my mouth everytime I hear them talk about opening up sockets. And what about their ability to break military-grade encryption in hours. I'm assuming it's military-grade, 128-bit or higher encryption because if it isn't, then Jack Bauer and company had no excuse to not get all of the data off of that key card quickly. You'd think that the terrorists just used ROT13 on their communications.

This bill is getting a lot of press from the chicken littles. I read through the text, and all I saw was that it creates a commission to study the root causes of violent radicalization and homegrown terrorist groups. It doesn't create a single new police power, nor does it do anything other than create the legal parameters needed to create an academic commission that will report to Congress in the near future. But, if you didn't know better, you would swear that it was going to be the end of the First Amendment. Overreactions like this do nothing but make it harder to target genuine threats to civil liberties.

A simplified HTML specification, as opposed to a more complicated one? Great idea! Too bad it probably won't get past the W3C. The only area that I could disagree with the writer of that article is that HTML 5 should be a simple XML language. There is no good reason why people who write HTML cannot be bothered to close their tags properly, and things like that.

Rachel is watching Fred Thompson ramble on and on about stability in the Middle East. That brings to mind the story of the Tower of Babel. Do we really want a stable, cohesive Islamic Middle East? If and when the Muslim nations of the Middle East come together, it will not be for peace, but to restore the jihad. As I said on Sunday in that conversation I referenced earlier, the last time there was true stability in the region, it was because of a little old group known as the Ottoman Empire, and we know how well that worked out.