July 2008 Archives

Things could get interesting for Mac and Linux users in the next few years if Midori is any indication. It looks like Microsoft may actually be quite serious about building a whole new operating system from scratch to compete with its more nimble competitors, and Midori is an impressive start in that direction. The most interesting part of all is that the vast majority of the operating system is actually written in C#, not a low-level language like C or C++.

If Microsoft is able to get old Windows software to run in an emulator on top of Midori, it will be a very competitive product. Then, Microsoft can encourage developers to switch entirely to .NET for their development and do all of their day-to-day tasks in C# or VB.NET on top of a high performance virtual machine built deep into the guts of their operating system, probably running as part of the kernel.

Managed code really is the wave of the future. There is very, very little that has to be done in native code today, that cannot be done in a combination of managed code like .NET or Java and the occassional forray into native code via C libraries. We're fast approaching the point in hardware where the benefits will vastly outweigh the costs of relying that heavily on virtual machines.

Boundless certainly is much more sensitive to women who openly admit that they have not been trying very hard to earn male affection than it is to men who are in a similar situation:

I consider myself to be a very plain-looking young woman. I've never been one to wear makeup, style my hair, wear fashionable clothes, etc. In addition, I'm overweight. I was never popular, and I never wanted to stand out in a crowd. I emerged from junior high and high school relatively "unscathed" by the typical cattiness of the other girls mostly by remaining unnoticed.

I've heard countless messages about how a girl shouldn't put too much emphasis on physical beauty. But is it possible that this message can be taken too far? Shouldn't we temper what we say depending on our audience? I feel like no one has tempered his or her words regarding beauty for someone like me -- someone who's already disinclined to try to be beautiful.

I find myself at 24 just as I was at 17 -- still overweight, still plain-looking and still detesting the time, effort and money required to "beautify" myself in the world's eyes. I still have never been on a date, and I still stubbornly insist that a man should get to know me and love me for what's on the inside, rather than what's on the outside. The only thing that's changed is that now I find myself wanting to someday be married and have children as God has designed (a result of having come across the Boundless webzine this summer). And I wonder: Have I done something wrong? Have I mismanaged the body God has given me?

"This man need not be concerned with his physical appearance, his personal hygiene or his moral character in the eyes of a wife. Without this structure and accountability, he is free to take his sexual pleasure without regard for his unshaved face, his slothfulness, his halitosis, his body odor and his physical appearance. He faces no requirement of personal respect, and no eyes gaze upon him in order to evaluate the seriousness and worthiness of his sexual desire."

This three page article about the role that Java has played in university Computer Science curricula foreshadows the ultimate effect of what would happen to other fields in the event that they have to get more students by any means necessary for political reasons. The tendency of Computer Science departments to shy away from more complicated languages like C and Ada in favor of Java has done a lot to keep students from having to learn anything that comes even close to touching on the hardware. The decision was made to use Java in no small part because of the way that it could make things a lot easier for students and provide them a few good marks on their resumes.

I can't agree with Triton that McCain and Joe Farah that McCain is bad for this country because he may forestall a day of reckoning for this country. If anything, the fact that his positions do closely mirror Obama's positions in some areas suggest that we won't be that far off with McCain, and McCain's penchant for military aggression could certainly cause a day of reckoning in its own right. However, I think McCain is preferable on the grounds that Obama has gone off the deep end into acting like he is a modern day messiah, and has built up the foundation for a cult of personality about him.

Maybe it's just my overactive imagination from having read the chapters in Liberal Fascism about Woodrow Wilson and FDR's administration, but I could easily see an Obama administration returning us to the hard fascism of Wilson with the cult of personality that FDR had about him. McCain, even if he want to do that, wouldn't be able to get us there, and I think Obama has already showed that in his personality, not necessarily his platform, but in his personality, he has all of the makings of a god complex-addled despot.

It may surprise some of you to know that I was actually thinking about voting for Obama in the general election until he started act like Fruitcake Socialist Black Jesus. Back in the primaries he seemed clearly preferrable to Clinton, and at least no worse than McCain. I wanted to punish the Republicans as much as the next Ron Paul supporter for giving us McCain, but you know what? The last thing this country needs is another president with a cult of personality around him because that is one serious change for the worse that I think won't bring about the changes anyone wants because we no longer have the sort of strong cultural opposition to resist it.

Police taser a teen who was laying on the ground with a broken back 19 times. 19 times. The excuse that the department makes for their actions? He was unresponsive and muttering crazy stuff. Of course, if you had just fallen off a 30-foot tall bypass, you might be a little off your rocker too, though, like this teen, it would be pretty freakin obvious that you are harmless in your state.

Men were tarred and feathered for a lot less than this back in the days of our founding fathers.

(Background: Ubuntu uses codenames like Gutsy Gibbon and Hardy Heron)

Building on this...

Fornicating Ferret
Lascivious Lemur
Dogging Dingo
Humping Hippo
Fisting Fox
Dominating Donkey
Sadistic Salamander
Masochistic Meercat.
Plushy Porcupine
Bound-up Beaver
Raping Rat
Fellating Fenicat

After the word fight I went through in the later part of this comment thread, I think it's abundantly clear that when we talk about sexuality we need to be clear about some terms. I propose the following:

• Sexual preference: something minor, such as preferring feet, breasts, butt, legs, long hair, shaved, etc. It is a preference that does not, by itself, determine who or what you are attracted to.
• Sexual orientation: the subject that you are primarily, or exclusively, attracted to.
• Sexual perversion:
  • A sexual preference that is tainted by a psychotic condition.
  • A sexual orientation to anyone other than sexually mature or pubescent members of the opposite sex.

BDSM came up, and my take on that is that there are generally two types of practitioners of BDSM: those who toy with it, and those who are serious afficiandos. I would hazard to guess that the former should not be considered perverts because they are just toying with the boundaries, rather than seriously past them. There is an obvious difference between someone who likes to be tied to the bed with velvet ropes, and someone who likes to be tied up with normal rope in painful, contortionist positions. That's one of many examples.

A lot of people have an emotional reaction to hearing the word "pervert," but I'm just using it matter-of-factly here.

In college, a girl I was dating convinced me for a few weeks to drink soy milk. I found some that actually tasted pretty good. Then, I stumbled onto research that had been posted online that pointed out how soy products increase the levels of female hormones in your bodies, and I've never touched the stuff since. Jim Rutz has a good point here about how Westerners know just enough to be dangerous when it comes to other cultures in this point about soy consumption:

Soy has never been a leading staple there like rice, fish or pork. Even going back to the 1930s, calorie intake from soy in China was rarely more than 1.5 percent of their diet, whereas pork provided 65 percent! No comparison. Traditionally, soy plants were plowed under in fields as fertilizer. Soy was a poverty food, eaten heavily only by the poor in times of famine. (Grazing animals don't like to eat it, either.) People have always eaten soy in small portions as a condiment or a supplement with a meal. The highest intake of soy in Japan is among monks, who eat it to turn off sexual desire. (Think about that the next time you're in the grocery store.)

The previous article that he wrote for WorldNetDaily on the subject has some scary information on what soy products can do to babies and small children. Further confirmation that we cannot really trust the FDA to do its alleged mission of keeping toxic substances out of our food. This is the same agency that sees no evil, hears no evil with respect to products that contain phenylalanine[A better starting link]-a chemical that is a neurotoxin.

As I have said before about the level of salt that is in a lot of foods, we're slowly poisoning ourselves. For all that we pride ourselves on how safe our food is, what we really need is a sober examination of whether we really are eating food that is objectively safer and better for us than what existed before the FDA gave the majority of Americans the sense that the bad days were almost over.

[Update] Fox News says soy decreases your sperm count.

People talk about opposing Wal-Mart a lot, but none of the strategies seem to really work. Here's a thought. Why not use the credit card system against them? If millions of people went to Wal-Mart and bought packs of gum and such with their Visa, it would have a serious impact on their relationship with their credit card processor, and they'd lose money in every transaction too. All without breaking the law.

I've completed the first version of a plugin for Movable Type that makes photo blogging easier. It allows you to associate an image with an entry, and provides a number of template tags for accessing information about the image. An example of how it may be used in conjunction with Galleria can be seen here on my themes blog.

We all love to hate on Starbucks, but admit it, they've done a lot of good for coffee drinkers. One of the things that they've really helped with is getting alternatives to regular coffee at many restaurants. Not that they all get it right, but given the choice, I'll take a badly made cappuccino over an expertly made cup of that black swill that most places and corporate offices call coffee any day.

Heather Koerner volunteers herself for an intensive fisking:

"Boats or Votes?" asked one prominent newspaper at the time, seeming to indicate that women needed to choose between equality (the right to vote) and protection (the boats).

That dichotomy--either choose protection or choose equality--is a difficult one. On one hand, I want it to be known and acknowledged that I am not inferior, that I am absolutely of equal worth as a man. On the other, I know deep down that I am more vulnerable to harm in this life, and I long for safety and security.

Thankfully, it's a choice that Christianity does not demand I make. Certainly, the world will tell me that accepting protection from godly men is the same as affirming my inferiority to them. But the Word tells me different. It acknowledges both truths--my worth and my vulnerability--without making me choose between them.

First of all, the Bible does not use the concept of equality in the sense that Heather is using it. The Bible is quite clear that authority and value are not in any way tied to one another, as God gave incredible authority to people who were quite clearly inferior in His estimation to even the bottom of the barrel in the invisible, eternal, catholic body of believers. Heather's fundamental problem is that she cannot accept that authority is not, biblically speaking, tied to equality. In fact, the Bible is rife with examples of God giving authority to people without regard for any matter even tangentially related to equality. Thus, there is no contradiction between a biblical view that respects the equal worth of a woman and an equally biblical view that says that women should not hold positions of political or ecclesiastical authority.

God tells me that I am an equal heir to His kingdom. But He also commands that my Christian brothers, my husband in particular, act to me as Christ acted toward the church. That he be willing to give himself up for me.

This is only partly true. Paul's words regarding the role that men are to play toward women they are not married to comes from 1 Timothy 5:2, not Ephesians 5, as Heather suggests:

¹Do not rebuke an older man harshly, but exhort him as if he were your father. Treat younger men as brothers, ²older women as mothers, and younger women as sisters, with absolute purity.

In the sense that there is a familial obligation to protect relatives, Heather has a point, after a fashion. However, the majority of the modern set of expectations toward women flies in the face of the behavior that was expected of a sister toward a brother during the time in which Paul wrote these words. They were, after all, written in an age when it was generally expected that a sister would not only respect her brothers, but also in an age when brothers also tended to carry a greater authority in the family than their sisters, so some context is necessary.

Going back to Ephesians 5, the same verse that places the burden of protection and sacrifice on Heather's husband for her, a wife is also expected to submit to her husband. Submission and obedience are not the same thing; the former is voluntary, not based on a command-control relationship between the two. In this sense, it is an even greater burden as Heather must voluntarily accept her husband's authority.

Ephesians 5 is dangerous for the Christian feminist who wants to argue equality in general, while keeping the chivalric obligations because if the husband's role is expanded into a broad socio-political one, then so is the wife's role. Invariably, this expansion of a chapter which focuses on the power dynamics of a married couple into a broad statement about male-female interaction in general naturally demands the complete disenfranchisement of women and their purge from the halls of power in general within the state and church. Arguments may be made against this, naturally, but not ones that are rational and scripture-based.

As I write in today's Boundless article, "Nurturing Protection," "the world's masculinity either demands to be served or refuses to be bothered." But biblical masculinity acknowledges both my worth and its mandate to serve sacrificially by laying down his life for mine.

Biblical feminity acknowledges a man's worth and its mandate to serve sacrificially by submitting to male authority so as to not undermine the very source of the masculine obligation to care for and sacrifice for the women in a man's life. This means that biblical feminity naturally gives up claims of authority granted to it by the culture in exchange for what is offered by the biblical relationship described in Ephesians 5.

To me, those Titanic men were unquestionable heroes. They didn't demean a woman's worth by protecting her; they esteemed it.

This is amusing in light of the fact that this tragedy transpired in the twilight years of the chivalric era. Undoubtedly, both the men and women on that doomed vessel would have been horrified if they could see the behavior of and dynamics between both genders today. Both the crude and weakened masculinity of the men, and the selfish, almost categorically unlady-like behavior of the women. Were the Titanic to happen today, it wouldn't be a struggle to imagine many a boorish woman shoving men out of the way (one could even see some of them trying to throw kids overboard), nor would it be a struggle to imagine a number of men doing the same. The moral of this story is that one cannot play the back-and-forth transposition of values and actions between two distinct eras and hope to come to conclusion that can pass muster before a crowd with a three digit IQ.

Today, this was, more or less, the theme song for the server that my blog was hosted on.

After I talked to tech support, they said that they were already on it, but the server went down hard. Like kicked in the nuts by the devil and thrown off a cliff with a millstone around its neck and a bucket of chum bad. I was able to restore most of everything from a backup that, by the grace of God, I made early this morning over coffee at work before I started the documentation that I've been writing. So, not much lost, just a comment or two, and some such.

The moral of this story is that you must not take for granted that your data will always be there because it may not. What's worse, with the way that a lot of high capacity hard drives (500GB-1TB) have reliability problems, backups are even more essential than ever.

How the creation of untold numbers of felonies has imperiled clear policy on felons and firearms:

The amendment guarantees a "right of the people to keep and bear arms" - and the Founding Fathers did not think "the people" included criminals. Under the law as they knew it, felons were "civilly dead": They had no legal rights whatever. All their property (including guns) was forfeit. (Moreover, they were subject to execution - which made their rights irrelevant.)

In all societies recognizing a right to arms, that right was limited to "the virtuous citizenry." In this, as in much else, our Founders looked back to the ancient Greek and Roman republics. There, every free man was armed so as to be prepared both to defend his family against criminals and to man the city walls in immediate response to the tocsin's warning of approaching enemies. Thus did each good citizen commit himself to the fulfillment of both his private and his public responsibilities.

In sum, the constitutional right to arms simply does not extend to people convicted of serious criminal offenses. By "serious," I refer to the early common law - under which felonies were real wrongs like rape, robbery and murder.

Unfortunately, modern legislatures have added a host of trivial felonies. For instance, in California an 18-year-old girl who has oral sex with her 17-year-old boyfriend has committed a felony. The courts should rule that conviction of such a trivial felony can't deprive such a "felon" of her right to arms.

But the fact remains that people who have been convicted of serious criminal offenses have thereby lost their rights under the Second Amendment. They are subject to our laws against felons possessing firearms.

Far more ridiculous felonies exist, such as felony not for profit copyright infringement that doesn't involve tens of thousands of dollars worth of goods being swapped between offending parties. There is also the relatively new felony act of breaking the encryption on DVDs that you have lawfully acquired in order to make, get this, a backup copy of the movie in case the original is damaged or destroyed. Surely that ranks right up there with inflicting serious bodily harm on another or laying waste to their property.

As a matter of public safety, disarming felons has never done any serious good for society. The felons that we need to have disarmed in the first place are the sort who have no good business rejoining society. In fact, society would be better off demanding the permanent removal of such felons from society without any mercy as the ways that unrepentant violent felons could continue to wreck havoc on society are limited only by their imaginations.

Now here is where an interesting dilemma comes about: white collar criminals. Objectively speaking, there are white collar crimes that deserve execution. Surely if one could quantify the harm done to their victims by someone who commits serious and repeated fraud or identity theft, it would be as egregious as any armed robber, rapist or even a murderer. Does a man who wipes out 100 senior citizens' life savings in a clever, predatory scheme deserve to live anymore than a man who murders one of them? Objectively, no he doesn't. Yet society will not bring itself to execute this sort of felon because their action isn't as brutish as that of the more mundane, violent felon. This is the real weakness in our outlook on felons in general: we don't limit the label "felony" to crimes where society really would like nothing more than to see the perpetrator removed permanently, and we frequently show mercy to those who don't deserve it.

We shouldn't rely on the courts to fix this problem. The legislators need to start doing their job which includes reviewing and fixing the laws that are already on the books.

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. -Nietzsche

That's the best way to summarize this blog post. It's amazing how much we have lost sight, as a culture, on being able to disagree without being disagreeable. The longterm consequences of the radicalization and balkanization of American politics do not bode well for the future of our country. Surely this has been one of the reasons why the traditional conservative-libertarian alliance has collapsed, and now even both respective sides are breaking apart into smaller factions still.

Is truly amazing...

They say that hard cases make for bad law. Extreme behavior may make for bad descriptions of the state of things in a society. However, I couldn't help but feel that there is something indicative of where America stands, culturally, after watching a show about bridezillas off and on with Rachel yesterday. Those women are insufferable monsters; the culmination of every effort to create the perfect self-centered princess-bitch-goddess.

It's easy to blame the girls because they are so loathesome. If you suppress the urge to reach through the screen and beat them half to death with a golf club for the way they treat everyone around them, you might notice something going on in the background: the father just doesn't do anything. You might be tempted to say that it's because of his wife, but that's not always the case. In some cases, the mother is actually trying to beat some sense into her daughter and the father is actually undermining her, letting the little bitch-princess get her way.

Blame mom and dad equally.

It's easy enough to blame women because they tend to be the ones to walk out first, and in the process ruin everything that a man has built. However, men deserve a lot of blame in their own right. A few generations ago, they stopped disciplining their daughters and grounding them in reality. They're the ones who let their daughters be "daddy's little princess" and in the process allowed them to grow up spoiled in their expectations toward men. I blame it on the Victorian-era myth that women are moral angels, rather than cut from the same genetic and spiritual cloth as men. Fathers just couldn't believe that their daughters were formed from the same depraved nature as their sons.

"Man up." "Woman up."

"Give up!"

Yes, give up. A lot of conservatives cling to yesteryear and the Victorian myths about men and women like a child to a security blanket. "If only men would step up to the plate." I don't see many women ready to pitch. There is so much cultural and legal inertia to changing the culture that it is, at this point, a done deal that on the aggregate, marriage is a failed institution in America. The exceptions prove nothing. Optimism-junky Americans have a hard time facing the fact that marriage has failed as an institution. We are addicted to good news like a drug user to smack. Bad news and truth is like getting strapped down to a chair and forced to go cold turkey.

Too many people benefit now from marriage failing for it to succeed as a broadly-participated social institution. The laws are even skewed now in ways to advance their interests. Put more simply, in general, there is nothing that can be said or done to fix it. The wheel of history must turn for America the way it did for Rome from the moral collapse in the early years of Augustus' reign, to the return of public morals during the latter years of Christianity's rise in the empire.

Three good posts on the FBI's past and present criminal behavior.

Whatever good the FBI does is generally outweighed by the lawlessness that it has displayed since its inception. America would do well to consider liquidating the entire agency, transferring its jurisdictions to other agencies in the law enforcement and intelligence communities, and blacklisting most of its management from ever holding another post in the federal government.

If the mainstream media were the watchdog that it claims to be, then a lot more attention would have been paid over the years to police corruption and prosecutorial malfeasance. God forbid that the headlines be about criminality in the federal government instead of Jamie Lynn Spears' baby.

A swat team surrounded a Moraine motel looking for a suspected purse snatcher

Think I'm kidding? And no, it's not from The Onion.

This is the natural result of allowing every podunk town to have its very own SWAT team.

It's generally not a good idea to rely on strength to fight someone who is easily three times or more stronger than you are, which is generally the case when women go toe-to-toe with a man in close-range combat.

You have to love the placement of the ads and links on this article.



This is about as good as an article on cities working together to enforce gun bans having a bunch of ads for firearm dealers within driving distance of several major cities.

Why you shouldn't dress like a skank underneath your wedding dress[NSFW]. UPDATE: I take it El Borak and J Razz saw the original page. Got this one from Reddit and when it was originally posted there, the girl had on transparent panties that left nothing--nothing--to the imagination. Someone posted a mirror to them here; obviously NSFW under any cirumstances.

Wachovia gets busted.

1 in 7 Americans still haven't been forced into a wireless leash--sorry, cell phone.

China tells us to stop selling weapons (one of our biggest exports) to Taiwan. The punchline? We not only give a rat's ass what they think, but do it!

The World Court bleats in despair as no one in the American legal system takes it all that seriously.

Apparently the Linux kernel team is creating some controversy by partially suppressing information about patched security holes. What they are doing is they're burying the information about patched security holes deep in the changelogs for the new kernel releases and not boldly advertising them to Linux distributors.

Sounds like a smart move to me. The companies that make commercially supported Linux distributions have people on staff who can be tasked to keep abreast of the latest changelogs for important updates. When something important catches their eye, they can just download the updated source code, package a new kernel and send it out to all of their users as an urgent update.

In the slashdot thread, someone complained about a comment I made about how this should be expected of anyone who maintains a Linux distribution. Their argument was that many organizations would have to move toward buying support packages from companies like RedHat, but really, what's the big deal with that? It's cheaper for a university or small company to rely on the vendor of their Linux distribution than it is for them to do everything in house. The more they rely on getting good kernels from RedHat, Novell, etc., the less they work they have to assign to their internal IT staff. Less money spent on expenses, more money invested into what the company actually does.

The more that IT support shifts away from being something that has to be done in-house, to something that can be outsourced, the better, just like how most people no longer need to know how to fix their own car.

Men get castigated in church, in the media and society in general for watching porn. The only thing as easy as finding porn online is finding someone who will scold a man for looking at porn. Yet women not only get away with consuming pornography, but it is generally considered socially acceptable, especially among other women. If this sort of story is not pornographic, then I don't know what is:

I read the first two Twilights, searching for the key to their success. (This is where the part about being not all that deep comes in handy.) The attraction is clearly the vampire hero, who is a perfect gentleman, eternally faithful and -- as the author points out repeatedly -- quite a hunk. ("He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculpted, incandescent chest, his scintillating arms bare ... A perfect statue, carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble, glittering like crystal.")

Before you make fun of this, I want you to seriously consider whether you're interested in denigrating people who spend their leisure time actually reading books rather than watching "America's Got Talent."

A better comparison would be to men who spend their free time watching hardcore pornography that caters exclusively to male interests.

Beneath the exterior, pornography is not about sex, it's about reducing another person to being essentially an automaton that caters to one's every desire without having to take into consideration their needs. Few women really object to a normal, healthy male sex drive when they discuss pornography; what they really object to is the way that porn turns a woman into a sexual object that caters not just to a man's basic sexual needs, but to his every whim regardless of how she feels, and without consideration for her needs or desires. The equivalent is equally present in all sorts of romance media marketed to women. Just as women in porn are often caricatures of real women, so are the men in many romance novels, movies and tv shows.

As more and more women find it difficult to have find partners for long-term, committed relationships, the role of romance novels and similar media should be examined. Unrealistically high standards of their behavior are very commonly cited by men as to reasons why their relationships with women fail. Of course, when much of the media that caters to women is filled with men who essentially exist to romance women, it should be taken for granted that there will be a bleed-over into the culture similar to how men increasingly demand unrealistic sexual performance from normal women.

It'll be hard for a lot of women to admit to any of this for the same reason it's hard for an alcoholic to admit that they have no standing to criticize the addiction of a drug user, but that doesn't change the fact that there isn't a lot of difference between pornography and most romance media today.

Over the weekend I paid the $9.95 upgrade fee for my iPod Touch to get the new version 2.0 OS. It didn't really add that much to what I already had, but that is probably because of the fact that I paid $19.95 a few months ago for the app bundle that made it reach parity with the iPhone except for the phone features. The important thing is that it can now access the App Store.

And the App Store is largely a disappointment.

It's not that they're selling a lot of crappy software or something like that, it's just that most of them really should just be free. I think OmniFocus is the only app there that, from the sounds of it, is clearly worth the price that is being asked for it. However, given that it cannot do location awareness on an iPod Touch due to a lack of GPS and the improbability of finding an open wifi network anywhere near where you want to use that feature, it's already limited.

As far as I have seen, there are no killer apps for it available on the App Store right now. There are a lot of good, free apps worth having, but none of them that are compelling enough to make people want an iPhone just to have that app. For that reason, unless you are willing to switch to AT&T and just have to have the iPhone, consider buying an iPod Touch instead.

On a different subject, I have completed more work on Movable Type themes. More of that to come on my themes blog in the near future, depending on when I get free time during my move.

Speaking of Movable Type, this has the potential to be a very interesting template if it gets built up properly.

You know you're a geek when you see this and your first thought is to take a few potshots with a .22 or get a bow and shoot off a few flaming arrows...

H/T: El Borak.

• I hear people complain about the idea of judicial review, but their answer is always to have Congress police itself. That that is like seriously proposing that a wanton, out-of-control alcoholic control their drinking without any external influence is lost on them. You have two choices: either the courts rule on the constitutionality of the law and sometimes go too far, or you trust the same idiots and criminals that passed the law the first time to come to their senses and fix the problem. Appeals to "voting them out of office" don't count, as the people don't do that.
• No one is required to actually fix our country's basic problems. Infrastructure problems? Fuhgedaboutit! Billions of dollars being wasted by bureaucracies so corrupt and opaque that no legislative act will coerce them back into efficiency? Why you must be an anarchist if you seriously believe the only viable solution is for Congress to "bomb" them from a mile in the sky by passing a bill that says "Having grown sick to death of the jerks at $INSERT_BUREAUCRACY not giving a rodent's posterior about the law and spending tax dollars like crackwhores with a Wallstreet banker's stolen credit card, we the Congress hereby cut them off the public teat, and forthwith slap them upside the head with pink slips." Then there's the whole issue of them never having to fix bad laws they make unless they feel like it.
  
• No one ever got impeached for being a sophistic ass. Congress, too busy chasing bribes and jockeying for sweet positions in influential committees never takes the time to look at court rulings, say "this is a load of bullshit" and file impeachment charges against federal judges when they do stupid things.
• You're a cop who is guilty of unleashing hell upon the citizenry under the color of law? Don't worry. Sovereign immunity's most likely got your back. Those serfs will never be able to sue you or get you prosecuted for being a violent criminal hiding behind a badge and uniform. Corollary: no prosecutor ever got the legal equivalent of being beaten up with a golf club by the body politic that nominally oversees them for having a sense of justice that can be best described as "I wonder how many charges I can stick to that ham sandwich."

Something I read on the Agitator got me thinking about some of the fundamental structural flaws in our system. It was probably the Rack-N-Roll case, where essentially the police and courts have all but a gentleman's agreement to not protect the rights of a local bar owner who has been viciously hounded by corrupt local authorities.

Felony murder rules state that if you commit a crime against someone, and they die as a result of your actions, what would normally be considered manslaughter, by virtue of the felony committed, becomes a murder charge. This makes a lot of people uncomfortable today because it seems so vindictive, so judgmental. For example, people often object to these rules on the grounds that the criminal just intended to rob someone, rather than take their life, even though the person may have shot or stabbed or otherwise harmed someone in a way that took their life. Such arguments don't stand up to scrutiny.

Felonies that take lives are not committed by people who have no intention to harm another person. By their very nature, the core felony charges that have been recognized as serious offenses for millennia involve a desire or willingness to render significant harm to another. Therefore, the felon has already put their foot into the door to be considered a murderer when their actions, during the crime, lead to their victim's death.

As a matter of justice, it is dubious whether or not the intent to kill even needs to be there during a felony to justify the upgrade into murder. After all, the practical effect of the crime is that someone is dead as a result of the criminal behavior of another. There can be no doubt that had the criminal not committed the felony, the victim would not have died by their hand. It is thus clear that in practice, those who fall under this rule will be people who have no innocent explanation for why someone died by their hand.

There are obvious hard cases such as a thief who kills an old person with a weak heart because of the surprise of seeing them sneaking around their property, or someone who is charged because they drove a friend to buy or sell drugs, and the person ended up killing someone. The law obviously has to be nuanced enough to deal with the fact that there are many felonies on the books which have a tenuous relationship to wanting to harm another in a way that could lead to death. That does not, however, make the rule invalid or unjust in the majority of cases where it may be applied.

Origin.

Apple couldn't have picked a more loathsome partner (AT&T) if it tried.

If the video gets a DMCA take down notice, here is the original link that cannot be embedded into a web page.

Paul Ellis makes a strong case that the W3C and WHATWG are to blame for the increased use of proprietary technologies on the web. I don't think the problem is all of that serious yet because there are alternatives to the proprietary, corporate implementations of Flash and Silverlight. Furthermore, the official Java implementation from Sun has been released as an open source work, and that will only serve to help keep the web at least partially open because of the open infrastructure that can be supported on open source Java (not to mention maybe some actual innovation with Java Applets).

The "problem," though is one that is caused by people trying to make the web do things it was never designed to do. Here's a simple fact: web applications cannot do a lot of things that people wish they could do. The reason for this is that HTML was never designed to be a good language for designing a user interface. It's not like Swing, Qt, GTK, Windows Forms, wxWidgets or any other major GUI toolkit. Rather it was designed to be good for representing documents.

Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX, etc. are good because they get people to stop trying to make the web be something it isn't. You want some nifty, wizbang application to load up in your browser that does heavy duty work? Use one of those. Embed it into the web page. As long as the effort is put into those environments, it won't be put into perverting HTML and JavaScript to the point that they become proprietary, useless kludges.

The future will hopefully see more technologies like Java Web Start. Using Java Web Start, you can distribute real, functional Java programs to users via their web browser. Need to give remote users access to full corporate email? No problem. Just put a Java Web Start-based email client for them on the corporate VPN. When they log into the corporate intranet remotely, they can activate Java Web Start and get the program delivered right to them effortlessly.

Normally I am an opponent of licensing, in any form, to be part of a profession or job. However, when it comes to providing forensics services, I think there is a case for it. This series of interviews about a forensics bill in Texas at least gets much of the spirit right. The reason that I am opposed to allowing people who cannot pass a bare minimum set of qualifications from being able to act as experts in court is because of guys like Steven Hayne. Click on that link and do a little digging before you react with arguments about "free market this," or "capitalism that."

Now, here's the catch. It makes no sense to prevent someone from being able to get any IT worker who can reasonably perform forensics work to do it for them, provided the information must be verified by a licensed forensics expert before being introduced into a court of law. If it prevents that, then obviously it needs to be amended, however based on the interview, the legislator who drafted this law seems to be amenable to new information and eager to tweak any serious bugs he may have unwittingly introduced into Texas law. (Debugging, what a novel legislative concept...)

Things get worse for the Big 3...

Americans will soon have another feel-good reason to buy a Prius.

Prius production in the U.S. will begin in late 2010 at a plant currently under construction in Blue Springs, Miss., Toyota announced Thursday.

So, aside from saving on the cost of gas through better gas mileage and raising environmental awareness, buying a Prius will soon be a product made by American workers...or at least assembled by them.

One of those odd twists of capitalism is that you often have two options when it comes to buying a car in the United States. Buy an "American" car made in Mexico, or buy a "Japanese" car that was at the very least assembled in the United States. Personally, I prefer to buy Honda, especially since most of their cars sold in our market now are assembled by American workers. Let some of the profits go to Japan. I don't know which is worse: keeping the life-support juice flowing to the three ghouls based in or near Detroit or knowing that my "American car" was probably built on the other side of the border.

Buy (North) American... or something like that.

Anyway, this is a good trend. It makes more sense for companies to do their production locally where they are going to be selling if it's a big market. Easier on the import duties, better public relations with the people in the market.

I have tried unsuccessfully to get a Costco American Express card for the last two weeks because it gets at least 3% cash back on gas purchases, plus we intend to start shifting more of our buying to Costco (they don't take Visa). The moving process has caused them American Express to see two addresses, and they're skiddish about sending the card without some sort of verification of the home address. Doesn't matter that I gave them all of the information in the first place, doesn't matter that in a subsequent call I answered every security question without incident.

They need to prove that I actually live there, so they want a utility bill or someone else like a doctor or lawyer to verify that address. Sounds like a pretty decent system for stopping identity theft, doesn't it? Wrong. Let me explain why.

One of the basic security principles in infosec is the chain of trust. American Express doesn't trust me, so it goes to someone who can ostensibly vouch for me. The problem is, this relationship is too fluid to establish a reliable chain of trust. What is to stop an identity thief from setting something up that seems to come from a licensed lawyer, accountant or doctor verifying that address? Nothing, and that's because American Express doesn't already trust the source that is attempting to verify my credentials. It's blind trust which is really no trust at all. One of the reasons that digital certificates work is that we trust signers like Verisign to not just be some fly-by-night operation that will give the thumbs up to any Tom, Dick and Harry that casually slips it some greenbacks under the table.

So, while it is a speed bump for an identity thief, it really only offers protection from casual identity thieves.

Stories like this are way too common these days. If we hadn't wasted so much money on Iraq, I might be inclined to literally support what I am about to suggest...

• The United States Marine Corps is sent into southern England as a beachhead for American military forces.
• Within a few weeks, the British military is forced to surrender to the United States military; the conquest of Britain is complete.
• American military forces execute the entire Labor government and most of the Conservative shadow government.
• Around the country, especially in bigger cities, American military forces summarily execute every police officer and prosecutor for reasons related to incidents like the one listed above.
• All social workers are herded off to detention camps to await summary punishment for conspiring with the Labor tyrants.

You know what?

Screw this.

By the time we'd be done eradicating the tyrants and their sympathizers, eighty percent of Britain would be six feet under.

Stick a fork in Britain, it's done.

Too many libertarians seem to define libertarianism as a very specific and restrictive political program: as a laundry list of government programs to be abolished, or equivalently as a very short list of government programs that won't be abolished. By that measure, libertarianism is nowhere close to successful. But if we define libertarianism more broadly as a set of general ideas and attitudes--pro-market, pro-tolerance, skeptical of authority--the last few decades look a lot better from a libertarian perspective. Few major government programs have been abolished, but the role of market in the economy has expanded dramatically, and partly as a consequence people are freer than they've ever been to live their lives as they seem fit without interference from those in authority.

Isn't this a little like saying that if you think of libertarianism as, well, libertarianism, it has been a failure, but if you redefine it to mean something rather different then it is going very well? The book Lee is talking about, Brink Lindsey's The Age of Abundance, makes a similar move: see here for an example. So, for example, the facts that the number of people who are unchurched is growing, and that attitudes toward sex have liberalized, are taken to be evidence that the country is growing more libertarian. For decades, conservatives have accused libertarians of hostility to organized religion and traditional sexual morality. These days, they often come close to boasting about that hostility--and consider it more important than reducing coercion.

I think this accurately summarizes the criticism of the "beltway libertarians" that came about during the controversies over Ron Paul's past. "Beltway Libertarians," a.k.a., "social libertarians," tend to place a premium on any liberty which allows them to acquire more wealth, have sex or use drugs. This is how they can remain cheerful about the state of the union despite the overwhelming evidence that the United States is actually going deep into cultural, economic and political decline. It's like an alcoholic saying that things aren't quite that bad on a sinking ship because the bar is still open, undisturbed and serving great martinis.

In the past forty years, we have seen many profoundly illiberal changes to the government, and especially the way the government relates to the people. Property rights have been all but destroyed by a combination of asset forfeiture laws and court rulings. Surveillance has increase dramatically on all communications mediums. Law enforcement has not only been granted sweeping discressionary power in many cases, but has been militarized to a point where it is dubious as to whether the damage can be undone in less than a generation; SWAT units are now routinely employed in cases where they have no reason for being there.

What Tim Lee failed to factor into his assertion that attitudes are growing libertarian is that the public is actually growing more left-wing on economic issues. The entitlement mentality that is the summary execution of libertarianism in politics is now more rampant than ever, and thus it's not at all unreasonable to see the loosening sexual views as part of a big picture based on Roman-style bread and circus.

As I have said before, libertarians in general do not understand the idea that certain ideas only work when others have been implemented. For example, they are utterly incapable of admitting that rampant, unrestricted immigration by unskilled laborers is effectively a guaranteed way to lose the war to privatize education. If you bring in millions of people who will benefit from it, but won't have to pay into it, they have no incentive to agree to reform or change it (since most poor immigrants will never pay property taxes). Social libertarianism is irredeemably "presentist" and as such, it will never yield lasting, beneficial results.

Glenn Sacks has an interesting case of a man who was arrested under child pornography laws for videotaping a high school cheerleader competition. The first thing that comes to mind here is that if the videotape itself is of a sexual nature, then one can conclude that the performance itself was as well, at which rate anyone involved in organizing it is guilty of exploiting minors. So he did focus on their butts and such, but since they were clothed and not engaged in lewd and lascivious acts, it doesn't logically follow that this can be legitimately considered pornography. If the mere act of focusing on clothed body parts that are not being used in a sexual way is enough to be declared pornographic, then one could easily argue that focusing in on the Washington Monument, a phallic symbol if there ever was one in D.C., could be construed that way as well.

Of course, this is the natural result of a society that has abandoned universal truth and the need for an intelligent theory of justice.

Not even a year after we integrated our "households" as a result of getting married, Rachel and I moved nearly everything with the help of friends and family over the weekend to a new townhouse down the street. The upgrade has netted us about an additional two hundred square feet and an attached garage, but talk about a pain in the ass! My legs are still sore from carrying all of that stuff up and down three flights of stairs at our current complex and some of it up one or two flights of stairs at our new townhouse. Maybe the high gas prices will help discourage employers from making their employees move, and thus we'll develop a culture that is more rooted. I can only hope because I hate moving.

I've been tossing around some ideas about Movable Type plugins, and came across this jQuery plugin while I was looking for some implementations of a dialog box written with jQuery. It allows you to load a dialog box similar to how the ones on Facebook work. Could come in handy, especially in modified form.

This article on defense contracting got kicked around and discussed about two weeks ago. I didn't really want to comment on it at the time, but boredom's gotten the better of me. Right out of college I worked on a defense contract. It was nothing big, and in fact was unclassified stuff (Google knows more about the project than I do, if that says anything).

My impression at the time, and reinforced even more so by hindsight, is that you cannot underestimate how much bureaucracy and idiocy goes into a lot of these contracts. One of the biggest problems with the way the government operates is that has no real pressure or mechanism to handle people making idiotic decisions about how the project is going to be run. As a contractor, you can easily find yourself being paid to march a project right off a cliff, and you can beg, scream, and even nearly take hostages, but you are powerless to force things to be done the right way.

One of the other big complaints that I've heard from others is the failure of the government in many cases to get maintenance built into the contract. Without that, once the contract is over, the developers are let go and now the government has no one on retainer to fix bugs. Thus, any serious problems cannot get fixed, and the system must be rewritten from scratch.

All of that said, I don't think I ever saw anyone this bad when I worked on that contract... (For those that don't get it, no one in their right mind ever allows anything resembling SQL to be passed from a form to a web server by a web browser)

Who did your church honor this holiday weekend? It's always rubbed me the wrong way when people combine patriotic sentiment and religiosity. Not because either of them is bad, but because they are two competing loyalties. The Battle Hymn of the Republic is indeed a trashy song in my opinion, and while one could make a quasi-calvinist argument about how the Union army was an instrument of God's wrath, I think we all know that that is not quite what the lyricist was getting at.

Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule. -Nietzsche

Is there any other explanation for why so many people tolerate actions by society and the state that are harmful, ranging from keeping energy production down to a minimum while energy is expensive, to contemplating a new war with Iran while we occupy two countries already? As someone who has a tendency to analyze and seek consistency, I cannot help but agree with Nietzsche on this point.

This is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that God hears such a "lamentation."

 

Selling protection packages for local businesses to ensure that they are not disrupted by corrupt local cops. In some jurisdictions, this insurance would sell so well that the mafia would become the Blackwater of the insurance industry.

Let there be no more doubt that prosecutors really ought to be the ones who are subjected to the utmost scrutiny in our legal system:

Imagine a fellow who lives in a dry county in Mississippi (where alcohol is not sold or served) goes to a friend´s bar in New York and has a drink. Shortly thereafter, the bartender visits his friend in that dry county in Mississippi. The local sheriff arrests both the bartender and his friend for an act committed in New York.

Most people, quite properly so, would argue the Mississippi sheriff has no business arresting people for a legal act committed in New York, even though it would have been illegal if committed in Mississippi.

Unfortunately, some prosecutors in the U.S. federal government are now acting like the rogue Mississippi sheriff described above when it comes to gambling, securities and tax laws in foreign countries.

The federal government under the Bush Administration has made this country increasing inhospitable to foreigners who want to visit or do business here because it is getting more and more dangerous for foreigners to come here. We should have learned our lesson when the federal government arrested executives from a British gambling company because they didn't stop Americans from using their online gambling services. Such actions show absolutely not one iota of respect for the sovereignty of other nations, such as Britain and Switzerland, and it's only a matter of time before other countries begin to do this in earnest to our citizens in retaliation.

Cases like this serve as high markers for how dangerous prosecutors can really be. They're the link in the legal system that are typically forgotten. We hear all about rogue judges and cops, but not nearly enough about rogue prosecutors who come up with these insane legal arguments just to expand their own power. Short of a prosecutor behaving like Nifong in the Duke Lacrosse case, they rarely get called out to explain their actions and be held accountable for them. If civil liberties groups want to do more good, it would be better to stop focusing on the police, and start focusing on holding accountable this country's prosecutors because they've been able to operate with impunity for too long.

Ok, so there might be a snowball's chance in Hell that Mark Zuckerberg really isn't guilty as charged, but Facebook's actions make that seem impossible:

James Ware, a U.S. district court judge, barred reporters and the public from attending the June 23 hearing in San Jose, Calif. He also put many of the documents in the case under seal. CNET Networks filed an objection to Ware's decision last week.

On Wednesday, Ware said he would release a redacted copy of the transcript from the June 23 hearing and allow a magistrate judge to decide on whether some of the other sealed documents should be released. What was redacted is still unclear, according to CNET lawyers who were at Wednesday's hearing.

Facebook has agreed to pay ConnectU's founders cash and stock as part of the terms of the settlement, but the exact amounts have not been released.

It's pretty much a given that whenever a company  agrees to pay someone off in a settlement of this nature that there is some merit to the accusations brought against it. From what little I know about this case, Zuckerberg used to be associated with the guys who worked on ConnectU, so I don't think their case is outrageous in the least from what I've gathered about it so far.

The guys who rise to the top in this industry seem to have a habit of having an almost Macchiavellian view of dealing with others and their intellectual property rights. Microsoft under Bill Gates got dinged several times for taking others' code. Of course, you almost have to be like that in order to succeed in this industry, so I don't know that there is much that can be done about that.

Well, it looks like the guys at ConnectU will now no longer have any bitching rights. They'll be able to smoke antique Cuban cigars lit with $100 bills for the next twenty years when Facebook finally goes public.

An interesting dilemma for the libertarians who read my blog. According to this, many of the industrial materials needed to make things like LCDs will be exhausted from known supplies by 2017. Simply put, if these chemicals are gone, there will not be enough materials anymore to continue making a lot of common display technology. Even copper is starting to become scarce.

So how should this be handled? If it is left up to the free market, there are two possibilities. Either someone will eventually figure out a way to get around this using alternate chemicals, or a company will rise up that does industrial recycling and sells the materials that are harvested from landfills to computer companies--probably at significant cost because of the labor force required to pull out the dead electronics, among other factors. The alternative, is state governments make it a misdemeanor to be caught throwing electronics out in the trash. Instead, you have to take them to a special recycling facility or your trash service will do it for you.

I lean toward the former out of principle, but practicality tells me that the latter might be necessary just because of how many people will act like their human rights have been violated by not being able to constantly consume as much electronic hardware as they can afford.

Ilya Somin makes some good points about how the War on Drugs affects black demographics:

As I have noted in the past (here and here), some 55% of US federal prison inmates and 21% of state inmates are non-violent drug offenders. And over 62% of incarcerated nonviolent drug offenders are black(most of them poor black males). I don't claim that this racial disparity in drug incarceration is caused solely - or even primarily - by racial prejudice. But even if undertaken for the best of motives, it drastically reduces the available pool of marriageable men in poor black communities. And, as Kerry notes, those men who remain have far less incentive to marry because their stronger bargaining position caused by scarcity makes it easier for them to obtain sex without making any longterm commitment to the women they do it with. Even after drug offenders are released from prison, they are likely to be worse marriage prospects than before, if only because it's hard to get a steady job after being in prison for several years.

Some conservatives might argue that the kinds of men who get arrested for drug possession or dealing wouldn't make good husbands even if they stay out of prison. Perhaps that is true in some cases. But these men still probably beat the alternative of single parenthood. Moreover, Kerry's point about bargaining position is crucial here. If fewer men from these communities were in prison, there would be more competition between them in the dating market and thus stronger incentives for them to behave in ways that appeal to women. To the extent that women prefer men who don't get high to those who do, that might well include staying off the drugs - as well as becoming better providers and fathers in other ways.

Ending the War on Drugs would certainly be no panacea with respect to the problems that the black community faces such as the rate of illegitimacy among black children. However, one need only look at the statistics cited above to realize that the War on Drugs has done tremendous damage to black demographics when it comes to the ability of black men to become stable providers and contributors to society. You cannot have such a large percentage of black men with black marks on their records for what are, objectively speaking, petty offenses without serious problems for black family life. Not only will it be harder for them to get good jobs, but it helps continue the poverty that fosters lower expectations about what sort of role black men can, should and must play in their communities.

To see evidence of what Somin says about black men having more power, one need only look at the disparity between college-educated black women and college-educated black men. There are significantly more of the former than the latter, and that gives college-educated black men a great advantage over black women. Not only is it easier for them to find a black woman at their social level than it is for a black woman to do the same, but their position also gives them more access to women of other races.

If drug dealing were no longer a profitable, black market enterprise, that would also provide incentive for more black men to do well in school and follow other social norms. The single biggest problem with the War on Drugs is that it gives many people a lucrative alternative to the normal economy for making a living, thus allowing them to effectively not contribute to society while making money.

This is an interesting take on what happens when the politicians, judges and prosecutors fail to hold up their end of the criminal justice system. Namely, some police begin to feel that they cannot actually do their basic job if they have to turn to the courts because the courts so thoroughly fall down on the job. While I appreciate law and order as much as the next guy, I can see how some of the controversial tactics mentioned in that post would actually be good for some of the poorer parts of the community. Besides, you can only shed so many crocodile tears for serious criminals who finally get their comeuppance when the police and community work together to find more "organic solutions" to the local crime problem when the courts just routinely slap the offenders on the wrist for serious crimes.

The primary reason why these failings happen is because it is antithetical to "democratic wisdom" to suggest that we should only elect people to the legislature who have some sort of serious philosophy of law and justice. Why, that might smack of elitism!