August 2008 Archives

I had been waiting for Too Human with a lot of excitement, and it didn't really disappoint. It has its problems, but that is to be expected when you have a game that tries novel ideas with game controls and has certain expectations set on it by the story. One of the problems there is that the levels are massive and the enemies legion--something that was probably assumed to be just expected by Silicon Knights because the game is based on Norse mythology. There is also the matter that no matter how hard you level up, because the enemies scale up to meet your challenge, you never really feel like leveling up means a damn thing. The Hellheim level can get very annoying because of the endless battles against enemies that can make Baldur seem about as strong as a preteen nerd, rather than a cybernetically-enhanced member of the Aesir.

So, that's all that I can really complain about. A lot of the reviewers have missed the point about this game which is that it is a fusion of a movie with a traditional dungeon-crawler RPG. The gameplay may be weak, but the cinematic component is very well integrated and on par with the story scenes in any game from Square-Enix short of Final Fantasy VII.

All in all, I would say that if you can get through the unbalanced aspects of the gameplay, you'll enjoy it. The gameplay rarely gets much worse than some of the tricky points in Gears of War, and it does have its great moments. Give it a shot, and hold off on judgment until Silicon Knights has a chance to work on a sequel which can give them a chance to fix some of the annoyances with the game.

Rachel and I will be voting for McCain, since both of us are scared of the cult of personality that Obama is building up around him. She also took time to vote for Ron Paul in the primary, which was enough incentive for me to agree to not consider Obama back before he started acting like he was the second coming of Jesus Christ. Neither of us are crazy about McCain, but after talking to her a lot about Obama, I think that the guy is actually seriously dangerous--more so than McCain. Also, as previously stated, I don't vote libertarian anymore in presidential elections because I don't want to encourage them to shoot so high.

Now that we've gotten things back under control around here, Rachel's been able to start cooking. Damn that woman can cook a mean sweet potato and pork roast! Yeah, I feel lucky to have a woman can cook and loves cooking for me. It's pretty cool to read a lot of these stories about women behaving badly and to have an exception to what is increasingly becoming the rule as my wife!

A lot of people at sites like Digg just don't get why Palin was a smart choice. For the sake of brevity, I'll list a few key reasons why:

• She seems to be a bona fide conservative, and that will actually be the one thing that might energize the Republican base to come out to vote for McCain.
• She seems to have a pretty tough attitude toward fraud, waste and abuse, if her strong opposition to the "bridge to nowhere" is any indication.
• She may be fairly inexperienced as a politician, but her experience has been as an executive officer; whatever experience Obama and Biden have as legislators does not translate into practical experience as an executive.
• The so-called scandal about the cop she got fired will actually resonate with both many women voters and civil libertarians who are frustrated by the "brotherhood of blue" that always seems to protect its own. Not only that, but it is hard to justify a case against her on this when the officer was not only abusive toward his wife, but used his tazer as a disciplinary device on his own 11 year old son!
• She's young, attractive and has a big family which can pull in stragglers from demographics ranging from those who wouldn't mind having a VPILF (that's the professional jargon for her position), to female voters who can identify with her being a mother with several kids balancing a full tme job.
• She's not a Washington insider. She can't be, when she's only held state jobs and shown no prior aspirations for Congress or the Presidency. By choosing Biden, Obama tied himself down to a Washington insider, and now McCain can exploit Palin's outsider status for better or for worse. It also gives him more credibility as a "maverick."

Let it not be said that America is in any way, shape or form immune to the politically correct, legalistic bullshit that has infested the United Kingdom and that is threatening Australia. Here's one from Texas, no less:

Two weeks ago, a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram got into a rapidly escalating argument with his 11-year-old son in a McDonald's.

The confrontation made for a poignant Aug. 15 column by Dave Lieber, who wrote about angrily jumping into his car after telling the boy to walk home, a distance of "a few blocks."

After cooling off, Lieber returned a short time later to find police officers interviewing his son.
Father and son apologized to each other and, after a stern lecture from a police officer, were allowed to drive home together.

Lieber's confessional column about his "stupid and quite serious mistake" sparked a flurry of mostly supportive comments -- many from parents who had done the same or were treated similarly by their own parents -- on the newspaper's Web site.

But the story wasn't over. After additional investigation by detectives in suburban Watauga, Lieber was arrested Tuesday on charges of child abandonment and endangerment -- reigniting a debate over proper parenting and the role of police in family matters.

I kid you not... one of the charges was "child abandonment with intent to return!" What is that? One of those laws where the state legislators wanted to make sure that they had every possible angle covered so that there was no way you couldn't possibly find yourself getting screwed by the police once you tip-toed over the line? This certainly proves Ayn Rand's argument that when the government runs out of criminals, it sure as hell will find ways to make new ones!

Emotion aside, this sort of thing is an aspect of totalitarianism. People don't often get what totalitarianism really means, but it simply means that every single last aspect of life is politicized. America is a totalitarian society, though not necessarily an authoritarian one in many respects. If you need proof of the fact that America is a totalitarian society, just try to think of a single area where the government defers to individuals or other institutions, such as families. Good luck. You won't find it, especially on any issue having to do with kids, where the state today reserves a veto right from nearly everything from where your kid is, to how you punish them, to how you feed them.

Which one do you think is likely to convince 18-30 year old men to come out and vote for the candidate they support?

Rachel Hoffman is yet another casualty in the War on Drugs, but her case sheds light on the way that many drug enforcement officers are not only corrupt cops, but are just all around dirty individuals who will use anyone and anything to get their job done. Cases like the infamous "House of Death," where American federal employees tolerated acts of murder by an informant are not just isolated incidents, but rather are part and parcel of the ends-justify-the-means culture in the War on Drugs.

"Do we feel responsible? We're responsible for the safety of this community," Jones said, labeling Hoffman a "criminal" because she was caught twice with a baggie of marijuana.

"People we use as confidential informants are people that are familiar with the drug trade," the police chief said.

Instead, say the friends, police pushed Hoffman to work undercover against two men considered much bigger in the drug scene, and to try to buy a gun. A transaction involving a gun can bring much more serious charges.

Former FBI agent Brad Garrett, an ABC News consultant, says it made no sense to use an inexperienced person like Rachel for a gun deal.

"You have her make the phone call, you have the bad guys come into the picture and you never have her go to them," said Garrett, a veteran of scores of such undercover deals.

"You arrest them in the park and she's never exposed to the gun or the dope," said Garrett.

So much for the so-called "new professionalism" that has taken root, according to Scalia. Any professional in their position would have known, as Garrett points out, that this operation was doomed from the start. Not only was she ordered by her police handlers to buy a quantity of marijuana that was well above anything she had ever asked for--enough to make her a drug dealer herself--she was told to have them bring a gun for her, which would tip off most drug dealers to the possibility of the arrangement being a set up because such a request would uniquely exacerbate their drug crime sentences.

Jones says his department is continuing its own internal investigation, but at this point he sees no reason to take any disciplinary action against any of his officers.

As if turning her into the equivalent of human shark chum isn't reason enough to, at the very least, dismiss the officers involved from the police force. Anyone with a room temperature IQ could look at the lines fed to this girl by her police handlers and know that she was making a terribly bad attempt at a set up of the drug dealers--which is why she was killed by them. At the very least, the officers involved are so unprofessional and incompetent that they are a useless burden to the rest of their peers, if one overlooks the obvious threat that they pose to their community.

Rachel Hoffman is dead, and because of that some drug dealers might be on the run, and not selling drugs. The local price of marijuana probably went up a whole $0.01-0.03/ounce. Good job. That's the way you keep your community safe.

(Note: Before I begin, I would like to say that with articles like this, Culture11 is off to a great start.)

"The whole data-mining model doesn't work," he says. "We're sub-contracting to companies who want to solve terrorism with technology. It's pure snake oil." Explaining this, German likes to point out that pro football teams use much narrower data sets to scout rookies than the government does hunting terrorists, but they still draft a guy like Ryan Leaf. "If this kind of predictive analysis really worked, these companies would be selling their services in Vegas or on Wall Street. Vegas and Wall Street aren't buying it-only the government is."

It doesn't take a genius to realize that if the technology were viable, that investment firms would have been using it at least as long as the government has been trying to use it because of the way that it would revolutionize their profit making abilities. If nothing else, the technology would have been able to prevent the housing investment bubble that is currently rocking the national economy and threatening to drive many banks into bankruptcy.

For the government, this technology is just an end run around the fact that they need to do more human police work and intelligence gathering. Criminals and terrorists are not stop by computers, they're stopped by agents in the field. No small part of the reason why 9-11 happened was that for years, the government has sought unviable technical solutions to the basic problem that it just hasn't been doing nearly enough field work.

In this case, the woman who filed the complaint wasn't ignorant, she was just flat out stupid and should have been warned to not file a complaint by the police.

Breastfeeding Association spokeswoman Tracey Kelly said many people were ignorant about expressing milk.

"There's a public ignorance and there's still a lack of knowledge around breastfeeding and how it works,'' she said.

The mother who complained about this behavior is a useless busybody. It seems that one of the few things that the English-speaking world has in common and in abundance are moral busybodies. The incident happened because the complainer's child ran through the curtain which concealed the breast-pumping mother from the rest of the parent room at the mall, so the very fact that the incident happened at all is because the complainer could not keep control of her child and tell them to mind their own business.

Of course, that's one of the things about busybodies: they're beyond reproach in their own eyes. It obviously never occurred to the woman to apologize for the child's behavior, as a child cannot be expected to understand what the woman was doing and the woman should have been given the benefit of the doubt. In a politer society she would have, anyway.

Incidents like this happen because the English-speaking world has become extremely legalistic as we've grown secular. Everything has to be resolved through official complaints, court trials, etc. The police can't be expected to sort things out on the street by asking the woman what she was doing, seeing the pumped bottle of milk and then going back to the complaining busybody to tell her that her complaint is baseless because the police discovered that no offense had been committed. God help the police if they added further insult to injury by suggesting to the busybody that her child had provoked the entire incident, and that she needs to get a better handle on her spawn.

I've been writing a lot about ActionStreams lately, and I've submitted two plugins for ActionStreams to MovableType.org. The first one is for my Slashdot plugin, and the second is for my Reddit plugin. I've also downloaded and installed the Disqus plugin which keeps track of my commenting at sites like the Technology Liberation Front (a great blog if you like libertarian geek issues). I think my next plugin will be one that integrates support for coComment into ActionStreams.

How many of you use a RSS/Atom feed reader? The reason I ask is that I am thinking about putting together an ActionStreams template that will generate a news feed based on interesting links I find from places that are integrated into ActionStreams, thus making it easier for those of you that come here to find offbeat and interesting news. What do y'all think?

I better not show this to a friend of mine who's a mechanical engineer. Knowing the way that he hates small, furry animals, he'd build a squirrel trebuchet.

Quoth kat on another post:

please can some clever person explain to me what sort of government we have in this country - i know it is probably neither lefr nor right wing but IS it exactly? i would like to educate myself about politics and would appreciate some help!!
thanks

kat

To which I respond, thusly:

It's all over the place. It's what happens when you have a government that was designed a long time ago for one purpose, and then progressively twisted and modified into different roles by a squabbling committee of ideological malcontents from across the spectrum.

Or, more succinctly, ours is the duckbill platypus of republics.

Going up against a peer this good might harm some kid's self-esteem, and that would be the worst thing in the world:

NEW HAVEN, Conn. - Nine-year-old Jericho Scott is a good baseball player -- too good, it turns out.

The right-hander has a fastball that tops out at about 40 mph. He throws so hard that the Youth Baseball League of New Haven told his coach that the boy could not pitch any more. When Jericho took the mound anyway last week, the opposing team forfeited the game, packed its gear and left, his coach said.

It certainly would be intimidating to go up against someone who can pitch so well when you're that age, but it's no reason for anyone to tell him and his team that they have to give up. One thing that surprises me about this, is the fact that the other coaches aren't trying to get the kid to switch over to their side.

As for the parents, this kid presents a great opportunity, which they're missing, to get their kids the kind of practice that may help them when they get older. The ones that learn how to handle someone this good at an early age would be able to hold their own very easily if they keep up with the sport when they get to high school. Of course, that doesn't matter. What really matters is the fact that this kid has hurt their self-esteem.

For many reasons, I don't like Biden. As if his stances on the War on Drugs were not so bad as to make any limited government conservative or libertarian's skin crawl (hint: he's one of the key leaders who brought the War on Drugs into many innocent people's lives), his views on IT and surveillance issues are really troubling. It's with absolutely not hyperbole and a straight face, that I say that if Benito Mussolini were alive today, he would probably find an incredible amount of common ground with Joe Biden's political views as they are the perfect synthesis of capitalism and socialism with a pragmatic, centralizing twist. Compared to him, John McCain really isn't that bad.

One of the issues that Biden has been passionate on in the past is the issue of encryption getting into the hands of the common man. PGP, the first serious encryption software for the masses, was created as a response to legislation that he cooked up. Biden should scare the hell out of libertarians and conservatives because he is both anti-firearm and anti-encryption, which means that he is for government supremacy both on the use of force and ability to communicate with others in secret. If those come together, they're the foundation of a modern police state.

So, in honor Biden, go download a copy of TrueCrypt. It's free, open and available for Windows, Linux and MacOS X. Think of it as the equivalent of going out to buy a firearm in honor Obama's opposition to gun rights and the Fenty regime's refusal to abide by the ruling in District of Columbia vs. Heller.

Steve Chapman is incensed that defenders of the second amendment and gun rights in general, tend to support a law in Florida which requires employers to allow those with concealed carry permits to leave their weapons locked up in their vehicles. I think it's a good law, because there is a natural obligation to provide for the security of others, regardless of the wishes of property owners.

Perhaps this is just my conservative side showing, but I have no sympathy for the radical property rights defense here. Not only do most businesses provide no effective, armed security for their employees and customers, but they prohibit the same from carrying their own weapons. It is true that their property rights run deep, but the right to life runs deeper than property rights, and any property owner who refuses to take full responsibility for those that he or she would disarm on their property deserves to have their property rights infringed in this matter.

The natural libertarian objection is that one could find a new employer that is amenable to armed employees, or shop at places that don't prohibit firearms. This is true, but it doesn't acknowledge the fact that if this line of thought were taken seriously, that property owners could put all sorts of intrusive regulations on their employees and customers, only limited by the maximum that people would stomach. Under this model, property rights become a cudgel in the hands of petty tyrants who can act out their most oppressive fantasies under the guise of liberty, without respecting any boundaries, social obligations or the liberties of others--not the least of which is others' right to self-defense and life.

The one thing that Chapman observed that is even remotely a good argument for allowing employers to keep weapons off of their premises, fails under closer scrutiny. The average employee who might shoot up an office after being terminated is the sort of person who is likely to bring a weapon to the office anyway, even without the legal permits. Crime and violence by those who take the time to get a concealed carry permit are exceptionally low because it takes a very law-abiding person to seek the permit in the first place.

Libertarians tend to focus too much on individual rights, and not on individual responsibilities. Liberty exists in both. Property rights carry with them a responsibility to respect them by not stealing or damaging them; the right to life carries with it a responsibility in others to not infringe upon it with violence or deny others a reasonable means of self-defense. It would be easier to argue this libertarian point of view here if the law recognized an obligation to defend those that an employer or store has disarmed. However, neither the law nor most libertarians recognize this responsibility, which is a key part of why the problem exists in the first place.

One of the benefits of Movable Type is that the ActionStreams plugin tracks a blogger's use of sites like Digg, Slashdot and Google Reader and posts information that they have shared onto the user's blog. Check out my Action Stream for a regularly updated list of interesting links if you are bored.

In honor of Anakin Niceguy's recent comment thread.

Any libertarian who thinks all taxes are inherently immoral and wants to do away with them, has never considered the alternative.

Your thinking is completely backwards, based upon the wretchedly immoral class envy. Taxes are theft. Always.

Imagine a government based on user fees, not taxes. It's not hard, if you try. Just take everything you hate about your health/car insurance provider, and add a law enforcement and military component to it.

That's what they all say:

Karly Rossiter filed the lawsuit against Alan Evans, of Muscatine, claiming he told her he was free of any sexually transmitted diseases before they began dating in December 2004. A few days after they had sex, Evans asked Rossiter if she had been tested for the human papilloma virus, which causes genital warts.

The lawsuit alleged that she learned in 2005 that she might have the virus and later began showing symptoms.

This ruling could be problematic for a few reasons. In general, HPV cannot be tested in men because only a few strains manifest symptoms in men. There is also no way of knowing, in general, where a woman got HPV from because it could just as easily be her own mother during birth as from a partner.

Now, in general it is perfectly reasonable to make the transmission of STDs a civilly actionable offense when the person who has the STD conceals that fact or deceives someone. It would also be appropriate in the case of something like AIDS or Hepatitis C to argue that such a transmission could constitute a de facto desire to commit homicide since the person who has the disease knows fully well, in a pre-meditated fashion, that their actions will result in the death of that individual. If they die from another cause, it's no less fair to call them a murderer than to suggest that someone is still a murderer if they mortally wound their victim but their victim stumbles out into traffic and is hit and killed by a car.

Still, I am skeptical that the judge took into consideration all of the details surrounding HPV when deciding this case.

A lot of people think that America has a genuinely capitalist economy. If you are one of those people who think that that be the case, then here are some things to think about. Remember, the definition of laissez faire capitalism is "hands off capitalism," which implies that the economy is generally unregulated:

• The market for education is almost as dominated by government services as any industry in a Communist society. The vast majority of education is provided by government agencies in America, so much so, that the cost for alternatives is prohibitively high because of the combination of property taxes for government schools and tuition for private schools that parents would have to pay.
• The government routinely bails out failing corporations, something that is anathema to capitalist economics, as it completely warps market forces and short circuits creative destruction.
• The government has absolute control over what medicines enter the marketplace, irrespective of what any patient wants.
• The government also controls the ability of private parties to buy whatever medicines they need via prescription drug laws.
  
• The government has the power to control what wireless devices enter the marketplace in the name of ensuring that they place nice with one another.
• The government puts mandates on a variety of industries for environmental reasons, telling them how they will build their products. Some of these cost consumers a considerable amount of money. Bottom line is that there is no choice here between buyer and seller.
• Through laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), there are significant regulations on what products may be created by computer software and hardware engineers. CALEA also puts a significant mandate on telecommunications companies.
• The government subsidizes most agriculture.
• The government provides health insurance to the poor in the form of Medicaid, thus creating a disincentive for health insurance companies to compete for that space.
• The government very heavily regulates the manufacturing, sale and ownership of weapons; most classes of weapons simply cannot be owned by private citizens.
• The government heavily controls the entire process of flying.
• The government has heavily restricted the construction of new oil refineries for ostensibly environmental reasons.
• Many jobs, such as cutting hair and driving a taxi, require expensive licensing from local and state governments.
• Many states don't allow retailers to sell hard liquor.
• An increasing number of jurisdictions won't allow private establishments to even have the option of allowing smoking on their property.
• Local and state franchising rules create barriers to entry for providers of TV and broadband internet services.
• Federal election laws have placed strong limitations on the ability of private citizens to buy and sell advertising, or even just throw up a homemade sign on their property, for a candidate of their choice.
• The federal government has aggressively attacked the Liberty Dollar, even though it was being explicitly offered as an alternative currency, not one meant to confuse people into believing that it was official currency.
• The Supreme Court, through the ruling in Kelo vs. New London, allowed local and state governments to seize the property of one party via eminent domain for the benefit of another party, so long as the other party can provide a greater "public benefit" in the form of increased tax revenue via the use of that property.
  

This is certainly not an exhaustive list of all of the ways that the government meddles with the economy. Some of these restrictions might not be entirely bad, such as preventing people from buying powerful antibiotics without a prescription because the overuse of these antibiotics by irresponsible parties (such as parents who scream "give him/her a pill" to a pediatrician) has damaged their effectiveness against certain infections. However, this list should give the undecided at least enough of an idea as to how regulated our economy is, that hopefully some people will be disabused of the idiotic notion that our economy has been "laissez-faire" for a long time.

Then again, if you're stupid enough to watch the Federal Reserve bailout of large banks and think that it's a capitalist conspiracy, maybe there is no hope for you.

Show me another language where you can download the contents of a web page, scan it for a complex text pattern, stuff all of the entries into an array, and dump them to the console in so few lines of code:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

open(SLASHDOT, '<slashdot.html');
my $data;
while (<SLASHDOT>)
{
    $data .= $_;
}
close(SLASHDOT);
$_ = $data;
my (@stuff) = /attached to \<a href=\"[\/\:\?\.\;\w\%\=]+\"\>[^\>^\<]+\<\/a\>/g;
print "You have commented on ~$#stuff entires\n\n\n";
foreach my $s (@stuff)
{
    print "$s\n";
}

I through this script together while trying to figure out what regular expression syntax would work to extract all of the entries that I have commented on at my Slashdot user profile. It's not even as compact as it could be either, but then uber-compact Perl code has a tendency to offend my Java/C#-developer sensibilities. Though, there is something to be said about a programming language that can be so succinct that you can express the process of breaking a DVD's encryption in about seven lines of code. When you can read that, you can probably natively understand Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn...

Steve Chapman argues in his latest article for Reason:

It may seem obvious that easier divorce laws make for more divorce and more insecurity. But what is obvious is not necessarily true. What two scholars have found is that when you make divorce easier to get, you may actually produce better marriages.

In the old days, anyone who wanted to escape from the trials of wedlock had to get his or her spouse to agree to a split, or else go to court to prove the partner had done something terribly wrong (such as committing adultery). The 1960s and '70s brought "no-fault" divorce, which is also known as "unilateral divorce," since either party can bring it about without the consent of the other.

The first surprise is that looser divorce laws have actually had little effect on the number of marriages that fall apart. Economist Justin Wolfers of Stanford University, in a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), found that when California passed a no-fault divorce law in 1970, the divorce rate jumped, then fell back to its old level-and then fell some more.

That was also the pattern in other states that loosened their laws. Over time, he estimates, the chance that a first marriage would break up rose by just one-fourth of one percentage point, which is next to nothing.

In short, nothing bad happened. But in another NBER paper, Wolfers and fellow economist Betsey Stevenson of the University of Pennsylvania report that in states that relaxed their divorce laws, some very good things happened: Fewer women committed suicide, and fewer were murdered by husbands or other "intimate" partners. In addition, both men and women suffered less domestic violence, compared to states that didn't change their laws.

Chapman goes on to actually use the word boyfriend at least once in the article to describe what he meant by intimate partners there. Now, I know what you're thinking. How the hell do you divorce your boyfriend/girlfriend? I don't know, and chances are Chapman doesn't know how that works, either in practice or as an argument for divorce laws, but there you have it.

A much more obvious reason why domestic violence has gone down dramatically since that era is that it is taken much more seriously--too seriously, depending on who you ask. In fact, in many jurisdictions, the police are actually by policy required to arrest someone that they can blame for the incident in order to make sure that all Is have been dotted and all Ts have been crossed with respect to the reports of domestic violence.

While it's true that divorce rates have tended to go down, they seem to have gone down at rates that are fairly comparable to the rate of marriage itself; you have to be married in order to get a divorce, after all. This article from USAToday shows that the rate of marriage has actually been in deep decline since the 1970s.

Of course, the one thing that Chapman conveniently left out is the fact that feminists have fought bitterly to ensure that no laws pertaining to alimony, child support and asset division have not been adjusted accordingly. From a libertarian point of view, this is problematic because in many cases, contracts are just conveniently thrown out by the judge to the benefit of the spouse that is leaving (usually the wife) without legal recourse for the non-consenting spouse. It is also extremely unfair that a spouse may simply walk out one day, and in many states take half of the assets regardless of the wishes of their spouse, or any consideration for how much the spouse that is leaving has invested.

With more families moving toward cohabitation, eventually feminist groups will advance on that lifestyle and demand a similar situation for asset division, etc. The only result from the further disintegration of marriage will be more state power.

By default, ActionStreams doesn't seem to provide any functionality for Reddit. I've taken the liberty of addressing that by creating a patch for ActionStreams that adds support for comments, submissions, likes and dislikes. The only catch is that the links it harvest are directly to the subject of the Reddit discussion, not the Reddit pages themselves. Sorry, I don't know enough about ActionStreams to know if there is a way to scan ahead and get the Reddit permalink. See, by default, Reddit links you to the subject, and puts the permalink to the Reddit discussion in a separate set of HTML elements below that. Well, anyway, it should work well enough for most people.

To install this:

1. Open ActionStreams/config.yaml in a text editor
2. Find action_streams:
3. Add the contents of the following text file to it, making sure that there are no tabs or spaces other than the ones provided; yaml apparently needs exactly four spaces per indentation to work.
   

Download the patch.

I think this comment thread is a good example of how one goes down hill pretty quickly. We can't even agree on what "right wing" actually means because of the old spectrum/continuum problem with defining right wing and left wing politics. Now, I'm no scientist, but I think you have a real problem when you allegedly have a spectrum, but the poles seem to resemble one another in many practical characteristics; the practical difference between allegedly right wing Fascism and left-wing Communism is like the difference between violent and blue light. One of my favorite delineations between Fascism and Communism is the alleged racism of the former (the Italian Fascists were not particularly racist), with the alleged non-racism of the latter. This ignores the fact that Fascism, National Socialism and Communist worldviews are based on a dichotomy between two classes who are locked in a struggle against one another. For the Nazis, it was the Aryan race versus the world, for the Communists it was the proletariat versus the capitalist class and its allies.

This is why a divide between collectivism and individualism is the one spectrum that makes sense. Even then, it is problematic because people may be individualistic in one way, and collectivist in another that defies an easy labeling along a spectrum line. Still, it makes more sense than pretending that you have a coherent spectrum when "extreme right and extreme left look the same in practice."

There is a Movable Type plugin called ActionStreams that allows you to share your actions from other blogs, web 2.0 sites, social networks, etc. Take a look at my action stream for an example of what this plugin can do. I'm thinking about cutting back on the "random links" entries now that I have this installed, since I can just create a widget that shows entries from Digg and other sites.

Yet another reason to move away from Blogger and toward Movable Type.

Stories like this, where irresponsible parents bring their young children to see movies that aren't appropriate for them, and/or allow them to ruin the experience for other paying customers are all too common. We've all been there at some point, especially those of us that live in big cities and the suburbs thereof. Usually, it's a parent who won't control their children, or someone who refuses to take their cell phone call outside of some place (movie theater, fancy restaurant, etc.) that is supposed to be a quiet environment.

In many cases, you can't just go over and tell the person to stop behaving like that or take control of their kids because if they get upset with you, the police will probably be on their side. It doesn't matter that they were behaving in a way that was destructive to the environment around them, what matters is that you invaded their space and created a heated argument or fight by telling them to behave like a civilized person. The police could issue citations for their behavior, but they're not going to do that, and most importantly for you, they are probably not going to let you--or anyone else--intimidate someone into behaving like a sensible person.

This behavior on the part of authorities is a form of legalism. For the uninitiated, legalism generally means rigid adherence to the exact letter of the law, rather than the spirit of the law. Usually, the only sort of people who behave this way are authoritarians and limp-wristed, bed-wetters who cringe at the thought of people being able to exercise discretion in the use of force or verbal coercion. The archetypes of these two types are the cop and prosecutor who will send an old man to prison for murder for killing a young man robbing him at gun point (we must enforce the gun ban and excessive force laws, after all) and those who apologize for this behavior saying that it's necessary to prevent vigilantism. Nevermind the fact that such legalistic, letter-of-the-law-uber-alles behavior tends to accomplish nothing good for society.

In a society where legalism is not the norm, there would be no potential legal trouble for going to the table of a couple whose children are destroying the dining experience at a restaurant, and telling them to get their brats under control. If they did anything about it, the police would be firmly on the side of the restaurant, and the customers who said something. After all, it would be clearly the family with the children, not person who confronted them, who were disturbing the peace. Yet, once again, in reality, one is likely to be told that "their behavior didn't make your actions necessary" and you're likely to get in trouble for having the guts to confront them.

So how do we get away from this legalism? The answer is that society must start once again trusting individual, non-state actors to behave intelligently in doing their part to enforce societal norms. Most people can't accept this, however, because it means that there will no longer be as many matters which are entirely up for personal opinion as there are now; it'll mean that you have to regard the parent who says that their unholy terror's behavior isn't "kids being kids" as an idiot and a bad parent. That might even be a bit judgmental--though not all judgmentalism is created equal.

The simplest answer for why things have gotten a lot worse is that people have been liberated by the government from having to be accountable to one another. The government won't allow private citizens to non-violently enforce social norms anymore, lest someone, somewhere not be allowed to just be themselves.

"My 12-year-old and 6-year-old don't want to be home at all," she said, adding that her younger children cower or run to the back of the house when they hear anyone approaching.

"'That's the police,' they say," Pennyamon said.

Police said no arrests were made in the subsequent raid at the upstairs apartment.

And so, another family grows up fearing and loathing law enforcement, after seeing their epileptic father getting his head bashed in with a gun, and having shotguns aimed at them. Not only did they suffer needlessly, the police didn't even do anything of value for their community when they "fixed their mistake" by executing the warrant on the right apartment.

The next time you hear someone say that it's so hard to be a cop because people don't trust and hate the police, you might want to remind them why many people have come to hate them. Their actions speak far louder to the public than the left-wing agitprop.

Ever since some MIT students discovered some serious flaws in the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority's systems, the state has been trying everything it can short of breaking their knee caps to keep them quiet. It may work in this case, but it just shows that the state is unwilling to play ball and work with security researchers instead of against them. In the future, students will be far more inclined to just release this sort of information as a surprise because of the heavy-handed reaction from the state government.

All of this to keep them from publishing vulnerabilities in the subway card system, when if the bureaucrats had been smart about it, they would have been on the phone threatening the vendor if they don't fix the bugs. That would, of course, be the method of covering one's ass by which one actually puts on a pair of pants, rather than insisting that everyone simply stop looking at the nakedness on display, which is why the state clearly didn't go for that option.

Since the state government is relying on precedent that is related only to commercial activity, and there is no present here on the part of the MIT students, it'll probably have a hard time defending itself on appeals. That's a stupid strategy to rely on, since aside from notoriety, the students will gain nothing from this presentation.

This guy is proof that it simply does not pay to be a law-abiding, legal immigrant in the United States when you can be far better treated by Uncle Sam if you just come here and thumb your nose at our laws. If even half of the story is true, some of those immigration officials should be prosecuted by the states they reside in for some criminal negligence crime related to homicide.

The broadband technology of the future?

Some perspective on what happens when a private citizen shoots through a door at someone coming through, and when a cop does the same thing. Ironically, in the case of the former, they actually had a far more credible reason to believe that an attack was bearing down on them from the direction of the doorway.

Apple is selling 95 new iPhones per store, per day now. This would be why I am focusing on learning Objective-C and Cocoa, not more about Java.

Promising updates on the Chevy Volt. Now, if only it weren't a first generation American car, I might actually be able to convince my wife that we need one...

Police are starting to use GPS tracking against suspects--without warrants. I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for the usual legal suspects to decide that this is a violation of the 4^th amendment.

FCC Commissioner McDowell, who was opposed to the reprimand against Comcast for their efforts to mess with BitTorrent traffic on their network, warns us that that may be the first step toward bringing the Fairness Doctrine to the Internet. As it currently stands, I think this is largely just partisan rhetoric on his part because the courts have not, to my knowledge, backed the FCC's reprimand of Comcast. This is important because the consensus seems to be that the FCC did not have the authority to reprimand Comcast, and if the courts uphold that line of thought, then there is not much to worry about from the FCC unless Congress gets in on the act.

It's true that a future administration and Congress might make things difficult for free speech online, but that's a constant threat for all liberties. Given where they stand, it just does not seem obvious to me that the FCC is much of a threat at present because of the lack of authority that they have under the law to make the sort of decisions that McDowell thinks they may make in the future.

It's no secret that the United States very badly lags behind many other countries when it comes to the speed of Internet access. Some of the smaller, more densely populated industrialized nations have a severe advantage over us in this regard, and that doesn't bode well for our future because bandwidth will play a major role in future applications and services.

I can't complain about the quality of our Internet access; our complex shares a 70mbps leased line of some sort that reliably gets me 500Kb-2MB a second. That's megabyte, not megabit. Yet ADSL is the best that a lot of people have, and that gets a max of 3Mbps in most areas. Realistically, that is not anywhere near fast enough to provide any sort of quality experience for something as simple as downloading movies and shows off of the iTunes Music Store. Many rural areas still don't have broadband at all.

In about 10 years, I predict the disparity between rural areas and cities in the United States will reach a serious point for bandwidth. Many communities may just flat out not be able to grow because they won't have the infrastructure to attract businesses that want access to large amounts of bandwidth. While it won't be as dire as fuel costs, it'll be another economic issue of similar importance, and will no doubt see exploitation in the media by politicians and poverty pimps.

When writing an article about how Linux is evil, it is a good idea to not do so using a website that is hosted on a series of Linux-based appliances. One of the things that always cracked me up about the anti-open source blowhards that used to (probably still do) dominate the Progress and Freedom Foundation's IPCentral blog is that their blog is managed by Movable Type, which is written entirely on an open source foundation. Suffice it to say, if you are a blogger, chances are your blog is based at least in part, if not entirely, on open source software. WordPress and Movable Type, the two largest blogging applications, are both open source applications.

Open source: because not everyone can afford a high-end Solaris server running Weblogic or Websphere and Oracle...

It's no secret that a key part of the success of open source software has been the desire of the people who use it to have the freedom to act like they own the code that runs on their computers. Open source software is often not the best software, but it is good enough for many tasks, and unlike proprietary, commercial software, it doesn't spy on you, limit the number of times you can reinstall it on the same hardware or treat you like a sharecropper on your own PC.

Situational morality generally has a pretty bad reputation with Christians because it is often synonymous with moral relativism, but it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, situational morality plays an important role as an extension to absolute morality that is often misunderstood, and without it, can lead to absurd situations such as people wringing their hands over whether or not it is moral for a Christian to donate blood or a non-vital organ that a dying person may live.

First, it's important to realize that in the Bible, absolute morality is defined in explicit, atomic, non-contradictory principles. These are akin to the atomic elements in chemistry from which all compounds are derived. Such things range from "love God and your fellow man," to "don't murder," to "don't lie." Each of these serves as a guide for Christians about what to do in a particular situation, and the commandment to love God is the "North Star" of our entire moral code.

Where there is no prohibition, and the action is not dishonoring of God, we have freedom to pursue what we believe is the best path as Paul said in 1 Corinthians 10:23-31 and Romans 14. Here our intuition, knowledge of what the Bible says is moral and prayer work together to inform of us what is the appropriate course of action for us in a particular situation. For example, the sale of gun is permissible in general, and may be even righteous in one case, and sinful in another; righteous when sold to a good person who needs it for self-defense, and sinful if sold to a criminal. The morality of the action is dependent on the situation that surrounds the action because it is the situation which combines with the atomic, absolute moral principles to provide a guide for the right course of action.

One objection to this sort of thinking could be that it's a variation of every man doing whatever is right in his own eyes, but such a critique is partly off base. What separates this sort of situational morality from relativistic morality is that it is anchored firmly in a set of concrete principles that can be combined together to provide a reasonable estimation of what is right or wrong in a particular situation for a particular situation.

To borrow another biblical ex