April 2009 Archives

Think about all of the social issues out there. Don't just do the ones in the media. Expand your perspective to ones that the media hasn't necessarily thought of bring to the public's attention.

Now, ask yourself if the government should be involved. If it should have any involvement, how much?

If you had difficulty actually imagining an issue in which the government simply has no role, nothing to say, no jurisdiction, one where you could tell the government to piss off and leave you alone, you've just proved something about modern life. That property of modern life is that it is totalitarian.

Our disagreement isn't whether or not the government has a role here or there, but merely how much. Modern society debates whether society should be squeezed by a rough hand in a gauntlet of steel or a soft hand in a velvet glove.

This is why I have come to be skeptical about mainstream libertarianism which is as much a social movement as it is a political movement. Mainstream libertarians see little separation between politics and civil society as they perceive a battlefield that stretches from City Hall and D.C. to the living room in terms of power dynamics, relationships and attitudes among family members. It is a continuum, not a separation wherein politics has only a naturally limited, legitimate role in forming society and social issues are frequently incestuously mingled with political issues.

If a free society can be genuinely recreated in America, the totalitarian mindset of the modern, secular West must be broken and politics must be neatly compartmentalized and limited even down to how we see authority distributed throughout society. This means we must restore the balance of competing social institutions which have their own legitimate authority which the state dare not tread but in the most serious of circumstances lest it be rejected as an usurper.

This will require a more conservative understanding of human nature and the limits of human civilization. The process of nurturing competing social institutions requires an understanding of their natures and needs that only a thoughtful, intellectual conservatism more in the line of Bill Buckley than Rush Limbaugh can provide. For some of us, this will mean admitting that our libertarian tendencies must be limited to the realm of politics while our greater worldview is conservative. It is clear on balance that a far-reaching libertarianism is no more balanced and in line with human nature than socialism.

More and more people are starting to see why the Republican Party's fall from grace was painfully obvious and inevitable:

A vacancy occurs in Congress. Who's going to fill it? The GOP establishment has its favorite son, an amiable fellow who thinks he'd be one heck of a congressman. And then there are other candidates, probably three or four, who lay hold to the label of true conservatism. They fight it out. Leaders of many right-of-center groups endorse the good old boy. The good old boy is hailed for his electability. He may have his flaws, but he can win, we're assured. So voters nominate and then elect Congressman Good Old Boy.

Congressman Good Old Boy doesn't give a lick about issues like right to life or limited government. Sure, he may personally believe in some of these things, but they have nothing to do with why he got into politics. The congressman's focus is on getting re-elected, so he works his darnedest to bring home tens of millions of dollars in earmarks and to impress a cross-section of special interest groups.

Congressman Good Old Boy is focused on appropriating money, doling out favors, defending the party establishment, and getting re-elected. Rinse, lather, and repeat a hundred times, and you have the story of two-thirds of the Republicans in Congress.

The problem the Republican Party faces is twofold. First is the division between the GOP's leadership and its membership. Scott Rasmussen has defined a divide in polling between the mainstream (or "populist") mood and [2] the political class. This is the basic divide within the GOP.

One of the dirty non-secrets of the GOP's electoral demise is that most voters care more about seeing the system run efficiently and reliably than they do about most political issues. Had the Republicans kept us out of Iraq, run a budget surplus that was being used to pay down the national debt reliably year-after-year, kept taxes low and avoided the earmarks and other financial scandals, they'd still be in power today. They'd have had the political capital to appoint a strongly libertarian-conservative Supreme Court and actually bring about an end to Roe v. Wade among other things that matter to their much more conservative base. The moderate and liberal voters would have been far more tolerant of things like Roe v. Wade being reversed by a SCOTUS appointed by a government that ran a tight ship of state that really made the government work for the public on most issues close to home.

The "moderates" like Specter were also often the ones who were the least committed to the conservative base's principles and to running an efficient operation. The conservative Republicans who have made fighting graft, inefficient spending, government growth, etc. are not the ones losing their support today. Rather it is the unprincipled moderates who go whichever way the wind blows, and are focused more on their own office than principles which are facing the toughest time.

For a society that recoils in horror at the thought that bastardy should have any stigma attached to it, modern America holds a belief that would have caused most of the societies that came before it to recoil in even greater horror: the notion that rape babies have no right to live. Even a large number of "pro-life" people have agreed to this bargain wherein a child that is the product of rape or incest is automatically, without saying, reduced to the lowest level of untermensch. It has less of a right to live than a calf born on a farm that specializes in veal.

This issue is one of the few real unprincipled exceptions of the right. Unprincipled exceptions of this magnitude are more commonly found on the left in American politics. Conservative pro-lifers will swear up and down that a child's right to live is not dependent on the mother's mood, but will all too often sheepishly compromise if the mother says she was raped or a relative is the father. So normally, the child has a right to live, but sometimes fate conspires to create the child in the wrong way, and that empowers the mother to relieve herself of any responsibilities she would have had to the child, had the circumstances been different.

The subhuman rape baby is nothing more than an emotional argument aimed at carving out an unprincipled exception. It would be nonsensical to engage in this sort of thought on the issue of rape itself, where one would argue that if a woman sufficiently puts herself at risk for rape, that a man has a "right to rape her." I don't know anyone who would argue for a circumstance-based exception to the criminal nature of rape, yet a lot of people seem completely comfortable making the case for abortion under that logic.

I'm not surprised in the least that society has generally accepted this wholesale destruction of life, liberty and property, as I don't believe in the existence of "progress." Human civilization has always operated as a wheel spinning in place with one generation triumphing over one set of sins and foibles that plagued those that came before it, while falling prey to their own set. Thus the trees may change the color of and even lose their foliage seasonly, but that's the only part of the scenary that changes as we "progress toward a better future." There is nothing new under the Sun, just a lot of recycling going on.

When we try to explain Christian morality today, too often the arguments are framed in the language of "divine command theology" where we simply take it for granted that just because the Bible tells us that God ordained something and it was recorded means it is so. Obviously this is not convincing to people who haven't made some a priori acceptance that the Bible is at least mostly true. For most people, this approach is little more than a naked assertion. So what if the Bible says that homosexuality is an abomination if you don't already believe that the Bible is the Word of God?

What we need is a way to convince people that these things are more than just naked asertions to be taken on blind faith, but rather are rational, reasonable and can be seen at work in the order of the world around us. For generations, Christians relied on natural law theology to convince non-Christians that Christianity was not only rational, but fundamentally reflective of the world around them. Borrowing from the Acton Institute and Cicero, natural law is...

a true law, a right reason, conformable to nature, universal, unchangeable, eternal, whose commands urge us to duty, and whose prohibitions restrain us from evil. . . . It is not one thing at Rome and another at Athens; one thing today and another tomorrow; but in all times and nations this universal law must for ever reign, eternal and imperishable. It is the sovereign master and emperor of all beings. God himself is its author - its promulgator - its enforcer. He who obeys it not, flies from himself, and does violence to the very nature of man.

The Acton Blog has a great treatment on how and why modern Protestants began to have a strong aversion to natural law theology in any form. Here they are.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

The existence of a natural law was not debated in the Bible, but was actually taken for granted. The moral law of the Old Testament combined with human reason and intuition instructed by the same is what we know as natural law. From the moral law, we know what is good and evil, from reason we can apply those laws to complex scenarios such as ascertaining when a government has rendered itself illegitimate. The Apostle Paul referred to natural law in a limited scope in both Romans 1 and 2 in reference to sinners having known from the beginning what was good and what was evil, and the fact that gentiles often behaved in ways very similar to the pure, revealed form of the moral law given by Moses:

18The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities-his eternal power and divine nature-have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

12All who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. 13For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God's sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous. 14(Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law, 15since they show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts now accusing, now even defending them.) 16This will take place on the day when God will judge men's secrets through Jesus Christ, as my gospel declares.

To expand on Paul's points, natural law theology offers Christians a common starting point in dealing with many other religions, as most major religions are based on a large portion of the moral requirements referred to by both Paul and Cicero. This similarity allows Christians to appeal to them on the grounds of an ancient shared heritage and to guide them to the realization that Christianity is, in fact, the final form of that ancient shared heritage which traces its origins to the foundation of the world by God. The moral law of the gentiles that Paul referred to is a form of the natural, universal law.

The explanatory power of natural law is sadly missing in many Protestant churches which frequently make statements like "anything the government does to you is acceptable, until it violates God's law." However, such statements are not entirely correct. There is a universal law which applied as much to the Roman Emperors who ordered persecutions as it did to those persecuted by them. God may grant authority over people and property, but a grant of authority should never be confused with legitimacy from that point onward as legitimacy can only be conferred by right action. A head of state may rise to power with the permission of God, but their actions can just as easily render them an illegitimate ruler, even a criminal, according to what we know from reason and revelation about good and evil. A ruler who wantonly slaughters the innocent is no less a criminal than common man who does the same. A ruler who visits unprovoked violence on peaceful people is no different from a common man who does the same to his neighbor.

I think too often Protestants fail to realize why it was that the early church chose martyrdom over insurrection. Martyrdom, especially at the hands of a government that is doing blatant evil is a very powerful form of revolt because it exposes a raw, unavoidable difference between the aggressor and their victim. It leaves the former with no defense, as all witnesses can see that the victim didn't even fight back, thus all of the action is directed toward the victim, and the aggressor's actions are exposed for what they are to all people of decent character. Those same people begin to question what could the victim have possibly done to deserve that violence, and in the process often become naturally curious about who the victim was and what motivated them.

Aside from all of this, natural law theology can also serve to remind the church of the line between religion and spiritual life. Natural law theology confronts us at different times, and reminds us that there is more to the dictates that we see in the Bible. We can see them play out in the very fabric of the world itself and human nature. The universality of natural law can also be a bulwark against modern secular non-judgmentalism and multiculturalism which teaches us to never judge the constructs of another belief system, no matter how blatantly absurd and irrational they may be.

I suspect that most modern American protestants would not be at ease with a return to natural law theology because of the way that it would shape and mold their beliefs. American protestants have grown accustomed to the "right of schism" the moment that their cherished beliefs clash with their church or another religious authority. Natural law theology is inherently incompatible with that tendency because of its basis in the authority of revelation and insistence that reason is integral to faith.

This blogger seems to think that the woman in the case cited there was sent to jail for 30 days just because she sent a text message to her husband. Read the story and see if you can figure out what might have motivated the judge to sentence her to thirty days in jail. Hint: it's not the act of text messaging itself.

While the chief admitted that the officer was wrong and suspended him, it'll take more than that to get officers like Ramirez to back down and behave themselves:

According to ABC-7, Hunt and cameraman Ric Dupont were sent out to film a flipped semi on the interstate. They parked on the shoulder of the other side of the road as men in military fatigues were helping pull the driver out of the cab. 

At that point, Sgt. Raul Ramirez ordered them to leave. When Hunt persisted in trying to ask the men in fatigues what was going on, Ramirez jumped over the barrier and began yelling, "Get in your truck and move!"

Hunt replied, referring to his cameraman, "He can shoot if he wants to," and Ramirez rushed over and grabbed him. 

"Do you want me to arrest you?" Ramirez yelled. "I'm telling you something. I'm giving you an order."

An increasingly angry Ramirez twisted Hunt's arm behind his back, as Hunt objected, "I'm not doing anything. I haven't done a thing. I'm just trying to leave."

Ramirez handcuffed Hunt and pushed him against a chain-link fence, then handcuffed the cameraman as well. Both men were taken to the Westside Regional Command Center but were quickly released.

The only way that the nation will be forced to deal with situations like this is when someone gets recorded being treated like Hunt, but then hauls off and beats the hell out of the cop in self-defense. It'll have to be equal parts "Minuteman" and "Rodney King" to get the public's attention and to make the public so pissed off that the government has to explain why a man is being arrested and prosecuted for defending himself against a thug cop who is arresting someone who he has neither a good reason nor authority to arrest in that situation. It'd have to be someone that the middle class could easily identify with, such as a father whose family is getting badly mistreated.

On the otherhand, the mainstream media likes to tow the provocateur line, setting the public off against the police when it is in the interest of the media in cases like this, and then protecting its relationship with the government by destracting the public from actual serious issues regarding government malfeasance (especially of the local variety). My guess is that such an incident would have to be recorded on a HD camcorder, and then published on YouTube for it to really get out there.

Of course, if the police would just treat their own like anyone else, most of these situations would just be footnotes in the newspapers ("Cop tasers 74 year old woman too much; police chief fires cop for excessive, illegal use of force pending review by district attorney.") and the public wouldn't have a reason to care.

If I were Government Motors employee, I'd be praying for the comparatively sane process of bankruptcy as I would have a greater chance of keeping my job than under this plan:

DETROIT (AP) -- General Motors Corp. could be majority owned by the federal government and the United Auto Workers under a massive restructuring plan laid out Monday that will cut 21,000 U.S. factory jobs by next year and phase out the storied Pontiac brand.

The plan, which includes an offer to swap roughly $27 billion in bond debt for GM stock, would leave current shareholders holding just 1 percent of the century-old company, which is fighting for its life in the worst auto sales climate in 27 years.

GM is living on $15.4 billion in government loans and faces a June 1 deadline to restructure and get more government money. If the restructuring doesn't satisfy the government, the struggling company could go into bankruptcy protection.

GM said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it will ask the government to take more than 50 percent of its common stock in exchange for canceling half the government loans to the company as of June 1. The swap would cancel about $10 billion in government debt.

In addition, GM is offering the UAW stock for at least 50 percent of the $20 billion the company must pay into a union run trust that will take over retiree health care expenses starting next year.

If both are successful, the government and UAW health care trust would own 89 percent of GM stock, with the government holding more than a 50 percent stake, CEO Fritz Henderson said in a news conference at GM's Detroit headquarters.

The only thing more idiotic than keeping the GM management in place would be to give the UAW a large block of stock in the company. This is, after all, a union whose every action is nothing short of a shot to the head for the libertarian assumption that humanity is prone to rational self-interest and has called into question every platitude spoken in favor of Homo Economicus. If the UAW had ever been a rational actor rather than a chip right off the old socialist block, it would have long ago agreed to fiscally conservative restrictions on its members' benefits and pay. All this plan will do is give these hyenas one last turn at the GM corpse-buffet.

At least they are starting to shed brands and employees. That is the only glimmer of intelligence that is visible with anything less powerful than the Hubble Telescope. Maybe one of these days they will learn that the reason why the Japanese companies can actually have two separate brands each in the United States is that those different brands actually build different cars and are marketed to different segments of the market. Nissan and its Infiniti high-end models would be the very best model for Ford to emulate if it wants to restructure so as to not become Federal Motors.

I feel like I've been seeing a lot of stories about bullying popping up on Digg lately, and it's an issue that troubles me as someone who wants to have kids. I've seen it leave deep, lasting scars in people that go well beyond the age in which the torment occurred. The solution that I was raised with is also not compatible with my Christian faith. I grew up being told to not only stand up to bullies, but if they attacked me, to vigorously defend myself even if it was just a single blow.

As Christians, we cannot automatically respond to violence with violence. Rather, we must assess the situation and respond with violence only when it is necessary to prevent grievous harm to life, limb and property. I don't think a single blow, maybe even two goes past the "turn the other cheek" teaching. At the same time, I've also seen men who were deeply troubled by bullying that was barely a risible offense as it came off as a fundamental weakness in their masculinity in their minds. It's a tricky subject. How do you teach a kid that not responding to a bully like that isn't weakness when, for most kids, their nature tells them that it is? That part I haven't figured out, anyway, but God willing, I will.

A taekwondo instructor taught me something when I was in elementary school that may be useful. He said that there are three things one must do regarding violence:

1. Don't be there (avoid associations that lead to it; this is backed up by Proverbs, among others)
2. If you are there, try to leave.
3. If your adversary won't allow you to leave, then fight them as hard as you can until you can get away.

I think #1 is common sense to most kids. Why hang around bullies and kids that like to start fights? #2 is trickier, but I think most kids could come to understand that it is not cowardly to evade an opponent who might beat you, and to not beat up some idiot who is clearly out of their league. It's also possible to show kids who dangerous the world is today, and let them see that even if they think they might win, their opponent might have a hidden advantage like a weapon or an accident might seriously hurt them. As to #3, if they cannot get away, their opponent is serious, and they must seriously defend themselves. The gloves come off, and the kid is entitled to use whatever force is necessary to extricate themselves from the situation.

I know I'm overthinking it (just a little bit) but I think that's my coherent way of explaining to any kids that I end up having not just how to live their family's faith in such a situation, but to understand (when they're old enough) why an automatic response to stand up to, and deal with a bully can be dangerous. I know first hand how exhilarating it can be to take down a bully with force... to see a weaker one nearly piss his pants because suddenly the tables are turned. I've also seen bullies grab people, throw them onto the fake "marble-like floor" that some of the schools I went to had, straddle them, and pummel the guy into the ground to the point he was hospitalized. The best way to avoid dealing with the second type of bully is the aforementioned 3 step analysis.

One of the biggest reasons why I hope my kids never have to go through this is because I don't want them to learn some of the things I did. It changes you a bit when you see an aggressor suddenly become very, very afraid of you and what you might do to them in self-defense. That's something that few people should ever know, and it's an ugly lesson I hope God ensures they'll never learn.

Change or die:

Microsoft has achieved something of a Pyrrhic victory against Linux-based Netbooks: it now claims 96 percent of the Netbook market, but its earnings continue to be battered by the lower revenues and profits that come with the low-end Netbook phenomenon.

Even as Microsoft "wins" in Netbooks, it loses, as ZDNet's Larry Dignan writes. Microsoft expects "the overall spending environment to remain difficult," but it may not yet appreciate just how much worse it can get.

Microsoft needs to completely change how it sells Windows. Rather than seeing it in $100-$400 upgrades every few years, they should either be selling it as $25 upgrades every six months or $50 upgrades every year. That is the approach that Be used with BeOS, and it helped them to minimize the damage caused by upgrades and to keep a steadier revenue stream from their users. It would also help Microsoft on the compatibility front because the difference between upgrades done every six months of solid development are much smaller than those done ever few years. A hybrid subscription-purchase model would be just the thing to get their users to regularly upgrade and help make the case for buying new upgrades to their software.

Despite the fact that the law gives their targets an explicit right to open carry, and the state Attorney General has affirmed that right to the prosecutors throughout the state, Milwaukee's Police Chief thinks that he is a law unto himself:

Meanwhile, some law enforcement officials are preparing to face more open-carry situations, and some are clear the memo won't change their approach.

Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn said he'll continue to tell officers they can't assume people are carrying guns legally in a city that has seen nearly 200 homicides in the past two years.

"My message to my troops is if you see anybody carrying a gun on the streets of Milwaukee, we'll put them on the ground, take the gun away and then decide whether you have a right to carry it," Flynn said. "Maybe I'll end up with a protest of cowboys. In the meantime, I've got serious offenders with access to handguns. It's irresponsible to send a message to them that if they just carry it openly no one can bother them."

Well, that violates Wisconsin state law, federal civil rights law, the 2nd amendment and the 5th amendment. This "civil servant" is practically begging state and federal authorities to gang up on his department in an orgy of civil rights litigiation and prosecution. By the time they're done, the EPA will be flying in to fine them for not leaving enough carrion for the vultures.

Let this officer's example serve as yet another reminder of how the police often disregard the law when it is inconvenient for them to follow it. Sometimes the worst threats to public order come from the very police that are supposed to be maintaining it.

This is how it begins in the 21st century:

BERLIN (AFP) -- Germany's cabinet has agreed a draft law to block access to child-porn websites, Economy Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg said Wednesday.

The government signed agreements last Friday with the country's main Internet service providers (ISPs)-- representing 75 percent of the German market -- to block around 1,500 sites per day with illegal images of children.

Internet users hoping to download child porn will instead be met with a large red "stop" sign, warning of the impact of paedophilia on the victims. They will not have their personal details or IP addressed recorded.

The draft legislation is an "important signal" but not a "silver bullet" in the fight against child pornography, zu Guttenberg said.

Given Europe's history of censorsing a lot of other things, this is only where it will begin. It's a modest proposal in that it covers something that most people wouldn't mind being censored, and it doesn't get too intrusive in this first iteration. However, it puts the first pieces of infrastructure in place in Germany to allow for a comprehensive censorship regime similar to what is employed by the Chinese. Within a decade of this going into effect, I predict that it will be greatly expanded, and the German government will start to include other sites which are there more for political reasons than legitimate law enforcement reasons.

However, celebrity Miley Cyrus sided with Hilton in a Twitter conversation.

"Ya that's lame!" the "Hannah Montana" star wrote. "God's greatest commandment is to love. And judging is not loving. That's why Christians have such a bad rep."

Funny, I recall the greatest commandment being "Love the Lord," not "Love your neighbor as yourself." The specifics aren't important since the Bible is just a collection of writings by dead semites who wanted to exploit women and hate gays...

One of the most common arguments used in favor of file sharing and other forms of copyright infringement which have no legitimate fair use defense is that the cost of distributing intellectual property is so low that times have changed. Those who make this argument are generally immune to the counterpoint that the cost to make the intellectual property is often still very high; many video games and movies still cost tens or even hundreds of millions to produce. Countefeiting has a similar effect on physical goods, but so far, those who defend non-fair use copyright infringement don't typically support a right to counterfeit.

The right to counterfeit is simply a natural extension of the argument that one has the right to copy a copyrighted product and hand it out without the permission of the creator. That counterfeiting still costs something, and is done for profit is irrelevant. Motive has no meaningful role since the underlying action and outcome (reproducing and distributing a product without permission) is the same. It is not logical to argue that someone has the right to give a copy of a new DVD to every one of their friends without the studio's permission, but doesn't have the right to fabricate an exact copy of their car and sell it to their friends at cost (or even give it away for free). Taking this point forward, if thousands of people pooled their money to build a factory to duplicate expensive cars for one another at cost, that too would be simply an extension of any argument in favor of non-fair use copyright infringement.

The only serious argument is made against countefeiters in this scenario is that they aren't who they say they are, but that is no reflection on the quality of the product. As long as the quality is comparable, that's a quibble, not a fundamental complaint. Now, take that aspect away, and suppose that new Ferraris are being duplicated almost perfectly by Ferris' Fast Cars Inc. They don't call them Ferraris, but they cost only 10% more than the cost of the materials and labor, making them significantly cheaper than a real Ferrari. There is no personal incentive for anyone to buy a Ferrari other than bragging rights. As a result, Ferrari probably goes out of business, and then some other company comes along from a cheaper locale, and puts Ferris' Fast Cars Inc. out of business by using cheaper labor and materials in a poor country--while using the same Ferrari schematics.

The cost to build new physical goods will only improve as manufacturing processes continue to become more efficient. At some point society is going to have to decide whether or not the act of creating a product entitles one to a right to exclusive manufacturing and distribution rights. If not, then society will have to come to grips with the fact that it has taken away most of the foundation for people to continue to build and create. Some say that people have always created, even when profit wasn't a possible motivation. While there is truth to that, it is only within the last 150 years where the aforementioned premise was generally accepted in industry that there has been genuine prosperity and the prospect for elevating more people out of poverty.

Between switching from one CMS to another or upgrading, you may run into a situation where you stand to lose your original URL structure. For example, if you are upgrading from older versions of Movable Type, you may use the underscore for your URLs but want to convert to a hyphen. In even older installations, entry ID numbers were used as the url (ex. /2009/03/001383.html). With Movable Type, it's easy to build an error handler that will convert from one URL format to another.

There are two files which will be created, a .htaccess file and a PHP script which will do the conversion for you between old URLs and new URLs when the old URL is accessed. Figure 1 is the contents of the .htaccess file needed to set up the HTTP 404 error handling. Figure 2 is the basic Movable Type error handler template.

ErrorDocument 404 /404errorhandler.php
-Figure 1

<?php

     $mappings = array(
<mt:Entries lastn="2500">
          "/<mt:EntryDate format="%Y/%m"/>/<mt:EntryBasename separator="_"/><mt:BlogFileExtension/>" =>
          "<mt:BlogURL/><mt:EntryDate format="%Y/%m"/>/<mt:EntryBasename separator="-"/><mt:BlogFileExtension/>"
          <mt:unless name="__last__">,</mt:unless>
</mt:Entries>
               );
     $location = ($mappings{$_SERVER{'REQUEST_URI'}} != '' ?
          $mappings{$_SERVER{'REQUEST_URI'}} : 'http://www.yourdomain.com');
     header ('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
     header ('Location: '. $location);
?>
-Figure 2

You can upload the .htaccess file by FTP to the root of your domain. It does not need to be created as a Movable Type template. To create the PHP error handler, go to Design->Templates, create a new index template, use the contents from figure 2 (or a variation thereof that is appropriate for your old URLs) and save the template as /404errorhandler.php

That shows a simple conversion between underscores and hyphens. To convert between ID numbers and the entry basename, make the following substitution.

"/<mt:EntryDate format="%Y/%m"/>/<mt:EntryBasename separator="_"/><mt:BlogFileExtension/>"

Becomes:

"<mt:EntryDate format="%Y/%m"/>/<mt:EntryID/><mt:BlogFileExtension/>"

To convert from WordPress or another CMS or blogging application that uses log entry names, go to Preferences->Entry. You will see a field for basename length. Increase it to at least 100 characters in length. This must be done before you import your entries into Movable Type, as Movable Type will not rebuild entry basename fields once they have already been created. If you import all of your WordPress entries while the length is set to the default value of 40 characters, they will be permanently set to that.

Adjust the first part of the error handler template to match the URL structure that you are coming from, import your entries, and then republish the entire blog. Once that is done, you are all set.

References:

• HTTP 301 redirects
• <mt:BlogFileExtension>
• <mt:Entries>
• <mt:EntryID>
• <mt:EntryBasename>
• <mt:EntryDate>

Making the world safe from poorly-dressed teenage girls:

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (AP) - Two FBI workers are accused of using surveillance equipment to spy on teenage girls as they undressed and tried on prom gowns at a charity event at a West Virginia mall.

The FBI employees have been charged with conspiracy and committing criminal invasion of privacy. They were working in an FBI satellite control room at the mall when they positioned a camera on temporary changing rooms and zoomed in for at least 90 minutes on girls dressing for the Cinderella Project fashion show, Marion County Prosecutor Pat Wilson said Monday.

Gary Sutton Jr., 40, of New Milton and Charles Hommema of Buckhannon have been charged with the misdemeanors and face fines and up to a year in jail on each charge if convicted. Sutton has been released on bond, Wilson said, and Hommema is to be arraigned later this week. Wilson did not know Hommema's age.

Naturally, they had a female agent posted nearby to give fashion tips to these girls. There was no jeering, leering, videotaping or masturbation on the part of the FBI personnel caught up in this terrible misunderstanding. It's imperative that each girl put her best foot forward so she has the best prom experience possible. Good prom experiences are vital to the psychological well-being of modern teenage girls, and psychologically balanced girls contribute to the health of America. The terrorists don't like that. Nope, not one bit. You can rest assured that if the FBI hadn't vigilantly guarded these young women from making bad fashion choices, it would have gone terribly awry, and then the terrorists would have won without firing a single shot.

You don't want the terrorists to win, do you?

Now, let this be a lesson to anyone who says "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." The mere presence of surveillance technology in any place, deserved or not, makes situations like this possible. The more available it is, the more chances there will be for abuse.

Larry Dignan, writing for ZDNet, makes a common mistake in judging the assumptions and capabilities of Oracle regarding Sun's intellectual property rights and MySQL:

Oracle gets to kill MySQL. There's no way Ellison will let that open source database mess with the margins of his database. MySQL at best will wither from neglect. In any case, MySQL is MyToast.

This statement shows several bits of ignorance about Oracle, MySQL and open source software. First of all, Oracle's database doesn't even compete with MySQL in most spaces. MySQL is only really used in low-end database environments like shared hosts, and in environments where performance matters more than features or even data integrity like some of Google's services. It simply does not compete with serious databases like Oracle and SQL Server in markets where features, enterprise integration and reliability are of the utmost importance. Second, it is in Oracle's best interest to have control over the market that MySQL controls, as it is a critical segment of the database market, and Oracle can sell products and services there if it leverages its control of MySQL.

The most problematic assumption about Oracle's new relationship with MySQL, though, is that it can just "kill it." Since MySQL is dual-licensed under the GNU GPL a la Linux, it can be forked by people who want to preserve the legacy of MySQL. In fact, it already has been forked into a new project once already. Oracle is no doubt aware of this, and the danger that PostgreSQL would pose to Oracle if it suddenly received an influx of millions of users and developers thanks to brash moves on Oracle's part.

Larry Ellison is many things, but stupid isn't one of them. There is more value and safety for Oracle in keeping MySQL alive and thriving, if sequestered, in its current space, than in strangling it.

..20th Century Fox managed to surprise anime fans with a devastating surprise attack. Leave it to Fox to turn a series like Dragonball into a movie with a scene that looks like a horny teenager is trying to seduce a high school cheerleader with a radioactive Godiva chocolate truffle. After seeing the way that Hollywood ruined the Guyver series with two train-wrecks-turned-movies, I'm inured of the pain that comes from seeing a decent, watchable series get so thoroughly sodomized, labotimized and deligitimized by Hollywood that one feels compelled to buy a copy of the DVD simply to take it out behind a shed and shoot it like a beloved dog afflicted with rabies.

Dragonball was cheesey. I'll grant its critics that, but it didn't deserve this, anymore than Pokemon would deserve to be turned into a series with the Olsen Twins running around with a yellow cat that shoots lightning out it's ass.

Jonah Goldberg misses a great opportunity to take his argument to the next level:

Well, some of it surely is. But look. According to that reason video I posted below, Americans work an average of 103 days a year just to pay their taxes. If you had to work 365 days a year to pay your taxes, that would be a kind of slavery or indentured servitude, because all of your productive labor would be going to the government. You would have no resources of your own to provide for the life you wanted. Instead the government would provide you not with what you want, but what the government decides you need.

That sounds like a kind of tyranny to me.

I don't think that working 1/3 of the year to pay your taxes is inherently tyrannical or a form of slavery. Emphasis on inherently. What makes the income tax structure cross over into the realm of slavery is that there are a large number of income earners who don't pay it and who benefit from the productive labor of those who do pay into the system. If plantation owners had paid black slaves for their labor, kept 1/3 of the fruits of their labor, and then compelled them to pay 1/3 of the fruits of their labor that they made on outside tasks, few would line up to argue that the exchanging of wages for labor suddenly marked a wholesale transformation of the plantation system from slavery to a free labor market for southern blacks.

The "progressive income tax" is a monumental, illogical joke. A child who had been taught the story of the tragedy of the commons could easily grasp the danger inherent to allowing a large number of modestly productive adults to reap public benefits with almost no tax burden.

I have the sudden urge to put on cowboy boots, blue jeans, a large belt buckle and a wife beater...

Long ago, when James Dean and Marlon Brando wore it, denim was, Akst says, "a symbol of youthful defiance." Today, Silicon Valley billionaires are rebels without causes beyond poses, wearing jeans when introducing new products. Akst's summa contra denim is grand as far as it goes, but it only scratches the surface of this blight on Americans' surfaces. Denim is the infantile uniform of a nation in which entertainment frequently features childlike adults ("Seinfeld," "Two and a Half Men") and cartoons for adults ("King of the Hill"). Seventy-five percent of American "gamers" -- people who play video games -- are older than 18 and nevertheless are allowed to vote. In their undifferentiated dress, children and their childish parents become undifferentiated audiences for juvenilized movies (the six -- so far -- "Batman" adventures and "Indiana Jones and the Credit-Default Swaps," coming soon to a cineplex near you). Denim is the clerical vestment for the priesthood of all believers in democracy's catechism of leveling -- thou shalt not dress better than society's most slovenly. To do so would be to commit the sin of lookism -- of believing that appearance matters. That heresy leads to denying the universal appropriateness of everything, and then to the elitist assertion that there is good and bad taste.

It's time for America to put away childish things like video games, cartoons and blue jeans, and adopt adult hobbies like baseball. In fact, America should be grateful for George Will. Not only has he brought this maturity deficit to our attention, but he has even written two books on a real man's pass-time to help us make the transition to adult modes of leisure and entertainment.

Well, it's nice to see a conservative commentator defending good fashion instead of frugality at a time of >8% unemployment and fast rising debt levels. That's just in time for Obama's plan to bail out America's bakeries so everyone can enjoy a delicious slice of cake.

There are many legitimate criticisms of Java, but one thing you cannot say about it, as a platform, is that lags behind on adding new features to accommodate new requirements:

JDK 5 added support for coarse-grained concurrency. However, this model is suitable for multiprocessor systems (MP systems). Therefore, JDK 7 adds support for fine-grained parallelism, offering the developers the possibility to exploit multicore microprocessors using the new fork-join framework.

Definitely, Java is evolving to survive the multicore revolution.
This new framework offers the possibility of working with tasks, instead of using more expensive threads. For example, the new package java.util.concurrent.forkjoin, proposed for JDK 7 release offers the following useful base classes:

• RecursiveAction: To represent divide-and-conquer solutions.
• RecursiveTask: To represent result-bearing tasks.
• AsyncAction: To work with tasks that require asynchronous completion.
• CyclicAction: To work with parallel iterative tasks.

It's too bad that Java's main strength now is in applications that require complicated application servers, rather than desktop applications where you can really take advantage of features like these. I don't know how you would actually use these interesting new features in most of the Java work that we have around here, which is the sort of mundane web/EJB/JMS kind of work where you rely on the applicaiton server to handle most of the multitasking details for you.

Still, this news warms my heart. The more powerful the Java SE API grows, the more compelling it will be as a toolkit for desktop application development, and maybe that will help free some of us from the shackles of Java Enterprise Edition.

In their defense, they do know how to make a mean breakfast burrito.

Yesterday I wrote about the case of Riccardo Calixte whose computer was seized by Boston College Police. I still think that the best that they could probably do is to draw on the line of thought in the Lori Drew case, and that the argument for going after Calixte was weak. That said, if you read the warrant, they have Calixte dead to rights on the charge that he was responsible for faking a profile of his roommate on a gay dating website and sending out a mass email about it. The officer involved did his homework, and has plenty of network information connecting Calixte to the incident. The officer also had noted that the roommate had been a "trusted source of information" in the past, and that the college's Director of Security for IT is backing up the claim that Calixte signed up his roommate on the site.

That said, there is a credibility gab that the roommate has created for himself. A lot of the accusations seem to be baseless so far, not the least of which is the allegation that he changed grades. Most well-funded universities use systems like PeopleSoft products to manage that process, and the police should have been able to get audit logs showing when grades were changed and then compare those times with the activity of the professors whose classes were affected. The "probable cause" in the warrant comes down to the following allegations:

1. Changing grades
2. Making his roomate look gay
3. Appear with strange laptops that the roommate could not identify
4. Crashing his roommate's PC
5. Jailbreaking phones
6. Copyright infringement

So far, there is no reported evidence that I have come across that proves point #1. Point #2 may be a crime, but based on the warrant, the necessity of seizing Calixte's property was minimal since the police had a mountain of evidence from the university network logs, and they were getting access to Calixte's webmail accounts from Google and Yahoo. The roommate has no proof that anything illegal was ahppening with point #3, as there are many good reasons why Calixte would have laptops that the roommate had never seen, given Calixte's job and reputation. Point #4 is simply reaching, as there was no evidence presented in the warrant other than the paranoia of the roommate (which, while understandable, was still just paranoia if the warrant was any indication). Point #5 is not illegal either unless the jailbreaking is done specifically to enable copyright infringement. Jailbreaking phones normally implies that the goal is to run 3rd party software, not copyright infringement. Point #6 would, at the most, be a federal issue, and the US Attorney's office for Calixte's district has far too many fish to fry to deal with a student whose whopping federal offense is the bootlegging of 200 movies for private enjoyment.

The seizure of all of his devices, disks, etc. was, on balance, still overkill, especially in light of how much information they had from the university's network logs. It still looks like it was little more than a fishing expedition on the part of the campus police.

Never before has so much of the world given into a leader who commands a country so incapable of mounting a sustained threat to so few people:

Of course, Pyongyang can build new reactors as it announced some time ago. Yet Kim has not made much progress, largely because he does not have the resources to continue their construction. North Korea, now in the fourth year of a downturn, has a gross domestic product so small -- about $20 billion -- that some buildings in Manhattan boast a larger economy. So let's see if the Kimster can begin building sophisticated reactors.

The one reactor that the North Koreans have is getting so old that it's becoming a Chernobyl-like danger for China. It's probably only a matter of time before North Korea becomes more of national security and public health threat than a club with which to beat South Korea and the West in the eyes of China. When that happens, North Korea will quickly fall apart because it is highly unlikely that their top brass would follow an order to use their nuclear weapons that would result in the People's Liberation Army or the United States unleashing a nuclear holocaust on their army. North Korea is so poor and agriculturally destitute, that American and South Korean forces would simply have to blockade the sea trade routes and target North Korea Army food storage sites to bring their army to brink of starvation within a few weeks of a conventional conflict.

If the world would, just for once, stop bleeding its heart to death over civilian war casualties, the threat that North Korea poses directly to the northern areas of South Korea through its conventional weapons, and to the rest of the world through its trading of nuclear technology would quickly be over. A country of 23 million supported by an economy of $20B can only exist by the cowardice or undeserved compassion of its neighbors.

The Professional website template set has not gotten the attention that it deserves from designers so far, which is why I decided to start turning these WordPress themes into styles for the Professional Template Set. I think that the screenshot shown here is, over all, very faithful to the original WordPress theme. I hope to have this style completely finished, cleaned up and packaged on my themes blog. I also need to do some clean up on other WordPress themes to get them ready for release as well. There is just not enough time these days. At any rate, this is the second style that I have worked on for this template set, iNove being the first one.

This is probably not as baseless as you might think in the wake of the Lori Drew case:

Christopher said in his application that, following a dispute between Calixte and his roommate in January, the roommate told an officer that Calixte was "involved in some computer hacking incidents." Christopher subsequently interviewed the roommate, who said among other things that Calixte has a reputation as a "hacker," uses two different operating systems to allegedly "hide his illegal activities," and that Calixte had hacked into the university grading system to change students' grades. The roommate also told Christopher that he had been the victim of a mass e-mail incident in which someone sent out attachments to a fake profile of the roommate on a gay Web site.

The police department was later asked to look into the origin of the mass e-mails, given the stress endured by the roommate, and the e-mails were allegedly traced back to Calixte. Christopher subsequently obtained the warrant in question, claiming that given all the information submitted about Calixte, his property would constitute evidence of the crimes of "obtaining computer services by fraud or misrepresentation" and obtaining "unauthorized access to a computer system."

The EFF is arguing it is irrelevant whether or not Calixte sent the e-mails, since the application for the warrant fails to establish probable cause that sending such an e-mail is a criminal offense.

Calixte "stands accused of fraud, though no money or thing of value is at issue," EFF said in its statement of support. "He is accused of 'hacking' merely by sending an e-mail to a list server. Without a crime, there is no just cause for the search."

I am not a lawyer, but I bet that Calixte broke the terms of use for his campus's network when he pulled that stunt with his roommate and the gay web site. He could probably also be charged with harassing his roommate and causing emotional damage (whatever the law for that is called). Combine those two facts with the twisted arguments used in the Lori Drew case with the fact that the judge ruled in favor of the prosecution in that case, and this case may not be quite as baseless as assumed. In that case, violating terms of service in conjunction with a crime was ruled itself to be a violation of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Objectively speaking, the evidence against Calixte is not very strong. So far it seems to just be little more than hearsay from a person who has been in conflict with him and who may have a good motive for making him look bad to the police. Furthermore, the presence of two operating systems on a computer is no more a legitimate source of probable cause for seizing and searching his property than the presence of common kitchen utensils in the house of an alleged murderer thought to have stabbed his victim to death. By itself, it has absolutely no common correlation with criminal activity, and it's a stretch to argue that someone would use an operating system like Linux to "hide evidence of their crimes" when it is fairly well-known by such users that forensics specialists are no more deterred by that OS than Windows.

If this is all they had when executing this warrant, then the judge really needs to suppress the evidence gained from this warrant.

In which Stanley Fish makes a naked appeal to authority in order to justify demolishing the right to not violate one's conscience:

It is called the "conscience clause" because it affirms the claims of conscience - one's inner sense of what is right - against the competing claims of professional obligations. Mike Leavitt, Bush's Secretary of Health and Human Services, said at the time of the rule's introduction, "Doctors and other health providers should not be forced to choose between good professional standing and violating their conscience." In good liberal fashion, Leavitt assumes two registers of judgment - public and private - and imagines a conflict between them. He himself would resolve the conflict in favor of the private judgment; others would insist that public norms trump and that conscience must yield; both parties would share the definition of conscience Leavitt assumes.

Were he alive, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes would dissent, for he has another understanding of conscience altogether, one that casts quite a different light on this conflict. Hobbes begins with the etymology of "conscience" - conscire, to know in concert with another - and proceeds to a definition of conscience that turns the one we know upside down. Since conscience, correctly understood, refers to those occasions "when two or more men know of one and the same fact . . . which is as much to know it together," it is a violation of conscience - of knowing together - to prefer their "secret thoughts" to what has been publicly established.

Hobbes is aware that others take conscience to be the name of the private arbiter of right and wrong, but he regards this as a corrupted usage invented by those who wished to elevate "their own . . . opinions" to the status of reliable knowledge and try to do so by giving "their opinions . . . that reverenced name of Conscience."

Hobbes's larger point - the point he is always making - is that if one gets to prefer one's own internal judgments to the judgments of authorized external bodies (legislatures, courts, professional associations), the result will be the undermining of public order and the substitution of personal whim for general decorums: ". . . because the Law is the public Conscience . . . in such diversity as there is of private Consciences, which are but private opinions, the Commonwealth must needs be distracted, and no man dare to obey the Sovereign Power farther than it shall seem good in his own eyes."

The Law itself is no arbiter of truth or morality. It is nothing more than the private opinion of a sovereign imposed on the public or the opinion of a simple majority of politically empowered citizens acting in a republican or democratic system to impose their views on society. The only appeal that the Law has to its own legitimacy in this case is based on circular reasoning; the Law is to be followed because it is the Law. As it contains no inherent conception of what "two or more men know of one and the same fact . . . which is as much to know it together." The very fact that so many people have a genuine, natural revulsion to abortion, calling it by instinct a form of abortion, is enough to eviscerate this line of argument as clearly the two factions certainly do not "know of one and the same fact." Thus the imposition of one private judgment here is at least problematic in that two seemingly legitimate, dichotomatic opinions exist, and even more so in the possibility that the one currently accepted is demonstrable false upon deeper, logical examination.

Some "ethicists" have argued in favor of infanticide against children that have been born defective. Now, let's assume, for the sake of argument, that their position were to become the law of the land. Even most abortion rights advocates would not be able to support that sort of position, for it would be too clearly a form of cold-blooded murder of a human being for them to defend it. At that point, it would suddenly become a matter of private conscience being superior to "public conscience," the latter being widely regarded as irredeemably evil. However, the line that separates the two cases is arbitrary and unprincipled. To accept that line is nothing more than to give abortion rights advocates the arbitrary authority to designate where public and private conscience become respectively superior and inferior to one another.

I suspect that if Dr. Fish were to have to give his opinion on the matter of conscientious objectors, he would have no problem with accommodating them. That is generally how people who make his argument feel on that issue. It's just another example of how far from being an internally consistent worldview, the secular liberalism which he defends is, a bundle of unprincipled exceptions that would collapse if they had to be reconciled. Ironically, it makes more moral sense to force a man to kill those who are trying to harm his countrymen than it does to deny the equivalent right of obeying one's private conscience to those who have chosen a career of saving lives. Where one can be defended as a matter of civic virtue and duty to one's neighbor, the latter requires one to force action which many in that profession feel violates the very core of what they do for a living. To force such medical practitioners to provide access to abortion is no different from ordering a citizen-soldier to oppress and slaughter his countrymen and upend its constitution.

Ironically, if the Roman Catholic Church is forced to provide abortions or close its hospitals, Dr. Fish and others like him will get the very public order disaster they fear. As forcefully as Obama may impose his elimination of the conscience clause, the Roman Catholic Church may deny its medical services to the public. This is just another reminder that public order is more complicated that laws and the rote, mindless enforcement thereof.

Who would have thought that low pay saved lives?

He got a good look at the boys' writings only in the past couple of years. Among the revelations: Eric Harris was financing what could well have been the biggest domestic terrorist attack on U.S. soil on wages from a part-time job at a pizza parlor.

"One of the scary things is that money was one of the limiting factors here," Cullen says.

Had Harris, then 18, put off the attacks for a few years and landed a well-paying job, he says, "he could be much more like Tim McVeigh," mixing fertilizer bombs like those used in Oklahoma City in 1995.As it was, he says, the fact that Harris carried out the attack when he did probably saved hundreds of lives.

"His limited salary probably limited the number of people who died."

Had they had the money and training, Columbine would have actually killed far more people than the Oklahoma City Bombing. They had enough explosives in the school to blow up the entire cafeteria during lunch time, and bring the upstairs library down on top of the students inside who might have survived the initial blast. On top of that, they had rigged their cars with explosives and positioned them in the right location to blow up large numbers of first responders and people fleeing the building. If they had known what they were doing, and had more money to buy weapons and explosives, they could have easily taken down the entire school, killing most of the students. At a large school like Columbine, the death toll would have been closing in on the WTC attack if they had been successful.

It has come out that most of the information that we were told about the case was completely false. That's not surprising, and no less surprising will be the tendency to disregard the fact that regardless of what caused this incident, public schools tend to be a breeding ground for the sort of behavior that can drive an unstable teen over the edge. The public schools create a Lord of the Fliesesque environment wherein the primary source of socialization is other kids, and not adults. It shouldn't surprise anyone that they have also tended to exacerbate mental problems in unstable teens like the majority of school shooters.

Dana Blankenhorn reports on some harsh new realities about the cost of the software that will be used to implement some of the new medical information systems used for Obama's health care infrastructure upgrades:

By week's end Trotter was calm enough to explain the problem in simple terms.

• Before it certifies software CCHIT wants to know who "owns" it and thus takes responsibility. The problem is that open source companies like ClearHealth don't have full control of their code. Projects can be forked, then re-certified for one-tenth the cost. Or not certified.
• CCHIT certification requires CPT codes, which are proprietary to the AMA. This makes it impossible to create a fully open source EMR system.

What this means for the public is that comprehensive, open source proposals have been effectively ruled out for the time being. Proprietary, closed-source software is the only kind of software that will be able to be used for systems that get the CCHIT certification and are thus eligible for the health care stimulus package that Obama is working on. Right off the bat this means that competition has been limited, and all of the software involved will be more expensive, regardless of its merits. Good for vendors, bad for the health care industry and the public paying for the stimulus.

Unlike Blankenhorn, I see no reason to celebrate the fact that open source vendors were even given an audience here, as it is obvious that it was a meaningless event for them. It is bad enough that the public will have to pay for this, it's even worse that the public will have to do so with fewer vendor choices and an entire, legitimate paradigm not allowed to compete.

There are fair arguments to be made about having only the most rigorously tested and supported software running critical hardware like X-Ray machines and CAT scan systems. These systems should no more run commodity software than sensitive military weapon systems that need custom systems, often with hard real-time capabilities that are very seriously tested and debugged. However, to just rule out open source, period, especially for systems that have no potential loss of life and limb if there is a failure, is just blatant favoritism.

Fabius Maximus has a well-written overview of the piracy issue from the days of the Roman Republic's efforts against piracy, all the way to the modern problems in Somalia. Strategy Page also has a well-written explanation of why we have not dealt more forcefully with the piracy problem because of legal and logistical issues with how modern pirates operate.

It seems to me that the United States could solve most of this quickly by a few serious shows of force, such as summarily executing a few pirate crews and dumping their corpses into the sea for the sharks to feed on. Congress probably should also establish an update to federal law which states that, by the end of the year, only American ships that make at least a modest effort to arm themselves will be entitled to the protection of the US Navy. The federal government should, at some point, not concern itself with people who not only go into pirate-infested territory, but do so without the slightest means of effectively defending themselves. To protect them would only be to encourage stupidity and irresponsibility while putting our servicemen in danger for the sake of fools.

Strategy Page brings up some good points about the media issues involved with attacking pirate bases, as well as how the pirates might use human shields, however in some of these cases, it doesn't stand to reason that the government has to officially acknowledge involvement. If they see a speedboat with pirates who have women and children in there as human shields, there isn't any particular reason why the Navy cannot simply blow the ship out of the water and simply disavow any knowledge of the incident should the media catch wind of it. One of the dangers that the pirates face by being so adventurous as to being willing to go up to 700km outside of Somali waters is that out there, first world navies can dispose of them like trash without accountability.

Rational self-interest can be a very powerful motivator to make people invest into their community's infrastructure:

"If the park is not open, it would be extreme for us, to say the least," he said. "Bankruptcy would be imminent. How many years can you be expected to continue operating, owning 15-passenger vans, $2 million in insurance and a staff? For us, it was crucial, and our survival was dependent on it. That park is the key to the sheer survival of the business."

So Slack, other business owners and residents made the decision not to sit on their hands and wait for state money that many expected would never come. Instead, they pulled together machinery and manpower and hit the ground running March 23.

And after only eight days, all of the repairs were done, Pleas said. It was a shockingly quick fix to a problem that may have taken much longer if they waited for state money to funnel in.

"We can wait around for the state or federal government to make this move, or we can go out and do our part," Slack said. "Just like everyone's sitting around waiting for a stimulus check, we were waiting for this but decided we couldn't wait anymore."

It shouldn't surprise anyone that they were able to do this so quickly and cheaply. Without the bureaucracy required to go through the Contracting Kabuki of bids, counter-bids, setting up a team and all of that nonsense, they were able to get to work immediately. As it was on their own time, they had no reason to spend anymore time than absolutely necessary to get the work done.

This entirely private enterprise process shows how efficient this can be when time and resources are not guaranteed by the government, but come out of private pockets. The United States would be a lot better off if more infrastructure development were privatized, and the government would allow private businesses to own and maintain it for a reasonable, market-determined profit.

With the way that federal tax laws are set up, it shouldn't surprise anyone that the costs to contract out the repairs would have been enormous. For an independent worker to be able to take home $10/hour--$10/hour--they would have to charge the government about $18/hour for the work because of the employer taxes they would have to pay on top of their income tax, social security and medicare. The tax payers of Hawaii were very lucky that these businesses depended on this infrastructure getting rebuilt because the repair costs would have been hefty.

The more they struggle, the more they sink into the tar pit:

Taking aim at the way news is spread across the Internet, The Associated Press said on Monday that Web sites that used the work of news organizations must obtain permission and share revenue with them, and that it would take legal action against those that did not.

A.P. executives said they were concerned about a variety of news forums around the Web, including major search engines like Google and Yahoo and aggregators like the Drudge Report that link to news articles, smaller sites that sometimes reproduce articles whole, and companies that sell packaged news feeds.

If the A.P. had any fundamental understanding of how the web economy works, it would know that linking and excerpting small portions of the content (with credit given) are good for it and its members. Obviously, sites that reproduce content in whole, or close enough to whole that no one has any reason to visit the original content, are problematic for them, but sites that build lists of links and excerpts for their content are only driving more viewers to their content which means greater advertising exposure for them.

What the A.P. is unwilling to accept is that the advertising model is just dying. Slowly, but surely, it is dying as a reliable source of revenue. It was bound to happen when the number of sites where it could appear exploded out of control. Advertising space, like all things in the market, is governed by the law of supply and demand and there is a increasingly large glut of advertising spaces with which they compete. Every effort they can successfully take to encourage others to send hits to them increases their audience, which in turn increases the leverage that they have with their advertisers. The best thing for the A.P. would be to be the single most excerped and linked source of information for news online as that would send hundreds of millions of additional hits to their outlets!

That's probably expecting a mite much from an organization which harasses its own members for embedding videos from its very own YouTube channel which it officially publishes.

Rather than getting a warrant for the parts of the colocation business that were used for crime, the FBI finds that it's just so much more convenient to tar and feather the entire business and hundreds of its innocent customers:

Among more than 300 businesses affected by the raid on Crydon were Intelmate, which provides inmate calling services for prisons and jails and had about $100,000 in equipment seized in the raid; a credit card processing company that had just become PCI compliant and was in the process of signing on its first customers; Primary Target, a video game company that makes first-person shooters; a mortgage brokerage; and a number of VoIP companies and international telecoms that provided customers with service to the U.S. through servers belonging to a separate company Faulkner ran called Intelivox. These customers essentially lost connectivity to the U.S. after the raid, Faulkner says.

Faulkner says the FBI appears to have assumed that all the servers located at Crydon's address belonged to him, and didn't seem to understand the concept of co-location.

The seized data included transactional records for companies, which means the companies won't be able to bill customers for services already rendered before the raid.

"All of our clients will have to refund their customers, and we're in the hole now to refund our customers," says Faulkner. "I could tell the FBI agent had never even considered that. He just said, 'Well, that's your problem.'"

The FBI attempted to weasel its way out of this by arguing that its understanding of how colocation sites work is that all of the information is shared between the pieces of the infrastructure, but as the article shows, that wasn't true in this case. The data center did a lot more than just shared hosting of internet services, as many businesses found that their hardware was seized as though it were the property of the business(es) being investigated by the FBI. What the FBI did here was akin to arguing that if there are several crackhouses in a neighborhood, it is legally acceptable for them to seize the entire neighborhood pending investigation because of the possibility that other houses might have been used as storage space for the known crackhouses.

The FBI has caused several of the data center's customers to go bankrupt and many more are in danger of going bankrupt. All of that because the FBI could not be bothered to be more diligent in ensuring that it got the data that it needed. The best part of the case is that was all based on a confidential informant who, surprise, surprise, had a grudge against the owners of the data center:

Many of the allegations against Faulkner are based on claims from an unidentified informant who told the FBI that he used to work for Faulkner, and witnessed many criminal acts Faulkner committed. The witness told authorities he was "unaware of any legitimate business being run by Faulkner and that as far as he/she knew all of his income was derived from his illegal activities." The informant also claimed Faulkner used crack cocaine and methamphetamine and engaged in commercial spamming.

Faulkner says the unnamed informant is a former employee who was fired after failing to show up to work over an extended period.

"We paid him $70,000 to help us launch a VoIP business, and he never actually did anything," Faulkner says.

Indiscriminate seizure of property without regarding to the cost to a number of legitimate businesses. A confidential informant who has a serious grudge against the owners. A connection to Verizon and AT&T who were somehow able to turn a civil debt issue into a criminal case. Nothing questionable going on here...

In cases like this, law enforcement tends to seize a lot of property which has no legitimate bearing on the trial. It seized power strips, server racks, routers and even servers that didn't even belong to the businesses that were under investigation. There is never a good reason for the FBI to seize routers and switches outside of hacking cases were they have reason to believe that a hacker broke in by changing the configuration on the device or by changing the software. In the vast majority of cases, that's about as pointless as the FBI seizing a telephone 40 years ago when phones were nothing more than dumb devices that stored no data. Even if the routers connected the "criminal servers" and the "innocent servers," that has no bearing on whether or not the latter were actually used for the commission of a crime.

For law enforcement, one of the best reasons to overseize here is that it will cripple the business, and the assets are still very valuable. I would not be surprised in the least if the value of the seized property in this investigation was worth as much as many medium-sized drug raids. Just one of the customers affected lost $100K worth of equipment, and if they go bankrupt while the FBI checks for criminal use of the hardware, then the FBI will be able to sell it off at auction. The FBI may not make a policy of doing this sort of thing, but the fact that there are so few clear legal reasons not to do it, and good economic reasons to do it, don't give any incentive to take on anything resembling an above reproach civic responsibility either.

If only we had the right people in office, we could trust the government with broad authority over everything with minimal negative side effects. Why, bad legislation would get patched as soon as a member of Congress found out that it was "flawed..."

Granted, this is the kind of stuff that makes libertarianism look attractive. And it is doubly distressing that Congress doesn't appear eager to close the loophole in short order. Unintended consequences of legislation are inevitable -- the measure of good government is how politicians respond to them. Without the will to impose real oversight, acknowledge mistakes and fix them when they are discovered, and constantly strive to improve governance, we will be stuck with bad government. And that might be one of the most distressing results of decades of being told that government is the problem -- we hear a story like Hayes', and think despondently, you know, they were right, rather than squaring our shoulders and reapplying ourselves to the wheel.

Software development and the legislative process have a lot in common. Both of them work to establish complex rules for governance of resources and people. Compare the typical software development cycle, with the way that the legislative process usually ends up working:

1. Requirements gathering
2. Initial architecture work
3. Test plan is created
4. Working alpha release is developed and unit tested against most foreseen problems
5. Working sample sent to customer for more testing
6. Steps 4 and 5 are repeated until it is ready for a final revision

How the legislative process works, in a nutshell:

1. Legislator gets an idea
2. Legislator drafts a law
3. Other legislators either attack or defend it
4. Bill goes to committee
5. If it goes beyond the committee, it will go to the full house
6. If it makes it out of Congress, the President can sign it

Seems fairly similar, right? Well, let's look at the exceptions here that the legislators can get away with under the rules of the systems:

• If it doesn't pass in committee, just add it onto an important spending bill!
• If another legislator wants to sneak in their own legislation, they can add it to yours!

There is no rigorous legal analysis of every bill before it goes to a general vote by Congress. No one tests the law for unintended consequences, side effects or constitutionality. There are no checks and balances against a bill that is 110% total fail beyond the consent of the legislators, the courts' review authority or the willingness of the people to revolt.

To get the system to the point where it would start producing more reliably good legislation would take decades of extremely aggressive reforms, many of which would be attacked by people who would see them as attacks on Congress' authority (or checks and balances) or would have a partisan interesting in maintaining the status quo. The current legislative process is deeply flawed, so much so, that to reform it would be all but another way of saying "throw it out and start over."

It probably was a little too much to hope for change in the government's fear of having some of its dirty practices brought to light and scrutiny in the courts:

The Obama administration's argument in February that even some of the worst government abuses are "state secrets" beyond the reach of the courts proves to be no temporary flashback to the Bush era. In a court filing last week, the Justice Department reiterated that argument, demonstrating that, in many ways, not much has changed just because the White House is under new management.

Obama: virtually everything you hated in Bush, but brought to you by a black democrat. By the end of the year, almost all of his campaign violations will have been systematically violated. You have to hand it to the man, he is pretty brazen and audacious in his dashing of the hope of so many of his supporters.

It took me a little while to get this just right, but these two mod_rewrite rules will do silent rewrites to allow you to have a printer-friendly URL and a beautified tag url like http://www.domain.com/tag/data-retention without having the URL redirected to a different location as far as the content in the browser address bar is concerned.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^printer-friendly/(.*)$ $1?printerfriendly=1 [L]
RewriteRule ^tag/(.*)$ mt\/mt-search\.cgi\?IncludeBlogs=x,y,z\&tag=$1\&limit=20

Include whatever blog IDs would want to be searched where you see x,y,z. Put this in the htaccess file at the root of the domain.

This is what happens when the government allows the camel to get its nose into the tent on the issue of data retention:

A European Union directive, which Britain was instrumental in devising, comes into force which will require all internet service providers to retain information on email traffic, visits to web sites and telephone calls made over the internet, for 12 months.

Police and the security services will be able to access the information to combat crime and terrorism.

Hundreds of public bodies and quangos, including local councils, will also be able to access the data to investigate flytipping and other less serious crimes.

It was previously thought that only the large companies would be required to take part, covering 95 per cent of Britain's internet usage, but a Home Office spokesman has confirmed it will be applied "across the board" to even the smallest company.

Privacy campaigners say the move to force telecoms companies to store the data is the first step towards the controversial central database at the heart of the Home Office's Intercept Modernisation Programme, which will gather far more detailed information on Britain's online activities.

Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, said: "I don't think people are aware of the implications of this move. It means that everything we do online or on the phone will be known to the authorities.

"They are using this to produce probably the world's most comprehensive surveillance system.

The Stasi would be proud to have lost to a people who would go on to make a surveillance system that is far more comprehensive than anything they had ever been able to attempt. What you see here is precisely the reason why I say that data retention simply must be opposed on principle. No compromises, no "reasonable regulations." Once the legal and technological infrastructure is in place, government surveillance on a level previously never imagined will be possible in the United States--much of it automated. Even if ostensibly 4th amendment-friendly controls are put into place, the only protection that the public will have at that point is the willingness of the government to obey its own regulations, something which federal law enforcement has shown time and again that it cannot regarding the USA PATRIOT Act according to the FBI's Office of the Inspector General.

If Britain persists in creating this database, then they will succeed only in creating one of the most tempting information targets in human history. There are a lot of criminals and foreign intelligence services that would love to get their hands on all of that personal, financial and communication information for purposes ranging from datamining for credit card information, to analyzing call patterns in Britain to find links between government agencies, individuals and private businesses.

Obama wants to be able to pull the plug at his discretion:

The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 introduced in the Senate would allow the president to shut down private Internet networks. The legislation also calls for the government to have the authority to demand security data from private networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule or policy restricting such access.

The headlines were all about creating a national cyber-security czar reporting directly to the president, but the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 introduced April 1 in the U.S. Senate would also give the president unprecedented authority over private-sector Internet services, applications and software.

According to the bill's language, the president would have broad authority to designate various private networks as a "critical infrastructure system or network" and, with no other review, "may declare a cyber-security emergency and order the limitation or shutdown of Internet traffic to and from" the designated the private-sector system or network.

The 51-page bill does not define what private sector networks would be considered critical to the nation's security, but the Center for Democracy and Technology fears it could include communications networks in addition to the more traditional security concerns over the financial and transportation networks and the electrical grid.

An even more imperial presidency. More change we can believe in, but is this what we hoped for, one wonders?...

More and more, the legislative machinery is being pushed into place to systematically crush dissent. The financial system is deeply regulated with law enforcement being informed of any large transfer of wealth through the system by private citizens. Civil asset forfeiture laws allow the police to seize any large amount of cash they find on you. A number of firearm regulations require gun stores to send personal information to law enforcement about the sale of weapons to private citizens. Now, the federal government is extending its tentacles even deeper by trying to formally seize for itself the authority to shut down any network when a "state of emergency exists." Take or block your money, take your guns, shut down your communications; the modern trifecta of tyranny.

Update: As jimmyb points out, there is a fourth angle to this: food. So, now the feds are looking to control your communications, take your guns, block or take your money and threaten you with loss of your property if you even grow your own food.

I bought one of these a few weeks ago for about $99.99 plus tax at Office Depot. It isn't very noteworthy in terms of the actual printing that it does. It's typical of the above average quality of the average HP inkjet printer. What is remarkable about it are a few of the features that it has.

The 6940 is a network-enabled printer that has a standard ethernet connector next to its USB connector. It doesn't do wireless, but if you have your home router in a good location, it doesn't matter because you can just plug in this printer with some cheap ethernet cable. Configuring network printing is painless with MacOS X. The installation software for the Mac driver uses Bonjour to figure out how your network works, find the printer and help get things up and running quickly.

There is a duplex printing accessory for this printer which costs only about $37.50 before tax. I bought one shortly after buying this printer, and installed it today. It does slow down the printing a little bit, but it is far more convenient than manual duplex printing. So, for about $140 you can get a network-enabled, duplex-printing, good quality inkjet printer.

A blogger who has been critical of the Phoenix Police Department just got raided by the Phoenix PD. They took all of his computer equipment ranging from computers, to storage media, to the cable modem that he used for internet access. They seem to be wanting to charge him with some vague violation of anti-hacking statutes for possessing information about their operations that he should have, but which was actually given to him by informants from within the police department.

The most interesting part of this case to me, however, is the back story here because it's what's going to get short thrift:

The conflict between Pataky and the Phoenix Police Department began two years ago during "a nasty divorce" after moving out of the house he had shared with his wife. His said she was not taking the divorce too well and began filing false allegations against him accusing him of stalking and harassing her.

Many of the reports she filed accused him of doing things when he was out of town, he said.

So he began filing complaints with everybody from Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon down to Phoenix Police Chief Jack Harris to no avail. He was eventually indicted for harassing his ex-wife.

A month before the trial, he and a few friends launched the website as a rant against the police department. When he went to trial in May 2008, his charges were immediately dismissed because of lack of evidence, he said.

I don't believe for a minute that the charges against him are legitimate because if they were, they would have thrown the warrant and affidavit in his face with a note that says either "pwn3d, bitch" or "all ur base are belong to us." There are few things that police departments like this would love more than to be able to slam such a visceral critic which serious charges that actually stand a chance of sticking.

The man has every reason to be upset with the police department. They did nothing to stop his wife from abusing the system, and when he started to bring it to their attention, they punished him instead. Clearly, justice only flows in the directions of those who happen to tap into the sympathy of the powers that be in Phoenix, and divorcing men with perjurious ex-wives don't fit that bill (not that they normally do anywhere).

When the dust settles, hopefully the FBI will come rolling into town to crack some skulls. The people involved need to be behind bars.

First, Obama sends back the bust of Churchill that was given to Bush by Tony Blair. Then, he sends Brown a DVD set that won't work because of region code issues. Then, to top all of that off, the best he can do for coming up with a gift for the queen is an engraved iPod. Had he known that this is what would have been tolerated of Obama, Bush should have held a summit or something like that at a NASCAR event.

This story from EW's blog reminded me of a great present for college-age men. You can get get camcorders like this from stores like Best Buy for under $200. The quality isn't great, but for a device that can be slid into your pocket pretty casually and that isn't much bigger than your hand, it's a balanced purchase based on what I have seen from samples taken with them.

Now, it's true that the best remedy for situations like the one that EW mentions is to teach your son to stay away from loose women, especially drunk or stoned loose women. Conservative men, especially ones of a more religious nature, tend to have that one at least somewhat down. For the rest of the men out there, this is probably the best substitute that they could ask for. Find a position in the dorm room or hotel room where you can mount it, turn the volume on the recorder up to full blast, and record the whole thing. Chances are, she'll think it's kinky when you do it, and if you get called in by the police later, she'll think you're a bastard for proving that she really wasn't that drunk or passed out when she "got raped."