August 2009 Archives

I have committed a lot of changes to my GitHub repository lately, adding 3 new styles: Connections, Shiny Glow Things and Carrington Blog, as well as cleaning up a few other styles that needed some fixing. The following screenshots are a sample of some of the work I have done on these. They're not ready yet for me to add them to my themes blog, but they're close enough for a preview. I just need to a get a chance to clean up some of the CSS.

Connections for the Classic Blog template set.

Swirly Glow Things for the Professional Website template set.

Swirly Glow Things for the Classic Blog template set.

Carrington Blog

Connections is about 50-60% finished now. It looks better than that screenshot which I took earlier in the day. I'll probably release a batch of new styles this weekend on my themes blog.

At least one appeals court recognizes that the fourth amendment is still in effect as law of the land:

A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that federal investigators' seizure of drug-test results of more than 90 major league baseball players five years ago was illegal.

The decision recommended new guidelines for computer searches to prevent investigators from using information about people who are not named in a search warrant but whose private data is stored on a computer being searched.

Investigators looking into steroid use by professional baseball players obtained search warrants and subpoenas for the drug tests results on 10 major league players, but they took the results on 104 players.

The Major League Baseball Players Association sued for the return of the seized results, while the government argued investigators should be able to use them since they were "in plain sight" along with the other results during the search.

Those crazy sons of bitches on the 9th circuit court of appeals upheld the common sense notion that if the feds get a search warrant for records a, b and c, they have no right to view records d-z unless they have probable cause to search them and get a warrant to search all of the records. Federal law enforcement, being the weasels that they are notorious for being, felt that they have a right to any records which happened to be turned over to them, even if they turned over because of error or incompetence on the part of the party complying with the search warrant.

The scenarios where this is a non-trivial issue are legion. Shared web hosting, outsourced enterprise services, even inside of companies internal networks. There have been plenty of cases where the feds will raid a data center and seize every piece of hardware, irrespective of the nature of the data center. That can mean that data from dozens or hundreds of businesses who are totally unrelated to the investigation ends up in their hands.

Rulings like this are a good example of why the 9th circuit is probably the best appeals court in the country.

• UK police are now fake robbing people to raise awareness of the threat posed to private property by people who aren't vigilant. Now all criminals have to do is dress up like the police and they can catch the British public in a no-win situation; that's already happening on this side of the Atlantic with criminals masquerading as raiding SWAT officers.
• The Democrats are drafting legislation which would allow the President to declare a state of emergency and seize control of private networks, effectively giving the federal government authority to nationalize control over the Internet in the U.S. in a "state of emergency."
• DHS has responded to criticism of its border search policy by tightening the regulations on government agents who seize and search electronics from people entering the U.S. In order to keep a device for longer than five days, agents will need both probable cause and management approval. In addition, managers must now be present when property is taken to be searched.
• Venezuela is now in the process of banning violent video games, claiming that they are harmful for the youth of the country. No mention on whether they are going to ban cults of personality, one party state politics, assaults on their constitution by populist demagogues or providing aid and comfort to rebel factions which are attempting to overthrow the lawful governments of their neighbors...
  

Lately, I've caught some flack from some (on another blog) for my insistence that a belief in the very essence of Genesis is necessary to Christian faith. I don't see how one can believe in evolution and Genesis at the same time because the simple wording of Genesis 1 and 2 states that God created the world through direct acts rather than by molding an existing process or merely allowing that process to happen (which by happenstance produced humanity).

Genesis is hardly the most "absurd" thing to take literally or semi-literally. The resurrection of Jesus is arguably at least as "absurd." Think about it, for a moment. According to the Gospel narrative, Jesus was beaten, scourged, crucified, bled out by a spear, wrapped in a constricting funeral wrap and placed into a dark, dry tomb with minimal air flow (due to the huge rock wedged into the entrance) and left there for three days. By divine fiat, He comes back to life brimming with vitality and vigor (after 3 days of not eating or drinking), sneaks past a cohort of Roman soldiers and chills with His homeboys before ascending to the right hand of the Father.

Ahhh, but there is the strong testimonial evidence of the apostles and other witnesses like Mary Magdalene, you might say. Fair enough, but we take it for granted that these same reliable witnesses were wrote scripture under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. The same Holy Spirit who was the one who revealed the Genesis story to Moses. It is very likely that the Holy Spirit was rather coy about the full details of the creation of the universe. It's hard enough to give divine revelation through human language, let alone do so accurately while explaining physical laws and events that are likely a millennium or more beyond our current knowledge of Physics, to a desert-dwelling, primitive tribe. For God to explain the full monty to Moses and have him dictate it to the Israelites would have been like Henry Kissinger trying to lecture a gerbil on Diplomacy.

To my knowledge, no human being has actually seen a nebula turn into a solar system with an Earth-like planet. For all we know, Genesis is quite objectively plausible and the secular narrative a textbook case of the post hoc fallacy. That's really no less likely than the events of the Gospel regarding the resurrection since we do know for a fact that no human being could, without divine intervention, experience the events that preceded the resurrection and come back to life. The fact is, their body would be too badly damaged, the conditions in the tomb too hostile and the lack of a fresh air flow, food and water coupled with the blood loss from the spearing would seal the deal.

I'm not saying you are ipso facto stupid or irrational for believing in the resurrection. I'm merely suggesting that you are the very least, straying off the reservation if you can believe that the resurrection with a straight face, but then dismiss those who believe in the intelligent design narrative of Genesis as crackpots and irrational fideists.

Firebug really simplified the process. In fact, Firebug was critical to getting the majority of this converted in about a hour of work.

I don't know whether Aleynikov is innocent, but he contends that almost everything he transferred was open source software. This is rather interesting...

Sabrina Shroff, a public defender who represents Mr. Aleynikov, responded that he had transferred less than 32 megabytes of Goldman proprietary code, a small fraction of the overall program, which is at least 1,224 megabytes. Kevin N. Fox, the magistrate judge, ordered Mr. Aleynikov released on bond.

It is conceivable that he actually did copy mostly open source software. If the software was originally produced under the GNU GPL, then Goldman's claim to own the modifications would not be as legally obvious as one might think because the viral nature of the GPL. It is possible that what he did was actually copy modified GPL software and some of the code was actually proprietary and owned by Goldman. In that case he would still be legally liable for copying their proprietary work, but I would think that if Goldman's systems were based on open source software that was tightly integrated that their claim to trade secrets protection would be weakened since much of their system's functionality was publicly known.

At any rate, it sounds like the devil is in the details. No one is forthcoming with what he actually is alleged to have stolen at this point, and the attorney interviewed for this case said that it is extremely bizarre that criminal proceedings were happening right now since this sort of thing is almost invariably handled by civil proceedings. Only time will tell who is the bigger weasel: Aleynikov or Goldman Sachs.

Last year, I wrote two blog posts about the case of Dymond Milburn. After doing a Google search on the subject (which was prompted by someone search for information on Milburn on my blog), I found that there have been two follow ups about the case. The first case and the second case where she was tried for resisting arrest have both ended in a mistrial. It seems that the best that the Galveston police could come up with was "ummm, we didn't hear everything that was put on the radio..."

The judge was probably not happy about the fact that rather than call in for a repeat on the information, which would have told them that the complaint was specifically about three white prostitutes, they just acted without any confirmation. Granted, that's assuming that there wasn't more to the story, and the judge didn't just call shenanigans on their story.

Even if one "factors in" the fact that her father had been picked up on drug charges in the past (why would that even be relevant...) it doesn't do anything for their argument. Ultimately, they were guilty of attacking an entirely innocent, twelve year old black girl, in her yard, without probable cause.

I am steadily moving my plugins over to my personal repository at GitHub. Recently, I updated the ActionStream plugins I wrote for Reddit and Slashdot. Reddit is now officially integrated into ActionStreams, but I think the version I wrote has a tighter integration with Reddit as it captures more information about the user's actions on Reddit. Also, along those lines, I uploaded all of the work I have done so far on Movable Type styles to GitHub.

I wouldn't put it past the Obama Administration to be just toying with the birthers, but stuff like this makes you realize that there are three possibilities: they are lying, they are manipulating or they aren't quick to fix serious mistakes in their public relations websites. The third option is not as likely as it may sound since search results for it are starting to trickle onto Google News.

Our highly advanced, modern, civilized, completely unbarbaric legal system has a curious habit of allowing prosecutors to do things like withholding exculpatory evidence, editing video-taped testimony to take out "inconvenient statements" like the "victims" stating the defendant did not harm them, and delaying the release of said evidence for months and even years. Bet you didn't know that a prosecutor cannot be sued for their actions in court, even if they are withholding exculpatory evidence in a capital case. That's right. They can have evidence that you are innocent beyond a reasonable doubt, withhold it from you, send you to your death, and there is nothing that can be done within the system to hold them accountable except **maybe** getting them disbarred.

I think we've finally found the female counterpart to Jon Gosselin...

It's rare that you see an elected official admit that they took a course of action specifically to cover up and avoid learning about pesky details related to terminating a senior employee. In this case, they avoided the hearing because they didn't want to find out what was going through the principal's mind when she tried to get one student to buy drugs from another in order to catch the alleged drug dealer in the act.

Lastly, I think I may be changing my blog's name/domain coming up soon. I haven't decided on what it will be, but I think it's about time that I move onto something new, for various reasons.

For my business law class, I had to write my take on "reasonable person" versus "reasonable victim" in sexual harassment and hostile work environment cases. Here is my (likely) submission:

Sexual harassment is, to paraphrase one Supreme Court justice on the issue of pornography, one of things that we cannot really define, but we know it when we see it. The average person knows sexual harassment when they witness it in front of them. There are the obvious examples that range from blatant quid pro quos, to inappropriately touching a coworker who gave no signs that the attention was wanted, and a bunch of guys standing around at the water cooler making wolf whistles at the hot secretary.

It's been a long time in coming, but HaikuOS is now finally sufficiently feature complete and stable to release a full system-wide alpha. There are kinks that they have to work out before it is released on September 9th, but it's finally coming.

Why should anyone care about the open source clone of BeOS, an operating system that died off in 2001? For starters, it is faster and more responsive than most desktop operating systems that have ever been created. The architecture was also designed to be heavily multi-threaded which makes it even more relevant today in an age where processor performance is increasingly achieved through adding more cores to a CPU. Lastly, if a stable 1.0 release is ready by the end of 2010, it would be the perfect OS for netbooks because it provides a Mac-like GUI, but with a tiny memory footprint.

Keep an eye on this project. It very well may become the most significant open source OS on the desktop in the next two years.

I4i, which mainly makes software for drug and defense companies, obtained the patent for a "customized XML" tool in 1998. XML is a specialized alphabet that can capture any kind of computer file as a regular text. -[Source]

At first blush it's easy to make fun of USA Today, but they did a surprisingly good job of dumbing down what XML is in such a way that the average person could gain a basic understanding of what the dispute is about. By itself, XML is actually not entirely different from an alphabet in that it allows you to write down communications, but provides little inherent meaning or value. As differences in the way that Latin alphabet is used testify, an alphabet is just the first step in giving the written word meaning and that's essentially what XML is to documents.

The abstract of the patent does not give me any reason to believe that Microsoft will lose on appeals:

A system and method for the separate manipulation of the architecture and content of a document, particularly for data representation and transformations. The system, for use by computer software developers, removes dependency on document encoding technology. A map of metacodes found in the document is produced and provided and stored separately from the document. The map indicates the location and addresses of metacodes in the document. The system allows of multiple views of the same content, the ability to work solely on structure and solely on content, storage efficiency of multiple versions and efficiency of operation.

I don't have time to wade through page after page of attempts to obfuscate and puff up what this "invention" does, but the abstract basically claims a significant swath of the potential use cases for XML. Furthermore, there is possible prior art in the field of XML work in the form of the original XSL specification which was begun in 1997. Since XML was already well under way in that time period, and they are essentially claiming the majority of XML use cases, I doubt that any judge outside of Eastern Texas (a district notorious for patent trolling), let alone on the Supreme Court, would take their claims seriously. The alternative is to give them license to sue nearly the entire field of professional software development given how common XML is today.

Chicago Boyz accurately predicts what Obamacare will end up doing to the elderly and the unproductive poor:

The elderly consume 70% of all health-care spending. That means that when it comes to cost control they will bear the brunt of the burden. If we don't cut spending on the elderly we can't reduce costs without simply denying care for everyone else. When it comes down to a choice between spending on old people and children, the elderly know full well who we are going to pick. The elderly themselves will choose to spend money on their grandchildren rather than themselves.

Worse, if health care is not supported by its own specialized flat tax, health-care spending on the elderly and poor comes into direct competition with all other government spending, and with all of the groups that disproportionately benefit from that spending or pay the taxes that support it.

We should think long and hard before we set up a political dynamic that pits the interests of the productive and powerful against the interests of the non-productive and powerless. It is unwise to make people choose between care for their own children and care for their parents and poor strangers.

The elderly are, without a doubt, the most expensive consumers of health care services. Unlike other groups, they are also the one segment that is most likely to be compromised because the perceived cost-benefit ratio, when examined purely from a bean counter's perspective, is utterly insane. Unlike any other group, there is an inherent limited return on investment because they don't have much life left to live when judged from the big picture. Furthermore, no one in their right mind would put the elderly at even the same level of priority as children, teenagers and young adults with families.

Invariably, the government is going to have to prioritize starting with children, working through teens and young adults and then maximize coverage for adults who are not health care lost causes and have families. The latter group is important because it is cheaper to help adults with dependents remain independent in most cases than it is to allow them to become wards of the state.

The advantage of the compartmentalization is that by creating dedicated pools of money, it can ration care without wholesale denying care to any class. Medicare is a fairer compromise because it caps the liability of the productive to the non-productive in a way that balances the needs of many non-productive who are genuinely in need with the need for restraint on the burden placed on the productive. Obama's plan will invariably break that balance and pit both classes against each other, and it will be the younger generations that will win the lion's share of resources.

I've spent the last two days learning about web services. Spring and Axis2 both seem to have nearly identical approaches to it, just with differences in minor details. I like Axis2 better than Spring for web services that aren't very complicated because you can just write up a POJO, archive it and drop it into the Axis2 engine. It's not like Spring where you have to customize web.xml, create a new Spring context for the service, create a XSD schema, create an Endpoint object, and then pray that you didn't mess up some minor detail of the configuration.

The Apache group is really onto something with this simple approach. JAX-WS is very similar in how it uses annotations to mark methods of POJOs as web service calls. It seems like people are really beginning to wise up and realize that it is too damned involved to create things like web services in Java.

In college, for an assignment, I created a few JSPs which did essentially what these web services do. All they did was take the input passed to them, and return a body of XML to the calling client. Java is going to need to keep simplifying to the point where it is as easy to do common things in Java as it is in other languages. Even with .NET, all a typical web service is is a modified ASP.NET web page that generated the web service when called.

And in the end, all web services really are are glorified CGI scripts that print "Content-type: text/xml\n\n\n" to the client, while spewing out XML output.

Since then, conservatives have been using Gladney's case as a cause célèbre to claim that "union thugs" are being used to silence dissent at health care town halls and have turned him into a hero of their movement.

The irony is that Gladney's situation underscores the vital need for health care reform. He was recently laid off and lost his insurance (14,000 Americans suffer a similar fate each day). Because he has no affordable health care option available, Gladney is now soliciting donations to pay his medical expenses -[Source]

The irony is that the proponents of that "health care reform" are the ones who put him into a hospital in the first place. If any need is underscored by this case, it is the need for more robust laws permitting greater latitude in the use of force in self-defense.

The very fact that Think Progress has to use scare quotes around union thugs is a testament to how entrenched hypocrisy is to modern politics. Had a conservative group attacked an anti-war protestor, the scare quotes would have come off, regardless of the facts that came out.

This discussion shows how there is a natural tension between the goals of libertarianism and the realities of human nature. That post is two months old, but it was the best example that I could think of off the top of my head.

There is a real tension in mainstream libertarianism between its conception of what humanity can and should be, and what it really is. Take, for instance, the view on voluntary single motherhood. Being a good mother is already difficult as it is for women who have the active involvement of a long-term partner or husband helping them daily to support their children. Parenting is expensive, time-consuming and not something that lends oneself to being done by a single parent who wishes to maintain some sort of personal life. That is why, aside from the rare exceptions, single mothers tend to be, to one extent or another, wards of the state. Libertarian goals like privatizing education and making the payment thereof the responsibility of the parent run head long into a brick wall in cases like this because the person's chosen lifestyle is simply not compatible without major heart ache or poverty.

Not to beat a dead horse, but humanity is not by nature rational. The default position of humanity is emotional, not logical. That is why women choose to be single mothers instead of either finding a suitable partner or foregoing children. That is also why the working and lower middle classes around the world often support politicians whose positions on economics amount to class-level economic suicide in the form of unsustainable spending that either leads to rampant inflation or wealth being transferred abroad. Mainstream libertarianism assumes a rational humanity that would choose good policies if better informed, but the truth is closer to Jonestown, except that a majority of humanity is greedily chugging the Kool Aid and asking for seconds.

Liberty is a lot like the infamous Quality-Speed-Cost triangle used to describe the pitfalls of priorities in manufacturing and services. For liberty, the triangle is something like Autonomy-Sustainability-Societal Health. You can have autonomy and sustainability, but you won't have societal health (many people will go without because of the emphasis on individual autonomy). You can have autonomy and societal health, which is where we are today in most respects with our policies on sex, family and debt-financed consumption backed by increased government care for the poor, but it is proving to not be sustainable. Finally, you can have sustainability and societal health, but that will come at a loss of individual liberty on all levels for all classes. It need not come in the form of government regulations, but even in voluntary action it will have that effect as individual happiness is subordinated to higher goals like maintaining mediocre marriages, sacrificing luxuries for the well-being of families, spending more money on charity, etc.

Once libertarians realize that the archetype of the rational human being who, out of principle, chooses to not let their personal lifestyle choices burden society, is a statistical oddity, the tradeoffs and hard choices will become more self-evident.

IE6 users have probably noticed the effect of the following JavaScript placed at the top of each page:

$(document).ready(function(){
   if ($.browser.msie && $.browser.version.substring(0,1) <= 6) {
      ie6cat = $("<mt:Asset id="680"><mt:AssetLink encode_js="1"/></mt:Asset>")
      .attr("rel", "prettyPhoto");
      ie6cat.appendTo($("#alpha-inner"));
      $("a[rel^='prettyPhoto']").prettyPhoto({showTitle: true});
      ie6cat.click();
      ie6cat.remove();
   } else {
      $("a[rel^='prettyPhoto']").prettyPhoto({showTitle: true});
   }
});

For those with reasonably modern, standards-compliant browsers, it looks like this.

Like the conservatives who believed that George Bush had a super secret plan for getting conservative goals accomplished, a great many liberals are so pathetically loyal to Obama that they refuse to recognize the implications of his effort to track what people are saying about his health care plan. This digg comment is a typical example:

Jesus... the level of ignorance and fear mongering in this thread is what's truly frightening.

Nobody is asking anyone to "report" on anyone. All they are asking is to be given a heads up on what type of lies are being circulated via email chain letters. They never said send in every email address and name that sent or received the email.

They're just trying to get one step ahead of the fear mongering that keeps getting pushed out that has no basis in truth. Things like: "You won't be able to choose your own doctor." or "They're going to force old people to choose how they want to die."

It's not fascism to try to be up on the latest bullshit rumors being spread by people who will say ANYTHING to stir up hatred towards the current administration.

Please, for the love of humanity... stop and think for a minute.... maybe even two.

Considering Obama's efforts to harass and shut down certain radio stations during his campaign, it shouldn't surprise anyone outside of the Obama kool-aid guzzling camp that a lot of reasonable people would see this as thuggish, Chicago-style politics. Obama's people who are working on this legislation have access to Google, and so they can find out what people are saying. The only reason that they would ask others to forward such content to them is to at least create a sense of intimidation in many of the opponents of the legislation. Even if they don't plan to do anything with it, they are well aware of the psychological impact that such an action would have.

Once again, we see an example of how Obama's supporters will uncritically excuse behavior from Obama that would have driven them batshit insane with rage had it been done by Bush. Most of them have no principles; their main objection was who was doing it. For that very reason, even if the Republicans take over in a landslide in 2010, I don't expect there to be a serious change. Once the Republicans are back in power, many of their supporters will make their own set of excuses for why their candidates must be allowed to compromise and move parts of Obama's agenda forward.

If this is what passes for "insightful..."

They would have been better off buying her a sports car and a $25k wardrobe:

Trina Thompson gave it the old college try, but couldn't find work. Now she thinks her sheepskin wasn't worth her time, and is suing her alma mater for her money back.

The Monroe College grad wants the $70,000 she spent on tuition because she hasn't found gainful employment since earning her bachelor's degree in April, according to a suit filed in Bronx Supreme Court on July 24.

The 27-year-old alleges the business-oriented Bronx school hasn't lived up to its end of the bargain, and has not done enough to find her a job.

The information-technology student blames Monroe's Office of Career Advancement for not providing her with the leads and career advice it promised.

"They have not tried hard enough to help me," the frustrated Bronx resident wrote about the school in her lawsuit.

"She's angry," said Thompson's mother, Carol. "She's very angry at her situation. She put all her faith in them, and so did I. They're not making an effort.

(For the sake of reference, here is the degree that this chick paid so much money to get.)

If I had to guess, I would say that like most women who come out of these programs, she has little to no personal interest in any of the subjects she studied. If she did, then she would have at least one solid Oracle or Cisco certification which would have already helped her get a job. Companies pay good money for employees with those skills. She probably looks good in a suit and knows how to ingratiate herself in an office environment, but not how to actually handle an Oracle server, a Cisco router or write code in any programming language (she probably forgot the C++ she was taught in her first year or two by the time she graduated from her undergrad).

As for the rest of it, we all know the drill. It's not her college's job to find her a job, blah, blah, blah, personality responsibility, blah, blah. Still, even if one tried to see things from her side, it would be a tenuous case. Expecting her alma mater to do the impossible is **probably** not a valid consideration under any state's contract law even if someone promises it.