How exactly has the death of someone who has been artificially kept alive via a feeding tube for 7 years "arbitrarily hastened"? That seems more along the lines of artifically and cruelly extended life to me...
Then again, I make it a habit to avoid taking advice on morality from people who believe in the infallibility of anyone and more generally claim to have a special relationship with an invisible man who lives in the sky. But hey, that's just me.
Thursday, March 31, 2005
Wolfowitz confirmed/Shiavo dead
Don't really have any more commentary here...just thought it was interesting that there wasn't more resistence to his nomination, and that he was ultimately unanimously confirmed.
Also, Terri finally bit it. Thank god.
Also, Terri finally bit it. Thank god.
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Technology fetishists
Jesus...just put it on a fucking bracelet, for fuck's sake. There's no need to resort to surgery here. Christ.
Yay exponential population growth!
Fuck the planet! We're all doomed! Wheee!!!
No, really, I'm serious. I don't care any more. People who take active steps to screw over other people for their own benefit in an immediate way piss me off, just on a personal level if nothing else, but at this point I could give less of a shit about humanity as a whole. Sure, we're fucking up the planet in an irreversible way, but I'm pretty sure we can't completely destroy it before I'm dead, and given my aforementioned loathing of children and, you know, people, what the hell do I care if the planet turns into a barren, toxic wasteland after I'm dead? It's a wonderful two-way "fuck you" both to the conservative, self-involved assholes of the world, who are slowly poisoning their children, and to the crunchy granola "every single human life is a precious spark!" hippies, who will have spent so much effort on blindly staving off death that ultimately overpopulation will kill many more people far faster than any of the forces they fought against. Oh, isn't existence fun?
No, really, I'm serious. I don't care any more. People who take active steps to screw over other people for their own benefit in an immediate way piss me off, just on a personal level if nothing else, but at this point I could give less of a shit about humanity as a whole. Sure, we're fucking up the planet in an irreversible way, but I'm pretty sure we can't completely destroy it before I'm dead, and given my aforementioned loathing of children and, you know, people, what the hell do I care if the planet turns into a barren, toxic wasteland after I'm dead? It's a wonderful two-way "fuck you" both to the conservative, self-involved assholes of the world, who are slowly poisoning their children, and to the crunchy granola "every single human life is a precious spark!" hippies, who will have spent so much effort on blindly staving off death that ultimately overpopulation will kill many more people far faster than any of the forces they fought against. Oh, isn't existence fun?
Murphy baffled by Snow's bafflement at resistence to private account
There's resistence because it will cost lots of money to switch over the system, and it's a bad idea in general, jackass.
A sane voice from the Democrats
Wow...it's been so long since I read something that actually bothered to look at the broader position of american politics and draw coherent, well-reasoned conclusions from it. This may be the first op-ed I've seen where the author actually manages to put his finger on what's wrong with the Democratic party and gives a reasonable prescription for fixing it. Moreover, it's refreshing to see someone warn against going "Republican Lite," someone who, unlike me, other people might actually listen to. Mr. Dean, are you listening? I've said it before, and I'll say it again: you can't out-Republican Republicans. It's a horrible strategy that simply won't work. You have to drive the debate. Go now. Fix country.
Danforth on Christian Conservatives
It's a nice sentiment, but I still think it's rather naive to think that fiscal conservatives are separable from Christian conservatives. It is an unholy but symbiotic union that allows each to promote its agenda with the help of the other. The Christian conservatives seem to have been getting cocky lately and believe that they don't need the fiscal conservatives anymore. What a wonderful blunder that would be...
A new meaning to "boy scouts"
But yes, obviously, homosexuality is still clearly the greatest threat to the Boy Scouts of America.
Idiots.
Idiots.
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
Clinton (no, the Senator one)
Although Hillary Clinton should be ashamed of herself for such political pandering, nonetheless this is profoundly stupid.
Monday, March 28, 2005
A word on bandwidth...
In computer science, there are generally two basic measure of performance: bandwidth and latency. Bandwidth is the one you normally think about. DSL and cable modem companies like to talk about the bandwidth they provide. Cable modems these days are generally either 1.5 megabits (note that it's not megabytes! To get megabytes, divide by 8) per second or 3.0 Mb/s. At school, your ethernet connection was probably either 10 Mb/s or 100 Mb/s, although you generally don't actually get such high speeds, particularly when connecting to a site waaaay across the internet.
So, basically, bandwidth is a measure of how much data you can shove through something in a given amount of time. In contrast, latency is a measure of how long it takes to complete any particular thing.
Now, if you haven't grappled with these concepts before, it would seem that these are duals of each other. Shouldn't low latency mean high bandwidth and vice versa? Well, it turns out that no, that's not necessarily true. Case in point, a brief discussion I had with some people at lunch today.
People I know do data mining on data from the web. By one means or another, they obtain a "crawl" of the web, which is basically a bunch of data you get by starting out at a bunch of web pages, collecting those pages, then collecting all the pages those pages link to, and so on until you decide to stop. As you can imagine, these data sets get very big very fast. They are gigabytes if not terabytes large.
I am in California. These crawls live on computers in Washington (often). You would assume that being a big, fancy corporation, we would just transfer the data over the network. Not so! Remember our discussion of latency versus bandwidth? Well, imagine you could transfer stuff over the network at 2 megabytes per second. To get a 500 GB data set over that link, it would take about 70 hours, or 4 days.
So what do such researchers usually do instead? That's right: they take a big disk or two, write all the data they want to it, and then mail the fucker.
That's right, mail it. Good old UPS. High latency, but really high bandwidth. An oil tanker full of DVDs has far higher bandwidth than any cable modem you'll ever see. Just happens that it can take a month or two to get anything anywhere.
Welcome to the weird, wonderful world of computer science.
So, basically, bandwidth is a measure of how much data you can shove through something in a given amount of time. In contrast, latency is a measure of how long it takes to complete any particular thing.
Now, if you haven't grappled with these concepts before, it would seem that these are duals of each other. Shouldn't low latency mean high bandwidth and vice versa? Well, it turns out that no, that's not necessarily true. Case in point, a brief discussion I had with some people at lunch today.
People I know do data mining on data from the web. By one means or another, they obtain a "crawl" of the web, which is basically a bunch of data you get by starting out at a bunch of web pages, collecting those pages, then collecting all the pages those pages link to, and so on until you decide to stop. As you can imagine, these data sets get very big very fast. They are gigabytes if not terabytes large.
I am in California. These crawls live on computers in Washington (often). You would assume that being a big, fancy corporation, we would just transfer the data over the network. Not so! Remember our discussion of latency versus bandwidth? Well, imagine you could transfer stuff over the network at 2 megabytes per second. To get a 500 GB data set over that link, it would take about 70 hours, or 4 days.
So what do such researchers usually do instead? That's right: they take a big disk or two, write all the data they want to it, and then mail the fucker.
That's right, mail it. Good old UPS. High latency, but really high bandwidth. An oil tanker full of DVDs has far higher bandwidth than any cable modem you'll ever see. Just happens that it can take a month or two to get anything anywhere.
Welcome to the weird, wonderful world of computer science.
Thursday, March 24, 2005
My ringtone is more hardcore than yours!
They're putting ringtones on fucking rap CDs now?! Are you shitting me? What kind of hardcore gangsta has a fucking midi ringtone on his CD? Fucking fuck...
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Wow...you mean there are actually still Republicans left who base their political position on some kind of deeper principle than "We like money, power, and dumb people who will do what we tell them to if we say we like Jesus"? Who think that states' rights and limited government were actually principles instead of useful slogans for a minority party? How quaint!
I guess I shouldn't expect anything different from the poor idealistic bastard who not only understood that laissez-faire economics doesn't work unless the associated limited government is free of lobbyist money, but took the further logical leap that, hey, maybe we should try to limit the influence of money in government!
Siwwy Wepubwican. Yoaw pawty doesn't wespect such pwofitwess pwincipews!
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Monkey vs. Tiger
This has to be one of the funniest things I've ever seen. That monkey has some fucking _balls_.
What do they care? They're dead!
Millenia of theological questions answered: after you die, you become a crash-test dummy.
Networking (and not the computer kind) how-to
I can't decide which side of "useful" or "sickening" this falls on.
An entirely new level of sleaze
The Religious Right are some scary fuckers, you know that? Not only are they bigots, but they're amoral sleazebags, too.
Yeah, what they said
Ah yes...exploit one family's suffering for political gain. God bless the Republican party.
Sunday, March 20, 2005
Confusing genes and people
You know, I generally like Maureen Dowd, but this op-ed is assinine pseudo-science. The translation between genes and traits, particularly high-level traits like personality, is extremely complex. To say that the second X expresses more genes than the Y means women are more varied and complex than men is a misleading oversimplification. It may be, for instance, that all those "extra" genes are simply coding for different eyelash shapes. We have no idea.
The haunting ghost of Enron
Lest we forget what an utter douchebag our President is, or what utter douchebags his friends are. These are the kind of people we're supposed to entrust our retirements to?
Beware neocons bearing gifts
I really hope the black and hispanic communities don't buy this bullshit. Rangel puts it very well:
"If one of the appeals to blacks is that they're not getting a fair shake because they die earlier, it would seem to me that they would at least address the question of why they die earlier and what we can do about it."
The argument that minorities don't get as good a deal out of social security as whites is fucked up on so many levels. First, the obvious one just mentioned: saying social security needs to be revamped because you'll die before you benefit much from it is like saying we shouldn't feed the hungry since, fuck, they're just going to die anyway. Seems like ass-backwards reasoning, doesn't it?
Second, the numbers are warped (try to act surprised). As the article mentions, average and median lifespans of minorities are skewed by a high infant mortality rate; a minority who reaches 65 only lives two years fewer, on average, than his or her white counterpart. Ok, so white people get another two years worth of retirement income. That doesn't say "overhaul" to me. It says, at best, "pro-rate retirement benefits for minority retirees." Somehow I don't think Republicans would think that's a good idea.
Third, the assertion is just plain wrong. Social security is a great deal for minority communities that are more economically challenged than their white counterparts. They rely on that money. And obviously the proponents of privatization don't even slightly have these communities' interests at heart. They're fucking carpetbaggers. These are the same people that welcomed the likes of Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, and Trent Lott into their ranks. These are the same people that have undermined affirmative action every chance they get. And now that they need the support of the same groups they have repeatedly fucked over, they have the balls to wander in and lecture them on how they're getting a bad deal from their government. Yeah, no shit.
It's just mindblowing. Even more mindblowing is that a lot of these groups tend to be more amenable to the Republican party. Yay religion. Yay for the painfully naive belief that just because someone else professes an affection for Jesus they won't turn around and dick you over if it serves their own interests.
*grumble*
Second, the numbers are warped (try to act surprised). As the article mentions, average and median lifespans of minorities are skewed by a high infant mortality rate; a minority who reaches 65 only lives two years fewer, on average, than his or her white counterpart. Ok, so white people get another two years worth of retirement income. That doesn't say "overhaul" to me. It says, at best, "pro-rate retirement benefits for minority retirees." Somehow I don't think Republicans would think that's a good idea.
Third, the assertion is just plain wrong. Social security is a great deal for minority communities that are more economically challenged than their white counterparts. They rely on that money. And obviously the proponents of privatization don't even slightly have these communities' interests at heart. They're fucking carpetbaggers. These are the same people that welcomed the likes of Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, and Trent Lott into their ranks. These are the same people that have undermined affirmative action every chance they get. And now that they need the support of the same groups they have repeatedly fucked over, they have the balls to wander in and lecture them on how they're getting a bad deal from their government. Yeah, no shit.
It's just mindblowing. Even more mindblowing is that a lot of these groups tend to be more amenable to the Republican party. Yay religion. Yay for the painfully naive belief that just because someone else professes an affection for Jesus they won't turn around and dick you over if it serves their own interests.
*grumble*
Saturday, March 19, 2005
Priorities
Why is it that Bush thought it was ok to go on vacation after September 11th, but keeping a vegetable alive is an important enough national emergency to cut short his vacation?
Thursday, March 17, 2005
That...does not...make...sense!
Sometimes the things you don't understand are more interesting than the ones you do.
You people haven't been reading enough science fiction
This seems like a really, really, really bad idea...
The Bush ironic nominee train keeps on chuggin'
...and the latest screeching boxcar added to Bush's ironic nominee train is...ta da! An "independent" board to oversee safety issues at the FDA appointed by the head of the very same FDA? Niiiice...
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth
This is bullshit. Even the legal system has recognized for quite a while that "facts" presented in a misleading way are dangerous. The medium's the message, people. Nazis will happily tell you that the Jews charged Christians exorbitant interest rates on loans in the middle ages, and technically that's true. Doesn't really justify Nazism though, now does it?
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Shocking!
Isn't it funny how the Republican leadership somehow always end up being taken down due to one or another ethics violations? Gingrich, Lott, and now maybe DeLay...it's almost like, I dunno, just saying you like Jesus doesn't necessarily make you a good person...
Can we replace the dictionary definition of "hubris" with just a picture of DeLay's face?
Can we replace the dictionary definition of "hubris" with just a picture of DeLay's face?
Social Security a bust for Bush...and yet, Democrats still fuck it up
Leave it to the Democratic party to fuck up a rare opportunity to paint the neocons as the out of touch liars they are. I never did like Lieberman much.
Monday, March 14, 2005
Graduate school survival guide
A very interesting CS grad school survival guide for those of us contemplating such things.
Mommy, Bugs Bunny said a bad word...
I'm not so sure about this whole extreme Bugs Bunny thing...
...and while we're at it, whack your boss.
...and while we're at it, whack your boss.
Sunday, March 13, 2005
Remember feminism?
Interesting to see what is essentially a feminist piece in a prominent newspaper. I thought the following comment was particularly interesting: "Going from Tess Harding to Carrie Bradshaw, Dorothy Thompson to Candace Bushnell, is not progress." Sexualization of women, anyone? It took my mother pointing it out to me to realize that both Sex and the City and the late Ally McBeal were fundamentally anti-feminist tv shows. They're both about women as sexual entities and women struggling to make up for their incompleteness and essentially helplessness without their Mr. Right.
That said, I've always had trouble reconciling myself with feminism. I agree wholeheartedly with its observations. Corporations and government are run based on the way men, and not the way women, interact, and women are considered in the public psyche to be subservient and often simply sexual objects, etc. But I could never quite get comfortable with the conclusions of feminism, the calls to arms and the demand for revolution. Yeah, so, the world sucks...what now? The world was shaped by men. That's how the chips fell. I don't think the world would be any better if women had set it up. Merely different, with a different set of problems. And the fact is, women _didn't_ set it up. The chips fell the way they did because that's the way we are, just the same way that some people are rich and some are poor. Sure, there are institutional mechanisms that reinforce those kinds of divides and resist efforst to change them, but those institutions evolved as a result of human nature. To fight those tendencies is to fight our very nature, and a system that fails to accomodate that nature will crumble.
So sure, it's an admirable goal...government and civilization are in some sense contrary to natural law, and we instinctively want to hurt or kill those we hate, and it's probably best that we don't. But the best you can probably aim for is simply to be aware of such prejudices and do your best to limit their effects, recognizing that they will never go away entirely. Capitalism has serious problems, for instance, but the solution is not pure communism. Communism is totally untenable because it's fundamentally contrary to human nature. Better to rely on capitalism, which jives nicely with our innate competitiveness (our genes, after all, are here because our ancestors managed to reproduce where others didn't), but make damn sure there are safeguards to minimize the shit that can go wrong.
I dunno...it's kind of moot since feminism is more of a dirty word even that liberal these days, but it made me think. *shrug*
My, I have been prolific tonight...be sure to watch the little Social Security debate we seem to be having. :)
That said, I've always had trouble reconciling myself with feminism. I agree wholeheartedly with its observations. Corporations and government are run based on the way men, and not the way women, interact, and women are considered in the public psyche to be subservient and often simply sexual objects, etc. But I could never quite get comfortable with the conclusions of feminism, the calls to arms and the demand for revolution. Yeah, so, the world sucks...what now? The world was shaped by men. That's how the chips fell. I don't think the world would be any better if women had set it up. Merely different, with a different set of problems. And the fact is, women _didn't_ set it up. The chips fell the way they did because that's the way we are, just the same way that some people are rich and some are poor. Sure, there are institutional mechanisms that reinforce those kinds of divides and resist efforst to change them, but those institutions evolved as a result of human nature. To fight those tendencies is to fight our very nature, and a system that fails to accomodate that nature will crumble.
So sure, it's an admirable goal...government and civilization are in some sense contrary to natural law, and we instinctively want to hurt or kill those we hate, and it's probably best that we don't. But the best you can probably aim for is simply to be aware of such prejudices and do your best to limit their effects, recognizing that they will never go away entirely. Capitalism has serious problems, for instance, but the solution is not pure communism. Communism is totally untenable because it's fundamentally contrary to human nature. Better to rely on capitalism, which jives nicely with our innate competitiveness (our genes, after all, are here because our ancestors managed to reproduce where others didn't), but make damn sure there are safeguards to minimize the shit that can go wrong.
I dunno...it's kind of moot since feminism is more of a dirty word even that liberal these days, but it made me think. *shrug*
My, I have been prolific tonight...be sure to watch the little Social Security debate we seem to be having. :)
Comparing SAT analogies to the ability to make a logical argument is like:
a) idiotic
b) fucktarditudinous
c) well, you get the idea...
This pissed me off. (What? A link to something that pissed somebody off in a blog? No!) I have long detested the analogies in the SATs. Good riddance. They're fucking useless. And to see them defended in the New York Times makes me want to strangle somebody. Or more people, since I probably just wanted to strangle someone on principle anyway. Fuck off.
I cannot even begin to tell you how useless the analogies are. I'm honestly having trouble figuring out where to begin. Ok, first of all, it's utterly retarded to believe that the ability to compare the relationship between two sets of words relates in any way, shape or form to the ability to make a logical argument and participate meaningfully in debate. The reason that comparing the estate tax to the holocaust is that _in context_ it's an outrageous assertion. That doesn't mean there aren't necessarily parallels between the two. They're just likely irrelevent and/or pale in comparison to the larger issues each deal with. The relationship between two concepts always depends upon the context in which you're discussing them. The words in the analogies section of the SAT were entirely without context, and therefore any comparison of them is meaningless. Meaningless! It doesn't tell you anything about the abilities of the test-taker to ask him or her to compare two words out of context. Nothing. Zero. Zip. Nada. It's complete and utter horseshit. For any set of words on an analogy question, I guarantee you I can make an argument as to why any given answer is most appropriate given a certain context. You may find the argument uncompelling, but guess what? That's a subjective judgment, and subjective judgments are not supposed to be part of a standardized test. Or if they are, it's only meaningful to evaluate them with supporting evidence which you obviously cannot give in your answer.
The analogies tested exactly two things in conjunction: your vocabulary and your ability to divine how the test writer thought about those vocabulary words. That's it. There is a separate vocabulary section, and there is a reading comprehension section that will test your ability to comprehend analogies in context.
The fact that Cohen brings up the use of analogies in law is especially telling. The pervasiveness of analogies in law is part of the reason the legal system is so fucked up. Frug was exactly right: "All things are alike in some ways and different in other ways." What does that tell you? That whether an analogy is apt boils down to the skill with which one makes an argument that it is. There is no objective truth to analogy. It's a subjective judgment, and the fact that law degenerates into an analysis of analogies means it has degenerated into a reliance on linguistic cunning to determine objective justice. Frightening, no?
b) fucktarditudinous
c) well, you get the idea...
This pissed me off. (What? A link to something that pissed somebody off in a blog? No!) I have long detested the analogies in the SATs. Good riddance. They're fucking useless. And to see them defended in the New York Times makes me want to strangle somebody. Or more people, since I probably just wanted to strangle someone on principle anyway. Fuck off.
I cannot even begin to tell you how useless the analogies are. I'm honestly having trouble figuring out where to begin. Ok, first of all, it's utterly retarded to believe that the ability to compare the relationship between two sets of words relates in any way, shape or form to the ability to make a logical argument and participate meaningfully in debate. The reason that comparing the estate tax to the holocaust is that _in context_ it's an outrageous assertion. That doesn't mean there aren't necessarily parallels between the two. They're just likely irrelevent and/or pale in comparison to the larger issues each deal with. The relationship between two concepts always depends upon the context in which you're discussing them. The words in the analogies section of the SAT were entirely without context, and therefore any comparison of them is meaningless. Meaningless! It doesn't tell you anything about the abilities of the test-taker to ask him or her to compare two words out of context. Nothing. Zero. Zip. Nada. It's complete and utter horseshit. For any set of words on an analogy question, I guarantee you I can make an argument as to why any given answer is most appropriate given a certain context. You may find the argument uncompelling, but guess what? That's a subjective judgment, and subjective judgments are not supposed to be part of a standardized test. Or if they are, it's only meaningful to evaluate them with supporting evidence which you obviously cannot give in your answer.
The analogies tested exactly two things in conjunction: your vocabulary and your ability to divine how the test writer thought about those vocabulary words. That's it. There is a separate vocabulary section, and there is a reading comprehension section that will test your ability to comprehend analogies in context.
The fact that Cohen brings up the use of analogies in law is especially telling. The pervasiveness of analogies in law is part of the reason the legal system is so fucked up. Frug was exactly right: "All things are alike in some ways and different in other ways." What does that tell you? That whether an analogy is apt boils down to the skill with which one makes an argument that it is. There is no objective truth to analogy. It's a subjective judgment, and the fact that law degenerates into an analysis of analogies means it has degenerated into a reliance on linguistic cunning to determine objective justice. Frightening, no?
P is for propaganda!
Dude, it was bad enough when local news ran corporate VNRs as actual stories. Now they're running political VNRs produced by the government? Has the Cold War been over for so long that people have entirely forgotten what propaganda looks like?
Saturday, March 12, 2005
AOL owns your soul
We own you. We own your children. If we want to burn the fragile body of your infant son to fuel the infernal contraptions that run our crappy service, well goddamnit that's our prerogative.
Friday, March 11, 2005
Microsoft...not evil?
Oh, I love it...I can just see the brains of all the anti-Microsoft Linux people exploding. How _do_ you reconcile the Evil Empire with its recent public calls to reform the patent system? :)
Social Security's new math!
Funny how the funding gap estimate for social security got twenty times worse in the past year. It's almost like the numbers are being...I dunno...purposefully screwed with to make Social Security look like it's on the verge of collapse.
Isn't goofy accounting what got Enron in trouble?
It's so frustrating that the mainstream news outlets are too chickenshit to come out and say that the Bush administration lies. I understand why they're chickenshit...they stand to lose moderate and conservative viewers, not to mention incurring the wrath of the Republican leadership and being denied access to government sources...but that's exactly why it's so frustrating. Ignore for a moment the argument that the press isn't really free if it's bound by bottom lines and profit margins, thereby forcing it to pander to the lowest common denominator and to ruffle as few feathers as possible. Even if you pretend it's a philosophical argument about the position the press should take, it's still bullshit. Media theorists long ago abandoned the idea of objectivity in reporting. It's obviously an unachievable goal. Just the choice of what to cover and who will cover it involves a certain amount of filtering that is, in some sense, a bias. But the industry has flown haphazardly to the other extreme: they strive for this bizarre notion of "balance" (yes, the term was being thrown around in academic circles well before Fox leeched any semblance of meaning from it). The argument goes along the lines of: well, if you can't be objective, you can try to present an issue in a way that balances opposing viewpoints since the truth probably lies somewhere in between.
But think about that...at the risk of falling back on an utterly overused rhetorical point, imagine modern news covering Nazism. Think about what CBS News would look like in taking a "balanced" approach to Nazism. Point: Jews are people too and have a rich cultural heritage. Counterpoint: Jews are evil and must be exterminated to make way for the Third Reich. This week we explore the pros and cons of genocide of God's chosen people. Brought to you by Ford. Stay tuned!
It's fucking ludicrous. As Jon Stewart at some point pointed out, why even have "news" if all it's going to do is serve as a medium for people from the Left and the Right to spout talking points? A fucking wall could do that. You could have a hedgehog moderate. There's no reason for a journalism degree. The whole point of having freedom of the press was to allow some kind of objective reporting of the facts. Sure, "objective" is an unachievable ideal, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth striving for anyway. So much of the hijinx Bush has pulled has been objectively bullshit, and yet the main news organizations haven't called him on it. Social Security is a beautiful example of that...the numbers they're publishing are objectively fictitious, and yet the country is actively debating an argument based on smoke and mirrors.
Once again, I suppose, we must stand in awe of the ability of conservatives to manipulate a thoroughly broken system and get the poor and indigent residents of the red states to vociferously support the dismantling of the very programs that are designed to help them.
Isn't goofy accounting what got Enron in trouble?
It's so frustrating that the mainstream news outlets are too chickenshit to come out and say that the Bush administration lies. I understand why they're chickenshit...they stand to lose moderate and conservative viewers, not to mention incurring the wrath of the Republican leadership and being denied access to government sources...but that's exactly why it's so frustrating. Ignore for a moment the argument that the press isn't really free if it's bound by bottom lines and profit margins, thereby forcing it to pander to the lowest common denominator and to ruffle as few feathers as possible. Even if you pretend it's a philosophical argument about the position the press should take, it's still bullshit. Media theorists long ago abandoned the idea of objectivity in reporting. It's obviously an unachievable goal. Just the choice of what to cover and who will cover it involves a certain amount of filtering that is, in some sense, a bias. But the industry has flown haphazardly to the other extreme: they strive for this bizarre notion of "balance" (yes, the term was being thrown around in academic circles well before Fox leeched any semblance of meaning from it). The argument goes along the lines of: well, if you can't be objective, you can try to present an issue in a way that balances opposing viewpoints since the truth probably lies somewhere in between.
But think about that...at the risk of falling back on an utterly overused rhetorical point, imagine modern news covering Nazism. Think about what CBS News would look like in taking a "balanced" approach to Nazism. Point: Jews are people too and have a rich cultural heritage. Counterpoint: Jews are evil and must be exterminated to make way for the Third Reich. This week we explore the pros and cons of genocide of God's chosen people. Brought to you by Ford. Stay tuned!
It's fucking ludicrous. As Jon Stewart at some point pointed out, why even have "news" if all it's going to do is serve as a medium for people from the Left and the Right to spout talking points? A fucking wall could do that. You could have a hedgehog moderate. There's no reason for a journalism degree. The whole point of having freedom of the press was to allow some kind of objective reporting of the facts. Sure, "objective" is an unachievable ideal, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth striving for anyway. So much of the hijinx Bush has pulled has been objectively bullshit, and yet the main news organizations haven't called him on it. Social Security is a beautiful example of that...the numbers they're publishing are objectively fictitious, and yet the country is actively debating an argument based on smoke and mirrors.
Once again, I suppose, we must stand in awe of the ability of conservatives to manipulate a thoroughly broken system and get the poor and indigent residents of the red states to vociferously support the dismantling of the very programs that are designed to help them.
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
Must...get...image...out of...brain...
Can I please never, ever see or hear the words "semen-frosted" and "brownie" in such close proximity again? Please?
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
The consequences of peeking
Wow...when being impatient about hearing your results comes back to bite you in the ass...
Wear your tinfoil hats!!!
Doesn't this sound a wee bit paranoid to you? I mean, even if he's right, it still sounds a bit cracked to keep repeating the phrase, "Enemies of Linux."
Government as champion of the wealthy
I just hope schoolchildren of the future look back on this time the same way we look back on the pre-civil rights era, thinking to ourselves, "What the fuck was wrong with them?"
It's so telling that amendments attempting to close loopholes for the rich were killed. Blows my mind that anyone with an income of less than $100k could vote Republican.
It's so telling that amendments attempting to close loopholes for the rich were killed. Blows my mind that anyone with an income of less than $100k could vote Republican.
Monday, March 07, 2005
Yet another .NET argument
I found this rather an interesting ping pong on .NET.
A few of Grimes' comments are spot-on, but many are totally off-base. Microsoft is in no way abandoning .NET. The problem is that it's hard to justify rewriting things in managed code when they work well enough in unmanaged code. Similarly, as Fernandez points out, .NET isn't necessarily a good tool for building operating systems (as the Windows division is doing), and it never was supposed to be because most people don't build operating systems. However, it's generally great for building stuff on top of operating systems. Sure, .NET has all kinds of problems, performance and otherwise. This is always the case with any relatively new platform. Unix and Linux have been around for decades at this point, and they're still working out the bugs. .NET has only been around for a few years.
Moreover, it's stupid to criticize it for being a thin veneer over Win32. What the fuck else would it be? That's how you transition from one platform to another. You create a new interface and then implement that interface on top of whatever platform you have. In the case of Windows, that's Win32. Once you have people writing against the new interface, you can wipe away Win32 from underneath it and replace it with something more reasonable. Unfortunately, Grimes is right about Microsoft setting an arbitrary deadline for the next version of Windows, so things that should have been done for Longhorn aren't being done, which sucks. But this is what happens to every piece of software written by anyway. It's a business, and you can't go too long without rejuvenating your revenue stream. So at some point you have to cut your losses and release what you have. I'm not saying that's a good thing, but it happens. You'd think Microsoft would learn from the Windows ME debacle, but no...
The one thing Grimes is right about is what a piece of shit VB.NET is. I wholeheartedly agree. I hated VB, and VB.NET takes the worst parts of VB and .NET and combines them to form a Captain Planet of crap. VB in general was a horrific, abortive attempt to take something that is inherently hard (programming) and to try to make it accessible to idiots. Consequently, it ended up being a mess, because to do anything useful, you have to actually consider the things that VB covers up, which means introducing horrible hacks. VB is an embarassment. While we're at it, PERL is an embarassment too, but in that case it's because people took a reasonable language to use for simple scripts and tried to make it a full-fledged programming language. At least PERL has a kernel of usefulness in it.
Ok, done with my programming rant for the day.
A few of Grimes' comments are spot-on, but many are totally off-base. Microsoft is in no way abandoning .NET. The problem is that it's hard to justify rewriting things in managed code when they work well enough in unmanaged code. Similarly, as Fernandez points out, .NET isn't necessarily a good tool for building operating systems (as the Windows division is doing), and it never was supposed to be because most people don't build operating systems. However, it's generally great for building stuff on top of operating systems. Sure, .NET has all kinds of problems, performance and otherwise. This is always the case with any relatively new platform. Unix and Linux have been around for decades at this point, and they're still working out the bugs. .NET has only been around for a few years.
Moreover, it's stupid to criticize it for being a thin veneer over Win32. What the fuck else would it be? That's how you transition from one platform to another. You create a new interface and then implement that interface on top of whatever platform you have. In the case of Windows, that's Win32. Once you have people writing against the new interface, you can wipe away Win32 from underneath it and replace it with something more reasonable. Unfortunately, Grimes is right about Microsoft setting an arbitrary deadline for the next version of Windows, so things that should have been done for Longhorn aren't being done, which sucks. But this is what happens to every piece of software written by anyway. It's a business, and you can't go too long without rejuvenating your revenue stream. So at some point you have to cut your losses and release what you have. I'm not saying that's a good thing, but it happens. You'd think Microsoft would learn from the Windows ME debacle, but no...
The one thing Grimes is right about is what a piece of shit VB.NET is. I wholeheartedly agree. I hated VB, and VB.NET takes the worst parts of VB and .NET and combines them to form a Captain Planet of crap. VB in general was a horrific, abortive attempt to take something that is inherently hard (programming) and to try to make it accessible to idiots. Consequently, it ended up being a mess, because to do anything useful, you have to actually consider the things that VB covers up, which means introducing horrible hacks. VB is an embarassment. While we're at it, PERL is an embarassment too, but in that case it's because people took a reasonable language to use for simple scripts and tried to make it a full-fledged programming language. At least PERL has a kernel of usefulness in it.
Ok, done with my programming rant for the day.
A less vitriolic (i.e., less political) note
On Saturday I went to see Animation Show 2005, which was awesome. I think Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeld got tired of the crap that Spike and Mike have been putting out lately and decided to start their own rival festival. It has turned out very well. I actually got to meet Don Hertzfeld (creator of Billy's Balloon), which was a trip. He's just as warped as you would guess he is.
In other news, Bush nominates Pol Pot as envoy to Amnesty International...
Honestly, my first thought was: why the hell didn't Bush just nominate a fucking hampster as UN ambassador? It would make the point that he thought the UN was shit just as well but ultimately would do less damage. Fucking fuck...
Well, let's get ready to rumble, I guess...
I'll put money down that Republicans will attempt the rules change. How can they not? They believe they have a divine mandate to reshape the universe to their warped view of it. I just wish I thought it would generate the appropriate level of public outcry. That would mean the Democrats would have their shit together enough to frame their subsequent shutdown of government as a response to tyranny and the dismantling of minority rights and not, as the Republicans will inevitably try to paint it, as a bunch of grumpy children throwing a tantrum because they didn't get the flavor of lollipop they wanted. At the moment, I have no reason to hold such faith.
As Lord Helmet so famously put it in Space Balls, "Evil will always beat Good, because Good is dumb."
As Lord Helmet so famously put it in Space Balls, "Evil will always beat Good, because Good is dumb."
I'm already tired of hearing about social security
People, this isn't actually all that hard. Conservatives hate government-run social programs, ergo, they hate social security. They want to get rid of it, but they can't get rid of it outright because a) too many people actually like it, and b) old people especially like it, and the fuckers vote. So, if you can't outright get rid of it, slowly dismantle it. The nice part about that plan is that you can frame your dismantling under the banner of reform. But to motivate reform, you have to show why you think the system is broken. Hence, suddenly we've started hearing about how social security is going to go broke and how this is an imminent problem.
Thing is, even if the projections are right, social security isn't fucked for several decades. And even then if the economy performs as Bush's budgets says it will, social security will be just fine thank you. But let's assume it is fucked. First of all, I don't even know why we're talking about this now given that the budget and trade deficits are far greater and more imminent threats to long-term economic stability than social security will ever be. But let's ignore that little detail for the moment and go ahead and consider social security. Even if social security is indeed fucked 40 years down the road, as I've said before, it's not fundamentally broken. It's going to have to endure a temporary demographic shift. Ok, fine. You have two choices. You can either infuse it with extra money to tide it over, or you can reduce benefits. Personally, I'm in favor of the latter. Social security should be a welfare program, and people who don't need the money shouldn't get it. Simple. Pick some reasonable rules about who actually needs the money, and then adjust expenses accordingly. Rich old people shouldn't get my money. And I bet if you make that change, you might just have enough left over to pay for a war or two. See? I can compromise.
Thing is, even if the projections are right, social security isn't fucked for several decades. And even then if the economy performs as Bush's budgets says it will, social security will be just fine thank you. But let's assume it is fucked. First of all, I don't even know why we're talking about this now given that the budget and trade deficits are far greater and more imminent threats to long-term economic stability than social security will ever be. But let's ignore that little detail for the moment and go ahead and consider social security. Even if social security is indeed fucked 40 years down the road, as I've said before, it's not fundamentally broken. It's going to have to endure a temporary demographic shift. Ok, fine. You have two choices. You can either infuse it with extra money to tide it over, or you can reduce benefits. Personally, I'm in favor of the latter. Social security should be a welfare program, and people who don't need the money shouldn't get it. Simple. Pick some reasonable rules about who actually needs the money, and then adjust expenses accordingly. Rich old people shouldn't get my money. And I bet if you make that change, you might just have enough left over to pay for a war or two. See? I can compromise.
When your bullshit comes back to haunt you
Now, why would China be skeptical about the quality of American intelligence data?
Next step: Ambulance care provided only if you agree to a new cell phone contract!
At what point is "it cost a lot to make it" going to cease to be an excuse for drug companies to do whatever the hell they want to?
Saturday, March 05, 2005
Apple as Microsoft
See? I've been saying this for years. There's nothing really special about the shit Microsoft has pulled. It's mostly a function of market position. Any other company in Microsoft's position would do essentially the same kinds of things. And voila...observe Apple, finding itself in a dominant market position, suddenly starting to act assholically.
Your tax dollars at work
Just gives you a warm, sickened feeling to know your tax dollars are being spent to sell political bullshit, doesn't it?
Friday, March 04, 2005
Things that could never, ever happen in the US
Imagine...accountability for misrepresenting evidence that provided a basis for going to war. Damnit, that's just un-American...
Thursday, March 03, 2005
Yet another headline you never, ever expect to see...
It takes a minute for your brain to progress from the headline to the actual article. The headline is such a bizarre phrase that your brain actually seizes up for a minute to protect itself.
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
Remember that whole betraying your country thing? Yeah, about that...
Man...this kinda sucks for the spies...
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
Forget playing with your food...what about parenting it?
See, that's just not going to go well. Would you adopt a pepper steak? I didn't think so...
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