State of the Union: Bored

I didn't really expect anything different, but the State of the Union address is really, really boring. Bush isn't saying anything. So far I've got:

• Terrorism: Bad
• Democracy: Good
• Unrelatedly, Hamas should stop blowing stuff up
• Support our troops
• Strong ecomony: Good
• Government waste: Bad
• Doing something about social security and medicare costs, which constitute over 60% of the budget, might be a good idea.
• We should talk about that. We'll even include the Democrats. At least, you know, in the talking part. Probably not in the doing stuff part though.
• Secure the border
• Expensive healthcare: Bad
• We use oil. God put all the oil underneath mean people. This seems bad.
• Corn is good.
• I had this dream where we had magical cars that ran, not on oil, but on dreams. Wouldn't that be cool?
• Math and Science: Good
• Funding basic science seems like a good idea. Maybe we shouldn't have cut all that research spending. To be fair, we had to make a token effort to make it look like we were paying for the tax cuts.
• Being nice: Good.
• Yay Sandra Day O'Connor.
• Life: Good.
• Ethics: Good.
• Staying in school: Good.
• Rebuilding Gulf Coast: Good.
• HIV: Bad.
• Americans: Good.

The only really controversial things he's said are:

• Immigrants: necessary
• The tax cuts that we made temporary so that it wouldn't explode budget estimates should (surprise!) be made permanent
• We will cut the deficit in half by 2009. Somehow. We didn't tell you before, but we have a magic powder that will do this that we got from a pixie.
• We're helping the poor and sick. No, really, I swear. Just don't ask me for evidence of it.
• Your doctor's bill and prescriptions are expensive because your doctor gets sued a lot.
• Teenagers are having fewer abortions because we told them not to have sex.
• People spend a lot of time worrying about courts that don't tell gay people God hates them.
• 'Member how I put two new members on the Supreme Court? That was cool.
• I like my wife. You should let her do stuff.
• Church groups who have never dealt with AIDS education seem the best people to deal with the problem, don't you think? They seem to have a firm grasp on reality, I've found.
• I'm like MLK.

Curious to see if the rebuttal will say anything more substantial. If I had to guess, I'd go with "no."

Sony ain't got shit

Let me go on record right now as saying that any Xbox Live competitor Sony comes up with will be utter crap, at least in comparison. Ignoring the fact that Microsoft has been working on Live for many years now, the mere fact that Microsoft is a software company and Sony isn't means they are facing a near insuperable barrier to entry out of the gate.

For fuck's sake. Literally.

Can we please just fire-bomb Kansas and start over with a less retarded population?

Jesus: "I will survive!"

Wrong on so many levels.

(yes, I've been at Google Video again...)

Grad school admission dates

(A rare personal information about me post...)

For those that have asked, I actually bothered to go look on various schools' admissions pages and found that notifications generally go out late February/early March.

Also, I realized I really need to go update my work web page. Sigh. I really hate personal web pages, to be honest. They usually contain all kinds of personal information that no one really cares about. I hope the various admissions committees are too busy to bother looking at applicant web pages.

Well, Conservatives certainly are organized...I'll give them that

Why is it that Democrats (or liberals, since they're not really the same...probably part of the problem from the get-go) are fundamentally unable to organize such well-oiled and powerful networks? I am not merely lamenting here...I genuinely would like to know. Is it that the liberal base is too diverse a group, and trying to get them to cooperate on a wide, far-reaching agenda is like herding cats? Is it that every dinky little interest group is too myopically focused on their particular issue that they are politically unable to see the forest through the trees? Maybe it's simply that Conservatives had a 20-year head start on them...I don't know.

I would love to be able to blame a Conservative conspiracy, and certainly there is a fundamental funding disparity, but I don't think that's the critical factor. There is a fundamental disorganization on the part of groups on the Left that seems to be their own doing (and, of course, undoing). Each individual group (ACLU, PFAW, Planned Parenthood, Move On, etc. etc. etc.) seems reasonably organized on their own, but they are totally incapable of cooperating. There had to have been points on which the Federalists and the Religious Right disagreed, but they seem to have done a damn good job of getting shit done nonetheless. What gives?

Maybe it's that liberals are still not in the mindset of a minority and remain focused on how most of America is stupid (which, admittedly, it is) and how they are losing to tactics rather than policy. Maybe it's that they have to become as cynical as the Right have and stop worrying about ethics, morality, or any other such pesky issues of conscience and do whatever it takes to wrest control of the country back, even if that means outright lying (strategically) to the electorate. Seems to have done wonders for the neocons. Their only problem was that once they finally got what they wanted, it turned out to have been a fundamentally terrible idea, and in fact such a disaster in practice that even they haven't really been able to cover it up.

Only the beginning

This is what will happen if any schmuck can edit a Wikipedia entry.

In contrast...

This hurts me. Very, very deeply. I just died a little inside.

I'm...I'm going to need a minute here

I...I just...whew...umm...yeah, can you come back to me?

(I think that's the closest I'll ever be able to get to watching porn at work...god bless you Carmen Electra)

Holy hell

Now _that's_ fucking public transportation!

There are no words to describe this

Axel F...insanity test...annoying frog...I got nuthin'.

Update: There's a BBC story, and there's an album. I shit you not.

Debate is pointless

Not surprising, but here's the evidence: people ignore evidence.

I've always regarded debate as ultimately pointless except insofar as it's good practice at debating.

Google censoring results

How's that whole "Don't be evil" motto working out for you guys?

From a technical and business perspective, Google has been doing some amazing shit. But from a corporate culture perspective, it's a goddamn scary cult sometimes. One of these years Google is going to slam into middle age at approximately a bazillion miles an hour, and they won't have any fucking idea how to cope with it.

"Shit...we're a big, stagnant, amoral corporation. We've become Microsoft. Fuck."

What?!

"We Black" is going away?!

Oh, so profoundly delicious

This doesn't even need a snide comment. It speaks for itself.

Some quality Amazon reviews

Amazon is becoming a good source of entertainment...

Search engines as leeches

I would retitle this article, "Why Google's stock price is so high."

Therapy in a pill

Major traumatic event in your life? Here! Take this pill!

"You've got..."

"...herpes!"

It's a good idea, but man...can you imagine getting an e-card from them? There are so many delicious possibilities for doing that tastelessly.

"Ever wondered what it would be like for it to burn when you pee?"
"Hypothetically, how would you feel about oozing sores on your genitals?"
"Clap on!..."
"After a night of freaky sex, I hope you're well rested/But just as a thought, you might want to get tested..."
"We want to give you oral...antibiotics!"
"Herpes: the gift that keeps on giving..."
"You've got three letters. The first is H, and the last one is V. Is the middle one P or I? Find out!..."
"Ever heard that song 'Tainted Love'?..."

Etc...

Web 3.0

I was amused by this quippy rant against Web 2.0 culture. If you don't know what Web 2.0 is, count yourself lucky, and try not to learn until the hype passes.

Fuck Scalia

Forget anything I may have said about any judicial principles I was under the delusion Scalia was loyal to. Is there any more basic test of state's rights and limited government than assisted suicide?

Ah yes

Welcome to the Internet of the future. So much for our current democratic panacea. Say hello to the market forces that have thus-far been supressed in the name of incubating a new market.

Remember your economics, boys and girls: in the long run, you never get something for nothing.

God is pissed

Hey, maybe He's pissed off because every idiot pundit and political figure you can think of seems to have the audacity to think they have any fucking clue what He's thinking. You ever think of that?

Oh for fuck's sake

You're not serious, are you? Jesus and video games? Really?

The absurdity of ad absurdum

Do I even need to tell you how absurd this rant on DRM versus Security is? No. But I'm going to anyway. Or at least, I want to address the "issues" Mr. Yodaiken raises as I think it's an interesting intellectual exercise.

1. This issue is the "analog hole" issue. Except it's not. You always lose some amount of fidelity when you convert to or from analog and digital. But plugging the audio out from your computer back into the audio in and recording a piece of DRM'd music still sounds decent, and that scares the RIAA and the MPAA. They'd prefer it if everything but the speakers dealt in digital, because then everything could be mandated to carry DRM protections. But that's a damn far cry from having a security camera shut off when it recognizes a copy-protected image. That's quite simply a ridiculous extreme that wouldn't serve as a means to perpetrate mass-infringement, and therefore wouldn't have such idiotic protections on it, and it's paranoid to think anyone would ever propose such a thing.
2. This is a minor software problem. One answer is simply that in a world of media appliances, the frequency with which you will be replacing individual hardware components will be very low. When's the last time you replaced a video card in your Tivo?
3. You always have to determine where the DRM boundary is, and where it will be placed will be dictated by common sense. You don't care about DRM on a blood test machine...you care about DRM on a patient's medical records. Will any idiot set up a system where a DRM-sensitive database refuses to accept non-DRM'd blood data? No. That's retarded. You'll have a system where the blood data will be inserted into a patient's medical records, _then_ protected with digital rights.
4. This is an age-old legal issue that really has nothing to do with DRM. These are the same sorts of issues that arise when you have legal wrangling over a paper copy of something, or in fact any object that cannot be easily duplicated. All DRM does is turn something that is easily copied or transferred into something that is not.
5. What?? Is using a media player in a manufacturing system a big concern for people?
6. This is another stupid objection. You don't install random pieces of software on systems that have hard real-time demands. You don't do that now, let alone in a DRM world. What hospital allows people to install file-sharing software on heart monitors, for fuck's sake?! If a system that had hard real-time demands needed DRM for some reason, it would be built in from the get go and designed not to interfere with the scheduling.
7. Seriously, what world is this guy living in? Software for home entertainment or offices is vastly different from software that controls planes and ICUs, and the latter has vastly more stringent demands on creation and maintenance actions. You don't have some jerkoff installing "something cool" he found on the web on an ICU computer.
8. I refuse to address this point as it's a) too much like previous points, and b) too stupid.
9. Viruses are pieces of software that subvert the intended functions of the piece of software they are infecting, therefore the effects of a virus are inherently unstable and unpredictable. What does this have to do with DRM?
10. Remote verification of license integrity is a separate issue from DRM (or, in other words, nothing says that a DRM scheme involves outside checks). Ergo, again, this has nothing to do with DRM.
11. Hooks to be used by viruses is more an issue of OS security than it is DRM.

You know, on retrospect, that exercise felt like an utter waste of time. I really want to debate someone who has more intelligent points to make.

Dangers of marriage

Yeah...pretty well articulates my fears relating to marriage...add in the slave to kids and mortgage thing, and that's about right...

Maryland health care bill

Liberal though I am, I'm not sure making WalMart pay at least 8% of their payroll is necessarily a good idea. It's the supply-side that needs to be addressed, not necessarily the demand-side. Making WalMart pay more may just cause their insurers to charge more, in which case you're simply shifting money from WalMart to an HMO without improving anyone's benefits.

If you're going to interfere with a market, make sure the ultimate effect you will have is the one you want.

Confirmation hearing annoyance

I just have to mention that I've been listening to a bunch of the Alito hearings, and every time I do I get more annoyed. Not necessarily because Alito is a conservative fucktard (which he is), but because he doesn't answer a single goddamn question. I know this is not something that is particular to Alito and that every modern nominee does his best to dodge questions, but it's still infuriating. It's like confirmation hearings have become an idiotic game of cat and mouse where the opposition party attempts to ask hard questions and the nominee does his damndest to avoid answering all of them at all costs. Alito wouldn't even answer basic yes or no questions like "Do you think that term limits or age caps should be imposed on federal judges?" There are three fucking answers to that question: yes, no, or I'm not sure. "There are many different views on that" is not a fucking answer!

Mouse sadism

"Kazuya Ikematsu and his colleagues anesthetized and then killed two small groups of mice, by either strangulation with a string, or by decapitation."

These guys really need a less morbid hobby.

The United Freemasons

Ever flown United and wondered what those "Global Services" people they talk about in announcements are? Wonder no more. Instead, consider being creeped out.

Fiscal responsibility

Seriously, if you're a conservative, I don't want to hear any shit from you about government spending before you give me an appropriately incensed condemnation of the Iraq war as being both stupid and costly. We could pay for all the government pork that both sides despise, let alone those "expensive" controversial social programs there's disagreement about, several times over with the amount of money that's been frittered away on this war.

What's wrong with this picture?

Well, it's an article about Enron, and a picture of Enron, and yet something seems amiss...

On judicial activism

Having seen this headline on Alito, I felt the need to comment. And by felt the need to comment, I mean that I don't want to work and this seems a reasonable way to procrastinate.

Complaints about judicial activism are stupid, plain and simple. "Judicial activism" is merely Republican code for "not agreeing with us." Moreover, it's a dangerous fallacy to profess a belief in a single, totally objective interpretation of law. It just doesn't exist, and to convince people that it does is to convince them that one particular viewpoint is an indisputable truth, which, much as the conservative Congressional majority would like us to believe, it isn't.

Judges are not administrators, and they were never meant to be. That is, it is not the case that the law is entirely prescriptive, and judges are there merely to unquestioningly administer those prescriptions. Reality, and consequently law, are simply too complex for that to be the case. It is unavoidable that a judge must attempt to discern intent behind a set of laws and rule accordingly. The difference between rule of law and prejudicial magistrates is that a judge is supposed to base his or her judgments on an academic interpretation of law and precedent rather than his or her own personal opinions about either the specific case or the issue at hand. It is unavoidable, however, that a judge's opinions about particular judicial principles shape his or her judgments, and that is has it should be. Though Scalia is generally a sleaze, and he should never be forgiven for his prejudice in the Bush v. Gore case, it is to his credit that he dissented to the majority opinion that upheld the federal government's priority in regulation of marijuana use in California. I'm sure, being the conservative douchebag he is, he hates the idea of legalized marijuana, but he felt compelled to rule in favor of it based on his belief in limited government and states' rights. That's how judges are supposed to operate.

It is frustrating, then, to see all this rhetoric about "judicial activism" surrounding Alito. It's quite simply the wrong fucking debate. The issue is not whether Alito will dispassionately administer the law "as it is written." The Supreme Court by its very nature addresses issues where the law is murky, and decisions will necessarily be based upon larger issues and concerns. Therefore, what people _should_ be looking at is what Alito's views on the Constitution are, and what larger principles he adheres to when making decisions. And the evidence is compelling that he believes in an extremely limited governmental power to regulate, well, anything, as well as an interpretation of fundamental Constitutional principles that is so narrow as not to be applicable to modern issues (a la abortion) the way Scalia and Thomas do. And it is on that fact, not his supposed "activism," that he should be filibustered as an extremist.

(As an aside, this op-ed by George Will, who is often a right-wing douchebag, was surprisingly cogent. Probably that's because the one area I tend to agree with Conservatives [that is, true, academically honest Conservatives] is on the value of meritocracy over democracy...people are basically dumb and quite often leaving decision-making up to them is a terrible idea)

Oh hell

Please tell me Sharon's stroke isn't going to turn into another Shiavo incident.

Once more

Didn't they already make this, and wasn't it called Blade?

In case you were wondering

Bush is still a douche.

Return of Futurama

It seems Futurama will be following in Family Guy's footsteps.

This suggests to me that the initial failure of both Futurama and Family Guy rest not on those shows' respective creators and writers but squarely on the shoulders of the idiots in charge of scheduling at Fox. Fucking 'tards.

Urges

Believe it or not, you're probably better off as a consumer going with Microsoft's Urge music service over iTunes. Heresy, I know, but let me explain...

Apple makes virtually no money on iTunes. In fact, virtually nobody makes money on music services because consumers generally aren't willing to pay that much for individual songs, and what they will pay is pretty much exactly what the RIAA is willing to sell the licenses for. The reason, then, that Apple even bothers with iTunes is one reason and one reason only: to sell iPods. And guess what? If iTunes exists solely to support iPod sales, do you think Apple will ever open up their DRM-protected audio format to other music players? Nope!

In contrast, Microsoft's Urge will undoubtedly be supported by Windows Mobile and Windows media licenses, which means that Microsoft has an incentive to have as many different devices be able to access the service as possible. So, in fact, you'll (probably) have more options with Urge than you will with iTunes. Fancy that.

But yes, I know...Microsoft is evil, Apple only does things that are pure and true, blah blah blah. Do you people have any idea the premiums Apple gets on their hardware? It's ridiculous, and it's totally unjustifiable by anything but zealotry.

A goddamn waste of money

I saw this story on people in Missouri (who no doubt have nothing better to do) finding the largest known prime number, and I couldn't help but think about what an utter waste of time, money, and resources it was.

I am, of course, as big a nerd as they come, but calculating large prime numbers seems stupid and pointless to me. I don't think we really gain anything from it. It doesn't advance crypto research or anything like that, and it's not really much of an engineering feat to do it. It just takes a really long time.

I did a quick back of the hand calculation with a researcher here, and we estimated that, given about 10 cents per kilowatt per hour, the 700 compute years it took to calculate the prime would cost somewhere between $100k to $300k.

That's a fuck of a lot of money to pay for a prime number.

Cool! Or hot. Or rather, both.

Seems plausible to me...wonder if it has any future.

I am increasingly of the opinion that the world really doesn't have an energy crisis and never truly will. There's a fucking huge (and I mean fucking _HUGE_) perpetual thermonuclear explosion going on not 8 light-minutes from our goofy little blue orb that's generating more energy than we could ever hope to consume. The problem is converting it to something usable in an efficient and cheap way.

The amount of power potentially available from solar, wind, and geothermal sources is copious and renewable. There's enough power out there to power your car, your house, your pda, your xbox, your blender, your fridge, your a/c, your microwave, and even your cat for fuck's sake...that's not the issue. The issue is that all our equipment is geared towards the combustion of fossil fuels, and that's very difficult (and costly) to change. Now, if we didn't have assholes like Ted Stevens in Congress who want to drill in ANWR for their own personal amusement and profit (they saute baby seals in petrochemicals...I've seen it!), we might actually embark on a prudent plan for developing such technologies and switching over to them. But, instead, because Americans are lazy and their politicians are corrupt, we're going to bury our heads in the sand and keep using oil until there isn't a drop left and then panic. Oh, we'll have plenty of energy, but we won't be able to use it. Like having a potato gun but no potatoes. Or Barbies. Or anything else one launches with a potato gun. Kittens. Whatever.

Dear god...sensible legislation!

From Wisconsin, no less!

Though I have business issues with the open source movement, this kind of legislation is just plain common sense. Computer scientists have been screaming since the whole electronic voting debacle that you have to have a paper trail for something as important as voting, and for transparency reason the "blueprints" for the voting software need to be viewable by the public. I mean, fucking "duh."

On a related topic, I realized the other day that there's kind of an inherent tension between patents and open source. As I've said before, I think freely available source code for commercial software is generally, with a few exceptions, a good thing. It allows for external evaluation and better compatibility between programs. I part company with open source, however, when it comes to the "free software" movement because, well, it's stupid, or at the very least counter-productive. But I've rambled about that topic before.

In my ideal world, you shouldn't need to hide your code in order to protect your inventions or business model. Things like copyright should prohibit you from using a piece of commercial software willy-nilly without paying for it because, all things being equal, the law should prohibit actions you could potentially take rather than fundamentally strip your ability to take those actions in the first place. It's the difference between having speed limits and putting a speed regulator in your car that prevents you from going more the 65 mph. One is a sensible world, the other downright Orwellian (no really...it's definitionally Orwellian...read "1984").

The problem is that such a world depends on protections of intellectual property, or in other words, the degree to which allowing anyone and everyone to look at your code does not jeapordize your incentive to develop a piece of software is directly correlated with the strength of intellectual property law, i.e., patents. But we've already said that the state of patent law in this country is ridiculous. Well, fuck. I guess you can't win.

Anyway, I stand by my assertion that IP law needs to be drastically more intelligent. Copyright is actually generally okay (except for its duration, which is unjustifiably long...80 years? Really? How much protection does Mickey need?), and is a good way to prevent outright theft of code. Patents are trickier...at the very least, the bar needs to be much higher ("one-click" is something that Sling Blade "french fried potaters" guy could have thought up while watching tv...that is _not_ a significant invention), and idiotic protections of things like business practices need to go. That was a pandora's box that never should have been opened.

But, of course, we have a government that goes to the highest bidder, so until Microsoft and the other tech giants decide to really put their muscle behind reforming patent law, it ain't changing any time soon.

Ha!

I stayed up for no apparent reason and solved an "evil" difficulty Sudoku. So there. Ah-pthththbbbtttt.

A quick addendum to the argument for universal health care

It occurred to me...utterly randomly...after a recent debate on if and how Walmart's decision to change their job descriptions in order to deter the elderly from seeking employment with the company (since it cost the company more in benefits to hire such people) amounted to discrimination, that implementing universal healthcare would essentially sidestep the issue.

The reason that Walmart wanted to deter the elderly from applying was largely health care costs. The problem, regardless of how moral you regard such a move, is that Walmart has to shoulder some of the cost of the elderly's health care. If the cost were on the state instead, there's no incremental cost to Walmart, and they have no more incentive to discriminate in the first place. Granted, there are other similar costs of having the elderly employed (more sick days, etc.), but I think it would help.

See? Problem solved. I'm a genius.

Agreed: worst name ever

She really is a biatch.

A serious moral question

Why is it okay to shoot whales to put them out of their misery but not okay to give old, very sick people a painless way to die? Why is human suffering less important than whales'?

BusinessWeek op-ed on the broken state of US patent law

BusinessWeek has a slightly more evidence-backed argument against the current state of patent law in the US than I have herein made.