Stephen Colbert at the White House Press Corps dinner

Fan-tas-tic.

Amateur lightsabre battle

I gotta say, for being amateurs, and amateur kids at that, it's pretty damn impressive. Well choreographed and everything.

No.

Look. I'm all in favor of having a restaurant where female waitresses willingly turn themselves into sexual objects for my gratification. Hell, I might even stay in a hotel dedicated to that purpose in Vegas.

But if you're going to build a Hooters in an exotic location, the _last_ place you should build one is in China. Is this just wishful thinking on the part of Chinese businessmen? Like, if you put skimpy clothing on Asian women, they'll magically get, well, hooters?

A quote that had to be shared

No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
- WH Auden

That pretty much sums up my distaste for both opera and musicals. I think West Side Story is the most quintessentially dumb musical in this regard. How can you have a story about rival gangs that involves dancing and ballads? Lost teeth, cigarette burns, gang rape, and being bound in a gasoline-soaked tire and set on fire, yes. Dancing? No. Not so much. Very few Tupac songs about how crappy a rival gang's choreography was in South Central...

A fickle god

John Kenneth Galbraith apparently just bit it. My uncle actually lives right next to him, so probably the neighborhood is a zoo at the moment.

Why is it that God seems to be striking down the good and meanwhile letting evil thrive?

I am a photographic genius!

Okay, not really. But I did have a few nice pics on my camera. Others here.


San Diego






I-280 in the Bay Area

When your family's long history of making bone-headed financial decisions comes back to haunt you

After this little gem, I think I just lost about $5000 between stock and options. Fucking Microsoft. Fucking Wall Street.

I had meant to exercise my options earlier, but of course I didn't get around to it. I thought to myself, "Well, what's the big deal? Microsoft stock doesn't really move much anyway..."


My family has a long history of making stupid financial decisions, so in some sense I'm doomed. My grandmother lost an original cell from Snow White (which is probably worth tens of thousands of dollars at this point), and my family also sold all its Eastman stock just before the merger that caused it to become Eastman-Kodak.

Why is this so hard?

Guys, look...I know each of you has your infrastructure all set up to use your respective next-gen DVD format, but come on...there has to be a sum of money or deal you can broker to get one of you to use the other's format. Your idiotic and stubborn greed is going to force the rest of the world to suffer a format war, and you'll be harming your own profit margin while most consumers wait for the winner to emerge before commiting to an entirely new format. This is a classic lose-lose when it could easily be turned into a win-win if you could get your heads out of your asses.

Dicks.

Yet another reason I come from the good Carolina

The southern, lesser one wants to ban sex toys.

Don't these people have better things to do? Is feeding the poor really less urgent that eliminating vibrators? Really?

There is a god!

And He hath bestowed upon us bigger boobies!

When you download music, the terrorists win

Are you shitting me? Is this the mantra now? Anything somebody doesn't like can be construed as funding terrorists?

Somehow I don't think Al-Qaeda is getting rich off of bootleg Kelly Clarkson CDs.

Oh, right, I forgot...

Republicans are still douchebags.

Republican operating procedure:
If you don't like the idea, insist on endless studies to "get the facts."
If you do like the idea, immediately close off all debate on the topic and label those who oppose you obstructionist.

A quick musical critique

The Red Hot Chili Peppers are fantastic musicians and terrible poets/lyricists. I love a bunch of their music, but their lyrics always make me cringe. Because they're trite and retarded. The lyrics, I mean. I don't know about the guys. One of them _is_ named Flea though.

That is all.

Linus is an asshole

The Linux Linus, not the Charlie Brown one.

This is what I hate about some kinds of engineers and developers. They turn arguments about programming personal, and they think that just because they think they know better than everyone else gives them license to behave like an asshole. It doesn't. Civility and respect for one's peers doesn't evaporate because you can do math well.

People like to talk about how democratic Linux and Open Source is, but in fact it's really more like a monarchy or dictatorship with an arguably benevolent dictator. Ultimately, a very few number of people have control about which patches get into the Linux kernel and which ones don't. At best that is a representative democracy with no checks and balances. But I don't know that Linus actually ever faces elections over his control of the kernel.

Stupid United

Why must there be inflation in frequent flyer miles required for award tickets? It's not like San Francisco is moving farther away from New York every year, for fuck's sake...

A phrase you don't expect to read

Did they really just say the animals were "radioactive...but otherwise healthy"?

No...no no no...see, glowing and radioactive is not a minor physiological quirk. One cannot be "healthy" and "radioactive" at the same time. If you glow in the dark and emit a low humming sound when standing perfectly still, I think it's safe to say you are very, very far from healthy.

No sympathy

Fer fuck's sake...do I even need to say it?! Frankly, I think he should be able to use the fact that the two women let him in as a defense.

"Look, your honor...I, looking like the creepy old man I am, went around door-to-door asking women if they wanted free breast exams. They voluntarily let me in. They thought to themselves, 'You know, I _have_ needed a breast exam for a while, and I don't find it at all odd that an overweight old man is wandering around neighborhoods offering to fondle women's breasts. Come in, good sir!' I think it's only fair that I get to touch boob if I have to deal with the fact that there are people that stupid still alive in the modern world."

My impulse to protect people from being taken advantage of has limits, boys and girls. At some point, for the good of the gene pool, natural selection should be allowed to take its course.

Go away

You had your chance Mr. Kerry. You, and the rest of the Democrats, blew it. And now you're a loser in the collective consciousness. Do us all a favor and don't fuck up two consecutive elections. Please?

Your daily idiotic patent

Microsoft's guilty of patent infringement. The patent? Using a product key.

Are you shitting me? The patent system has gotten ridiculous...

Are you fucking shitting me?

Yes. That's it. Everything would be fine if we just reinstituted the draft. You fucking retard.

1) Iran's crazy nuclear talk is all just posturing for the sake of domestic public opinion. Nothing galvanizes a country behind a leader, no matter how crazy or inept he is, more than a credible external threat. Just ask Mr. Bush. The _worst_ thing you can do at this point is to provoke them.

2) You actually wrote this in something that you knew was going to be published in the New York Times: "President Bush has the perfect credentials overseas to execute this move, and little political capital at home to lose at this stage. Polls confirm that a wide majority of people in many countries view him and the United States as the major threat to global peace. Why let them down on this count? Go with the flow."

I...did you?...wow. Have you ever been so dumbfounded by a confrontation with stupid that you're left speechless?

3) You called Reagan a master of strategy. Just like Bush is a master of oratory? The man was a fucking retard. He had alzheimers, and he was a dick. If you're looking to him for foreign policy, that tells me you're an idiot with a dangerous failure to grasp the differences between the Cold War and the Middle East.

Please go back to jacking off to Rambo movies and stop cluttering the Times opinion section. Idiocy like yours just isn't as fun when it's so overt.

Stupid lack of foresight

This pisses me off. Wanna know why? Because I didn't think of it. September 12th (well, ok, maybe more like September 29th, or something like that), I should have put a whole lotta money in mining companies, but especially people like tire producers. This was entirely predictable. And I could have made money off of it.

Damnit.

Wow...go Windows!

Suck it, Apple.

Gabe from Penny Arcade reported getting 15-20 frames per second running World of Warcraft on his MacBook using OS X and then 30-40 frames per second on the same hardware using XP. Damn. Apparently software does matter.

Windows may not be able to do anything else right, but damnit, it still beats the shit out of Apple when it comes to games.

Why Free Software is bad

I think this is a great case for why I like the idea of Open Source and I generally detest the idea of Free Software for being a naive view of the world.

As Stallman points out, there are four basic freedoms involved in Free Software (and, incidentally, I think the comment that, "Real programmers count from zero..." is very telling. The point of a computer, dear Richard, is to interact with people. Most people aren't programmers, nor should they be. _People_ count from 1. Idiot...):

• Zero is the freedom to run the program as you wish
• One is the freedom to study and change the software
• Two is the freedom to redistribute copies as you wish
• Three is the freedom to distribute modifed versions as you wish.

As far as I'm concerned, One is the only important principle there. The danger to the software industry is having software that's a black box. It's extremely important for interoperability and safe layering of software to know the exact behavior of the software you're interacting with. Indeed, this mismatch between two interacting pieces of software is the cause of most bugs, security holes, reliability problems, etc. Moreover, it's the way software vendors lock you into their products. Therefore, it's important to be able to study code both for research purposes as well as for competitive marketplace purposes.

Typically, the counter-argument to Freedom One is that, well, if people can see your source code, they can just copy it and use it without compensating you, and there's no incentive to create software any more. With regard to literal copying, that can be taken care of with copyright. With regard to copying the idea, well, any significantly complex idea is difficult to copy correctly. The value of any piece of software is generally not the fundamental idea behind it, but instead the robustness of the particular implementation of that idea with respect to performance, reliability, managability, etc. By and large, you don't get a benefit with regard to the latter simply by looking at someone's code. So I think that objection is bullshit.

As for the other freedoms, I have ranted about how ridiculous they are as ipso facto virtues. They aren't. They're derivative virtues that are essentially principles attempting a particular implementation of a wider goal where that wider goal is...actually, I'm not even sure what the wider goal is. The mentality of the Free Software movement seems to parallel a wider Libertarian philosophy that total freedom to do anything is a virtue in and of itself, which is both naive and stupid. Personally, I would say that the goal is to make computer systems that make people's lives easier and better. That's not the same thing as saying anybody should be able to do anything with their computer and/or their software.

Want an example in which the two are different? I'll give you my three favorites:

1. Heterogeneity is the bane of managability, and computer managability is the single greatest headache of most consumers. In simpler, more concrete terms, computers infuriate most people because they are expected to be able to know what to buy, how to configure it, and how to fix it if it goes wrong. One of the best lessons we can learn from Windows is that if you give people enough rope to hang themselves, they will find a myriad of creative ways to do so. Want to install this ActiveX control? What about this program? How about executing this attachment? Think it's safe to go to this phishing web site? How about this driver...think it will destabilize your system? Etc. Most people neither want nor need all the flexibility of such a system, and would be downright grateful not to have to make those decisions.
2. Data has more semantic meaning and importance than simple bytes. If your medical records are digitized, you want some guarantee about what the computer systems that manipulate those records can and cannot do. It is not necessarily in your or society's interest to have someone be able to load arbitrary software on a server storing medical records, because then all bets are off.
3. Sometimes you want to be assured that a computer system not under your control faithfully performed some action. Think, for example, of a car odometer. When you buy a used car, you rely on the accuracy of the odometer to tell you how much that car has been driven. If someone came in and told you, "I should have the freeom to put whatever software I want in that odometer control!", you would probably get rather pissed off, don't you think?

Anyway...I think Stallman is an idiot (can you tell?), but Lessig I tend to have more respect for. I would like to hear his arguments against DRM as I suspect they are far more pragmatic than Stallman's.

(Keep in mind, incidentally, that because I think DRM is a good thing in principle doesn't mean I think it should be handed to industry carte blanche. We're being fucked by people like the RIAA, and I think DRM is our collective bargaining chip to get such people to stop being such monopolistic pricks. I.e., "We'll give you DRM, but you have to open up to increased competition. Mmm'k? Good boy. Have a biscuit.")

Working at Microsoft

A pretty good summary of working at Microsoft. I particularly agree with his comments on managers, both in the sense that there are too many of them and they get in the way, and in the sense that there's very little review or consideration of people skills in hiring managers. Most companies have the reverse problem: managers have nothing _but_ people skills (if even that), and they have no concept of the actual work being done. Microsoft (and now Google, incidentally) have the reverse problem: engineers tend to be the ones promoted to managerial positions, and consequently they have a very good grasp of the products and the technical issues, but they have _no_ idea how to deal with group dynamics or the fact that their reports are, you know, people.

Probably my other biggest gripe with being an employee at Microsoft is that there's no incentive in the review and compensation structure for group achievement. Everything's way too individual-focused, and consequently employees are basically pitted against each other in various ways. It's stupid.

But, overall, Microsoft really is a great place to work. I swear. Every group is different, and a lot of groups don't have these problems.

Wikipedia in a nutshell

Bravo, Mr. Sjöberg, Bravo!

30 second bunny theatre

I think my two favorites are Reservoir Dogs and Jaws. SmileYouSonOfA...!

No, no, I think Jaws is my favorite hands-down if for no other reason than the shark has bunny ears.

Dear sir

To whomever wrote the following on my NSF fellowship application review:

"The only reason candidate wants to pursue graduate study is because other colleagues have PhDs. Although proposed research is exciting and would benefit software systems, particularly Microsoft..."

I would like to offer a deep, heartfelt "Fuck. You." Did you even read my application, or did you just look at the fact I worked at Microsoft, have flashbacks to Windows 98 crashing in the middle of writing one of your technically shallow and uninsightful papers, and immediately conclude you didn't like me?

Not only do I have a very good idea of why I'm going back to grad school, but I guarantee I have a hell of a lot better idea than 90% of the people you gave awards to, most of whom are going to grad school because they can't figure out what the fuck else they will do when they graduate, and who will inevitably vanish into directionless oblivion soon after their grad school careers. I could quite happily stay in this job, but for some reason (one which is apparently beyond your comprehension), I voluntarily decided to take a drastic pay cut and up-end my life. Now, maybe you, my dear douche, are retarded enough and so incapable of independent thought that you would actually move to a different state and live off of $25k a year just because your friends did, but some of us actually, like, think through things. Try it sometime.

So, to reiterate, fuck you, fuck you, and, in closing, fuck you. If you didn't like me, or you thought the money would be better spent on someone with fewer financial means, fine, but you didn't have to be a dick about it.

Fuck you,
Nick

Don't make me come over there

Hey! Fuckers! Didn't I just say I didn't want to hear the word "teledildonics" used ever again? Didn't I?

-----
"A field dubbed "teledildonics" already allows people at two remote computers to manipulate electronic devices such as a vibrator at the other end for sexual purposes.

"People who use it are just blown away," said Steve Rhodes, president of Sinulate Entertainment, which has sold thousands of Internet-connected sex devices over the past three years. "This is not something that just the lunatic fringe does."

"The Iraq war...was kind of a boom for our company."
-----

*shudder*

How I learned to stop worrying and love the reactor

A founder of Greenpeace says he wants to take some time out from hugging trees and hug nuclear reactors. Aww...how cute.

Seriously, if we want to get rid of fossil fuels as a power source, the replacement is going to have to involve nuclear reactors. It's just that simple.

Just when you thought fundamentalists couldn't get any crazier

...They found a new low! Hooray!

From the "No, seriously, don't even _think_ of trying this at home" files

This has to be the most elaborate, and sloooowest, Rube Goldberg machine ever built. Nice use of chemistry.

I am a truly terrible person

Fun things to do on Easter Sunday: give your cousin a hard time about her paper on black kids in special-ed programs. Extra bonus: cross any and all lines of decency you can think of.

-----
...
(18:34:35) Suzanna: my paper
(18:40:34) Sirius137: on?
(18:43:45) Suzanna: the overrepresentation of african american males in special education programs
(18:44:32) Sirius137: so you're saying black people _aren't_ special?
(18:44:40) Suzanna: precisely
(18:44:45) Suzanna: no...
(18:44:58) Sirius137: they all look the same to you?
(18:45:16) Suzanna: word
(18:45:40) Suzanna: i'm saying that teachers are stupid and that tests used to assess and diagnose (to place) kids with LD in sp. ed. are culturally and linguistically biased and that aa males are five more times likely to be diagnosed as MR than white females
(18:45:46) Suzanna: ...among other things
(18:47:31) Sirius137: so black people can't take tests?
(18:48:03) Suzanna: no
(18:48:45) Sirius137: Why don't you want black people to be special, Suz?
(18:48:49) Sirius137: What do you have against them?
(18:48:56) Suzanna: they scare me
(18:49:32) Sirius137: fair enough. They are kind of violent. You can tell from the shape of the skull.
(18:49:45) Suzanna: And they smell kinda funny
(18:49:59) Sirius137: like chicken. and watermelon.
(18:50:09) Suzanna: oh nick...we're terrible
(18:50:38) Sirius137: you're the one writing a paper on how not special black people are.
(18:50:46) Suzanna: it's also kinda my major and minor
(18:50:58) Suzanna: afro am studies with a minor in education and child study (concentration: special needs)
(18:51:17) Sirius137: so, black people and how retarded they are?
(18:51:26) Suzanna: ...
(18:51:32) Sirius137: Jesus...that's so insensitive.

From the "people are gullible" files

For the jews...

TrailerTrashTastic!

Mmm...that's a whole lotta silicone and peroxide...

The Easter Bunny is going to kick your ass

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Damn skippy

No shit Rumsfeld should resign.

From what I can tell, the military is doing the best they can in a totally unworkable situation. At the same time as I find it totally incomprehensible why anyone would (while sober) join the military (in the past few years...not necessarily in general...I can understand why you might have done it back when the illusion that the military kept America safe and wasn't simply a political pawn hadn't been completely shattered), I think they deserve a lot of credit. They're being given idiotic orders, and they somehow have to find a way to carry them out. And they're doing it.

How about we do them a favor and get rid of the fucktards deciding policy?

A (hopefully) quick education rant

Look, I understand that the Republican leadership and the business leaders don't like academics who actually have some degree of independence and have an annoying penchant for pointing out what lying, underhanded pricks the Republicans and various industry agents are, but you don't have to go fucking up the American higher education system just because you're bitter.

Look, boys and girls: America doesn't produce shit anymore. Their manufacturing is dead, and agriculture is on its way out. The one (you hear me? The _one_!...) remaining competitive advantage we have is our academies, which are pretty much unparalleled in the world. Sure, they have their inefficiencies, but basically, yes, Mr. Miller, they're doing just fine, and we would do well to pat them on the back, say, 'Good job!", and give them more money to educate more people. The worst possible things you could do would be to a) drown them in standardized tests, or b) turn them into vocational schools that teach them just enough to get them employed.

American ingenuity is the one advantage we still have over the rest of the world, and these fuckers want to kill it. You breed ingenuity by both giving college students the background knowledge they need _and_ giving them relatively free reign to pursue the topics that interest them as per any decent liberal arts education. Making them take a semester class on fucking Excel just so companies can save on those training costs when they hire college grads is going to rapidly erode the quality of American universities and turn our college grads into mindless drones who not only can't think for themselves but know only how to perform drudgerous, repetitive tasks not even as well as their Indian and Chinese counterparts.

God I fucking hate businessmen who think the country should be run like a giant quantifiable assembly line.

Because it's fucking pretty

Teledildonics

Can I please never read anything ever again with the word "teledildonics" in it? Thanks. That'd be great.

Hey, I'm all in favor sexual exploration, but I really, really hope the tech part of my life and the sex part of my life never, ever meet. Ever.

(don't read too much into the fact I'm posting a sex article at 2 am...the correct conclusion you should draw is _not_ that I was up googling "teledildonics" [shudder] but rather that I'm bored and avoiding going to sleep because I know it means getting up and having to work will occur sooner)

An...alternate...view on parenting

For those of you who think babies cute, perhaps this will illuminate my feelings on parenting.

Japanese guide to ebonics

Oh yes, it had to be shared...

My god...a coherent essay on software patents

This is probably the most cogent essay on software patents I've ever read, and it is a breath of fresh air when compared against RMS's nonsense.

My only gripe with it is the degree to which Graham thinks software patents are inherently okay. I buy all (or at least most) of his pragmatic arguments to the effect that patents actually have very little effect on modern software development. But that doesn't mean that the patent system is therefore good. Big companies tend to hoard patents in the way superpowers tend to hoard nuclear weapons; no one is stupid enough to actually use them. Okay, fine...but then why do we have patents at all? Graham argues that the USPTO is to blame for issuing idiotic patents. I agree. But I don't necessarily agree that it's possible even in an ideal world that the USPTO could differentiate between trivial and non-trivial patents. I mean really...how in the world would you codify what is a "trivial" software creation and what isn't? Some of the most powerful ideas in software are the simplest (think of, for example, auto-complete).

Oddly, Graham seems to indirectly recognize this when he talks about the different barriers to construction of real world inventions versus software inventions. Moreover, he (correctly) notes that the particular algorithms used _aren't_ what's hard about writing software. It's the thousand little details and performance optimizations that differentiate a good program from a bad one. Consequently, it can't possibly be patents that are creating the incentive for people to invent in the software world. It's the fundamental difficulty in copying the idea alone. Most of the time, the patent is irrelevent.

So, I dunno...the more I think about it, the more I am of the opinion that software patents are pointless. Copyright and trade secrets are enough to promote growth in the field.

Our brains are actually different

Ever wondered why women make no sense? Well, it really is because their brains are wired differently.

:-D

Ladies and Gentlemen, a quick reminder:

Richard M Stallman is still an idiot.

It's the usual free software drivel, so rather than rant, I'll simply refer you to my previous posts on the subject.

A goddamn motherfucking brain teaser

Usually I hate brain teasers. And this case is no exception. Except this one keeps preoccupying me, so I'm going to make you suffer through it too.

-----

13 Yakuza subordinates go to the Yakuza boss's house. Out of respect, they all take off their shoes on the way in. After all of them have gathered, the boss walks over to the collection of shoes, sniffs, makes an unpleasant face, and picks up one (matching) pair of shoes. "These shoes are dirty and disgusting! Who dishonors me with such shoes?!" No one raises their hand. Infuriated, the Yakuza boss immediately shoots one of the subordinates utterly at random, takes the body and the offending shoes, and throws them into the snow.

Since the meeting cannot continue after such a violent episode, the boss dismisses the remaining subordinates. Each leaves one by one. If the subordinate's shoes are in the pile, he takes them and leaves. If not, he takes a random (matching) pair of shoes and leaves.

The question: What is the probability that the last man to leave takes his own shoes?

Update: I'll give you a small hint. I think it's probably easier to intuit the answer and then prove it than try to derive the answer (as I tried to).

Talk to me, Blendie!

I think I would do a lot more cooking if I had this blender.

(further proof that people at MIT have too much time on their hands)

Crazy clouds

I'd never heard of mammatus clouds before. You'll think it's photoshopped, but amazingly, it's not. An actual sight over Nebraska. Is this the first interesting thing to ever come out of Nebraska?

A frighteningly complete list of April Fool's hoaxes

Go wiki.

Google romance

You gotta love a company that has a sense of humor about itself. Microsoft would do well to poke a little more fun at its own ridiculousness.