Beware Paint

You never know what will happen to your innocent scribblings...

Insult to injury...oh, and more injury

Hey, need another reason to despise the Pentagon and policy makers?

For fuck's sake, how could depleted uranium _not_ be bad for you? And these idiots are coating tanks in the stuff?! Suddenly Gulf War Syndrome is much less mysterious...

The dark lord favors this one

"I called him. He's a personal friend," Rove told reporters traveling with Bush to Wisconsin.

Predictable politicizing

Were you surprised to read this New York Times article on the reaction to the bomb plot announcement? I wasn't.

It makes me fucking ill. That Lieberman is joining the Republican chorus makes me especially ill. I think I'm officially downgrading my opinion of Lieberman from "dislike" to "loathe."

This was the one paragraph that gave me some semblance of hope:

But in a sign of how this campaign might be different, Democrats struck a tone notably different from the elections of 2004 and 2002, when for the most part their strategy was to try to turn the subject away from national security. This time, Democrats attacked Republicans as failing to improve airline security and, most of all, argued that the decision to invade Iraq had been a distraction that depleted United States resources and allowed the world to become more dangerous.

For fuck's sake...the "weak on national security" horseshit Republican line is so very, very easy to counter. All you have to say is, "We're pointlessly wasting resources on Iraq, W gave the entire federal budget away to the wealthy so we don't have the resources we need to deal with the real threats to this nation, and even if we had them, the Republicans have managed to screw up, mismanage, and otherwise corrupt the very agencies (like FEMA) that should be on point to deal with crises." Or, perhaps something a little more punchy like, "George W. Bush and the Republicans put a horse judge as the head of the nation's disaster relief. Is this who you want dealing with national security?"

It's always been ridiculous that the Republicans managed to keep the upper hand on security issues, but it's especially ridiculous now that their screwups are not merely predictable (as they were when all of this shit started) but empirical and obvious.

I'm trying not to be conspiratorial and let myself consider the possibility that this plot announcement was politically timed, but I can't help but wonder. What are we?...T-3 months?

Have I mentioned everybody is fucking stupid?

Everyone is dumb

Okay, I'm infuriated, and I need to get this off my chest.

I had thought we were mostly done with the security ridiculousness after we got through the first few weeks after 9/11. I dealt with it. I rolled. I was annoyed, but I got through. I was even willing to take my shoes off. Again, I was annoyed, but I rolled.

But this...this shit is ridiculous. No, ridiculous is too soft a word. Retarded. Assinine. Idiotic. Paranoidly incompetent.

They're banning drinks. And lip balm. And toothpaste. Fucking _toothpaste_. How fucking retarded are these people? Do they really think this is going to make us safer? Look, I understand that they foiled a plot to use liquid explosives with an mp3 trigger on flights from Britain to the US. But first of all, they _foiled it_. Has everyone missed that little detail? They intercepted the terrorists before they could even get to the airports. Wow! What a novel idea! Instead of making idiotic, ineffective rules about air travel, how about we invest in infiltration? With the money we would save on the ridiculous amount of airport security we now have (not to mention the economic losses they induce), I bet we could have remarkable coverage. After all, it's not like you can go to the corner store and order liquid explosives. You can track the sale of ingredients that are required to make such explosives. In fact, that's what they did! Wow! The system works! At least in the UK...I don't know that I have as much faith in the morons running our government.

But let's ignore all that for a moment. They're banning liquids. _Liquids_, people. Know what you can store liquids in? Anything. I could put a baggy in my socks and store liquids there. Are they going to make me remove all of my socks? Hell, I could probably find a way to store liquids in pretty much every piece of clothing I own. And all the shit in my carry-on? Pretty sure I could get liquids in there too. Even the book I'm reading. Cut out a few pages, ziplock bag pasted in...presto! Liquid container! I bet I could easily make a makeshift bomb out of a Bible. I fucking _dare_ them to take someone's Bible as a potential terrorist device. I think that's the one thing that would make all this shit worth it.

Let's also remember that baby formula and medicine are still allowed. Because apparently putting liquid explosives in a baby formula container is a moral line the terrorists won't cross.

And btw, last I checked Israel, who let's remember is in an actual war right now, still lets you carry _all_ this shit on planes into and out of Tel Aviv. Which is in the MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING MIDDLE EAST. Somehow they manage to maintain flight safety with all those volatile tubes of toothpaste on their planes.

AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*bangs head against wall repeatedly*

Lamont wins, Lieberman is a dick about it

Umm...yay?

Campaign finance law is hard, so we should give up

I hate this sentiment.

The arguments here are similar to those over tax reform. Tax laws are too complicated, so we should simplify them. Well, look kids...there's a reason this shit is complicated. It's because the targets of both, the tax evaders and government bribers, are very clever people, and they find complicated ways to launder their money to make it look clean.

The problem is that the difference between the allowed and the forbidden is very, very fine. So, you have a choice. You can try to enact extremely precise laws, in which case you end up with the systems everyone's bitching about: very complicated, very intricate laws that attempt to surgically extract the bad actors from the good, honest folk.

But there is an alternative. You can trade fairness for simplicity. In other words, if you want a simpler system, fine. We can do simpler. It just won't be as fair. We could, for instance, just lower taxes across the board for those in the lower income brackets instead of the complicated system of credits and deductions, and we could similarly tax the upper brackets at a higher rate in proportion to the amount of money we expect the rich to offshore and otherwise sleaze out of. Similarly, in the realm of campaign finance, we could just forbid any political advertising from any group in an election year, and give a fixed amount of time to each candidate to use as they please (perhaps with a higher proportion going to the challenger to take care of the incombent effect).

Would those be fair? No. Certain honest players would get screwed. But hey, maybe it's worth doing that to take care of the apparently terminal complexity.

Despite the fact that many of the arguments in the article are downright insipid, like comparing the operation of the federal government to the operation of the Virginia government (since, really, who the fuck has a serious vested interest in _Virginia_, for fuck's sake?!), they do have a point: bandaids for campaign finance reform don't work. I agree. I think you need to overhaul the system. Barring a total severing of the tie between money and media exposure, you're screwed. The money always wins.

And don't get me started on the utterly retarded argument that prohibiting media spending is tantamount to prohibiting speech. Last I checked, a guy on a street corner in Bumblefuck, Idaho handing out leaflets is not going to have the same impact on the electorate than a PR piece funded by Monsanto running simultaneously on every tv channel will. Not all speech is created equal. Being drowned out by someone else's message is no better than being forbidden to utter your message at all.

Time Machine

Couldn't help noticing the Leopard preview on Apple's web site (it's currently Apple's yearly World Wide Developer's Conference/Orgy), specifically the Time Machine feature.

Once again I'm struck by the UI. Undelete is nothing new, and frankly it shouldn't be that hard to implement. But Apple really focuses on the UI for such utilities, and that's what makes people love their Apples. This feature's in Windows would be coded by some incompetent intern and end up being some inscrutable dialog box.

Cameroon typo-squatting

I'm not sure exactly why, but i find this immensely entertaining.

New York Times military strategy

Shouldn't we be disturbed when the New York Times is a better source of military strategy than the Pentagon?

Hezbollah really is an army

Holy shit. I did have the stereotypical view of Hezbollah as a rag-tag bunch of crazy para-militaries, but Jesus...those fuckers are organized and well supplied.

Lieberman and Lamont

Blog post catalyzed by this New York Times article on Lieberman's last-ditch effort to salvage his primary bid. I suspect, frankly, that he doesn't give a shit any more and is just positioning himself to run as an independent.

I find the whole thing very frustrating. Having watched Lamont's Colbert Report appearance, I really got kind of a queasy feeling about the whole thing. Lamont clearly has no sense of humor, and I suspect him of merely taking advantage of Democratic frustration with the war (and frankly, with Lieberman) to put himself in power. I have no faith that, were he to win the seat, he would do anything useful. If I were a voter in Connecticut, I'd be despairing rather deeply right about now.

As previously stated, Lieberman's an ass. As noted in a recent Krugman op-ed (which unfortunately I can't link to because it's a TimesSelect article...grumble), it's fantasy and naivety to believe anything other than profoundly partisan politics is operating in the federal government right now. In other words, Republicans have been ramming through their agenda, and you either get on board or be attacked and mowed down. It isn't "bipartisanship" to lend your support to their shit; it's lying down and letting them run over you. Lieberman likes to trumpet the fact that he's a moderate and "doesn't hate" Republicans, and while that may be a nice sound bite that might resonate with Connecticut housewives who haven't been paying attention to the political scene, the fact is that Lieberman has been enabling Repulican shit for years now and not gotten anything in the way of progressive legislation in return. Somebody please explain to me what the fuck Lieberman has been able to accomplish by kow-towing to Republicans time and time again? I would love to know, because as far as I can tell, all he's accomplished is avoiding the Republican attack dogs, which is not so much honorable as it is saving his own ass.

But, like I said, I don't trust Lamont either. I'd probably vote for Lamont on the principle of punishing Democratic enablers who didn't have the fucking spine to stand up to Republicans when this Iraq shit started (which, yes, would imply I'd vote out pretty much every Democrat in the Senate right now, which I would). But it would definitely be a "lesser of two evils" vote. And now the Democratic party faces having Lieberman run as an independent, which must have the Republicans grinning ear to ear. If Lieberman weren't such a self-centered douche, he would fucking bow out after losing the primary. If he's really the man of principle he says he is, what does he hope to accomplish having alienated his own party if he were elected as an independent? Who the fuck on capitol hill is going to listen to him?

Grr. It's just so fucking infuriating. Why is it so hard to get Democratic candidates who have more charisma than a soggy bowl of corn flakes and are willing to say things like, "Look. 1) We're digging ourselves a hole in Iraq, we're bolstering Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas, and we need to leave now before more of Americas children die, 2) the nation is going to shit as gas, healthcare, and college costs skyrocket, 3) government stopped looking out for the public (e.g., the EPA, FDA, etc.) the instant Republicans took power, and they're letting big companies poison your children, and 4) the current Republican leadership is too corrupt and incompetent to do anything about it (see 3). I can fix it." Why? Why why why? Why is that so hard? Everyone but the top 1% are getting dicked, and if you made even the slightest insinuation that you want to do something about it, the message would resonate.

I don't understand how the Democrats can be this inept. You couldn't create a better political atmosphere for a liberal revolution if you tried, and they're still managing to fuck it up!!!

Deer vs. hunter

There's something deeply satisfying about seeing a deer beat the shit out of a hunter.

Sleaze 2.0

Welcome to the brave new world of PR.

Women in banking

This has to be one of the hardest industries to penetrate (as it were). I don't think even the tenure process can compete with banking for demanding and time-consuming.

I frankly don't think this is a solvable problem. When hours mean the difference between cutting a multi-billion dollar deal or not, there just isn't that much room for flex-hours or people who are going to prioritize other parts of their life. Even having husbands who will be stay-at-home dads doesn't fix the problem because I suspect it's fundamentally that women don't want to miss their children growing up. There's a fundamental tension that is unresolvable.

Welcome to capitalism.

Is this my future?

I know I'm not in the demographics they're talking about, but still...

Hubris

Jesus tap-dancing Christ:

"Mr. Wilkes capitalized on the system. The license plate on his black Hummer still reads “MIPR ME,” a reference to a “military interdepartmental purchase request” — bureaucratic jargon for payments for a defense contract."

Are you shitting me? Does it get any more brazen than that?

RIAA sues LimeWire

I was wondering how long it would take for the RIAA attack dogs to turn their attentions towards LimeWire.

I don't know how to feel about this. I don't know whether I believe you should be liable if you knowingly enable a criminal act without actually committing said act. In this case, yes, the RIAA are greedy douchebags, and it's tempting to cheer LimeWire on, but what if LimeWire were basing their business model on the exchange of kiddie porn rather than mp3s? Much more disturbing moral implications, but it's the same basic legal question.

Ad-supported OSes and other idiotic ideas

The idea of an ad-supported OS is one of the stupidest ideas I've heard in a while. As any half-intelligent Linux bozo will tell you, most of the cost of a computer over its lifetime is in its maintenance, not in the software license itself. That's the cost places like libraries have to contend with. They could generally care less about paying for the OS license.

Morons.

Craigslist Best-Of jewel

Craigslist Best-Of is getting a bit stale and repetitive these days, but this entertained me...

Entirely predictable

Estate Tax Assassination Fails; Democrats Fail To Stand On Giant Red 'X'

See previous comments re: Republicans who need to be punched.

Apple smugness

A truly satisfying quote:

"Still, the presenters said they ultimately decided to run the demo against a Mac due to what Maynor called the "Mac user base aura of smugness on security."

"We're not picking specifically on Macs here, but if you watch those 'Get a Mac' commercials enough, it eventually makes you want to stab one of those users in the eye with a lit cigarette or something," Maynor said."

Remember, boys and girls: the primary reason macs have fewer problems with viruses and security is that there are fewer of them out there, not because they're all that much more competently engineered.

On network neutrality

I'm not yet ready to jump on the bandwagon of people scurrying around demanding network neutrality when I'm guessing most of them don't really have any idea what it means. On the one hand, yes, the telcos are behaving like jackasses. I pay for broadband access on my end of your pipe, and Google pays for a fuckload of bandwidth on their end of the pipe, so you're getting revenue out of both sides. Quit yer goddamn bitching.

On the other hand, there are reasons and situations net neutrality is a bad thing from a technical point of view. See, this is how things work (listen up Senator Stevens):

Imagine a very strange world in which you can't actually move, but you're within shouting distance of all your friends. There are no telephones, radios, etc., so the only way to communicate is by shouting things at your friends and asking them to shout to their friends and so on until, eventually, the person you were trying to talk to hears your message (assume for a moment that people weren't retarded and that this wouldn't degenerate into an assinine game of telephone; assume everyone is attentive enough that they always pass the message on correctly). So, for instance, if I want to get a message to my good buddy Wilbur, I might first have to yell something to Pedro, who would yell at Rosario, who would yell at Gustav, who would finally yell at Wilbur. I don't know why Gustav knows Wilbur. I think they met in a chat room.

Anyway, this is all well and good. Except not everyone has an infinite capacity for messages. What happens if Pedro's trying to listen to a message from Muffy at the same time that I'm shouting at him? He can't listen to both. So, he has to ignore one. Since no one in their right mind listens to a woman named Muffy, he chooses to listen to me.

But, as we all know, not all messages are created equal. What if it happens to be the case that what I'm shouting is something along the lines of, "Hey Wilbur! I took a crap I'm really proud of! Want to see?" Moreover, what if Muffy's shouting, "Dear sweet baby Jesus! My infant is on fire! And being slowly devoured by a python!" You know what? Shallow, annoying bitch that Muffy is, and as amazing as that monstrous dump was, I think Muffy's message is more urgent.

...Which brings us back to the question of net neutrality. As things currently stand, the "people" (i.e., routers) inside the internet routing messages around are oblivious to what's actually in the messages and who they are coming from and going to. This is what neutrality is all about. The routers are neutral. They don't give a shit about the messages beyond the fact that they're messages.

The problem, as you saw in my oh so clever little metaphor, is that there are indeed times when it may be important to care about what's in the messages, who they're from, and where they're going. A simple example might be that it's more important for you to get the next video frame from video.google.com in the next few milliseconds than it is for Boris to tell Wilma Joe Shitforbrains in Idaho about discounted Cialis in a timely fashion.

That said, a) there's no guarantee that a free market will deliver you a morally optimal outcome (if Boris pays the router owner more, he may well get his Cialis offer delivered in preference to your video frame), and b) since a few companies own most of the internal routers on the internet, there's not a lot preventing them from jacking up their prices for essentially the same level of performance we get today.

So, I don't know. I think network neutrality as it's being talked about is too blunt a hammer. I think it may well end up being important for service providers to be able to strike contracts that allow certain kinds of traffic to be delivered preferentially to others. But by the same token, without some kind of regulation, you'll probably just see the telcos soaking content providers for as much as they can get away with, which is why people like Google and Microsoft are in favor of net neutrality.

Have we learned something today, children?

A very poor argument against net neutrality

At first I thought that this New York Times op-ed was written by Tim Berners-Lee, in which case I might have given it more credence, but it's not. It's written by this Tim Lee instead, a Tim Lee who worked for the Cato Institute, which means he's a Libertarian, which means he's an idiot.

I think there are cases to be made for holding off on so-called "net neutrality" legislation, but he doesn't make any of them. Instead he argues a derivative of the basic libertarian credo, which is roughly that, "Because every government official is corrupt, telco lobbyists will write legislation that gives them control of everything in a legally binding way! See? It happened 150 years ago with the railroads! Eh? Eh?" Ignore for a moment that anti-trust legislation was enacted in the 30's partly due to the railroads. And that the internet is vastly more complex than the railroad system. Ignore all that.

Focus instead on the logic, which basically says that because you can end up with the wrong people writing or influencing regulations, you shouldn't try. That's stupid, and I think most sane people recognize that that's stupid. The same line of reasoning would lead you to declare giving up on the criminal justice system entirely because you can never catch all the crooks, and in the meantime figure that the criminals will kill each other off in sufficient numbers that a few of us normal folk will survive the mayhem. Good system, eh?

And as an aside, the comment, "Today, government regulation of cable television is the primary obstacle to competition" is unsubstantiated horse shit (yes, this is my new favorite phrase). The fact that there's only one physical coax cable winding around your sprinkler system and into a hole in your wall is the primary obstacle to competition, and that cable is either connected to something on the other end if you paid your Comcast bill this month, or it's not, you jackass.

(I've decided to cut this rant short and do a separate network neutrality rant)

Discriminatory housing listing

So, I was wandering around HousingMaps for Seattle, and I came upon this listing.

So, not only does it prohibit pets, it prohibits lawyers. And Republicans.

Huh.

That seems like it might be, you know, discriminatory. Although at first I wondered if it really is because it doesn't fall into any of the normal categories like race, sexuality, etc. It's clearly prohibited if Republicanism can be considered a mental disability (sorry...I had to). Ultimately, I decided that it does fall under "creed," though. So I flagged it as prohibited. And sent a note to the person telling them what a douche they are.

Am I going to have to deal with such hypocritical douchebag granola liberals in Seattle? Ugh. They're almost as obnoxious as conservatives.

Almost.

Top-paying tech jobs

The only problem with having a high-paying job in Montomery, Idaho Falls, or Fort Smith is, of course, that you would have to live in Monterey, Idaho Falls, or Fort Smith.

In other news, note to self: find and marry Ivanka Trump. Further note to self: money will make up for the fact that your father in law is an asshole.

Plasma is a girl's best friend

Alternative headline: Women Come To Their Damn Senses.

Just the thought of being asked to pay thousands of dollars for fucking useless rocks has always made me want to bang my head against a wall. Can we move to engagement plasma tvs?

Ride on the shuttle...'s booster rocket

In my endless quest for procrastination, I came upon the following video, which is an end-to-end video feed from the top of the shuttle's right solid rocket booster. It's actually kind of cool (though feel free to skip ahead if it starts to get boring). It's continuous from launch until splashdown (which takes about 12 minutes). If you ever wondered what it's like to fall from space into the ocean, here's your video. :)

There's also one for the bottom camera as well, which overall isn't as interesting but does provide a really nice parting view of the shuttle.

Motivation

Someone please, PLEASE remind me to get this for my office once I'm up in Seattle.

Colbert's Wikiality

As I should have expected, Stephen Colbert has had the last word on Wikipedia. And it's genius.

I have absolutely nothing to add to his commentary. :)

So you think you can type?...

Since I know that at some point you're going to be bored enough to test your typing prowess.

My result:
-----
Your score: 474 keys per minute ~ 94 words per minute
Language/mode: en
Ranking: Very fast.
Comparison: 6% of registered TyperA users using this language have typed a better result; 94% have a lower or equal result.

You typed:
Tell 'em a hookah smoking caterpillar Don't do anything at all. Those texts are called 'reading material. I've just GOT to start labeling my software. But I wouldn't consider it. The kearney communipaw. To err is human; to forgive is simply not our policy. We their sons are more worthless than they: so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt. Sight is a faculty; seeing is an art. She'd whimper and tug at their sleeves, and they'd always waste precious minutes saying things: Do you think something's wrong? Daughter: IT looks like goat barf. When all else fails, read the instructions. In my experience most of them are trash. Rebellion is simply a device used by the immature to hide from his own problems. Your hangover just makes it seem terrible. Moral: There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else. There are running jobs. That's the way this country was built. I went and shouted in his ear. Do not meddle in the affari

Mistakes: IT(It), affari(affair) Well done!
-----

Appropriate props to Lisa.

On the proposed minimum wage hike

Sigh...okay, so certain parties, who shall remain nameless but whose name rhymes with "Moquee," wondered why I was doing useful work and not posting about the minimum wage. I thought other things were more interesting, partly because it was clearly a cynical election year attempt by Republicans to look like they care about the poor.

But fine. Looky here, then looky here.

Trading a minimum wage hike for elimination of the estate tax is just that: a trade. And it's not even a good one. Ignore for a moment that in a time of "war" with increased military spending and already record deficits, the last thing you should be doing is cutting taxes, let alone taxes on the ultra-wealthy, let alone taxes on the ultra-wealthy _and dead_. Ignore that. The estate tax constitutes about $25 billion in the '07 budget. Republicans will, I guarantee you, immediately after elections start screaming about "runaway spending" (nevermind they're the ones who perpetrated said spending), and will insist on making cuts. And they'll make cuts the same place they always do: social programs. And won't you be surprised when the benefits of the working poor drop further than $2 per hour per person. This is all, of course, assuming that Republicans won't turn around and find a way to undo the wage hike directly.

But okay...maybe the wage hike will make up for those cuts. Except that even if it did (which it won't), there's no guarantee that the minimum wage will keep pace with inflation. Which means the wage increase is, in effect, temporary, while the estate tax repeal is permanent. If you figure about a 4% inflation rate, in less than 9 years low-wage workers will be right back where they are now.

So, like I said, not only is it a trade, it's a bad one. And the first Republican you see claiming a Democrat doesn't care about low-wage workers because he/she didn't vote for the minimum wage hike, punch them.

Err...so much for the Hippocratic Oath?

Ow.

AOL is dumb

You know, I've said it before, and I'll say it again: AOL is dumb.

AOL is dumb not just because, well, it's just inherently dumb, but because it is and always has been a non-viable business model, and they're finally realizing that. All AOL is and has really ever been is a thin veneer over the general internet that they're trying to charge a premium for. AOL can't possibly compete with the internet as a whole for content, nor can it really compete on the basis of its user interface when people like Google and Microsoft give away their products for free. Add to that the fact that, even if you could charge for either the content or the UI, AOL is shit on both accounts.

So, basically, the only viable market for AOL is people who don't know any better, and reliance on ignorance of something as now pervasive as the internet is a fucking stupid business plan. Why the fuck would you pay AOL when you can pay any old ISP less and get essentially more unless you're a) stupid or b) ignorant?

I'm pretty sure Microsoft has realized this as well...they seem to be shifting away from MSN and towards the "Live!" brand.

Texas is useless

I never thought I'd see the day when a Texas Democrat was behaving more idiotically than a Texas Republican. Both are scraping the bottom of the barrel to begin with...

His name is "Fred Head," which is a strike against him out of the gate, and he's stupid enough to make large numbers of copies of this statement in print:

"Would you vote for a candidate who wrote a trashy, pornographic romance novel that glorifies premarital sex and seeks to arouse sexual interest as your State Comptroller of Public Accounts?" Head asks in a campaign flier.

Jesus. I think the idiocy of that statement speaks for itself.

Science versus religion

My takeaway:

When science and religion clash, science always ultimately wins. Ironically this is because science, unlike religion, contains objective truths. Indeed, the scientific method has proved to be the only path to anything even vaguely approximating objective truth. The problem, of course, is how long the battle takes. Occasionally the battle literally takes centuries. Sigh.

Kind of interesting though...I'd never quite looked at it like that before. For all the fundamentalist decrying of moral relativism, it is precisely religion's lack of objectivity that ultimately damns it when it tries to make assertions about the material world.

Hope for Kansas?

I hate little tidbits in the news that give me hope.

Oh, right...

You know, I was just thinking that it seemed like there was some corner of the globe not engulfed in flame yet...

Things that are bad

Wow. I'd say that drug trial didn't go too well...

Penny Arcade on E3

As you would expect, Tycho has managed to wax eloquent on the announcement of the down-sizing of E3 (not to mention the genius accompanying comic):

"All it really means for gamers in general is more news more often, outside of arbitrary dates. I knew a Jehovah's Witness named Hannah in gradeschool, and after learning that she didn't celebrate birthdays or Christmas as the rest of the class did I imagined her life a miserable parched desert, barren of gifts. She looked at me like I was an idiot and informed me that she got presents all throughout the year.

If you thought I couldn't tie Jehovah's Witnesses into this shit, well, you were wrong.

There must have been a time before there was an E3, but that's not really a part of my experience. Hearing that it's cancelled, or at any rate will be altered in "format and scale" (read: cancelled) is like hearing that Australia has been cancelled, or that the weak gravitational force is being temporarily suspended. It's not an event anymore, I don't even remember how many I've been to. It's like something that cracks through the asphalt and then grows upward. I make it a point to avoid Los Angeles the rest of the year, so it's always been my presumption that the entire Staples Center recedes below the Earth's mantle, there to sleep until the warm pavement buckles again in early May."

I swear to god...the fact that Tycho is a writer of such genius and yet never even attended a day of college boggles my mind...

Conservative boot camp

I'm torn. On the one hand, I take conservative boot camp to be just another way in which the Right is far, far more organized than the Left. I'm tempted to say, "Why is it so hard for liberals to do this?" On the other hand, there's something anathema about it. After all, it's really indoctrination under the guise of healthy debate.

I guess the problem is that conservatives have long viewed themselves as an oppressed minority, and as such to give theoretical underpinnings to your biases is viewed less as indoctrination and more as providing a healthy alternative viewpoint to a presumed inherent liberal bias in, well, everything. In contrast, liberals are only now beginning to feel like an oppressed minority. The more they feel this way, the more they may start acting in the same manner and thus trying to create an organized and fiercely loyal resistence (didn't we already do this in the 60's?).

(incidentally, the idea that conservatives rely more on a theoretical underpinning than liberals is unsubstantiated horse shit. Rationalization of your inherently held biases is not the same thing as arriving at your "enlightened" views through intellectually honest debate.)

While we're on the topic, I am increasingly of the opinion that what liberals should be doing is creating programs to ship kids from red states into either coastal blue states or even internationally for summers and such. Not into ideological camps where they're told why they should be liberal. Just any kind of camp where they're forced to interact with people from different places and different views on life. After all, a lot of the ignorant conservative philosophies are bred from living an utterly insular existence, and the solution is not to yell at people and tell them they're dumb but instead expose them to different people, cultures, etc. Why is this such a difficult concept? The blue states are blue largely because they _are_ on the coast and thus have more interaction with the outside world. Has no one ever watched "30 Days"???

Gay marriage op-ed

Just in case you haven't been following, several state courts have proposed an utterly ridiculous rationale for banning same-sex marriage (though, of course, that's sort of redundant...).

This shouldn't be surprising, of course. People will rationalize their biases and prejudices no matter how nonsensical the rationalizations turn out to be. Savage does a nice job of explaining why the rationale makes so little sense.

Totally the wrong question

This NYT op-ed on the insanity defense is infuriating precisely because it so completely misses the issue. The point of a criminal justice system explicitly should not be to determine who does and does not deserve punishment.

Let me say that again because it's important: The point of a criminal justice system explicitly should not be to determine who does and does not deserve punishment.

...and, in fact, attempts to the contrary are exactly what results in such a screwed up system of justice.

What the criminal justice system should be concerned with is creating a system of deterrents to behaviors that are deemed socially undesirable. Note how different that is from trying to tease apart the motivations of defendents: in the former case, it's vitally important to understand whether someone is acting as a rational agent when committing a crime, for we deem it "immoral" to punish someone who isn't acting rationally. But in the latter case, that distinction is secondary. More immediately important is whether the prospect of being captured and punished would dissuade someone from committing the act. Whether or not they are acting rationally is utterly irrelevent. It's a judgment on the effects rather than the causes, which means a) it's ultimately much more effective in achieving concrete ends like reducing crime, and b) it's far less subjective, both of which we can all hopefully agree are desirable.

Think about it: in the latter case, you could have someone who thought that angry pink unicorns were terrorizing a victims head and decided to rid that person of said malicious unicorns by bashing them over the head. If the prospect of being thrown in jail for actually going through with the bashing is compelling, you don't care how fucked up the logic the attacker is using is. You just care that the victim lives. At trial, you don't spend weeks upon weeks trying to tease apart whether the attacker really thought there were unicorns, whether it was reasonable to think there were unicorns, etc. You just care about the effects. If it's the case that someone can be prevented from trying to bash unicorns by threat of jail time, then bashing someone over the head, regardless of unicorns, is a crime. All you have to determine is whether the crime was committed or not by the defendant.

You might be inclined to object, "But it seems so unfair to throw someone who was just trying to help in jail!" You're missing the point. What I'm proposing is a framework of law that cares only about pragmatic implications instead of arbitrary moral judgments. Define your goals. If you care a lot about not sending unicorn bashers to jail who were, in their own minds, just trying to help, fine. Legislate to that effect. Bear in mind that you may have to balance that desire against the desire not to have random bystanders beaten senseless by unicorn hunters. But once you determine the balance between those, and no doubt a variety of other factors, you encode that balance into law, and at that point, law becomes largely deterministic rather than subjective. Granted, you no doubt still have the ambiguities in verbiage and other such imperfections in the process of encoding the law, but you no longer are teasing apart intent because it's totally irrelevent.

In a world where it's increasingly clear that nobody acts entirely rationally...ever...laws based on the faulty assumption of the Rational Man seem utterly outdated and, more than simply useless, actively detrimental. There is a line between regarding people as agents of their own rational and free will and as agents of environmental forces beyond their control that we will likely never fully nail down, so it seems stupid to try to legislate based on those fatally obscure motivations. Legislate instead on the things that are readily visible and trivially agreed upon: objective, tangible outcomes.

Fuck Lieberman

Granted, this op-ed, and much of the support for Ned Lamont, is clearly more of a negative vote against Lieberman than it is an endorsement for Lamont (who, frankly, I know nothing about). Nonetheless, Lieberman has been a douche. As the NYT says, he's been an enabler. Bi-partisanship is a two-way street, and the Republican party of the past, oh, decade have gone out of their way to exclude the opposition and ram through their own agenda. Being a patsy for that effort is much, much different than reaching across the aisle. After all, show me one reciprocal piece of legislation that Lieberman got in exchange for his kow-towing.

The Democratic party needs new blood willing to actually stand up to the Republican majority and, moreover, offer a concrete and coherent alternative. And that's not Lieberman.

Some people are really fucking stupid

I try to differentiate between ignorance and stupidity. I think these web support requests to ComputerWorld fall safely on the side of stupidity.

Bad Condi! No biscuit!

*incoherent anger*

Reading between the lines

You don't think the fact that one of the Shiite leaders wants the US to hand over internal security to Iraqis has anything to do with the fact that the Shiites have finally organized militias and vastly outnumber the Sunnis, do you?

Nick answers your "Ask Slashdot" questions

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/28/0051241

The question is, "What pure research labs are left out there?"

Basically, for CS, the answer is Microsoft Research and no one else. IBM does have Watson labs, but researchers get their funding entirely from product groups, which means that if no product group sees potential benefit from the work you want to do, you ain't getting funded. Google doesn't have anything close to a pure research labs. Google has "Google Labs," which isn't exactly the same thing. Google labs kind of dicks around with things that don't have a concrete plan to be productized but are nonetheless aimed at something Google wants to do. There's a strong undercurrent of near-term applicability of those projects. Sun...well, Sun barely exists any more. How would you feel if you got laid off and found out your employer hadn't scaled back it's "blue sky" R&D?

Microsoft, on the other hand, has a fuckload of money, and are actively engaged in pure research for a variety of reasons. Contrary to popular belief, the research division is not accountable to any product unit and has an entirely independent budget. They are interested in a long-term productization of some of their research efforts, yes, but just as much if not more they also want to foster relationships with universities, be visible at major academic conferences, etc. They've had an historically rocky relationship with academia, and Microsoft Research is as much about fixing that relationship as it is about directly making money off of inventions.

Did the world really need this?

Did the world really need an online repository of cats that look like Hitler?

Indecency fines are so goddamn stupid

Indecency laws lead to shit like this, which pisses me off.

I say they just fucking air it, and then publicize the fuck out of the fact that they were fined for trying to celebrate World War II veterans. It will spur donations that, I'll bet, will more than cover the fines.

Overzealous posting

Huh. 9 posts in the past 24 hours.

Sometimes I'm amazed I actually still get paid.

How to fuck with your neighbors

Neighbors stealing your internet? You could just lock them out. Or, you could do something more interesting...

Best. Job. Ever.

You can get paid to play video games?!

You've seen Rube Goldberg devices

...but have you seen virtual Rube Goldberg devices made out of explosives and flying bodies?

I didn't think so.

The Flat Life

I have only one question: Why was there a panda?

The Amazing Screw-On Head

Hey...ever wondered why there weren't more shows involving Abraham Lincoln, a metallic head with interchangable bodies, a werewolf, a monkey with a crown and a gatling gun, and David Hyde Pierce wise-cracking as a decomposing zombie in a tuxedo?

No?

Hmm.

Yeah, I guess I can see how that might not have been the first thing to leap to mind.

Watch the pilot anyway if for no other reason than it contains the highest concentration of utterly unlikely phrases you'll ever encounter (see above).

Dear climate change nay-sayers:

"Please remove my name from the list of global warming skeptics."

How to kill your sex drive forever

*shudder*

Pictures with water

I want one.

You can't handle the Hulk!

I'm not quite sure why I find this so amusing, but I do: the MPAA is suing Hulk Hogan.

Actual electoral college reform...

I actually find this article on electoral college reform rather fascinating.

It's less an idea about how to restructure the electoral college than it is an idea about how to short circuit the electoral college if you want to make the electoral college reflect the popular vote. The idea is simple: have a set of states that constitute a electoral majority pass laws that mandate throwing all of their electoral votes behind the winner of the national popular election. It's fucking ingenious. I just don't know if it's legally feasible to have states enter into legally binding contracts to this effect. I mean, it amounts to saying, "Regardless of how people in the state vote, all of the state's electoral votes are going to be decided by my friend Ed here..." That seems like it should violate some state constitutions...

Fuck New York

My state, run by a goddamn braindead member of the cast of Predator, gutted by the fuckers at Enron not five years ago, and faced with air conditioners across the third largest area in the nation fighting temperatures approaching 110, manages to keep all the power on at a peak usage 11% higher than the previous record.

New York, on the other hand, can't even keep the lights on in part of one city in temperatures that aren't even triple digits.

New York sucks. West coast, bitches!

(side note: whose fucking genius idea was it to have next day spot markets for energy?! Why was it such a difficult supply-and-demand calculation to realize that some dumbfuck jackass like Ken Lay would come in and price gouge at the first heat wave forecast?)

Misuse of "literally"

I heard a misuse of the word "literally" on a BBC report on Lebanon today (I know...absolutely shocking to hear the British misuse their own language!):

"I talked to a farmer in northern Israel...where the fighting is taking place literally on his doorstep..."

Really? Literally on the doorstep? Like, Hezbollah and Israeli forces are standing in front of his door and beating the shit out of each other? 'Cause that would actually be kind of funny...

This is your fault

You started it.

Quick Bush update

Yup...still a fucktard.

How to fuck with people at a truck stop

A stuffed, animatronic deer, a camera, and a remote microphone. Let the fun begin!

No global warming

Apparently this shit is just normal geologic fluctuations. (Horse. Shit.)

109?! In the bay area? Are you kidding me? We beat the previous high for the day by 15 goddamn degrees! And the low was only six degrees below the _average high_. _Fuck_.

(if that link is broken, which it almost certainly is, try to find the weather report for July 22nd, 2006 in zip code 94403)

Fucking inexcusable

This administration is fucking shameless. They can't change the law, so they're going to undercut enforcement.

We don't need to protect the planet, apparently

Latest neocon jackass move: changing the mission statement of NASA.

Mirror, mirror, you useless floosy/What's the temperature of my jacuzzi?

For those just a little too obsessed with fairy tales...

An Organic Pun-fest

I'm mildly embarassed that I watched the entire thing.

Portal

I found this here video at Penny Arcade, and I must say I'm intrigued.

At first, the idea seems kind of boring. And depending on what the ultimate game ends up being, that may in fact be the case. But still...though simple at first, by the end of the video you begin to grasp the kind of really weird shit the game concept could allow you to do.

Apparently the basic idea came out of an experimental design called Narbacular Drop. One of the more interesting things about Narbacular Drop is that it arose out of DigiPen. Which, you'll remember, is a video game university.

Ow.

Perhaps the most appropriate headline ever.

That's...that's just sad. Like, torturously sad. At what point is Wal-Mart going to figure out that the only things it's good for are selling things to poor people at low enough prices that they're able to afford them on their Wal-Mart salary, and serving as a place for bored, upper-middle class white kids to go late at night in order to ride the Power Wheels and play with the bouncy plastic balls until they get kicked out.

Of dubious utility

Look, I'm as eager as the next guy to pounce on news that objective studies have found CEOs a) useless, and b) overvalued, but this study seems, from what I can tell, to not say anything at all about the actual deservedness of executive pay. At the very least you should be grouping companies by market cap, and frankly companies like Microsoft are in a league of their own and shouldn't really be compared against other companies in this respect. Microsoft shares have dropped by 20% in the last 6 months. So? That doesn't mean Microsoft is doing _badly_, per se. They're fucking huge. They still make more money than Google does in a day (I'm talking about revenues here, people...not imaginary, stock market, "we're going to buy Google's overvalued stock because we didn't learn a goddamn thing from the tech bubble" money). Do you really think you can get significant growth out of a company that already makes money on nearly every computer sold anywhere in the world? No. Frankly, you're doing well if you maintain your position in the market.

I'm sure CEOs _are_ largely overpaid. Their judgment is questionable, and company boards are both nepotistic and don't get objective guidance (I can't find that link about how firms that recommend CEO salary are often in a position to then get lucrative contracts from the CEO). But this study doesn't tell me anything useful.

There goes my retirement plan

Goddamn government red tape...what happened to good old fashioned entrepreneurialism?!

Just in case you were running low on reasons to despise Bush and the religious right

Here ya go!

(That's just fucking appalling...there's no greater sin in my book than providing purposefully inaccurate health information. Also: go Waxman! It's nice to see someone in government doing something actually useful!)

iPods don't fix everything

Turns out exercising still sucks even with an iPod.

I feel betrayed.

Wikipedia vindication

Proof from the field that Wikipedia's claims of accuracy are, in practice, horse shit.

Sweet real estate opportunity

Hey, want an island? It's undergone some, umm, minor use.

(Memepool article at the top)

My continued yuppification

I finally caved and bought a pretty new black 4GB iPod nano (one of the benefits of keeping only music you like rather than every piece of music you ever came across is that your library fits in under 2 GB). I found someone on Craigslist selling a new, unopened one for $200 (as opposed to the usual $250 the 4GB version usually is), so really, how could I pass that up? Especially with no tax.

I justified it to myself in two ways:

1. I realized I could fairly easy hook the thing up to my car stereo and thus have my entire music library in my car so that I don't have to suffer through the shit that passes for modern music radio, and
2. I'm less lazy about exercising if I have music. And I'm in danger of becoming fatass. So really, the iPod is an anti-fatass device. Wouldn't you pay $200 to not be a tub of lard?

Incidentally, I find myself really impressed with the iPod interface. I hadn't played with it much, but now I understand the hype. It's really easy to use the touch-spin wheel to go through songs even if you have a fuckload of them (which everyone these days does), and it makes the stuff you often want access to (like volume) available by a single touch. They have, effectively, only 6 controls on the thing, but you pretty much never feel limited.

Apple really gets their UIs right. Why is this so goddamn hard for Microsoft?

The state of our government

This is what we've been reduced to: a Republican President vetoing a bill signed by an overwhelmingly Repulican Congress.

On choosing to go to graduate school

I noticed this "Top 10 Reasons to go to Graduate School in the Modern World" thingy on Slashdot, and since my alternative is doing real work, I wanted to respond to it. I'll start by dealing with the points made individually:

1. You get to meet and work with people who are pretty clear about what they want.
   
   Utterly false. Most people in graduate school have no idea what they want. They're there because they couldn't think of anything better to do.
   
   
2. The rest of the world suddenly takes you more seriously.
   
   Only partially true. Yes, having letters after your name potentially makes people not immediately blow you off, but that's about it. It generally doesn't translate into more money or help you in any way when it comes to actually getting people to do stuff that involves resources or money. Moreover, we're in the midst of an anti-intellectual backlash, and in a lot of circles, having a PhD = "being out of touch with the real world." People holding this opinion are often referred to as "conservatives." (I'll resist the urge to digress into another rant here...I will say that, at the very least, the non PhDs have proved that they, too, have no concept of how the real world works. See Iraq.)
   
   
3. You can use graduate school as an ideal environment for beginning work on a startup.
   
   Horse puckey. Yahoo, Google, and Sun were given as examples of startups started by graduate students. Let me point out that 1) all of those were in the lead up to or in the midst of the dot-com era, and as such shouldn't be taken as general examples of, well, anything, and 2) I suspect those startups were started in part because their founders were fed up with grad school and wanted to do something "real."
   
   Most good startup ideas in tech don't require state of the art research. They just require applying known techniques in a clever way and presenting them in a compelling, useful-to-business light. If you want to do a startup, go do a startup. Grad school isn't "pre-startup" world. (An exception to this is biotech, where almost all novel research can end up being applicable to somebody, somewhere with a lot of VC funding).
   
   
4. You can use graduate school as a pivot to change your career.
   
   True insofar as you want to pivot towards something vaguely academic (i.e., either academia itself or an industrial research lab). Won't help you much elsewhere. Some people will, in fact, not hire you in lower-level technical positions because you'll suddenly be overqualified.
   
   
5. You get to pick your choice of work and your work hours.
   
   Ha! Not quite. More flexibility than a corporate job, perhaps, but come a paper deadline, your "choice" of hours will amount to choosing whether to sleep between 4 and 6 am or between 5 an 7 am.
   
   
6. You can get involved in projects that can actually impact the real world.
   
   Utter horse shit (most of the time). Research is about exploring "what-if's." There's a reason those are what-if's, and it's because they're ostensibly _not_ "actually-are's." Studies occasionally have impact (UWashington's spyware study, UCSD's Diebold security analysis, etc.), but most of the time the path from research to something that vaguely even touches reality is very long and very winding, and quite often doesn't even connect. This is one of the fundamental things you need to be at peace with before even considering a graduate degree. :)
   
   
7. You can get involved in projects that have absolutely no impact on the real world.
   
   There we go. Much better. This one I wholeheartedly agree with. Not having to deal with idiot business-folk is fan-fucking-tastic.
   
   
8. You can do things that you missed out on in your undergraduate school. It’s a second chance.
   
   No, it's not. It really isn't. If you're expecting this, you will be disappointed. Graduate school is a very, very different endeavor. Undergrad is about giving you a base of knowledge and a basic set of analytical tools. It's about breadth. It's also, in the US at least, an exposure to peers who come from wildly different backgrounds and have wildly different interests. Graduate school is about depth. You try to learn as much as you possibly can about a particular area, and you even try to push the boundaries of knowledge within that area. You are surrounded by other people who are interested in roughly the same thing you are, and those people have much more varied ages. They may not interact with you at all if they have families.
   
   
9. If you’re good at what you do, you can count on being invited to travel around the world to conferences and seminars.
   
   If you're good at what you do, _and_ you're lucky, your papers will get into prestigious conferences, and then you'll spend your time scrambling to find the money to actually attend said conference. Also, once you get there, you'll likely spend all your time in a windowless conference room being bored by most of the other work presented.
   
   (depressed yet? :))
   
   
10. You get to be the TA this time around.
    
    Alternatively: you _have_ to be a TA this time around. It's fucking hard work, man!
    

All that said, I'm really, really looking forward to grad school. You're surrounded by really bright people, not weighted down by business demands, PR departments, and assinine corporate policies. You can study whatever you want to, and you have the freedom to tell the rest of the world they're full of shit (just don't say that to your advisor). And to some degree, yes, you can just get up on a Wednesday and decide, "You know what? I don't fell like working today. Fuck it. I'm spending the day in front of the xbox." Now, that might mean you spend your weekend making up for that sloth. But hey, at least you can do it.

Basically, you just have to know why you're going and what to expect. If you do, it can be a fantastic experience.

Grrr.

How fucking stupid and brainwashed do you have to be to pull this sophomoric shit? What exactly was the thought process?

"Well, if I send them something that looks like anthrax, then they'll realize that they could get anthrax, and then they won't talk about the government, and then there won't be any more anthrax!"

Idiots.

Bye bye Bruthe!

Bruthe hath been thummarily dithmithed.

You had to see that coming.

Random me trivia: long, long ago, I went to Arena's soccer camp at UVA. I got the "most improved" award.

Yeah.

There's a reason I don't talk about that much...

Gays can't get married because straights are such big fuck-ups that they need to be bribed with marriage

Huh? Run that by me again?

You've got crabs!

Why is this a problem? Fish the fuckers! They're overpopulated, and they're delicious. I would think the solution is fairly obvious.

Poor India

Really not a good day for them...blown up bus, failed missile test, botched satellite launch...

Santorum

Aww...Santorum's having trouble being re-elected?

Ask me how bad I feel for him.

Ask me how much of a crock of shit his "I'm a moderate, really!" campaign is.

Ask me if I think he's a hypocrite and a douchebag.

Ask me if, as a founding member of the K-street Project along with his good buddy Tom DeLay, he's one of the most poisonous influences on Capitol Hill.

How the Japanese entertain themselves

Ever wondered how big a fish a cat can carry?

Not only are Republicans douchebags, they're hypocrites! Yay!

States rights is apparently only a useful principle when it doesn't interfere with your legislative agenda.

Quotes of jaded idealism

Was reading something that evoked several quotes from different sources to similar effect...thought I would jot them down:

We are all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled that 60's. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling "consciousness expansion" without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously... All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody... or at least some force - is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.

-- Hunter Thompson via Raoul Duke
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

...San Francisco and its ghosts. San Francisco and its frozen revolution. Once again a time in San Francisco, the city of all excesses and the wildest orgies -- the city, too, it should be said in passing, where, in one night, in a former garage at the intersection of Union and Fillmore, the literary generation was born that, from Kerouac to Lamantia, from Michale McClure to Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder, most transformed America, and thus the world, for half a century. Now this city has become a conservatory of audacity, a museum of successful liberations, a tomb for 300,000 activists, escapes from the merry apocalypse of the sixties -- the proof, again, that the time has come in America to choose between reality and commemoration, between the position of the living and that of the survivor.

-- Bernard-Henri Levy
American Vertigo

What I feel is a sense of betrayal by my species and by my culture -- that they lost their way and misled me, too, to a degree.

-- George Carlin, interview with Salon

Top 99 Most Desirable Women

Some of the orderings here are very weird. Kournikova as 99?! Please.

I gotta say, very few of the women really took my breath away. More often, the reaction was, "Eww." I bet they'd all look better with some less ridiculous clothing and hair. And some of them, frankly, need to _gain_ weight.

Indirect fame

In a NYT article on Google's infrastructure:

"Mr. Gates acknowledged that MapReduce was a significant technology, but he asserted that Microsoft was building its own parallel processing software, opening another front in the technological war between the two companies.

"They did MapReduce; we have this thing called Driad that's better," Mr. Gates said. "But they'll do one that's better."

Woo hoo! Dryad (they spelled it wrong) is a project started in my lab, and I was the one who named it! Wheeee!

A good idea from our government?!

I suspect this is the only piece of legislation sponsored by Coburn that I'll ever think is a good idea.

Google antitrust

Oh, the irony is delicious...

Real life pac-man

Brilliant prank. :)

Freedom of the press

Kind of sad that the American public has to be reminded why freedom of the press is a good thing.

Sandcastles

My sandcastles have clearly sucked.

World cup chances

I just realized...at 26, my prospects of playing in a world cup are really starting to dim.

Fuck.

Mmmmmmm hmmm!!!

"Girl, he craaaaazy! He a low-down dirty dawg!"