The Vatican is dumb

How exactly has the death of someone who has been artificially kept alive via a feeding tube for 7 years "arbitrarily hastened"? That seems more along the lines of artifically and cruelly extended life to me...

Then again, I make it a habit to avoid taking advice on morality from people who believe in the infallibility of anyone and more generally claim to have a special relationship with an invisible man who lives in the sky. But hey, that's just me.

Wolfowitz confirmed/Shiavo dead

Don't really have any more commentary here...just thought it was interesting that there wasn't more resistence to his nomination, and that he was ultimately unanimously confirmed.

Also, Terri finally bit it. Thank god.

Technology fetishists

Jesus...just put it on a fucking bracelet, for fuck's sake. There's no need to resort to surgery here. Christ.

Yay exponential population growth!

Fuck the planet! We're all doomed! Wheee!!!

No, really, I'm serious. I don't care any more. People who take active steps to screw over other people for their own benefit in an immediate way piss me off, just on a personal level if nothing else, but at this point I could give less of a shit about humanity as a whole. Sure, we're fucking up the planet in an irreversible way, but I'm pretty sure we can't completely destroy it before I'm dead, and given my aforementioned loathing of children and, you know, people, what the hell do I care if the planet turns into a barren, toxic wasteland after I'm dead? It's a wonderful two-way "fuck you" both to the conservative, self-involved assholes of the world, who are slowly poisoning their children, and to the crunchy granola "every single human life is a precious spark!" hippies, who will have spent so much effort on blindly staving off death that ultimately overpopulation will kill many more people far faster than any of the forces they fought against. Oh, isn't existence fun?

Murphy baffled by Snow's bafflement at resistence to private account

There's resistence because it will cost lots of money to switch over the system, and it's a bad idea in general, jackass.

A sane voice from the Democrats

Wow...it's been so long since I read something that actually bothered to look at the broader position of american politics and draw coherent, well-reasoned conclusions from it. This may be the first op-ed I've seen where the author actually manages to put his finger on what's wrong with the Democratic party and gives a reasonable prescription for fixing it. Moreover, it's refreshing to see someone warn against going "Republican Lite," someone who, unlike me, other people might actually listen to. Mr. Dean, are you listening? I've said it before, and I'll say it again: you can't out-Republican Republicans. It's a horrible strategy that simply won't work. You have to drive the debate. Go now. Fix country.

Danforth on Christian Conservatives

It's a nice sentiment, but I still think it's rather naive to think that fiscal conservatives are separable from Christian conservatives. It is an unholy but symbiotic union that allows each to promote its agenda with the help of the other. The Christian conservatives seem to have been getting cocky lately and believe that they don't need the fiscal conservatives anymore. What a wonderful blunder that would be...

A new meaning to "boy scouts"

But yes, obviously, homosexuality is still clearly the greatest threat to the Boy Scouts of America.

Idiots.

Clinton (no, the Senator one)

Although Hillary Clinton should be ashamed of herself for such political pandering, nonetheless this is profoundly stupid.

A word on bandwidth...

In computer science, there are generally two basic measure of performance: bandwidth and latency. Bandwidth is the one you normally think about. DSL and cable modem companies like to talk about the bandwidth they provide. Cable modems these days are generally either 1.5 megabits (note that it's not megabytes! To get megabytes, divide by 8) per second or 3.0 Mb/s. At school, your ethernet connection was probably either 10 Mb/s or 100 Mb/s, although you generally don't actually get such high speeds, particularly when connecting to a site waaaay across the internet.

So, basically, bandwidth is a measure of how much data you can shove through something in a given amount of time. In contrast, latency is a measure of how long it takes to complete any particular thing.

Now, if you haven't grappled with these concepts before, it would seem that these are duals of each other. Shouldn't low latency mean high bandwidth and vice versa? Well, it turns out that no, that's not necessarily true. Case in point, a brief discussion I had with some people at lunch today.

People I know do data mining on data from the web. By one means or another, they obtain a "crawl" of the web, which is basically a bunch of data you get by starting out at a bunch of web pages, collecting those pages, then collecting all the pages those pages link to, and so on until you decide to stop. As you can imagine, these data sets get very big very fast. They are gigabytes if not terabytes large.

I am in California. These crawls live on computers in Washington (often). You would assume that being a big, fancy corporation, we would just transfer the data over the network. Not so! Remember our discussion of latency versus bandwidth? Well, imagine you could transfer stuff over the network at 2 megabytes per second. To get a 500 GB data set over that link, it would take about 70 hours, or 4 days.

So what do such researchers usually do instead? That's right: they take a big disk or two, write all the data they want to it, and then mail the fucker.

That's right, mail it. Good old UPS. High latency, but really high bandwidth. An oil tanker full of DVDs has far higher bandwidth than any cable modem you'll ever see. Just happens that it can take a month or two to get anything anywhere.

Welcome to the weird, wonderful world of computer science.

My ringtone is more hardcore than yours!

They're putting ringtones on fucking rap CDs now?! Are you shitting me? What kind of hardcore gangsta has a fucking midi ringtone on his CD? Fucking fuck...

"My party is demonstrating that they are for states' rights unless they don't like what states are doing. This couldn't be a more classic case of a state responsibility." -- Rep. Christopher Shays (R)Connecticut

Wow...you mean there are actually still Republicans left who base their political position on some kind of deeper principle than "We like money, power, and dumb people who will do what we tell them to if we say we like Jesus"? Who think that states' rights and limited government were actually principles instead of useful slogans for a minority party? How quaint!

I guess I shouldn't expect anything different from the poor idealistic bastard who not only understood that laissez-faire economics doesn't work unless the associated limited government is free of lobbyist money, but took the further logical leap that, hey, maybe we should try to limit the influence of money in government!

Siwwy Wepubwican. Yoaw pawty doesn't wespect such pwofitwess pwincipews!

MahnaMahna!

Doo dooooo do do do...

Monkey vs. Tiger

This has to be one of the funniest things I've ever seen. That monkey has some fucking _balls_.

What do they care? They're dead!

Millenia of theological questions answered: after you die, you become a crash-test dummy.

Another one of those things you don't expect to see

Charlie's Angels 3: Don't Fuck with the Burka!

Do "beatbox" and "harmonica" belong in the same sentence?

Yes!

Networking (and not the computer kind) how-to

I can't decide which side of "useful" or "sickening" this falls on.

An entirely new level of sleaze

The Religious Right are some scary fuckers, you know that? Not only are they bigots, but they're amoral sleazebags, too.

Yeah, what they said

Ah yes...exploit one family's suffering for political gain. God bless the Republican party.