Best-worst horror movies

Cracked tells us about the eleven must-see horror movies which are so bad they're good. Like Return of the Living Dead:

It has the coolest zombies ever. Forget 28 Days Later, this was the original fast-zombie movie. Not only that, they talk. In fact, to my knowledge, this is the only zombie movie that actually features the zombies saying "Braaaaaains!" which may make it worth seeing in itself. Also, there's a scene in which, after the zombies have killed and eaten a group of paramedics, a zombie grabs the CB radio in the ambulance and insists that the dispatcher "Send...more...paramedics!"

Convenience more important than price

Ed Felten at Freedom To Tinker discusses evidence that people choose to download songs from file-sharing sites, not because they are free of cost, but because they are more convenient and free of Digital Restrictions Management software:

In explaining the popularity of Napster and other file-sharing systems, commentators have often overemphasized the price factor and underestimated convenience. Here we see students given the option of a free subscription service, and passing it up to use another free (though illegal) system, or a for-pay system that is more convenient than the free one.

(Emphasis added.)

Rogue scientist's method

The Onion is reporting on a rogue scientist who has rejected induction, logic and verification in favour of "calling test results as he sees them, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary".

"But if you want your results fast and with some flair, then come with me and I'll prove that the boiling point of water is actually 547 degrees Fahrenheit."

Pete the dolt just gets funnier and funnier

I recently posted about Pete the wingnut who used a satirical article from The Onion as evidence of the depravity of women who have abortions.

Pete's at it again. After it was pointed out to him that The Onion is satire and that "Caroline Weber" is not a real person. Does Pete say mea culpa and hide his head for being so humorless that he didn't realise that after reading the first paragraph?

No. He defends his post:

because I meet women like her in the field all the time

Yeah, sure you do. Because women just love those uterine contractions.

Since Pete asks us to call him a dolt, it would be rude of me to do otherwise.

Recording Industry vs The People

Ty Rogers and Ray Beckerman, two lawyers from New York, have a blog Recording Industry vs The People which records the legally dubious war being waged by the RIAA against music fans and computer users -- with, it seems, the full approval of the US Department of Justice.

Of particular note is How the RIAA Litigation Process Works.

In a nutshell, the RIAA plays fast and loose with both the intent and letter of the law. Defendants are sued without any investigation, let alone evidence that they violated copyright. Defendants have included people who have never even used a computer, or have never engaged in illegal file-sharing. In many cases, no music downloading even took place. The RIAA games the system, turning it into a unfair case where the defendant is denied a fair trial.

On occasion, the RIAA's own technical witnesses have admitted that as far as they knew, the only downloads that ever took place off the defendants' computers were when they, the witness, copied files off the computer. You'd think that admission alone would be enough to sink the lawsuit, but in the lottery of the American justice system, not necessarily. Just because no crime took place doesn't mean that the defendant doesn't have to suffer for committing it.

Undoubtedly, there is illegal file-sharing taking place somewhere -- the RIAA hasn't invented that claim out of nothing. (They have however undoubtedly invented the figures they claim for financial losses due to file-sharing.) However, the lawsuits seem to be based on the idea that, since the crime of copyright infringement occurred somewhere, somebody has to be punished for it, and it is hardly necessary to bother making sure that the person punished is the person who committed the crime.

Unfortunately, it seems that between the DoJ taking the attitude that giant corporations like the RIAA can do no wrong, and individual judges with imperfect understanding of copyright law and even worse understanding of the technology involved, the RIAA has a nice little money-spinner going for them. In an example that is unusual only for the judge's honesty, in Interscope v. Duty, the judge denied the motion to dismissal, not because he agreed with the RIAA, but because he admitted he didn't understood the technology well enough to tell whether or not there was a case to answer.

I was going to say the lawsuits were a winner for the RIAA, but since the stated aim of the lawsuits is to discourage file-sharing, and file-sharing is even more prevalent now than before the lawsuits began, they certainly aren't having the effect the RIAA says they want. They are, however, bringing in a bucketload of money into the RIAA's coffers -- with absolutely no indication that one single cent of that money ends up being paid to the artists the RIAA claims to represent.

Also worth reading is Andrew Harden's warm-and-fuzzy guest op-ed, Between the RIAA and a Hard Place. Much of Harden's op-ed comes perilously close to soppy computer-hugging (which doesn't make it wrong, merely unconvincing to hard-headed politicians and judges) but, if nothing else, it is important for his explanation of why the RIAA's tactics threaten virtually every computer user in the world:

In the case of Elektra v. Barker, attorneys for the Recording Industry Association of America have made the argument that simply having a "Shared" folder on your computer can be considered grounds for infringement and, by extension, prosecution. [...]

The problem with this is that nearly every PC in use right now, running a modern operating system like, for example, Microsoft Windows XP, has a "Shared" folder on it. In fact, it might even have several. But you know who created these folders? Not the people using them, not some fiendish Internet pirates (sans eye patch and cool boat), but rather, Microsoft itself.

The RIAA has successfully fooled judges into imagining that "file-sharing" is just another word for "copyright infringement". But it isn't. The RIAA might like to believe that they are the only copyright holders in the world, but they aren't. File-sharing is just what it says: a way of sharing files between computers. It can be used to share your own files from one computer to another, which is not infringement, or it can be used to infringe copyright. It is dishonest of the RIAA's lawyers to suggest that the mere presense of file-sharing technology is evidence of a crime; and it will be disasterous if they get their wish to make it a criminal offence to even possess so-called "anti-circumvention" tools.

Cthulhu

A couple of interesting post-Lovecraft Cthulhu stories I've stumbled across.

The first is an interview with the Old One himself (itself?): "I, Cthulhu" by Neil Gaiman. Also known as What’s A Tentacle-Faced Thing Like Me Doing In A Sunken City Like This (Latitude 47° 9’ S, Longitude 126° 43’ W)?

The second, here, is a novelette by Charles Stross about a Cold War arms race with a difference. Nuclear bombs are the definite lesser of evils here.

It's official: satire is now dead

And it was murdered by Pete.

Pete's written a rant about the evils of abortion, and guess what his primary source is?

The Onion.

Oh lordy lordy lordy. If Pete wasn't so deadly serious, I'd be rolling on the floor laughing.

Now, some folks might think that poor old Pete is guilty of nothing more than failing to read the whole "essay" in The Onion. But no... Pete actually quotes the supposed author as saying:

I realize there are those who will condemn me to hell for what I'm about to do. Well, I don't care what they say: It's worth it for all the fun and laughs I'm going to have at the clinic.

Is it possible that Pete's eyes glazed over the bit where "Caroline Weber" described the "fun" she was so looking forward to?

I seriously cannot wait for all the hemorrhaging and the uterine contractions.

Or maybe, since it involves real hard words with four syllables, perhaps he just didn't understand it. (What is a uterine anyway? Something to do with pickup trucks?)

Certainly he doesn't get satire or irony. And now he's murdered it for the rest of us.

Tough questions for the Entertainment Industry

The EFF is asking the entertainment industry some questions they don't want to answer, including:

• The RIAA has sued over 20,000 music fans for file sharing, who have on average paid a $3,750 settlement. That's over $75,000,000. Has any money collected from your lawsuits gone to pay actual artists? Where's all that money going?


• Major entertainment companies have repeatedly brought lawsuits to block new technologies, including the VCR, Digital Audio Tape recorders, the first MP3 player, the ReplayTV PVR, and now P2P software. Why is your industry so hostile to new technologies?


• Unlike the major record labels, many popular indie labels offer mp3 downloads through sites like eMusic. Why won't you let fans purchase mp3s as well?


• The major movie studios have been enjoying some of their most profitable years in history over the past five years. Can you cite to any specific studies that prove noncommercial file sharing among fans, as opposed to commercial DVD piracy, has hurt the studios' bottom line in any significant way?


• Is it legal for me to skip the commercials when I play back time-shifted TV recordings on my TiVo or other PVR? How is this different than getting up and going to the bathroom?


• Why are there region-code restrictions on DVDs? How does this prevent copyright infringement? Is it illegal for me to buy or and use a region-free DVD player, or to modify a DVD player to be region-free?

American Ayatollahs

Alternet is running a story about the ten richest religious organisations in the U.S.A.

Where Jesus Christ taught love, compassion and tolerance, to these Ayatollahs the message is more about hate than love and "tolerance" is a dirty word. While Jesus spent time with the poor, the sick, hated tax collectors and prostitutes, these would-be theocrats spend their time consorting with the rich and powerful and even murderous and corrupt foreign dictators. Jesus said to pay your taxes (render onto Caesar); these churches are all tax exempt.

Velcro as you've never seen it before

Unless, of course, you've already seen this photo somewhere else.



Link to photo of velcro being pulled apart.

Election fraud is the new black

Greg Palast reports on the suspiciously large number of spoiled and blank votes in the Mexican election. The pro-Bush candidate squeaked in with just 36.38% of the vote, barely one percentage point more than the opposition. Strangely enough, ChoicePoint Inc. -- the same company that helped purge Florida's voting rolls of Democrat voters -- was involved in the Mexican election as well, apparently paid for by the US Republican Party. Must be one of those coincidences, hey?

IT Support Anecdotes

Some hilarious anecdotes from the front lines of IT support:

• A help desk shift worker who received a wrong number call from a lady whose dog's testicles were enlarged. Instead of telling her she'd called the wrong number, he logged the call on the incident log, complete with full details of the advice he'd given her.


• A user who complained that his floppy disk drive was "eating disks". On investigation by the technician, he had been squeezing the disks into a tiny gap beneath the disk drive. On opening the PC's case, 20 or 30 disks tumbled out. "At what point did you figure out that this drive wasn't working?" asked the technician. "When I ran out of disks, I figured I'd better call for help."


• A lady who complained that her printer wasn't responding at all. She was told to switch the printer off and on again. She answered, "It's already off, do I need to switch it on before switching it off and on again?"


• The user who called up to say his "rabbit" was dead, because he couldn't move the pointer around the screen.


• The person who said his "broadbean" connection may be down.


• The user who called help desk to say his monitor was too dim. He was talked through changing the monitor's brightness and contrast, but that didn't help. The technician who was sent over to investigate took the sunglasses off the user's head and the monitor was fine.


• The female helpdesk operator who, when asked to lend a hand to move a bunch of 21" monitors, admitted "I can't even handle 17 inches", much to her workmate's (male and female alike) amusement.

See El Reg for more.

Who says Bush has no sense of irony?

Fifty years ago, Hungarian insurgents waged a bloody but unsuccessful uprising against foreign occupation by a superpower, the then USSR. In memory of that battle for self-determination, President Bush Jr visited Hungary last month.

According to the New York Times, Bush gave his own administration a sharp warning over Iraq:

"The lesson of the Hungarian experience is clear," Mr. Bush said.
"Liberty can be delayed, but it cannot be denied."

I think it is a fine thing that Bush is able to compare Hungary’s fight for independence with the Iraqi struggle for self-determination without foreign occupation.

Google on Click-Fraud

Google's CEO Eric Schmidt has an interesting take on click-fraud for online advertising: "let it happen".

Schmidt's argument is a purely economic one: the price of online advertisments will ultimately depend on the amount of fraud. As the amount of fraud increases, the price of the ads will drop, until they drop so low that it isn't worth the cheaters' efforts to commit fraud. In time, there will be an equilibrium state where the price is just low enough to make the amount of fraud bearable but not high enough to encourage more.

Eventually, the price that the advertiser is willing to pay for the conversion will decline, because the advertiser will realize that these are bad clicks, in other words, the value of the ad declines, so over some amount of time, the system is in-fact, self-correcting. In fact, there is a perfect economic solution which is to let it happen.

Pretty standard Economics 101. From a purely economic point of view, Schmidt may be right... but I can imagine an awful lot of their customers are feeling quite nervous about now. Given that Google's bread-and-butter comes from online advertising, I'm thinking Schmidt is probably regretting saying what he did.

And on the other hand, he might be wrong about click-fraud not mattering. There is no real reason to imagine that the equilibrium point must be at some positive cost per ad. It may be that the equilibrium price is lower than Google's cost of supplying the ads, making it uneconomic for Google to provide that survice no matter how many advertisers they have; it might be that committing click-fraud becomes so cheap that it drives the equilibrium price all the way to zero. At the point that advertisers will surely reason that, no matter how cheap the ads are, if none of the clicks come from real people, it isn't worth paying even a penny for them. That would really do some damage to Google's business model.

25% of web users now using Firefox

Recent statistics from W3Counter show that Firefox's marketshare has now reached 25%. The top five distinct browsers are:

1. Internet Explorer 6.0 with 66%


2. Firefox 1.5 with 21%


3. Firefox 1.0 with 4%


4. Internet Explorer 7.0 with 1%


5. Safari 2.0 with 1%

The statistics are based on over one million distinct visits to more than one thousand different websites.

What I find amusing is that Netscape Navigator has completely fallen off the radar, with an insignificant marketshare, and yet corporate and government websites (always assuming they even acknowledge browers other than IE) continue to act as if Netscape was still important.

This also shows than any web designer who codes purely for IE is effectively treating one third of all users as unimportant. Maybe if IE held a 98% marketshare could that attitude be defended, but it certainly can't be now.

One last factor that should be considered... many web users set their browsers to identify itself as Internet Explorer. The main reason for doing this is to work around obnoxious websites that would work perfectly with multiple browsers, but explicitly check for non-IE browsers and kick them off the site. (Your browser is not recognised. Minimum system requirements are Internet Explorer... sort of nonsense.) So that figure of 25% for Firefox should be considered a minimum.

Link to the W3Counter report here.

And 200,000 geeks suddenly cry out...

...on seeing the IT Goddess calendar.

Sky-mice and somnambulant chickens

Despite having a backyard barely big enough to swing a cat, I have three pet chickens. After much labour, I finally finished putting up the chickenwire fence and bird-netting over the chicken enclosure. Take that sky-rats! Go and steal somebody else's food, you pigeons!

I had barely turned my back for 15 minutes when I discovered dozens of sky-mice in the chicken enclosure. I watched with absolute amazement as these mutant sparrows landed on the chickenwire, and then phased their bodies, passing their molecules through the steel molecules of the wire. I'm pretty sure that's the explanation -- I've looked at the sparrows, and they're too big to fit through the holes in the wire without phasing their molecular structure into an alternate dimension. At least that's how it looks to me.

So it's back to the drawing board. Fortunately the sky-rats don't have mutant superpowers.

And then last night, about midnight, I noticed that Bridget the white fluffy Silkie was sleep-walking. Go figure.

Bush, FDR and Hamdan

Earlier I discussed the White House's attempt to cast FDR in the same unpopular light as Junior Bush. Rather than comparing Bush and Roosevelt, it might be more useful to contrast them.

Eric from Is This Legal? writes:

I am reminded of the discussions within the Roosevelt Administration (the War Department, the Justice Department, the Department of the Interior, and to a lesser extent the President himself) during the summer and fall of 1944 as they awaited the Supreme Court's decision in Ex parte Endo.

The Endo decision came on December 18, 1944; it declared illegal the continued detention of loyal Japanese Americans in the eight "relocation centers" that the War Relocation Authority was operating at that time.

What's interesting to me is that the Administration spent the summer and fall of '44 preparing for the possibility of an adverse outcome in Endo. Felix Frankfurter tipped the Administration off that the decision was coming on the 18th; this enabled the Administration to preempt the Supreme Court's decision by announcing on the 17th of December that it would be bringing the detention and exclusion of Japanese Americans from the West Coast to an end. It had a plan in place to end the mass exclusion of Japanese Americans and to replace it with a system of targeted individual exclusions of those it deemed especially dangerous.

Compare this to the disarray in Washington over the last couple of days.

It's quite obvious to me that this Administration just could not bring itself to believe and plan effectively for the possibility that it might lose the Hamdan case, and lose it big.

Why am I not surprised?

On the other hand, Paperwight's Fair Shot has a much more pessimistic view. According to Paperwight, Bush and Co. weren't keeping their head in the sand, they wanted a confrontation with the Supreme Court:

Given the Bush Administration's adoption of the theory of the Unitary Executive, for which the traitor John Yoo is the most well-known advocate, the Bush Administration does not believe that any power on earth short of force can prevent them from doing whatever they damn well please. In other words, the Bush Administration has adopted the political theory of dictatorship. Whether they use it to the fullest extent, or only around the edges, mostly on brown people, mostly on non-citizens, is a different question.
[...]
The question to ask is this: When the Bush Administration has ignored Congress and defied the Supreme Court, unwinding over two hundred years of the balancing act of our Constitution, and almost eight hundred years of Anglo-American law, and faced no consequences, what is there to stop them from doing as they truly please?

We will all live at the king's sufferance, and can only hope that he chooses to step down peacefully, as Generalissimo Franco finally did. Of course my belief is that we already live at the king's sufferance, but I am admittedly pessimistic.

Paperwight's prediction was "shortly after the July 4 recess" -- which would make the next couple of weeks very interesting. Will Mad King George insist he's beyond the law? Will he and his neo-cons end the pretence that America is a country ruled by laws? Or will they avoid the confrontation for a little while later?

My guess is that they won't burn any bridges just yet. That's not to say that they haven't explicitly said that the President is above the law; but why force the issue when they don't have to?

Bush's Baghdad Palace

The Nation reports on the American Embassy being build in Baghdad:
writes about :

Among the many secrets the American government cannot keep, one of its biggest (104 acres) and most expensive ($592 million) is the American Embassy being built in Baghdad. Surrounded by fifteen-foot-thick walls, almost as large as the Vatican on a scale comparable to the Mall of America, to which it seems to have a certain spiritual affinity, this is no simple object to hide.

So you think the Bush Administration is planning on leaving Iraq?
[...]
USA Today has learned that the "massive new embassy, being built on the banks of the Tigris River, is designed to be entirely self-sufficient and won't be dependent on Iraq's unreliable public utilities." Thus, there will be no reason or excuse for any of the thousands of Americans working in this space, which is about the size of eighty football fields, to share the daily life experience of an Iraqi or even come in accidental contact with one.

Is ethanol really a green fuel?

That depends on how it is made. Regardless though, you can bet a lot of greenies will jump on the ethanol bandwagon, as will the corporate corn farmers. There's nothing like government subsidies to have corporate CEOs falling over themselves to act green. (And remember folks, the essential nature of acting is that it is all pretend.)

Still, anything that reduces the need to pump oil out of the ground is a good thing. If I'm going to be peon to a baron, I'd rather it be a corn baron than an oil baron.

No more War On Terror in London?

James Wimberley at The Reality Based Community points out an interesting thing about the London bombing commemorations.

There was no sign of any talk about a War on Terror.

There is plenty to dislike about Tony Blair, but he knows his audience. If he's not talking about a War on Terror, it's because he knows that Brits aren't buying it.

Direct American involvement in WW2 started in December 1941, after Pearl Harbour. (Well, the US occupied Iceland in July 1941, but that doesn't count.) Less than four years later, WW2 was over and America was one of the victors. But five years after declaring a War on Terror, not only has Bush been unable to defeat al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, but he's even stopped trying: the CIA taskforce hunting bin Laden was disbanded last year.

Over the last half century, there have been many conflicts with extra-national groups that used more or less indiscriminate terror tactics. In Ireland, it was the IRA; in Spain, the Basque ETA; the French OAS; the Red Brigade in Italy, and others. They adopted military terminology and identified themselves as warriors, declaring they were fighting a war. Invariably, the governments they fought refused to take the bait. For three decades, the British insisted that the IRA were no more than criminals.

This is the only sensible strategy:

• it denies legitimacy to the terrorists


• it encourages the terrorist group to renounce the use of violence in order to gain that legitimacy, and therefore gain real political power


• it helps keep events in perspective (Sept 11 was a terrible event, but al Qaeda is powerless to destroy the USA let alone the entire democratic West)


• it reminds authorities to practice restraint (in war, it may become necessary to destroy a hospital or a school, but you don't burn a hospital to the ground to catch a thief).

Less than 24 hours after al Qaeda's first attack on US interests during President Bush's watch, he'd conceded that legitimacy to bin Laden. That demonstrates the sheer cluelessness of the neo-cons pulling Bush's strings.

McCain and Bush, together at last

Mark Kleiman at The Reality Based Community seems to be (not very) surprised to discover that Senator John McCain is playing nice with Team Bush.

Well duh. Of course he is. You don't get to become a serious contender for the leadership of any political party, let alone the Republican Party, by being an honest, ethical human being. The other politicans would eat you up before breakfast. Sure, the ability to give the illusion of decency, ethics, fairness and all those other things are important. Now that Bush and McCain are no longer rivals for the presidency, there is no longer any need to pretend that McCain and Bush are anything but natural allies.

Comparing Bush and FDR

Meta And Meta links to a discussion about a recent comparison of President Bush Jr and the late President Roosevelt.

White House spokestool Tony Snow recently compared Bush's policy of "staying the course" with FDR's efforts during World War Two, saying:

If somebody had taken a poll in the Battle of the Bulge, I dare say people would have said, 'Wow, my goodness, what are we doing here?' But you cannot conduct a war based on polls.

Joshua Micah Marshall at Talking Points Memo took issue at that false comparison, pointing out that the Battle of the Bulge was over in less than six weeks -- an eternity for the troops on the ground, but not even in the same ball park as the three year occupation of Iraq.

In fact, as Marshall later discovered, the Roosevelt administration did take opinion polls during the course of World War Two, and during the Battle of the Bulge his approval rating was 70% -- compared to Bush's current approval rating of 33% in a recent Fox News poll. (As I write this, his approval rating seems to have hit 40%. I wonder what divisive distraction Karl Rove has come up with now?)

As Marshall put it:

But the basic picture is clear: the American people then, as they will now, will stick through a lot of adversity if they think the war they're fighting matters and that their president knows what he's doing.

Then they did. Now they don't.

The Founding Fathers' major mistake

An interesting argument that the American Founding Fathers, for all that they got so much so right, made one major blunder:

There are people who disagree with almost all of Bush's policies, yet still support him--a fact that puzzles many folks on the left. Neocon-men will argue that it's all about "moral values" (i.e., celibacy and bigotry), but something more fundamental is at work. Why are some patriotic Americans supporting a president who seems so bent on destroying America--America's constitution, America's democracy, America's good name, America's credibility, America's land, air, and water, America's solvency, America's educational system, America's security, America's children, and America's future?

The answer lies not in the present but in decisions made 219 years ago at the Constitutional Convention. The Founding Fathers were so determined to avoid having anything that looked like a king in our land that they overlooked the one useful function kings and queens had--still have today in some countries: they served as a symbol of the nation.
[...]
It may also account for the obsession we Americans have with our flag--an obsession unmatched around the world. It's the only symbol we have that can be detached from everyday political disputes. Yet because it's not a living symbol any cheap politician can wrap himself in it to make points. And since it's usually the least honest politicians who have to resort to this tactic, the flag itself then becomes tainted as a symbol, and is subject to attack.

I'm not sure I agree, but it is certainly something to think about. However, it leaves unanswered the question, why are Americans so nationalistic and patriotic? America, as a whole, takes love of country to the level of unhealthy obsession. It seems to me that, with their constant shout of "U-S-A U-S-A We're #1!" they're trying too hard, as if they realise, in their heart of hearts, that they've been robbed of the American Dream and have nothing left but "My country, right or wrong".

Winds of change in Italy?

Is it possible that the Italian Secret Service, for years now run as a state-within-the-state, may be shaken up and reformed? The Italian government is starting to ask questions about the "extraordinary rendition" (that is, kidnapping) of an Italian citizen.

See the stories here and here.

Saints and horrors

Butterflies and Wheels talks about that sanctimonious horror, Mother Teresa:

It has come to my attention that this business of 'Mother' Teresa's being a horrible nightmare instead of the tiny little saint she's cracked up to be is not common knowledge. Well I knew that, but it's not common knowledge even among the kind of warped, twisted people who read B&W; that I didn't know. I should have realized though. It's meme stuff. The phrase 'Mother Teresa' is a kind of pop culture synonym for self-sacrificing altruism, and the corrections of that illusion get drowned out as a result. So let's get to work and spread the counter-meme, shall we? She was a horror.

In the words of Christopher Hitchens:

In other words it's pretty much like the state of indulgences in the Middle Ages. The bulk of humanity is described as a bunch of miserable sinners condemned to everlasting hell unless they’ve got the price of a pardon, which they can purchase at the nearest papacy. [...] They simply do not judge her reputation by her actions. They consistently do the reverse and judge her actions by her reputation.

[...] religious figures are given this sort of special pass on credulity. It's either consciously or subconsciously assumed that a person of the cloth actually has better morals. There's precious little evidence of this; there’s a great deal of evidence to the contrary, in fact. But somehow it’s still considered—especially in a country like America which suffers from a sort of mediocre version of multiculturalism—a possibly offensive thing to suggest.

Mother Teresa was friend to dictators like Albania's Enver Hoxha and Haiti's Duvalier family. She fawned over thieves like Charles Keating. She committed false witness over the state of Calcutta. She collected millions of dollars -- maybe billions, only the Catholic Church knows for sure and they aren't telling -- in charity for the poor of Calcutta, and yet when she died, the hospices and orphanages were no better off than when she had first arrived. She was a hypocrite and a liar and did far more harm than good to the people of Calcutta.

And she is sure to declared a saint as her reward for decades of selling indulgences for the Catholic Church.

See also the Wikipedia article on her.

So Belgian they called it Belgium

I found this discussion of life in Belgium amusing:

Usually I avoid writing about annoying aspects of Belgian life and its weird mix of individual opportunism and ossified institutional arrangements (what I call ‘the dodgy and the stodgy’). [...] At least in France you could develop the front of a Parisian and enter into the theatre and power play of, say, getting a refund on your train ticket. But in Belgium you might as well be talking to a bag of flour. [...]

Anyway, this post is about the things in Belgium that work. When things work in Belgium, they really, really work. Especially in contrast to the usual lumpen state of affairs.

Fifty Conservative rock songs

Two weeks ago, the National Review published John J. Miller's list of fifty Conservative rock songs. Well, mostly rock songs, with a few pop or country thrown in for good measure.

Now, some folks have taken this as demonstrating the sheer unadulterated gall of Miller for misrepresenting politically liberal, and even radical, songs as conservative. Others have suggested that perhaps he's just stupid and doesn't understand the songs -- some of those songs even use irony and sarcasm. It has been suggested by many people that he's guilty of cherry-picking lyrics out of context. And a very few have pointed out that Conservatives don't have a monopoly on (for example) the love for freedom.

A few have wondered about Miller's failure to include The Kinks' Young Conservatives. And what about Bruce Springsteen's Born In The U.S.A.? At least Jon Swift includes Born In The U.S.A. as his #2 choice, behind only Bobby McFerrin's Don't Worry, Be Happy. Now there is a Conservative who gets it.

But the burning question that keeps me awake at nights is, how could Miller have missed Hulk Hogan's Real American?

Machismo vs Overlapping Fields of Fire

The War Nerd, Gary Brecher, writes about one of the most decisive battles in 20th century history:

Celaya, the decisive battle of the Mexican Revolution, has its own flavor too, with all the gory comedy of the First Bull Run mixed up with the anti-fun, hard lessons of WW I trench warfare. Best of all, it's about a confrontation between the ultimate macho cavalry leader, our old friend Pancho Villa, and one of the most underrated generals in history, a cool-headed, very un-Mexican dude named Alvaro Obregon. It's the ultimate clash of brawn vs. brain, charisma vs. machine guns. Three guesses who won.

One thing which I found fascinating was the size of Pancho Villa's army. We (and by "we" I mean me) have this idea of Mexican bandits being in bands of maybe a dozen men or so. I thought that somebody like Villa, whom the US Army invaded Mexico to get (that's another American war that ended in defeat, by the way -- I'm just sayin'), might have had a couple of hundred followers.

Boy was I wrong.

In the battle of Celaya, Villa first fielded an army of 12,000 men. After getting beaten, losing a good quarter of his army, just days later he was able to field 30,000 men. "Bandit" does not even begin to describe Pancho Villa.

Nearly all binary searches are broken

Joshua Bloch from Google writes about the recent discovery of a bug in almost all implementations of binary search:

I was shocked to learn that the binary search program that Bentley proved correct and subsequently tested in Chapter 5 of Programming Pearls contains a bug. Once I tell you what the it is, you will understand why it escaped detection for two decades. Lest you think I'm picking on Bentley, let me tell you how I discovered the bug: The version of binary search that I wrote for the JDK contained the same bug. It was reported to Sun recently when it broke someone's program, after lying in wait for nine years or so.

The Window Washers

Eric from Is That Legal? tells an interesting anecdote about Fox News commentator and former judge Andrew Napolitano.

While promoting his book about how the Federal government commercial regulations are out of control, Napolitano recently told a story on talk radio. According to the retired judge, the Feds argued in court that window washers on the Empire State Building were engaged in interstate commerce, and therefore under Federal juristiction, merely because they could see New Jersey from the top of the building!

Problem is, it seems that Napolitano made the whole thing up. The case never happened, as Eric explains:

I've searched for this case using Westlaw, Lexis, Google, and even the New York Times historical newspaper database (which has the full text of everything in the NYTimes since 1851), and I have found nothing that even faintly resembles this case. (Nor have I found "hundreds and hundreds of examples" of similar cases.)

What, a conservative former judge working for Faux News lied got his facts wrong in public??? Say it ain't so!!!

All joking aside, we folks in the reality based community need to come to grips with extremist Right-wing tactics like this. While we worry about little things like truth and honesty, liars simply invent stories. The sort of person who does that has an agenda to push, and couldn't care less that the facts don't support his ideology. Given a lack of facts supporting his ideology, he'll just make up his own non-facts.

It is a successful strategy too. As conservatives have discovered, in the court of public opinion, one anecdote is worth a hundred statistics and actual facts.

Religious bellweathers

Dan Filler over at Concurring Opinions suggests that some recent church elections could be the first signs that mainstream America is becoming slightly more moderate:

Bob Dylan was right. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. The best way to learn that is by following major church elections. Before I moved to Birmingham, I would never have noticed the incredibly important votes being held at the annual conventions of Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Southern Baptists. If you want to get a sense of the American mainstream, look no further than these meetings.

The Episcopalians, desperately trying to maintain a balance between their American progressive membership and the broader Anglican church, rejected a ban on gay bishops, but then adopted a non-binding resolution urging Episcopal leaders "to exercise restraint by not consenting to the consecration of any (bishop) candidate whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church and will lead to further strains on communion." And here in Birmingham, Alabama, of all places, Presyterians (by which I mean Presbyterian Church USA, the largest group of American Presbyterians) gave local church groups leeway to decide whether to ordain gay clergy, or allow gay members to become deacons and elders. While hardly an endorsement of gay clergy, the vote - by a relatively narrow 57% margin - was a significant step for the recognition of gay people as full members of the church.

A Joke You Might Go To Prison For

The talkative half of the comedy magic duo Penn & Teller, Penn Jillette, has an idea for a joke that you might will go to prison for.

Apocalypse for prisoners

Kim from Is That Legal? talks about a dangerous legal decision in Woodford v. Ngo:

Ngo, by contrast, is really apocalyptic for inmate civil rights suits. Prison administrators set the requirements and deadlines of their grievance systems. They have now been told that they can immunize themselves and their employees by constructing a system that is sufficiently procedurally complex and unforgiving to trip up inmates. Of course that’s what they’re going to do -- prison grievance systems are going to become the first line of litigation defense, and a very effective one. And, as I will try to show next time, it doesn't make much sense, either logically or in terms of any policy aim other than keeping inmates out of court regardless of the merits of their claims.

So where’s the outcry over Ngo?

Where indeed? I think it speaks volumes for the hardening of America's collective heart that they are less concerned about punishment being appropriate for the crime, as set by law, and more accepting of a prison system that allows guards carte blanche to commit any crime they like, so long as the only victim is an inmate. Civil rights suits are the last legal line of defence to protect inmates from predatory guards and cruel and unusual punishments.

Rainbow Children versus Homeland Security

What happens when you have thousands of hippies congregating in a National Park, and Homeland Security starts putting up road blocks and issuing fines?

You get rumour, misinformation, confusion -- and a whole lot of money pouring into government coffers.

Summary: yes, the government is trying to keep the "Rainbow Gathering" from entering National Parks, but it seems to be for a mix of good and bad reasons: keeping out hordes of potentially destructive people from sensitive forests, at least if they aren't the sort of destructive people who can pay for a permit. Yes, thousands of people have been given citations and tickets, but they haven't been arrested. There are no lawyers at the hearings, because there is no jail time on offer. In other words, it is just ordinary bureaucratic greyness, and not necessarily completely unjustified greyness. Yes, in principle it would be nice for the public to have free and unfettered access to public lands... but imagine the damage if everyone decided to tramp through the forest, pulling up flowers and digging holes and dumping trash and burning timber.

It's an interesting example of Chinese Whispers. The rumour mill rapidly went crazy, describing mass arrests, people being rushed to kangaroo courts without an attorney or a jury, then being shipped off to secret prison camps. The reality is not so bad, just fines and a fairly half-hearted attempt to keep the hippies out of the forest, and hardly anyone was machine-gunned in the back.

So you think the Iraq War made you safer?

Think again. As reported by Juan Cole, another poll of counter-terrorism experts has found that the majority say that the war in Iraq has hurt the fight against terrorism. In this new poll, 84% of counter-terrorist professionals say that the US is not winning the war of terror, and the invasion of Iraq is the reason why.

One participant in the survey, a former CIA official who described himself as a conservative Republican, said the war in Iraq has provided global terrorist groups with a recruiting bonanza, a valuable training ground and a strategic beachhead at the crossroads of the oil-rich Persian Gulf and Turkey, the traditional land bridge linking the Middle East to Europe. "The war in Iraq broke our back in the war on terror," said the former official, Michael Scheuer, the author of Imperial Hubris, a popular book highly critical of the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism efforts. "It has made everything more difficult and the threat more existential."

What a wonderful scheme for power, for those with the cajones to attempt it:

• Create, or take advantage of, a threat to the nation


• Talk tough and paint yourself as the only one who can save the nation from that threat


• Take actions which actually make the threat bigger rather than smaller


• So that the increased danger will cause the people to turn to you, as the only one who can save them

Of course, the danger is that eventually the strategy will blow up in your face -- but with a bit of luck, you'll be retired, living on a nice quiet ranch somewhere with plenty of money and permanent Secret Service bodyguards paid for by the tax payers.

King George, then and now

On the 4th of July, historian Juan Cole suggested comparing the actions of the current US administration to those that lead to the American Revolution:

Our game for the 4th is to identify how many of the complaints Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues directed against Britain and King George in the Declaration of Independence could either:

1. be directed by the current American public against the Bush Administration or


2. be directed by ordinary Iraqis against US policy in Iraq.

The parallels between the then-monarch and the current Mad King George in the Whitehouse are astounding. As Thomas Jefferson predicted wrote centuries ago:

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
[...]
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation.
[...]
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury.

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.

Had Jefferson and the other signatories of the Declaration of Independence been alive today, no doubt the Whitehouse would call them "insurgents" -- and don't think for one moment that I'm not aware of the irony of lumping humanist, secular, democratic men like the Founding Fathers with anti-humanist, religious, anti-democratic thugs like the vast majority of the Iraqi resistance. The Iraq war isn't Good against Evil, and none of the sides battling it out are the good guys -- not the Shiites, not the Sunni and certainly not the occupying Americans.

Everybody loves a pun

Especially if it combines a visual gag with a bit of early 20th century history.

Happy birthday Mr President

The Rude Pundit has some fascinating ideas for birthday gifts for Junior President Bush on his 60th birthday yesterday. (Warning: contains extreme language.)

[...]what do you get the man who has everything? No, no, really, seriously, the man has everything. One can be sure he has an electric razor or a snazzy tie collection. And you can't buy him a bottle of wine or whiskey (well, you could, but you'd have to give it to him on the sly, wink, wink). [...]

The Rude Pundit thinks we should all chip in and get George W. Bush a corpse for the start of his seventh decade despoiling the Earth. But which one, which one?
[...]
No, no, Ken Lay's skinny corpse doesn't seem quite vivid enough for George W. Bush's 60th birthday. Perhaps for a 59th or 61st. But this one oughta be really special. The Rude Pundit's got it. Let's give the President the corpse of Abeer Qasim Hamza, the 15 - maybe 16 - maybe older - but no doubt young woman who was stalked, raped, and killed by a group of American soldiers, along with her parents and 7-year old sister. Sure, it'll be hard to give the entire body, what with Abeer having been shot over and over in the head after at least three soldiers gang-raped her. And who knows how much skin is left, since they used flammable chemicals to burn her body.

What could be a more perfect gift than the nearly headless, fleshless charred corpse of a young Iraqi woman? After all, the most poignant of the savageries of Saddam Hussein's reign in Iraq, the one repeated ad nauseam starting in 2003 (with nary a mention before), was the rape room, where the women of Iraq had to fear being kidnapped and taken to, where they were raped and tortured, with videotapes of the acts being used as a way to destroy their families, who were "dishonored" by the rape (one of the more charmingly culturally-repellent aspects of many Muslim nations). And now the women of Iraq no longer have to fear rape rooms. They get to fear predatory groups of American soldiers plotting to [rape] and murder women, kill their families, and desecrate their corpses. The more things change, you know...

I must say, the Rude Pundit's gift ideas are a little too practical for me. It feels like buying your mum a new frying pan for her birthday. I prefer more whimsical gifts, less practical and more intellectual. How about we chip in and buy the President the corpse of American democracy? But no, he already has two of them, gifts from the Electoral College in 2000 and Diebold voting machines in 2004.

Annual report on Privacy

Bruce Schneier links to the Canadian Privacy Commissioner's annual report:

It is my duty, in this Annual Report, to present a solemn and urgent warning to every Member of Parliament and Senator, and indeed to every Canadian:

The fundamental human right of privacy in Canada is under assault as never before. Unless the Government of Canada is quickly dissuaded from its present course by Parliamentary action and public insistence, we are on a path that may well lead to the permanent loss not only of privacy rights that we take for granted but also of important elements of freedom as we now know it.

We face this risk because of the implications, both individual and cumulative, of a series of initiatives that the Government has mounted or is actively moving toward. These initiatives are set against the backdrop of September 11, and anti-terrorism is their purported rationale. But the aspects that present the greatest threat to privacy either have nothing at all to do with anti-terrorism, or they present no credible promise of effectively enhancing security.

The Government is, quite simply, using September 11 as an excuse for new collections and uses of personal information about all of us Canadians that cannot be justified by the requirements of anti-terrorism and that, indeed, have no place in a free and democratic society.

And this:

A popular response is: "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."

By that reasoning, of course, we shouldn't mind if the police were free to come into our homes at any time just to look around, if all our telephone conversations were monitored, if all our mail were read, if all the protections developed over centuries were swept away. It's only a difference of degree from the intrusions already being implemented or considered.

The truth is that we all do have something to hide, not because it's criminal or even shameful, but simply because it's private. We carefully calibrate what we reveal about ourselves to others. Most of us are only willing to have a few things known about us by a stranger, more by an acquaintance, and the most by a very close friend or a romantic partner. The right not to be known against our will - indeed, the right to be anonymous except when we choose to identify ourselves - is at the very core of human dignity, autonomy and freedom.

If we allow the state to sweep away the normal walls of privacy that protect the details of our lives, we will consign ourselves psychologically to living in a fishbowl. Even if we suffered no other specific harm as a result, that alone would profoundly change how we feel. Anyone who has lived in a totalitarian society can attest that what often felt most oppressive was precisely the lack of privacy.

The full report is here.

It's not just the monotheists

Throughout history, the three major monotheistic religions, Christianity, Judaism and Islam, have used their religions are justification for murder, war, persecution of others, theft and oppression. But it isn't just monotheism: Hinduism, with its inhumane caste system, is right at home with oppression, as seen by their treatment of the Dalits ("untouchables").

Butterflies and Wheels describes the successful blocking of a Hindu supremacist attempt to hijack Californian textbooks and use them as a platform for their ideology:

Even as the HAF, HEF and VF sought to erase Dalits from the ancient past and portray the caste system as a benign form of social classification instead of the brutal system of oppression and exploitation that it really is, the Sangh's view of caste was on full display at the public hearing [...] every mention of caste found the Hindutva supporters squirming in their seats and exchanging unpleasant glances. Some of them, laboring under the illusion that they were whispering, spewed vitriol about the [California State Board of Education] "allowing all these chura-chamars to speak" (chura-chamar, literally scavenger-cobbler, is one of the derogatory terms commonly used by upper-caste Hindus to insult Dalits and lower castes).

Religion-based extremism is on the rise in India, driven by Hindu Fundamentalism. Isn't religion wonderful?

Lay may be dead, but his ideas live on

Ken Lay, one of America's biggest thieves ever, just died yesterday. Alas, he wasn't gut-shot and left to die slowly in agony as a warning to others, but we can take comfort in the thought that all his stolen wealth wasn't enough to save him when his heart broke.

Unfortunately, his idea that government regulation should only exist, not to protect people, but to make them more vulnerable to outright theft from people like him, hasn't died with him.

China criminalises journalism

Seems that China is about to criminalise the reporting of news without government permission.

Didn't the Soviet Union try that? How did it go for them?

There's an image I really didn't need

Peggy Noonan, contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal, on how much Mad King George just loves the troops:

Bush the Younger would breastfeed the military if he could.

Link here.

Let's think about that. George the Younger, the man who called in Poppy's connections to get a cushy National Guard position during Vietnam, and then went AWOL when playing fly-boy became too much trouble, loves the military and feels their pain. Yeah, sure.

That's why he:

• sent the troops off to fight in Iraq under false pretenses
  
• turned a blind eye to Hallibuton supplying the troops with contaminated drinking water and spoiled food


• penny-pinchs when it comes to basic equipment like bullet-proof vests and body armour, armour for Humvees and even bullets

Bush fan-girls like Peggy Noonan are, of course, allowed their opinion, no matter how pig-ignorant and divorced from reality they are, but I have another image which is probably more realistic than Noonan's: Bush standing in front of the troops, his pants around his ankles, crying out "Here you go boys, suckle on THIS!".

The strange and horrible history of Superman

With the latest Superman movie just out in the cinemas now, it is a good time to link to the strange and horrible history of the movie, and how (as of 2004) the studio had spent fifty million dollars on it without even agreeing on a director or writer. It is a tale of utter disrespect and contempt for the Superman character and the fans:

[Jon] Peters then told [Kevin] Smith to have Brainiac fight polar bears at the Fortress of Solitude, demanding that the film be wall-to-wall action. Smith thought it was a stupid idea, so Peters said, "Then have Brainiac fight Superman’s bodyguards!" Smith responded, "Why the hell would Superman need bodyguards?" Peters wouldn’t let up, so Smith caved in and had Brainiac fight the polar bears. Then Peters demanded that Brainiac give Luthor a hostile space dog as a gift, arguing that the movie needed a cuddly Chewbacca character that could be turned into a toy. Then, after watching Chasing Amy, Peters liked the gay black character in the film so much that he ordered Smith to make Brainiac’s robot servant L-Ron gay, asserting that the film needed a gay R2-D2 with attitude. Then Peters demanded that Superman fight a huge spider at the end of the film, which Smith refused to do—he used a "Thanagarian Snare Beast" instead. (However, Peters did manage to recycle his spider idea and use it in Wild Wild West.)

It is no wonder that Hollywood finds it next to impossible to bring out quality movies. The few exceptions tend to come from independent or semi-independent producers. Judging by the history of Superman, it seems that the worse a director, the more his movies bomb, the better the major studios love him.

And casting choices... Oy vey!

WB made Justin Timberlake a firm offer to cast him as Superman...which he turned down cold, saying "whatever it is you’re smoking, I don’t want any part of it"

I have it on good authority that the new Superman movie isn't bad -- but, with the exception of the incredible performance of the lead actor, isn't especially good either. As I'm not a fan of Superman, I doubt I'll be forking out my hard-earned to see this flick at the cinemas.

Still, we can all give a sigh of relief that at least there were no polar bears.

Bosnian Pyramid Update

Christopher O'Brien at Northstate Science has an update on the Bosnian Pyramid:

Over the last several weeks I have been in touch with a number of concerned Bosnian citizens and experts who helped draft the UNESCO letter. There is clearly international concern here, and many Bosnians are fearful that Mr. Osmanagic's team is destroying Bosnian cultural history in an effort to prove a preconceived idea, rather than test the idea against evidence gathered with professional integrity.

I signed the letter largely to protest the fact that Mr. Osmanagic has no professional qualifications and should not be directing scientific excavations. As a professional in historic preservation I also share the concern of my Bosnian and other European colleagues who legitimately fear for the loss of important archaeological data: 1) because Osmanagic is not a professional and probably overlooks far more than he catalogs simply because he lacks professional training and experience in archaeology, and 2) like most amateurs out to prove something, he's undoubtedly destroying evidence that doesn't support his view.

Archaeology is as much an art as a science, and archaeologists are keenly aware just how many priceless historical artifacts have been damaged or destroyed by amateurs with an agenda. They are right to worry: axe-grinding amateurs can and have destroyed irreplacable historical sites.

Wikipedia has more information on the Bosnian pyramid. It details how Osmanagic has already lied about the work going on at the pyramid, the data found, and the involvement of other archaeologists.

Capturing output of print in Python

The standard Python disassembler, dis, prints its output directly to standard output instead of returning it as a string. This is very inconvenient if you wish to do further processing on the disassembled code, or even if you just want to do something simple like count the number of lines.

Fortunately, it is easy to write a wrapper to capture the output of any Python function:

import sys, cStringIO, traceback

def capture(func, *args, **kwargs):
    """Capture the output of func when called with the given arguments.

    The function output includes any exception raised. capture returns
    a tuple of (function result, standard output, standard error).
    """
    stdout, stderr = sys.stdout, sys.stderr
    sys.stdout = c1 = cStringIO.StringIO()
    sys.stderr = c2 = cStringIO.StringIO()
    result = None
    try:
        result = func(*args, **kwargs)
    except:
        traceback.print_exc()
    sys.stdout = stdout
    sys.stderr = stderr
    return (result, c1.getvalue(), c2.getvalue())


With the aid of capture it is easy to grab the disassembled code:

import dis

def disassemble(obj=None):
    """Capture the output of dis.dis and return it."""
    return capture(dis.dis, obj)[1]


The power of astrology

In 2000, astrologer Lynne Palmer published her Astrological Almanac for 2001. On page 95, Palmer advised:

"Avoid terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001."

Astounding! Amazing! Incredible! How did she do it?

Fellow astrologer Robert Hand said:

"Only one person predicted the date of the attacks, and that was Lynne Palmer. I don’t know how she did it. Things looked chaotic, but I could not have foreseen September 11. I looked and looked and I don’t know how anyone could have predicted it to the day."

Think about that, and astrology's claim to be a science. One of the most respected professional astrologers says that even in hindsight, nobody can tell how Palmer predicted the September 11 terrorist attacks. That's a science?

But honestly, if Hand can't tell how she did it, he's not very bright.

Palmer lists 160 dates in 2001 to "avoid terrorist attacks". 16 of them were in September. Almost 44% of all days were listed as potential terrorist attack days. Talk about a scattergun approach to prediction: with thousands of astrologers, making dozens or even hundreds of predictions every year, it isn't the least bit surprising that one of them happened to hit the bullseye by accident.

How did she do it? Make enough predictions, and some of them will come true just by luck. That's all it takes -- if you place enough bets, you will win some of them.

(I'm curious what she means by "avoid terrorist attacks". Just how are you supposed to do that? Are there days when it isn't useful to avoid terrorist attacks?)

Read more on Skeptico.

Jewish family flees persecution

Not in Iran, or Iraq, or even Russia.

In Freedonia.

A large Delaware school district promoted Christianity so aggressively that a Jewish family felt it necessary to move to Wilmington, two hours away, because they feared retaliation for filing a lawsuit. The religion (if any) of a second family in the lawsuit is not known, because they're suing as Jane and John Doe; they also fear retaliation. Both families are asking relief from "state-sponsored religion."

The behavior of the Indian River School District board suggests the families' fears are hardly groundless.
[...]
A former board member suggested that Mona Dobrich might "disappear" like Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the atheist whose Supreme Court case resulted in ending organized school prayer. O'Hair disappeared in 1995 and her dismembered body was found six years later.

The crowd booed an ACLU speaker and told her to "go back up north."

In the days after the meeting the community poured venom on the Dobriches. Callers to the local radio station said the family they should convert or leave the area. Someone called them and said the Ku Klux Klan was nearby.

Story here.

Banning unions

One of the first things fascists and dictators do once they've consolidated power is ban unions. When you're trying to exploit people for fun and profit, the last thing you want is for them to use strength in numbers.

Of course unions aren't forbidden in the U.S.A, not in the Land of the Free, surely?

They are. Hundreds of thousands of salaried workers are forbidden by the Taft-Hartley Act from forming unions. And there are moves to expand the scope of the Act, banning even more workers from collective bargining.

See the Daily Kos for further details, and the history of the Act.

A year off from reality

Tom the Dancing Bug has a cartoon about General Motor's offer to give new Hummer buyers a year off from reality. Link.

The Big Brother turkey slap incident

The latest catastrophe controversy over Australia's Big Brother "reality TV series" is the so-called "turkey slap" incident, where two male contestants, Ash and John, are said to have sexually harrassed a female contestant, Camilla.

The following is a transcript of the events:

Ash and John call Camilla to their bed
Camilla: "Why, what are you doing? You're not going to fart on me, are you?"
John: "No, better."
Camilla: "Did you just fart?"
John: "Get in the middle."
Ash: "We're not going to do nothing, seriously."
Camilla laughs
John: "Lie down and shut your eyes."
Camilla: "Why?"
Ash: "Just lie down and shut your eyes."
Camilla: "What are you going to do? You're not going to turkey slap me, are you?"
Ash: "No."
Camilla: "You are, you liars. Let me in. I'll hurt you if you do. I'll come and bite it."
John: (pins Camilla's arms in bed) "Go."
Ash: (as he unbuttons his jeans and pushes his penis into Camilla's face) "Check this out, hold her down, hold her down."
Boys both laugh
Camilla: (screams) "Hey ... I just got turkey slapped!"
Boys cackle
Camilla: "You guys are mean to me."
Ash: "It's funny though."
Camilla: "You're mean. That was so mean."

What a wonderful invention reality TV has become!

Was this tasteless and childish? Absolutely.

Was it sexual harrassment?

I find it hard to understand how we can even talk about sexual harrassment in an environment which is as highly sexualized as the exhibitionistic Big Brother. The contestants talk about sex, masturbate and have public sex -- if not directly on camera, at least just off camera. And the contestants are all volunteers. This is something like the tenth series of BB on Australian television -- it is just not credible that the contestants didn't know that BB is a sexualized environment. There are no innocents on BB.

If you are a boxer, being punched in the face in the course of your job is not assault and battery. (This is not open-season on boxers; boxers still have protection from being assaulted outside of the constraints of the boxing match.) If you are a soft-core porn actress, you're going to get penises stuck in your face from time to time -- it's part of the job, like miners get dirt on their faces and boxers get punched in theirs. And, let's be honest here, being a BB contestant is being a soft porn actor or actress. Sure, the TV executives don't actually give you a script that says "Tim and Jill have sex here", but the expectation is that there will be lots and lots of sexual tension, and just enough sexual relief to keep the viewers from getting bored.

As the transcript shows, Camilla expected that the guys were going to turkey slap her. When they denied it, she called them liars, and still insisted that they let her into the bed. If this was real life, we'd say she was stupid and foolish to put herself in danger like that. But BB isn't real life, there was no real danger. It is a game, as artifical as any other movie or television series despite the lack of script. Camilla knows the rules of the game (as, no doubt, do John and Ash, and the TV executives). The good people at home want to see penises waved about, they want that tiny little thrill of seeing a woman held down against her will (even if she volunteered to be held down against her will) and most of all they want to be shocked, SHOCKED!, at how terrible it has become.

Camilla's response is telling. "You guys are mean to me." Is that the response of a person who has been harrassed? No way -- that's the response of somebody who is pretending to be upset. It's a knowing wink -- "What you did is socially unacceptable, and I'm supposed to be upset, so I'm going to tell you you've been mean to me, but I don't really mind." I'm not saying that Camilla enjoyed the turkey slap -- although it's conceivable that she might have -- only that "mean to me" is such a weak, watered-down, tongue-in-cheek protest that it is beyond all credibility that she was genuinely upset at the treatment.

Rude, crude, childishly stupid, nekulturny and obnoxious -- but not harrassment. And also, no doubt, incredibly good for ratings.

The Baen Free Library

A few days ago, I wrote about the death of science fiction editor Jim Baen.

This may be an appropriate time to mention the Baen Free Library, started when author Eric Flint decided to put his money where his mouth was and offer one of his books as a free, unencrypted, unprotected download:

There was a school of thought, which seemed to be picking up steam, that the way to handle the problem was with handcuffs and brass knucks. Enforcement! Regulation! New regulations! Tighter regulations! All out for the campaign against piracy! No quarter! Build more prisons! Harsher sentences!

Alles in ordnung!

I, ah, disagreed. Rather vociferously and belligerently, in fact. And I can be a vociferous and belligerent fellow.

Flint, like Baen, didn't do this because he is a tree-hugging hippy. Their political philosophies are almost polar opposites: Flint has been described as a socialist, Baen as a conservative, but both agreed on the importance of individual liberty and the profit motive. Flint wrote:

And it is that word of mouth, percolating through the reading public down a million little channels, which is what really puts the food on an author's table. Don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise.

Think about it. How many people lend a book to a friend with the words: "You ought a read this! It's really terrible!"
[...]
And, just as important — perhaps most important of all — free books are the way an audience is built in the first place.

Even if you're not a fan of science fiction and fantasy, check out Flint's updates on the progress of the free library.

The Foie Gras Wars

Nate Oman from Concurring Opinions writes about the assumptions we have about contract law and the free market:

Generally speaking debates in contract law get played out according to a well-worn ideological script. On one side are the heartless conservatives who think that a contract is a contract is a contract and that folks ought to be able to deal or not deal on whatever terms they wish and that the law should confine itself to enforcing the deal as written. On the other side are the bleeding-heart liberals who insist that the vision of the marketplace as an arena of free choice and personal autonomy is an illusion and that a host of supposedly "voluntary" associations are shot through with coercion that the law ought to be policing. Or at least that is the way that the discussion tends to play out in a first year contracts class.

But exceptions are always good for shaking up people's assumptions, and Sonoma Foie Gras v. Whole Foods is just such an example. Discussion here.

Scripture to live by

This has been going around the Internet for a few years now, but it never gets old.

A few years ago, US professional agony-aunt Dr. Laura Schlessinger said on radio that, as an observant Orthodox Jew, she considered homosexuality an abomination, as declared by Leviticus 18:22, and could not condon it under any circumstances.

The following response is an open letter to Dr. Laura, penned by an anonymous US resident.

---

Dear Dr. Laura,

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate. I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some other elements of God's Laws and how to follow them.

1. Leviticus 25:44 states that I may possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighbouring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?


2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?


3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual uncleanliness - Lev.15: 19-24. The problem is how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offence.


4. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odour for the Lord - Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbours. They claim the odour is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?


5. I have a neighbour who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself, or should I ask the police to do it?


6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination -- Lev. 11:10 -- it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this? Are there "degrees" of abomination?


7. Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle-room here?


8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev. 19:27. How should they die?


9. I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?


10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev. 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them (Lev.24:10-16)? Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair, like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws (Lev.20:14)?

I know you have studied these things extensively and thus enjoy considerable expertise in such matters, so I am confident you can help. Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.

Your adoring fan.

---

Ah, the smiting. There's not enough smiting in the world today.

The one good thing about Fortran

The one good thing about Fortran 77 is the ability to redefine the numeral 7. That and optional whitespace between tokens.

The two good things about Fortran are redefining integers, optional whitespace, and computed GOTOs.

Three good things! The three good things about Fortran are redefining integers, optional whitespace, computed GOTOs, and self-modifying code.

Four! Four good things! The four good things about Fortran are redefining integers, optional whitespace, computed GOTOs, self-modifying code, and six-character variable names.

Five! The five good things...

Intelligent Designer Found!

Well, this is a surprise.

After all these years thinking that "Intelligent Designer" was just a coy way of saying "God", it turns out I was wrong. Seems that the Intelligent Designer has been found.

Acting on tips from researchers in the fledgling science of Intelligent Design, federal law enforcement officials yesterday located and trapped the so-called "Intelligent Designer" in a Motel 6 just off US Route 66 in the New Mexican desert.
[...]
Clues as to the existence of the Intelligent Designer were first uncovered in 1998 by Dr William Dembski (Phd., BA., MBA., MBTA., AAA., NAACP) while investigating the genome sequence of the common bacteria (E. coli). Dembski was shocked to discover that the basic functioning of the bacteria's cellular machinery was much too hard for him to understand, even though he possessed many academic degrees. After discovering the same traits in other entirely unrelated biological organisms, Dembski suspected foul play and immediately alerted the FBI to the possibility that some sort of supervillain was tampering with our DNA for sinister purposes.

I guess I have to apologise to all those Creationists. Fancy me thinking that Intelligent Design was just a sneaky way for them to spread their religion under the guise of talking about science.

WGA false positives

There's nothing official, as yet, but the rumour-mill has it that Microsoft's beta WGA software, pushed out as a critical update, is finding a lot of false positives:

And you really, really don't want to inform a client like Proctor and Gamble that it is pirating code; and, my sources insist, that's exactly what the beta code has been doing.
[...]
When the rumour started spreading, users got together to share outrage. It quickly became apparent that some of them weren't at P&G and instead of having corporate rank, were quoting military rank. Yes; the USAF has also been tagged, say my sources, as a corporate pirate.

Python: using print with lambda

In the Python programming language, print is a statement, not a function. (This has been recognised as a design flaw, and will be corrected in Python 3.) One of the disadvantages of that is that you can't use print in anonymous functions using lambda.

However, there are work arounds.

Firstly, the simplest: create your own print function:

def prnt(x):
    """Print object x."""
    print x


And now you can write lambda obj: prnt(obj).

Too easy? Here's a marginally more complex solution. If you know that your code has imported the sys module, you can do this:

lambda obj: sys.stdout.write(str(obj)+'\n')

What if you can't assume that some other piece of code has called import sys for you? There are those who claim that the right behaviour is to raise an exception if sys hasn't been imported, which Python will kindly do for you at runtime. Others prefer to import it when needed:

lambda obj: __import__("sys").stdout.write(str(obj)+'\n')

Of course, the real print statement takes optionally many arguments, printing them separated with a single space. Can we do that?

A list comprehension makes it easy:

lambda *args: __import__("sys").stdout.write(
" ".join([str(obj) for obj in args])+'\n')

The __import__ function, like the import statement, is smart about importing modules. If the module has already been imported, it doesn't do anything, so importing an already imported function has negligible penalty.

The real print has subtly different behaviour if you end its argument list with a trailing comma: it doesn't print a trailing newline. Our lambda can't capture that behaviour, but this gives you almost all the functionality of print within an anonymous function.

SCO hits another iceberg

SCO's nuisance lawsuit against IBM, already in trouble, has just hit the mother of all icebergs. Judge Brooke Wells has upheld IBM's motion to limit SCO's claims, throwing out 2/3rds of SCO's accusations.

This isn't the end of the fight, of course, but even Blind Freddy can see where this is going when the judge hearing the case makes this analogy to SCO's arguments:

Certainly if an individual was stopped and accused of shoplifting after walking out of Neiman Marcus they would expect to be eventually told what they allegedly stole. It would be absurd for an officer to tell the accused that “you know what you stole I’m not telling.” Or, to simply hand the accused individual a catalog of Neiman Marcus’ entire inventory and say “its in there somewhere, you figure it out.”

Pamela Jones' comment speaks volumes:

There has never been an operating system picked over with such care and determination to find fault. And Linux has come through utterly clean as a whistle.

Brainiac will have to do the chores

John Holbo writes with obvious amusement about DC's "The Mutiny of the Super-Heroines" comic from May 1968.

Legion comics suffer from a tendency toward the 3-panel disaster story. (A building is falling over. Oh no, Karate Kid's karate is not strong enough to catch a building. Mon-El catches the building.) So nothing seems out of place when the visiting ambassador's ship just blows up for no reason. What stuns our boys is the figure who emerges from the burning craft. Superboy: "*GASP* The ambassador ... a woman!" The ambassador is equally shocked. "You're in charge? A male?" "Of course." "You mean earth still has a primitive patriarchal society ... ruled by men?"
[...]
Anyway, it turns out the ambassador has a plan for a feminist revolution, and the key is giving the girls more power. She does this thing with some statues. Now the girls are powerful, they make the boys look like schmucks. Invisible Kid tries to order them all into quarantine on the theory that they must have some sort of space disease, but the girls bust out to save the guys, who have screwed up again in stopping a jail break. The boys claim to have had some brilliant plan for stopping the break ... and you girls get back to quarantine!

Priceless!

Is Microsoft about to release a Windows kill switch?

Is Microsoft planning to make their new anti-piracy tool, Windows Genuine Advantage compulsory? And if they do, what happens to people who refuse to install WGA?

Could Microsoft be planning to remotely shut down incorrectly licenced or unlicenced copies of Windows?

June 27: David Pollak over at Interesting People quotes a Microsoft help-desk operator:

in the fall, having the latest WGA will become mandatory and if its not installed, Windows will give a 30 day warning and when the 30 days is up and WGA isn't installed, Windows will stop working, so you might as well install WGA now.

June 27: Ed Bott at Zdnet picks up on the story. Being suspicious of anything coming from "a front-line tech support drone", he asked Microsoft for an official confirmation or denial. Instead, he got the following:

As we have mentioned previously, as the WGA Notifications program expands in the future, customers may be required to participate. [emphasis added by Ed Bott] Microsoft is gathering feedback in select markets to learn how it can best meet its customers' needs and will keep customers informed of any changes to the program.

June 30: Microsoft's Public Relations firm contact Ed Bott, and deny -- sort of -- that Microsoft could or would shut down copies of Windows remotely:

I’m still trying to reconcile this rambling response with the terse statement I received from a Microsoft representative on Monday, flatly refusing to deny a report that WGA will become mandatory in the fall. [...] In fact, I can’t find anything in this new response that contradicts the earlier statement I received from a Microsoft spokesperson

Later that day, Microsoft, via their PR firm, flatly refuse to answer any more questions about WGA.

June 30: Respected computer security researcher Bruce Schneier blogs about the hypothetical kill switch:

The stupidity of this idea is amazing. Not just the inevitability of false positives, but the potential for a hacker to co-opt the controls. I hope this rumor ends up not being true.

Although if they actually do it, the backlash could do more for non-Windows OSs than anything those OSs could do for themselves.

I'm going to put my reputation (such that it is) on the line here:

Microsoft is absolutely positively working on a Windows kill switch, no doubt about it.

How do I know? One word: FlexGo.

If Microsoft is serious about FlexGo ("Pay as you go computing") -- and you better believe that they are -- then they absolutely have to be thinking about ways to ensure people do, in fact, pay as they go. Otherwise, FlexGo will be just the world's biggest give-away of PCs and software.

Microsoft says:

Microsoft FlexGo makes it possible to lower the entry cost of PCs and let people pay for computers as they use them. This technology supports two models today: a pay-as-you-go model enabled by prepaid cards or a subscription model with monthly payments.

People on the subscription model have to pay the monthly bill or else the debt collector will come take the PC back. But what about those on prepaid cards? If the PC keeps working, what's going to motivate them to buy recharge cards?

There is only one thing that can ensure they keep buying those cards. Windows has to lock itself down and stop working until they do. And that means a kill switch. Windows will have to recognise when the prepaid card has run out, and stop working.

That kill switch may or may not be put into standard Windows (XP or Vista). It may never work sufficently well for Microsoft to inflict it on developed nations; Microsoft might decide the backlash from the kill switch will hurt them too much; they might even decide to open-source the whole of Windows. (Yeah, right, and the Queen of England is a lizard.)

But you can bet the farm on Microsoft working on a kill switch right now. They know that this could be a PR disaster, but they need it desperately -- which is why they're so reluctant to comment on it. They're hoping that people will just get used to WGA, just like they got used to Product Activation. Microsoft are counting on users not realising the long-term consequences until they have the ability to lock people out of their own computers.

RIP Jim Baen

Three days ago, science fiction publisher and editor Jim Baen passed away after a stroke.

In its heyday, science fiction editors like John W. Campbell, Gardner Dozois and Hugo Gernsback were almost as well-known to readers as the authors. Jim Baen will surely be counted as one of those illustrious few.

In his obituary for Jim Baen, David Drake, one of Baen's most popular authors, talks about Baen Book's wildly successful experiment with a permissive publishing strategy for electronic-books:

This is a fair description of Jim's life in SF: he was always his own man, always a maverick, and very often brilliantly successful because he didn't listen to what other people thought.

For example, the traditional model of electronic publishing required that the works be encrypted. Jim thought that just made it hard for people to read books, the worst mistake a publisher could make. His e-texts were clear and in a variety of common formats.

While e-publishing has been a costly waste of effort for others, Baen Books quickly began earning more from electronic sales than it did from Canada. By the time of Jim's death, the figure had risen to ten times that.

On a personal note, I never knew Jim Baen, but his anthologies were part of the reading staples in my teens and early twenties. It's been a long time since I've read them -- perhaps it is time to pull them out of storage and read them again.

Clowns and pregnancy

"I Can't Believe It's Science" in Seed Magazine reports on research suggesting that clowns cause pregnancy.

Ah, clowns. Who doesn't love 'em?

What should scientists think about religion?

PZ Myers from Pharyngula discusses what scientists should think about religion, with a follow-up here.

Well said.

Perfecting the desktop

Found on teh interweb:

i've spent the last 8 years perfecting my desktop... and now, i've finally done it!

(Sorry, no link available, to protect the identity of the guilty party.)

Included is a screen shot of the "perfect desktop", and captions explaining its features:

• Most commonly used desktop icons


• Custom black and white Winamp skin to blend in with the background


• Desktop image, always black and white


• Slim AIM buddy list, top to bottom, "because I have sooooo many friends"


• Active Desktop HTML page with most used links


• Three high taskbar with most used shortcuts and IE address bar

And that's it. How excitment.

So. The perfect desktop:

• Runs Windows, with Internet Explorer always running for added security holes


• Has AOL Instant Messenger, complete with obnoxious adverts running all the time


• Pretentious black-and-white desktop background that isn't even good art


• No sign of anti-virus or anti-spyware, so you just know this guy's PC is a zombie for some crime syndicate in Bulgaria or Russia


• And best of all, it took this guy eight years to move his desktop items out of the way of Winamp.

Sheesh. It only took four years to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.