Journal of Omnifarious

09:18 - Depressing story from Alabama

A nice, red state. Though, IMHO, it doesn't really matter, both sides play the same game in this regard. One sides talks pretty, and makes a show of supporting various social programs. But really, they aren't tackling the basic issues that lead to this kind of inequality in the first place.

As The Billionaires Plunder Alabama, U.S. Troops Occupy Towns…Illegally

Current Mood: angry

00:08 - Sexism in the FOSS movement...

This question, generalized to the software field as a whole has been of great interest to me for a long time. And the main conclusions I've come to are that the whole topic is very complex and nuanced and there aren't a lot of simple answers.

Most interesting to me are the knee-jerk reactions, many of which are in evidence in this articles on Slashdot titled "FOSS Sexism Claims Met With Ire and Denial".

I will address a few of them here...

Current Mood: contemplative

01:34 - Wow, two fantastic pieces on the Virginia Tech shootings

There are two articles that, in my opinion, give an excellent analysis of the Virginia Tech shootings.

The first is a scholarly piece by a professor of sociology that carefully dissects the situation and the blame spinning around it to raise some serious questions about exactly why the shootings happened:

MOBBING AND THE VIRGINIA TECH MASSACRE

Another piece is very literary and subjective. The authority this author speaks from is having been in a very similar situation to Seung-Hui Cho. His intelligence and wit make his viewpoint a very compelling one:

The Truth About the VT Shooting

In my opinion, the first author understates the frequency of mobbing. I experienced it in elementary school, and to a lesser extent in high school. I've also experienced it once, in a fairly mild form, on a job.

In this, it is very important that whenever someone seems to be 'out' with everybody, someone needs to make them 'in'. And by 'in' I don't mean taking it upon yourself to guide them into being orthodox. I mean really taking the time to be a part of their lives and see the world from their point of view.

The second author has a view of the world I sympathize with a great deal. It closely mirrors my own, though I feel more positively about people as individuals than he does. I find people individually to be flawed, but marvellous and wonderful. I find people as parts of large institutions or authority structures to be disturbing and horrible.

In getting through school a strategy I semi-consciously followed was to make sure that at least some of the teachers knew me as an individual. I worked as hard as I could to make the machinery of authority and control leave me alone because individuals would avoid making the choice to invoke it.

I now wonder how many people had experiences similar to mine.

Current Mood: impressed

11:27 - Response to 'Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school' by Mark Slouka

This is a response to this article: "Dehumanized: When math and science rule the school" by Mark Slouka. Initially I'm going to be tossing ideas against a wall because I feel his argument is broken in several different respects. Later I intend to try to go back to edit it to be more coherent. Or, at least, that's my intention right now. :-)

In his article he talks about how the humanities are being consistently and constantly dissed in favor of science and math education in our schools. He thinks this is a bad thing. I think he's right about the dissing, but I partially disagree that it's a bad thing, and I definitely disagree about why it's happened.

Current Mood: annoyed

14:21 - Well, my collaborator wants a patent :-(

And the only way I'll let myself be associated with a patent is if it's clear the patent will never be asserted against any software meeting the open source definition or meeting the free software definition. This is a concession he's unwilling to make. In particular, he wants some kind of definition for 'commercial' against which the patent can be asserted.

Oh, well. I'm going to generously allow him to use it in proprietary software if he so chooses. I'm trying to think up a set of conditions that will make sure the source never appears in public so nobody is ever tempted to put themselves in the way of a patent, should he choose to file one.

He thinks I'm completely nuts, and also thinks my principles are antithetical to his ability to make a living. *sigh* That's not how things work. The only power in ideas is if they're shared widely and freely.

I think the idea is a neat idea, but not that neat. Like all ideas it builds on and incorporates existing ones. For all I know, someone has already thought of doing something like it. I know at least one project of mine was something close.

Current Mood: disappointed

11:58 - A really excellent post about moving to IPv6

This really excellent post makes the analogy of upgrading to IPv6 being like moving to longer phone numbers. Not that the analogy is perfect by any means, but it is useful for illustrating some important differences in the attitudes of people towards it.

One cogent commenter mentions:

The telephone equivalent of NAT is a PBX with built-in extensions, but you're right in that no one is suggesting that PBXes will relieve the burden of upgrading the phone system at some point.

Current Mood: anxious

13:19 - Public service for russians part 2 - Никто не осмелится назвать это тайным заговором

The entire article didn't fit in my first post, so I had to break it into 2.

Current Mood: determined

13:14 - Public service for russians part 1 - Никто не осмелится назвать это тайным заговором

This is the russian version of an article published in GQ magazine, but only in their print version. The publishers of GQ wanted to make sure nobody in Russia saw this and so they only published it in print, in the US, and not on the web or any other country. They did it because they are chicken. LJ has a lot of russian readers, so I thought I would post a copy here.

This article is about how Vladimir Putin's rise to power almost certainly happened because the political structure surrounding him orchestrated a series of bombings of occupied russian apartment buildings that they then blamed on the Chechans. Almost every russian who has pushed this theory in any kind of significant way is dead. One was killed by polonium poisoning in a case that made the US news.

It also illustrates the fallacy behind some of the 9/11 conspiracies. The russian conspiracy unraveled for any number of reasons. People noticed something strange going on and reported inconvenient and highly damaging facts. The motivations of the supposed culprits were vague (Chcehnya had already won its independence). Physical facts didn't support official stories. With 9/11 conspiracies people almost exclusively talk about physical facts that seem to have many interpretations, only some of which support the conspiracy theorists arguments. In particular, nobody has talked and I'm pretty sure someone would've.

Anyway, here, behind the cut, is the russian version of the story. The original copy of this translation also contains pictures of the english version of the article that you can read, if you are so inclined.

My only worry is that the guy who talked the most might end up dying as a result of this article. :-(

Current Mood: determined

14:23 - Empathy and OTR

Empathy has been starting to make it into Linux distributions as the default IM client. I think this is a mistake at this juncture, and this bug about Empathy not supporting OTR is one of the larger reasons why.

Another reason why is that Empathy seems to be connected with several different libraries and there is no clear sense as to what functionality lives where. It appears to be something of a spaghetti mess of libraries. I mostly figured this out because of repeated calls to 'code it or shut up' in response to the bug I posted.

One of my responses was good enough that someone else felt the need to cross-post a link to it in the Launchpad bug about lack of OTR support in Empathy.

I will cross-post it here:

Someone else goes on later to suggest that Empathy support some horrible idea like TLS over XMPP. Which, in addition to being an awful idea for any number of reasons, also fails to address the issue of support for any protocol aside from XMPP.

In order for encryption to be useful in a communications system, everybody has to be able to use it whether they want it or not. It should be a first-class feature designed in from the very beginning, not tacked on as an afterthought (something that OTR in pidgin fails at) and certainly not treated as unimportant because only a few really want it.

Current Mood: annoyed

08:11 - An excellent article on why the drug war is an awful idea

But it comes from a bunch of icky, umm... you know... libertarians.

The Drug War's Collateral Damage: Drug prohibition militarizes our police, enriches our enemies, undermines our laws, and condemns our sick to suffering.

My only worry is that with all the power and militarization the police have been the happy recipients of, with the pervasive "us against them" attitude the drug war engenders, how are we ever going to get them to go back? I mean the police recently deployed a SWAT team against a massage parlor. Won't they just find new uses for SWAT teams if the excuse of drugs goes away?

The paranoid in me thinks that all the fears of 'terorrists' are because some people realize the drug war is horribly destructive, but want an excuse to still have the kind of power the drug war gives them.

Current Mood: contemplative

15:25 - Amazon randomly burns people's copies of 1984

The publisher of several books by George Orwell decided that they didn't like the fact that they'd published them electronically. Many people had bought these books for their Kindle. Mysteriously, these books completely disappeared from people's Kindle book readers.

In my humble opinion, people who bought a Kindle deserve exactly what they got, and I hope Amazon does it again. If you buy into DRM in any way you are asking for stuff like this to happen to you. The reasonable response is not to complain bitterly about how unfair it is, but to not buy DRM enabled products.

People seem in a terrible rush to trade away rights that are essential in the rush to convenience. They spare little thought for what they're doing and then act surprised at the ultimate result.

At the recent Convergence I was on a panel about copyright. People there persisted in calling copyright a 'property right' and referred to the vast network of weird and wonderful rights that are patents, trademarks and copyrights as 'intellectual property'. I object strongly to the conflation of trademark, patent and copyright into 'intellectual property'. The rules around each are very non-property-like and very different from each other.

And Techdirt comes to the rescue again with an article about how in many ways copyright is very much not a property right.

Current Mood: amused

10:51 - Two relevant words to capture the import of The Colbert Flu

Of course, this sort of flies in the face of my determination to rename the flu 'The Colbert Flu', but...

Hamthrax (perhaps this one sort of fits) and the Aporkalypse.

Current Mood: amused

18:43 - The real cost to us of "Gitmo".

I have a rather odd view of some things. One of my views is that evil ultimately costs more than good. That evil is ultimately self-destructive.

We've committed evil recently. Our imprisonment and interrogation of hundreds of people in Guantanamo Bay and other lesser well known facilities around the world is evil. That evil is now costing us something, and as near as I can tell we got no benefit whatsoever from doing it.

Current Mood: angry

15:33 - There's a new term

For those who are not aware, Dan Savage has coined another new term. The term in question is 'saddlebacking', named after Rick Warren's Saddleback Church.

I encourage you all to tell your friends and link liberally.

Current Mood: amused

13:22 - A really interesting perspective on the bailout

Sadly, it's a youtube video. But, it does have choice C-SPAN excerpts: $700 Billion Bailout LAW - YOU WERE ROBBED

Current Mood: angry

09:10 - Excellent quote on piracy

In an article on online sales and piracy linked to from a slashdot article I see this quote: "Pirates are underserved customers". Yes! Someone understands the issues.

An organization making copies of your stuff and selling them is a lot different from hoards of downloaders swapping something for free. One is a criminal enterprise making money off of your work. The other is a bunch of potential customers who you've so far failed to reach.

Now, that isn't the whole truth. In some ways, hordes of downloaders sharing the stuff you made is a detriment to your ability to make money off that stuff yourself. But mostly they represent an opportunity, not an enemy.

Current Mood: hopeful

09:16 - I'm all for finding the fulcrum

I like government that is as small as possible. One of the tricks to making this happen is making very intelligent and future thinking choices that are easy to implement and have a broad impact. The problem is, it's much easier to see symptoms and try to treat them, and that's what usually happens.

One thing I think would be easy, and would definitely treat a cause is to repeal corporate personhood. And you can go to that link and vote for that idea on change.org. And the idea needs votes. I think that it seems kind of esoteric and remote to most people and so doesn't get the attention it deserves.

Current Mood: hopeful

18:26 - Consensus has no place in science

This is a really excellent essay on the politicization of science by Michael Chrichton. It is about all attempts at politicization, but it specifically addresses the hypothesis that human activity is responsible for the rise in average global temperature.

I am not a fan of Michael Chrichton. I have not read a single one of his books. But I read this essay and it was really well done.

I think he's right. There is so much in the way of politics surrounding the debate on whether or not global warming (which is definitely happening) is caused by humans or not that it's nearly impossible to tell the good research from the bad.

Consensus is often sighted by people on the 'pro' side of this debate. But, as Mr. Chrichton pointed out, consensus is about politics, not science. A hypothesis requires evidence, not consensus for its truth or falsehood.

My personal thoughts on the global warming hypothesis.

I think the link between atmospheric CO₂ levels and global temperature has support from both historical record and from much more tricksy predictive climate models. But I also think that evidence is far from conclusive, and you can only rely on the climate models (which are of extremely limited usefulness) to determine a cause and effect relationship.

But I also think the potential economic cost of not trying to do something about atmospheric CO₂ levels is extremely high. So I think we should be doing something about them, even if we aren't sure it's actually a problem. It's debatable whether or not it will be economically costly anyway since moving to renewable energy sources just makes good economic sense.

So, on one hand, the amount of waste if we scramble to do something about atmospheric CO₂ levels and it turns out not to be a problem is likely not large. And on the other hand, the potential risk of not doing something about atmospheric CO₂ levels and they do turn out to be a problem is absolutely huge. So I think doing something is the wisest move long-term.

Edit: Further research reveals that Michael Chrichton engages in some pretty dubious politicking while claiming to be on the side of 'science' himself. *sigh* That's the problem with so many of the global warming skeptics.

Current Mood: contemplative

10:24 - Net neutrality

The Register has a really interesting take on Net Neutrality. I can't say as I totally agree with their viewpoint, but the idea of regulating things in this fashion does make me queasy for exactly the reasons they state.

toxic_pink37 also has a short blurb pointing at a really interesting editorial laying the blame for the current financial crisis right at the feet of regulation and government intervention. This resonates with me for a very similar reason to the article questioning the regulation of net neutrality.

Current Mood: contemplative

10:44 - XKCD on DRM

XKCD has a take on DRM that, while not up to the fantastic levels of insight I sometimes see from that comic, is definitely still right on target.